Sajid Javid

As Home Secretary, Amber Rudd’s intransigence brought the Undercover Policing Inquiry to crisis point. Will her successor Sajid Javid open his ears and undo her damage?

The country was shocked to learn of Britain’s political secret police units infiltrating more than 1,000 groups over 40 years, violating human rights, orchestrating miscarriages of justice and undermining democratic dissent.

When Theresa May’s choice of Chair for the public inquiry, Lord Pitchford, resigned for health reasons in May 2017, Amber Rudd appointed Sir John Mitting.

Mitting displays huge gullibility and misplaced faith in the integrity of the trained liar police officers whose wrongdoing is the subject of his Inquiry. He has ignored the sustained, increasingly desperate pleas of victims as he steers the Inquiry deeper into crisis of confidence.

Rudd stonewalled repeated appeals from victims to intervene. Women deceived into relationships by spycops and Neville Lawrence asked to meet her but the requests weren’t even acknowledged.

Victims who have been granted core participant status at the Inquiry are clear that Mitting must resign, or at least sit with a panel alongside him. Alison, an activist deceived into a five-year relationship by Special Demonstration Squad officer Mark Jenner, explained:

‘At the heart of this inquiry are the politics of race, sex and class. If we’re ever to get to the bottom of what’s been allowed to happen with undercover political policing in this country, we need an inquiry led by people with sensitivity, experience and real understanding of these issues.’

LAWRENCES STILL SHUT OUT

As we passed the 25th anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence last week, Theresa May announced an annual Stephen Lawrence Day.

Just as she had commissioned the Undercover Policing Inquiry but restricted it to events in England and Wales, so May’s government gives an elevating hand to Stephen Lawrence’s memory then slaps it back down.

Whilst the annual commemoration may help people examine his legacy, Stephen’s loved ones are still being denied answers about what happened. The state is still protecting the corrupt police involved in spying on the family.

In 1998, five years after Stephen’s murder, the Macpherson inquiry examined the case and came to the famous conclusion that the Metropolitan Police were ‘institutionally racist’. Macpherson was meant to get to the bottom of the matter, but it was never even told about the Lawrences being spied on by undercover officers from the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS).

Spycop Peter Francis had been tasked by his SDS managers to ‘find dirt’ with which to discredit the Lawrence family and their associates. Later, at the time of the Macpherson inquiry, he suggested the unit should come clean to the Macpherson inquiry but was overruled by his superiors.

NOT JUST THE LAWRENCES

Stephen Lawrence’s campaign is just one of dozens of similar groups spied on and undermined by the SDS who worked hard to ensure the failings and racism of uniformed officers went unchecked. There had been a spate of racist attacks in South London before Stephen was killed. Two years earlier, 15 year old Rolan Adams had been murdered.

Rolan’s father Richard Adams said:

‘There is no doubt that had Rolan’s murder been investigated properly, Stephen Lawrence may still have been alive today.’

Instead, as with the Lawrences, the police resources that should have caught the teenager’s killers were spent instead on undermining the family’s quest for the truth.

NOT JUST THAT SPYCOP

The establishing of Stephen Lawrence Day cannot be meaningful while the state is still withholding the truth from Stephen’s family. It’s not just that the Home Secretary has repeatedly refused to meet Neville Lawrence. Last month we were finally told the fake name of SDS officer HN81, previously described as ‘a spy in the Lawrence family camp’. He was deployed as David Hagan.

But what was David Hagan’s real name? What did he report? Who else spied on them with him? Which other groups did Hagan spy on? What has he done since? Who ordered him to spy on the Lawrences?

The head of the SDS at the time of its spying on the Lawrences was an officer known only as HN58. Mitting has granted him full anonymity at the Inquiry, saying that because he has been married for a long time he is presumed to have been incapable of wrongdoing.

The spycops’ swathe of crimes, human rights abuses and counter-democratic stifling of campaigns has shocked all those who have heard of it. Yet, we only have partial details on a minority of officers. There is much, much more still below the waterline waiting to be revealed.

Though they are numerous, the black justice campaigns were a comparatively small proportion of the 1,000+ groups that were were spied on. Scores of people were fitted up with wrongful convictions and dozens of women deceived into long-term intimate relationships.

JUDGING THE JUDGE

All the victims deserve answers, as do the wider public whose democracy has been undermined by these agents paid out of public funds. To be effective, the Inquiry needs to understand what it means to be in a marginalised group and, under Mitting’s sole stewardship, it cannot do that.

The Macpherson inquiry had a panel of lay members whose experience was directly relevant to the issue. It is plain that Mitting should resign and hand over to a panel, or at least accept a panel to sit alongside him.

As the victims’ lawyer Phillippa Kaufmann QC told Mitting at an Inquiry hearing in February:

‘We have the usual white upper middle class elderly gentleman whose life experiences are a million miles away from those who were spied upon.’

With Mitting credulously granting police anonymity on dubious grounds and refusing to act on responses from those who were spied upon, Kaufmann led her legal team and the victims out of the February hearing.

Doreen Lawrence backed the walkout:

‘I want to know the names of the police officers who spied on me, my family and our campaign for justice. The chair is not allowing that, in my view, for reasons which are completely unjustifiable and unreasonable. Theresa May, then Home Secretary and now Prime Minister promised me a truly thorough, transparent and accountable inquiry.

‘This has turned into anything but that and before any more public money is spent on an Inquiry which does not achieve this, the chair should resign or continue with a panel which is not naive or old fashioned and which understands my concerns about policing and what I went through. Anything less than this will lead me to consider carefully whether I should continue to participate in this inquiry.’

A LAST REQUEST

Having expressed their concerns to both the Home Office and Mitting himself, last week victims delivered a letter to the Home Office calling for a panel to be appointed.

Three women who were deceived into relationships by undercover police officers – Andrea, Alison & Jessica – went with Neville Lawrence and Sharon Grant (widow of Bernie Grant, black Labour MP who was spied on) to personally hand the letter in.

Neville Lawrence explained:

‘We were grieving and someone felt it necessary to send people into my house to spy on us. The crime was outside my house but they spent the money to send undercover police into my house, that money could have been spent on finding the people who carried out the murder. I want answers.’

Mitting’s inclination towards secrecy makes the appointment of a panel all the more urgent; he has held more hearings in secret than in public. We need credible, independent people in there to hear the evidence rather than an uncritical judge drawing on his career of rubberstamping state surveillance.

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.’

With Amber Rudd’s departure from the Home Office, lawyers for spycops’ victims have already written to Sajid Javid. Will he meet with victims and restructure the Undercover Policing Inquiry so it can fulfil its purpose and reveal the truth about Britain’s political secret police?

Special Demonstration Squad officer Jason Bishop

The Undercover Policing Inquiry has just released six more names of officers from Britain’s political secret police units.

These are the fake names used by officers who took on fake identities and lived for years at a time as one of the activists that they spied upon.

Whilst infiltrating a huge range of campaigns, pressure groups and political parties, many of the spycops acted as agents provocateur, stole the identities of dead children, deceived women into long-term intimate relationships.

The newly confirmed officers are all from the Special Demonstration Squad which, founded in 1968, was the longest running of the two main spycops units.

Covering a period of 38 years, in chronological order of deployment, they are:

Barry Morris
Vietnam Solidarity Campaign
1968

Gary Roberts
International Socialists/ Socialist Workers Party, International Marxist Group
1974 – 1978

Tony Williams
Revolutionary Communist Tendency, Direct Action Movement
1978 – 1982

Malcolm Shearing
Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist/Leninist), Revolutionary Communist Party
1981 – 1985

Dave Evans
Socialist Workers Party, London Animal Action, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty
1998 – 2005

Jason Bishop
Reclaim the Streets, Earth First!, Disarm DSEi.
1998 – 2006

These names come a fortnight after another six officers were named by the Inquiry:

David Robertson
Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, Banner Books
1970 – 1973

Bill Biggs (deceased)
Socialist Workers Party
1977 – 1982

Alan ‘Nick’ Nicholson
British National Party
1990 – 1991

David Hagan
Socialist Workers Party, Class War, Movement Against the Monarchy, Movement for Justice
1996 – 2001

Jaqueline Anderson
Reclaim the Streets, Earth First!, WOMBLES
2000 – 2005

Ross ‘RossCo’ MacInnes
United British Alliance
2007

SDS officer David Hagan, aka N81

Not all of this is news. Jason Bishop was exposed in 2013, which had indicated that his flatmate Dave Evans, who travelled with Bishop to the 2005 G8 protests in Scotland, was also an undercover officer. AR Spycatcher, who documents spycops’ infiltration of the animal rights movement, named and profiled Evans in February 2014.

David Hagan is the officer formerly only known by the cipher N81. He is the officer that was described by the 2014 Stephen Lawrence Review as ‘a spy in the Lawrence family camp’. With his insider knowledge of the campaign by Stephen’s loved ones, Hagan was summoned by the Met’s management to brief them at the conclusion of the public inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder in 1998.

WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE US?

We have updated our How Many Spycops Have There Been? page to show the new spycops – we now have the cover names of 45 out of a total of at least 144 undercover officers.

Yesterday the Undercover Research Group published the results of a meticulous sift of the names released so far. They project that, at the current rates, the Inquiry will be granting full anonymity to around 25% of Special Demonstration Squad officers.

The Inquiry’s list of cover names shows the groups they infiltrated. More than fifty are now listed, and all but two are left wing or animal rights. The Inquiry’s gives an average of two groups per officer. Last year they admitted that more than 1,000 groups were spied on, which is at least seven per officer.

More cover names are due to be released, but without a contemporaneous photo or the true list of groups infiltrated, it is very hard to identify many of the people spied upon.

Why aren’t they giving us the real list? Why aren’t the groups being told in their own right? It is another instance of the Inquiry restricting information even as it publishes. It is the secret public inquiry.

Stephen Lawrence

Today, the public inquiry into undercover policing published the cover names of six more officers from Britain’s political secret police units.

One of them is ‘David Hagan’, the officer known as N81, who spied on anti-racist campaign Movement for Justice and who the Ellison Review described as ‘a spy in the Lawrence family camp’.

Movement for Justice have issued this statement:

Today the Undercover Policing Inquiry finally releases the cover name used by the most notorious of the police spies that infiltrated anti-racist organisations during the explosion of anger sparked by the murder of Stephen Lawrence, and at the time of the subsequent Stephen Lawrence Inquiry.

This officer, referred to as N81 and part of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), operated under the name of ‘Dave Hagan.’

Movement for Justice (MFJ) was one of the organisations he was sent to infiltrate. For us, his partial exposure serves as a reminder of the fears of our enemies, and that racism is increasingly the most important tool of the rich and powerful.

The activities of ‘Hagan’ and the SDS can’t be treated and ‘apologised’ for as part of a sad history – any more than the detention, deportation and attempted deportation of black British people of the Windrush generation can be apologised for as ‘mistakes’ (as in Amber Rudd’s forced ‘apology’ yesterday). They both shed a light on the brutal racism that still lies at the heat of the British state, on its ruthless cynicism and duplicity, and its fear of the struggles of the black, Asian, Muslim and immigrant communities for justice and equality.

Those have been the most dynamic and powerful struggles of the exploited and oppressed over the last four decades, and therefore the biggest threat to our oppressors. It has always been and remains quite clear to black & Asian people that racism is a constant part of day-to-day life in Britain: in the workplace, in the targeting of black youth by police, in the violent deaths of black people at the hands of the police, in the constantly expanding, racially-defined anti-immigrant laws etc.

What is being exposed now, before a much wider audience, is the obsession of the state with trying to sabotage every justice campaign and anti-racist organisation that shines a light on police and state racism. 

Stephen Lawrence was murdered by a racist gang in Eltham, south-east London twenty-five years ago this month. His murder was a massive flashpoint for action by the black community and for youth in the fight against racist & fascist attacks AND against police racism and cover-up. It became the most famous case to highlight both those expressions of white racism, and the links between them.

It followed a series of racist murders and attacks of which the most high-profile were the murders of Rolan Adams in Thamesmead and Rohit Dougal in Erith, and the savage attacks on Quddus Ali and Mukhtar Ahmed in Tower Hamlets – areas targeted by the fascist BNP at the time.

A few weeks after Stephen’s murder tens of thousands of youth joined an angry, militant demonstration, called by Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE), that marched on the BNP head-quarters in Welling. In the following autumn a 60,000-strong national demonstration confronted the police in Welling.

From the start, the people involved in the struggle were the targets of police frame-ups (most notoriously of Duwayne Brooks[1], Stephen’s friend and a victim of the same attack) and of infiltration by police spies and agents provocateurs.

When four years later, in 1997, the newly-elected Labour Government announced a public inquiry into the Stephen’s murder, which began its public hearings the following year, the police campaign of obstruction, frame-up and infiltration went into overdrive. It was during that period that ‘Dave Hagan’ became involved in MFJ (disappearing 2 or 3 years later). Though we were not aware of his role then, our evidence before the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry at the time perfectly summed up the police motivation for his infiltration…

“…the police would not publicly acknowledge the racist nature of Stephen Lawrence’s murder because they see racism as a ‘public order’ issue, as shown by their concern about the two massive anti-racist demonstrations in the area in the six months following the murder. That is to say, they see black and Asian people, and their response to racism, as the main public order ‘problem’.”
– From Oral testimony given to the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry in Tower Hamlets by MFJ on 15/10/1998[2]

During the Lawrence Inquiry, on the first of two days when the five racist gang members who killed Stephen Lawrence were forced to give evidence, MFJ called and led a demonstration that reversed an attempt to reduce public access. An overflow room with video link was opened, and by day two more people came to watch every word. When the racists finally left they were subjected to an angry reception by many hundreds of mainly black youth fighting for justice[3]. It was a crucial turning point in that inquiry.

Several years after the Inquiry, Peter Francis publicly exposed the role of the SDS, of which he had been part. Francis had briefly been an undercover officer in the Kingsway College Anti-Fascist Group (a forerunner of the MFJ) at the time of the second Welling demonstration, and was then moved to infiltrate Militant Labour (now the Socialist Party) the organisation that established the YRE. While his speaking out began the systematic exposure of the operations of the SDS that led to the present Undercover Policing Inquiry, it has been the tireless determination of all the individuals and groups spied upon who have relentlessly held the police to account and demanded an end to the cover up.

MFJ bases itself on the real, historic importance of the struggle against racism in Britain, on its inspiring character for new generations of youth, and on the social power of black, Asian, Muslim and immigrant communities. Peter Francis, ‘Dave Hagan,’ and various other provocateurs we have dealt with since then have not been capable of diminishing that fight. 

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/26/duwayne-brooks-lawrences-answers (coverage of the police campaign against Duwayne Brooks)

[2] http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~justice/ (our full submission to the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry)

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zs5oObxg4R0 (footage of the demonstration on the second day when the killers of Stephen Lawrence left the inquiry)

Undercover police officer Andy Coles, 1991

Former undercover police officer Andy Coles has finally broken his silence with a startling lie. Despite three women testifying about his sexual predation, he has flatly denied it.

Having refused to comment since he was exposed as a member of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) in May last year, his hand was forced by when the Undercover Policing Inquiry confirmed his identity last month.

Coles was in the SDS from 1991-95. During that time he was sexually aggressive to a number of women he spied on, and groomed a vulnerable teenager – known as ‘Jessica‘ – into a year-long sexual relationship.

As the Met’s Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt made plain in 2015:

‘Some officers, acting undercover whilst seeking to infiltrate protest groups, entered into long-term intimate sexual relationships with women which were abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong. I acknowledge that these relationships were a violation of the women’s human rights, an abuse of police power and caused significant trauma.’

Jessica has been granted core participant status at the public inquiry into undercover policing. She is also bringing legal action against the Met for Coles’ abuse.

As soon as Coles was exposed in 2017, he resigned as Cambridgeshire’s Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner. However, he has clung on to other positions of public trust, including his Peterborough City Council seat and his governorship at two schools in the city.

He has locked all his social media accounts and refused to comment on the issue at all. Coles only broke his silence last month when the public inquiry confirmed he had been an SDS spycop.

NO ADMISSION

In a statement to the Peterborough Telegraph, Coles conceded only what the inquiry has said, that he was an SDS officer.

‘I am pleased at last to be able to confirm that in my past I was deployed as an undercover police officer to infiltrate some of the most committed and violent animal liberation extremists operating in the UK in the early 1990s.’

He knows there is no excuse for spycops deceiving women into sexual relationships, so he has taken the only option to shore up his social prestige, a path well-trodden by other infamous sexual abusers with a public profile to protect. He claims it didn’t happen.

In a second statement he says that there simply was no relationship with Jessica.

‘The allegation the ALF activist known as “Jessica” makes that I had a sexual relationship with her for over a year while undercover are completely untrue.’

He refuses to admit anything further, hiding behind the Undercover Policing Inquiry.

‘The right place to make further comment in this case is in the Public Inquiry where I welcome the opportunity to give my evidence in due course.’

Coles speaks as if he had been prevented from commenting, and as if the public inquiry is a court that will examine all the evidence of his deployment and come to a judgement. He knows none of that is true.

The public inquiry is not a criminal court, it is perfectly proper to discuss what it will examine. Indeed, several spycops have given extensive interviews to the media, including his former manager Bob Lambert.

SCARE QUOTES

Andy Coles’ SDS Tradecraft Manual author credit

He exaggerates the threat from the animal rights activists he infiltrated (who mostly leafleted and occasionally freed some animals from breeders), and fails to mention the peace campaigns he spied on.

The most well-known photo of him whilst undercover was taken after a day of protest at the US air force base at Fairford, where Coles and comrades had tied peace symbols to the fence.

Just after his deployment ended in 1995, he wrote the SDS’ Tradecraft Manual. He devoted a section of it to infiltrating pacifist organisations.

It was something he was well acquainted with – the author credit on the manual said he infiltrated ‘environmentalist & pacifist’ groups as well as animal rights.

In his rush to justify himself by making the people he spied on appear scary, Coles excludes any mention of this aspect of his deceit.

If the activists he spied on really were as terrifying as he now claims, why didn’t he get them arrested? To this day, Jessica does not have a criminal record.

After his statement last month, Coles was commended on Twitter by the Countryside Alliance’s hunting campaign.

Coles replied:

‘Thank you. I now know from personal experience how it feels to be targeted by the anti-democratic radical fringe I infiltrated. I look forward to giving my evidence at the undercover policing inquiry.’

It’s notable that his statement speaks about the violence of animal rights activists and welcomes the support of hunters, as it’s the opposite of what he told his colleagues at the time.

Extract on hunters from SDS Tradecraft Manual written by Andy Coles, 1995

His Tradecraft Manual doesn’t give details of violence by activists, but he does talk in damning terms about violence done to them by uniformed police and hunters.

‘I know that in the future I will have nothing but contempt for fox hunters and in particular their terriermen.’

In his tweet, Coles said he infiltrated ‘the anti-democratic radical fringe’. It is a peculiar term for him to use. Pressure groups that Coles infiltrated, such as the London Boots Action Group who leafleted outside Boots shops in protest at animal testing, are a key part of democratic culture. Democracy is much more than political parties.

SPOILING THE PARTY

That said, the SDS spied on political parties too. They targeted at least ten Labour MPs including Jeremy Corbyn, Jack Straw, Bernie Grant and Diane Abbott. They began spying on Jenny Jones, Green Party member of the Greater London Assembly, after she was elected and continued for over ten years. These are all democratically elected public figures.

They spied on numerous trade unions, including the Fire Brigades Union and Communication Workers Union. They illegally gave information on citizens to a blacklist of construction workers that unlawfully prevented thousands of people from getting work. Again, there is no clandestine activity nor threat to public safety. It is the deliberate undermining of people exercising their democratic rights. The Special Demonstration Squad was a counter-democratic organisation.

IMPLAUSIBLE DENIAL

After they have been unmasked as members of the disgraced secret police units, many spycops hide from the public. The few who do speak tend to follow the same pattern of admitting a few of the more innocuous details, denying their more serious abuses no matter how many witnesses saw it, and demonising the people they spied on.

Bob Lambert issued an apology to one of the women he deceived into a relationship, Belinda Harvey, but he omitted any mention of his two-year relationship with Jacqui, with whom he had a child and shared a home.

Mark Kennedy sold his story to the Mail on Sunday under the headline ‘I Fear For My Life’. He testified to parliament but insisted he had only had two sexual relationships with women he spied on whilst an undercover officer. The Met have already apologised to and compensated four who had significant relationships with him, and those who knew him can name many more.

Andy Coles has chosen this route, admitting some details but denying the most damaging details even though, as with Kennedy, everyone around him at the time saw him do it.

The Met’s self-investigation into spycops, Operation Herne, was very clear in 2014:

‘there are and never have been any circumstances where it would be appropriate for such covertly deployed officers to engage in intimate sexual relationships with those they are employed to infiltrate and target. Such an activity can only be seen as an abject failure of the deployment, a gross abuse of their role and their position as a police officer and an individual and organisational failing.’

Coles, however, thinks differently. His Tradecraft Manual for undercover police officers gives tips on how to handle a sexual relationship with people being spied on.

‘you should try to have fleeting, disastrous relationships with individuals who are not important to your sources of information.’

This is an explicit instruction to cause anguish and distress. It is premeditated, calculated abuse. Coles is drawing from his own experience here. Whilst a year is scarcely ‘fleeting’, the relationship with Jessica was certainly disastrous.

Specifying ‘individuals who are not important to your sources of information’ is particularly callous. Nobody deserves to be treated this way. Indeed, the Met have conceded it breaches the right to freedom from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment – an absolute right that it cannot ever be justified to breach.

Even if the officer has the warped disdain to believe the targeted activists deserve it, Coles specifically instructs officers to go for more peripheral figures around the group being spied on, as Lambert did with Belinda Harvey.

What Jessica and the others are saying is very damaging to Coles’ social standing – Andy Coles is violator of human rights and sexual abuser of women. English libel laws are notoriously biased towards the subject; they do not have to prove an allegation false, instead their accuser has to prove the claim is true. Why doesn’t Andy Coles take legal action? Instead, it is Jessica suing the Met for Coles’ abuse.

His total denial of his relationship with her comes from an inhuman, degrading and calculating place. Well aware that it cannot be justified, he tries to shield himself from accountability by pretending the public inquiry is some sort of court case, and that it would prejudice a trial to speak about ongoing criminal proceedings. He knows this is nonsense.

He must surely be aware that, in doing this, he is compounding the damage he has done to Jessica and other women. This is not something that can be dismissed as something from long ago, this is the measure of the man’s character today.

Here is Jessica talking about Andy Coles’ abuse. Decide for yourself who you think is the liar.

See the Sack Andy Coles campaign site (and follow them on Facebook and Twitter) for more.

The public inquiry into political undercover policing is in crisis, but has it ever been functional? It is as if they want to technically publish information whilst keeping it effectively secret.

Despite being set up more than three years ago with a projected finishing date of 2018, the Undercover Policing Inquiry is still in its preliminary stages. This waiting period has been so long that we have seen key figures die, including two former Home Secretaries, a former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, core participant victims of spycops and the Chair of the Inquiry itself, Lord Pitchford.

MITTING THE POINT

Pitchford promised to have ‘a presumption for openness’. There was alarm that the new choice of Chair, Sir John Mitting, would incline the opposite way due to his background in secret courts that almost invariably comply with government surveillance agencies.

The fears were well-founded, and a majority of the victims given core participant status at the Inquiry appealed for change in November 2017.

‘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.’

It was ignored.

Mitting has shown himself to be gullible, taking police assertions at face value despite the fact that the Inquiry is into wrongdoing by trained police liars.

Last month victims and their lawyers walked out of a preliminary hearing on granting officers anonymity, saying:

‘We are not prepared actively to participate in a process where the presence of our clients is pure window dressing, lacking all substance, lacking all meaning and which would achieve absolutely nothing other than lending this process the legitimacy that it doesn’t have and doesn’t deserve.’

Victims are desperate for the Inquiry to fulfil its purpose. Keenly aware that the Met would like nothing more than a boycott that let them protect their secrets, the walkout was not a permanent move. Rather, it is an act of desperation as the victims’ good faith has been eroded by a process that goes out of its way to ignore them.

We want to tell our stories of being spied upon, but we cannot do it until we all know which of our friends and comrades was actually a police spy. We come eager to participate but the Inquiry’s acquiescence to police demands for secrecy means we are blindfolded and hogtied.

Stephen Lawrence’s father Neville has declared his loss of faith in Mitting and the Inquiry, and Doreen Lawrence has threatened to boycott the entire process if Mitting stays in charge.

PROTECTING THE GUILTY

Mitting grants anonymity to undercover officers even when the ‘independent risk assessor’ (a fellow police officer) says the risk of harm if they are named is low.

A few days ago we learned that officer HN15 – whose risk assessor said the danger of harm is high – is in fact Mark Jenner. He has had his real and cover names in the mainstream media along with his photo for over five years without, as far as we know, coming to any harm.

How can other officers’ risk assessments still be taken seriously? How can we trust in a Chair who believes such twaddle and then acts to shield abusers from accountability?

Last week, thirteen women deceived into relationships by spycops have demanded change from the Home Secretary.

‘Andrea‘ explained:

‘the Chair holds the rights of perpetrators in higher regard than the rights of victims. He clearly sees the officers’ human rights as sacrosanct, withholding the names of the spycops who invaded our homes, our families and our intimate lives…

‘Secrecy pervades this so-called ‘public’ inquiry, where officers who abused our rights are granted private hearings with the Chair to convince him to protect their privacy.’

But the Inquiry’s bunker attitude pre-dates Mitting’s appointment and goes beyond what he makes rulings on.

PUBLIC HEARINGS TURNING THE PUBLIC AWAY

The hearings have been held in the Royal Courts of Justice, with a public gallery that can’t quite squeeze 100 people in. With 200 significantly affected victims designated as core participants, most of them are physically prevented from attending the hearings, even before any of the wider public want to attend.

So far, only one preliminary hearing has had to turn people away – perhaps because the Inquiry won’t cover travel costs for victims who want to attend – but that will surely increase as the Inquiry moves towards hearing evidence.

Last month’s hearing took place on the same day as one for the Grenfell Tower inquiry. The Grenfell one was livestreamed, but the spycops Inquiry chooses not to let the world see what it is doing. The best it does is issue a transcript a day or two later in a bizarrely formatted PDF.

PUBLICATION UNSEEN

Much of the Undercover Policing Inquiry website is pages with links to dozens of PDFs bearing uninformative titles like ‘Detailed consultation document,’ ‘Chairman’s note on risk assessments,’ and ‘Ruling on undertakings’.

When scrolling through the list – one page is already at 66 different PDFs, some with the same name as each other – bear in mind that the Inquiry process hasn’t properly begun and the site is a small fraction of the size that it will end up.

A huge proportion of the PDFs on the site are ‘flat’, ie made of pictures of documents rather than text, which means they can’t be wordsearched and the contents won’t appear in websearches.

The search function on the website doesn’t assist. It claims there is nothing on the site about undercover officer Mark Kennedy.

A search of the site via Google turns up 56 results.

NAMING THE OFFICERS, A BIT

There was some hope of relief when they published a page listing undercover officers. However, that only lists four items of information about each officer:

• Cover name
• Herne nominal (without explaining what the term means)
• Groups they infiltrated
• Years of deployment

As ‘Alison‘, who was deceived into a relationship by a man she knew as Mark Cassidy said:

‘There is no restriction order on his real name: Mark Jenner. Yet his real name – and the real names of other confirmed officers – are not listed on this table, making it hard for the public to keep track of who’s who. It feels as if they’re always trying to keep as much hidden as possible.’

There is no link to an officer’s statements, independent assessments or anything else that is buried elsewhere on the site.

For the officers as yet unnamed, there is a link to one document that includes a ruling about them. Once the officer is named, they remove that one link and leave the reader with nothing but the four categories.

Page from undercover officer Mark Jenner’s 1996 diary, showing his attendance at a UCATT meeting

Even within that, the information is incomplete. Looking at the groups they infiltrated, they average less than two per officer. The Inquiry has previously admitted that more than 1,000 groups were spied on which, divided by the number of officers, means it must average as at least seven each. Every infiltrated group has a right to know. Why can’t we see the full list?

With the named officers, we can even name some of the other unmentioned groups they infiltrated, yet the Inquiry won’t admit it.

Whistleblower officer Peter Francis has publicly said his list is incomplete, as it omits Kingsway College Anti Fascist Group, which became Movement for Justice whilst he was infiltrating it.

Mark Jenner’s list doesn’t mention anything to do with trade unions, yet he was known to be a member of construction union UCATT and targeted other unions including the RMT, Unison, CPSA and TGWU. He was also a regular at meetings and on picket lines.

NO RESPONSE

The list of officers is incomplete in other ways. The section on those whose cover names won’t be published (‘Table Three : Where The Cover Name is Restricted’) only has has three officers, code-numbered HN7, HN123 and HN333.

It does not include others who belong in it, for example, HN23, HN40, HN58 and HN241 who were decided upon on 20 February 2018.

This is not a matter of the page not being updated, as ‘Table Two: Where the cover name is not known’ includes officers who were decided on in the same ruling (HN322 and HN348).

We emailed the Inquiry about this on 18 March. They have ignored it.

Trying to contact them on social media would be equally futile as their Twitter bio specifically says:

‘Tweets will not be responded to.’

END THE CULTURE OF SECRECY

The Undercover Policing Inquiry has already cost over £9m and despite its glacial pace, exclusion and secrecy, it insists it does not need extra staff. If it believes it is competent, that implies it is this way by design.

This is not just an overpaid underskilled worker making a bad website. The Inquiry site, the one-way social media and the refusal to livestream hearings are all online symptoms of a wider fundamental belief that the Inquiry does not have to properly engage with the public. The only substantial information it has given has been about officers already exposed by the people who were spied on.

Mitting has had more secret hearings than public. He not only refuses to answer key questions but rebuffs requests to explain his refusal, saying ‘I know more than you do’.

It is all an extension of his and the Inquiry’s belief in themselves as establishment overseers, which gives the process an inflated trust in the police whose wrongdoing the Inquiry is supposed to expose.

Enough is enough. The clue is in the name – it is a public inquiry. It takes the public’s money, it exists to make public the truth about the abuses of Britain’s political secret police. Nothing less will do.

Poll Tax Riot pamphlet cover

Twenty eight years ago today, 31 March 1990, Trafalgar Square hosted a major demonstration against the poll tax that became a riot.

The Conservative regime’s plan to change local government funding property rates based on the value of the house to a charge per person had caused uproar. Eventually, it would be overturned, and take Thatcher’s premiership with it.

Among the crowd on the March 1990 demonstration was John Barker, aka Special Demonstration Squad officer John Dines.

Maintaining character, Dines later designed, printed and sold a benefit poster for those arrested on the day. He also wrote an account for the subsequent Poll Tax Riot pamphlet.

Many officers from Britain’s political secret police were agents provocateur both in deed and in the written word. Just last week Roger Pearce was identified as the author of what the Undercover Policing Inquiry called ‘virulently anti-police’ articles for Freedom Newspaper in the early 1980s. Twenty years later, Mark Kennedy was a frequent contributor of such invective to Indymedia under the name Lumsk.

In between, in 1990 John Dines penned this:

MR. SWEENEY AND ME

As I lay face down in a gutter in Whitehall, with a policeman’s boot in the back of my neck and his two mates wrenching my arms from my shoulders, their macho sergeant bawling instructions on how best to incapacitate me, I briefly pondered my ‘wrongdoing’ in trying to prevent someone I‘d never met before from being arrested for shouting his opposition to the Poll Tax. The kick in the forehead diverted my thoughts and l was bundled into one police van, manacled so tightly my hands went blue, then dragged across the road, booted and thumped as l was pushed into a second van.

We sped off horns, sirens blaring madly, through red traffic lights, along the wrong side of the road and up pavements. l was sure that the guy I had tried to help who was being trampled upon by his captors must be the world’s most wanted fugitive. None of it, this was just members of the world’s finest police force maintaining the Queens’ Peace.

SDS officer John Dines whilst undercover as John Barker

l was one of the thousands and thousands of people who had left Kennington Park about an hour earlier. I was with a group of friends, all much like me, not really poor but no spare cash at the end (or beginning) of the week.

Some of us were working, some of us on the dole, some on housing benefit, some squatting because they couldn’t afford to pay for a reasonable home, others because there aren’t any homes available, some folks had worked all their lives to provide for their families, some had never been able to find work.

We all had something in common – we were all working class, and in today’s wonderful British society we had become part of the growing, but powerful underclass. The Poll Tax was another financial burden to us. like all the other benefit and welfare cuts we’ve experienced, particularly in recent years. We’ve got no money left to pay now though, but “ode seems to listen or care. Well, we came to bloody shout it loudly enough so that we couldn’t be ignored. and didn’t we shout?

I was surprised by the huge, vast crowds who had turned up to demonstrate their opposition to the poll tax. Sure, there were many politicos espousing the virtues of other terms of extremist control. But overwhelmingly those present were ordinary families, pensioners, community groups, disabled folk, there were musicians, there was dancing, there were balloons, there was anger, annoyance and frustration – but our march was peaceful. There were ‘suits’ in the crowd, there were cops in the air, they were high on buildings with their telescopic sights and their focused binoculars, their videos were running and soon so were they, for this was going to be our day.

Such was the enormity of the crowd that the march eventually bottlenecked from Trafalgar Square to Lambeth Bridge. And then the realisation – we were stopped opposite Downing Street, the home of our democratic leader, “dear Maggie”.

Nevertheless we stood in reverence, the occasional ribald comment of course, but there were no bricks, there was no barrage, there was no onslaught on the thin blue line guarding the entrance to No. 10. After all, we had no weapons, no truncheons, we had no specially designed riot overalls, no helmets and visors, no jackboots, no leaders directing operations, we didn’t come charging on horseback, our dogs were strictly anti-Poll Tax mongrels.

I remember children spilling onto a nearby glass verge, somebody uncoupling fencing to prevent us blindly falling over it, people sitting in the roadway, nowhere to move, penned in by barriers manned by cops. In front of us thousands of marchers, behind us many thousands more.

Obviously the Metropolitan Police Force’s expertly trained riot cops couldn’t handle such a confrontation. Passivity could not be tolerated. A foray by six brave Constables led by an Inspector was easily repelled. We weren’t going to be arrested for sitting on the bloody ground. Not to be defeated (not yet anyway), a charge by about 20 cops, truncheons out, fists, boots flying into kids, women, the old, whoever got in their way – l was soon to meet the gutter.

There were five of us in a cell made for one; 63 on a corridor of cells cosily constructed for 10 people. Food, no problem there. We each got a packet of custard cream biscuits after seven hours – shame I don’t eat them! Drinks, yep as much water as your bladder could hold, because the toilet didn’t flush. Air, sure, we swapped the contents of each other’s lungs for about 14 hours. Solicitor. I’m definitely allowed one of them, just a shame he wasn’t bloody interested. He reassured me that I could be charged with causing an affray even if I was acting on my own. There was nothing he could do for me however and it wasn‘t worth his while coming to the station (his words). He must have known I’d be on legal aid.

What about speaking to the lay visitors? Well, why not. Why indeed, these middle aged arseholes clad in Harrods’ latest fashions, blue rinses, adorned with jewellery, 1 lb. of plums in their gobs, just out of the ‘Upstairs…’ part of Eaton Square, they’ll understand how I feel, they’re in touch with local issues. The scumbags could hardly bring themselves to inhale the putrefied air in the cell corridor. Someone further along just beat me in telling them to go back home, only I think she said “why don’t you fuck off?”

‘Disarm Authority Arm Your Desires’ – Poll Tax Riot poster designed & distributed by undercover police officer John Dines to raise funds for those arrested in the riot on 31 March 1990

Cellmates: a traveller got himself arrested for shouting and using a profane four lettered word. A shoe salesman who protested to a senior police officer about the manner in which a person was arrested quickly found himself on the floor of a police van with a black eye. Still, the salesman was black, so guess he must have deserved it! An engineer was amongst a group of peaceful protesters who were charged at by cops on horses, he was one of those who fell over so he must have been guilty of something.

And, finally, through the cell door walked this man mountain. 18 stone, 6’4”, beer belly, flash leather jacket, mohair trousers, crocodile skin shoes, Armani shirt – must be a fraudster – not at all. “I was on my way back home”, his story goes, “when I walked into this riot. Never have liked cops, so thought I’d have a bit of action”. This colossus found a half brick and with deadly aim caught a cop on the back of the head; out like a light he said. He was then jumped on by two riot clad officers, but our hero threw them off and eventually it took six of the bastards and burst eardrums to restrain him.

Tarzan could well understand their anger however, for he had once been a paratrooper and had served the good old British Army on the streets of Belfast, eh! A philosophical individual, but he was upset on two counts: firstly, his mum would go apeshit when she found out, secondly, having been arrested for “incitement to riot”, he was bound to lose a new job he was due to start the following month – he was to become a Prison Officer! Amongst other things, this character merited some in depth discussion, but I was halted from discovering the reasons for his actions, bearing in mind his former and intended employment, when he simply said “I fucking hate cops”.

Some 14 hours after being arrested, I was taken to the custody centre where some young Sweeney type ’intellectual’ asked me if I was a member of Militant, what an insult, and then suggested I must be “some sort of socialist”, before letting me go, warning me not to fail to turn up at court to answer my charge.

Well, l did fail to turn up, so bollocks Mr. Sweeney. As I walked home I saw iron barricades still strewn along the length of Whitehall, a crushed cop’s cap lay amongst the rubbish on the pavement, hundreds of ’No Poll Tax’ placards were discarded everywhere, some decorating the Cenotaph, that meaningless monolith in the centre of Whitehall.

The scale of the events I had missed were becoming excitingly apparent. The stench of burning wafted down Whitehall and as I reached Trafalgar Square I saw the ashen remains of buildings in Northumberland Avenue, the smell of wasted Portakabins was now overpowering, smoke still billowing around Trafalgar Square, fire fighters still dousing neighbouring premises. The shattered windows of the South African Embassy further lifted my spirits and I couldn’t resist an ear to ear grin as a mob of miserable cops walked towards me, peering out from under the brims of their helmets, hunched shoulders, literally ’plodding’ along. Though l had missed it, I knew the bastards had taken a real good hiding.

Whilst undercover, John Dines deceived activist Helen Steel into an intimate relationship. They moved in together, living in a house he had found for them. It backed on to the home of the family of Winston Silcott’s family, who were campaigning for his conviction to be overturned after he and others were framed by the police for the death of PC Keith Blakelock in 1985.

Soon after after Silcott had his conviction quashed in November 1991, Dines’ undercover deployment ended and he disappeared from his activist life.

His abuse of Steel was one of the cases in the Metropolitan Police’s landmark apology of 2015. He now lives in Australia, training police in infiltration and surveillance of political activists.

Here’s Helen Steel talking about her relationship with Dines in 2014:

Last Wednesday, 21 March 2018, Jenny Jones (aka Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb) probed the government about Britain’s political secret police in the House of Lords.

Her question had been submitted in advance, and it focused on what the government knew about the disgraced spycops units.

The Special Demonstration Squad was directly funded by the Home Office for its first twenty years. The government must have wanted something back for the millions it spent, and it received reports from the SDS.

But when the government commissioned ex-Audit Commission director Stephen Taylor to investigate and report in 2015, he couldn’t find a single document anywhere in any of the Home Office archives.

How much the government knew of the detail of the units’ tactics, such as the psychological and sexual abuse of women, is unknown. With that in mind, Jones challenged the Home Office Minister, Baroness Williams of Trafford.

As there had been a mass walkout of the victims and their legal team earlier in the day, other lords took up that issue to highlight the crisis of confidence in the public inquiry.

Here is the full video and transcript of the session (the video has closed captions):

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (Green Party): I beg leave to ask the question standing in my name on the order paper [To ask Her Majesty’s Government what communications they have had, over the last 30 years, with police forces regarding the tactic of undercover police officers forming sexual relationships to develop their cover stories].

The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Conservative): My Lords, as part of its terms of reference the undercover policing inquiry is investigating ​the state of awareness of undercover police operations of Her Majesty’s Government since 1968.

The Home Office is a core participant in that inquiry and is in the process of making disclosure to the inquiry of material relevant to the terms of reference. The inquiry will report its findings once all the evidence has been reviewed.

Baroness Jones: Well, I thank the noble lady for her response which, of course, is not an answer to my Question.

I’m not sure if she is actually aware that, over a period of 24 years from 1985 to 2009, almost every single year there was a state-sponsored sexual relationship between a police officer and a woman who at no point was accused of doing anything illegal – not arrested, not accused – I just don’t understand how the Minister can sit there and think that this is alright.

This strikes at the heart of the ethics and the integrity of our police forces, and of course our security services. I must stress that the cases we know about are only the ones we have heard about, those are the only police names in the public realm. We don’t know all of them. Until we know all the police undercover names we won’t know how many victims there were.

I am also concerned about the Inquiry. The Minister may know that there was a walkout today by the whole legal team of the women involved and the women themselves. So how is the Government going to restore the credibility of that inquiry?

Baroness Williams: The noble lady refers to ‘state-sponsored’. I would refer her to the actual terms of reference of the inquiry, which is to ‘ascertain the state of awareness of undercover police operations of Her Majesty’s Government’. That is precisely what the inquiry was set up to do.

In terms of the walkout of today, I have been made aware of that walkout, and I am aware that the hearings are still ongoing. I would encourage all core participants – indeed, anyone impacted by undercover policing – to participate fully in the inquiry so that we can learn the lessons and get to the truth.

Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Labour & Co-operative Party): My Lords, can the noble lady confirm this is a very serious matter? Notwithstanding anything that comes out of the inquiry and the recommendations that follow, that she is absolutely confident that robust procedures are now in place and that it can never happen again?

Baroness Williams: My Lords, I would love to stand at this Dispatch Box and say that certain things could never happen again, but nobody can legislate for the odd rogue undertaking or the malicious intent of people. Therefore, one cannot be absolutely certain that it could never happen again. What one can do is put measures in place to try and mitigate as far as is possible [so] that it never happens again.

Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate (Non-affiliated): Does the noble Minister agree that undercover policing is an essential tool in the fight against terrorism and crime and that, provided it is properly regulated and standards are adhered to, we shouldn’t judge the majority of very brave police officers that go undercover by the misdeeds of a few?

Baroness Williams: I must completely concur with the noble Lord. He is absolutely right, so much crime has been unearthed by the use of undercover policing. As I say, there are now strict rules in place to mitigate unacceptable behaviour from going on and I couldn’t agree more with him.

Baroness Burt of Solihull (Liberal Democrat): We know that this inquiry has already taken three years, and it’s expected to take another year before the victims get answers – campaigners walking out in protest today notwithstanding. We also know that the Special Demonstration Squad has been disbanded. But it would be naive to think that all embedded undercover work has ceased.

What assurances can the Minister give that the culture, practice, instructions to and supervision of undercover officers have already changed to ensure that, as far as is humanly possible, no man or woman will ever be subjected to these practices again?

Baroness Williams: The noble lady makes a very helpful point, because the policing Code of Ethics makes it clear that police officers should not use their professional position to, ‘establish or pursue an improper sexual or emotional relationship with a person with whom you come into contact in the course of your work’. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 provides the legal framework for the lawful deployment of undercover officers as covert human intelligence sources [CHIS]. We also have the 2014 CHIS codes of practice.

In relation to the point she makes about the length of time that the inquiry has taken, the slight extension to the length of the inquiry is due to purely the sheer number of pieces of information the inquiry has to look at.

Lord Faulks (Conservative): My Lords, I understand that the walkout from the inquiry was because of a sense that it was important that the individual police officers were actually identified by name.

I think my noble friend the Minister confirm that, by definition, undercover police officers have a cover name, and that, whatever the importance of getting to the bottom of what went on in this inquiry, it is important that they retain that anonymity, because that is a pre-eminent part of what they do.

Baroness Williams: My noble friend is absolutely right, and of course it protects the safety of those people as well.

Lord Soley (Labour): So, to confirm, this is not just a matter of rules and regulations? If it went on for so long, there must have been a serious management failure, because if there is the relationship between a senior officer and the person doing the job, that relationship is crucial in terms of keeping a check on their behaviour. That seems to me, as an outsider, not to have happened, and it’s what we ought to focus on.

Baroness Williams: I wouldn’t like to speak for the chair of the inquiry, but I am sure that some of the institutional failures that happened way back in the day will what the inquiry looks at.

Lord Scriven (Liberal Democrat): In the walkout today, the leading QC who was representing the victims said that the walkout was due to the legal teams not being able to participate in a meaningful way. How have we got to a position where this has been going on for three years, cost £9,000,000 and senior QCs feel they cannot participate in a meaningful way?

Baroness Williams: My Lords, the people who walked out will have their reasons for walking out, but I know that the Home Secretary has full confidence in the chairman to carry out the inquiry in a way that gets to the truth of what happened.

Victims walk out of the Undercover Policing Inquiry, 21 March 2018

It’s been such a hectic week in the spycops scandal that nobody can have properly kept up!

In no particular order, here’s a list of twelve key events and revelations in the last six days:

1) Roger Pearce – who was spycops officer ‘Roger Thorley’ – was revealed as having written what the Inquiry called ‘virulently anti-police’ articles for Freedom Newspaper, who have now been granted core participant status at the public inquiry.

2) The announcement of the Secret Spycops Ball, a comedy benefit on 8 July for Police Spies Out of Lives, featuring Stewart Lee, Evelyn Mok, Mark Steel & Rob Newman. Be quick, most tickets have already been sold!

3) A new spycop has been named – Special Demonstration Squad officer ‘Michael Scott’ infiltrated the Young Liberals, Anti-Apartheid Movement, and Workers Revolutionary Party, 1971-76.

This means political parties targeted by Britain’s political secret police include:

• Liberal Party
• Labour Party
• Green Party
• Socialist Party
• Independent Labour Party
• Socialist Workers Party
• Workers Revolutionary Party
• British National Party

4) Kate Wilson, who was deceived into a relationship by undercover police officer Mark Kennedy, secured an admission from the Met that Kennedy’s managers acquiesced to the relationship. This is surely the death knell for the claim by senior police that such abuse was ‘rogue officers’ acting on their own initiative.

5) In Paris, after ten years the Tarnac defendants have finally come to court. Originally arrested for terrorism after security services linked them to damage to a train line, and an anonymous anarchist book, the accused have garnered huge support in France.

Under public pressure, the terrorism charges have been dropped, but the case still partially rests on unreliable intelligence from British undercover police officer Mark Kennedy. The Canary published secret police files, including excerpts from Kennedy’s notebook.

6) The Undercover Policing Inquiry finally confirmed Andy Coles was a spycop, a year since he was exposed as another one who deceived a woman into a long-term relationship, and was forced to resign as Cambridgeshire’s Deputy Police & Crime Commissioner.

7) Having been officially outed, Andy Coles ended his silence and not only defended his deployment but went full Rolf Harris and simply denied his year-long relationship with Jessica ever happened!

Having resigned from his post as Deputy PCC, he is desperately clinging to his Peterborough City Council seat and school governorship. He must step down from these too – men who abuse their power to sexually exploit the citizens they’re supposed to serve should not be in positions of public trust. Follow the Sack Andy Coles campaign for more info.

8) Victims of spycops and their entire legal team walked out of a hearing of the public inquiry, having told the Chair, Sir John Mitting, that he should resign or get a panel of people who understand the issues. We published the full blistering speech to Mitting by the victims’ counsel, Philippa Kaufmann QC.

9) As organisations who were spied on, both the Fire Brigades Union and Unite the Union issued statements supporting the walkout from the Inquiry.

Doreen Lawrence also gave a strong warning to the Inquiry about Mitting:

‘Theresa May, then-Home Secretary and now Prime Minister promised me a truly thorough, transparent and accountable inquiry. This has turned into anything but that and before any more public money is spent on an Inquiry which does not achieve this, the chair should resign or continue with a panel which is not naive or old fashioned and which understands my concerns about policing and what I went through. Anything less than this will lead me to consider carefully whether I should continue to participate in this inquiry.’

10) The Met finally admitted that Special Branch officers illegally supplied info on political activists for construction industry blacklisting. Thousands of people were denied work for asserting their legal rights, such as union membership or wanting proper safety equipment.

Most major construction firms supplied and used the list, and police added to the blacklist’s files with information on citizens’ political and union activity. It’s has been known for some time that Special Demonstration Squad officer Mark Jenner was an active member of construction union UCATT, and here is Carlo Neri on a construction industry in 2004.

11) A less redacted version of the Special Demonstration Squad’s tradecraft manual was released, a book dripping with disdain for not only those spied upon but every other person that spycops into contact with. Officer Andy Coles was named as the author.

12) Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb, aka the Green Party’s Jenny Jones, challenged the government in the House of Lords about the failure of the public inquiry.

‘the cases we know about are only the ones we have heard about: those are the only police names in the public realm. Until we know all the names of the undercover police we will not know how many victims there were.’

At the end of the busiest week ever in the spycops scandal, with demands for justice coming from ever larger numbers of people, the push for truth has never been stronger.

Phillippa Kaufmann QC speaks to the press outside the Royal Courts of Justice, 21 March 2018

There were startling scenes at yesterday’s preliminary hearing of the Undercover Policing Inquiry as victims and their lawyers walked out.

Victims of Britain’s political secret police have reached breaking point with the new Chair of the Inquiry, Sir John Mitting. He holds more secret hearings than public, he grants anonymity to spycops – sometimes in excess of what they ask for – without letting victims test the evidence. The shocking Inquiry hearing in February,left us with no other real option.

We emphasise that we are not abandoning the inquiry – we passionately want to participate, but it must be thorough and credible. With Sir John Mitting in sole charge, the inquiry cannot fulfil its purpose.

It must be something of a psychological challenge for a barrister and their legal team to walk out on a hearing when their professional role is based on arguing in court. But counsel for the victims, Phillippa Kaufmann QC, well understands the frustrations of her clients and the dead end that Mitting is steering the Inquiry into.

Here is the full text of Phillippa Kaufmann’s extraordinary speech to the hearing:

Sir, what I’m about to say to you now does not actually relate to the individual anonymity applications under consideration today. As you know, I represent about 200 individuals. We can’t be precise about exactly how many because some of the core participants are groups and it is anyone’s guess how many individuals are represented as individuals within a particular group.

Over the last few months, we have expressed to you increasing concerns over the manner in which the anonymity application process is being conducted and has been conducted to date. We have now reached a point where our concerns, we think, can no longer be ignored and have come to a head.

The focus of my clients’ now very grave concerns are disclosure and, to be frank, yourself.

Disclosure, if I can deal with that first. We have from the outset been at great, great pains to ensure that the anonymity application process is as open as possible in order, firstly, that due regard is had to the need for openness and the way in which public confidence can be served through that. But also, to ensure that disclosure is made in a way that will enable decisions to be taken on a properly informed basis, by which I mean that decisions are taken which, to the greatest extent possible, allow testing of the police officers’ contentions as to why anonymity orders are required.

Your response to us has consistently been that our argument is circular, and that you cannot provide more information. As with disclosure, so too with your reasons. These are scant and largely uninformative.

You have never indicated once that you have taken into account the compelling public interest factors favouring openness as against anonymity. You have never explained why you have discounted those factors in favour of the interests favouring anonymity.

And we agree entirely with the observations made on behalf of Mr Francis [whistleblower Special Demonstration Squad officer Peter Francis] in the submissions that are currently before you for this hearing, and in particular paragraphs 4 to 6 of those submissions. I am going to read them in full because they so precisely echo my client’s feelings.

They say this:

“4. The opaque nature of the Chairman’s reasoning has attained a new height in his ‘minded to’ note number 3: In it he has dispensed with open reasons altogether in relation to his indications re [officer code-numbered] HN109. This is so despite the fact that the Chairman is aware of the extreme frustration that his general approach to the restriction order process has caused thus far.

“5. A considered decision not to publish any open reasons at all, in the context of an officer in relation to whom the current risk of physical harm is assessed as ‘low’ with any increase by revelation of real or cover name assessed as ‘very low’, signals a disregard for those, like Peter Francis, who have shown a real respect for the Inquiry’s processes by not revealing information that they hold and in relation to which the Chairman has no power to restrict.

“6. Peter Francis has been prepared to engage with this judicial process (which he was instrumental in bringing about) in the belief that this process would fairly balance the public interest in openness with other factors at play. Failing to give any reasons for restricting both a real and cover name of a former undercover officer, who was a manager at a crucial period of time in Special Demonstration Squad history, and where there is no disclosed risk, significantly undermines the trust and belief in the Inquiry process that Peter Francis has shown to date, compounding his perception that there is a lack of mutual respect.”

Our argument has consistently been that the anonymity applications form an absolutely critical part of the process. If you don’t get this right now, then so much of what has gone wrong with undercover policing operations, the operations of the Special Demonstration Squad and of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, will forever remain secret and that is precisely the problem that the Ellison inquiry ran into. And it arose exactly for the reason that the police officers’ accounts could not be contested against the evidence of those people that the officers have been spying on.

My clients greatly fear that you are walking into the same dead end. In short, we have got precisely nowhere in relation to our attempts to ensure that we can meaningfully participate. It is now abundantly clear, particularly in light of the latest disclosure and ‘minded-to’ indications, those with which this hearing is concerned, that we simply cannot participate in this hearing in a meaningful way. You have our written submissions.

Your ‘minded-to’ indications in respect of two key officers close off all avenues for getting to the truth, in respect of what they were doing. And those two officers are managers, managers at a key time. HN109 is one of them and you have had the submissions of Mr Francis in relation to that.

There is this as well. We have just learnt in relation to Mark Kennedy, through an IPT [Investigatory Powers Tribunal] application that is underway brought by one of Mark Kennedy’s victims, a woman with whom he had a relationship when he was undercover, that not only is it affirmed that he had a relationship but it is also clear from what is admitted in the pleadings that his managers and his supervisors acquiesced in his having a relationship.

Now we know he had at least three relationships. That is activities on the part of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, an organisation set up under the legal regulatory framework of Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act that was supposed to make sure that considerations were given to the private rights of individuals whose rights would be interfered with by operation of any undercover operation and that was authorised in those operations, or acquiesced to in those operations. This obviously signifies the importance of managers giving evidence in an open, public manner that is tested as much as possible.

MITTING: What make you think that won’t happen merely because the name of the individual is not made public?

Because precisely what can’t happen, as we have repeatedly said, is in relation to those officers nothing can be discerned about those activities when they themselves were undercover and that is, and remains, a very important part of your ability to get to the truth.

We are not prepared actively to participate in a process where the presence of our clients is pure window dressing, lacking all substance, lacking all meaning and which would achieve absolutely nothing other than lending this process the legitimacy that it doesn’t have and doesn’t deserve.

The second major concern that we have relates to the Inquiry panel itself. That falls into two parts. The first concerns the failure to ensure that the Inquiry is heard by exactly that, a panel representing a proper cross-section of society and in particular – and this is absolutely essential for reasons I’m going to come to – including 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.

I’m sorry to say this, but instead we have the usual white upper middle class elderly gentleman whose life experiences are a million miles away from those who were spied upon. And the very narrow ambit of your experience is not something I’m simply creating out of thin air. It has been exemplified already in the way that you have approached these applications.

I remind you of [officer code-numbered] HN58. Your ‘minded-to’ note in relation to him, what you said at the hearing in relation to him and what you maintained in your decision thereafter. I remind you that your observation in the ‘minded-to’ note was that in your view it was very unlikely that HN58 would have had any intimate relations while undercover with those he spied upon because he had been married for many years.

Now you will recall, because it was an extreme reaction, how everybody – or perhaps not everybody but a very, very substantial number of people in this room – responded when you said that. Or when it was tested and you repeated it in the course of the hearing. Your response was, and we would agree with it, that perhaps you are somewhat naive and a little old-fashioned.

Yet what is for us even more alarming perhaps than your original observation is that despite the astonished, disbelieving, uncomprehending and dismayed response of everybody here, you maintained reference to those naive – or reliance upon those naive and old-fashioned views that had originally been set out in your ‘minded-to’ note. And you did so not just in relation to HN58 but that reasoning showed itself again in relation to other officers.

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.

And they have no confidence in the prospect of an inquiry being properly probing or understanding the evidence if it is conducted with an inquiry panel or chair as currently constituted.

So, those who have expressed a view therefore ask that you recuse yourself from this Inquiry. Or if you are not prepared to do that, that you ensure that measures are taken to bring about a true panel. That is that you sit together with others who well understand the critical issues that shape and frame this Inquiry.

And I remind you and everybody of the Macpherson inquiry, the Lawrence inquiry, and what a difference it made to the understanding and world view of Mr Justice Macpherson to sit with people who understood because they had experience of the issues that went to the heart of that inquiry.

Now, as matters stand, those clients who have given instructions – and you well know that many do not actively participate – are not prepared to continue to participate in today’s hearing. I am instructed, therefore, together with the entire legal team, to withdraw from this hearing while these issues are considered by you. That is all I have to say this morning.

Police on horseback charge demonstrators against the Vietnam War, Grosvenor Square, 17 March 1968

1968 was a time of tumult around the world. Political dissent was brewing to a boil in Paris, Mexico City, Berlin and beyond. The civil rights movement, and latterly opposition to the Vietnam War, had brought a new wave of confrontation to the streets of America and the screens of the world.

In Britain, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) had been set up in 1966 and attracted a broad mix of people from the left of British politics. It was supported publicly and financially by venerable peace activist, the then-94 year old Bertrand Russell, who had left the Labour Party in protest at its stance on the Vietnam War. (Woodsmoke blog describes the background of its formation and events that followed.)

There had already been a demonstration outside the American Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square in October 1967 that passed off without much incident. But the militant political mood, galvanised by outrage at the escalating horrors of the Vietnam War, meant the next one on 17 March 1968 would be much larger.

The war, already prolonged and brutal, was intensifying. Though the world wouldn’t know it until late the following year, two days before the march American troops had killed at least 347 people in the My Lai massacre.

SQUARING UP

It has been said that the Metropolitan police weren’t expecting trouble on the day, but that isn’t entirely true. Coaches travelling to the demonstration were stopped and thoroughly searched, and people were charged with possession of offensive weapons using a broad and creative definition of the term – in one case, it was a sachet of pepper.

As always, estimates of the size of the demo vary, but it’s thought around 80,000 people rallied in Trafalgar Square to be addressed by activists including actor Vanessa Redgrave. Afterwards, a crowd of around 15,000 marched to the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. The plan agreed with police was that demonstrators would be kept on the roads around the square, and a small delegation led by Redgrave and Tariq Ali would go to the embassy itself to present a letter.

The access route was changed at the last minute. The crowds in Trafalgar Square weren’t told, and so there was confusion when entry to the square was bottlenecked by police. Feeling as if police were trying to block the way, then squeezing a gap in police lines only about eight metres wide, the marchers felt the tension markedly increase.

Though police were used to forming solid barriers to protect buildings, (eg buses would be parked across the entrance to Downing Street as demonstrations passed), for some reason they chose to defend the American embassy with police officers on foot, supported by others on horseback. This inevitably drew heckles and the volatile atmosphere headed towards ignition.

As the crowd funnelled out into the centre of the square, as they had at the previous demonstration, police saw them as deviating from the original plan to be in the three streets around the edge. Officers on horseback galloped in to disperse them, batons flailing, with no regard for the safety of those they were charging into.

EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS

Counterculture legend Mick Farren described it:

‘They came at us like the charge of the Light Brigade, these mounted police sweeping across the square. They had these long clubs, kind of like sabres. We said “get under a tree so they can’t get a clean shot at you”.’

Many among the crowd responded by throwing whatever they could in return – stones, fence posts, clods of earth. Protestors broke the police lines, rocks and fireworks were hurled towards the American embassy. Somewhere in the chaotic scene was Mick Jagger, who shortly afterwards wrote Street Fighting Man, an uncompromising call for revolution.

A magistrate, Mr E Appleby, later described the scene to the Guardian:

‘One case will illustrate. An inoffensive student of exemplary character and integrity, standing some distance from the police, taking photographs, was set upon by four policemen shouting “Let’s get this one!” He was dragged into a van and told not to use his camera or he would not see it again.

‘Next day he was charged by his assailants with assault and summonly convicted. No opportunity had been given him to use a ‘phone or to contact his parents. And no time before or after his arrest had he done anything which could be remotely construed as an assault!’

One of the 25 legal observers from the National Council for Civil Liberties was watching another neutral figure, a journalist, but both were pulled into more involved roles:

‘When the superintendent reached the cameraman—with the clear aim of destroying camera and film (and film-maker too if necessary)—about a dozen other people, half police, half civilians, converged on the pair, the former concerned to aid the superintendent and the latter to rescue the camera and cameraman.

‘For my own part, I took only two steps forward when I was surrounded by five policemen, received a knee in the groin, was thrown to the ground and kicked by five or six boots. After a time I was hauled up and according to accounts of witnesses afterwards two attempts were made to arrest me but I was not in a state to respond and in the end was dropped.’

Mick Brown recalled:

‘The whole thing was disorganised. The police weren’t lined up and charging the way they would be now. There was just a general melee.

‘It was probably not intentional but this young girl of about 18 got trapped underneath a [police] horse and was in a state of panic. I’m not sure the rider was that aware of what was going on. All I did was pull her out. To do that I had to bend down more or less underneath the horse and so the policeman hit me over the head.

‘I left the square – I was a bit stunned. When I was outside the square I saw a friend of mine quite close to me. He leant over to a policeman who had his back to him and he tipped the policeman’s helmet off. He turned and ran. The policeman saw him so I stepped in front of him. I didn’t hit him, but I must have obstructed him. And he said, “Right, if I can’t get him I’ll get you.”

I didn’t realise the seriousness of it and he arrested me. He charged me with assault.’

The officer told the court Brown had grabbed him round the neck and punched him in the face several times. Brown was sentenced to two moths in Brixton prison and never went on another demonstration.

EXTRAJUDICIAL PUNISHMENT

It doesn’t matter whether an action or campaign has violent intent. It doesn’t matter whether it plans anything illegal. Some campaigns are deemed politically unacceptable and they are met with an array of police behaviours that amount to extrajudicial punishment. They are faced with police violence, arrest, protracted spells of detention, trumped-up charges and home raids. These are disproportionate but very difficult to challenge legally. Even if a victim is one of the sliver of a percent who bring a successful claim for wrongful arrest, they have still had to endure the treatment.

Political movements are broken by separating the deeply committed from the rest who can be discouraged from participation or bought off with minor compromises. Police punishments make everyone who hears about them choose between risking being subjected to them or staying away. It’s an effective way to curtail an increasingly popular movement and teach people not to challenge authority.

It’s the instinctive reaction of a state that fears the power of people who are calling for a world different from the one the government delivers.

START OF THE SPYCOPS

By the end of the day on 17 March 1968, 246 people had been arrested. It was political violence on British streets of a kind unknown since battles against fascists in the 1930s. It shocked the public and shot fear into the hearts of the political elite.

The government and police were terrified of the revolutionary fervour sweeping the world. A few weeks after the March demonstration, the French government was almost overthrown by ‘les évènements’ of May 1968. Could the UK be heading the same way?
Chief Inspector Conrad Dixon of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch said he could deal with the problem.

On 10 September 1968, Dixon prepared a report for his bosses.

‘The climate of opinion among extreme left-wing elements in this country in relation to public political protest has undergone a radical change over the last few years. The emphasis has shifted, first from orderly, peaceful, co-operative and processions to passive resistance and “sit-downs” and now to active confrontation with the authorities to attempt to force social changes and alterations of government policy.

‘Indeed, the more vociferous spokesmen of the left are calling for the complete overthrow of parliamentary democracy and the substitution of various brands of “socialism” and “workers control”. They claim this can only be achieved by “action on the streets”, and although few of them will admit publicly, or in the press, that they desire a state of anarchy, it is nevertheless tacitly accepted that such a condition is a necessary preamble to engineering a breakdown of our present system of government and achieving a revolutionary change in the society in which we live”.

(For more on this, see the Special Branch Files Project’s section on released documents about police reaction to anti-Vietnam War protests.)

Conrad Dixon’s Special Branch memo, 10 September 1968

Asked what he would need, Chief Inspector Dixon is said to have replied ‘twenty men, half a million pounds and a free hand’. That’s what he got. He set up the Special Operations Squad (SOS) which, in 1972, would change its name to the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS).

Around ten officers would be deployed at a time. They handed in all their police identity documents, changed their appearance and went to live among their targets, becoming one of the activists they were spying on.

Though we are told they were warned not to become agents provocateur, take office in organisations or have sexual contact with people they spied on, it’s clear that all these things were mainstream tactics in the unit from very early on.

THE NEXT MARCH

Vietnam Ad Hoc Committee leaflet, October 1968

On 27 October 1968 there was another march against the Vietnam War. This time, the police were ready and so were the press. The Observer declared that ‘to allege that the British police are violent is as dazzling a piece of hypocrisy as the big lies that Hitler once remarked deceive people more than small ones’.

Organisers, too, had taken steps to avoid a repeat of the violence in March. The Ad Hoc Committee – an umbrella co-ordinated by the VSC – issued leaflets calling for no militancy and no excuses for arrests.

The VSC said 100,000 attended the protest, while contemporary media accounts (presumably taking figures from the police’s notoriously implausible underestimates) said it was around 30,000.

Whichever, the bulk of the march stuck to the planned route, passing Downing Street where Tariq Ali handed in a petition of 75,000 signatures calling for an end to British support for the American side in the war, before heading on to Hyde Park.

A separate, more confrontational, group on the demo openly planned to go to Grosvenor Square, but VSC activists succeeded in ensuring that the bulk of the march did not join in.

Nevertheless, several thousand broke away for the now-familiar Grosvenor Square set piece. Though there was a four-hour stand off with some fireworks and argybargy, there was nothing on the scale of the March riot.

Despite the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign’s rejection of political violence at that moment, it was the major target of the first spycops. Of the five SOS/SDS officers known to have been deployed in that first year, four were in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign.

The unit rapidly expanded its remit. Within a year it had infiltrated the Independent Labour Party, and spread out through peace, workers’ rights and anti-capitalist groups to anti-racist campaigns, Irish nationalist campaigns (which had been the sole remit of the Met’s Special Branch when it was formed in 1883), far right groups and later into environmental and animal rights campaigns.

ORDERS FROM ABOVE

This was not just paranoid police inventing a job for themselves. The SOS was to be secretly and directly funded by the Home Office. Who gave the instructions? How much oversight did the politicians have? What did the Home Office think they were paying for?

A short while after the spycops scandal broke in 2011, Stephen Taylor, a former Director at the Audit Commission, was commissioned to investigate the Home Office’s links with the SOS/SDS. He searched every archive and found nothing. Millions of pounds spent by the Home Office yet not one single page of evidence has been kept.

Taylor’s slender 2015 report unequivocally said:

‘it is inconceivable that there would have been no discussions within the Department or with Special Branch’.

Time and again he had found reference to a file, catalogue number QPE 66 1/8/5, understood to have covered Home Office dealings with the SDS. It has disappeared. It would have contained material classified Secret or Top Secret, which would have strict protocols around its removal or destruction, yet there is no clue as to what happened to it. They physically searched all storage facilities in the Home Office. It’s gone.

Taylor couldn’t make allegations but rather pointedly said ‘it is not possible to conclude whether this is human error or deliberate concealment’.

Taylor did not dig deep. He does not appear to have spoken to any of the twelve living ex-Home Secretaries when investigating. The Undercover Policing Inquiry has dragged on so long that two former Home Secretaries and a former Met Chief Commissioner have died since it was announced.

Fifty years on, we still have no answers as to why it all happened, what it was all for and who was really responsible.