It comes as no surprise to anyone that the British security services serve a higher master than the elected government of the day.
Now the judiciary have ruled that it is not illegal for MI5 or MI6 to intercept the emails, correspondence or phone calls of MP’s. The decision was made by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, a panel of senior judges charged with scrutinising the activities of the security services.
None of this is news to us. Spooks have been bugging whoever they want, on the grounds that they don’t like the look of them, for decades. They are known to have placed bugs inside 10 Downing Street, and to have kept them there during the premierships of Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson and Callaghan.
The idea that elected representatives should be spied in by the security services exposes the fiction of democratic control of the spies. They are a law unto themselves. The reassurance given to MP’s by Harold Wilson, that they would not be spied on (referred to as the Wilson Doctrine) was a joke. Harold Wilson himself was spied on by the spooks.
You have to ask yourself on whose behalf they are working, if it is not for the government of the day. If they are prepared to spy on the Prime Minister then what are the objectives of their surveillance?
The short answer is that they work to maintain the status quo, and the grip on real power exercised by the ruling class. Anyone that represents a potential threat to the existing order is automatically a ‘subversive’ and warrants intrusive surveillance. But a state that does not answer to Parliament is, by definition, not a democratic state. Parliament is just the fig leaf, which exists to provide an illusion of democracy.