The terrifying consequences of the ‘licence to kill’ bill

Should the Food Standards Agency be permitted to engage in torture in order to put a stop to the sale of horse meat? Should the Gambling Commission have the authority to issue licences to its agents to commit murder with impunity?

That would be the astonishing outcome were the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill, which passed its second reading in the House of Commons yesterday, to be enacted in its current form.

The justification for the Bill arises out of the real dilemma of how the intelligence services handle undercover agents who may be forced to break the law in order to carry out their work.

The purist’s position that agents of the state should never break the law is obviously unsustainable. To take but one example: if MI5 wants to place an agent (a ‘covert human intelligence source’ or ‘CHIS’, pronounced like the first syllable of ‘chisel’) within a proscribed terrorist organisation it’s not much good telling him that he mustn’t join it because that would be breaking the law.