Soooooo. Does anyone want to explain why the NZ Police were spying on one of the most famous whistleblowers ever? Hello? Where is the NZ media?
I appreciate everyone is very busy and stretched right now, and we have enormous problems erupting left right and centre with 51% of Māori households living with food insecurity, 860 000 Kiwis living in relative poverty and the strongest El Nino in 150 years about to peak over NZ – I appreciate all those things.
But if we have time for Trashy Nashy and who Paul Henry would Shoot, Marry or Shag, then dammit it, we should have time for this issue I’d like to bring to everyones attention.
No NZ Media seem to have picked this story up, and it feels wrong that I’m the one left to ask, but this week The Guardian, as part of their investigative series into undercover spies living with, sleeping with and having false relationships with women in the UK revealed a NZ connection in a bizarre way, that does kinda require someone ask some questions in the mainstream media about the NZ Police secretly spying on one of the great whistleblower activists of the 20th Century.
According to the Guardian, released this week, that famous whistleblower McLibel activist, Helen Steele, was subject to one of these British spy fake relationships, and she attempted to track him down in NZ after he disappeared. The British Secret Intelligence Service asked the NZ Police to secretly spy on Helen Steele when she visited NZ in December 2002…
How the Met police spent £2.5m hiding spycop from former partner
At 2pm on 14 December 2002, Helen Steel, a well-known leftwing campaigner, and her parents landed at Auckland airport for a family holiday. It had been a tiring journey, so they were irritated when they were delayed leaving the airport for an hour.
What they did not know until recently is the reason for that delay. Their arrival had triggered a secret warning on Steel that had been put in place by police three weeks earlier. It prompted customs to carry out a discreet search of her luggage.
Steel’s sister collected the family and drove them to her home 90 minutes away. Again, none of them knew surveillance officers employed by New Zealand police were tailing them.
Nor did they know that over the next few weeks, police officers tracked their movements and took photographs of them. One picture was of them leaving her sister’s home.
Details of this extraordinary operation came in yet another damning disclosure to the spycops public inquiry, which is examining the conduct of undercover police officers who spied on more than 1,000 political groups between 1968 and at least 2010.
The inquiry has heard in recent weeks how senior Scotland Yard officers arranged for the police force of a country 11,000 miles away to covertly monitor Steel on two of her trips there as part of a calculated plan to protect a secret.
They feared that Steel was about to expose one of their undercover officers. The spy, John Dines, had had a sexual relationship with Steel for two years without disclosing his real identity to her. When he mysteriously vanished from her life, she set about tracking him down.
At the behest of Scotland Yard, New Zealand police put them under surveillance and reported back. One police report set out the measures that would be put in place to “monitor Steel’s movements whilst in New Zealand … Thus far Steel has done little other than local shopping with her sister.” It added “urgent inquiries are in place to fully identify” her sister and family.
The Guardian
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..Helen Steele is one half of the infamous McLibel court case from the 1990s that destroyed McDonalds brand like no other event beforehand. She was an incredibly well known activist against corporate power. She was tricked and betrayed into a relationship with a British Spy, and then when she went searching for him in NZ, our Police secretly spied on her?
See, I kinda think spying on legitimate dissidents for our British Overlords seems a tad boot sucky to me.
Shouldn’t someone ask something because that seems pretty vile in terms of her mana. Helen Steele is one of the great activists, she deserved way better than that. Especially when a Labour, Progressives, United and Green Government was in Power at the time!
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Soooooo. Does anyone want to explain why the NZ Police were spying on one of the most famous whistleblowers ever?… Martyn Bradbury
That one’s easy.
Since the days of the East India Company, British Imperialism has been an economic and political system that puts the full forces of the state police, army, courts, prisons, at the service of predatory big companies to extract maximum profits.
The colonial lickspittals, in the state services of a tiny remote outpost dounded by the British Empire at the bottom of the South Pacific are called on to serve the interests of the modern US UK imperialism and says Yes Sir! Three bags full Sir! We will have the state forces right on it. Calling the police right now, Sir. Just a minute while I tug my forelock and bow my head at the same time.
While I am down here do you want me to get on my knees as well?
As for the answer to Martyn Bradbury’s other question:
“… Hello? Where is the NZ media?” Martyn Bradbury
I can only guess at this one.
Maybe, possibly, the NZ media are embarrassed at the forelock tugging colonial obsequiousness of the New Zealand state and police. And maybe this accounts for their silence.
Who knows? I don’t. Maybe they are on their knees as well?
Maybe NZ media are deep in the pockets of big business as well, and dare not whisper a word of state complicity in, and spying on, and a vile state sponsored catfish attack on a decent and brave human being.