Reviews: Statewatching and Turning up the Heat

Tony Bunyan ed Statewatching the New Europe: A Handbook on the European State Statewatch, £4.50 Larry O'Hara, Turning Up the Heat: MI5 after the Cold War Phoenix Press, £5. Reviewed by PETER NEVILLE.

<*> Both these books cover an important aspect of the British state, its security services and how they operate. Tony Bunyan's Statewatching the New Europe comprehensively covers the European Union (including Britain) and a number of other non-EU Western states; Larry O'Hara's Turning Up the Heat covers the British security service. The two books are best read together.

Bunyan's handbook looks closely at the nature of the European state, police and security services, internal controls, immigration, racism and fascism, and has a number of detailed appendices covering aspects such as Interpol, the Schengen Agreement, and human rights. In fact, it covers everything that you might want to know as a citizen activist in the European Union.

The book may seem a bit pedantic--lots of names and abbreviations -- and, inevitably in a team production, writers over-emphasise certain services and forget others, but overall this is a masterly synthesis of what we might face in the new Europe. Its concentration on immigration, looking specifically at racism and fascism, ties in well with O'Hara's book, as well as with the concerns of many European activists.

O'Hara's book looks at one aspect of the British security services in detail and tries to bring our knowledge of MI5 up to date. It includes chapters on Welsh and Scottish nationalism, the current state of play of Marxist and parallel groups and how the security services manipulate them, Ulster Loyalism and its links with fascism, and other areas. It also points out that although the structures dealt with in Bunyan's book are designed to deal with known phenomena (such as "terrorists" and other bad people), in reality, in a changing world, just like any other bureaucratic organisation, MI5 has to find a rationale for its existence, has to invent demons to fight.

Most statewatchers are aware of the in-fighting currently going on, at least at managerial level, between MI5 and MI6, MI5 and Special Branch, and all the security services and the police. It was said of Hitler that he carefully failed to define the boundaries of power in the Wehrmacht, SS, Gestapo and so on to keep them so busily watching each other that none of them became too powerful. The same thing appears to be going on in Britain and the new Europe.

Of course O'Hara's book is speculative. A lot of what he says is a linkage of research, content analysis of the media, and guesswork. But it is necessary to be innovative, even if invention sometimes leads to inaccuracies. O'Hara enables a little lateral thinking to come into play. You move into an arena of uncertainty. But is this a problem? Can you trust the state's answers?

Read these books. Enjoy them (though it's a pity that neither has an index). The media hacks keep telling us that "the public has a right to know", but I do not think that having up-to-date knowledge of Princess Di is all that important. What is really going on in the state is important. If they are not writing about it, then why don't you? There are so many other public forces you never hear about--it all requires further research.