British Intelligence: A Law Unto Themselves

 

On May 1st, The Times reported that Britain’s Intelligence and Security Committee, a parliamentary body intended to supervise and appraise the work of London’s assorted spying agencies, was facing a funding “crisis” so severe it may be forced to cease functioning outright. Moreover, in a remarkable statement, current ISC chair Lord Beamish fulminated that the Committee’s work was “being undermined by continued interference by the Cabinet Office,” the British government’s most powerful component, within which the ISC is based, but also meant to scrutinise:

“The root of the problem lies in the control exerted over the Committee’s staff and resourcing by the Cabinet Office…An oversight body should not sit within, and be beholden to, an organisation which it oversees…The UK intelligence community has grown at an extraordinary rate…There is now around £3 billion of public money being spent for which there is no oversight capability…if the committee does not receive an increase in resourcing then it will not be able to keep its doors open.”

Beamish added that this issue “goes to the very heart of parliament’s ability to hold the government to account for those actions being taken in secret, behind closed doors, funded by the public purse.” His statement noted the Conservative government of Rishi Sunak agreed to an “emergency uplift” to offset the ISC’s fatal funding shortfall prior to the July 2024 general election, but “officials [have] declined to implement it” ever since Labour’s landslide victory.

The Times was at pains to frame the ISC’s “robust criticism of the inner workings of government” as “rare”, and the Committee’s grievances as a mere “administrative matter”. In March however, Beamish voiced similarly grave anxieties about “intelligence activity” being conducted in Britain “without democratic accountability,” sounding alarm the ISC was “on the brink”, with “serious gaps which need to be addressed.” He slammed the established framework under which the Committee operated as “woefully out-of-date”, and savage Cabinet Office cuts to its already inadequate workforce:

“We don’t have enough staff to keep us operational at the moment…This is a crisis…Our headcount [has] been decimated by the Cabinet Office. We have shrunk. We are down to a skeleton staff…We are in crisis. This isn’t a bloated organisation that has been steadily growing over the last decade: this is a tiny team that was already overwhelmed and has now been cut even further.”

Concerns about whether the Committee is fit for purpose have abounded almost ever since its 1994 creation under the Intelligence Services Act - which formalised in law MI6’s “licence to kill” for the first time - and with good reason. Unlike other parliamentary select committees, the ISC shares its reports with the government and spying agencies it ostensibly holds to account in advance of publication, to ensure no details Britain’s political leaders or intelligence community want to remain secret seep into the public domain.

We must ask ourselves whether the ISC’s ever-increasing inability to keep an eye on the activities of Britain’s spying apparatus is by design, and the Committee is concertedly being primed for extinction. As domestic repression ratchets due to constantly mounting public outrage over the Gaza genocide, and London inches ever-closer to all-out hot war with Russia, from the perspective of MI5, MI6, GCHQ et al, it has never been more vital their activities remain camouflaged from public view.  (more...)

British Intelligence: A Law Unto Themselves