Tilly Gifford

Today sees a vital court hearing in the battle for truth and justice for victims of political spycops in Scotland.

Our new sister organisation, Scottish Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance, explains the background:

After a series of “activists” were exposed as long-term undercover police spies, and the revelation that police undercover officers had been spying on political campaigners from 1968 to the present day, a Public Inquiry into undercover policing was ordered.

The UK government, however, chose to limit the Inquiry to England and Wales. Many of the same police spies now being investigated by the Inquiry also operated in Scotland. We know that they spied in Scotland, we know that they lied in Scotland, and we know some of them were with their unsuspecting activist partners in Scotland – something the Met concedes is a breach of fundamental human rights that police are sworn to uphold.

The Scottish government made repeated formal requests to the Home Office to extend the Inquiry to cover Scotland. Every party in the Scottish Parliament backed the call. They were repeatedly refused.

Rather than have their own inquiry, the Scottish government hired HM Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland – an organisation of career police officers – to do a report. It was the most brazen whitewash imaginable. It ignored all policing before 2000 and failed to even mention officers deceiving women into relationships.

Tilly Gifford, a social justice activist with the Plane Stupid climate campaign group, was targeted by spycops in Scotland in 2009. In 2016 Tilly took legal action to challenge the UK government over its failure to extend the Inquiry to include Scotland, and also to review why the Scottish Government failed to have its own independent public inquiry.

She was denied legal aid as the case supposedly had no merit. After considerable legal wrangling, and some crowdfunding, she got the decision overturned. The full hearing is happening today and tomorrow, the 19th and 20th of July.

Realising this crucial moment was coming, a month ago, Tilly and other activists, researchers and lawyers called a public meeting in Glasgow to form the Scottish Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance (“SCOPS”).

SCOPS, along with its UK-wide counterpart Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance, is an alliance of people spied on by Britain’s political secret police. SCOPS’ focus, however, is on political policing carried out by Scottish police forces and on political policing in Scotland. The first task for SCOPS is, of course, to support Tilly in her judicial review.

SCOPS believes that victims of political policing in Scotland deserve nothing less than a full, independent, Scottish public inquiry. We’ve looked in increasing horror at the undercover policing inquiry in England and Wales, and we are determined to learn from its mistakes.

It must be led by a panel of experts. One sheriff – or judge, in the case of the Inquiry down South – is not nearly representative enough. Time and again we’ve seen the Inquiry’s chair display his lack of awareness of modern life. Scotland can and must do better. Whatever the outcome of this week’s judicial review, SCOPS will continue to campaign for a proper independent public inquiry.

We hope you’ll join us on the 19th and 20th of July at the Court of Session in Edinburgh. But whether you’re able to join us or not – if you, or someone you know, has been affected by political policing in Scotland, or can share information on political policing by Scottish police forces, please do get in touch.

We believe political policing is likely to disproportionately affect Scotland, where trade union activism has always been strong. It’s notable that the construction industry blacklist – in which police help to illegally prevent political activists from working – has a disproportionate number of Scottish names. We strongly suspect recent campaigns in Scotland – from Faslane to the Independence Referendum – will have been targeted by spycops. Every piece of information that comes to light seems to prompt further revelations.

Our campaign is just beginning, and it won’t end until political policing in Scotland ends.

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This weekend in London we’re celebrating 50 years of resistance. Since the Metropolitan Police formed their counter-democratic undercover Special Demonstration Squad in 1968, more than 1,000 groups have been spied upon. Despite this, those targeted have achieved great things.

On Saturday 7 July we will have a roll call of groups in Grosvenor Square, where 1968’s demonstration against the Vietnam War triggered the formation of the spycops unit.

On Sunday we will be at Conway Hall for a day of exhibitions, discussions and much more.

See our 50 Years of Resistance page for more.

Here’s the full programme of the weekend’s events (which you can also download download as a PDF):

Three people spied upon by Britain’s political secret police are bringing a crucial legal case in an attempt to steer the public inquiry away from its bias towards secrecy and protecting abusive police officers.

They have launched a crowdfund appeal to raise the funds.

PUBLIC INQUIRY FAILING VICTIMS

Announced in 2014, the Undercover Policing Inquiry has yet to formally begin. Since the original Chair, Lord Pitchford, stepped down for health reasons in June 2017, it has been under the stewardship of Sir John Mitting. There were concerns about his suitability at the time, especially his background in secret courts that almost invariably find in favour of state spies, but victims gave him the benefit of the doubt.

In September 2017, a group of 13 women deceived into relationships by undercover police officers wrote to the Home Secretary with concerns that Mitting and the Inquiry were not recognising the institutional sexism of the Met’s spycops.

Nearly 200 of the most significantly affected victims of spycops have been granted core participant status at the Inquiry. In October, the majority of them wrote to Mitting expressing their grave fears about the direction in which he was taking the Inquiry.

As one of them, Kim Bryan, explained at the time:

‘As Core Participants we are rapidly losing confidence in the Inquiry and in the abilities of John Mitting. He is rowing back on commitments made by the previous Chair, Christopher Pitchford, who stated the inquiry’s priority is to discover the truth and recognised the importance of hearing from both officers and their victims along with the need for this to be done in public as far as possible.’

None of it has made any difference. Mitting has been granting full anonymity to around 30% of spycops, even when the police’s own risk assessments say there is little danger in publishing the name, and when the officer’s objection rests on fear of embarrassment.

In his first public hearing in November 2017, Mitting said he would not comply with the Met’s dodging tactic of saying they ‘neither confirm nor deny’ any details about undercover deployments. Mitting unequivocally stated:

‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny has no part at all to play in Special Demonstration Squad deployments’

But by February 2018 he was granting full anonymity to officers without explanation, repeatedly telling victims they would ‘meet a brick wall of silence,’ and saying:

‘it is not a Neither Confirm Nor Deny approach. It is stronger than that. It is a flat refusal to say anything about the deployment in the open.’

This led to victims walking out of court and boycotting all subsequent hearings on anonymity for officers.

Sharon Grant – widow of Bernie Grant, one of ten Labour MPs known to have been spied on – accompanied Stephen Lawrence’s father Neville to hand deliver a letter to the Home Secretary demanding change.

It’s plain that Mitting is to gullible and biased to be at the helm of the Inquiry. For the process to function, he needs to be replaced, or at least sit alongside, a panel of people with life experience relevant to the victims.

Phillippa Kaufmann QC, lawyer for the victims, told Mitting of the urgent need for a panel of:

‘individuals who have a proper informed experiential understanding of discrimination both on grounds of race and sex. Two issues that lie absolutely at the heart of this Inquiry…

‘The core participants – the non-state, non-police core participants – do not want this important Inquiry, something that they so richly deserve to have conducted in an efficacious way, to be presided over by someone who is both naive and old-fashioned and does not understand the world that they or the police inhabit.’

Neville Lawrence is clear that the appointment of a panel of people from different backgrounds is make-or-break. If it the Inquiry doesn’t get that, he said:

‘I will withdraw from it. I will leave it alone because it’s a waste of my time. I’ve wasted two years already.’

THE LEGAL CHALLENGE

Three core participants at the Inquiry want to bring a legal challenge to the refusal to appoint a diverse panel. They need to raise £5,000 to get a hearing to apply. If the win that, they will need a further £50,000 to bring the full case.

The three are:

1) The family of Jean Charles de Menezes; a young, innocent Brazilian man, was gunned down at Stockwell tube station on 22 July 2005 by police officers in a botched surveillance operation after he was wrongly deemed to be one of the fugitives involved in failed bombing attempts the previous day.

Over the next decade, the family endured the stress of two IPCC complaint investigations, an inquest, a civil claim, a further complaint and two legal challenges in their quest for justice for their loved one. In 2014, they were devastated to learn that their justice campaign had been spied upon by undercover police. They demand to know why and will not be denied justice again.

2) ‘Jessica’ (a pseudonym) was an inexperienced, vulnerable 19 year old girl with a love of animals. Her first real sexual relationship was, she believed, with Andy Davey,a 24 year old, socially awkward, fellow animal rights activist who shared her values.

Last year she found out that he was Andy Coles, a 32 year old, married, undercover police officer, tasked by his senior officers to spy on her and her friends. Jessica would never have consented to sex or intimacy if she had known his real identity.. She feels violated and humiliated. She wants to know the truth about his deployment and his relationship with her, particularly whether her clear vulnerability made her easy prey.

3) John Burke-Monerville’s 19 year old son, Trevor, was held at Stoke Newington police station in 1987 during which time his family believe he was beaten and in consequence suffered brain damage. A Justice for Trevor campaign was mounted, supported by the Hackney Community Defence Association. Trevor and members of his family were thereafter harassed by the police. Tragically, Trevor and his brother were murdered in separate incidents years apart. No one was prosecuted for the murders because, the family believe, of failures in the police investigation. Mr Burke-Monerville has learned that the justice campaign meetings were subject to surveillance by the Special Demonstration Squad.

The loved ones of Jean Charles de Menezes and Trevor Monerville are just two of 18 such campaigns that the Met admit spying on. Resources that should have caught killers were spent preventing justice.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

The people launching the appeal have spelled out their aim to have an Inquiry that simply fulfils its remit:

‘Our fear is that if it continues in its current trajectory that the Undercover Policing Inquiry will be a whitewash. We have been forced to initiate a legal challenge to the Home Secretary’s decision to refuse to appoint a panel with the skill and diversity required.

‘Our aim is to restore public confidence in the Undercover Policing Inquiry and its ability to get to the truth. Join us by contributing now and sharing this page on social media.’

The Crowdfund page is here.

Please share the link and, if you can afford it, donate.