 Keir Starmer suffered his biggest rebellion in Parliament since becoming Labour leader when 35 of his MPs broke the whip to vote against the covert human intelligence sources bill, otherwise known as the spy cop's bill. So Labour had whipped for MPs to abstain on the bill, which would give law breaking by undercover agents a basis in law, but which has been criticised for offering few safeguards for victims of state abuse. We'll talk about the details a bit more in later, a bit more later, but MPs who resigned from the front bench had a big rebellion. To vote against the bill included Shadow Education Minister Margaret Greenwood, parliamentary private secretaries Nav Mishra, Kim Johnson, Mary Foy, Rachel Hopkins and Sarah Owens, and Shadow Treasury Minister Dan Cardin. And we can take a look at Cardin's speech in Parliament explaining his decision. The bill paves the way for gross abuses of state power against citizens. And in Liverpool, we have a healthy suspicion of state power, because we've felt it's damaging force too often in the past. We've experienced the 30-year fight of the Hillsborough families and survivors for truth and justice. We've had striking work as targeted by state violence, trade unionists blacklisted and spied on for representing their members. And we're not alone. Campaigners fighting miscarriages of justice across our country, like Orgreave, like the Shrewsbury 24, and now Grenfell Tower. They oppose this dangerous bill. And I fear my own party is being taken for a ride by this government. Because I tell you what happens. You start with the idea that legislating for something that operates in the shadows must be a good thing. You then engage in good faith with a morally bankrupt government arguing for vital safeguards. And once that government finishes stringing you along, you end up in the perverse situation of condoning laws that ride a coach and horses through our nation's civil liberties, and could even be used against the labour movement itself. That was a brilliant speech by Dan Gardin, Apologies, talking about how labour here by sort of trying to play smart politics by saying we're going to do constructive opposition, we're not going to oppose the government, have ended up basically just backing anything the government do. So the Labour Party was saying, oh, we're going to vote for this on the second reading because we want to put forward some amendments. Then it gets to the third reading and they're like, oh, well, none of our amendments have passed. We'll still abstain anyway. It's too clever by half and it ends up making the Labour Party just onlookers as a really reactionary law gets passed. And it is worth reiterating what is wrong with this law because the front bench are kind of correct that sometimes you will have to have agents of the state break laws in some situations. So for example, if you are spying on a terrorist cell, then you might have to take part in planning a terrorist act to get in with that cell. That's illegal, but obviously that person who is an undercover agent who's trying to stop that terrorist attack should not go to prison for planning a terrorist attack. They were only ever planning to foil. You get what I mean, right? So it makes sense that this should be brought above board before it was all sort of informal and this law makes it official. But the problem is that if you are going to do that, if you are going to give agents of the state basically immunity to break particular laws, you need to have some proper safeguards in place. You need to have external agencies deciding when an agent of the state can and cannot break the law, ideally a judge. But this law as it's been passed by the Conservatives means that if the Met Police want to have a cop break the law, then it's the Met Police who get to decide. That's not, you know, no one would argue that's a good form of accountability. They also place no limits on what kind of law can be broken. So in Canada and the United States, they have a law of this type, but it limits what agents of the state can do. It says, you know, it can't be torture. It can't be murder. It might say it can't be rape. It should do. It should have done in Britain, but I'm not 100% sure actually what's in the Canadian one. And no limits are in this bill, which has just been passed by Parliament. And Dalia, I want to bring you in on this. It does seem, I mean, one morally abject Labour party just abstained on this. But also, I mean, I don't know what you think, whether Keir Starmer will be celebrating the fact that seven people, I think six of them were in the Socialist Campaign group. So the left wingers of the party have resigned from the front bench. You might think that's just a helpful clearing of them out. Or do you think he might think he misstepped here? I can't get into the head of Keir Starmer. I don't think he particularly cares. I think that this whole principle of what is it that he says, not opposition for opposition's sake, that to me makes no political sense. So again, I can't really see a logic in which this is situated. I think that he, maybe this is just his politics. And you know, that really sucks. But this this bill is absolutely shameful. And what frustrates me about it is that our newspaper columns, like newspaper columns, TV shows, panels, there's no end, there's an endless amount of ink and words spilled over questions of freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of political thought, dissent, all of this. But it's only ever spoken about in reference to, you know, crusty old snowflakes winging because they have to use a different pronoun to the one that they thought they should use or, you know, cross, you know, someone not having their column at, you know, a broad sheet paper because they won't stop being a dick to black people. Like it's just like this idea that this is where we need to have these really serious conversations about freedom of speech, when really the essence of freedom of speech is a principle, is about the very thing that this bill is attacking, which is the freedom to dissent, the freedom to express, the freedom to of political association without the threat of being punished by the state. And that is what the spy cops saga was about. It was about people being punished by the state for raising concern for organizing around things like climate justice, for organizing around animal rights, for organizing around police brutality. You know, women were, people were, you know, women often talk about how, you know, things like when undercover cops would set up with, you know, establish relationships and have children with activists while undercover, they often frame it as being, as being raped by the state. And I think that idea of actually the severity of how it, how it is a punishment and how it is an act of violence in, as a consequence of doing, organizing that is part of a democratic society, it's absolutely foul. And I think that in terms of disempowering and, I think demobilizing the socialist campaign group and, and, you know, Labour Party members who are probably only there because of the socialist campaign group, I think that's more what Keir Starmer is interested in doing. I think he's more interested in sort of crushing the last element of that spirit of Corbynism and sort of making exhausting and debilitating its base as part of the Labour Party membership. I don't think the actual material stuff of the bill is of his concern, quite frankly. I want to go to what was the sort of official defense of abstaining for, abstaining on this bill, which is represented in a piece that Conor McGinn, who is Labour's shadow security minister, wrote for Labour List. And this is sort of an explanation of the front bench decision. So he writes, the CHIS bill, so the SpyCops bill addresses a vital issue, the need to provide a clear lawful framework for the use of human intelligence sources who often help undercover crimes such as far right terrorism and child sexual exploitation. Any responsible government acting in the national interest would need to legislate to address this. The current status quo is unacceptable, as it means this happens without proper oversight and the formal protections offered by the Human Rights Act. Without this legislation, undercover sources will either be unable to operate, depriving our security services of a vital tool in disrupting terrorism and serious and organized crime, or continue to do so only by operating in the shadows. Neither outcome is in the national interest, both are worse than this bill passing. You can see there that the Labour front bench is already doing the government's game by putting in your mind when you're thinking about this bill, things that everyone think is wrong. No one has that much concern when someone is planting themselves in a child sexual exploitation ring, how much accountability they have. It's when you put in the minds of the public trade unionists and climate activists where people are like, yeah, you probably do need some accountability here, so the front bench already doing the government's work. I want to go on though because this is the bit that I find particularly weird. So, Conor McGinn writes, there have been concerns raised about the potential for this bill to interfere with the campaigns against burning injustices such as the spy cop scandal, the appalling events at and surrounding war group, the abuse and secrecy around the Camel-led shipyard workers, and the Shrewsbury 24, and collusion on blacklisting. That is why we have been pressing the government to be explicit in stating that this bill is in no way retrospective and cannot legally impede these campaigns for justice. Now, what I see is really weird for this. It's also kind of pathetic because it's like we've been pressing the government. The government haven't even conceded this. But the fact that this is a priority for the Labour Party to say this cannot be done retrospectively to deny the people who have been subject to past injustices, the right to justice, essentially. Why if they're worried that it's going to prevent people in the past seeking justice? Are they not worried about people in the future seeking redress for injustices by the state? If they believe that this law would undermine the ability of the people who suffered, as Dali has put it, right by the state in the spy cop scandal, then why wouldn't it also hinder the ability of people in future to seek and achieve redress for those kinds of crimes? Now, I just don't understand this. I mean, there's a couple of ways of looking at it. I suppose one is to have this sort of weird naive thing that, oh, the state might have done it nine years. Spy cops was not a long time ago. It was about a decade ago. So you can say, oh, the state's changed so much since the 80s. I'm not sure how much it has, but at least it's a plausible argument. But one of your examples is from 10 years ago and you say, oh, well, it doesn't matter if we inhibit the ability of people to seek redress because this is the kind of thing that happened in the past. I mean, it just seems bizarrely naive. The other option is that the Labour Party under Keir Starmer know that they only have a support movement when they're in the past. So you see Black Lives Matter. Oh, we're not sure about Black Lives Matter. But something that happened 40 years ago that maybe broke the law. It's like, oh, yes, we're in favour of the miners right now. We weren't at the time. I mean, that's very much the idea. Dali, I want your thoughts on this, I think, quite pathetic official justification for abstaining on the Spy Cops bill. Yeah, I think that that's actually such a good point about how not only is it about, I think in many ways it's not the right way to think of this as like a concession. I think that for a lot of these extra parliamentary groups, climate justice groups, police brutality groups, anti-racist groups, migrant justice groups, these are all the groups that hold the Labour Party, trade unions are all the groups that hold the Labour Party's feet to the fire, that hold Labour MPs to particular standards, that I'm sure that a lot of Labour MPs find very pesky and annoying and don't really, and we saw this with Corbynism, that a lot of the response of the centrist was like, these are just kind of like crazy campaigners or crazy activists, this isn't a social movement, it's a party and it's like maybe you would have won a few elections if you allowed it to become more of a social movement, but I really think that you are right in that, that kind of like only supporting these kinds of extra parliamentary campaigns when they're in the past is a perfect summary and this idea that it's not going to be retroactive, it's going to allow for for past injustices to still be taken to court etc and this idea that the state will never repeat these kinds of practices again, it's like I actually don't believe that you're that historically illiterate, you know I actually refuse to believe that because then I just can't even bother, I can't even engage with it anymore, so we have to, it is really that kind of just attempting to cover their backs because this is not something they want to kick a stink up about.