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‘I’m a Trade Unionist, Not a Terrorist’: UK in Workers’ Union Spying Row

Sputnik – 22.09.2015

The British government, along with large multinational corporations, are trying to wash away the rights of workers and create a culture of fear among the country’s workforce through a series of systematic spying and blacklisting campaigns, a former blacklisted worker has told Sputnik.

As the government tries to usher through a new Trade Union Bill, described by critics as one of the most oppressive in the Western world, multinational corporations have been accused of taking part in extensive spying and intimidation tactics aimed at effectively locking vocal workers’ rights campaigners out of their professions.

The controversial bill has drawn the ire of trade unionists all over the country, with officials particularly angered by proposals which would require 50 percent of members to vote in favor of taking strike action for an event to be considered legal.

There are also fears that fines of up to £20,000 may be issued for unions whose members don’t wear identifying armbands during pickets.

Conservative business secretary Sajid Javid said the proposals would stop workers making “endless threats” at the expense of “hardworking people,” while union officials have seen it as an attack on trade unions and workers’ rights.

“The Tory government at the moment are trying to introduce the new Trade Union Bill, which even some Conservative MPs have said is the most restrictive legislation for trade unions in the whole of western Europe,” Dave Smith, former trade union representative and member of the Blacklist Support Group told Sputnik.

“The British government is never neutral when it comes to disputes between trade unions — it’s always on the side of big business.”

Some aspects of the Conservative’s bill even raised eyebrows with Tory MP David Davis saying some of the aspects resembled oppressive measures implemented by former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.

“I agree with most of the Trade Union Bill. I think it’s very sensible… but there are bits of it which look OTT, like requiring pickets to give their names to the police force,” Davis told the Guardian.

“What is this? This isn’t Franco’s Britain, this is Queen Elizabeth II’s Britain.”

‘Spying and Blacklisting Still in Practice’

On top of the government proposals for trade unions, Dave Smith raised concerns over historical spying and intimidation tactics, which over the years has seen many trade union representatives placed on a blacklist, shared and used by multinational corporations to effectively lock some workers out of employment.

It was also revealed that undercover police units took part in spying and intelligence, gathering exercises on a number of unions and various members over the space of 40 years in order to identify leading figures in the movement and place them on employment blacklists.

While officially such practices are illegal, Dave Smith told Sputnik that he believes “there is no question about it whatsoever” that spying and blacklisting is still going on.

“They [large companies] were lying to everyone and lying to parliament for forty years, so why should we believe them now?”

Mr Smith, who is the co-author of the book, ‘Blacklisted: the Secret War between Big Business and Union Activists’, said he was first placed on a blacklist in the early nineties merely for campaigning over unpaid wage disputes and raising health and safety concerns in the construction industry.

“People got added to the list for doing fairly standard trade union activities — standing up for workers’ rights, standing up for unpaid wages, standing up for safety. That’s why I got on it,” Smith said.

“What they used to do, is as well as keeping files on you, every time you applied to work on a big building site, the big multinationals would check to see if your name was listed or not. And if you were on the black list you were just sacked or you weren’t offered a job.”

Despite being a qualified engineer, Smith said he was eventually forced to change professions to help pay his mortgage, because he couldn’t manage to find employment, even during the UK’s building boom of the late ’90s — early 2000s.

Blacklisting ‘Systematic’

He said the practice of placing some workers on an industry blacklist was endemic in Britain, and affected thousands of workers over the years — in some cases, ruining people’s lives.

“I’ve seen people whose blacklist files have got entries from the 1960s. This isn’t just one or two rogue managers having a quiet word with each other in a pub spreading a bit of gossip about you — this is systematic.”

“This is [a case of] directors of a multinational company keeping files on people and deliberately stopping people from getting work because of their trade union activities. I’m not a terrorist, I’m not a criminal — I’m a trade unionist. They’re deliberately stopping us because they don’t want trade union activists on their building sites.”

Mr Smith said that such practices, which he believes are to a degree still in operation today, created an environment of fear, where workers are now hesitant to stand up for their rights amid attacks from David Cameron’s Conservatives.

“The whole purpose was not only to victimize the activists but to discourage anyone else from standing up for their rights as well. It’s to scare everybody else and create that climate of fear.”

September 22, 2015 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, UK | Leave a comment

Britain Moves From Democracy to Authoritarian State in Pernicious Veil of Secrecy

By Graham Vanbergen | TruePublica | September 16, 2015

One should not forget that “Openness and participation are antidotes to surveillance and control”.

When David Cameron won the 2015 election one of the first things he said was; “For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone”. This ominous statement immediately threw a dark shroud over Britain’s civil liberties laws, its openness and participation.

Few of the mainstream establishment press thought this was worthy of mention. From ZeroHedge – It’s not just those domestic extremists and crazy “conspiracy theory” kooks who took serious issue with UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s overtly fascist language when it comes to freedom of expression in Great Britain.” The Independent was more sanguine – “This is the creepiest thing David Cameron has ever said.”

New powers being brought in by the Conservatives should be of great concern to everyone. They are expected to be the introduction of banning orders for organisations who use hate speech in public places, but whose activities fall short of proscription and include;

1. New Extremism Disruption Orders to restrict people who seek to radicalise young people;
2. Powers to close premises where extremists seek to influence others;
3. Strengthening the powers of the Charity Commission to root out charities who misappropriate funds towards extremism and terrorism;
4. Further immigration restrictions on extremists;
5. A strengthened role for Ofcom to take action against channels which broadcast extremist content.

Simply take out the word ‘extremist’ from those five points and you have the existence of something completely different. Of course you could be forgiven for thinking that the government would not abuse such laws. But they already allow for such abuses to take place on current terror laws, for instance:

1. The BBC is using laws designed to catch terrorists and organised crime networks to track down people who dodge the £145.50 licence fee.
2. The Metropolitan Police Service has also come under fire for using the same powers to access the phone logs of journalists on two newspapers to trace their protected sources.
3. In addition, Big Brother Watch discovered 372 councils had been authorised (by gov’t) to use the terror laws 9,607 times -the equivalent of around eleven spying missions a day to hunt down non-payment of council tax.
4. Seven public authorities, including the BBC, refused under the Freedom of Information Act to disclose why or how often they had used the powers. The BBC now refuses 48% of such requests.

What is most striking about these events are that publicly funded bodies such as the BBC, the Police and local authorities are refusing to answer perfectly reasonable Freedom of Information Act requests. They are exercising powers they shouldn’t have but were given by a government that the electorate were not consulted on and do not approve of in the first place.

There is proof that local authorities have even used terror laws to surveillance dog fouling, underage sunbed users and people breaking smoking bans.

Now that the Conservative government in Britain has it’s feet under the desk it is preparing to enact new legislation that, under the guise of the “war on terror,” that will vastly expand police-state powers and essentially criminalise speech and other political activity.

Presented officially as an anti-terrorism bill, the proposed measures will be targeted at any popular opposition to the government’s policies of aggressive militarism abroad and austerity measures in Britain, or for that matter anything the government deems worthy of oppressing.

The new bill will include a series of measures targeting groups and individuals deemed by the government to be “extremist.” This term is defined so vaguely as to encompass a wide array of political activity.

The new bill will create extremist “disruption orders” for individuals and “banning orders” for groups. The targets for these new police powers will be those who have conducted “harmful” behaviour.

The “harmful” behaviour covers activities that pose “a risk of public disorder, a risk of harassment, even alarm or just distress or creating a ‘threat to the functioning of democracy’.”

This will be used to criminalise campaigns critical of government policy and protests, which are frequently dispersed by the police on precisely the grounds that they disrupt public order. The language also indicates that the government would have the authority to target those merely planning such activity prior to it taking place – and they would do that through mass surveillance.

UK intelligence agency GCHQ has already been caught acting unlawfully by spying on two international human rights organisations. In addition, last year it was revealed that GCHQ were illegally eavesdropping on sacrosanct lawyer-client conversations in order to both disrupt and make gains on negotiations. GCHQ failed to follow its own secret procedures. “If spying on human rights NGOs isn’t off-limits for GCHQ, then what is?” said Privacy International.

From here we can see we now have a vast illegal state surveillance system that Mussolini would have had wet dreams about. The government is slowly closing down Britain’s very open society and they intend on doing so using one of Britain’s finest philosophers and a well tried theory.

The Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow a single watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. Although it is physically impossible for the single watchman to observe all cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that all inmates must act as though they are watched at all times, effectively controlling their own behaviour constantly.

The internet has become the architecture of the state managed panopticon.

Speaking to the Guardian weeks after his appointment as the UN special rapporteur on privacy, Joseph Cannataci described British surveillance oversight as being “a joke”, and said the situation is worse than anything George Orwell could have foreseen.

Terror laws we have are already being abused. One is reminded of 82 year old Mr Wolfgang‘s pass being seized and he then detained under the Terrorism Act for interrupting Tony Blair’s speech at the Labour party conference in 2005.

Some of the most egregious cases of misuse include: a council in Dorset putting three children and their parents under surveillance to check they were in the catchment area for the school they had applied to.

Like the prisoners of Jeremy Bentham’s building – there is nowhere to hide in the panopticon.

A report by the House of Lords Constitution Committee, Surveillance: Citizens and the State, had warned in 2009 that increasing use of surveillance by the government and private companies was a serious threat to freedoms and constitutional rights, stating, “The expansion in the use of surveillance represents one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the Second World War. The government’s of 2010 and 2015 have taken no notice at all.

‘Tempora‘ was one such government mass surveillance and spying programme among many. It is alleged that GCHQ produces larger amounts of metadata than America’s NSA. By May 2012 300 GCHQ analysts and 250 NSA analysts had been assigned to sort data.

The amount and type of data collected and stored is mind-boggling. Every email, phone call, location data, relationships, family and friends, affairs, work, income, expenditure, social habits, it simply has no end. You would not write down the passwords to your email account, bank or Amazon account, social media platforms and give a stranger the list. But that is exactly what GCHQ and other organisations have got.

‘Optic Nerve‘, another UK state surveillance mission, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing. They have stored naked pictures of you, your little daughter and pictures you have sent to family and friends in a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy. This was a biometric exercise of epic scale – collating nearly 2 million citizen images in just a few months.

On May 13th 2013, Edward Snowden made a dash via Hong Kong to Moscow. That June the spying and surveillance revelations came forth. And what came forth was the stunning realisation that our government has been lying to us about the sheer scale of state surveillance conducted on a truly industrial scale.

Not happy with all this illegal state activity over its citizens, new orders that the government are now seeking contain bans on individuals broadcasting their views on television, and anyone subject to an order will be compelled to submit any written publication, including social media posts, to the police before it is printed. In addition, the orders will make it illegal for individuals to attend or address public gatherings or protests.

Banning orders will allow the government to outlaw any organisations it feels is not in their interests. If such a move is taken, anyone found to be a member of such an organisation will be guilty of a criminal offence. Authorities will also be able to shut down premises used by groups.

Human rights group Privacy International branded the new proposal as an “assault on the rights of ordinary British citizens.”

As the Guardian’s home affairs editor wrote in an analysis of the proposal, “the official definition of non-violent extremism is already wide-ranging” and, as Big Brother Watch has pointed out, the national extremism database already includes the names of people who have done little more than organise meetings on environmental issues.”

Last year the government even attempted to hold an entire terrorism trial in secret before abandoning it at the last minute.

Together with a sweeping attack on democratic rights and legal norms, the Conservatives’ anti-terror bills will further advance the government’s right-wing agenda. Cameron’s proposals make clear that the Conservatives are determined to vastly expand the repressive powers of the state.

In little more than five years the state has gone from an open society of democratic principle to one that resembles an authoritarian state. Soon, it will be impossible to have a dinner party with friends without the state knowing about it and wanting to know the purpose of your gathering. Quite the opposite of his ‘big society’.

The British government and its intelligence services are acting under a pernicious veil of secrecy to the detriment of all citizens.

September 17, 2015 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, UK | Leave a comment