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Editorial
Who guards the Tories?
All that the senior Tory shadow minister Mr Green was doing, he claims, was his "duty to democracy", and that, according to outraged commentators on the right, left and centre, was his job- publicising information he happened to receive from a 'whistleblower' in the civil service, information which embarrassed the government; thus the arrest of this top Conservative Party official has been characterised as a vengeful attack on our British liberties by a Labour Party regime which is comparable to that of Robert Mugabe or Joseph Stalin.
In Conservative newspapers, Sir Paul Stephenson, the current head of London's Metropolitan Police, is accused of officiating over an East German Stazi-style assault on political freedom; and it is notable that Sir Paul's predecessor, Sir Ian Blair, was recently forced out of his post by the Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.
The police investigation is ongoing, and the details of the information which led to the detention of the Honorable Damian Green, the Conservative Party's Shadow Minister for Immigration, on suspicion of 'aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring misconduct in a public office' are as yet unclear. But some facts are beginning to emerge which indicate that the police may have had good reason to suspect that the 'job' which Mr Green was conducting for his party was one which went somewhat further than merely doing his democratic duty.
The word 'whistleblower' suggests a conscience-stricken civil servant, forced by his loyalty to the public to bring damaging information into the public domain. But the 'whistleblower' in this case did not release his information directly to the public, which he could have done, for example, via an internet blog. He did not even release his information directly to the press. He provided his information to the Conservative Party, which was then in a position to select from his his information, spin it, and use it to promote that Party's agenda.
We now know why. Christopher Galley, the Home Office assistant private secretary who provided the condidential documents to Damian Green, is no ordinary civil servant. He is a committed Tory, a Conservative Party activist, who was in 2004 an unsuccessful Conservative candidate for the local council in Sunderland.
Following Mr Galley's arrest on 19th November on suspicion of 'misconduct in public office', he was no doubt interrogated on the nature of his relationship with Damian Green and other senior figures in the Conservative Party. We do not know what he disclosed or alleged under questioning by the police. But we do know that in 2006, while in his Home Office post which gave him access to politically sensitive confidential documents, Christopher Galley applied for a job working for the Conservative Party. According to The Sunday Times, he was interviewed by Shadow Minister Damian Green.
The Sunday Mirror quoted an un-named 'senior ministerial source':
"We need to know exactly what happened and what, if any, promises were made to this young man after his job application to work with Mr Green was turned down."
Whatever the reasons for the Conservative Party's decision not to directly employ the talented Mr Galley; by staying in his Home Office post and supplying confidential information to Damian Green, he subsequently became far more useful to the Conservatives than he would have been had they given him an official job. Galley provided Green with information which in four instances was publicised by the Conservatives to promote their political agenda. At this stage, we can only surmise whether Galley also supplied other material which was not put into the public domain, but was used by the Conservative leadership to assist them in deciding their anti-Labour strategy and tactics.
Was the detention of the Honorable Mr Green legally justified? Only if it could reasonably be suspected that he had not merely happened to be the recipient of information from a public servant who was bound by his contract to keep that information confidential, but had aided, abetted, counselled or procured that information.
And only a person of extreme naivety would fail to entertain that suspicion.
Tip of the iceberg
Now that the Galley-Green operation has been broken, the Conservative Party's newspapers The Telegraph and The Mail have responded not only with 'democratic' outrage against the Stazi-like actions of the police and the Labour Party; they have also sought to infuriate the government by gloating about its inability to put a stop to the Conservative Party's other other highly successful illegal spying operations. As the Sunday Telegraph reported on 28th November:
...senior Conservatives privately boasted that the junior Home Office official and Mr Green's operation was simply the tip of the iceberg. Over the past year, the Conservatives are also thought to have obtained a leaked copy of the Government's new welfare legislation and even details of the budget ended up in the hands of the opposition.
"They were running scared and were driven mad by it, what appeared in public was only the tip of the iceberg," said one Conservative insider last night.
The Sunday Mail went further, taunting Labour supporters with the boast that the Conservative Party has, among its still-functioning spy network, an undiscovered 'mole' at the centre of the UK's finance ministry. In its article entitled 'How the Conservatives' secret network of Whitehall moles spooked No 10', the newspaper reported:
According to one senior Tory, the party is receiving secret information from up to six insiders who are determined to expose what they regard as Government blunders and other information considered to be in the public interest.
However, The Mail on Sunday can disclose that the alleged activities of Mr Galley are considered to be far less damaging by Labour than those of another, as yet undiscovered, mole deep in the heart of the Treasury.
The Treasury mole is believed to have been responsible for leaking secrets to the Conservatives ever since David Cameron became party leader, and perhaps further back than that.
Labour insiders think the mole was responsible for the lowest point of Mr Brown’s year-and-a-half in No10: The on-off Election fiasco in the autumn of 2007.
Mr Brown was forced to call off the Election after a dramatic revival in Tory ratings prompted by Shadow Chancellor George Osborne’s shock pledge to scrap inheritance tax.
The idea was an instant hit with voters and slashed Labour’s opinion poll lead overnight. Within days Mr Brown was branded a ‘bottler’ when he decided to call off the Election.
Labour’s claim that it had been planning a similar move was dismissed out of hand at the time.
Thus the lift in popular support which the Labour Party received after Gordon Brown replaced Tony Blair as leader was erased. The article continued:
But Government sources insist they had been planning their own inheritance tax cut and say they now believe Mr Osborne was tipped off in the first of a series of leaks from a mole who had burrowed deep into the heart of the Treasury.
They claim the same mole tipped off the Tories about Chancellor Alistair Darling’s plan to cut corporation tax by 2p in the pound, allowing the Conservatives to trump him by announcing a 3p cut, spiking Mr Darling’s guns.
There were further claims of a Tory mole at work last week when key elements of Mr Darling’s pre-Budget report were leaked.
The Tories responded by pointing out that one of the most damaging ‘leaks’ concerning claims that the Government was secretly planning to raise VAT to 18.5 per cent appeared on the Treasury’s own website.
‘We have known for some time that someone inside the Treasury is giving information to the Conservatives,’ said a source. ‘There can be no other explanation for the way that the Tories magically anticipate some of the key decisions made by the Treasury.’
But, although most of the Conservative 'mole' operations at the top level of the civil service are as yet unpunished, the government and the police have at least fired a shot against them by the arrest of the Galley-Green duo.
No principles
So, what of the issues of liberty, democracy, and of the power of the police versus the freedom of politicians? Despite all the hypocritical outrage, it is not at all clear that these are genuine issues of principle in this scandal.
No opposition party which is serious about gaining power will turn down opportunities to embarrass, discredit and outwit the government, even when the means available are illegal or of questionable legality- so long as the party leaders believe that they can either get away with it undiscovered, or if they should be discovered, can count on being able to cite the means used to effect that discovery as an accusation against the government.
Equally, no government which is serious about staying in power can tolerate, among those of its its paid officials with access to sensitive and confidential information, a nest of 'moles' who report to the opposition party in violation of the law. How a government responds to the evidence that such 'moles' exist is a matter of political tactics. But the legal duty of government ministers when encountering evidence of illegal activity by state employees is to inform the police.
As for the police- if they are, as is supposed to be the case in a liberal country, a force able to investigate the actions of suspected law-breakers, no matter what their position in society, then they must be able to use their authority to arrest, interrogate, search and sieze in order to do so. The idea that the British police force should abstain from using their powers because to do so would have political ramifications is a laughable concept, as any veteran of the trade union struggles of the 1980s, or the environmental struggles of the 1990s, can attest.
To the extent that any issues of principle are at stake in this debacle, they are political issues, which can be considered case by case or in terms of whether one would prefer the next election to be won by the Labour Party or the Conservative Party.
So let us first consider the cases. Three effects of the obtaining and manipulation by the Conservative Party of 'leaked' information stand out in their impact on recent British politics.
One is the use of material, supplied by Mr Galley, to highten fears about immigration; concentrating the worries of indigenous British people against the 'foriegners' amongst them.
Another is the use of the information that the government was about to change the levels at which inheritance tax is extracted, in order to help the Conservative Party steal a march on the Government and make this tax on inherited wealth into a 'cause celebre' for the free-market right wing.
The most recent case is the Conservative Party's foreknowledge of the pre-Budget report, assisting the Conservatives to counter the political gains which the Labour Government had hoped to achieve by means of some small but significant changes in taxation, which would help the poor and working class majority at the slight expense of the rich.
Gordon Brown's initial 'bounce' in the opinion polls in 2007 was overcome by the Conservatives with the help of their illegal 'mole' operations. But then, by shifting to the left in response to the global capitalist crisis, the Labour government under Gordon Brown made a second recovery, and for a few weeks- until the arrest of the Honorable Damian Green became a scandal against the government- appeared to achieve the prospect of a possible victory at the next general election. Meanwhile, the Conservative Party moves ever closer to its Thatcherite heritage.
Bearing no illusions about the modern Labour Party, and in rememberance of the appalling damage done to British society by the Conservative governments of the 1980s and the 1990s, let us hope that Gordon Brown will make a third recovery.