There are plenty of reasons that Gavin Williamson, the "stupid boy" of British politics, should have been sacked as Defence Minister. Informing the public about government discussions isn't one of them. There should be no such thing as state secrets. In a democracy, the government, and the state, is supposed to be the servant of, and accountable to the people. It is not supposed to withhold secrets from them, which in itself means that it cannot be held accountable.
All government discussions should be fully minuted, and published, in the interests of open government and democratic accountability. The fact that we have "secret services", is itself an affront to democratic principles, because those secret services are often themselves put in a position where there own activities are not fully disclosed even to politicians, let alone to the public. Indeed, how could they be secret, if they were! The whole point about a parliamentary democracy is that it is supposed to be the elected parliament that holds the members of the permanent state to account. Of course, in practice, that is never the case. In reality, parliament acts as merely a convenient front for the state, giving out the facade that the state is in some way the servant of the people, rather than what it is, which is the servant of the interests of the ruling class. The secret services are merely the epitome of that real underlying nature of the state.
Take an issue like the development of the Atomic Bomb. Everyone knew that states were developing such weapons. It was only a question of who got there first. Had US citizens known that their state had produced such a weapon, should they not have been informed about that matter, and asked their views about whether it should be used in their name, before it was? Indeed, had the fact been announced that such a weapon existed, and what its destructive power was, and that it was about to be used against Japan, is it not likely that before that happened, the Japanese people would have risen up against the Emperor, and the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thereby been saved?
The truth is that the secret services are used mostly against the domestic population, not against any foreign threats. Because other countries engage in similar secret activities, mostly each of these states already know the most important secrets of the others anyway. Abolishing state secrets, and creating an open society overnight abolishes all of the mystique surrounding the secret services, and makes them redundant. If we look at the actual activities of the secret services, it has been to infiltrate left-wing, and often not even very left-wing organisations. They have had spies and agent provocateurs implanted into even groups such as environmental protesters, into the Stephen Lawrence campaign, not to mention a very large payroll of people working on their behalf at the top of the trades union and labour movement. They carried out extensive operations during the 1984-5 Miners Strike and so on.
If the British government is going to subcontract the building of a 5G network in Britain, and that has the possibility that our phones, and other devices could be used as means of mass surveillance on us, even more than they already are, don't we have citizens have a full right to know about that, and what our elected politicians and ministers are cooking up behind our backs?
It was suggested by one commentator on TV this morning that well yes, of course, the public should be involved in that discussion but only after the government and the security services had discussed it first, so that they could come to a position that they were then prepared to discuss with the public. In other words, there could be no clearer statement of the fact that what this amounts to is simply using a public discussion as simply a PR exercise, giving a sham impression of public involvement, that is based only on what the state is prepared to let them know, and thereby on the basis of partial information that is framed so as to lead them by the nose to reach the decision that the secret state has already decided on for them. And,, we saw with the Iraq War, and the dodgy dossier just where that leads.
We should demand that all government meetings be fully minuted, and published. The idea that we the people should only get to know about state secrets and actions carried out in our name, after 30 years have passed, is a disgrace and affront to democracy. Labour should commit to scrapping the Official Secrets Act. It is in direct contradiction to the Freedom of Information Act. The secret services should be scrapped, including their equivalents within the police force. Labour should be in favour of creating a truly open and democratic society, which can only occur when there are no secrets, no secret deals, and when the public are fully informed, and involved in all decision making. Indeed, in that respect, Labour should commit to creating a Citizen's Militia, as opposed to a standing army, in the same way that the American Revolutionaries committed to, in their War of Independence against Britain, and which they framed in their constitution.
The state already has far too much power to wield against civil society. Its time to reduce it.
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