MPs demand truth on MI5's 'Stasi' files

Labour MPs accused secret police of demonising decent British citizens and displaying cold war mania 21 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Amid allegations that MI5 is unjustly secreting over a quarter of a million personal files, left MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Grahame Morris are tabling questions to Justice Secretary Chris Grayling.

Dossiers on many hundreds of deceased communists and "suspected communists" have been handed to the Kew National Archives.

The files contain inane details, such as noting that Communist Party organiser Betty Reid's "great weakness" was "a profound liking for cheese-cake."

But there are also intimate details about people's personal lives, and clear evidence that MI5 stigmatised leftwingers and blighted lives through blacklisting.

The documents are among 3,700 personal files selectively released after at least 50 years - many with blanked-out pages and blacked-out names.

Ten personal files on former Morning Star foreign editor Sam Russell were among those released last year.

Large-scale spying against anti-fascists in the International Brigade Association and against anti-apartheid campaigners has been revealed.

But large numbers of files are kept under lock and key as MI5 claims their release would pose a "risk to national security."

These include the miners' strike of 1984-5 and the Shrewsbury pickets case 40 years ago.

Communist Party general secretary Rob Griffiths has dispatched personal letters to Mr Grayling and to MI5 chief Jonathan Evans amid concerns at the scale of the surveillance.

Mr Griffiths demanded that files on the party and its members must be made available for scrutiny by the individuals concerned, just like the opened Stasi files from the former German Democratic Republic.

Thousands of still secret files must also be released to public gaze, he said, with "appropriate safeguards" in respect of intimate personal details.

This would reveal "the shocking extent of state surveillance, harassment and disruption of a legal political party."

In an Orwellian twist, many government files transferred to the National Archives are still kept secret, including Cabinet records of the "Official Committee on Communism (Home)" up to 1968.

Labour MP Tom Watson, who is demanding release of the Shrewsbury files, was told last week by Justice Minister Helen Grant that 118,759 files held at the National Archives "are closed to public access and more than 30 years old."

However, a National Archives spokesman confirmed that the figure given to Mr Watson did not include the large number of files still held by MI5.

MI5 claims that it no longer investigates "subversion," since the threat is "negligible."

The Metropolitan Police S015 section has taken on the role of spying on activists and campaigners via the National Domestic Extremism Unit (NDEU).

Alleged sexual liaisons by undercover police officers spotlighted the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, now merged into the NDEU.

Former MI5 chief Stephen Lander admitted in 2001 the existence of 400,000 files.

In 1998, then Home Secretary Jack Straw declared that 20,000 files were still "active," and 270,000 of the remaining inactive files were still closed or restricted.

He said 110,000 files had been destroyed since the early 1990s.

The MI5 website suggests that a further 90,000 files have been destroyed since 1998.

Easington MP Mr Morris today demanded up-to-date figures, declaring: "The security services must abandon their outdated cold war attitudes."