Kim Howells in charge of Spooks (and I don't mean the TV program)

Kim Howells has been moved from the FCO to Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee. This is the parliamentary committee that rubber stamps overseas the work of the MI5, GCHQ and MI6.

This is a position of some importance as the chair can virtually hold the prime Minister to ransom on issues of national security. He is the first person to Chair the committee who has not been a cabinet minister and replaces Margaret Becket who replaced our great leader St Murphy.

This is an interesting appointment for an ex-communist, especially who ran one of the NUM offices in South Wales during the miner strike. Younger viewers will remember the 1994-85 was also a time of great economic upheaval where the government had a somewhat confused attitude to protecting the rights of its citizens that disagreed with it. Although Kim Howells was a moderate there has always been a whiff of suspicion about what exactly he was up to during the conflict.

Although the strike was particularly strong in south Wales the union rank and file remained sensible throughout. Despite this the union was engaged in activities that were clearly outside the law. Kim Howells has even admitted destroying clandestine union records when he thought the policy were going to raid an NUM office after a taxi driver was killed driving miners to work.

Many in the NUM believe to this day that Kim wasn’t exactly on the side of the union and that he was a stooge of parts of the Labour Party that wanted an end to the divisive strike. This was however obviously not the worst crime that a union official could commit. During the strike sections of security forces infiltrated the NUM probably to undermine the efforts of the moderates.

Kim is maybe now in a position to maybe find out what really happened.

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