Way back in 2000 the Blair government introduced the regulation of investigatory powers bill, a legislative dog’s breakfast that put formidable surveillance powers on the statute book. This was a long time before Edward Snowden broke cover, but to anyone who was paying attention it indicated that the British deep state was tooling up for the digital age. Because the powers implicit in the bill were so sweeping, some of us naively assumed that it would have a tempestuous passage through the Commons.
How wrong can you be? It turned out that the vast majority of MPs whom we canvassed seemed blissfully uninterested in it. It was, one remarked, “just a measure designed to bring telephone tapping into the digital age”. Of our 659 elected representatives, only a handful – and certainly no more than 10 – seemed at all concerned about what was being proposed. The most intriguing thing about the process, though, was that most of the work to improve the bill on its way through parliament was done, not by elected representatives, but by a handful of peers (some of them hereditary) in the House of Lords, who put in a lot of late-night work and trimmed some of the excrescences off the bill, which became law (nicknamed Ripa) in July 2000.
