Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

Abbott added: ‘My own privacy has been violated because of the political
whims of unknown state officials, when they decided to monitor my
emails, calls, texts, browsing history for years.’ Jeremy Corbyn was also
put under surveillance, as was his fellow Labour politician Baroness
Doreen Lawrence, who was spied on by the Metropolitan Police as
she grieved for her son who had lost his life in a racist attack. Shami
Chakrabarti is now the shadow Attorney General, the law officer for
Her Majesty’s Opposition. The two politicians who had been spied on,
Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott, are now the Leader of Her Majesty’s
Opposition and shadow Home Secretary, respectively.
You would think that given three of the most high-profile figures to
oppose state snooping were now at the very top of the Labour Party,
the opposition would be tearing the Government apart. Not quite.
Instead, it was announced yesterday that Labour would neither be tabling
major amendments to the legislation in the House of Lords to make it fit
for purpose, but – worse – nor would the party be voting against the new
powers contained in the bill.
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Chakrabarti is Labour’s law officer. Just months ago, the human rights
group she ran argued that the ‘proposed new law breaches our human
rights’. If this is the case, how on earth can she stay quiet while Labour
abstains? Theresa May is about to get away with the largest expansion of
state surveillance powers in peacetime, and no one can quite explain why
Labour politicians who have been spied upon still sit on the fence.
Across the Western world, faith in politicians from across the political
spectrum is ebbing away. Instead, populists such as Donald Trump tell us
October 2016