Victims of Police Spies Meet to Fight for Justice

A report on the spycops conference held on 7 May in London.

The Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance, Blacklist Support Group, Police Spies Out Of Lives, The Monitoring Group and their supporters – a broad alliance of people spied on by Britain’s political secret police – gathered on 7 May to hear the latest from the Undercover Police Inquiry.

The session, hosted by The Monitoring Group, reported on the infiltration of campaigns, such as the Broadwater Farm Defence Campaign and the Stephen Lawrence family.

Ricky Reel’s mother, Sukhdev, said the police were more interested in monitoring her family and supporters than they were in finding out how her son had died at the hand of racists in west London in 1997.

Sukhdev Reel, mother of Ricky Reel, speaking in 2016

Helen Steel and Alison, from the Police Spies Out of Lives campaign, had their lives infiltrated by spycops who deceived them into long-term intimate relationships. They uncovered these spies, exposed them and are continuing the struggle for justice.

The Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers hosted a session – with the Undercover Research Group and others – on how public inquiries had been whitewashes that have failed to get to the truth. The Grenfell inquiry refused to include class and race in the terms of reference, refused to look at failures leading up to the fire, but instead tried to scapegoat firefighters. Chris Peace, from the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, said the British state refused to even give them an inquiry.

Labour MP John McDonnell MP committed to pursuing the fight for justice in parliament.

Lydia Dagostino, a lawyer coordinating the response of victims of spycops who’ve been designated as non-state core participants at the Undercover Policing Inquiry, talked about the continuing problems with the process.

She highlighted a lack of disclosure of police files, secret hearings of the supposedly public inquiry, and the enormously long delays – it’s more than eight years since the Inquiry was announced and it isn’t going to get round to looking at officers from the late 1980s and early 1990s for another two years, with the more recent ones being examined even further into the future.

Despite all of the Inquiry’s problems we will continue to fight for, in the words of Suresh Grover from The Monitoring Group, “exposure and disclosure”.

Lois Austin of the Socialist Party closed the conference by demanding the trade unions who were spied upon get their legal costs paid so they could participate in the Inquiry fully.
We need to rebalance the inequality of justice. The conference was a call to arms.

We have scores to settle for the terrible abuse of activists and family justice campaigns at the hands of spycops and their paymasters. Our campaigns for justice and to expose what the British state got up to, and what it is continuing to do, will continue.