Turf war: MI5 bids for policing role (1)
01 January 1991
Turf war: MI5 bids for policing role
artdoc March=1995
Introduction: MI5 is bidding to take over from the National
Criminal Intelligence Service as the lead police intelligence
agency. While Stella Rimington, the head of MI5, makes the case
for its new role, the Special Branch are issued with new
guidelines emphasising their work for MI5.
The UK's internal security and law enforcement agencies - MI5,
the Special Branch, the police, and the National Criminal
Intelligence Service (NCIS) - are embarked on a `turf' war. It
is a battle for remits, powers and resources which threatens to
change the balance between `normal' policing and the introduction
of methods and techniques developed in the Cold War,
counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism into policing practices
and court procedures.
At the centre of this upheaval is MI5, the internal security
agency founded in 1909. With the demise of the Cold War from 1989
it successfully campaigned to take over the lead role for
counter-terrorism inside the UK from the Special Branch (part of
the police force set up to combat Fenian `terrorism' in 1883) in
1992. Last year the then Home Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, told
Tony Blair (then Shadow Home Secretary) in a letter that this
development did not foreshadow MI5 taking over other policing
roles such as combatting `organised crime'. Mr Clarke said that
MI5's job was the `protection of the national interest and the
safeguarding of the UK's economic well-being against threats from
overseas' in short its job was:
to investigate any activity of a nature and a level such that it
poses a threat to national security.
Although there were perhaps a number of countries where drug
trafficking or organised crime did pose a threat to `national
security' Mr Clarke wrote:
Serious though criminal activity of this kind is, however, I do
not consider that there is any question that it amounts at
present to a threat to the security of the UK.
If, he continued, MI5 were to become involved in the fight
against drugs or organised crime:
the level of such criminal activity would have risen to such a
point, and would evidently have done so, that it constituted a
threat to national security... I think it most unlikely indeed
that such a situation will ever arise: both the police and
Customs and Excise are working hard to ensure that it does
not..(italics added).
However, even as the Home Secretary was writing this letter the
ground was shifting. Under the 1989 Security Service Act MI5 was
extended to giving support in `the prevention or detection of
serious crime' (through the Intelligence Services Act 1993 the
roles of MI6, UK's overseas intelligence agency and Government
Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, were also extended to cover
`crime'). The ceasefire announced by the IRA on 31 August this
year was the signal for MI5 to exploit both its new legal remit
and its working links with the Special Branch and local police
forces in its anti-terrorist role which involved not just covert
operations but the preparation of evidence for court cases. Its
principle target is the National Criminal Intelligence System
(NCIS) of the police force. Senior police officers question the
timing of Stella Rimington's speech (see box). One said:
Why are we being offered this now? Drugs have been a massive
problem for years. I don't need to tell you that peace in
Northern Ireland would make MI5's budget and resources very
difficult to justify.
The NCIS was set up in 1992, the same year that MI5 took over the
109 year old police Special Branch role for anti-terrorist work.
From the start the NCIS was limited to the gathering of
information and intelligence to combat serious crime - an
operational role was denied to it because of problems of how to
make it accountable without the spectre of creating a `national'
police force. The limitations of NCIS's role are the subject of
a secret report to the Home