Campaigners say both parties’ manifestos would extend powers of security agencies with pledges that are ‘totally out of step’ with public opinion

The private lives of Britons will be an open book to the state within 10 years, campaigners have warned, highlighting manifesto pledges from Labour and the Conservatives that promise more powers for spies.

Both parties have pledged to extend the powers of the security agencies, nearly two years after revelations by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden shone a light on the extent of state surveillance in Britain and the US.

Last month a committee of MPs called for an overhaul of laws governing the intelligence agencies’ use of mass surveillance to make them more transparent, comprehensible and up to date. Labour and the Tories both promise better oversight, but they also promise to strengthen the powers of the agencies.

UK surveillance laws need total overhaul, says landmark report Read more

In their manifesto, the Conservatives vow to “keep up to date” powers to access communications metadata - the who, where and how of emails, text messages and phone calls. The Labour party manifesto said it was committed to “strengthening” the powers available.

The Tories also pledge that “new communications data legislation will strengthen our ability to disrupt terrorist plots, criminal networks and organised child grooming gangs”, which campaigners see as a promise to revive the controversial communications data bill. That proposal, known as the snoopers’ charter, was defeated after a public backlash.

Only the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the Scottish National party have pledged to curb surveillance powers. The Lib Dems, who helped to defeat the communications data bill from within the coalition, said they were opposed to the “blanket collection” of British people’s personal communications.

The SNP takes a similar line, explicitly opposing a return to the snoopers’ charter. Instead it calls for a “proportionate response” including targeted efforts to identify and spy on suspected extremists. The Greens are the only party to mention Snowden in their manifesto, pledging to oppose “any case for secret unaccountable mass surveillance” of the kind his leaks revealed.

Jim Killock, the director of the Open Rights Group (ORG), said: “The right to privacy could be meaningless within a decade if we don’t see both the Conservatives and Labour take a different tack on this issue if elected. Even after Edward Snowden blew the whistle on GCHQ’s programme that gives the agency the power to capture all our data as it crosses the Atlantic, it seems they feel it is necessary to go further.”

Documents leaked by Snowden have shown that joint UK-US programmes subject the British public to dragnet surveillance of email records, social network activity, internet browsing history and phone data. Advocates say a loss of privacy is the price society has to pay for safety from criminals and terrorists. Opponents say state snooping threatens freedom.



Jo Glanville, the director of English PEN, said: “If you undermine privacy, you undermine freedom of expression, as people hold back on exchanging ideas online … Unless we get a new law in the next parliament that pushes back against the mass surveillance programmes we have now, press freedom and free speech will be undermined still further.”

Campaigners say the intelligence agencies may try to bounce an incoming government into emergency legislation. In January four influential peers - Lord Carlisle, Lord King, Lord Blair and Lord West - tried to amend the counter-terrorism and security bill to include powers to retain the communications data of every citizen in the UK for up to a year. Such a move would put the UK in line with countries such as Kazakhstan, China and Iran, campaigners say.

Last summer, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats worked with Labour to pass emergency legislation to extend the retention of private data. Killock said it was up to Labour to rule out working with the Tories again to push through similar drastic laws. “Unless they can rule this out, anyone who cares about their privacy will remain concerned,” he said.

The manifesto pledges come nearly a year after a poll found that the overwhelming majority of the public believed it was important to keep not only medical, financial and credit information private, but also web browsing records, mobile phone location and telephone and email metadata.

The Ipsos Mori poll, commissioned last May by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, a year after the first publication of the Snowden leaks, also found just one in eight respondents thought the government could be trusted to set limits on surveillance, compared with a fifth who said parliament should set the rules and a third judges.

Gus Hosein, the executive director of Privacy International, said: “We are gravely concerned that at the moment the larger political parties are totally out of step with public opinion on the right to privacy.”

A report by the House of Commons intelligence and security committee, which oversees the security services, said last month that existing laws were not being broken and insisted the government’s bulk collection of data did not amount to mass surveillance or a threat to individual privacy.

It also revealed for the first time, however, that agencies have had the capability to trawl through personal records and form and examine “bulk personal datasets” without any statutory oversight.