Who needs the Secret Service?

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IT makes good sense for Thatcher's stern bunch of 'law and order' devotees and Cold Warriors to feel shaken and angry about the latest epidemic of spy scandals and "security" lapses.

From the Queen's bedroom to the clandestine computer banks of GCHQ in Cheltenham, the most hallowed sanctuaries of bourgeois inviolability have been treated like Liberty Hall.

Hand-picked and seasoned reactionaries have proved to have sexual preferences which fly in the face of Tory social norms. SUBSIDISED bomb factories on the rates - that is the programme for London in the '80s put forward by Red Ken Livingstone and his pals.

Red Ken and other councillors have ordered a teach-in on terror for a hard core of Labour councilors who plan to bomb, kill and maim their way to the top. On their list for murder and assassination are pensioners, the handicapped, holi ildren and nuns.

This is the only interpretation that can be put on plans by the Labour GLC to hold a meeting with Sinn Fein men behind the IRA bombing campaign.

Furious Tory MPs called today for the arrest of the GLC Labour group. "These men will be even moic dangerous if they are allowed to talk to Ken Livingstone" said Mr Eldon Griffiths, adviser to another para-military group - the Metropolitan Police.

Their invitation earned an official rebuke from Mr Michael Foot, leader of the Labour Party, reading a prepared text from Mrs Thatcher's personal office.

He said, "The Labour Party has stood resolute against change through violence throughout its history, and we will remain resolutely opposed to change of any sort while I am leader"

Prominent and trusted members of the public schools' 'old boy' network have turned out to be sufficiently alienated from the system and the state apparatus to feed information to the Stalinist Kremlin bureaucracy.

Top levels of military intelligence itself appear to have been virtually if not completely run prolonged periods by agents of the other side. What could be worse for a government hell-bent on policies of cold war, and on witch-hunting the Labour Party as riddled with "entrists" of a much Daily Foot: resolute Mr Foot went personally to Downing Street to apologise to the Prime Minister. He emerged after a ticking off to remind reporters that it was a Labour Northern Ireland Secretary who had visited a dying Bobby Sands to tell him they were glad he was dying. It was also a Labour Home Secretary who had ordered troops into Ireland in the first place.

"We don't need a lecture in terror from Mrs Thatcher" he said.

Mr Livingstone's claim to to be talkirg to elected representatives of the nationalist population in the North was rejected by Mr Foot and his lory back-bench colleagues. "We have heard enough nonsense about demoless spectacular variety?

But while Tory anguish can be understood and enjoyed by opponents of the state forces they seek to preserve, the same can not be said for the position of the Labour leadership.

Shadow Home Secretary Roy Hattersley has stepped up pressure for a Parliamentary debate on "security" and called for the secret services to be placed under direct charge of the Home Secretary and monitored by a Parliamentary Select Committee.

Labour MP Robin Cook has applauded the fact that cracy from Mr Livingstone. It is exactly this sort of attitude that made him think he could enact election pledges in London.

"These people are even more dangerous when they are elected. If Militant candidates can be expelled for winning elections, why should we listen to Sinn Fein?"

, The Home Secretary announced a new plan to beat the Sinn Fein visit. Danny Morrison and Gerry Adams are to be visited by marriage guidance officers tomorrow to be questioned.

If the two men cannot produce love letters, anniversary cards, and witnesses to show they have been happily married for at least two years to women unconnected with Sinn Fein, the Home Secretary will deport them to the New Commonwealth.

This concession is unlikely to satisfy the backbenchers, or Mr Foot, who are demanding that the whole of the GLC Labour Group, as well as Sinn Fein members, be deported from the EEC.

This subject will be top of the list at the next round of GATT talks. Western ministers will demand that Japan take them as part of a new deal for the import of Japanese robots to replace all elected Labour members of the GLC and Parliament. both right and left wings of the Party are now apparently agreed to support his call for parliamentary supervision of security matters. While the left argue the lack of accountability of the present system, the right argue that the system is "oor open", and leaves the further "moles".

But who needs a "security' service anyway? The whole apparatus is opposed to the interests of the labour movement. The "security" it protects is that of the military top brass, with their plans for genocidal nuclear minare, wannate ailu the state machine capitalist class as a whole, whose crisis-ridden system has brought exploitation and growing misery to the working class in Britain and internationally famous "ABC" Official Secrets Act trial of journalists Crispin Aubrey and Duncan Campbell and ex-soldier John Berry showed beyond doubt that the paraphernalia of SUTveillance and secrets legislation is not to keep knowledge from "the Russians" (who already know everythịng worth knowing from other sources) but to keep it from the British public; Roy Hattersley The bulk of the Special Branch's vast computerised surveillance network is targetted not supposed "foreign agents" but at ordinary socialists and labour movement activists. According to a BBC report last week, by 1940 MI5 already had-_files on 4½ millien people. How many are on its files now?

Whether this snooping takes place under nominal cosmetic •Parliamentary control" or continues as at present will not alter this reality.

The demand from the labour movement should be not for tinkering with the secret services to make them more "efficient" in their operations against us, but for scrapping the whole reactionary set-up, and exposing the extent of state spying on trade union and Labour militants. of fun?

THERE are lies, damned lies, statistics and lying statistics. The Tory government has succeeded in producing a combination of all four in their latest estimates and explanations of the mass unemployment their policies have created.

Their explanations need not concern us here. But the sheer scale and scope of unemployment is important not only as a tally of the misery created by Thatcher's policies but also as a gauge of the task to be confronted by the labour movement in organising the unemployed and devising policies to create new jobs.

According to Tebbit's latest computerised fiddle, unemployment is some 209,000 less than it would be under the previous system of measurement. The Tories announce that 'only' 3,063,000 are claiming benefit, while the old measure of those registered as unemployed is in fact 3,272,000.

But that is not the only statistical trick involved. The higher figure itself leaves out literally hundreds of thousands — chiefly married women not eligible for unemployment benefi. - who are out of work, but not registered as unemployed.

Estimates of the precise numbers involved are extremely hard - and have been made harder by government claims to have 'found' some 800,000 more jobs in the economy than was thought. All of the ARTY related figures have therefore been thrown into doubt. But it is still plain that the figure for people without work and wanting a job is vastly higher than the official unemployment total.

And in this must be incuded the currently employed! ooo cosmetic government schemes designed to hold down the figures of unemployment.

On this basis the leaders point out that a more accurate assessment of unemployment is 4½ million. Meanwhile, unfilled vacancies are static at a ludicrous 114,000.

It is against this background that Peter Shore's ragbag of half-cock reforms and adjustments must be assessed as falling miles short of the necessary socialist policies to create 4 million new jobs.

Tebbit: figures-fiddler BY IN a further body blow to the unemployed, a new 'economy measure' by the DHSS has brought a new monumental claim form in which 140 questions must be correctly answered before supplementary benefit will be paid.

The form is so complicated that in a pilot study only 50% of applicants filled in the form correctly: in another office, special advisory staff found that they had to complete the form for almost every claimant.

It seeks exhaustive details of family, previous employment, income gavings and outgoings Lodgers need to specify where they take each meal of the day. Employed wives or husbands of claimants need to give details of every last item of regular work-related expenditure - meals at work, fares, union dues. etc.

Claimants who fail this 'Mastermind' examination could face prosecution unless they can prove that errors on their forms are mistakes rather than deliberate falsification.

The government claims that the new form will 'save staff' and prove popular with claimants. It should certainly save more money - by detering still more desperatel! poor people from claiming bénefits to which they are legitimately entitled.

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Socialist Organiser no.112 December 9 1982 Page 4