LABOUR MPs were urged by trade unionists and campaigners to defy the party whip today and vote against a Bill that would authorise violent crime committed by undercover police officers and agents.

The government’s Covert Human Intelligence Source (Criminal Conduct) Bill had its second reading this evening after the Star went to print.

Labour MPs were on a one-line whip to abstain on the vote. Leader Sir Keir Starmer was set to let the Bill progress so that the party could press the government on “robust safeguards” at and after the committee stage.

However, some MPs pledged to vote against the Bill. After it was introduced to the House of Commons last month, Amnesty International  warned that the legislation “could end up providing informers and agents with a licence to kill.”

Some Labour MPs have cited the killing of lawyer Pat Finucane, so-called spycops relationships, the surveillance of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and interference in lawful trade union activities as reasons for rebelling against the party leadership.

Streatham MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy said she would be defying the whip, adding: “The prohibition against torture and murder in the name of the British state must be absolute.”

Labour MP Richard Burgon said the Bill has “alarmed” trade unionists, environmentalists, anti-racists and justice campaigners.

Unite the union also expressed its “serious concerns,”, saying that the Bill “poses a grave threat to freedom and justice,” and “allows infiltration of trade unions and protest organisations to ‘prevent disorder’.”

Dave Smith, secretary of Blacklist Support Group, which campaigns against blacklisting and surveillance injustices experienced by trade unionists, said that abstaining “is not an option” for MPs.

The Bill, according to the House of Commons library, would authorise criminal behaviour carried out by officials and agents of security and intelligence services, law enforcement and certain other public authorities.

It would also place no specific limitations on the type of criminal activity that may be authorised without judicial approval, and would prevent victims’ civil claims for injury.

The government has argued that it is “not a new capability” and that the lawfulness of agents’ criminality was upheld by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal in December 2019.

It added that the main purpose of the Bill is to place such activity on a “clear statutory footing.”