Surveillance

'I assumed I was a target of MI5, but I didn't have secrets & wasn't too worried' – K. Livingstone

Britain's conservative newspapers are obsessed by claims of Russian intelligence interfering in UK and US elections and Skripal allegations, but they have no interest in exposing the illegal activities of MI5 and MI6.

The Undercover Research Group worked with the Guardian newspaper to expose the fact that in the last 50 years 124 organisations have been infiltrated and spied on even though many of these were anti-war and anti-racist activists, environmentalists or animal rights groups – a total of 144 spies targeted them. Whilst I would expect our intelligence services to infiltrate terrorist groups planning to bomb and kill, it's hard to see what threat people campaigning for equal rights posed to Britain.

A total of 24 agents infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party, a small Trotskyist group with a couple of thousand members, even though London's police recorded that the SWP did "not have a recorded propensity for violence," the Guardian wrote.