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Britain's deep state breaks cover at Southampton University

April 17, 2015 at 12:13 pm

Since 2011’s wave of protests and uprisings in the Arab world, we have heard a fair amount about something often titled the “deep state”. This term is applied in different contexts but it seems most relevant in Egypt.

When, in 2011, a people’s uprising managed to overthrow dictator Hosni Mubarak, it was not long before the deep state reasserted control. What is meant by this phrase?

Interpretations vary, and the context is different from country to country, but we can make some general observations. The deep state consists of those enduring, authoritarian and secretive institutions that pull the strings of power behind the scenes. While figureheads like Mubarak are ostensibly in charge, the deep state often manages to survive – or even thrive – after political leaders change or are deposed.

This is very much what happened in Egypt. Although Egypt’s first elected president Muhammad Morsi made some, very tenuous, attempts to weaken the deep state, he mostly worked with the generals, who still held considerable sway. He, of course, was overthrown by that same military in July 2013’s coup.

Between February 2011 and Morsi’s overthrow the deep state (although challenged at times such as when protesters broke into a mukarbarat base and liberated many of its documents) was never uprooted. It managed to consolidate its power, ultimately leading to the coup.

The military. The intelligence services. The police. Those were some of the aspects of the deep state in Egypt. And – although the context is different in many ways – the same can be said of Britain’s deep state.

There are powerful institutions in this country that work behind the scenes in a highly undemocratic manner, especially the spy agencies like MI5 and MI6. We often know very little about how they operate, and that’s why it’s so fascinating when we get a fleeting glimpse of them, peering over the parapets.

This week, organisers of a conference about Israel at Southampton University went to the High Court to challenge a university decision to cancel their event. I was in court, and reported the day’s events for The Electronic Intifada. The organisers failed. The judge, in rather Orwellian language, ruled that the applicants could exercise their academic freedom “elsewhere”.

But listening to the barristers from both sides argue their case, some intriguing information came to light.

The barristers for the conference’s organisers (the applicants) objected to the fact that the university (the defence) had raised the existence of two police documents as relevant to their decision to cancel the conference (or “postpone” the conference, as the defence barrister rather laughably argued) – but had only disclosed one of them.

The first police document was an event assessment by Hampshire police, which looked at intelligence on expected protests by pro-Israel groups (including the English Defence League) against the conference. This was disclosed to the organisers, and it formed part of their case against the cancellation, since the document stated that the police would be able to to adequately police the event.

The existence of the second document, the applicants’ barrister argued, had only been raised by the defence the night before Tuesday’s High Court hearing. The defence claimed it had been shown to organisers, and in any event was not relevant to the judge’s decision. The applicants denied both of these claims, and asked the judge to order the release of the document. She refused.

But after the lunch break, the defence barrister did define the nature of the document: it was from the Metropolitan Police, and they had disallowed any disclosure. It was a weekly round-up of intelligence from the National Domestic Extremism Unit. The defence barrister claimed it was irrelevant to the decision the judge had to make that day, and she seemed to buy that excuse totally.

One wonders, then, why the university raised the document’s existence in the first place.

As the Undercover Research Group argued in a new article Thursday, the National Domestic Extremism Unit is in fact a front for Special Branch, Britain’s “anti-terror” political police force.

Special Branch is supposed to protect the country from the threat of a broadly-defined “extremism” (usually a racist dog-whistle word for Islam) and from the threat of terrorist outrages. But in fact it has a long history of politicised and reactionary policing, often targeting left wing protest groups and peaceful Muslims associations for subversion, infiltration and sabotage, even allegedly acting as an agent provocateur in some cases.

And indeed, there were more direct references to Special Branch during the trial.

It was said in court that the university’s head of security Gary Jackson held at least one meeting with Special Branch in which the alarming possibility of “armed response units” on campus was raised.

This was due to a possible “terror threat” that was said to be to those Jews who would be protesting against the event (alongside the EDL). Funnily enough, no one seem concerned about the safety of those Jews participating in the conference (of which there were due to be many, before it was indefinitely postponed).

All this talk of phantasmal “terror threats” and armed response units was in stark contrast to the local police force’s assessment that the risk of protest seemed perfectly manageable.

No. What this was in reality, was the long arm of Britain’s deep state setting out to enforce its own line on the bounds of acceptable political thought. This seems to have been very much in line with the political establishment — Conservative minister Eric Pickles also spoke out and called for the conference to be cancelled.

For any real, long term political change in this country, our own deep state will have to be challenged too.

An associate editor with The Electronic Intifada, Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist who lives in London.

 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.