Model motion
CLPD Model Motion – Stop the Spy Cops Bill
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Please find below (also attached as Word document and PDF) a model motion on the Spy Cops Bill for consideration within your CLP.
CLPD Model Motion – Stop the Spy Cops Bill
“This CLP [/Party unit] welcomes the campaign against the ‘Spy Cops’ Bill (Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill) supported by 14 Trade Unions, Labour MPs including Jeremy Corbyn MP and a wide range of human rights campaign groups.
This CLP further welcomes the stand taken by Baroness Chakrabarti in promoting progressive amendments to the Bill in the House of Lords and regrets the abstention by other Labour peers on her amendment seeking to strike out immunity for undercover agents acting within authorised guidelines leading to the amendment’s defeat.
This CLP notes with concern that the Bill
- Allows state agents to commit crimes without limit to their gravity, including murder, torture, kidnap or sexual offences, and to remain undercover;
- Allows them to commit crimes in the vague pursuit of maintaining ‘economic well-being’ or ‘preventing disorder’ which could be interpreted to allow spying on legitimate trade union activity or justice campaigns;
- Gives no provision for innocent victims to receive compensation;
- Allows a wide-range of agencies like even the Food Standards Agency to spy on people and commit crimes;
- Does not protect human rights;
- Lacks prior judicial authorisation to commit a crime; and
- Pre-empts any recommendations from the Mitting Inquiry into previous intrusive state surveillance of lawful trade union activity and justice campaigns.
This CLP calls on the Labour Front Bench and PLP to support Lords’ amendments on the prevention of the use of under 18s in covert activity, and on the inclusion of a list of grave crimes that would not be committed, but ultimately to oppose the Bill in principle during its final Parliamentary stages. We oppose the decision of the party leadership not to support Baroness Chakrabarti’s amendments and we also oppose Keir Starmer’s call on Labour MPs to abstain on the bill.
This CLP resolves to send this motion to Sir Keir Starmer, the General Secretary and all other members of the NEC*.”
[*NEC members’ email addresses may be found on the CLPD website]
Supporting arguments
During its Commons’ stages the ‘Spy Cops’ Bill was opposed by 38 Labour MPs including Front Benchers who resigned their positions while Labour formally abstained. The Bill places no express limits on intelligence agents to commit crimes that constitute human rights violations.
The Bill essentially gives free rein for torture, murder, and sexual violence. The Bill is inherently anti-democratic, deeply flawed throughout, and it should not have come to parliament in its current state.” Kate Osborne MP
The Bill is an attempt by this government to remove scrutiny from the judiciary and parliament in relation to the British constitution. Since 1968, political policing on trade unions and social movements has had a devastating impact with over three thousand trade unionists blacklisted, over one thousand organisations spied on by undercover police, and tens of thousands of ordinary citizens had files held on them by Special Branch. A disproportionate amount of the organisations spied on were from legitimate left wing and anti-racist movements.
The spy cops scandal has revealed that every constabulary’s Special Branch supplied the blacklisters with information on trade unionists and political activists. The police officers did not do this through legal obligations; the police broke the law to maximise corporate profits.
The Government has not learnt from this dark episode in our history. If anything, by going forward with this Bill, it gives power to unnecessarily and unlawfully interfere with the legitimate activities of trade unions and any other protest organisations. In fact, it encourages the infiltration of trade unions.
It also has disproportional gendered impact: the Mitting Inquiry into the still unresolved spy cops scandal shows that the state could allow an undercover officer to have in some cases long-term sexual relationships in order to facilitate the gathering of intelligence. This Bill goes further in that it does nothing to block sexual violence being committed by UK state agents. It also bars survivors of abuse from seeking redress through the courts, by protecting those who commit authorised crimes from civil liability forever.
Even permitting low-level criminality will disproportionally affect BAME communities. This abuse of police power was used to gain intelligence on activists involved in the Stephen Lawrence Justice Campaign with an officer even put undercover within the campaign to dig for dirt.
As a party, we need to be bolder; as an opposition we should not be letting Tories get away with subverting democracy and making this country a less safe place to live. The Tories should not be allowed to portray opposition to this Bill as an attack on the police and national security, when the opposite is true.
The point of national security is to maintain our civil liberties and rights. Any such legislation should give real-time, effective authorisation and oversight mechanisms to ensure that permissions to commit crimes have at least as robust authorisation and oversight as search warrants or phone tapping, and effective arrangements for post-operational accountability.