Met Police supergrass scandal - corrupt private investigators infiltrate witness-protection programme

The Independent 26/06/2013

Scotland Yard is embroiled in a new corruption crisis after it emerged that senior officers knew for years that criminal private investigators had compromised its highly sensitive witness protection programme – and did nothing about it.

Days after the Metropolitan Police was rocked by incendiary claims that officers took part in a smear campaign against the family of the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence, The Independent can disclose that private investigators (PIs) were employed by organised crime gangs to try to intimidate witnesses who had agreed to give evidence in high-profile trials.

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Also read

With the Met Police, if you are innocent you have everything to worry about

How can we invest our trust in a government that spies on us?

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Scotland Yard uncovered the shocking intelligence up to 15 years ago but, incredibly, did next to nothing to stop the private detectives, who also worked for the News Of The World. A registered police informant codenamed “Michael Green”, who spent years undercover working with a corrupt firm of PIs, warned his handlers at the Met that his colleagues were trying to locate “supergrasses” under police protection and “actively worked on them to withdraw their damaging allegations”.

But, for reasons yet to become clear, the Met failed to charge or even arrest the investigators for intimidating key witnesses. One of the supergrasses who was approached while under police protection later withdrew all of his original testimony, resulting in the collapse of a major criminal trial.

The news comes days after a former Met officer, Peter Francis, claimed he was asked find “dirt” and spy on Stephen Lawrence’s relatives in a bid to undermine the campaign to bring his killers to justice. Details of Scotland Yard’s witness-protection programme being compromised were included in a Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) report which was suppressed  by the agency but leaked toThe Independent.

The same documents led to last week’s revelation by this newspaper that private detectives had been hired by major companies to hack, blag and steal personal information about rival companies and the public. The latest disclosures have heaped fresh pressure on the Met and Soca, who are thought to have withheld crucial details of the criminal world of private investigators from a parliamentary inquiry last year.Keith Vaz, the Labour MP who chairs the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, said: “These claims are absolutely devastating. The committee has agreed to call Soca to give evidence next week and [the Met Commissioner] Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe will be giving evidence on 9 July. It seems they will have some very difficult to questions to answer. We were very clear in our report that the link between private investigators and the police needs to be broken, so they can be properly investigated without fear and favour. However, no action was taken and we are still awaiting a Government response. This industry needs to be brought out of the shadows and be properly regulated.

“I have today written to request all the information Soca has on private investigators and their links with the public and private sector. We need to be certain there are no more skeletons to come out of the closet.”

The eight-page Soca memo referred to intelligence that PIs were employed by the “criminal fraternity” to “frustrate law enforcement”. The Independentunderstands that the same corrupt investigators have also worked for the News of the World. The Soca report includes intelligence that crime bosses were hiring PIs to access “internal police databases, including those containing serving officers’ private details” and “deleting intelligence records from law enforcement databases”.

The most shocking practice, however, involves attempts to trace protected witnesses. Soca noted that PIs often had an “abundance of law-enforcement expertise either through corrupt contacts or from a previous career in law enforcement”, and they were “attempting to discover location of witnesses under police protection to intimidate them”.

The Independent has spoken to the registered police informant “Michael Green”, who did not wish to be named for fear of reprisals.

He infiltrated a team of private investigators who worked closely with a corrupt former Met police officer, who is well-known to Scotland Yard but has never faced any criminal charges. He cannot be named for legal reasons so the informant referred to him as “Mr Brown”.

He said the gang used to “boast” of locating supergrasses in the witness protection programme and “actively worked on them to withdraw their damaging allegations”.

Mr Green said: “Indeed on one occasion I managed to get possession of a CD ROM disc which was a recording of a person in the witness protection programme being interviewed by Mr Brown who had traced him. Basically, Mr Brown wanted him to retract his evidence.

“My handlers wanted to have the disc copied, but I knew I had to hand it back, and I was concerned that if it was copied it might be discovered. I asked them to check with their own experts to see if that was possible.

Mr Green said his handlers told him that forensic experts claimed it would not be traceable. He said: “I persisted and asked for a second opinion which I believe they obtained from the security services. Their experts stated that it might be proven that the disc had been copied. As a result a sound recording was taken and the disc was not used to burn another copy.”

Despite being handed this extraordinary intelligence, the Met took no action against the private investigators or Mr Brown. The supergrass, whose identity is known to The Independent, later dramatically changed his evidence and caused several convictions to be overturned, to the great embarrassment of the Met and the Crown Prosecution Service.

The Met declined to comment and referred enquiries to a SOCA spokesperson who said: “This report remains confidential and SOCA does not comment on leaked documents or specific criminal investigations.”

Disclosures over the Met’s inability to maintain the security of its witness protection programme have also raised fresh questions over the decision by the Leveson Inquiry to ignore the bombshell SOCA report.

The confidential document was offered to the public inquiry into the press and police by Ian Hurst, a former British Army intelligence officer whose computer was hacked by private investigators employed by the News of the World.

However, in an email to Mr Hurst’s lawyer, Kim Brudenell, the solicitor to the Inquiry said: “The Inquiry does not propose to go into further detail or take further evidence regarding these matters and so will not be pursuing the [informant], utilising Mr Hurst’s statement as evidence or calling him to provide further oral evidence.”

Lord Justice Leveson then embarked on a fortnight of hearings dominated by arguably far less evidence from union officials, civilian police workers and press officers from provincial police forces. Mr Hurst told The Independent: “Leveson obviously considered the media officer for Staffordshire police to be far more relevant to his Inquiry than the experiences of a man who had spent years infiltrating a criminal gang with direct knowledge of Metropolitan police and News of the World corruption.

“There is no more sensitive system within the police than the witness protection programme. I would have thought evidence of it being compromised almost at will by corrupt detectives, private investigators who work with newspapers and organised crime syndicates would have been relevant to culture, practice and ethics of the press and police.”

However, the Met’s former deputy assistant commissioner Brian Paddick did manage to publicly reveal that the witness protection programme had been compromised during his evidence to the Inquiry.

He told Lord Justice Leveson: “That is something I would expect the (Met) to take with the utmost seriousness. However, there is nothing in the documents disclosed to me to suggest that anything was done.”

Despite the acute sensitivities and the Met’s bizarre, decade-long inaction to tackle the corrupt private investigators, Lord Justice Leveson barely referred to the matter in his final report, published last November – for fear of compromising ongoing criminal investigations. He said: “Although I understand the concern, it would not be appropriate for me to go further.”

Tom Watson, the campaigning Labour MP, said: “It is absolutely shocking that the media-criminal nexus could have got anywhere near compromising the Met’s witness protection programme.

“These new revelations are the strongest argument I have heard for Lord Justice Leveson conducting Part Two of his Inquiry as soon as the criminal cases are over.”

A Leveson Inquiry spokesperson said: “The terms of reference for the Inquiry were absolutely about the culture, practices and ethics of the press and how they engaged with the public, the police and politicians. Evidence on other issues would have been considered to have been outside those terms of reference.”

Generation Y: why young voters are backing the Conservatives

 Young people are supposed to be left-leaning idealists, but polls tell us that today's under-34s don't believe in handouts and high taxes – and they're voting for David Cameron

• 
• • John Harris
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 26 June 2013

David Cameron at a secondary school in Bury in 2010. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

If you want a good idea of where Britain might be headed, go to Peterborough. The city centre is smattered with the usual high-street names, and scores of empty shops (51, at the last count). Plenty of people complain about youth unemployment. The area of the city around a thoroughfare called Lincoln Road is a little Poland, smattered with businesses that also see to the needs of people from Portugal, the Baltic states, and more. Mention immigration, and you tend to get two kinds of response: tributes from recently arrived people to the kind of life that's possible in the UK, and angry, sullen opinions from locals who think advantages and opportunity are flowing in the wrong direction.

I spent a few days in and around the city a couple of months ago, and as well as all those issues, I was reminded of another very modern syndrome: the fact that as you progress down the age range, opinions about the job market and welfare state tend to harden, to the point that droves of twentysomethings sound like devout Thatcherites. In my regular trips around Britain for the Guardian's Anywhere But Westminster series, this has become almost a given. Quiz people under 30, in short, and you're more than likely to hear echoes of the kind of on-yer-bike, sink-or-swim values that decisively embedded themselves in British life when they were mere toddlers.

So it was in Peterborough, where I stopped for a chat with a young woman – born and raised in Cambridgeshire, it seemed – who was selling subscriptions to LoveFilm, next to a row of empty retail outlets and a branch of Caffe Nero. "British people are rubbish," she said. "Lads especially need to be pushed into jobs more."

"I think they need to stop letting people into the country, to start with," she went on, and then paused. "And stop jobseeker's, as well. I don't think it's right."

This was a reference to jobseeker's allowance, the benefit that pays unemployed people under 25 the princely sum of £56.80 a week. "There are hardly any people that are willing to go and get any job that's out there, just to say: 'I've earned that money'," she continued. "They want the best, don't they?"

At this point, my lefty, bleeding-heart soul could take no more, and I blurted out a riposte. Don't they just want to be paid seven or eight quid an hour and be treated with some respect?

"I was on £6.55 in my last job," she said. "If you don't want to go to college, start at the bottom and work your way up."

Such are the prevailing opinions of what pollsters call Generation Y, the millions of people born between 1980 and 2000, who have grown up in a country in which postwar collectivism is increasingly but a distant memory, and the free-market worldview handed on from Thatcher, to Major to Blair and Brown and now Cameron, is seemingly as ordinary and immovable as the weather. I have heard much the same stuff in Manchester, Birmingham, Swansea, Brighton and beyond. This is not a view of things, moreover, solely borne out by random vox pops: careful, long-term research highlights exactly the same things, in spades.

Earlier this year, the polling company Ipsos MORI began to publish the fruits of its work on 17 years' worth of polling results, spread across four generations, starting with those born in 1945 or before, and ending with Generation Y. Among the most striking examples of a yawning gap between the generations was their respective responses to the claim that "the government should spend more money on welfare benefits for the poor, even if it leads to higher taxes" – a signifier for the principle of redistribution, support for which has fallen among all generations over the past 20 or so years. Here, though, is the remarkable thing: whereas around 40% of those born in 1945 or before still agree, the numbers tumble as you move down the age range, reaching around half that figure among those aged 33 and under. Similarly, among Gen Y, the claim that "the creation of the welfare state is one of Britain's proudest achievements" is now supported by around 20% of people; when it comes to the prewar cohort, the figure always hovered at around 70%.

 Adele said her tax bill made her: 'ready to go and buy a gun and randomly open fire'. Photograph: Jason Merritt/Getty Images

This, says Ipsos MORI's accompanying blurb, "clearly raises important questions about the future of the welfare state". It certainly does, and the point is fleshed out by poll after poll. In research done by ICM in March, for example, the idea that most unemployed people receiving benefits were "for the most part unlucky rather than lazy" was rejected by 48% of 18- to 24-year-olds, and 46% of 25- to 34-year-olds, who apparently agreed with what we now know as the striver/skiver divide.

Look at the polling data relating to other issues and one thing becomes clear. In many ways, Gen Y is admirably socially enlightened: its support for gender equality and gay rights is overwhelming, and on such ideas as the wearing of traditional dress in state schools, its live-and-let-live mores tower over those of older generations. Moreover, among its younger members, the fusty, nostalgic politics of Ukip seems to have very limited appeal: when the party scored its highest ever ICM poll rating back in May, though its support among the 25-34s stood at 21%, the figure for the 18-24s was a comparatively paltry 8%.

A large share of Generation Y seems to build its opinions around a liberalism that is both social and, crucially, economic. This, conveniently, also forms the core of the modern Toryism espoused by David Cameron and George Osborne.

Which brings us to the next revelation, which reached the media last week. Though the under-34s are less keen on the idea of political loyalty than older cohorts, latter-day Tories have apparently managed to speak to a creditable swath of Gen Y, and pull off an amazing political feat. When Cameron took over the Tory leadership in 2005, the party's support among Generation Y stood at 10%. It has since more than doubled, to 20.5%: when Osborne gets up to deliver his latest spending review and serve further notice that the state must be hacked back, and the economy must somehow be rebalanced between private and public, large numbers of young people will apparently be in full agreement.

One recent YouGov poll put support for the Tories among the 18-24s at 31%, with Labour trailing at 27%. By way of a contrast, Tory support among those aged 40-59 was at 29%, with Labour on 40%. In other words, the time-worn wisdom about politics and the young may be in the process of being turned on its head. Welcome, then, to yet another element of the New Normal, and a sobering fact: when it comes to questions about the welfare state, work and the like, the younger you are, the more rightwing you're likely to be.

At which point, some caveats. I'm a comparatively ancient 43, and it has always seemed to me that my own generation – X, the pollsters call it – has been something of a washout. We seemed to be rendered punch-drunk by Thatcherism, holding on to a vague affection for the postwar welfare state – we could get the dole with no questions asked, after all – and being stunned into silence by the social and political revolution that began in our childhood, and was firmly embedded by the time we reached our 20s. For a time, many of us switched off from politics altogether. On that score, I have always liked a sentence written by that eminent Gen X-er Zadie Smith: "I saw the best minds of my generation accept jobs on the fringes of the entertainment industry."

At least part of Generation Y, by contrast, seems to be not just angry with the ever-rightward drift of politics, but more than prepared to take the kind of action at which most of my lot would have balked. It seems outraged by such issues as the marketisation of higher education, the position of the super-rich, and the all-pervasive effects of austerity. If you doubt this, consider the events of November 2010, when all those students laid siege to the Conservative party's HQ at Millbank, and trashed it, along the way spurning the kind of tepid politics espoused by the leadership of the NUS. Note also the fired-up voices who have given Generation Y a huge political visibility: the columnist and author Owen Jones, the left-feminist Laurie Penny, the people who have clustered around such brilliantly trailblazing groups as UK Feminista, People and Planet and UK Uncut.

And yet, and yet. Might the true views of Gen Y have been better summed up by 23-year-old Adele Adkins, whose response to the brief era of a 50% top rate of tax oozed the stuff of post-Thatcher individualism? Just to recap: "I'm mortified to have to pay 50%. I use the NHS, I can't use public transport any more. Trains are always late, most state schools are shit, and I've got to give you, like, four million quid – are you having a laugh? When I got my tax bill in from [the album] 19, I was ready to go and buy a gun and randomly open fire." Lovely. 

Not that one should set huge store by the often frazzled views of mere pop stars and celebs, but it may also be worth noting that Harry Styles (19) issued a mournful tweet about the death of Margaret Thatcher, and that the Marx-like oracle Rylan Clark (24) described her as a "legend" before affecting to think better of it. At the upper end of the Gen Y age range, consider also the infamous views of Frank Turner, the 31-year-old old-Etonian singer who apparently thinks that when it comes to the relationship between government and the individual, there should be an emphasis on "minimising the impact on ordinary people's lives … allow[ing] them to get on with their lives and not be bothered by the state. Then you've suddenly got a range of things to talk about that are achievable. Like everything from not having ID cards and trying to dismantle the surveillance system we've put together in this country on the one hand, trying to remove government from people's lives, social services. Letting people be freer, health and safety, whatever it might be." On the face of it, that all chimes brilliantly with the aforementioned polling.

But never mind pop stars and singer-songwriters. In the real world, what's often most remarkable about the Gen Y worldview is the way it extends even to people who, on the face of it, might have very good reason to think that economic liberalism and hostility to the welfare state have done them very few favours at all.

Last year, I went to Warrington, the sprawling Cheshire town that shares with Peterborough the sense of somehow being modern Britain incarnate. I was there to have a look at the local version of the Work Programme, the government initiative that aims to get people suffering long-term unemployment back into work, apparently by convincing them that joblessness is usually the result of character failings rather than the state of the economy.

There, I met a 27-year-old man who had just managed to re-enter the world of work, though the only thing he could find was a temporary contract delivering sofas. Around us were shelves peppered with self-help books; the people in charge assured me that even if work seemed thin on the ground, the people they supervised could always look for "hidden jobs". So I wondered: did he think that the fact he was unemployed was his fault?

His reply was just this side of heartbreaking. "Yeah," he said. "I do. I think I should have applied for more. I should have picked myself up in the morning, got out, come to a place like this – tried more. When you're feeling down, you start blaming the world for your mistakes – you feel the world owes you. And it doesn't. You owe the world: you have to motivate yourself, and get out there, and try."

There it was again: the up-by-the-bootstraps Conservatism of Norman Tebbit and Margaret Thatcher, largely unchallenged during the New Labour years, and now built into millions of young lives as a simple matter of fact. Oh, Generation Y. Why? 

With the Met Police, if you are innocent you have everything to worry about

Peter Francis's revelations show the need for a judicial inquiry – so the public can see how far our democracy has been eroded

• 
• • Michael Mansfield
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 25 June 2013 13.43 BST

Doreen Lawrence in 2008 at the memorial service marking 15th anniversary of the murder of her son, Stephen.

The revelations by the former NSA operative, Edward Snowden (now to be charged with espionage himself), about the massive extent of state snooping on telephone calls and internet traffic, shocked even the most sanguine. The authorities, however, on both sides of the Atlantic, came out with the same stock response verging on justification: if you are innocent you have nothing to worry about.

The quite disgraceful conduct of police undercover agents described by another whistleblower, Peter Francis, gives the lie to this complacent and arrogant mantra. The perfectly innocent family of Stephen Lawrence was targeted in an attempt to discredit and undermine its quest for truth. Not for the first time has the state tried to depict victims and their families as disreputable and unworthy of belief: Bloody Sunday, Jean Charles de Menezes and Hillsborough are other recent examples.

Besides institutional racism it seems the Metropolitan police was also guilty of institutional deceit. A whole unit was established in order to manage and practise this, within the special demonstration squad (SDS). So much for another mantra commonly trotted out by our leaders that we enjoy freedom of expression and the right to peaceful protest. This will come as no surprise to experienced observers (eg CND in the 1980s, which faced a well-funded government anti-CND propaganda unit and constant surveillance). It is not remotely comforting or reassuring to know that the SDS was disbanded in 2008, given the existence of another outfit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, which was charged with tracking green activists.

SDS employed in the region of 130 officers and a number of those were deputed to scratch around for anything they could find on the Lawrences at the very time they should have been devoting resources to what was to become a thoroughly incompetent investigation. They failed to make arrests based on reliable information received within 24 hours; instead we now know that Francis was acquiring alternative information on Stephen's friend and main witness Duwayne Brooks, which might undermine his credibility. Subsequent charges against him were later dismissed.

Additionally, it appears efforts were being made to discover who visited the Lawrence family home and who was involved in a support group, Youth Against Racism. Both home and group were being invaded on an entirely spurious basis.

The general background is far wider than the Lawrence case, embracing many other areas and activities. Officers have adopted false identities, often those of dead infants, played roles which involved intimate relationships with women who rightly feel desperately abused and has been described by one as "like being raped by the state". The Mark Kennedy saga is an exemplification of the scope and depth of infiltration.

In January this year, Maina Kiai, the UN special rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, provided a highly critical report on violations of human rights in the UK. One of the matters he focused on was the use of undercover policing. He recommended a review of the Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and a judge-led inquiry. Neville Lawrence has demanded exactly that in an interview with the BBC. He is right: we are dealing with potentially unlawful practices and fundamental breaches of the European convention, especially with regard to privacy.

At present there are 16 different inquiries taking place. One of them is Operation Herne, conducted by the chief constable of Derbyshire under the direction of the IPCC. Another is going to be an extension of the Mark Ellison QC review into the question of corruption.

This is manifestly inadequate. Fragmented, protracted and disparate inquiries behind closed doors, let alone carried out by police officers, will hardly restore public confidence already severely dented by denial and deceit. There has to be an independent judge-led public inquiry which incorporates the potential for accountability and transparency. A forum along the lines of Leveson is imperative, so the public can be made aware of how far our democracy has been eroded, and it needs to address the following questions:

1. Authorisation: a squad as big as this does not exist for more than 40 years without approval, if only tacit, at the very highest level. Who knew about it and to whom was it accountable?

2. What were its terms of reference, especially with regard to the unit described by Francis?

3. Funding: substantial sums of public money must have been devoted to this operation. Which budget was used? Who authorised it?

4. Method: who authorised the various techniques employed?

5. Monitoring: how was it regulated? What was Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary doing? Did they ask the right questions? Were they told the truth?

6. Who decided that the operation would not be disclosed to the Macpherson inquiry?

Once more we must expose collusion, corruption and manipulation. There can be no justice without truth.

The Britons leaving the UK to get their relatives in

British citizens are bypassing immigration regulations to get their relatives into the UK, using a technicality that means that if they work in another European country for three months, they can be considered under EU rather than British law on their return. Is this cheating the system or just getting past unfair rules?

Sarah Pitard is a screenwriter from Chicago who had been living in the UK for four years on student visas when she married actor Chris Hall from Swindon, in December 2012.

When the couple applied for their marriage visa the UK Border Agency returned their form saying they had not enclosed payment details. The couple maintain that these details had been included, but by that time it was too late for them to re-apply as Sarah's existing visa was about to expire.

"Our visa was refused and when I calculated how many days I was allowed to stay in the UK it turned out we had 48 hours to leave the country, otherwise I would have been banned for 10 years.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

If it is a cheat then we will cheat so that we can stay together for the rest of our lives”

Chris Hall, with his US wife Sarah Pitard

"I called Chris who had just left for a big theatre tour, and I said 'You gotta come back - meet me at St. Pancras'," Pitard recalls. "And we just shot out on the Eurostar and landed in Paris. I had never even been to France."

Under UK law, Hall was only able to bring his wife, a non-European Economic Area (EEA) citizen, in to Britain if he met the £18,600-a-year base earnings requirement.

But UKBA would not count some of his income as it comes from freelance acting work. So despite being married to a British citizen, Pitard was not allowed back in to the country.

A friend, though, knew of another way of getting a spouse in to the country.

The method they went on to pursue is known as the Surinder Singh route, named after an historic court case. It involves leaving the UK and working in the EEA for about three months.

By exercising your rights under European freedom of movement, your status as a European citizen takes priority over your status as a UK citizen, and when you return to the UK you are allowed to bring your Non-EEA spouse without having to meet the £18,600 minimum earnings requirement which applies to Britons.

In simple terms, EEA citizens have stronger migration rights than UK citizens, since they can bring in family members from outside Europe in this way.

"My friend said it's not publicised - it's really hard to find on the UKBA website, you pretty much have to know about it in order to find it," Sarah tells me. "They don't make it easy because they don't really want anyone to know about it."

It is therefore easier for someone from France or Germany living in the UK to bring in their Indian or American partner or relative, and each year around 20,000 non-European family members come into the UK this way.

Sonel Metha, of Reading, is currently living and working in Dublin in order to bring her parents across from Australia. They were blocked from moving to the UK by new rules on dependent relatives introduced in July 2012.

"It's the only route that's open to us and I think it's left open because the government can't close it," Metha says.

In migration terms EEA citizens have stronger rights than UK citizens

Although she knows the route is completely legitimate, she is expecting trouble when she arrives in the UK with her parents and tells the Border Agency official that she is using the Surinder Singh route.

"It will be clear that my parents are coming to settle in the UK. I'm absolutely expecting questions. I'm expecting the immigration officers to deny my right to be able to do that, but I'll have all the evidence with me to show that I have exercised my treaty rights in Ireland," Metha explains. "And paperwork printed out from the UKBA website which says that this route is something that British citizens can avail of."

Guy Taylor, of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, says that as other immigration options are closed off an increasing number of people are using the Surinder Singh route.

"One person I spoke to yesterday is working in an arcade in the south of Germany with his Russian wife," Taylor says.

"There are people who are working in Portugal, Spain, France. A lot of people going to Dublin - obviously because of the language.

"It's hard to estimate exactly how many people are doing this because so many don't declare they're going. There are Facebook groups about people trying to share flats and actually co-ordinating on this."

But he added that a whole new group of people are now falling foul of immigration rules.

"For the first time, we're seeing immigration rules hitting white British people and there's a lot of anger about that because this is an infringement on British people's rights, not just about immigrants."

But David Goodhart, director of think-tank Demos and author of The British Dream, a book about post-war immigration, believes the Surinder Singh route should be closed.

"I would regard that as a loophole. When different European countries are trying to place restrictions on the number of people coming from outside Europe, it seems bizarre that those people who are not British citizens find it easier to bring people in from outside the EU than British citizens," he says.

"To have rules about controlling people coming into the country from outside Europe, just made fun of by a European regulation - it should be stopped."

The Immigration Minister Mark Harper declined to be interviewed for BBC Asian Network/Newsnight's report and instead issued a statement:

"The EEA family permit is not a 'loophole'. It reflects the current requirements of EU law and would not apply if someone went abroad to a member state for a short time just in order to circumvent the immigration rules. An application will be refused if it cannot be proved the British citizen was genuinely engaged in employment."

This somewhat contradicts the UKBA website which says that it does not matter if the only reason a British national goes to another member state is to exercise an economic Treaty right so that they can come back to the UK with their family members.

Those using the route argue they have been forced into a corner. In Paris, Chris Hall says he is not in the least ashamed.

"We're doing this because we have no other options. So we're going to go ahead with it and if it is a cheat then we will cheat so that we can stay together for the rest of our lives."

I supported Brazil's World Cup bid, but the expense is now crippling us

This mega event can only deepen Brazil's problems. The only beneficiary will be Fifa

• 
• • Romário
  • The Guardian, Monday 24 June 2013

People gather for an anti-government protest in Rio. ‘The people on the street are crying out for an end to corruption and against the waste of public money, both of which are so common in our Brazil.’ Photograph: Silvia Izquierdo/AP

Over the last week, the Confederations Cup, which is taking place in Brazil, has been sharing space in the news with frequent and timely protests on the streets, most of them with the intention of forcing the Brazilian government into a new economic direction.

As five times world champion, Brazil's love of football has long been blamed for distracting the population from its social problems. It is ironic, therefore, that it was the country's preparation to host the World Cup that has mobilised Brazilians. Raising flags with no party colour, the people on the street are crying out for an end to corruption and against the waste of public money, both of which are sadly so common in our Brazil.

These protests will strengthen our democratic culture. It is the voice from the streets, for one, that will lead to the strengthening of our judiciary. And it couldn't come at a more timely moment: with the legislation currently weak, corruption is rife – and those who steal from the public are let off the hook. As a congressman for the Brazilian Socialist party (PSB), I am comfortable being so critical of the state of the law in my country, because for a long time I have not shied away from pointing out the abuses that take place around here.

When Brazil won the bid to host the World Cup, other politicians were in charge of the country, and our political reality was different. I supported the bid because it promised to generate employment and income, promote tourism and strengthen the country's image.

Since then, Brazil has been affected by the turbulence in the world economy just like any other country. Government plans were redrafted, public investment was cut – yet the commitments signed with all-powerful Fifa stayed the same. Investment in cities hosting World Cup matches were prioritised over the people's needs. Money was channelled predominantly towards sport projects, at the expense of health, education and safety. The lack of investment in education, for example, contributed to an increase in people with no occupation, leading to more unemployment and lack of security in the big cities.

In many cities, conditions in schools are deplorable. Teachers are poorly paid and demoralised, and Brazil is now ranked second last on Pearson's education quality index, out of 40 countries. Worse: one in four students who start out in basic education leave school before they complete the last grade, according to the UN Development Programme's 2012 development report.

Brazil's public health situation is worrying, too. Those who have to rely on public hospitals often end up with their sickness aggravated by the lack of professional treatment. There have been press reports about people dying while on hospital waiting lists, without receiving even basic treatment. Who is responsible for this criminal irresponsibility?

Problems with education, health and safety were inherited by previous governments, making the country socially vulnerable, in spite of what the economy index may tell you. Brazil is now one of the 10 major world powers, but how does that matter to the people if the social loss is so evident?

Under the government of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the World Cup proposal was to have an event in which there was transparency on public spending. The opposite has occurred. An initial budget of R$25.5bn ($11.4bn) for stadiums, urban transportation, improvements in ports and airports, has risen to R$28bn, according to the sports ministry's executive secretary, Luiz Fernandes – almost three times the cost of Germany's World Cup in 2006. Why are we organising the most expensive World Cup in history, without any of the benefits to the community we were promised?

Plans to improve traffic around host cities have turned out to be chaotic, too; only three have stuck to their budgets and deadlines. Numbers like these have made the public angry and fuelled popular protests, in a bid to reverse the logic of a system that privileges money over social matters.

Meanwhile, Fifa has announced that it will make a R$4bn profit from Brazil's World Cup, tax-free. Its easy profit contrasts with the total lack of an effective legacy. President Dilma Rousseff repeats what former president Lula said, reassuring us that we'll "host the best World Cup of all time". I don't agree, because we have failed on what matters most: a legacy to make us proud. Only Fifa is profiting, and this is one more good reason to go to the streets and protest.

I never thought the World Cup would solve all of our problems, but now my fear is that this mega event will only deepen the problems we already have.

Why I have no truck with the art of the pick-up

Pick-up artists exist to help men find sexual partners but their psychosexual babble is riddled with misogyny and bad advice

• 
• • Ally Fogg
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 24 June 2013 11.09 BST

Studying Austin Powers at work in The Spy Who Shagged Me could do more for your sex life than a pick-up artist, says Ally Fogg. But what has worked for you? Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features

I blame Transformers. Many of my fellow heterosexual men appear to approach potential romantic partners as if they were those complicated robotic toys with a special hidden feature. All you need to do is turn her head just enough, raise her eyebrows, utter the secret password and woop woop woop: a siren sounds, her nipples start flashing and she instantly transforms into your own personal sex machine – Bonktamus Prime.

Having met one or two real, actual women in my time, I'm not sure they operate like that. They're rather complicated creatures, with all sorts of varied and conflicting character traits, moods, tastes, preferences, senses of humour and sexualities. It's almost like they are human beings or something.

Nonetheless an astonishingly large industry has built up online over the past decade, promising to help lonely men find the elusive sex button. It's not surprising that self-styled pick-up artists (PUAs) have found a market. They offer perfect psychosexual snake-oil, cashing in on the gullibility of the desperate. Their potions are dressed up in a frilly blanket of pseudoscience, snippets of social and evolutionary psychology, stage mentalism, neurolinguistic programming and self-referential received wisdom. It is mostly marketed through far-fetched personal testimony and miraculous anecdote. Most importantly, there are so many different models offered, so many conflicting "treatments" for low sex appeal, that unsatisfied customers can drift endlessly from one treatment to the next in search of the magic sex switch.

Nonetheless, PUAs have a few PR issues to deal with. Last week a Kickstarter appeal to fund a new PUA book came to widespread attention when it was noticed that the proposed content of the book – the collected wisdom of the Reddit community called r/seduction and in particular the contributions of a certain Mr TofuTofu – were peppered with the most gruesomely misogynistic advice. Alex Hern at the New Statesman outlined the worst of it. Kickstarter has now removed the post and apologised, saying "the project has no place on our site".

The proposed book was horrible, but even the more mundane threads on PUA forums are peppered with nastiness. The phrase "last-minute resistance" is used in discussions of how not to take no for an answer. The PUAs insist that their advice is always framed with discussion of consent and respecting a woman's right to refuse, and it is true. However that often seems to boil down to "back off until she stops screaming and then try again". The PUA typically describes consent as a final inconvenient hurdle rather than the starting blocks of any sexual event.

PUA techniques are certainly manipulative, but that in itself isn't the greatest sin. A lot of the advice is a gender-mirrored reflection of the dating advice columns that have filled women's magazines and self-help books for decades. However there is an important difference. PUAs often advocate intrusive, oppressive and sexually intimidating techniques for approaching women, on the promise that it will work on perhaps one woman in 10. Even if that were true, it would mean that nine out of 10 women are being subjected to approaches they may feel are discomfiting, harassing or downright frightening. Where is the concern about the impacts of this behaviour on the other women? Nowhere.

To be fair, there are PUAs who recognise at least some of these problems, and attempt to incorporate some basic human sensitivity. It should also be noted that there may be constructive sides to the PUA experience. Feminist writer Clarisse Thorn has documented the scene with compassion and sympathy, and notes that the community often acts as a kind of self-help and personal development network for socially awkward, shy and unhappy men – something Neil Strauss, author of The Game and original PUA guru has always advocated.

The social support networks may be a major reason why so many men claim PUA tricks have worked for them – just as many homeopathy patients insist on their own positive experiences. A parable featuring the greatest of all PUAs illustrates this well.

As I'm sure you'll recall from your classics lectures, in The Spy Who Shagged Me, the great philosopher, spy and international man of venery, Austin Powers was cast into sexual inconsequence when the evil Fat Bastard stole his mojo during an encounter with Ivana Humpalot. Ninety minutes and several dance routines later, he learned the valuable lesson that it wasn't his mojo that he was missing, but his confidence.

So my advice, for what it's worth ($49.99 to my Paypal account, as it happens) is to abandon the PUA gurus and study the master Powers at work. Things will soon be utterly shagtastic for you, baby. What advice would you share? Whether you are male or female, what has worked for you, or worked on you? Let's see if the seductive hive mind of Comment is free can put the commercial PUAs out of business once and for all.

How can we invest our trust in a government that spies on us?

We should not fear some Orwellian future state where we're subjected to total electronic scrutiny – it's our present reality

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 24 June 2013 20.30 BST

Bob Lambert, an undercover policeman who is alleged to have lied in court and has been accused by an MP of firebombing, was awarded an MBE in 2008 and now teaches at St Andrews University. Photograph: guardian.co.uk

'If you are a law-abiding citizen of this country, going about your business and your personal life, you have nothing to fear." That's how William Hague, the foreign secretary, responded to the revelations of mass surveillance in the US and the UK. Try telling that to Stephen Lawrence's family.

Four police officers were deployed to spy on the family and friends of the black teenager murdered by white racists. The Lawrences and the people who supported their fight for justice were law-abiding citizens going about their business. Yet undercover police were used, one of the spies now tells us, to hunt for "disinformation" and "dirt". Their purpose? "We were trying to stop the campaign in its tracks."

The two unfolding spy stories resonate powerfully with each other. One, gathered by Paul Lewis and Rob Evans, shows how police surveillance has been comprehensively perverted. Instead of defending citizens and the public realm, it has been used to protect the police from democratic scrutiny and stifle attempts to engage in politics.

The other, arising from the documents exposed by Edward Snowden, shows that the US and the UK have been involved in the mass interception of our phone calls and use of the internet. William Hague insists that we should "have confidence in the work of our intelligence agencies, and in their adherence to the law and democratic values". Why?

Here are a few of the things we have learned about undercover policing in Britain. A unit led by a policeman called Bob Lambert deployed officers to spy on peaceful activists. They adopted the identities of dead children and then infiltrated protest groups. Nine of the 11 known spies formed long-term relationships with women in the groups, in some cases (including Lambert's) fathering children with them. Then they made excuses and vanished.

They left a trail of ruined lives, fatherless children and women whose confidence and trust have been wrecked beyond repair. They have also walked away from other kinds of mayhem. On Friday we discovered that Lambert co-wrote the leaflet for which two penniless activists spent three years in the high court defending a libel action brought by McDonald's. The police never saw fit to inform the court that one of their own had been one of the authors.

Bob Lambert has been accused of using a false identity during a criminal trial. And, using parliamentary privilege, the MP Caroline Lucas alleged that he planted an incendiary device in a branch of Debenhams while acting as an agent provocateur. The device exploded, causing £300,000 of damage. Lambert denies the allegation.

Police and prosecutors also failed to disclose, during two trials of climate-change activists, that an undercover cop called Mark Kennedy had secretly taped their meetings, and that his recordings exonerated the protesters. Twenty people were falsely convicted. Those convictions were later overturned.

If the state is prepared to abuse its powers and instruments so widely and gravely in cases such as this, where there is a high risk of detection, and if it is prepared to intrude so far into people's lives that its officers live with activists and father their children, what is it not prepared to do while spying undetectably on our private correspondence?

Already we know that electronic surveillance has been used in this country for purposes other than the perennial justifications of catching terrorists, foiling foreign spies and preventing military attacks. It was deployed, for example, to spy on countries attending the G20 meeting the UK hosted in 2009. If the government does this to other states, which might have the capacity to detect its spying and which certainly have the means to object to it, what is it doing to defenceless citizens?

It looks as if William Hague may have misled parliament a fortnight ago. He claimed that "to intercept the content of any individual's communications in the UK requires a warrant signed personally by me, the home secretary, or by another secretary of state".

We now discover that these ministers can also issue general certificates, renewed every six months, which permit mass interception of the kind that GCHQ has been conducting. Among the certificates issued to GCHQ is a "global" one authorising all its operations, including the trawling of up to 600m phone calls and 39m gigabytes of electronic information a day. A million ministers, signing all day, couldn't keep up with that.

The best test of the good faith of an institution is the way it deals with past abuses. Despite two years of revelations about abusive police spying, the British government has yet to launch a full public inquiry. Bob Lambert, who ran the team, fathered a child by an innocent activist he deceived, co-wrote the McDonald's leaflet, is alleged to have lied in court and has been accused by an MP of firebombing, was awarded an MBE in 2008. He now teaches at St Andrews University, where he claims to have a background in "counter-terrorism".

The home office minister Nick Herbert has stated in parliament that it's acceptable for police officers to have sex with activists, for the sake of their "plausibility". Does this sound to you like a state in which we should invest our trust?

Talking to Sunday's Observer, a senior intelligence source expressed his or her concerns about mass surveillance. "If there was the wrong political change, it could be very dangerous. All you need is to have the wrong government in place." But it seems to me that any government prepared to subject its citizens to mass surveillance is by definition the wrong one. No one can be trusted with powers as wide and inscrutable as these.

In various forms – Conservative, New Labour, the coalition – we have had the wrong government for 30 years. Across that period its undemocratic powers have been consolidated. It has begun to form an elective dictatorship, in which the three major parties are united in their desire to create a security state; to wage unprovoked wars; to defend corporate power against democracy; to act as a doormat for the United States; to fight political dissent all the way to the bedroom and the birthing pool. There's no need to wait for the "wrong" state to arise to conclude that mass surveillance endangers liberty, pluralism and democracy. We're there already