RAF Fairford arrests: Britain revives the accidental spy, again
After five men were bailed over the RAF Fairford arrests, Gloucestershire Constabulary wants every household within fourteen miles of the airbase to have a think.
Five men arrested near RAF Fairford have been released on bail while police investigate whether offences were committed knowingly or unknowingly for a foreign state. Gloucestershire Constabulary has taken the phrase to heart and sent every household within fourteen miles a form to check for themselves. Results so far are mostly inconclusive.
“…and I said to him, well, I don’t know, do I, that’s rather the point,” a woman in a waxed jacket was telling a constable outside Fairford’s community centre on Tuesday morning. She had come to find out whether she was a foreign agent. The constable, to his credit, could not tell her either.
Five men arrested near RAF Fairford on suspicion of explosives offences have been released on bail. Counter-terrorism police say the alleged offences could have been committed “knowingly or unknowingly” on behalf of a foreign state. That phrase has since done a great deal of work.
Gloucestershire Constabulary has answered it with a fourteen-question online self-assessment. Every household within fourteen miles of the airbase, which hosts American bombers, has been asked to complete it. The form is titled Have You Unknowingly Acted For A Foreign Power, and it takes about as long as appealing a parking ticket.
The questions
Question one asks whether the respondent owns, hires or has recently sat in a van. Question four asks whether they have driven through the countryside early on a Sunday “for reasons you would struggle to explain to a stranger in a high-visibility vest”. Question nine asks, simply, “Are you sure?”
Detective Superintendent Marion Ashcombe, who runs the scheme, defended its scope. “We accept most people do not know whether they are working for a hostile government,” she said. “That is what unknowingly means. We are just asking them to have a think.”
Anyone who ticks “unsure” on more than three questions is invited to a drop-in session at the community centre. An officer will look at them for a while and then release them on bail. Bail is now the default outcome for every interaction with the constabulary, including reporting a lost dog.
A country that has done this before
None of this is new, and that is the tired part. In 1924 a forged letter convinced half the country that its own Labour government took orders from Moscow. In the 1980s the women camped outside Greenham Common were searched for Soviet sympathies and found, mostly, to have thermos flasks. The Cotswolds have merely inherited the franchise.
One is reminded, inevitably, of the parish councils that spent 1940 painting over road signs so German paratroopers would get lost. The paratroopers never came. The signs stayed painted for years, and everyone in Gloucestershire got lost instead.
The Ministry of Defence has offered “full support” to the scheme while declining to say what that support consists of. A spokesman said security at the base “remains robust”. He then asked whether we had mentioned the bombers, and then asked us not to mention the bombers.
“We accept most people do not know whether they are working for a hostile government. That is what unknowingly means. We are just asking them to have a think.”
Reaction in the villages
Fairford Parish Council chair Gordon Pelling filled in his form publicly at the Tuesday market, to set an example. He scored “inconclusive”. “I did once buy a rug from a man who said it was Persian,” he said. “There is no box for that, so I put it under other.”
A local hire firm reported van bookings down by fourteen in a week. “People are frightened to be seen in one,” the owner said, asking not to be named because he owns nine. “Three men in a Transit used to mean a kitchen. Now it means a press conference.”
The Home Office has stayed quiet, which is what it does best. A source there called the constabulary’s scheme “enthusiastic”, in the tone usually reserved for a colleague’s amateur dramatics. A national version was “not ruled out”, the source added, which in Whitehall means it has already been costed.
Civil liberties campaigners have objected, mildly and for the record. Rights Before Roundabouts, a group formed in a Cirencester pub last spring, called the form “a loyalty oath with a captcha”. Its founder then asked whether filling it in badly counted as acting for a foreign power. Nobody could say.
Meanwhile the five men remain on bail while police work out why they were near a bomber base in three vans at dawn. It is a fair question. Groups of young men have been found beside military installations at first light for as long as there have been installations, and the explanations have ranged from treason to a very bad map.
What happens next
Detective Superintendent Ashcombe expects the form to run “indefinitely, or until people stop being unsure”. Nobody has told her which will come first. The community centre has booked its main hall through Christmas, and the tea urn has been formally requisitioned.
Britain has always suspected itself quietly and reported itself to the nearest available uniform. The form simply gives that instinct a reference number. Fill it in honestly, then post it, unknowingly, to whichever foreign capital is closest.
