GCHQ

Dennis Skinner Excerpts

Monday 10th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hague]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, including about the importance of the relationship and about how inevitably the vast majority of work done together by the UK and US intelligence agencies is to guard against threats from elsewhere in the world.

[Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)]

Following on from what my hon. Friend the Member for Blyth Valley (Mr Campbell) said, and the fact that GCHQ has been involved in trade union disputes for a long time, can the Foreign Secretary give me an assurance? He will not explain precisely how this interception takes place on the advice of a Minister; but surely, if the Prime Minister of the day in 1984 said that the miners and the NUM were the “enemy within”, would that not give the green light to GCHQ to intervene in every single coalfield? Because that is what we believed.

[Mr Hague]

We are in a different century now—we are 13 years into the 21st century. The challenges are different and the focus of the intelligence agencies is different from decades in the past and very different, of course, from during the cold war. It is important for Opposition Members below the Gangway to start to move with the times.