Meet the new Britain: just like the old one where green protesters are spied on

It doesn't happen often, but very occasionally something I write seems to make a difference - if only at the margins. Just before Christmas, I wrote a column showing how peaceful environmental protesters had been tarred by the police as dangerous subversives.

A group of villagers campaigning against an attempt to turn their local lake into a dump for fly ash from Didcot power station had found their names on a list of "domestic extremists".

As well as defaming them, the website of the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (Netcu) also carried images of people marching with banners, of peace campaigners standing outside a military base and of the Rebel Clown Army (whose members dress up as clowns to show they have peaceful intentions) and published press releases about Greenpeace and the climate camp at Kingsnorth. All this, it suggested, is domestic extremism.

On the day my column was published, Netcu took its site down. Now a skeleton site has been restored, without the misleading material: it no longer makes an association between peaceful protest and domestic extremism. So credit where it's due: Netcu took no time at all to recognise that it was doing a disservice to democracy.

No sooner is one battle won than another begins. Last night, I was sent an email linking to this story about a new police body, the Confidential Intelligence Unit, which has been set up to tackle domestic extremists. If the Mail on Sunday is to be believed – always a big if – the new unit does exactly what NETCU was doing until Christmas: conflating peaceful protest with violent extremism. Among its targets, apparently, are "environmental groups involved in direct action such as Plane Stupid".

The paper reports that:

The CIU's role will be similar to the 'counter subversion' functions formerly carried out by MI5. The so-called "reds under the bed" operations focused on trade unionists and peace campaigners

There's progress for you: if the report is true, the new unit appears to be taking us back to the days when the security forces played a blatantly partisan role in seeking to destroy progressive politics.

Like Netcu, the CIU is answerable to the Association of Chief Police Officers. So why is it running two units with the same function? Perhaps we'll never know: the CIU's work will be covered by public interest immunity certificates and won't be susceptable to freedom of information requests.

Meet the new Britain: just like the old one, except that this time the Labour government – previously a target of MI5's subversive activities - is also waging war on progressive politics.

www.monbiot.com