It emerged last night (29th November 2008) that Tory MPs have been so concerned about their private offices being, covertly bugged that they have regularly had them ‘swept’. This says a lot about an informed perception of the present Government’s modus operandi.

Conservative Shadow Immigration Minister, Damian Green, has embarrassed the UK Government on several occasions by making known information in the public interest which the Government wished to conceal. MPs have the acknowledged right to make known such information.

Around ten days ago a Home Office official, named by The Mail on Sunday as Christopher Galley, was arrested in a raid at 5.50am and is now in a Home Office ‘safe house’ to prevent him talking to the media. He is thought to have been a ‘whistleblower’ who had supplied Mr Green with the damaging information.

Andrew Grice, a journalist with The Independent, yesterday (29th November 2008) revealed first hand information on specific incidents where, when in opposition, Gordon Brown was a prolific leaker of such information. On one quoted occasion in the mid-1980s, Brown ‘gleefully handed round a bundle of leaked Government papers’. Ten years later Grice was ‘summoned to Mr Brown’s Commons office to receive a bumper crop of leaked Treasury documents’.

Mr Green, however, suddenly found himself arrested in full view of the public, by anti-terrorist officers and held for nine hours on suspicion that he had broken an obscure law banning the ‘procurement’ of Whitehall secrets. It is understood that he was physically searched and had his DNA taken. In his absence under arrest, his home was raided by nine anti-terrorist officers under instruction from the well-named Robert Quick, head of the Anti-terrorist Unit of the Metropolitan Police.

Mr Green’s teenage daughter burst into tears when she came home from school to find the family home full of police in purple rubber gloves, rifling through personal papers including love letters exchanged between Mr Green and his wife.

The officers searched the house for six hours and what they took away included three folders of bank statements, presumably hoping to demonstrate that Mr Green had bought information from Mr Galley. Mrs Green, a practising barrister, had to prevent them taking the family computer because it contained confidential information on her clients.

House of Commons authorities – highly unusually – then allowed police to raid Mr Green’s Commons office. They disabled his email account, took away his mobile phone, his Blackberry and computer files containing confidential communications with his constituents.

It is now alleged that the Police forced the whistleblower, Mr Galley, to collaborate with them in an attempted entrapment or ‘sting’ on Mr Green. Allegedly on instruction, the man rang Mr Green on several occasions, suggesting he had information but Mr Green would not be drawn into conversation on the matter. Senior police sources last night (29th November 2008) confirmed to the Mail on Sunday that Mr Galley had indeed telephoned Mr Green shortly after his arrest. They denied that he had been forced to make the call.

A blend of logic and a knowledge of both Police and Westminster procedures has led MPs and journalists to be concerned that the matter is politically motivated. They indicate that members of the Government and senior House of Commons and Palace of Westminster officials must have authorised the police to take the various actions against Mr Green, his home, his Commons office and his property.

The motive for the alleged Government involvement is thought to be the deterrence by fear of other potential whistleblowers and MPs from passing on any more information embarrassing to the Government but in the public interest – and from making it known to the public.

Ironically, the arrest of Damian Green and the raids on his home and office – involving a total of twenty police officers – came on the day that MI5 classified the terrorist threat to the UK as ‘severe’. It was also authorised by Sir Paul Stephenson, acting head of the Metropolitan Police and known to be intending – before this lapse of judgment anyway – to apply for the permanent job, replacing Sir Ian Blair. The question now arises as to whether the country needs a sequence of two top policemen who appear to be nothing other than Government bag men.

This frighteningly fascist sequence – whoever authorised it – comes on top of the plan to create a giant national database of all our private personal communications, situations and financial affairs. It follows the plan to introduce by stealth and compulsion universal biometric ID cards.

The Scottish Parliament voted 69-0, with 38 abstentions, against the government’s proposed ID cards, as a symbolic gesture of opposition to the move, even though it has no jurisdiction in the matter.

The UK has also recently seen:

• Anti-terrorist legislation shamingly used to seize the UK assets of failed Icelandic banks
• The application of the same legislation under Tony Blair to arrest Walter Wolfgang, an elderly and brief heckler of Jack Straw at a Labour Party Conference
• The application of the same legislation under Tony Blair to arrest Maya Evans for reading aloud at London’s Cenotaph the names of British servicemen killed in Iraq
• The application of the same legislation under Tony Blair to arrest protesters simply wearing anti-Blair t-shirts in Brighton at the same Labour Party Conference where fragile Walter Wolfgang was manhandled from his seat by hired heavies before being handed over to police to be arrested
• The application of the same legislation under Tony Blair leading to police shooting dead the innocent Jean Charles de Menezes
• The attempt to force through Westminster legislation allowing for 42 days detention without charge

There are times when opening one’s eyes to the reality of events around one is necessary to prevent descent into a fascism unthinkable in a country regarding itself as the mother of democracy.

This has been necessary for a considerable time – since David Blunkett sent tanks to Heathrow to frighten people into supporting our illegal war in Iraq and since Tony Blair took us into that war.

The events surrounding the treatment of Damian Green are our last chance to take action to stop this crisis of authoritarianism deepening – or at least to protect ourselves as best we can against the possibility of becoming its victims.

We tend to think that ‘it’ couldn’t happen here. It already has. The Government has legislation written loosely enough – such as the anti-terrorist legislation it has used with such damagingly irrelevant profligacy – to do what it likes. It has demonstrated its willingness to do just that – and never more terrifyingly than now.

For Argyll puts the question soberly and seriously: Is this the time for Scotland to go for independence to remove itself from the reach of this diseased regime?

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