Here are two articles about the ongoing harassment of individuals by unidentified forces within the state. Malcolm Kennedy (see Lobsters 39 and 41 and 43) is being harassed by having his attempts to create a business sabotaged because some policemen are afraid of what he experienced. In another society he would be killed or disappear. In ours he is simply being kept down. Robert Henderson is being harassed now because he made a fuss at being harassed in 1997 by Tony Blair and his circle. In effect, he is now being harassed because he is being a bloody nuisance to the powers-that-be. Happily, as a retired Inland Revenue inspector, Mr Henderson has a pretty good idea of how to be a bloody nuisance to the powers-that-be.
There are forms of harassment other than those experienced by Henderson and Kennedy. A couple of years ago an Israeli woman came to Hull from London to see me. We talked in the Station Hotel for several hours. She was a political exile with refugee status from the Home Office. An architect, she had stumbled across some big scam being run in Israel and had been forced to leave. The story was long and complicated. I’ve now forgotten most of it. She had piles of documents. She claimed that her flat in London was being repeatedly broken into and articles left, taken or rearranged. No matter how often she changed the locks the break-ins continued. She had been to the police and MI5 – large amounts of documentation on this – with no result. She assumed she was being harassed by MOSSAD. For reasons that I now cannot recall, we didn’t really get on. But having come across similar stories before I said I would write something about her. She wanted to see it first, didn’t like it when she did, and insisted I not print it. I complied and forgot about it.
I recalled my afternoon in the Station Hotel reading the account in Corinne Souza’s book Baghdad’s Spy (reviewed in this issue) of the harassment her family suffered at the hands of SIS. There it was again: break-ins, pranks, things left in the house, nuisance calls – the familiar repertoire.
Which is to say: we still have a secret state whose legal, intelligence and security wings are virtually unregulated. There are now elaborate procedures mimicking regulation – both Kennedy and Henderson are exploring these – but the state can still wreck our lives and there is virtually nothing we can do about it except make as much fuss as possible.
The Articles: