I’m currently watching The Wire for the second time and it’s quite a swear fest. “Motherf###” this” “sonofabitch that” and “dumbass f###up” the other. But no term of abuse comes close to expressing the primal hatred that the word “tout” has in the Irish political lexicon. It’s usually pronounced with a contemptuous spitting tone and connotes so much more than passing information onto the state. It carries the suggestion that the person so doing should immediately be made to suffer a long horrible death before their booby trapped body is left naked on a country road in a condition not suitable for an open coffin. So much history and passion in four letters.
It’s no surprise that the state has been recruiting informers in the environmental movement.The Guardian today reports that Strathclyde plod tried to recruit members of Plane Stupid to pass on information using a combination of intimidation and bribery. You have to admire the way they appeal to youthful idealism. “We have reason to believe that you care passionately about the fate of the planet. If we bung you a couple of hundred quid a month will you be a grass for us so that we can arrest your mates and allow the capitalists to carry on doing what they are doing? Otherwise how do you fancy some jail time?”
Well done to Maria Gifford and her lawyers for recording the conversations and going public with them.
The cops’ response has been robust. Their statement says they have “a responsibility to gather intelligence”. John O’Connor a former commander Scotland Yard who is developing into the media’s favourite pundit on the police was even blunter and took to the radio to describe the episode as “a storm in a teacup” and professed bafflement “to what this girl is complaining about”. For him there is no difference between running informers in a drug dealing ring, a group of aspirant suicide bombers or the environmentalists meeting in a squat to discuss planing flowers outside a nuclear power station.
A possibly apocryphal story relates how when the International Marxist Group moved into new offices there was a knock on the door one morning. A cop introduced himself and asked to speak to Mr X. Now by chance the previous owner of the property and the person who answered the door shared the same surname. The cop reminded Mr X that the station had an arrangement with him to allow them to use an upstairs room to watch IMG meetings in the pub across the street. He explained that he was taking over that duty and was checking that it would be ok for him to come later that evening. You can guess the rest.
If an organisation’s mission statement is the destruction of the bourgeois state, depriving Special Branch officers of a job by dismantling the repressive apparatus and creating a proletarian nirvana it can’t really complain if the state takes a passing interest in what it is up to. What Maria Gifford’s challenge to political policing does is pose the question of just how far the state is entitled to penetrate dissenting groups and who sets the limit. It’s pretty hard to distinguish between the weltaunschaung of the Daily Mail and political policing in Britain. It’s absolutely certain that they will have tried to recruit informers in Respect, no2eu, the Labour left plus as many of the environmentalists as they can corrupt or frighten.
To which the correct response is “to hell with them!” A fat lot of good it did the Stasi or the Securitate once millions of people get into politics.
Liam redux 
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