Phone tapping in Scotland ("Fettesgate")
01 January 1991
Phone tapping in Scotland ("Fettesgate")
artdoc August=1992
"Fettesgate" has revealed a police phone-monitoring
network, as Kenny Farquharson reports from Scotland
New Statesman and Society 7.8.92.
Splashed across the front page of the Scottish edition of
the Sun on 30 July was one of those tabloid headlines you
cannot help but admire. Next to a picture of a
sheepish-looking Sir William Sutherland, chief constable of
Lothian and Borders police, in very large letters it asked:
"HAVE THE PLODS GONE MAD?"
It was one of the first shots in a Scottish media blitzkrieg
against the police, following the heavy-handed treatment of
two journalists who had written stories about an embar-
rassing break-in at the Lothian and Borders force
headquarters in the Fettes area of Edinburgh. Intruders had
spent an estimated three hours in the offices of the
Scottish crime squad in the early hours of Sunday 19 July,
and had stolen dozens of confidential files detailing police
investigations and surveillance operations. Animal liberal
Front slogans were spray-painted on the office walls.
What has predictably become known as "The Fettesgate Affair"
continues to dominate the news in Scotland, and has thrown
up a number of prickly issues: the use of criminal law
against journalists who have been given sensitive
information; the safety of the European Community summit in
Edinburgh in December; the ability of the police to protect
their own offices and the identities of their informers; and
the use by police of a type of telephone surveillance that
does not require a warrant.
Nine days after the break-in, Ron McKay, 43, a reporter with
the quality broadsheet Scotland on Sunday, became the first
person arrested by the special team of detectives put
together to investigate the raid. While on holiday in Kent
with his girlfriend and baby son, he was woken by Scottish
detectives at 7am. Detectives searched the house, broke into
his car, searched a basement flat he owns in Maida Vale in
London, and then flew him back to Edinburgh where he spent a
night in police cells.
He was handcuffed, fingerprinted, denied a change of clothes
and eventually charged with reset, an offence in Scots Law
similar to handling stolen goods. McKay had written a story
about the break-in for SoS, based on a detailed account
provided by someone claiming to have taken part in the raid.
The operation, the source said, was organised by a new
alliance between the Animal Liberation Front and influential
figures in Edinburgh's criminal underworld.
The source also said files relating to police anti-terrorist
operations were being passed to the IRA and UVF, and that
two people revealed in other files as ALF informers had been
given 24 hours to leave Scotland. Copies of some files were
made available to the paper. The circumstances surrounding
McKay's SoS story are now subjudice. The day McKay appeared
in court, detectives also paid a 7am call at the Ayrshire
home of Sun reporter Alan Muir, 28. He was not arrested, but
under a clause in the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 1980,
he was held for six hours-the first five of which were spent
waiting alone in a police cell. He was eventually questioned
by detectives, who showed him a list of calls made to and
from the Sun's Glasgow offices and a transcript of a
conversation Muir had with a contact.
The increasingly beleaguered chief constable has since
agreed to an inquiry into his handling of the matter, to be
conducted by a senior officer from Strathclyde. The chief
has been visited by Labour MP Alistair Darling, an advocate
by trade, and the editors of Scotland's two quality daily
newspapers, the Scotsman and the Herald. Herald editor
Arnold Kemp has expressed concern that any move to extend
the law of reset to cover "information" would be a threat to
the freedom of the press.
But the affair is more than a furore about journalists'
rights. The real legacy o