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.

Former Special Demonstration Squad officer Peter Francis

Peter Francis, undercover police officer turned whistleblower, has declared he won’t have anything more to do with the Undercover Policing Inquiry’s anonymity applications from his former colleagues.

The former spycop, who infiltrated anti-racist groups in the 1990s and spied on the loved ones of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, says the public inquiry is protecting the guilty and concealing the truth.

Francis said:

‘I know at least half of all SDS officers. Armed with such knowledge, I had hoped to assist the Inquiry to critically assess the applications being made by former undercover police officers to keep their cover names secret. But the level of redactions accepted by the Inquiry Team is so high, even I am often unable to decipher from whom the applications are made…

‘Even when a risk assessment concludes that risks faced by an individual are “low”, the Inquiry has refused to publish his or her cover name. In such circumstances, I cannot justify continuing to incur tax payers’ money drafting written submissions or attending hearings which are clearly not going to change the approach adopted by the Chairman.’

THE SPY WHO STEPPED OUT OF THE SHADOWS

Francis was deployed by the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), a political secret police within the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch, from 1993 to 1998. He infiltrated Youth Against Racism in Europe, Movement for Justice and Militant (now the Socialist Party).

Francis was tasked to ‘find dirt’ with which to discredit the Lawrence family and Duwayne Brooks, Stephen’s friend and the main witness to the teenager’s murder.

In April the Inquiry named an officer known to have spied on the Lawrence family. Formerly known as N81, the officer – mentored by Francis – used the name David Hagan.

Francis told a 2015 conference of police corruption and racism campaigners, via his lawyer Rosa Curling:

‘I have let every single one of you down, especially the Lawrence family, by my cowardice in not appearing before the original Macpherson public inquiry when I knew in my heart at the time that I should have done so. No matter what my senior police managers were saying to me at the time, I should have been there, I should have spoken out.

‘Just imagine how many things might have changed for political protesters, especially all the black justice campaigns, had I had the bottle to do it then.’

Francis initially came forward to tell his story, only identified as ‘Officer A’, to the Observer in March 2010. It was the first time many people had heard of the SDS.

At the end of that year activists unmasked spycop Mark Kennedy, and Francis became a prime source of information for the Guardian’s detailed investigations into the unit, its remit and methods. This culminated in the Guardian journalists Rob Evans & Paul Lewis’ definitive book Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police in 2013. At that time, Francis dropped his pseudonym and shared details of his personal deployment.

He was keen to talk to Operation Herne, the Met’s self-investigation into spycops, if the Met would withdraw their threat to prosecute him under the Official Secret Act for sharing secret information. This was superseded when the full-scale public inquiry was commissioned.

THE SECRET PUBLIC INQUIRY

Since the original Inquiry Chair, Lord Pitchford, resigned for health reasons in 2017, there has been growing concern about his replacement Sir John Mitting. His credulous approval of police demands for anonymity coupled with a penchant for secrecy have seen a groundswell of protest, all of which has been ignored. He oversees a slow, shambolic and secretive excuse for a public inquiry.

Matters exploded in the February hearing of the inquiry when it discussed officers known as HN23 and HN40. Victims’ lawyer Phillippa Kaufmann QC asked why we couldn’t even be told the reason these officers were being granted total anonymity, to which Mitting famously responded:

‘They are examples of deployments where you are going to meet a brick wall of silence.’

Francis’ lawyer Maya Sikand told the court that Francis knew who the officers were and that they:

‘would have valuable evidence to give you about the violence that was permitted by Special Demonstration Squad managers to be used by Special Demonstration Squad officers.’

Francis broke protocol, rising to his feet to interject in person:

‘I have great, huge, concerns that these professional liars are spinning you, the Inquiry and definitely these poor solicitors they are working with here.’

Mitting insisted Francis sit, which he voluntarily, observing that the court’s ‘Krispy Kreme security’ would not have been capable of forcing him.

Matters came to a head at the following hearing in March, where Kaufmann led her legal team and the victims they represent out of court, telling Mitting:

‘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.’

Francis stayed and made some forthright contributions, only to see that Mitting ignored it all and granted anonymity to many officers as planned.

The Undercover Research Group analysed Mitting’s decisions so far, and they calculate that he is on course to grant full anonymity to around 25% of SDS officers.

Mitting’s “minded-to” note on the NPOIU officers

Last week, Mitting turned his attention to the SDS’ successor unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, which ran from 1999-2011. His ‘minded-to’ note shows intentions to grant anonymity to a much greater proportion of these officers.

It is inexcusable, unacceptable, and proof of what the victims have been saying for months; Mitting is wholly unfit to investigate and expose police wrongdoing.

It is into this atmosphere that we now hear Peter Francis’ withdrawal from the process of anonymity applications:

‘Three years ago, Stafford Scott (another Core Participant) said that walking into the Inquiry was like walking into a boxing ring, facing the Metropolitan Police with one hand tied behind your back and a blindfold covering your eyes. Sadly, his assessment has proved correct.

‘The approach adopted by the Inquiry to restriction orders has undermined its ability to uncover the truth about undercover policing in the UK. I had hoped my involvement in this process would in part remedy the unfair advantages identified by Mr Scott but this has not proved possible.’

There is another preliminary hearing of the Inquiry this Wednesday, 9 May. It is another session on the anonymity of officers. We have no faith that Mitting has altered from his method of listening to the police, making up his mind, then having a pantomime hearing before approving his predetermined ruling. We will not waste our time on it.

Neither the victims nor Peter Francis are abandoning the inquiry, just the process of appraising applications for anonymity. We want to engage with the Inquiry, as long as it is intent on revealing the truth about Britain’s political secret police. Sir John Mitting is an obstacle to that and he cannot be left in charge.

Join us for a protest before the hearing – 9am, Wednesday 9 May at the Royal Courts of Justice, Strand WC2A 2LL.

Follow Peter Francis on Twitter.

Tranche 1, Phase 1, Day 3

4 November 2020

Evidence from:

Oliver Sanders QC (Designated Lawyer Officers i.e. speaking for 114 spycops)

Richard Whittam QC (Slater & Gordon Clients representing 12 individual undercover officers / managers)

David Lock QC (whistle-blower officer Peter Francis)

Angus McCullough QC (Category M Core Participants – three ex wives of undercover officers)

Rajiv Menon QC (spied-upon core participants represented by Jane Deighton & Richard Parry)

Oliver Sanders QC
(Designated Lawyer Officers)

Oliver Sanders QC

Oliver Sanders QC, representing the majority of former spycops, concluded the opening statement he’d begun at yesterday’s hearing.

Sanders said the main function of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) was to assess public order threats, of which many came from political protests in the period currently being examined by the Inquiry (1968-82). However, he said it’s hard to quantify because few records have been kept and even at the time intelligence was ‘sanitised’ to obscure its source.

He turned to the SDS’ secondary function, providing intelligence on ‘subversion’ to MI5. He conceded that subversion is an amorphous concept and ‘difficult to grasp as a threat to national security’ but insisted it was a real threat then and now. He cited hostile states sponsoring cyber attacks as subversion, as if that has anything to do with those of us targeted by spycops. It was an extension of the previous day’s repeated iterations of ‘undercovers protect us from terrorism and paedophiles’, a tactic which only serves to smear victims of spycops.

MI5’s FOOT SOLDIERS

Sanders was keen to emphasise that the SDS was no aberration in its choice of targets, merely reinforcing the established work of MI5. He cited The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 by Christopher Andrew (2009), which estimated that in the 1970s a quarter of MI5 resources went on counter-subversion.

In 1980s the groups that fell under this category included the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (which had around 250,000 members and was mainstream enough to have its aims included in the Labour Party manifesto), trade unions such as the National Union of Mineworkers, and an array of left wing organisations including the Socialist Workers Party, International Marxist Group, and the Militant Tendency.

He said that MI5 and spycops were so allied that MI5 considered funding the SDS, and they liaised to ensure they didn’t duplicate spying – it would not only have wasted resources but they may have ended up spying on each other’s officers.

Most SDS intelligence reports were not only copied to MI5 but were sent with the file reference numbers of the people/group already added. The partnership was active, with MI5 recommended tips to SDS spycops, and they asked for specific info – though he didn’t mention any instances of the flow of information and directives going the other way. Instead, it seems the SDS was used as the foot-soldiers of MI5. Sanders noted that the SDS weren’t in a position to question MI5’s focus, thinking and efforts.

Sanders was at pains to assert that there was nothing sinister, surprising, or objectionable in this collusion, it’s just what both organisations were tasked to do.

The subtext of Sanders’ explanation was that, because MI5 targeted the same people in the same ways as the SDS, it means the SDS was acceptable rather than both of them being unacceptable.

PART OF THE UNION

Sanders then made a few tenuous claims about the limits of SDS activity. He unequivocally stated that the SDS did not have any involvement in industrial blacklisting. It did not target justice campaigns, members of parliament or trade unions directly, it was merely inevitable collateral collection while spying on other things.

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

Mr Sanders appears to have short-term memory issues. On Monday this week, David Barr QC, Counsel to the Inquiry, confirmed that in its earliest years, the SDS spied on the Shrewsbury 2 Defence Committee, a group in support of trade union activists who’d been fitted up with charges after their invovlement in the 1972 building workers’ strike.

Peter Francis was in the SDS from 1993-1998, and believes intelligence he gathered was used in construction industry blacklisting.

SDS officer Mark Jenner was a member of construction union UCATT.

Officer Carlo Soracchi was often on picket lines, and was photographed on an RMT picket in 2004 calling for the reinstatement of Steve Hedley.

Hedley went on to become general secretary of the union and is also a core participant at the Inquiry because it’s credibly established that he was spied on for his trade union activity.

Sanders said talk of the SDS spying on thousands of groups is wholly wrong. Once again, he’s arguing with the Inquiry itself, as that is the source of the fact that more than 1,000 groups were targeted. Sanders did not suggest what sort of figure he would like us to believe.

SPYCOPS STEALING DEAD CHILDREN’S IDENTITIES

Sanders then peeled a figurative onion and tried to sound a bit sad as he came to the issue of spycops stealing the identities of dead children to use as the basis of their undercover persona. He said it was invented in an earlier time when people felt differently about death and risk, and doing this to protect people who were still alive would probably have been OK with the families involved.

He said it was done because having a real birth certificate was the only way to prove a person was real. It was lawful, he reckoned, as ‘it didn’t involve quote-unquote theft’ he said. To the rest of the world, taking someone’s identity without the knowledge of them or their family and then using it to pretend to be them is a solid definition of identity theft.

Sanders said that though it was regrettable, if spycops hadn’t stolen dead children’s identities they would have been at greater risk of exposure, or else there would have to be no spycops and the alternative to that was paramilitary police on demonstrations. So, it was an unpalatable choice but obviously the best of a bad bunch.

This lawyer representing UK police officers, a force that supposedly prides itself on policing by consent, is saying anyone wanting to be politically active must put up with being targeted either by spycops violating fundamental rights in our homes or paramilitary police threatening us on the streets.

Spycops, Sanders informed us, understand why stealing dead child’s identity is upsetting, some were even uncomfortable doing it at the time, but they felt there was no choice. There was no pleasure taken in doing it, and the police hope that is of some comfort. He said it happened until the 1990s.

Sanders doesn’t explain why, once spycops were stealing dead kids identities and the Home Office Select Committee demanded families were told in 2013, the Met refused. In the end the Inquiry had to tell them recently.

SPYCOPS DECEIVING WOMEN INTO RELATIONSHIPS

Sanders said a couple of his clients admit to deceiving women into relationships while undercover, and just two of them say it was long-term. But, unable to deny established facts, he conceded that it appears a significant minority of SDS officers entered into such relationships. These shouldn’t have happened and were wrong, he said.

His excuse was that many of the officers who deceived women into relationships were unsuitable for undercover work, and officers who did so were personal failures who’d lost sight of what they were supposed to be doing. This is palpable nonsense; the very opposite is true. Such relationships were standard practice, known to the managers and seen as integral to the job.

Far from being seen as inadequate misfits, several of the officers who perpetrated them were appointed as role models. SDS officer Bob Lambert deceived at least four women he spied on into relationships and had a planned child with one of them. He was promoted to running the SDS, where he deployed numerous officers who did the same. He received an MBE for services to policing.

SDS officer Andy Coles groomed a vulnerable teenager known as Jessica into a year-long relationship when he was undercover in the early 1990s. He went on to be an SDS cover officer, before being appointed to train the first officers of the SDS’ sister unit the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). After that, he moved on to being Head of Training for the Association of Chief Police Officers’ Terrorism & Allied Matters committee, which oversaw the NPOIU.

SECRECY AND FEAR

Sanders then criticised the Inquiry itself. Its remit is too broad in covering 50 years. It’s also too narrow in only examining activity in England & Wales when spycops often went to other jurisdictions (like a stopped clock momentarily telling the right time, that last point is the bit of Sanders’ speech that does indeed have great merit).

Sanders accurately said that we can’t say what would have happened if there hadn’t been spycops. He then said the lack of this knowledge means the Inquiry will be inadequate, and that as we can’t say things would have been better, we can’t really say they were a bad thing overall.

He suggested that demonstrations may have been more violent and, as he did the previous day, invoked the death on protests of Kevin Gately and Blair Peach – both of whom were killed by police at events with heavily spied-on groups.

If Sanders’ reasoning were sound, we would expect any deaths to have been in unknown groups, and those who were infiltrated would have been safely policed. Instead, the very opposite happened. The spycops targeted the groups seen as dangerous threats, as did the most violent uniformed police in public order situations, all leading to the very worst consequences.

Sanders said a further limit on the Inquiry is the anonymity granted to many officers, including 34 out of the 74 he speaks for. This is, of course, the anonymity that officers have actively imposed on the Inquiry. But, Sanders said, if their identities were revealed some would be targeted and possibly killed.

Numerous spycops have been outed for years, including real names and photos. Some of them have outed themselves, appearing at advertised public events and doing media appearances. Many would be very easy to find. None have come to any harm, and it’s frankly insulting to victims to portray them as such a threat.

Neil Woods, a former undercover drugs squad officer scoffed at Sanders on Twitter:

‘I’ve gone public with my real name. And I actually did take down some dangerous people. Ridiculous to suggest that UC’s are at risk having infiltrated London Greenpeace or CND etc. But besides that, I ALWAYS understood that my anonymity was a privilege not a right.’

Sanders said that there was some genuinely dangerous work done by SDS officers, so secret that the Inquiry can’t talk about it, meaning that people will only hear about the pointless and outrageous activity and not have things in balance.

This crooked logic pretends that it’s a balancing act, that if you catch enough bad guys it’s OK to abuse some passers-by. The Met have admitted that spycops deceiving women into relationships is a violation of human rights including the right to freedom from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment. This is an absolute right that no circumstances can ever justify breaching. There is no pair of moral scales in which to put anything that can outweigh the abuses committed by spycops.

Despite all the admissions of abuse we’ve forced out of the Met in recent years, Sanders submitted that the SDS was lawful, effective and working in the public interest when gathering intelligence and helping MI5. ‘The SDS was a politically neutral cog as part of a much larger apparatus,’ he said.

There’s a right of free speech but no right to be heard or force views on others, he said. If we had a right to disrupt things without the police knowing it would have to be a right enjoyed by everyone and there would be mayhem. A lot of the groups targeted by the SDS wanted to promote their own views and suppress the views of opponents. It’s not fair to blame the SDS just because these groups had beliefs that were in conflict with the Met’s neutral job.

The accompanying written opening statement from Oliver Sanders QC on behalf of Designated Lawyer Officers

Richard Whittam QC
(Slater & Gordon Clients)

Richard Whittam QC

Richard Whittam spoke for Slater & Gordon clients, 12 individual undercover officers / managers.

He said that an uninitiated observer may think the Inquiry was just about spycops deceiving women into relationships, but it’s much more than that. However, it isn’t about blaming individual officers. The Inquiry will examine inappropriate deployment and tactics; management and supervisory structure, targeting and authorisation, reporting on justice campaigns, management’s attitude to relationships and commission of crime, the welfare of officers and their families. There are many more issues, Whittam said, but these are of particular importance to the people for whom he speaks.

Whittam said that officers can’t properly justify themselves because those who employed them adhere to the principle of ‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny‘ if anyone is an undercover officer (this tactic has been often been used by police to try to obstruct people getting the truth about spycops). The fact that the Met and Inquiry have confirmed the spycops, using ciphers to protect identity if they feel it necessary, means this assertion is simply not true in this case.

Officers committing crimes while undercover isn’t a problem, Whittam said, because there is some legal basis for allowing it. He expanded, saying the CHIS Bill proves the government see that commission of crime is an essential feature of undercover work in getting to the heart of groups that would cause the public harm. He didn’t pause to define public harm, nor to question whether the current government can be trusted as impartial and infallible moral arbiters.

Whittam turned to the personal well-being of the officers he was speaking for. He told us that their undercover careers and this Inquiry have had a significant impact on their mental health. He lamented that it was supposed to conclude in 2018 yet is only just beginning (neatly sidestepping that the bulk of the delays have come from the police).

Some of the officers he represents are further worried by campaigns to expose their identity. Some deceived women they spied on into relationships but, he said, it’s important not to judge the fact in isolation – one of these relationships continues to this day.

One of Whittam’s spycops, Jim Boyling, deceived several women into relationships. One of them, with a woman known as Rosa, was what Whittam termed “a consensual relationship, albeit with an undercover officer using his cover name, which was not regretted until more than a decade later when his true identity was known”.

Rosa has previously told the BBC:

‘If you put all these things together, you have a team of officers conspiring to rape’.

Boyling faced investigation for sexual offences for what he did. In addition to legal action for rape, he was subject to misconduct proceedings, and was sacked in 2018. Whittam said it’s all a heavy burden for Boyling to bear.

Is it credible that no manager knew about these relationships? Did any of them give approval? Perhaps, he speculated, there are too many for it to be possible to blame individual officers.

We shouldn’t blame them separately for the existence of what was clearly an institutionally accepted and encouraged tactic; for that, we must indeed go to the managers. But we can also certainly blame the undercover officers for perpetrating it.

Whittam mentioned the 2015 apology by the Met to some women deceived into relationships by spycops, in which it was said that such activity was ‘abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong’.

But, he said, spycops committing crime is essential for national security and the prevention and detection of other people committing crime. So we need to see the Met’s 2015 apology to the women ‘in context’, by which he seemed to mean it should be disregarded.

Perhaps it was justified to have a relationship to build and maintain an undercover persona, Whittam said with the air of someone who hadn’t just cited the occasion on which the Assistant Commissioner of the Met officially and bluntly declared:

‘sexual relationships between undercover police officers and members of the public should not happen. The forming of a sexual relationship by an undercover officer would never be authorised in advance nor indeed used as a tactic of a deployment… I can say as a very senior officer of the Metropolitan Police Service that I and the Metropolitan Police are committed to ensuring that this policy is followed by every officer who is deployed in an undercover role’

The accompanying written opening statement from Richard Whittam QC on behalf of Slater and Gordon Clients

David Lock QC
(Peter Francis)

David Lock QC

Peter Francis was an SDS officer from 1993-98. Like many of his colleagues, he suffered serious mental distress and PTSD after his deployment ended. He sued the Met for lack of psychological care. In 2010, he blew the whistle on spycops with an interview for the Observer. He has been a major source of evidence for researchers and journalists.

David Lock began by saying that we simply wouldn’t have the Inquiry if it weren’t for Francis. But he’s not a policy maker or politician, he’s only of use here as an ex-spycop.

Those giving evidence at the Inquiry have immunity from prosecution based on what they say at the Inquiry, but this doesn’t extend to revelations made elsewhere.

Francis has had no assurance that he won’t be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act for what he has already revealed. Such a prosecution would leave him open to forfeiture of his pension. He is, declared Lock, hereby asking the Met Commissioner for a cast-iron assurance that he won’t be prosecuted nor have his pension removed because of past disclosures. He wants to receive this before giving evidence to the Inquiry.

On 14 March 2010 Francis began his journey of disclosure because he believes the public have a right to know what is done in their name and with their money. By 2011, the Guardian had published more articles with him using his cover name Peter Black, and in 2013 he unmasked himself. He said he came forward despite threats of prosecution, but he had some confidence that a case would not be brought against a whistle-blower acting in the public interest.

Whistle–blowing is usually of interest not just for the facts, said Lock, but for the failure of the institution to admit the truth early on. Whistle-blowers have inadequate protection, there is no support for those who do it after leaving a job, or release the info to the public domain. Francis faces the additional threat of the Official Secrets Act. Police are effectively banned from whistle-blowing, even if the facts are about public harm. The Met don’t recognise Francis as a whistle-blower, so he has no security.

Although he went public over ten years ago, and the Inquiry was set up more than five years ago, Francis hasn’t been asked to make a statement to the Inquiry, and memories are fading with time. The Inquiry is undermining itself by creating such delays. Under the current timetable, the Inquiry doesn’t intend to take evidence from Francis until 2023.

Lock continued to relay Francis’ thoughts, saying that it’s clear when Francis was undercover in the 1990s that there wasn’t proper governance or oversight to balance the needs of the police with the rights of targets. The Inquiry must decide whether this has changed much, but claims of procedural improvement must be taken with circumspection as they come from professional liars in defence of their position.

The duty of care owed to officers is routinely breached, according to Francis, because the Met doesn’t see the stress of lying and deceiving as part of one’s day job. Those who live untruths for extended periods will find themselves living in the psychological shadows.

Lock said that focus is quite rightly on victims of this barely and badly regulated activity, but dedicated spycops like Francis were badly failed by the state too. He had to resort to litigation, which was settled in 2006. He left the Met with fragile mental health having lost the real Peter Francis from living a lie for so long. There should be long term aftercare for spycops as PTSD is a long term condition.

LOOKING FOR TARGETS

Francis observed that those targeted by the SDS were supposed to be subversives seeking the undermining of the state, but this concept was conflated with the policies and convenience of the government of the day, and of economic interests.

The Vietnam War was the policy of a foreign government, yet opposition to it was seen as so subversive of the British state that the SDS was formed to counter it. None of the original target groups were proscribed. Francis believes it is never justified to spy on non-violent groups.

Such a draconian incursion into the lives of ordinary people expressing peaceable opposition to the government of the day is wholly unjustified, according to Francis. It beggars belief to allege that the Women’s Liberation Movement or Croydon Libertarians posed a threat to society.

Lock said that Francis is clear that undercover policing can destroy lives, both those of the spied upon and those of the officers themselves. It cannot be done lightly. Undercover policing is legitimate in the right circumstances, he says, but policing must be transparent and with the consent of the public.

Obviously, spycops wouldn’t be able to work if they were exposed at the time, but Francis suggests that some time after the deployment people could be told. He’s keen to be clear that he doesn’t have the expertise to speculate about timetables, but there must be a time when the state says who has been lied to and why it was justified, and be entitled to compensation if the targeting was unwarranted. Keeping the lid permanently on the box shouldn’t be an option.

It is an excellent point. The Thirty Year Rule lets us see secret Cabinet papers from 1990, yet we can’t see SDS files from 1970.

The accompanying written opening statement from David Lock QC on behalf of Peter Francis

Angus McCullough QC
(Category M Core Participants: Families of Police Officers)

Angus McCullough QC

If there was any doubt as to how deep the institutional sexism of the spycops goes, look at how they treated their own wives. Angus McCullough represents three women who were wives of SDS officers.

McCullough said the women provide unique insight into the officers and the management. The Inquiry will hear many heart rending stories of betrayal and deceit, he said. The sacrifices of the wives went beyond anything they thought they were taking on. It has shattered their lives.

Each of the women has their own story, he said, but they all felt that being police wives was woven into their identity, as part of the wider police service. They felt pride in their husbands joining Special Branch, thinking they would be keeping people safe. They believed they were supporting their husbands in the fight for the good of the country.

McCullough described how they took on the burden of secrecy and fear of reprisals. They did it without any proper support from the Met. Years later they found out their marriages were based on lies. Their husbands’ jobs, of which they had been so proud, were vehicles for the worst kind of infidelity.

SDS Mark Jenner on holiday in Vietnam with Alison. Jenner is understood to have been in couples counselling with Alison & his wife at the same time, with both thinking they were his only partner

They saw the stress and anger that came with the spycop’s job. One had her husband tell her that they had to relocate the family at short notice, and was visited at home by manager Bob Lambert. She now doubts the necessity of this and other significant family decisions.

None had any idea that their husbands had relationships with women they spied on. All were shocked when they saw the media coverage.

Their children were born into relationships imbued with deceit. They saw them struggle with their fathers’ roles at the time, and had to help them negotiate this, then re–chart the relationships again after the publication of the awful truth. Neither the children nor the women got support.

They were an integral part of the process but also exploited by it. This is a unique position for the Inquiry. They saw close–up the impact on the officers and the lack of support. They occasionally met senior officers and have direct evidence about that and the veracity of what the managers said.

They can testify about the recruitment process into the SDS, including indications they specifically sought married men in order to ‘keep them grounded’ (i.e. outsource the stress relief and psychological care) without consideration of the damage it was likely to cause.

McCullough described how they were vetted as support for their husbands, but no support was offered to them.

SDS officer Carlo Soracchi on holiday in Bologna with Donna McLean

They were told that their husbands were infiltrating groups of serious violent criminals. When they found out the truth about the groups that were infiltrated they were horrified about how they’d been lied to.

They suffered further with the impact of their husbands’ unsocial hours, absences and missions abroad (which they now know included holidays with the women their husbands had deceived into relationships).

McCullough said the managers promised them support, yet this never materialised. With one exception, there has been no support at all since the scandal broke. They received no warnings before stories appeared in the media, even though the Met obviously knew it was going to happen. They had no support before during or after any of it.

McCullough said the women can also testify as to frequency of contact between spycops and managers, which was basically daily and gives the lie to claims managers didn’t know what undercover officers were up to.

The women who were deceived into relationships have received an apology, but not the wives of the same officers. Why has the Met not acknowledged the sacrifice they had to make and damage to them and their families?

McCullough described the women’s anguish as they’ve been left with so many questions unanswered. How much did their support make the officers a safe bet for spycop duty? Why were they encouraged to have kids even as the stresses piled up? What support were officers offered? Was there anything else the women weren’t told about? Why were the requests for support for wives ignored? Who in the SDS knew about spycops deceiving women into relationships? Were they authorised to have those relationships? Why weren’t wives told before they were made public?

Spycops should not deceive people they spy on into relationships. Nobody should be subjected to it, nor families have to deal with it. The wives are have been dismayed by the statements from police lawyers attempting to minimise and justify the abhorrent practice.

The accompanying written opening statement from Angus McCullough QC on behalf of the Category M Core Participants

Rajiv Menon QC
(Core Participants represented by Richard Parry & Jane Deighton)

Rajiv Menon QC

Jane Deighton represents Audrey, Nathan & Richard Adams, the family of teenager Rolan Adams who was murdered by racists in February 1991 & whose campaign was one of those targeted by spycops. Jane also represents Duwayne Brooks, friend of Stephen Lawrence & prime witness to Stephen’s murder.

Richard Parry represents five targeted activists, two of whom – Tariq Ali & Ernest Tate – will supply evidence to the early phase of the hearings covering 1968-72.

Menon opened with a bold and blunt question: Why has it taken 2,065 days for the Undercover Policing Inquiry to start?

The original Chair, Lord Pitchford, hoped to finish it in 2018. Some delay is understandable as Pitchford fell ill and Sir John Mitting took over and had to get up to speed, and of course Covid hasn’t helped, but this only explains a fraction of the delay.

The main reason for the long wait, said Menon, is the police’s attempt to obfuscate, obstruct, undermine and delay. They made 148 applications for anonymity for real and cover names of spycops, they insisted every document be vetted before others involved see it. Meanwhile, some of the witnesses have died.

The applications for anonymity were not justified, said Menon. There is no evidence that officers would be at risk if they were identified – no harm has befallen any former officers, either those outed by activists, or those who have outed themselves. It is ironic that officers who invaded other people’s privacy so intensely now invoke their right to privacy at an Inquiry into their own misdeeds.

Police compounded this with mass shredding of documents. The Inquiry’s indulgence of police whims led victims to walk out of the Inquiry then processes in 2018. Little has improved since. Yet victims are still here, hoping for answers.

The Inquiry’s forerunner, ‘Operation Herne’, admitted some facts but sought to defend them and portray the problems as historic, as we might expect from a police self-investigation.

The choice is stark. Is this Inquiry also going to blame the victims and give the state a ‘get out of jail free’ card? Will it blame a few rogue officers? Or will it admit that, since 1968, the spycops have been rotten from top to bottom?

There are 219 victims who are core participants. There are surely thousands more who fit the criteria. Special thanks are due to the Undercover Research Group who have tried to list who was spied on, as neither the police nor Inquiry will publish the lists they have.

What do the victim core participants have in common? They were spied on due to direct, indirect, or perceived connection to social justice, be it against war, racism, inequality, police wrongdoing, animal cruelty, environmental destruction, the abuse of corporate power, or the exploitation of workers. Some were victimised simply for challenging a police narrative. Then we have families of children whose ID was stolen by spycops, wives of officers and a lawyer targeted.

Menon went on to list ten general points on the subject of the Inquiry.

1 – Incompatibility. Spycops’ activity is incompatible with a truly democratic society, being targeted just for having anti-establishment beliefs.

2 – Focus. The Inquiry wasn’t created by police wanting to confess, but by the work of people the police were abusing. Particularly, the women deceived into relationships, and Duwayne Brooks, Doreen Lawrence and Neville Lawrence. Also Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, whose book Undercover is a must-read on the subject. Political policing must remain the focus of the Inquiry. This wasn’t ‘serious and organised crime’.

3 – Scope. The Inquiry is about human interaction; only in England and Wales; only police not MI5. Any conclusions Inquiry reaches will this be partial and incomplete. MI5’s escape of scrutiny is alarming given that most spycops intelligence was shared with MI5 but the reverse isn’t true. Their role is essential to understand the issue.

4 – Disclosure. We must see the documents for ourselves, and in good time, if we are to properly engage. Giving Tariq Ali & Ernest Tate and their lawyers over 5,263 pages of evidence five weeks before the hearings is not good enough.

The Inquiry says it has over a million documents. How can we participate if we only belatedly see a tiny fraction of what documents are available? The Inquiry should supply all relevant documents, as in a criminal case.

With redactions, we should be told who made them – police or the Inquiry? On security or privacy grounds? Why were they needed? Some of the names of spied-on groups from 1968 were redacted. Why?

5 – Shredding. We feared spycops would do it, and they did. The Inquiry must investigate this. How can there be trust in police who have definitely shredded relevant files?

6 – Racism. The British police have always been permeated with racism at all ranks. The Macpherson Inquiry ruling of ‘institutional racism’ wasn’t news to black people, but it was the first admission from the state itself.

We’re concerned that the Chair presides alone without a diverse panel. The Chair told lawyers that Macpherson’s definition of racism is ‘controversial’. The Inquiry mustn’t reverse the progress made due to the courage of black people who’ve fought racism.

7 – Burden. The burden is on the police to explain spycops, not on the victims to justify their own actions. To dissect the politics of victims, turning the spotlight away from the police, is the politics of victim-blaming.

8 – Responsibility. The Inquiry failed to ask the state participants to supply their position in advance, so we’re only just finding out what the agencies think. Some of these opening statements have defended abuse of women by spycops by talking about undercover work against serious and organised crime. This is a red herring, spycops were never about this.

9 – Participation. After next week, the only Inquiry live-streaming is to the Chair’s home and one limited venue in London for which booking has closed. The Grenfell and Child Sexual Abuse inquiries are live-streamed – even closed hearings get streamed to the core participants, lawyers and accredited journalists via secure lines. The Inquiry’s proposed live transcription is not adequate.

Reading is not equivalent to, or even close to being equivalent to, the experience of seeing and hearing a witness give evidence, either in person or on screen. It is also impractical to expect people to read five to six hours of transcript each sitting.

This is an Inquiry with hearings shrouded in secrecy, with most of the police hidden from the public. A time delay in the streaming would avoid any wrong things being broadcast, as other Inquiries are doing.

Which non-state participants are excluded from coming to the venue to see the live-stream? Those who can’t travel; black, disabled and older people are especially at risk. This is a breach of Equalities Act obligations.

Even now, the Inquiry can set up a secure link. If the Chair can have this, why can’t others involved.

10 – Objectives. Participants want answers, chapter and verse, not just scraps. Full disclosure, seeing their full files, complete access as Stasi victims had. They want to know when they were spied on, who authorised, who else saw it?

If the Inquiry does have people’s files, why can’t the subjects even see a redacted version? If the Inquiry doesn’t have them, how can they do their job?

WHAT DO WE WANT? WHEN DO WE WANT IT?

Menon concluded his contribution for the day by saying what the people he speaks for want to see as outcomes, and why the defences we’ve heard from police representatives in the last three days should be brushed aside.

We want it publicly declared that spying on us was wrong. We want the full disbanding of the political policing units, and nothing like them to exist ever again.

Since the 1880s, Special Branch has spied on suffragettes, socialists, pacifists, anti-colonialists and more. Ideas are policed; that’s what Special Branch is there for. But in 1968 things changed, and spycops began living undercover as activists for years on end. The SDS were different from other undercovers by gathering intelligence, rather than evidence for use in trials, so their activities went without scrutiny for decades. The SDS was never about detecting crime, but spying on political opponents of the status quo.

The SDS had a clear political orientation to the right of the spectrum. Officers were politically vetted. Targets were initially all on the left. This was secret, anti-democratic political policing. Only in the late 1970s did a couple of far-right groups attract attention.

There appear to have been no safeguards to check if this spying was justified, necessary or proportional, or its methods ethical or lawful. It was given free rein, regardless of norms and values.

Today, the 70th anniversary of the signing of the European Convention on Human Rights, police lawyers are telling the Inquiry ‘don’t judge 1968 by our standards’, as if people in the 60s didn’t care about human rights and liberty.

We have a host of regulations and supposed oversight bodies. So are spycops’ excesses a thing of the past? It would be extremely naive to assume the police have learned and moved on. Note the reluctance of Counsel for the Met to answer Inquiry’s questions about current policing yesterday: The CHIS Bill demolishes our belief in the effectiveness of oversight, placing no limits on state agents from committing crime, and bars victims from seeking legal redress.

Rajiv Menon will conclude his statement on the morning of 5 November.

The accompanying written opening statement from Rajiv Menon QC on behalf of the Core Participants represented by Richard Parry and Jane Deighton

COPS will be live-tweeting all the Inquiry hearings, and producing daily reports like this one for the blog. They will be indexed on our UCPI Public Inquiry page.

<<Previous UCPI Daily Report (3 Nov 2020)<<

>>Next UCPI Daily Report (5 Nov 2020)>>

Ahead of the Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings beginning next week, many people are dismayed by the Inquiry’s prioritising of the protection of perpetrators’ privacy above the right of victims and the public to know the truth. There seems to be little hope of the Inquiry providing the level of transparency and accountability that we all deserve.

A significant proportion of the 200 victims designated as core participants have signed this general statement on the issue of undercover political policing, calling attention back on to the key issues:

1. In 1968, following huge demonstrations in London’s Grosvenor Square (and around the world) against the widely-condemned Vietnam War, British police set up a Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) to monitor and undermine such street protests.

Since that time, over 1,000 groups campaigning in the UK for a better society and better world have been systematically spied upon, infiltrated, or otherwise targeted by secret and unaccountable political police units.

2. This targeting has included over 140 highly paid police spies living long term as ‘activists’ engaging in the everyday activities of groups and campaigns for equality and justice, for environmental protection, for community and trade union empowerment, and for international solidarity; for rights for women, black and ethnic minorities, workers, LGBTQ people, and for animals; and also targeting those campaigning against war, racism, sexism, corporate power, legal repression, and police oppression and brutality.

Such groups and movements have comprised many millions of people throughout the UK who want to make the world better, fairer and more sustainable for everyone. Thanks to their efforts, many of the ideas spread by such groups have now become mainstream opinion and some campaigns and rights sought eventually resulted in legal and other formal recognition by society.

3. Yet it appears that almost any group that stood up to make a positive difference in questioning or challenging the establishment has been or could have potentially been considered a legitimate target by the UK’s secret political policing units. Any claims that the UK police are a non-political institution are therefore clearly incorrect.

4. These secret policing activities went far beyond investigating what was said in meetings. Individuals within or associated with those campaign groups – most of which had an open membership and active involvement based on trust and co-operation – were subjected to intrusions into their personal lives. Thousands of fake ‘friendships’ were developed, exploited and abused by secret police who continuously lied for their own political ends. Many people, especially women, were deceived into intimate and abusive relationships.

Children have been fathered then abandoned, and the identities of deceased children stolen to provide ‘cover’ names. Police spies took part in and actively influenced groups and activities, and there have been very many arrests and victims of miscarriages of justice as a result. Family campaigns, people seeking justice for loved ones killed by police, were deliberately undermined by these units.

5. To bug a phone is recognised as a controversial breach of someone’s human rights and so police have to apply for a warrant. We’re generally opposed to that and note the public outrage over the phone-hacking scandal a few years ago. However, to hack people’s LIVES is infinitely worse and should be totally unacceptable to everyone.

6. Much of the State response to public anger over these tactics has been to present the spying and the abuses that came with it as an aberration, a mistake, or the fault of rogue officers. We disagree. Based on the evidence, this spying was established and conducted with the full sanction of the State and supported by its apparatus and taxpayer funding. As stated by one of the women deceived into a relationship with a police spy, it was not just a single undercover policeman in her bed but also all those who put the officer in the field and supported them there.

7. No decision about all this was taken in isolation. The Government, senior managers and the handlers may have tried to turn a blind eye to the abuses, or deemed them politically ‘necessary’, but the reality is they were complicit in all of it. They readily accepted the ‘intelligence’ provided, they funded, tasked and oversaw the spycops units, and they set the agenda and ethos according to which these units operated.

8. This had nothing to do with responding to genuine public concern over any real and imminent serious violent threats to public safety and lives. The groups represented in this Inquiry were not terrorist organisations, but were groups pushing for positive social change in an overwhelmingly public and open way. By targeting these groups the police were demonstrating unacceptable and ongoing institutional discrimination, racism, sexism and anti-democratic action, including industrial-scale breaches of laws and charters that protect basic human rights and the right to protest.

9. Over 100 of the Inquiry’s Core Participants summed up the problem here in a previous Collective Statement on 17th October 2017: ‘For us, this Inquiry is about political policing to undermine groups and organisations campaigning for a better society and world.’

10. This police bias was clearly sanctioned at the highest level. We know of no effort to show ‘balance’ by police infiltration or secret targeting of powerful establishment bodies to investigate their crimes and threats to social peace and society.

Such organisations not targeted include greedy and unethical financial corporations, tax-avoiding hedge funds, military elites and their development of weapons of mass destruction, and power-mad establishment political parties. This is despite their continuous and widespread promotion of systematic institutional violence (such as wars, poverty, exploitation of workers, colonialism and environmental destruction) and discrimination on the grounds of race, sex and class, reinforced by Public Relations and manipulation of society for these institutions’ own power and profit.

11. Following the exposure of this undercover policing scandal in 2010, it took five years of investigation, publicity and campaigning by victims and survivors of police infiltration, reinforced by police whistleblowers, for the Government to decide to act. Even then it took the shocking revelations that the family and surviving victim and close friend of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence had themselves been targeted by undercover policing.

12. In July 2015 following widespread public outrage, then-Home Secretary Theresa May tasked the current Undercover Policing Public Inquiry with getting to the truth about this scandal and who authorised it, and recommending action to prevent future police wrong-doing.

13. Since then we have had to suffer five more years of police delays and obstruction. These tactics have resulted in a refusal to release most of the names of the 1,000 organisations spied and reported on, refusal to release the names and photos of most of the police spies, and refusal to release most of the relevant documentation generated by political policing units.

Throughout these five years we and other core participants, despite an imbalance in resources and almost zero access to the documentation held by the police for decades, have worked hard to get the information and justice that we and the wider public are entitled to. We have worked hard and remain determined to bring the whole murky secret political policing operation and its unethical, unacceptable practices into the public spotlight where it belongs.

14. This is supposed to be a public inquiry, but it seems more like a police damage-limitation exercise or cover-up. The hearings are not yet publicly-accessible and nor will they be live-streamed, which is the only way to ensure that the millions of members and supporters of the targeted groups and movements have the opportunity to follow the proceedings as they happen.

15. We call for the Inquiry to recommend that police units targeting campaigners seeking a better society should never have been set up, and should be disbanded in their entirety. We call for full transparency, and release of all the names of the groups targeted, all the names of the police spies, and the full political files police have amassed on such campaign groups.

Only in a spirit of openness and transparency can the grievous police crimes of the past be acknowledged, those responsible at all levels be held accountable, and the many victims start to move forward with the answers they have consistently called for – and are entitled to.

16. When the SDS was formed they aimed to undermine the movements they were spying on. But despite the disgusting police tactics employed, movements for positive change to benefit the public good are still here and growing, and have had many successes on the way. Such movements are needed more than ever in order to address the cumulative and deepening crises into which humanity is being plunged by the current system and its policies. A better world is possible and it’s up to all of us, whoever we are, to ensure support for – and not the undermining of – such movements for positive change.

We endorse the 13 Recommendations discussed and agreed at the People’s Public Inquiry into Secret Political Policing, Conway Hall, London in July 2018:

1. Full disclosure of all names – both cover and real – of officers from the disgraced political police units, accompanied by contemporaneous photographs

2. Release of the names of all groups suspected to have been spied upon

3. Release of all the police’s personal files on activists

4. Extension of the inquiry to all countries where the British spycops are known to have operated

5. The appointment of a diverse panel with experience relevant to victims to assist the chair in making decisions and judgements

6. Inclusion of children and young people who had contact with spycops as Core Participants in the Inquiry

7. Urgent and immediate review of convictions where spycops had involvement in the cases and who misled courts – 50 wrongful convictions have already been overturned and this is likely to be a fraction of the true total

8. The Inquiry must extend its scope to understand political policing and its impact on democracy. This must include a thorough investigation into racist, sexist, anti-working class, anti-democratic behaviour on behalf of the spycops and those that instructed them to operate in this manner. Such political policing and political policing units must be abolished

9. An urgent review into all undercover police activities to investigate whether the bad practice exposed by this Inquiry has been extended to other areas of undercover operations

10. Make available the necessary resources of the judge to be able to do their job in the available time

11. Equalising of resources, the police are spending millions on stonewalling the inquiry, victims have almost nothing

12. Increase the severity of penalties for [police] non-compliance with the Inquiry

13. Investigation into collusion between police and corporate spies

Statement supported by the following Non-State Core Participants in the Undercover Policing Inquiry:

1. Albert Beale
2. Alice Cutler
3. Alice Jelinek
4. ‘AN’
5. Asa Winstanley
6. Atif Choudhury
7. Ben Leamy (aka ‘Mark Morgan’)
8. Ben Stewart
9. Blacklist Support Group
10. Brian Healy
11. Ceri Gibbons
12. Chris Dutton
13. Claire Fauset
14. Claire Hildreth
15. Cllr Shane Collins
16. Dan Glass
17. Danny Chivers
18. Dave Morris
19. Dave Nellist
20. Dave Smith
21. David Kaplowitz
22. Debbie Vincent
23. Dr Donal O’Driscoll
24. Donna McLean
25. Emily Apple
26. Frank Bennett
27. Frank Smith
28. Gabrielle Bosley
29. Gerrah Selby
30. Grainne Gannon
31. Guy Taylor
32. Dr Harry Halpin
33. Hunt Saboteurs Association
34. Indra Donfrancesco
35. Jane Laporte
36. Jason Kirkpatrick
37. John Jordan
38. Professor Jonathan Rosenhead
39. ‘Jane’
40. ‘Jenny’
41. ‘Jessica’
42. Juliet McBride
43. Kate Wilson
44. Ken Livingstone
45. Kirsty Wright
46. Kristina Goodwin-Jones
47. Leila Deen
48. ‘Lindsey’
49. ‘Lisa’
50. Lois Austin
51. London Animal Action
52. London Greenpeace
53. Martin Shaw
54. Martyn Lowe
55. Matt Salusbury
56. ‘MCD’
57. Mel Evans
58. Merrick Cork
59. Reverend Dr Michael Carroll
60. Michael Zeitlin
61. Michael Zeitlin on behalf of Advisory Service for Squatters
62. ‘Monica’
63. Nagakusala Dharmacharin (aka William Frugal)
64. ‘Naomi’
65. Nicola Benge
66. Nicola Benge on behalf of Rhythms of Resistance
67. Olaf Bayer
68. Patrick Gillett
69. Professor Paul Chatterton
70. Paul Gravett
71. Paul Morozzo
72. Robbin Gillett
73. Robert Banbury
74. Robin Lane
75. ‘Sara’
76. Sarah Shoraka
77. Professor Simon Lewis
78. Simon Taylor
79. Spencer Cooke
80. Terence Evans
81. Tom Fowler
82. Tomas Remiarz
83. Trevor Houghton
84. ‘VSP’
85. The Hon. Zoe Young BSc MSc MFA

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.

Tranche 1, Phase 3, Day 9

19 May 2022

Witness:Angus McIntosh (officer HN244)

The penultimate day of the 2022 Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings, dealing with spycops’ managers 1968-82.

Today, we first heard about Richard Walker (officer HN368), who worked in the SDS back office for over three years. He was not called to give oral evidence, but provided the Inquiry with a witness statement, so a summary of this was read out by a member of the Inquiry team.

The Inquiry then introduced documents relating to Lesley Willingale (officer HN1668), who is now deceased.

Only one witness gave evidence at the hearing: Angus Bryan McIntosh (officer HN244), the Detective Inspector who served as second in command of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) from mid 1976 to late 1979.

Lacking the polished veneer of his colleague Geoffrey Craft (officer HN34) the previous day, Angus McIntosh (inadvertently) gave more insight into the attitudes of the unit towards those it was targeting. A number of his statements caused outrage.

Otherwise, what we encountered was not dissimilar to much of the other live evidence so far. A mixture of truth and dissembling; though more forthcoming than others, he also had inexplicable memory lapses on important issues.

He was a teenager when he joined the police, moved to Special Branch in 1964, and continued to be promoted, up to Commander level – moving to National Coordinator of Ports Policing when it was formed in 1987, and staying in this role until he retired from 11 years later – very much a career Branch man.

TRAINING

Rebekah Hummerstone

Rebekah Hummerstone, barrister for the Inquiry, began by questioning him about his understanding of the law around policing.

McIntosh recalled attending police training courses at Bramshill and Hendon during this time, but these were general, and didn’t cover anything to do with undercover policing.

He was asked how he understood police powers to apply to undercover work, and admitted that they hadn’t given much thought to this at the time.

He suggested that if officers were invited to enter a private home or premises – even if this was under false pretences – they did not need a warrant, and suggested that in fact, not accepting an invitation might raise suspicions and therefore jeopardise their cover story.

He says his role entailed him applying his common sense and instinct – it was about “careful people management” of the individual officers to ensure their morale and safety.

His Special Branch background provided useful knowledge of the groups being targeted, the style in which reports were created, and some of the possible pitfalls. However the unit’s tactics were new to him, and he says there was no manual, and no specific SDS training course in those days.

In his statement he says that he introduced tutoring for SDS officers so they could take their ‘promotions exams’, and felt that his role included providing informal training for them, including the new recruits, who joined the office team first.

He says that he just learnt on the job, as was standard practice in those days, and adopted the unit’s existing practices.

CRAFT WORK?

Yesterday’s witness, Geoff Craft, couldn’t remember working with McIntosh in the SDS. Bizarrely, today McIntosh could not recall working with Craft either. The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, has asked both men to explain why, as the timeline prepared by the Inquiry shows significant overlap.

McIntosh’s only theory to explain this confusion is that he knows that he was away on various training courses for months, during which time someone else – probably Lesley Willingale (officer HN1668) – would have been acting up to cover his Inspector role.

MIKE FERGUSON

Anti-Apartheid Movement demo, London, 1973

He did remember Mike Ferguson (officer HN135). He says that he first learnt the details of what the SDS (or ‘Hairies’ as they were known within the Branch) did from Mike, before he joined the unit himself.

He actually recalled an incident that took place during Ferguson’s undercover deployment, in which he infiltrated the Anti-Apartheid Movement.

Ferguson turned up one day at McIntosh’s home, ‘seeking refuge’ – his wife didn’t recognise him but Angus recognised his voice and let him in.

“He visited my flat in his undercover appearance and clothing before I was part of the SDS. He wanted to be in a safe place and took refuge in my flat. I do not know what it was that he was seeking refuge from, but he wanted to be off the street.”

Later on, when they worked together – Ferguson became Chief Inspector of the unit in early 1978, so was effectively McIntosh’s boss – he remembers them as close, Ferguson as able to give practical advice to the officers, based on his own personal experience of going undercover, and seems to have shared a lot of his knowledge with McIntosh.

THE BLACK FOLDER

Despite saying “there was no training manual”, McIntosh clearly remembered the ‘black loose-leaf folder’ that others have mentioned, which contained SDS tradecraft and knowledge that had built up over the years.

He described it as “full of good advice for the new officers”, but at the same time claimed that he never looked inside himself. Unfortunately, this contradiction was not picked up on.

He was asked if managers ever checked the contents, to ensure that suggestions of bad practice were removed, but seemed to think this wasn’t needed.

TASKING AND SUPERVISION

McIntosh would expect requests for information – including those from the Security Service – to come in via a Special Branch Squad, usually C Squad which dealt with left-wing activism.

The SDS managers met daily with their line manager, an S Squad Superintendent, and such requests could be discussed then. Sometimes they turned them down, if they didn’t have a source in a suitable place.

Referring to A8 (the uniformed public order unit) McIntosh said:

“We fed them; they didn’t feed us”

That is, although the SDS provided them with plenty of information, they didn’t receive any requests from them.

Sometimes this information was delivered via a phone call, especially when it was urgent news about an upcoming demo.

The unit’s managers had a lot of autonomy and made a lot of important decisions without any external input. They would keep the S Squad Superintendent informed, but not always give them all the details. They wouldn’t necessarily report any problems that arose.

NO SPYING ON THE FAR RIGHT

National Front demonstration

McIntosh said he was too junior to have been party to a “high-level policy decision” like the one not to infiltrate the far right. However he recalls that it was thought it would be too difficult and dangerous for an undercover to be sent in, as these groups were so very violent, and prone to criminality.

This is another glaring contradiction. Ever since the spycops scandal broke in 2010, the police have denfended it by saying they had to infltrate groups in case they were planning anything violent or criminal. But McIntosh says it wasn’t safe to infiltrate groups who were violent or criminal, so they focused their attentions elsewhere.

He then added that the police didn’t need to spy on the far right to keep an eye on them; they could obtain good information about them from the left-wing groups who monitored fascist activity, with much less risk to officers.

This is something we learned at one of last year’s hearings. Several spycops said that, despite the far right waging campaigns of violence and murder, they weren’t regarded as much of a problem. Only one SDS officer infiltrated the far right in the 1970s, and he did so inadvertently.

‘Peter Collins‘ (officer HN303, 1973-77) infiltrated the Workers Revolutionary Party who, in turn, sent him in to spy on the fascist National Front.

THE SECURITY SERVICE

McIntosh suggested that his lowly position as a Detective Inspector meant that he had very little contact with the Security Service (aka MI5).

However, this is somewhat contradicted by a document he was shown; a summary of the contact that took place between the Security Service and the SDS in 1979.

It shows that he and Ferguson attended a meeting in February on behalf of the SDS, and the Security Service were keen for these meetings to become regular monthly events.

HOME LIVES

It was considered essential for undercovers to have stability, an ‘anchor’, and so almost all of them were married men. McIntosh made a point of always visiting the partners of new recruits before deployment. He said the main reason for this was to introduce himself, gain her trust, and ensure she had a way of contacting him if she had any problems. He says hardly anyone ever rang the telephone number they were supplied with.

He would use this opportunity to tell the officer’s partner what to expect: long absences, working evenings and weekends, etc. Although they wanted to asses the officer’s domestic situation, they “certainly didn’t investigate”.

It was left to the officer to ‘use his judgement’ about how to explain his changed appearance and new job to his spouse: “rightly or wrongly, we left it to them to deal with it”.

The welfare of these women was of very little concern to the managers of the SDS, the only thing that mattered to them was maintaining the secrecy around these operations.

He also referred to the wives and families in the context of overtime, saying he was concerned that officers weren’t spending enough time at home, at the same time claiming the long hours of overtime were important for maintaining their cover stories.

STEALING IDENTITIES OF DEAD CHILDREN

McIntosh was asked about spycops’ theft of dead children’s identities to create undercover backstories or ‘legends’.

He seems genuinely aggrieved by this – not regretting the practice as such, but the fact that it was exposed by activists:

“I think it is most unfortunate that this Inquiry has enabled the poor families and relatives to realise that this has happened. In normal circumstances, it wouldn’t have happened. I mean, it’s extraordinary.”

WELFARE

Undercovers were expected to phone the office before 11am every day to ‘check in’. The meetings at the SDS safehouse also served a social purpose – as we’ve heard before, they offered an opportunity for the officers to relax together and be themselves. One of them would cook lunch, but the office staff did not join the undercovers at the pub.

We have heard about a dysfunctional drinking culture within the SDS. McIntosh was asked of the officers were given any guidance on drinking; he says no beyond no drink-driving.

SEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS

Again, as previously, the Inquiry spend considerable time on officers deceiving women they spied on into sexual relationships, as McIntosh oversaw a number of undercovers who did this.

The Inquiry asked about the comments of ‘Graham Coates‘ (officer HN304) about the sexist banter at the meetings. McIntosh remembers the banter but does not recall jokes about Rick Clark’s sexual prowess (see below). He says he was out of earshot most of the time, having individual talks in the other room.

Like Richard Walker (officer HN368), another manager who has given a written statement, McIntosh says that what banter he heard, he did not take particularly seriously.

McIntosh felt he was able to build close relationships with the undercovers and that they could have approached him for help with problems, but if these problems were what he called “self-induced” he suspects they may not have been entirely honest with him as a senior officer. Particularly, he couldn’t see any of them confiding in him about a relationship in the field as this could have affected their career.

Asked if Ferguson was someone they felt they could confide in, he said yes, “he was a man’s man.”

McIntosh was also agreed that the risk of relationships was a real one and meant a serious a security risk to the unit. However, he did not view it as a case of an officer abusing his power; in his view “things happen” and it was a personal, individual matter, security risks aside.

SPECIFIC OFFICERS

The Inquiry then asked McIntosh about a number of officers whose problematic behaviour has been frequently discussed at the hearings.

Vince Harvey (aka ‘Vince Miller’, officer HN354, 1976 -1979)

SDS officer ‘Vince Miller’ while undercover

When joining the SDS, Harvey had been in a long term relationship, but that had ended. McIntosh was not aware of that fact, but would have dealt with it as a matter of welfare.

McIntosh said he was “amazed” at learning of Harvey’s sexual relationships while undercover, which had only come to his attention through the Inquiry.

Had he known, he says he would have taken this to Superintendent level and expects that Harvey would have been withdrawn.

Richard Clark (aka ‘Rick Gibson’, officer HN297, 1974-76)

Clark was exposed after the group he infiltrated investigated him and confronted him with his stolen identity. He also had multiple sexual relationships while undercover, which contributed to this exposure. McIntosh recalls Clark being withdrawn from the field, but claimed not to know many of the details.

However he says he was part of the surveillance team who sat outside the pub while Clark was being confronted by his suspicious comrades, just in case things turned nasty for the officer. He thought that Craft was there with him; yesterday Craft testified that he was there, but with Superintendent Derek Kneale (officer HN819).

McIntosh’s vague memory is incredible, given the severity the threat this represented to the secrecy of the entire unit.

This officer’s compromise doesn’t seem to have prompted any particular evaluation around security and processes. New officers were trained in exactly the same way as Clark, complete with the stolen identity that could lead suspicious comrades to a damning death certificate.

He described Clark as “very outgoing… the type that would brag about anything.”

He said he’d had no idea about Clark getting involved with at least four women while undercover, and sounded quite upset about Clark’s conduct:

“His behaviour has let everyone down.”

Not because of the possible impact on the women though but, extraordinarily, blaming Clark for everything, including this Inquiry being set up and a spotlight being shone into the workings of the SDS.

He sounded genuinely distressed that things had ‘unravelled’ and the unit was no longer a secret, saying:

“One of the proud things of SB was that the SDS was run without the general knowledge of the Branch let alone the police force or anyone else. Now the whole thing’s been exposed, unravelled, and that’s why I think it’s a great shame.”

‘Jim Pickford‘ (officer HN300, 1974-77)

McIntosh described Pickford as a “strange character” but also claimed to be unaware of his reputation as a womaniser. Another officer has told the Inquiry that Pickford confided in him that he had “fallen in love with” a female activist, prompting him to go straight to one of the unit’s managers (in his words, “the one with a Scottish name”).

This led to Pickford being withdrawn from the field. McIntosh denies being this manager, and insists that he knew nothing, and just thought Pickford’s deployment came to its natural end.

He said that if he had known about this, he would have gone to more senior management, and Pickford would have had to leave the Branch (as this would have affected his vetting status). Craft also denied knowing about this situation at the time.

However, Sir John Mitting said that in the Inquiry’s ‘closed sessions’ where certain officers have given evidence without the public present, he heard very detailed and convincing testimony from an undercover about them telling management about Pickford.

McIntosh expressed surprise that Pickford’s subsequent marriage (to the same activist) saying it was “amazing that rumour control kept it a secret”. He again suggested that this might all have happened while he was away from the unit – perhaps Leslie Willingale had been the manager?

Perhaps conveniently for McIntosh, the Inquiry is unable to check this as Willingale is dead.

THE PRINCIPLE OF SEXUAL DECEPTION

McIntosh didn’t think officers had to be reminded that sexual conduct on the job was a breach of police regulations.

He said he never “probed”, or asked them if they were engaged in such activities it would have been pointless to do so as they were unlikely to tell him, their supervising officer, that they were breaking the rules.

He denied that such relationships equated to an abuse of position or power. He viewed this as “sexual contact between consenting adults”, not something he gave a “green light” to but only because it was against police regulations.

He was asked if he considered this to be deceit:

“I can’t really answer that”

Instead, he posed a counter-question:

“Does everyone say before they have a sexual encounter, what is your occupation? And if it’s a certain one, do they say ‘Definitely not, because you are a policeman, or postman?’ So no.”

Which, again, is starkly reminiscent of what his colleague Craft said yesterday, leaving a strong impression that the managers are coached as to what to say, or got together to straighten out their stories.

SPYING ON BLAIR PEACH’S FUNERAL

The Inquiry has heard that another former undercover was advised by his managers not to attend the April 1979 demonstration against the fascist National Front in Southall, because it was known that the uniformed police was going to ‘clamp down’ on the protesters.

McIntosh denied being that manager, or having any knowledge of this, but understood why the warning would have been passed on:

“Well, we don’t want our officers arrested. We don’t want our officers involved in violence.”

Despite him saying this warning represented a “fairly unusual statement” he was not pressed to explain the rather curious fact that, according to officer HN41, a decision had been taken beforehand to crackdown on the protesters.

Likewise, McIntosh could not remember that the SDS had arranged for an undercover to be smuggled into Scotland Yard to make statement about the death of Blair Peach. Chuckling, he replied:

“Not on this occasion, but we used to smuggle in officers for various reasons”

Again, he wasn’t asked to explain.

An undercover who was infiltrating the Anti-Nazi League, officer HN21, was tasked with attending Peach’s funeral. McIntosh says he can’t remember if it was him, or another manager, who gave this instruction.

McIntosh provided his justification for spying on the mourners, claiming it was necessary to “identify disorder” and normal to cover such events of interest:

“because the whole reason of the funeral was for a person involved in extreme left wing politics and demonstrations, that’s all.”

Even HN21 has said that there was no known risk of public disorder at this event. Faced with this, McIntosh dismissed his officer’s professional judgement as a “subjective one”.

Sir John Mitting then intervened, suggesting that:

“many people might think it distasteful for a police officer, whether undercover or not, to attend the funeral of someone who had died in the circumstances we now know and record the names of all of those capable of being identified who have attended it.”

Mitting’s choice of phrasing, ‘died in the circumstances we now know’, is very telling. Blair Peach was killed by police officers. The police investigation showed this at the time, and identified Inspector Alan Murray as being highly likely to have been the killer. Yet even now, Mitting seems incapable of describing it in this way.

At last year’s hearing on the anniversary of Peach’s death, the Inquiry held a minute’s silence. In his preamble, Mitting avoided all mention of the police, and merely referred to Peach being killed by ‘a blow to the head’. In doing this, he insults all victims of spycops and underlines his partisan nature that is draining the Inquiry of its potential to get to the truth.

The comments made by McIntosh in response were the most outrageous yet:

“I can understand some people being upset by it, but, however, in public disorder … I’m quoting Northern Ireland for instance, funerals are often a hotbed of problems, and it wasn’t the friends and relatives of the person whose funeral it was, it was because there was an opportunity of demonstration against… it would be anti-police, in one way or the other.”

It is an extraordinary rant, with the bizarre suggestion that the National Front might have demonstrated at the funeral.

“Unfortunately, sir, I don’t think there’s a lot of respect in those circumstances for the real reason of the occasion.”

He didn’t see the irony in his comments.

Blair Peach protest

Undercovers are known to have spied on the Blair Peach campaign at other events over the years. In one of last year’s hearings, we saw internal documents showing they were still spying on vigils for Peach on the 20th anniversary of his death.

In his written statement, McIntosh said that he did not believe they were reported on because they sought to discredit or criticise the police.

However, today he told the Inquiry something different, and was asked to clarify his views – why did he think those people had been reported on?

One of the excuses he gave was that if an undercover was sent to cover an event, they understood it was their duty to report the names of those present, without any filtering. It’s more likely that they would have included activists’ names on the list as the officers are more likely to have recognised those people.

He then claimed to not recall the full details about the demonstration where Blair Peach was killed. Which was maybe the first time ever that a police officer used those words, acknowledging what has actually happened.

Witness statement of Angus McIntosh

Transcript, video of the morning and afternoon the day’s hearing

The current round of Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings, focusing on Special Demonstration Squad managers 1968-82, continue until tomorrow, Friday 20 May.

<<Previous UCPI Daily Report (18 May 2022)<<

Tranche 1, Phase 3, Day 4

12 May 2022

With the current Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings’ opening statements concluding yesterday, today saw the first day of evidential hearings. Testimony came from Dr Lindsey German, a witness who knew several undercover officers from the period covered in Tranche 1 of the Inquiry (1968-82) from her time in the Socialist Workers’ Party.

Dr Lindsey German

Dr Lindsey German was active for 30 years in the International Socialists (later the Socialist Workers’ Party or SWP). She was made a full-time student organiser in 1975, became the District Organiser for Central London in 1977 and was appointed to the Central Committee in 1979. She later helped found and lead the Stop The War Coalition.

However, today’s evidence focused only on the Inquiry’s Tranche 1 period (1968-1982). A detailed account of German’s political background can be found in her written statement to the Inquiry.

At least 24 undercover officers have spied on the SWP, recording such personal details as physical appearances, holiday plans, weddings, sexuality, and childcare arrangements.

INQUIRY OR TRIAL?

Before German’s questioning began, the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, responded to her witness statement, in which she addressed various common misconceptions and preconceptions about the SWP’s aims and tactics.

Mitting was keen to assure her that he and his team do not have any preconceived views. However, their approach to questioning, and their loaded use of the word ‘revolutionary’, showed they clearly do.

At times it seemed like German was on trial, to the extent she observed that:

“A lot of the questions this morning have been about my politics, rather than the role of the undercover police, which is the aim of the Inquiry.”

She was not put off by this, using it as an opportunity to correct the Inquiry and share her views of how a more just and democratic society could come about.

Nevertheless, the Inquiry’s hostile approach to questioning members of the public who were spied upon could put off future witnesses. This concern has been raised by a number of victims of spycops’ abuses, who do not want, and should not have to, defend themselves against the Inquiry’s preconceived views and thinly-veiled attacks.

IMPROVING DEMOCRACY

Under questioning from David Barr QC, Counsel to the Inquiry, German talked about the aim of the SWP to replace Parliament with things like Workers Councils: “a higher version of democracy than we have now”. However, in her opinion, these revolutionary aims were never close to fruition in her time with the SWP.

Barr asked a series of questions about whether the SWP sought to “escalate” industrial disputes and “confront” fascism. He questioned German’s “critical view of the police” and the security measures taken by the SWP at their National Delegate conference [UCPI0000013228] in 1978.

German responded that a more assertive attitude by workers was the best strategy, something that had also been trade union policy, as well as the SWP. She gave context about the growth of fascism and how her relatives had fought fascism in World War Two.

She explained that the SWP’s security stemmed partly from fears of state surveillance and blacklisting – fears, that it turned out, were entirely justified – and added the threat from the far-right.

POLICE BIAS

German explained her views of police bias, in terms of crimes prosecuted and the fact that they are used as a force of repression. These views are backed up by the evidence currently before the Inquiry, which shows the police planning to attack demonstrators and treating the far-right much more favourably than the left. In her view, she confirmed, the institution of the police does not benefit the working class.

Right to Work march at the Conservative Party conference, Brighton, October 1980

Barr made a large jump from that statement to ask if that meant she thought the police were “fair game” for physical violence in the streets. He asked whether if the police outside outside Conservative Party conferences – for example those who policed the Right to Work demonstration outside the one in Brighton in 1980 – [UCPI0000015888], were fair game for protecting the elite? Was it therefore legitimate to push through their cordons?

He pressed this point several times. German calmly argued that the question implied a misconception about whether people planned violence at demonstrations. They didn’t.

INTERACTION WITH OTHERS

Barr then went on to ask about a number of other organisations: School Kids Against the Nazis (SKAN), Women’s Voice, Rock Against Racism, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and armed Irish republican group the Provisional IRA(!)

We’ve already heard how the spycops of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) targeted youth organisations like SKAN at the Security Service’s direction.

German agreed the SWP was involved in SKAN, however she said that it was a broad front and ‘larger groups’ joined the fight against fascism. The SWP were a minority in that organisation.

Women’s Voice was different, it was not a broad front type organisation, it was an organisation of socialist women. While Rock Against Racism was different yet again, formed by a small group of people in reaction to racist comments made by Eric Clapton.

Barr asked if the SWP had a “surreptitious” approach to “controlling” the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). She dismissed the claim, saying the SWP was open about and localised in its approach to CND.

She did agree that the SWP wanted CND to be “more militant” – not by doing more direct action (something that CND already did, and continue to do, a lot of), but by making more links with trade unions and the working class, and being more collective.

ARMED STRUGGLE

Barr then pressed German on the SWP’s support for “the armed struggle” [UCPI0000015994], particularly in Ireland. She replied that the SWP supported the Provisional IRA’s aims but not their bombing campaigns; she could support attacks on military infrastructure but not the bombings of pubs or other targets.

We were shown another Special Branch report [UCPI0000019543] about a party held at the home of SWP organiser Chris Harman. Somebody who attended the party, a former IMG member who had lived in Belfast, allegedly ‘while somewhat the worse for drink’, spoke of being ‘trusted by’ the Provisional IRA and ‘fully sympathetic to their cause’.

Barr asked how common such views were within the SWP.

German didn’t think this report was true. This person was involved in the H blocks campaign, seeking political status for IRA prisoners, and in supporting the hunger strikers – something that enjoyed wide support at the time.

Ironically, we know that if the SWP really were directly involved with the Provisional IRA, they probably wouldn’t have been spied upon; the SDS’s 1976 Annual Report stated it was policy not to infiltrate groups directly connected with the Provisionals as this would be too dangerous for the spycops.

CONFRONTING FASCISM

After a break, Barr’s questions moved to the relationship between the SWP and the far-right. He started with events in Red Lion Square in June 1974. The fascist National Front had booked Conway Hall for a rally, and a broad range of organisations organised a counter-demonstration to stop them.

At the time German was a student at the nearby London School of Economics, a short walk away. She recalls that journey, and the huge number of police vans she saw on the way:

“I’m not surprised that somebody died on that day. It was very very heavily policed and in a very violent way”.

The police pursued demonstrators, attacking them with truncheons and even throwing some over the railings into the underpass on Theobalds Road. During charges into the crowd by mounted police, Kevin Gately, a young student from Warwick, was killed.

German said:

“We didn’t go looking for trouble, we weren’t the people who created the trouble.”

Rather, the police had put a huge operation in place because they were determined to ensure the fascist event would go ahead.

Barr mentioned Lord Scarman’s inquiry after the event, saying that he “fairly and squarely put the blame on the IMG [International Marxist Group]” who “assaulted the police in an unexpected, unprovoked and viciously violent attack”.

German disagreed: “that’s not an accurate description”, pointing out that Gately was an IMG member, and:

“they were demonstrating perfectly acceptably.”

THE BATTLE OF LEWISHAM

Anti-racist protesters, Lewisham, 13 August 1977 [Pic: Syd Shelton]

German pointed out that the “bizarre” report should be taken with a big pinch of salt, especially as there is no other evidence of this. It was down to her (not Barr) to comment on the language used by the author, saying “even in the 70s people didn’t talk like that”.

She also reminded Barr that this was a dangerous time for socialists, as well as Black and Asian people – fascists would attack people on the tube for wearing anti-racist badges. The SWP believed that combatting racists should be done collectively, involving the trade unions and wider groups.

“We were very careful, we didn’t want this to become a kind of individual gang fight between left and right”.

Barr had brought this up because he wanted to ask German about the August 1977 events that became known as the ‘Battle of Lewisham‘, and the SWP Central Committee’s attitude towards the anti-fascist counter-demonstrations that had been planned for that day.

German was at a by-election in Birmingham at the time of the Lewisham demonstration, and was not a member of the SWP’s Central Committee until 1979. Nevertheless, she patiently explained why it was so important to oppose a fascist demonstration that had deliberately chosen to walk through a multicultural community. It was a consciously provocative and intimidating act.

Indeed, not seeking to prevent the fascists marching would have been a mistake, as the consequence of not coming out on the streets (in Lewisham or anywhere else) would be more attacks on Black people – much, much worse.

Pressed, German provided more detail on the SWP’s approach to demonstrations, explaining that the SWP had an extensive stewarding operation:

“We wanted to make sure people could get to marches safely, that they would take place in a collective, disciplined way and not descend to individual fighting. We put a lot of effort into that.”

When asked about their use of obstruction as a tactic, she explained that they would occupy the road in order to prevent fascists from marching into areas where they might cause trouble. There were more than 50 racist murders of Black and Asian people in those years and the SWP felt strongly about this issue. There should have been official recognition that the National Front marches were unacceptable.

Nobody wanted the National Front in Southall – pretty much the entire community there were very clear about not wanting the fascists in their area, yet the police went out of their way to let that rally happen in 1979. There was a huge counter-demonstration, which SWP members attended, and this is when the police killed Blair Peach, who was a member of the Party.

Eventually, the Met banned all National Front marches in 1981.

German also gave examples of successful community resistance to the National Front such as occupying the space at the top of Brick Lane to stop them selling fascist papers there, painting over racist slogans, dealing with racism in ‘low-level ‘ways in workplaces, etc.

SPYCOPS IN THE PARTY

Finally, towards the end of the morning, Barr’s questioning moved to the activities of some of the spycops themselves. German was involved in the Right To Work campaign. In 1981 she spent three weeks on a Right To Work march – as did an undercover officer using the name ‘Colin Clark’ (officer HN80, 1977-1980).

She says that Clark put himself very much at the centre of the operation – “presumably to find out as much information as he could”. He took part in most of the day to day decisions, about money for food, etc, but also important discussions such as how to avoid dangerous situations or prevent young people who joined the protest march from being arrested.

Looking back, German said:

“It’s very disturbing that he was in this position… I feel uncomfortable, it’s disquieting…I find no justification for it whatever.”

After a brief detour to ask his characteristic questions about “trouble” during that Right to Work march (spoiler: there wasn’t any), Barr cited a 1982 report [UCPI0000015888] containing details of donations (including small ones) made to the campaign. This information was meant to be confidential, but it was hoovered up by the SDS.

The Inquiry sought a better understanding of the way the campaign (and the SWP) was organised and how these donations were dealt with. There were a number of questions about the office and headquarters, about the different positions within the SWP structure, and what these levels meant in terms of access to information and involvement in decision-making.

German explained that although some people in leadership roles worked from home, they would also come in to the office. Those who worked in the office would come along to meetings and social events, trips to the pub, etc.

She remembered some of the spycops – she says they attended social events and generally kept a fairly low profile. Some, like ‘Phil Cooper’ (officer HN155, 1979-1984), although not on the SWP’s Central Committee would have had some influence over what was going on. Of most concern, though, is the level of access to information of all kinds – people’s names and personal data, Party finances, etc – that he would have had. [UCPI0000011563]

TRIPE

Barr then moved on to a series of reports from October 1977, 1979 [UCPI0000013669], 1980 [UCPI0000013961], and 1983 [UCPI0000015986], all of which mention German by name.

Blair Peach protest

TThe spycops had reported back about her appointment as a new District Organiser, and then her promotion to the SWP Central Committee and role of as ‘Women’s Organiser’. They reported on her attending a Blair Peach demo on the first anniversary of his death.

One exhibit said that the photo they had of her on file was no longer a good likeness, and requested a new one. The last detailed her new address and living arrangements.

Barr wanted German’s reaction to all of these. She described the last report as “tripe”, dismissing it as inaccurate and pointless. She said these reports represented a completely unjustified level of intrusion, and pointed out that much of the information they contained was in the public domain. Events such as the SWP National Conference at Skegness were advertised publicly.

Blair Peach was her neighbour, someone she regularly saw and spoke to. The demo where he was killed was described by someone she knew as “the most violent demonstration he’s ever been on”.

“We know that Peach was murdered by the police”.

That the spycops reported the SWP used his death “for their own ends” was a “complete disgrace”, saying more about the mindset of the undercover police and their attitudes towards those who demonstrated.

German said this Inquiry must address the “appalling way” the police treated “people who were going about perfectly legitimate political activity”.

SPYCOPS AT THE PARTY

After lunch, Barr pulled up more reports, from the Easter rallies the SWP held in Skegness in 1980 [UCPI0000014551] and 1982 [UCPI0000018180].

According to German, these weekend-long events in Skegness were part holiday/ social, part political. Many of those who attended were not party members or politically involved – some “just went there because the wanted a good time” – others accompanied their partners – many people brought their children.

These two reports contain long lists of attendees’ names (running to 50 pages). Barr pointed out the words “no trace” after many of the names – suggesting that Special Branch ran searches on all the names and this was the first time that many of these people had come to their attention. Some of them were only there as paid entertainers, comedians and the like.

German confirmed that these lists of names, as well as other documents displayed by Barr, containing internal Party statistics [UPCI0000016148], and the phone numbers of the SWP secretariat [UCPI0000016582] would have been confidential, as would the level of detail in thereport of the SWP’s 1980 National Delegate conference [UCPI0000016619].

German stated that there was no justification for this level of intrusion from the police. She concluded the police “simply wanted to put the Left in a very bad light.”

Notably, there was no such infiltration of the National Front, an obviously political decision.

Asked for her reflections on the spycops operation, she said it represented a big effort and a lot of public money for very little results.

Mitting had a few questions for her at the end of the day. He noted that electoral candidates – even the National Front – were legally permitted to hold election rallies in public buildings , to make some kind of point:

“I accept that you objected to it, but you knew that the law of the land actually provided that they were entitled to make use of these places?”

The Inquiry’s Chair then thanked her for her time, inviting her back for Tranche 2 – covering 1983-92, expected to occur in 2024 – “health and intellect permitting of course – that goes for both of us”, he laughed.

With that slightly disturbing ‘joke’, suggesting that ongoing delays to the process will continue to result in many witnesses, and perhaps even Mitting himself, being too dead, infirm or mentally incapacitated to take part, Day Four of this round of hearings came to an end.

Follow Lindsey German on Twitter: @LindseyAGerman

Witness statement of Lindsay German

Full list of associated publications

Video and transcript of the day’s hearing

The current round of Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings, focusing on Special Demonstration Squad managers 1968-82, continue until Friday 20 May.

<<Previous UCPI Daily Report (11 May 2022)<<

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Tranche 1, Phase 2, Day 13

10 May 2021

Evidence from witness:
 ‘Madeleine’

‘Battle of Lewisham’, 13 August1977

The 10 May hearing of the Undercover Policing Inquiry was focused on ‘Madeleine’, one of the women deceived into a sexual relationship by undercover ‘Vince Miller‘ (HN354, 1976-1979), one of four women that he has now admitted to having sexual contact with.

She is the first person to give live testimony on her experience of the relationship and undergo questioning on it (another woman, ‘Mary’, had her statement read out by a lawyer last week). She gave a powerful account of her own activism and and time as a political campaigner with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Despite questions from the Inquiry that crossed the line, she gave an open and quietly compelling description of how she was deceived by Miller.

Miller is claiming it was only a one night stand, but Madeleine steadily demolished that, with a detailed account of the night they got together and their subsequent relationship. She went into the conversations where he emotionally manipulating her feelings, then suddenly withdrew as his time in the field came to an end. This included pointing to records of conversations she had with others at the time.

Miller is giving evidence tomorrow, 11 May.

It was forty years before she learned the truth, in 2018, and was able to deal with the knowledge, but the empathy that guided her activism was clearly now extending to all the other women affected – noting how much damage her younger self would have experienced if she had learned of it at the time.

Madeleine provided a witness statement to the Inquiry in February 2021 but, as Inquiry delays meant she had to produce it in a hurry, it didn’t include everything she has to contribute.

BACKGROUND TO AN ACTIVIST

Barricade on Cable Street, 4 October 1936 [Pic: Bishopsgate Institute]

Her father was a committed anti-fascist, at the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 when an alliance of antifascists stopped the British Union of Fascists marching through the Jewish area of London’s East End. He then served in the International Brigades fighting fascists in the Spanish Civil War, and after he returned he joined the British Army simply to fight the Nazis.

Madeleine was about 15 when she joined the International Socialists (IS), which later became the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

She had a break from activism when she was a student, but rejoined the IS Walthamstow branch in about 1973, and became an active trade unionist. This is the branch spied on by Miller throughout his deployment.

REVOLUTION, VIOLENCE & PLAIN OLD PAPER SELLING

Like with other non-state witnesses, the Inquiry are keen to find out just what was meant by the politics of the SWP, revolutionary politics and talk of violence. And again, like other such witnesses, she calmly dismantled the many (deliberate) misconceptions the police held of the group.

The SWP wanted an end to the constant class conflict of capitalism, seeking a fair and just socialist society, she explained. She rejected the Inquiry’s characterisation of the SWP as trying to overthrow parliamentary democracy:

‘We basically believed that extra-parliamentary activity was essential because we wanted to increase democracy, we felt that people should be active at all levels, not just voting once every five years. Our belief was in broadening participation in democracy…

‘We were not a terrorist group, we were not a violent group, we basically wanted to build a mass movement.’

Madeleine took issue with another mischaracterisation, disputing the implication that SWP members ‘infiltrated’ trade unions, rather they were trade unionists themselves and sought to support others.

They sold their Socialist Worker newspaper, held public meetings, and went on demonstrations:

‘Perfectly legal and legitimate methods.’

In the 1970s the far right were in the ascent with neo-fascists openly attacking minority communities and murdering Black and Asian men. Though the SWP, Madeleine was involved in the movement opposing fascism.

She said the SWP were opposed to active violence as counter-productive, and even expelled Red Action from the party.

WALTHAMSTOW SWP

With a membership of more than 40 people, the Walthamstow branch of the SWP was comparatively large, so split in two in 1977 – one covering Walthamstow & one covering Leyton/ Leystonstone.

This was the period when Miller was infiltrating. He became Walthamstow branch treasurer, and later district treasurer and social committee organiser for the Outer East London District Branch. This latter role would have entailedorganisingfundraising gigs and other socials.

The branches held regular meetings, as well as moresocial events. As people dedicated to the same ideals, their lives were very enmeshed:

‘We had a message to spread; we had a world to build’

All members were involved in selling papers, every week. They had regular pitches in the markets on Saturdays, and on weekdays would often sell papers outside factories, door to door on estates, and of course at any demos.

There were lots of demonstrations, about all sorts of issues, taking place most weekends.

The group were also active fly-posting and leafleting, to let people know about the speaker meetings they organised.

Madeleine lived in a large flat-share, with a huge living room and kitchen, four bedrooms. It was close to two popular pubs, so it was common for friends to come back after the pub closed.

Miller referred to it as ‘a drop in centre for SWP activity’ which Madeleine dismissed as sounding formal and functional, rather than domestic and sociable

BRANCH ACTIVITY – ‘A LITTLE BIT OF EMBROIDERY’

The Inquiry showed some reports on the branch’s activity. At one branch meeting in June 1977, 25 people listened to a talk on revolutionary feminism by a speaker from the SWP’s Newham Teachers Branch [UCPI0000017456].

Madeleine noted the women’s liberation movement was having a big impact on people’s thinking at the time. Women were not just oppressed as workers, but as women too. In essence they had two jobs – one at work to make ends meet and the other domestically:

‘We saw that the personal was very much political.‘

June 1977 saw the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, marked with a one-off Bank holiday. Not enamoured of the deference and imperial overtones of the occasion, Walthamstow SWP organised a family anti-Jubilee picnic in Epping Forest. The Inquiry asked if the picnic was likely to involve any public disorder:

‘Absolutely not, no. It was just a picnic. With children, I might add.’

The branch was also involved in protests at Sainsbury’s, with the Inquiry focusing on a report where mention was made of ‘occupying’ its supermarkets:

‘We felt supermarket prices were kept artificially high to extract profit for shareholders.’

Madeleine’s motivations andher politics shone through, as she spoke of the ongoing need to campaign about povertyin this country, illustrated by the existence of food banks, the estimated four million children living in poverty right now, and the recent campaigning of Marcus Rashford around school meals:

‘And now I’m thinking to myself, we were so right.’

Once again, she had to correct the Inquiry’s exaggerated ideas of their activity, explaining that they didn’t ‘occupy Sainsbury’s at all:what they probably did was stand outside with banners, handing out leaflets and talking to shoppers.

‘I believe that food, like clean water, fresh air, shelter, etc, are basic human rights.’

A July 1977 report [UCPI0000017571] of a meeting of 30 people describes their intention to produce bulletins for particular workplaces. Asked if this was done with the ultimate aim of recruiting, she once again rejected the suggestion of a hidden agenda, saying the aim was to get workers to:

‘build the movement, not necessarily get them to join SWP… we weren’t a secret sect – we were very much community based.’

Other reports showed cooperation with other groups – for instance, Women’s Voice involved a lot of SWP members, but also women who were not.

The July 1977 report claimed that the branch:

‘Restated its support for the Provisional IRA but remained critical of that organisation’s policy of random bombing of working class people.’

Again, Madeleine contradicted the characterisation:

‘We did not support bombing at all. Absolutely not. We supported a united Ireland, and we felt that Irish people had a right to self determination, and we saw British army as basically an occupying force’

Her witness statement refers to support for self-defence against the British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary. She explained that attacks by those institutions are well documented, and defence doesn’t mean physical violence, but non-cooperation in the form of things like rent strikes, workplace strikes.

She highlighted a practice familiar from spycop reports seen earlier in the hearings, of taking the most extreme or hyperbolic statement at a meeting and portraying it as the whole group’s real basis:

‘There’s a little bit of embroidery going on in many of the reports. There would have been people there who would have expressed opinions that we wouldn’t necessarily agree with, but we would discuss and debate and argue with them.’

REFUGEES FROM TORTURE

An August 1977 report [UCPI0000011129] describes a branch meeting addressed by a refugee from the Chilean dictatorship that had overthrown the democratically elected socialist government in 1973.

He told the meeting that he felt that if the Allende government had armed those prepared to defend it, they may have stood a chance. The report says there was a great deal of discussion about the need to arm the workers in the UK, which Madeleine dismissed out of hand:

‘That’s absolute nonsense. Absolute nonsense.’

But could the SWP envisage a situation where they’d like workers to be armed?

‘We foresaw, as I’ve said, a new society where the vast majority basically organised themselves, took action, and decided things would change…. We weren’t the Red Brigades, or anything like that; we didn’t support that type of activity. We basically believed… the working class would bring about this change, not us.’

Not content with this, the Inquiry highlighted the Chilean speaker’s observation that no people’s militia could directly oppose a trained army, so the only way to defeat it would be infiltration. So, the Inquiry asked, did this mean that the SWP considered infiltrating the Army?

Madeleine scoffed at the suggestion. Walthamstow SWP was selling newspapers and not even occupying Sainsbury’s.

The Inquiry failed to note that the whole issue was about the fascist overthrow of the democratically elected Allende government by the murderous General Pinochet. The refugee was actually speaking about counter-subversion, which was supposedly the SDS’s remit.

The report concluded with a mocking description of a branch member crying, and:

‘Someone threw an epileptic fit which ended my observations.’

Madeleine explained that they knew Chilean refugees who had been tortured in Chile, electrocuted and threatened with death. As compassionate people, they found that emotionally moving. That the spycop found it funny beggars belief.

FASCISTS ON THE RISE

John Tyndall (holding record), National Socialist Movement HQ

Calling the National Front fascist is no exaggeration. Madeleine supplied a photograph [UCPI0000034395] of future NF leader John Tyndall in Nazi uniform in front of a framed portrait of Hitler.

Madeleine described how her generation was dealing with parents traumatised from the Second World War, and yet these avowedly Nazi groups were allowed to organise and demonstrate, seemingly with the approval of the State and the protection of the police. The SDS was not monitoring them at all.

August 1977 saw a key moment in the fight against fascism in Britain. The National Front were organising a march in Lewisham, and there was a huge counter-demonstration. The collision of the two became known as the ‘Battle of Lewisham‘.

Spycop Vince Miller says Walthamstow SWP members went to check out the route of the march the night before, and deposited piles of bricks that could be used the next day. He also claimed they took weapons with them in bags on the day.

Madeleine utterly denies all of this. There is no evidence that anybody ever planted any bricks at all.

Madeleine attended the demonstration of 13 August with comrades from her branch.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The Inquiry asked Madeleine about the All Lewisham Campaign Against Racism And Fascism (ALCARAF), which it described as a coalition of the SWP, International Marxist Group and Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist).

National Front ‘Stop the Muggers’ banner, 1977

She explained it was much wider than that, bringing in trade unions, faith groups and church leaders. It’s extraordinary that churches has noticed fascist violence on the streets and took action, yet the SDS officers say there was no problem they were aware of.

Madeleine explained ALCARAF been formed in January 1977 in response to National Front violence and open police racism. This is vital context to understand the Lewisham protests.

Instead of doing anything about the NF’s ongoing street violence in the area (the Sikh Gurdwara had been attacked, as had shops and individuals in the area), police launched an ‘anti-mugging’ crackdown – ‘muggers’ being a racist trope at the time, as evidenced by the NF’s ‘Stop The Muggers’ banner.

In one large operation local police had conducted house raids, smashing in doors, arresting mostly Black people. Madeleine recounted how a white woman arrested in a raid was strip searched by police and subjected to vile comments about how she was catching diseases from living with Black people.

60 people were arrested, 21 were charged. The Lewisham 21 Defence Committee was set up to support them. They held a march that was attacked by the NF. Acid was thrown on a young girl, one person’s jaw was broken, another knocked unconscious. This alone is more public disorder than the SDS has managed to pin on the SWP, and yet nothing was done.

Just before the Lewisham demonstration, the NF’s National Activities Organiser, Martin Webster, held a press conference and announced:

‘We intend to destroy race relations here in Lewisham.’

As an aside, Madeleine noted that Durham Police had invited Martin Webster to give a talk on law and order in December 1977.

She asked the Inquiry to show a photograph of the NF on the day [UCPI0000034396], in which one of them could be seen armed with a stick. Madeleine said:

‘We could see where their philosophy ends. My husband Is Jewish, his family have the yellow star of his great grandfather…. Part of the family tree ends in the 1940s at Auschwitz.’

THE BATTLE OF LEWISHAM

The Bishop of Southwark leads the ALCARAF banner, 13 August 1977

Against this backdrop of racism from both police and the NF, the August 1977 Lewisham counter-demonstration was always going to be full of outrage.

Police allowed the fascist march to go ahead, while changing the route of the anti-fascist one at short notice. Madeleine found herself trapped in a ‘kettle’ by Clifton Rise in New Cross. People climbed up the corrugated iron hoardings to escape the crush. There was a line of police blocking one end of the street.

People from the overlooking houses told them that the fascists were frightened by the sheer size of the crowd. The next thing she recounted was police horses charging down the street, right through the crowd of demonstrators.

The police led out the NF’s flag-waving contingent, but the rest of the fascists behind had almost no police protection even though many officers were available. ‘All hell broke loose,’ Madeleine remembered, describing missiles coming overhead from behind her.

She and her comrades wanted to get out of the situation. They were not involved in throwing things. She noted that the majority of people on marches were usually white, but this day saw a large proportion of Black people on the streets, and the police responded with aggression.

She felt that the police ‘just lost control and went wild’ in an outburst of rage vented against the local community. She recalled police vehicles driven into the crowd, indiscriminate arrests, and severe police violence, as they escaped and walked to a train station some distance away in an attempt to make it home safely.

MORE MEETINGS

The Inquiry showed some more reports on the SWP meetings. One from November 1977 [UCPI0000011513] held at a public library, was on the life and works of William Morris, a Victorian son of Walthamstow, known for both his wallpaper/ textile pattern designs and socialist beliefs.

The meeting was addressed by a speaker who ‘delivered a well prepared speech which he illustrated with photographs and slides’. The meeting was apparently that told Morris was a ‘pioneer of English socialism,’ even if his ideas were not entirely consistent with the SWP.’

Morris was pretty mainstream in thought and indeed in wallpaper design. Once again, the SDS was reporting on things that were in no way subversive or a threat to public order, and the documents were copied to MI5 where they are still held nearly 50 years later.

A report of a meeting in July 1978 [UCPI0000011337] shows Miller was involved in the branch’s Industrial Group, which organised sales of Socialist Worker at factories, picket lines and similar settings.

A January 1979 report [UCPI0000013063] says sales of Socialist Worker are going well on a local industrial estate, though they must avoid places with a predominantly Asian workforce as workers say they would be subjected to violence or the sack if they showed support.

Madeleine wonders if Miller had contact information for sympathetic workers at these factories, and if their details were passed on to industrial blacklists.

The report also mentioned School Kids Against the Nazis (SKAN) and says it ‘can, with short notice, get large numbers of school students on to the streets, should the need arise’. The Inquiry asked Madeleine if SKAN were able to suddenly create a mob ready for street violence.

Yet again, she had to deflate suggestions of insurrection. She explained that SKAN had been formed when the NF held a demo outside a school in multicultural East London. About 200 pupils had opposed it, with 15 arrests – all but one of them Black kids.

SKAN was a self-organising group of kids responding to the upsurge of racism around them:

‘The idea that we would have somehow had to have planted these ideas in their heads is a bit ludicrous really. It was their own experience.’

SELF DEFENCE IS NO OFFENCE

In her statement, Madeleine notes other reports are deliberately facetious, and often selectively quote a few individuals’ opinions rather than the general view, even just picking up on comments made by members of the public – such as arming themselves with catapults [UCPI0000011196].

Madeleine said this suggestion was more likely made by a member of the public, and would have been ineffective given that a young woman selling the Socialist Worker had her pelvis broken by NF thugs with a sledgehammer. Rather:

‘the collective focus was was on how to stay safe by remaining in groups and avoiding situations where we might come under attack.’

The Inquiry did not address the above in the live evidence, but it did turn to another instance of SWP members protecting themselves against vicious racist violence.

A November 1978 report [UCPI0000012924] of an SWP meeting (of 22 people) details the compiling of a rota of members who would stay at the house of a Black woman with a Jewish boyfriend who needed protection from attacks by the National Front.

The report said that Dagenham police confirmed that bricks had been thrown through the windows at the house, one with an extreme right wing leaflet around it, the other bearing the letters DAK. The report said DAK stood for ‘Dagenham Axe Clan’.

The transliteration of ‘K’ standing for ‘Clan’ is unsettling. It seems like the police were attempting to deflect from the use of the word Klan, and the direct violent racism implied by it.

Again, these attacks are each worse than anything Miller has managed to conclusively attribute to the SWP. It disproves the claims that the SDS didn’t know about any threats from right-wing groups. And yet, there appears to be no record of the DAK being of interest to the SDS.

DISBAND THE POLITICAL POLICE

After SWP member and anti-fascist Blair Peach was killed by police at a demonstration against the NF in April 1979, there was a wave of outrage across the country. There were calls for a public inquiry into his killing, and for the notorious unit responsible, the Special Patrol Group (SPG), to be disbanded.

A July 1979 SDS report [UCPI0000021044] describes a Waltham forest District SWP meeting entitled ‘Police are the Murderers: Disband the Special Patrol Group’.

Madeleine reminded us of the unauthorised weapons and Nazi regalia found in the lockers and homes of SPG officers after they had killed Peach.

The report quotes a speaker as saying dissolution of the SPG is a necessary step on the path to socialist revolution. Madeleine broadly agreed – the SPG were effectively a repressive, paramilitary political unit, the opposite of policing in response to actual community need.

Although the meeting had not been advertised, two strangers arrived, separately, and were presumed to be police. The manner of their dress, their reluctance to divulge any details about themselves, and their leaving early gave them away.

The Inquiry asked if the meeting was private because it was doing something sinister. However, Madeleine explained that, as SWP meetings were being subject to fascist attacks, the party had simply become more security conscious.

PERSONAL DETAILS

The Inquiry then showed a report from November 1977 [UCPI0000011550] detailing Madeleine’s employment at a school, including her salary, start date, and a physical description of her. Another report from 1979 [UCPI0000021299] records her new job working on buses. Why did the spycops record this kind of personal info about her (and others)?

‘I’m outraged really. I find that a gross invasion of my privacy… Why did they need a detailed physical description of me? To what end? What was that used for?… I got a job in a school because I loved kids… and liked working with children very much.’

Even more disturbing was a report on Madeleine’s wedding [UCPI000011289]. She noted that, from her Special Branch Registry File number in the report, her file was opened in 1970, when she was only 16. Part of the details with that report are redacted:

‘I find that really, really sinister’

She demanded that the Inquiry reveal what’s been blacked out, and explain why they don’t want her to see information about herself from 50 years ago.

WELCOMING THE SPYCOP

It appears that Miller joined the Walthamstow branch of the SWP in early 1977. He made contact via a Socialist Worker seller at Walthamstow Market.

The branch was always keen to welcome new members. Madeleine recalls him seeming an ordinary working class guy, in contrast with the largely white-collar membership.

He became very active in the group, selling newspapers papers, fly-posting, joining pickets at the Grunwick strike. In all these things, his ownership of a van made him invaluable. Being the one with the reliable vehicle had rapidly became standard tradecraft for spycops since the early 1970s. It meant they were told of any action that needed transport, they got to chat to people while driving, and drop them home which provided opportunity to get their addresses.

Madeleine remembers Miller as a sociable person, always first to the bar after a meeting, well liked by all:

‘He was very enmeshed in the group, socially and politically.’

An old flatmate of Madeleine’s has located diaries from that time. They show that Miller visited their home as early as May or June 1977.

When Madeleine first knew Miller, she was married, and thinks she was probably less socially active and less friendly with him then, but increasingly regarded him as a friend after her marriage broke up in the autumn of 1978.

ROMANTIC DECEIT

In the summer of 1979 Madeleine was 25 and newly single. She was not actively seeking a relationship after the end of her marriage. She described how shy and quiet she used to be; her husband had been extremely possessive and abusive so it was only after she left him that she felt more confident socialising and talking to other men. She was still feeling vulnerable when she got together with Vince but believed she could trust him:

‘I thought he was lovely. A really nice guy. I thought he was a genuine, lovely, easy going person, I thought he was sensitive, he had this story of heartbreak and all the rest of it. I felt he was looking for genuine relationships with people.’

Madeleine was asked for her account of the house party in Ilford where they became romantically involved. She recalled 40 or 50 people, mostly young people connected with the SWP, there, drinking and dancing.

Miller turned up late and sat down. Madeleine went to try to get him to come and dance, but:

‘He pulled me onto his lap and that’s where I stayed for the rest of the night.’

He said how hard it had been to get to know her, which surprised her as he hadn’t indicated any romantic interest before. She trusted him and was happy to stay there, chatting and flirting.

Some friends came to get her to dance, but Miller put his arms around her and said ‘ ‘no, she’s quite happy here’. She found this funny and laughed.

Later, when the friends were leaving, Miller assured them he would get Madeleine home. He took her back to her flat and they began a sexual relationship. He stayed the night.

‘I was very keen on him. I thought he was lovely, a really attractive guy. I was very keen for it to continue, I was never looking for a one night stand or casual sex with anyone.’

Madeleine says that they saw each other about once a week for a couple of months. They always met at her house, she never visited his.

CYNICAL SYMPATHY

He told her a backstory, of having been in a long-term committed relationship that went toxic in some way, and how he’d had to leave all his possessions behind. The loss of this alleged relationship with someone he’d thought would be a life partner left him devastated and heartbroken, and he said he was too wary of get close to anyone as a result.

He also spoke of a troubled childhood that had damaged his ability to trust, and how he’d always had to rely on himself.

His cynical tale of woe is another piece of spycop tradecraft, one that other women deceived by spycops will recognise all too readily. By telling a story of a damaged upbringing, the officers gave themselves cover for not wanting to tell a full life story. More than that, it made the listener feel that they had been trusted, and so would be likely to reciprocate that trust.

Miller never stayed over after that first night. At some point in the early hours he would suddenly say he had to go home, saying ‘I have to wake up in my own bed because that’s where I feel safe’.

Madeleine accepted that explanation, and hoped it would change. She didn’t consider herself as part of a couple, but she hoped it would become that, and she didn’t see anyone else:

‘He was the focus of my affections, as it were.’

Her feelings for him grew, as he surely knew:

‘I think in the beginning he seemed very keen on me. He became increasingly distant, and I began to become disappointed that it didn’t seem to be going the way I wanted it to go. And, yeah, I kind of became a bit upset about it.’

Her flatmates knew about her relationship. She has a very strong recollection of one asking in the morning ‘is Vince still in bed?’ and commenting on his bad manners in not staying all night.

THE LAST TIME

The last time she saw ‘Vince Miller’ was at a friend’s house. She hadn’t seen him for about a week and saw him sitting on the other side of the room. He was with another woman, and she sensed from their body language that there was something between the two of them. She now thinks this is the other SWP woman he has admitted deceiving into a relationship.

He ignored Madeleine and, when he left, she followed him into the street to ask him why he was being so distant. He said that he’d already told her that he couldn’t get too involved and that he didn’t want to get hurt again.

He said he was going to go to California to ‘find himself’. This is yet another early example of what became standard practice – spycops would cover the end of their deployment by feigning emotional distress and say they were going abroad to sort themselves out.

The depth of emotional turmoil conveyed by some of the later officers had huge impacts on those who loved them. More than one desperately woman deceived into a relationship went searching in the country where her partner was supposedly living, not knowing he was actually back at a desk job in Scotland Yard.

Madeleine and Miller hugged for a long time and parted ways.

THAT’S NOT WHAT HE SAYS

Madeleine’s relationship with Miller described in a friend’s diary, January 1980

In his statement to the Inquiry, Miller describes his relationship with Madeleine as a ‘one night stand’ with no hard feelings and said that the pair remained on good terms thereafter.

In his version, he uses being drunk as an excuse for starting the relationship with her, and for his other ‘one night stands’.

She says that, on the night they got together, he didn’t seem drunk and she certainly wasn’t.

Madeleine then cited a close friend’s diary entry dated 9 January 1980 [UCPI00000034310]

The friend describes Miller as Madeleine’s ‘ex-lover’ and, noting his persistent leaving before dawn, suggests that he may be some kind of vampire who needs to be back in his coffin before sunrise.

Madeleine remembers Miller’s departure damaging her self-esteem, leaving her feeling upset, disappointed and rejected. She saw it as part of a pattern with her marriage and thought:

‘God, have I made another mistake?’

IF SHE KNEW THEN

The Inquiry said that despite everything, the whole affair would have had little impact on her life if she hadn’t latterly found out the truth about spycops.

Asked how she would have felt to discover Miller’s true identity at the time, she said it would have been devastating. She was young and naïve, and would have been profoundly shocked and distraught:

‘I’d made myself very vulnerable to him and I trusted him, and to me it would have been an absolute betrayal… I would have regarded it, as I do regard it now, as rape.’

As it is, she had some fond memories of him, and used to sometimes think about him, hoping he’d come to terms with his troubles and had a happy life. But now:

‘To discover that I didn’t know him at all and that he was a fiction, that’s been quite difficult to get my head around. He doesn’t actually exist, it was all an act, wearing a mask… it’s really chilling and sinister… I just don’t know how people can behave like that.’

Despite promises by the Inquiry to reveal the real names of undercovers to the women deceived into relationships, it has not provided Madeleine his name though she has requested it. The Inquiry are effectively providing cover for a serial sexual abuser – who has admitted to deceiving four women.

‘Like the other officers who deceived women into relationships during their deployments, Vince Miller has lost the right to have his identity protected on privacy grounds. And, like the other women who were deceived into relationships, I should be entitled to know his real name.’

Full written statement of ‘Madeleine’

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Tranche 1, Phase 2, Day 11

6 May 2021

Summary of evidence:
‘Jimmy Pickford’ (HN300, 1974-77)
‘Barry / Desmond Loader’ (HN13, 1975-78)

Introduction of associated documents:
‘Geoff Wallace’ (HN296, 1975-78)

Evidence from witness:
Celia Stubbs

Today’s hearing of the Undercover Policing Inquiry started with the reading of witness statements of undercover officers that could not or did not want to appear in person.

‘Jimmy Pickford’ (HN300, 1974-77)

‘Jimmy Pickford‘ (HN300, 1974-77) infiltrated a number of groups, including anarchist ones, like the South London branches of the Anarchist Workers Association (AWA) and the Federation of London Anarchist Groups (FLAG).

He spent a year in Special Branch – including ‘C Squad’, the left-wing surveillance section – before joining the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) in the summer of 1974. He started off in the back-room, and by October was ready to be sent in to the ‘field’.

His first reports show that he targeted radical newspapers (including ‘Freedom’, ‘Lower Down’, ‘Up Against the Law’ and ‘Pavement’) as well as local, grass-roots groups around Battersea and Wandsworth in South West London.

These included the Battersea Park Action Group (BPAG), the Battersea Redevelopment Action Group (BRAG), and the Battersea & Wandsworth Trades Council Anti-Fascist Committee.

Pickford met an (unnamed) woman during his deployment (in his cover identity), with whom he had a sexual relationship. His expressed desire to tell her his real identity led to his withdrawal from active deployment in 1976. He has since died, so will not be giving evidence.

FAMILY STATEMENT

However, the Inquiry has received a statement from Pickford’s second wife and children, detailing the impact of his undercover work on them.

The family are concerned that publicity from the Inquiry will interfere with their right to a private life, so have asked for his real name to be restricted.

They are concerned about ‘unscrupulous individuals’ who were around him in later life, who might try to ‘cash in’ on this association by selling (untrue) stories to the press. They are also concerned about the possibility of other police officers making connections due to his undercover work, and sharing details of his deployments.

They say that before becoming an undercover officer, ‘Pickford’ was supplied with assurances that his true identity would never be disclosed, to ensure the safety of both him and his family:

‘This was of paramount importance to him and he mentioned this to us many times’

He taught his children to be vigilant, not divulge information, and to be suspicious of anyone seeking information, no matter how innocuous it seemed. He talked about other police work, but never his undercover deployment. After this ended, he took public-facing roles. His family believe this is because he felt his identity was secure.

They believe he infiltrated at least two groups that represented high levels of risk and danger. One of these groups remains active now, in another form. They are worried that people from these groups will try to target the family, physically or via the media/ online. They believe they could easily be tracked down.

UNDERCOVER

Pickford radically changed his appearance when undercover, growing his hair and a voluminous beard.

The family say that he would disappear for long periods of time, with no way of being contacted. No emergency contact details were provided to his wife, and no support was given during his absences.

IMPACT ON FAMILY LIFE

He parked his cover vehicle away from the family home, to which he returned during the evening and night – there would only be occasional contact prior to his arrival. This caused considerable disruption to the family routine, especially given his children were very young at the time. They feel they have made enough sacrifices as a family for his work, which he saw as protection of the country.

To avoid compromising his cover, there was no going to joint social gatherings or having friends round to their home. This left his wife extremely isolated while trying to raise her children, as she had no family in the UK and so was reliant for support on close friends.

Because socialising, even with fellow police officers, was minimal, she was effectively a single parent, socially vulnerable and alone. There was no support from Special Branch.

RELATIONSHIPS

While undercover, he began a relationship with another woman. This, along with the strains that had been put on the family (by the demands of his deployment), led to their divorce, within a year of Pickford leaving the field.

He went on to marry the other woman and have a child with her. This marriage also ended in divorce, some years later. She has not been traced, having remarried.

The Inquiry has confirmed that another, unnamed undercover officer has now provided an account of being tearfully told by Pickford that he had fallen in love with a woman associated with his targets and wanted to tell her the truth. This officer says that they offered to act as a conduit between him and the SDS managers [UCPI0000034307].

Pickford’s wife and children did meet this other woman, and the children joined them on holidays. They noted that she sometimes called him ‘Jimmy’. This indicates she had met him in his undercover identity.

The Inquiry has caused the family distress and anxiety, causing them to re-live unhappy times. This is exacerbated by needing to keep it from other family and friends. Having kept their obligations of confidentiality about Pickford’s work, they now feel betrayed at the thought of this information being released, especially as it led to the collapse of the marriage.

THE INQUIRY’S ACCOUNT OF REPORTS

Pickford’s time undercover has been set out by the Inquiry. He focused on anarchist and community groups in the Battersea/ Wandsworth area. He came across a number of other people who are now core participants at the Inquiry, including Dave Morris in 1976 [UCPI0000021496, UCPI0000017641].

He was particularly interested in Ernest Rodker, who he reported on throughout his deployment, providing many personal details including legal proceedings and birth of his son. It would appear that Rodker was the key focus of his deployment.

The early part of the deployment in 1975 focused on publications such as ‘Freedom’, ‘Lower Down’, ‘Up Against The Law’ and ‘Pavement’ [UCPI0000007125]. He also reported on small local left-leaning groups which held meetings and lobbied politicians – such as BPAG and BRAG (which Rodker was also active in).

ANARCHIST WORKERS ASSOCIATION

Having joined the Kingston branch of the Anarchist Workers Association (AWA), he helped set up the Wandsworth branch in July 1975 (later it became the South London AWA) [UCPI0000006950, UCPI0000012805].

He was elected treasurer of Wandsworth AWA in July 1975 [UCPI0000012685], remaining in that role until the end of his deployment.

He was highly active in the AWA, particularly at branch level where he was responsible for much of the local organising. This included arranging public events and writing articles for the AWA paper. He was the Wandsworth branch’s delegate to the Federation of London Anarchist Groups.

The Inquiry notes the high degree of activity, in comparison to the small numbers at the meetings, and asks whether it was it in fact him who essentially kept the Wandsworth branch functioning: would it have survived without him?

He also gave him access to the larger AWA network. He attended delegate conferences as well as AWA’s national conference.

The Inquiry notes that there are various reports from Pickford indicating his targets were alive to the possibility of police infiltration. There are also times when he cites some AWA members as having a willingness for violence to advance their aims, but it is all very rhetorical and about future revolutionary moments.

There is little in the reports to suggest any criminality or violence; the most tangible threat is a September 1975 report of some members thinking about disrupting a Royal Navy recruitment event with stink bombs and smoke pellets [UCPI0000007604].

Two local, community-oriented papers, ‘Pavement’ and ‘Lower Down’, are reported on. Even the collective members’ personal relationships and living arrangements are recorded [UCPI0000014967].

‘Up Against the Law’ (UPAL) was another publication, put out by a campaign group that assisted people trying to overturn wrongful criminal convictions.

It is believed – but unconfirmed – that Pickford acted as a distributor for the paper. He certainly reported on them – for example this November 1974 report details a dispute between UPAL and their printers [UCPI0000015096]. As with many Special Branch reports, it hard to imagine the relevance of this information to the police.

Like almost all undercovers from this period, Pickford also spied upon anti-fascist campaigners – in his case an umbrella group called Wandsworth Anti-Fascist and Anti-Racist Committee [UCPI0000021581].

‘Barry / Desmond Loader’ (HN13, 1975-78)

‘Barry / Desmond Loader‘ (HN13, 1975-78) was deployed into the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) from 1975 to 1978. He is deceased.

His widow confirmed in a very brief statement [MPS-0740967], that he stole his cover surname from a deceased child from Wiltshire, and that he had told her of the surname during his deployment.

The Inquiry says that Loader’s affiliation with the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) provided entry to several associated organisations, including the Communist Unity Association (Marxist-Leninist), the East London Peoples Front, the Progressive Cultural Association, and the Outer East London Anti-Fascist Anti-Racist Committee.

EARLY REPORTING

The first report held by the Inquiry believed to be attributable to Loader dates from February 1975. These include intelligence on the Marxist-Leninist Organisation of Britain [UCPI0000012145], the Free Desmond Trotter Campaign [UCPI0000007024], and the West London Campaign against Racism and Fascism [UCPI0000007632].

COMMUNIST PARTY OF ENGLAND (MARXIST-LENINIST)

Loader’s reporting from 1977 onward focuses largely on the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) (CPEM-L), in particular the East London Branch. Loader was also an active member of the Party’s cutural activities offshoot, the Progressive Cultural Association.

Like many of the undercover officers we have heard from in these hearings, Loader reported on people involved in actions against the National Front (NF), such as the organisation of demonstrations, pickets, and leafletting as well as a willingness to confront the NF directly.

Loader attended the counter-NF demonstration that became known as the Battle of Lewisham on 13 August 1977. He was injured during the event, receiving a blow to the head – the first of the two times he was assaulted by uniformed police.

A report on a meeting of the CPEM-L in the aftermath of the Lewisham demonstration states that the Party were reviewing tactics to ‘attack’ the NF [UCPI0000011180]. Loader also notes in the same report:

‘it is generally agreed amongst members that, with the advent of the police shield, more sophisticated ‘weaponry’ is required in the riot situation.’

Internal Special Branch documents show that Loader met with Deputy Assistant Commissioner (‘A’ Ops) along with Peter Collins (HN303), DCI Pryde and DI Willingale following the Lewisham demonstration.

They wanted to convey his experience and provide recommendations for future policing in similar circumstances [MPS-0732885]. This meeting ultimately resulted in a note authored by DI Willingale aimed to assist with methods of policing future demonstrations [MPS-0732886].

ARRESTED TWICE & ‘BATTERED’ BY POLICE AGAIN

Loader was arrested twice while in his cover identity. The first occasion, in late 1977, was for ‘insulting or threatening behaviour’ following a clash with the NF outside Barking police station. Chief Inspector Craft of the SDS recorded that Loader was ‘somewhat battered by police prior to his arrest’ [MPS-0722618].

Seven other individuals from Loader’s group were also arrested. Superintendent Pryde maintained contact with a court official during the proceedings in April 1978. He informed them that one of the defendants was a police informant who they would be ‘anxious to safeguard from any prison sentence’ [MPS-0526784].

Ultimately, the charges against Loader were dismissed. Three of the other seven individuals were found guilty and fined on 12 April 1978 [UCPI0000011984].

These convictions were the subject of a 2014 report to the Crown Prosecution Service drafted as part of Operation Shay [MPS-0722618], examining miscarriages of justice stemming from undercover deployments.

Discussion in Special Branch Minute Sheets reveals that Loader’s senior officers prioritised keeping Loader’s identity secret over any other consideration.

SECOND ARREST

Just three days after his court appearance, Loader was arrested a second time during trouble at a National Front meeting held at Loughborough School, Brixton on 15 April 1978.

He was again charged with threatening behaviour under s.5 of the Public Order Act 1936, along with three others [UCPI0000011356].

At the hearing, an application was made to hear all the defendants’ cases together. However, the Magistrates decided to hear Loader’s case alone. This was, allegedly, because Loader had been involved in a separate incident to the other defendants, who had infiltrated an NF meeting while Loader stayed outside.

In fact, records reveal that Superintendent Pryde established contact with a court official during the proceedings and told them that one of the defendants was:

‘a valuable informant in the public order field whom we would wish to safeguard from a prison sentence should the occasion arise’.

Unlike the previous arrest, however, it is noted that Loader’s cover name was specifically given to the official [MPS-0526784].

All the defendants, in this case, were found guilty, with Loader being fined and given a one-year bind-over of £100. It is noted in the Minute Sheet that this sentence was considered ‘very useful’ as it would allow Loader to keep a low profile for the remainder of his deployment [MPS-0526784].

The Inquiry said that there is no evidence to suggest that this officer engaged in any sexual relationships in his cover identity.

A note made of a meeting with Commander Buchanan in 2013 suggests that Loader had difficulty reintegrating with the police following his deployment [MPS-0738057].

Loader is recalled by former CPEM-L party members with little detail, although they confirm he was known as ‘Barry’ rather than ‘Desmond’.

One member of the Party applied for Core Participant status at the Inquiry but was refused, despite obviously being in a good position to help the Inquiry with Loader’s evidence.

‘Geoff Wallace’ (HN296, 1975-78)

Summary of Evidence

‘Geoff Wallace’ (HN296, 1975-78) does not reside in the United Kingdom and the pandemic has prevented him from coming over, but he will eventually provide a witness statement.

To introduce him now, the Inquiry cites the account he gave to the Metropolitan Police risk assessor a couple of years ago. At the time he had not had access to the vintage reports attributed to him.

Wallace was a member of the Hammersmith branch of the International Socialists (IS) from summer 1975 to autumn 1978; IS became the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) during his deployment. He stole the identity of a dead child as the basis for his undercover persona.

SPYING ON SCHOOL CHILDREN

We heard earlier in the Inquiry that Paul Gray (HN126) spied upon a group called ‘School Kids Against Nazis’. Wallace also spied on school children.

The first report on the Hammersmith branch of IS signed by him [UCPI000009576] is dated 29 January 1976 and refers to students at Chiswick Comprehensive School’s intention to organise a Right to Work Campaign meeting for school leavers.

SPYING ON LAWYERS

In the course of the Right to Work Campaign, in April 1976 the IS magazine Socialist Worker hired solicitors to represent those arrested during the activities. Wallace reported [UCPI0000012323] on their complaints about police conduct, probably breaching legal privilege.

Wallace’s reporting contains many references to pickets and protests, some upcoming, some containing a list of those involved. In particular, he reports on a number of campaigns to protest the closure of local hospitals, such one [UCPI0000012378] on an April 1976 meeting of the Save Acton Hospital Campaign.

SPYING ON TRADE UNIONS

Wallace seems to be the undercover officer reporting in March 1977 [UCPI0000017818] on the Trade Union Committee Against Prevention of Terrorism Act. This was a Hammersmith group formed in April 1976 by local members of IS, the Troops Out Movement, Camden, Hackney and Hammersmith Trades Councils and various trades unions. Its aim was to provide a solicitor for anyone arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act which conferred emergency powers on police forces whenever terrorism was suspected.

According to a report from Wallace in April 1976 [UCPI0000012373] the Committee was suspected of having an underlying political goal; self-determination for the Irish people. In reality, they were actively campaigning for repeal of the Prevention of Terrorism Act by staffing pickets outside police stations holding people detained under the Act.

When the police raided the home of one of the activists in January 1978 [UCPI0000017917] they found a note amongst the seized paperwork that said: ‘In the event of no transport, phone Geoff Wallace’. Having a van available remained a key point in the tradecraft of generations of spycops afterwards.

YET ANOTHER TREASURER

Wallace held a series of positions of authority within his target group. The October 1976 report [UCPI0000021481] of a branch meeting of Hammersmith IS indicates that, as of 6 May 1976, Wallace was branch treasurer. Numerous other spycops of the era held the same post in groups they infiltrated.

By July 1976, it would appear Wallace had become the branch’s Socialist Worker newspaper organiser [UCPI0000017922].

SPYING ON ELECTION CANDIDATES

In a report on 5 August 1976 [UCPI0000011981] Wallace reported on a discussion at a meeting of the Hammersmith and Kensington branch of IS about standing in the Walsall by-election. In March 1978 the SWP talked about standing a candidate in the forthcoming general election in Hammersmith North. As these activities are within the parliamentary system, it is difficult to see how they fall under the counter-subversion remit of SDS.

NOTTING HILL CARNIVAL ‘RIOT’ 1976

The Notting Hill Carnival in August 1976 ended in a protest of young people of colour, harassed by an antagonising large police presence, and defending themselves against arbitrary police arrests. IS encouraged their members to join pickets outside the Magistrates Court where those arrested would appear. In September 1976 the branch also proposed [UCPI0000021361] that IS join the defence committee set up by the Black Liberation Front and Grass Roots and contribute to its funds.

YET MORE REPORTING ON ANTI-FASCIST ACTIVITY

In February 1976, the Coventry and Chrysler Right to Work Committee organised a march, supported by the IS, to counter-protest at a demonstration held by the National Front under the slogans ‘A Right to Work for Whites Only’ and ‘ Stop Immigration’.

According to the report [UCPI0000012230] that the Inquiry attributes to Wallace, after a peaceful march some IS members made their way to the location of the National Front election offices and attacked people with stones and bricks. At least one person was taken to the hospital.

Then, according to the same report, IS members then marched to a shopping precinct to chase away members of the National Party. This breakaway faction of the NF was led by fascist and Holocaust denier John Kingsley Read, who built a reputation for having said, after the murder of a young Sikh man in a racist attack, ‘One down, a million to go’. Read later joined the Conservative Party.

The Inquiry looks to this incident to perhaps justify this undercover deployment:

‘We note that, if the report is accurate, this was an occasion on which the violence was started by left-wing activists from the infiltrated group.’

This is not the first time that the Inquiry has used reports of ‘violent’ anti-fascist protests as a justification for many of the deployments.

ANTI-FASCISM IN BIRMINGHAM

Wallace may very well have have been one of the SDS deployed officers who attended a counter-protest march against the National Front in Birmingham. On 24 February 1977, London branches of the SWP and the IMG sent coachloads of their members to join the march.

An SDS report dated 7 March 1977 [UCPI0000017776] describes a single coach of SWP members being attacked by ‘five coaches’ of National Front supporters at Watford Gap Service station.

For some reason, the Inquiry glosses this incident in neutral terms:

‘The SWP contingent from NW London and West Middlesex districts appears to have been involved in an encounter with the National Front in a service station en route to Birmingham…’

This gives a misleading impression of this serious unprovoked attack by the NF on SWP members.

DS Richard Walker (HN368), representing the SDS management, was also dispatched to Birmingham by DI Geoffrey Craft (HN34) to ‘look after our interests’ as is remarked in a note in February 1977 [MPS-0730703].

BATTLE OF LEWISHAM & ANTI-JUBILEE PROTEST

A member of SWP who announced that he was mobilising local trades union branches to support an anti-Jubilee demonstration during the visit of HRH Princess Anne to Kensington Town Hall on 31 May, ended up in a report dated 26 May 1977 [UCPI0000017437].

Wallace also notes that of the 1,500 demonstrators expected, 1,000 were likely to be trade unionists who were ‘violently opposed’ to Jubilee celebrations, if such a thing were possible.

At the same meeting, branch members were urged to assist in staffing picket lines for the strike at the Grunwick photo processing factory. Again, in the Inquiry’s statement ‘intelligence’ on the Grunwick strike is offered as a supposed justification for the covert policing.

A report dated 21 July 1977 [UCPI0000011055] refers to the intention of the Hammersmith and Kensington SWP to send two mini-vans of people to an anti-fascist demonstration in Lewisham on 23 July 1977 ‘in order that the National Front could take a real ‘hammering’.

Celia Stubbs

Celia Stubbs

Celia Stubbs is a Core Participant at the Inquiry because of her relationship with Blair Peach and the campaign that followed his being killed by police in 1979, and the police cover-up that continues to this day.

As Stubbs’ lawyer Matthew Ryder QC told the Inquiry two weeks ago, the killing of Blair Peach remains one of the most notorious events in British police history, a national disgrace, and a permanent stain on the Met.

Stubbs believes the spycops reported on her to prevent other police officers from facing justice.

MEETING BLAIR

Stubbs began by telling how she’d first met Peach in his native New Zealand around 1962 when she was there with her then-husband who was teaching there.

Peach visited London after she had separated from her husband, and they became a couple. They lived together from 1971 onwards. Peach took an active role as step-father to her two daughters

Stubbs has campaigned since Peach was killed, seeking greater police accountability and supporting miscarriage of justice cases, and other bereaved family campaigns. She was a founding member of Inquest, and involved in Hackney Community Defence Association.

POLITICAL BACKGROUND

Blair Peach

In 1972, Stubbs joined the Hackney branch of International Socialists (IS), who later became the Socialist Workers Party. Peach joined later, around 1977.

She has recently learnt that Special Branch held ‘Registry Files‘ on both her and Peach – hers began in 1974/5, Peach’s in 1978 – but she hasn’t been shown any of the content of these. She feels that it would be useful to see these files.

Peach was a teacher, and ‘a very fervent trade unionist’ according to Stubbs, active in the National Union of Teachers in Tower Hamlets and Hackney.

IS put a lot of emphasis on building the class struggle, and Stubbs sold the ‘Socialist Worker’ newspaper in many places. She attended the group’s meetings, both public and private, as well as demonstrations and events supporting striking workers.

NATIONAL FRONT

One area of particular concern was a groundswell of far-right sentiment, especially the active presence on the streets of the National Front (NF). Stubbs and her comrades sold the Socialist Worker in the multicultural area of Brick Lane in East London, and regularly came into conflict with racist NF paper-sellers there. Peach and Stubbs joined the Anti Nazi League (ANL) when it was formed in 1977.

There was organised anti-fascist resistance to the NF, and usually a large police presence too. Stubbs recalled talking to people, lots of shouting at the fascists, banners and of course paper-selling.

The Inquiry showed a Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) report [UCPI0000010769] about the first public meeting of Hackney Community Relations Council, which took place at Stoke Newington Town Hall on 22 July 1976. It was attended by 250 people, significantly more than was normal for political meetings at the time.

The officer describes an NF member being ‘ejected from the assembly room amid a shower of fists and invective’, and that as people left they were taunted by NF members but did not physically confront them.

Asked if this was typical, Stubbs said she only remembered even that relatively low level of disturbance at one other meeting. She highlighted the fact that the anti-fascists had not risen to the goading of the fascists, adding:

‘I do remember unprovoked attacks and, you know, of course members of the left were often arrested. We certainly didn’t go out to do that, you know? We didn’t go to provoke’

The next report [UCPI0000021207] is from a meeting in a pub in North West London which took place on 24 April 1979, the day after Peach had been killed.

Persisting with the Inquiry’s habit of emphasising the violence of activists they read out the report’s summary of a speech made by SWP founder Tony Cliff.

Cliff is described as comparing the Southall anti-fascist demonstration with one two days earlier in Leicester, saying the vital difference was preparation, planning and organisation by the ANL. He is reported as saying ANL had provided Leicester stewards with maps of the area leading to:

‘a successful attack here on the police by about 200 demonstrators, high police injuries and a small number of arrests. On the other hand, at Southall, due to the lack of organisation and inadequate ANL stewarding, a lot of police had been injured, many demonstrators had been arrested and, more importantly, many demonstrators had been badly injured, with one death’

The bias of the reporting officer is apparent in the next paragraph which said:

‘many of the contributors from the floor then recounted their adventure during the demonstrations in Leicester and Southall and discussed instances of “extreme police brutality”.’

Stubbs said Tony Cliff was ‘absolutely wrong to compare Leicester and Southall’ or claim Southall just needed better organisation by the ANL in future. She explained that Southall was a very tight-knit community, ethnically diverse, a strong industrial base with factories around Heathrow, and well-organised, by the likes of the Indian Workers Association.

THE FATAL DAY

The NF’s meeting at Southall Town Hall on 23 April 1979 was part of their campaigning in the run-up to the general election two weeks later. Their candidate didn’t even live in Southall, but they were targeting constituencies with large Black and Asian populations.

Mounted police intimidate protesters, Southall, 23 April 1979 [Pic: John Sturrock]

Stubbs and Peach travelled separately to the demo – he was on school holiday, whereas she came after work with some colleagues. She had never been there before.

When she arrived, Stubbs found it very crowded. She recounted finding herself near Southall Park where police were chasing people on horses, and on foot with truncheons, hitting people.

5,000 local residents had signed a petition against the NF being allowed to meet. Stubbs described factories shutting down in protest, and how it had started out as a large peaceful sit-down demonstration. But at 1.30pm, more than 3000 police moved in and it was ‘a town under siege’. Police shut all four of the roads that converged by the Town Hall, creating chaos, and started dragging protesters out.

Stubbs said:

‘it was almost as if the police punished the people of Southall… with the 700 people who were arrested, and then there were 348 people actually charged with offences.’

She made her way back to the station at about 7pm, and got the train back to Hackney without having seen Peach. She only learnt that he had been hurt later that evening when, at around 10pm, she received a phone call from a friend who was at Ealing Hospital.

SPYCOPS IN SOUTHALL

She knows that one of the spycops attended the demo in Southall that day. The Inquiry has taken evidence in secret from officers who it does not want to identify. It has then blended their testimony into a single ‘gisted’ document. In it, an officer says they were at the demonstration in Southall, saw violence and were horrified, and left before Peach was killed.

Stubbs is offended at this. Firstly, the total secrecy around the officer – we aren’t given their name, cover name, or any other details at all. Secondly, the idea that there was only one spycop at the demo is ridiculous.

Stubbs said it looks very much like the officer was distancing themselves as far as they could from the killing of Blair Peach. In this, it reminded her of the statements of the officers from the team responsible for his death, who said their van had actually stopped well away from Peach, that other police were present, and other things that were simply lies.

SPYCOPS AT THE FUNERAL

Blair Peach’s funeral, 13 June 1979

Blair Peach’s funeral was held on 13 June 1979. Members of Peach’s family came all the way from New Zealand for it, and 10,000 people came to pay their respects. Undercover police officers took photos of them for later identification.

Spycop ‘Barry Tompkins’ (HN106, 1979-83) says he attended the funeral in case there would be a risk of public disorder, something dismissed by Stubbs as ‘absolutely ludicrous’. 71 mourners are listed by name in Tompkins’ report.

The Inquiry showed several SDS reports [UCPI0000021218, UCPI0000021270] on meetings and protests that showed that the campaign for the truth about Peach’s death was a prominent topic among many sectors of the left at the time.

CAMPAIGNING FOR THE TRUTH

The Inquiry showed a report [UCPI0000021297] which included a leaflet produced by the Friends of Blair Peach. The report, seemingly unable to accept that the police were responsible for his death refers to injuries ‘it is alleged’ caused Peach’s death.

The SDS’ Annual Report for 1979 [MPS-0728963] outrageously suggests that it was the protesters’ fault that he died, saying that his death was the result:

‘of the virulent anti-fascist demonstrations.’

The campaign ideas on the leaflet are what one might expect: writing newspapers, phoning local radio stations, organising collections of money in workplaces, visiting MPs and circulating a petition to push for a public inquiry, putting forward motions at trade union branch meetings, encouraging affiliation to the ANL, and supporting calls for the Met’s notoriously violent Special Patrol Group, whose officers had killed Peach, to be disbanded.

These are traditional democratic campaigning practices, a long way from the SDS’ alleged remit of subversion and public order problems.

BURYING THE FACTS

The Met’s internal report, by Commander John Cass, found that it was ‘almost certain’ that a police officer from the Special Patrol Group killed Peach with a blow to the head.

A search of the officers’ lockers found numerous unauthorised weapons. One officer’s home had Nazi memorabilia and more unauthorised weapons. This information was leaked to the campaign and made public in June 1979.

Stubbs’ solicitor saw the weapons. One was a long cosh with metal at one end, which fits description of weapon that killed Peach.

The Cass report was published on 12 July 1979, then updated on 14 September, but it was not made public. Indeed, Stubbs had to wait more than 30 years before the Met would allow her to see it.

THE INQUEST

An October 1979 report [UCPI0000013435], detailed pickets being planned at Kilburn and Harlesden police stations, to coincide with door-to-door leafleting nearby on the eve of the opening of the first inquest into Peach’s death.

Stubbs explained that over 100 police stations were picketed in this way:

‘people were so angry about it.’

The coroner, John Burton, refused to sit with a jury. He also refused to allow the Cass report to be considered. Campaigners went for a judicial review, stopping the first inquest on that first day.

The Director of Public Prosecutions agreed that there was ‘no case to answer’ and so no police officer would be charged in relation to Peach’s death.

The inquest started again in April 1980, with a jury. The coroner, despite having seen the Cass report, did not accept that established version of events to be taken into account. The inquest concluded in May, the verdict: ‘death by misadventure’

LICENSE TO KILL

One of Peach’s friends and teaching colleagues, David Ransom, wrote a booklet called License to Kill about the killing of Peach and the Special Patrol Group. The chapter on the Special Patrol Group (SPG) is being published by the Inquiry along with the Cass report [UCPI0000034077].

License to Kill cited the Met’s attempts to defy the facts and portray the SPG as an elite, disciplined unit. They told the press that the SPG was the only specialist unit within the force and around 50% of applicants failed the vetting. Those who qualified did a ‘full tour’ of three years. The Met said it had no room for the ‘headstrong type or those who are liable to over-react to any difficult situation’.

This was all nonsense. The Met had a number of specialist units including, as we’re seeing, Special Branch and the SDS.

The purported ‘rigorous controls’ described by the Met had never existed at any time. At least seven of the officers who gave evidence to the Peach inquest had been in the SPG for longer than four years. One of them had been in the SPG for eight years, and two others had been part of the unit since it was founded, 14 years earlier. One of these was PC White, driver of the vehicle that delivered the killer to Peach.

SELF-INCRIMINATION

On 1 June 1980, the Sunday Times published an interview with the SPG’s Inspector Alan Murray. He is now widely believed to be the officer who killed Blair Peach.

Murray had just left the police and appeared to be trying to use the interview to cast his role, and that of his erstwhile unit, in a good light.

He spoke of how ‘the loony left’ were expected to behave in Southall that day, and that it promised to be ‘a tasty one’. He talked of the ‘elan’ (which Wilkinson said she took to mean ‘enthusiasm’) in the unit, and said they were proud to be known as ‘The Cowboys’. He recounted how they played the ‘Dambusters’ soundtrack as they arrived on duty.

‘When I was out with my unit I was my own boss to a large extent. Before acting I didn’t have to ring up and say “Guvnor, do you think this is right?” I followed my own experience to do what was expected.’

PC ‘Chalkie’ White, who had been suspended, was reinstated, not just as a police officer, but back into the SPG. Murray went on to become a lecturer in corporate social responsibility.

ANNIVERSARY COMMEMORATIONS

On the first anniversary of Peach’s death, SWP and ANL groups organised pickets at police stations all over London, as described in a report [UCPI0000020094] 18 April 1980.

Blue plaques on Southall Town Hall commemorating Gurdip Singh Chaggar & Blair Peach, 2019

Another report from the same day [UCPI0000013891] lists 16 police stations at which vigils were planned.

In 1981, on the second anniversary, public feeling was still high. A report [UCPI0000016434] mentions the South London Right to Work group’s plans to picket Eltham police station on the day.

The next report [MPS-0001219] was from decades later. It was written in the summer of 1998, regarding the plans to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Blair Peach’s killing on 23 April 1999.

The Inquiry wanted to avoid doubt and said that the line ‘Intelligence: Touchy Subject’ refers to the code-name used by the officer who filed the report, and is not some kind of comment on Stubbs or the Peach case.

Stubbs leapt at the opportunity to illuminate this topic. She told the Inquiry that the officer referred to was Mark Jenner (‘Mark Cassidy’ HN15, 1995-2000) who infiltrated the Hackney Community Defence Association and the Colin Roach Centre (also in Hackney). Whilst undercover he deceived an activist, ‘Alison‘, into a long-term relationship.

Cassidy reported that:

‘local trade unions are organising a large rally and demonstration, which will be presented with a strong anti-racist/anti-police flavour… the event will inevitably attract a large left wing presence with particular accent on anti-police type groups and the potential for disorder will be significant.’

Stubbs was indignant at this:

‘we’d had remembrance demonstrations after five years, after ten years, and this was twenty years. There’d never been any disorder. I don’t know why he put that. I think it’s pretty unpleasant.’

In 2019, for the 40th anniversary, a blue plaque for Peach was unveiled at Southall Town Hall, the Inquiry said. Stubbs added that there was also one for Gurdip Singh Chaggar, a teenager killed by white racists in Southall in 1976.

A year later, in June 2020, the plaques were stolen. It is not known if the culprits were supporters of the police, or of the National Front, or someone else.

BANDING TOGETHER

Returning to the aftermath of Peach’s death, the next report [UCPI0000014149] was from July 1980, concerning the formation of a new network of justice campaigns for cases of police brutality.

Stubbs was visibly emotional as she recounted the details of some of these, including:

• Jimmy Kelly, who had been severely beaten by Liverpool police on his way home from a pub in 1979 and taken into custody where he died within the hour.
• Richard Campbell, a 19 year old Black Rastafarian who was in Ashford prison, charged with breaking a shop window which he denied, who was force fed and died alone.
• Liddle Towers, a 39 year old electrician who died after being beaten in custody by eight officers in 1976. His first inquest ruled ‘justifiable homicide’. After campaigning, a second inquest ruled it was misadventure.
• Matthew O’Hara who was remanded to Pentonville prison for withholding his name at a hearing for rate arrears in March 1980. Though he had diabetes, the prison did not administer insulin. He was kicked in the stomach by a prison officer. After four days without insulin he was rushed to hospital and later died.

Stubbs explained that they wanted to get together with these other justice campaigns so they could support each other through the official processes such as inquests, as well as share information and push for reform of the inquest process. She does not see any valid reason to spy on these activities.

We were next shown a report from 1999 [MPS-0001707]. The Macpherson inquiry into the 1993 racist murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence Inquiry had been concluded in 1998, and plans were afoot to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Peach’s killing.

This report mentions many of the family justice campaigners who were active at this time, as well as the Lawrence family themselves.

As with Mark Cassidy’s report, the author feels compelled to make false claims about the likelihood of disorder:

‘Suresh GROVER, who is the organiser of this event, will positively contribute to ensuring that the day passes off without disorder. However, given the large number of groups and individuals who are likely to attend this march, the potential for disorder is high.’

MISSING OFFICERS, MISSING FILES, CONVENIENT AMNESIA

The Met’s own annual report of 1979 described the Southall protest as its ‘most significant event of the year’ yet we don’t see any spycops statement, apart from the single one summarised and blended into the gisted document.

Kevin Gately in Red Lion Square, London, 15 June1974

Stubbs noted there were also scant spycops reports from the 1974 anti-fascist demonstration at Red Lion Square when protester Kevin Gately was killed. ‘Bob Stubbs’ (HN301, 1971-76) told the Inquiry he was at that demonstration but said he could not remember anything about it and only vaguely remembered Gately’s name.

Nothing from the SDS was presented to the public inquiry into the Red Lion Square protest. It’s simply not credible to say so few officers were involved and no significant reports were made.

Contrast these two anti-fascist protests – at which people were killed – with others in the same era where nobody died. Records show at least 18 undercover officers were present at the 1977 ‘Battle of Lewisham’ and we have more than 50 pages of reports.

It’s obvious that when someone is killed, the police don’t want to be associated with it. This looks like yet another cover-up. It makes us feel like we’re not being heard.

EAGER DENIAL

She wonders why spycop ‘Paul Gray’ (HN126, 1977-82) has been flagged up to her:

‘I was told that his statement was pertinent to my being spied upon. In fact, there’s absolutely nothing in his statement that involves me, except when, on 12 June 1979, he said he went with the SWP members of the branch he’d infiltrated to view Blair laid in state at the Dominion cinema in Southall.

‘He said he only went because it would have looked bad for him if he hadn’t and might have disturbed his undercover, but he then, immediately after that, said in his statement, “I never had anything to do with the family or Friends of Blair Peach”.

‘Why did he make that remark? It seems as though he quickly wanted to distance himself from. There must be something.’

Stubbs said that, having seen so many secret police reports, is left with as many questions as she had before.

‘I mean, Blair was killed by police officers and our feelings and campaigns were criminalised. The police, I think, wanted to keep ahead of our campaign so that Blair’s killers: we were never able to hold them to account.’

Speaking of how she and other Core Participants at the Inquiry feel violated, she concluded:

‘Core participants are fighting injustice in a climate where they are vilified by authority and we’ve been targeted. We don’t know why we’ve been targeted. I just hope this Inquiry, you know, will protect core participants, and that when you come to write your report, this will be foremost in your mind.’

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, thanked her for her evidence, though it’s unclear how much weight he will give it.

Before the Undercover Policing Inquiry’s hearing on 23 April 2021, the 42nd anniversary of the killing of Blair Peach, there was a minute’s silence in his memory. In his introductory words, Mitting referred merely to Peach being killed by ‘a blow to the head’. He did not mention the police at all. It seems the Inquiry is unwilling to fully admit even the facts established by Commander Cass decades ago.

Full witness statement of Celia Stubbs

Stubbs recently spoke about Blair Peach, and spycops, to Channel 4 News.

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Tranche 1, Phase 2, Day 5

27 April 2021

Evidence from police witnesses:

‘Dave Robertson’ (HN45, 1970-73)
‘Alex Sloan‘ (HN347, 1971)

The Undercover Policing Inquiry‘s current hearings (Tranche 1 Phase 2, covering the Special Demonstration Squad 1973-82) had their first day of police witnesses.

‘Dave Robertson’

(HN45, 1970-73)

‘Dave Robertson‘ (HN45, 1970-73) was questioned by Kate Wilkinson on behalf of the Inquiry.

Robertson told the Inquiry was deployed undercover by the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) in 1971, infiltrating Maoist groups.

He spied on Diane Langford who gave evidence in yesterday’s hearing. He was ‘compromised’ – ie, his true role revealed to those he spied on, as Langford described – and withdrawn in 1973.

PREPARATION

Asked why did he not steal the identity of a deceased child, he merely said ‘I just didn’t’, and that he was not aware of what other officers chose to do.

As was common with the early spycops, Robertson joined the SDS after working in Special Branch. He hadn’t done undercover work before. He was invited by serving member Detective Helen Crampton but has no idea why she approached him.

He said he didn’t know much about the unit before joining it, but:

‘Special Branch was quite a small knit community and people knew what might have been happening or not happening… everybody in Special Branch knew to some degree what was happening’

Robertson was vague about many points, even one the approximate number of officers in the SDS when he was serving. He admitted being ‘kind of aware’ of the SDS’s mission, and that it had been formed after disorder at a demonstration against the Vietnam War in March 1968.

He said the anti-war protestors ‘created mayhem’ on the day, and this was due to a lack of police intelligence. This is a familiar narrative, repeated by many of the officers who testified in the November 2020 Inquiry hearings, for instance, ‘Doug Edwards’ (HN326, 1968-71). Robertson embellished the tale, adding that he saw some demonstrators running around with scaffold poles.

According to him, Special Branch:

‘was a secret organisation anyway, and everyone in it was “positively vetted” so by definition it was a secret department.’

Pressed on how much chat there was in Special Branch about the SDS, he said ‘you wouldn’t really talk about the specifics’.

He said that he received no training as such, but does remember spending some time in the SDS ‘back office’ (recalling ‘an old police house’ at the back of a police station) before going out in the field.

This was the headquarters, where the admin was done, completely separate from the undercovers’ various ‘safe houses’.

‘Most of the people who went into that job… they just got on with the job and picked it up very quickly.’

DEPLOYED

He says he recalls Jill Mosdell (HN346) but is not sure about ‘Sandra Davies’ (HN348) – even though some reports indicate he attended meetings alongside her, and they appear to have worked so closely together that managers withdrew both women when Robertson’s cover was blown.

Robertson confirmed that he did not type up his reports himself, he would write it up and it was taken away to be typed up by someone else in the SDS ‘back office’. He often saw these reports after they had been typed up, and knew they were routinely copied to the Security Services, aka MI5.

The first document looked at was a report [UCPI0000010254] of a Britain-Vietnam Solidarity Front (BVSF) meeting at the Union Tavern in October 1970. Long-term SDS boss Phil Saunders signed off on it.

At this point in the Inquiry hearing, proceedings came to a halt Robertson mentioned the real name of an officer whose name is restricted by the Inquiry. Those following the Inquiry’s online audio (which has a ten minute time lag precisely to prevent these sort of slips going out publicly) had no clue what was happening and assumed it was a technical glitch.

SUPPLYING INFORMATION

Attention turned to a March 1972 Special Branch report [MPS-0739241] in which MI5 had requested details about someone’s occupation. Robertson confirmed that MI5 asking for such things was ‘obviously pretty routine’.

When he joined the SDS, Robertson said he was given no idea how long his deployment would be. He says he was not in the field for three years because, as things turned out, ‘in my case, it came to an abrupt end very quickly’.

The unit’s meetings took place at its ‘safe houses’. These were described as ‘diary days’ by Robertson. Most of the SDS officers would turn up, clutching their expense claims. He sometimes went there on other days too, but there were few people around then.

He had a cover accommodation, known in the unit as a ‘duff flat’, for which he paid approximately £4 week in cash. He would usually travel to and fro after political meetings and events. He was not trained to do this; it is an example of him using his initiative. As we’d hear later on, his cover accommodation has become a point of some confusion.

He would communicate by phone (from a phone box) with the back officer, but did not have any other, personal numbers or direct lines for the SDS managers.

NO MEMORY

He was asked if his colleagues would have spoken about things like relationships and events that occurred during their time undercover? He does not remember this happening. According to Robertson ‘Special Branch officers are renowned as ‘zip-mouths’.

Mike Ferguson (HN135) was deployed to spy on anti-apartheid activists, reporting back on the Stop The Seventy Tour campaign. Asked if he ever discussed this with Ferguson, Robertson replied ‘not to my knowledge’. By this stage, it was becoming clear that Robertson is certainly very zipped-mouthed himself.

Robertson had ‘cover employment’ as well as a ‘duff flat’ – he knew someone who ran a garage so pretended to work there.

IDENTITY CRISIS

Like many of his colleagues, Robertson let his hair grow long after joining the SDS (the Squad was nicknamed ‘the Hairies’). He was not provided with any fake identity documents, and didn’t know of any other spycops being given any either. He now says that it would have been better ‘more professional’ to have these.

He remembered one occasion when a group of activists questioned him about his identity, describing it as ‘a very personal face-to-face grilling’:

‘They didn’t know who I was, and in those days it wasn’t just the police doing that, there were lots of other organisations doing the same thing… Most of the people that I met were paranoid about infiltrators’.

Asked how he convinced them of his innocence, Robertson, once again, said he couldn’t remember specifics. He clarified that they had fear of infiltration from beyond state agencies, such as rival groups; ‘everyone,’ he said.

CAR TROUBLE

Being ‘the man with a van’ was later a standard tactic of spycops, as it made them useful to the group and offered opportunities to talk to members individually.

Asked if he did anything like that Robertson didn’t remember ever doing it. He said there were no SDS cars at the time. He thinks the office may have had some hire cars but has no idea who drove them and what they were used for.

This contradicts the account of one of the people he spied on, Diane Langford, who wrote in 2015 that her group’s suspicions about Robertson were initially raised by the fact that he kept having different hire cars.

Robertson was adamant that spycops could never ever have gone out in public in a car as, if they were stopped, they would have no proper license and identity documents in their fake name. We know that one of his contemporaries, ‘Peter Fredericks‘ (HN345, 1971) did just that – and was involved in a car accident.

MAOIST STUDIES

Next, Robertson was shown his application form [UCPI0000034339] for ‘Studies in Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought (Spring 1971), in which he listed a number of revolutionary texts that he had supposedly read.

Given his answers up to this point, it surprised nobody that he said he does not remember much about the study group or the form.

Similarly, Robertson also cannot recall any guidance about what might constitute ‘extremism’ or ‘subversion’. He said vaguely ‘it was just part and parcel of the whole’.

‘FAIR GAME’

He confirmed that small attendance was the norm at many of these groups’ meetings. He would include everything that he thought was worth reporting – including details of flowers given to speakers. He said that ‘everything was fair game for reporting’ and it was someone else’s job to decide what to do with the intelligence he collected.

Robertson insisted:

‘I never went to anybody’s home unless I was invited’

He was shown a report he had made on the Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist League in December 1970 and asked why he thinks he was invited to attend. He said he did not know.

Robertson was asked how often he visited this home, where Diane Langford and Abhimanyu Manchanda lived. He claims that, despite Langford’s certain and vehement dismissal of the very idea, he definitely did babysit for the couple’s infant child. He said he was asked to by Manchanda and ‘couldn’t get out of it’ but never saw the baby. However, he said he could not even remember seeing the child and thinks they were in a different room from him, and that the couple was not away for an exceptionally long time.

BANNER BOOKS

Banner Books catalogue

Next, a February 1972 memorandum [MPS-0730516] written by an SDS manager, Chief Inspector HN332, concerning London radical bookshop Banner Books. Robertson had infiltrated Maoist groups to such an extent that he was asked to take over running the shop when a enw branch was opened.

The memo specifies the advantages to Special Branch, including access to records and mailing lists, and being able to provide a plan of the shop and a set of keys.

Robertson played all this down, claiming that he was never alone in the shop and had no access to any records (the ostensible reason for this intrusion), and doesn’t think he ever had keys to the shop.

He has no memory of the 1975 fire at Banner bookshop (two years after his employment ended), even though someone died in it.

YOU CAN’T CALL HIM AL

Robertson claimed:

‘I never really went in and analysed things to any great depth’

But it was pointed out that he reported lots of detail about Manchanda, including some very critical comments about the man and his ‘insufferable anecdotes’.

Asked why his reports refer to Abhimanyu Manchanda as ‘Al’ or ‘Albert’ Manchanda, Robertson said that it was the name used by those around him. Langford flatly denies this – he was known as Manu. It is hard to imagine someone whose life was based on opposing to imperialism acquiescing to the practice of taking a common English name in place of their real name.

Yesterday, Diane Langford referred to a long and painful-sounding meeting in which an alleged attempted rape was brought up. She queried why, in Robertson’s report on this meeting, it was misdescribed as a ‘very personal attack on private morals’. Robertson characteristically claimed no recollection of any of this.

The report had ended with his overview ‘that the damage to the RMLL is irreparable’. He said he did not remember any of that either, despite it being a major event in the life of one of the main groups he infiltrated.

WON’T VOTE, CAN’T VOTE

Robertson did speak with certainty on one issue:

‘I didn’t vote on anything.’

Speaking for the Inquiry, Wilkinson patiently questioned him about this comment. How had he managed to never vote on anything, in such small groups? Did he really abstain from absolutely every vote? As with other officers such as Doug Edwards, a straight denial on this subject is issued without any explanation of how he managed to abstain from voting without raising suspicion.

He repeated the line about how he had never really got involved in the groups ‘because it wasn’t my place to do that’, despite his numerous highly detailed reports over a period of years.

Robertson was also questioned about parts of his witness statement.

In paragraph 53 he says:

‘I am not sure that the group posed a threat of subversion or revolution under either xxxxxx or Manchanda’s leadership given how low the membership was, but I suspect this may not have been appreciated at the time.’

Does this mean that he was not entirely convinced that these groups needed to be reported on so much? Did he feel as if he was wasting his time by spying on them? Did he ever go to his managers and suggest that he infiltrate another group instead?

‘I continued doing it until I was told to stop.’

This is inconsistent with an earlier statement that he was using his initiative.

NO PREJUDICE

Racist and sexist attitudes are common in the SDS reports of the era being examined, 1973-82. Robertson’s reports are no exception.

One of the instances was in February 1971 when he reported [MPS-0739236] that it was Manchanda that had decided he would be a stay-at-home Dad and his partner, Diane Langford, should go out to work. Robertson denied that it demonstrates sexist thinking by denying her agency in the decision-making.

Robertson had no recollection of being asked to include details of people’s race or colour in his reports. When shown examples in a report [UCPI0000021998] on a February 1971 meeting of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), he justified it by saying that he had never come across ‘coloured’ trade unionists at the Post Office before. He then makes the startling observation that:

‘race was not a problem in those days…that is my personal opinion.’

EXPOSURE

Moving on to February 1973, the Inquiry asked Robertson about an incident at a meeting at the London School of Economics which ended his deployment.

His report [UCPI0000016247] appears to be the last one he made. Although it’s dated February 1973, he dates it from memory as December of that year.

According to him, he came face to face with a neighbour, Ethel, who recognised him and said ‘here’s Scotland Yard, come to take us away’.

Robertson said he had only met Ethel once and did not know her surname and cannot remember her being Irish (or otherwise).

This conflicts with the account of Diane Langford, who was sitting with Ethel, and says that she recognised him from living close to her in known police accommodation, and that she already knew him by name.

He said he did not panic but just ‘took steps to ameliorate the situation’, specifically ‘pretended to give her a hug’ and whispered in her ear to say nothing.

‘I turned around, went out, down the stairs, and walked away at high speed for about ten minutes.’

According to Langford’s statement, Robertson was significantly more violent and threatening – grabbing Ethel’s wrist and leading her out, then threatening that ‘something nasty’ would happen to her family in Ireland if she told anyone he was a police officer.

DEPARTURE

It seems that Robertson then phoned one of his bosses, then Chief Superintendent Phil Saunders, at home to report this. (He said earlier that he did not have the managers’ home numbers though). He says he was visited the next day by some very senior officers, including Vic Gilbert, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Met and in charge of Special Branch at the time, as well as Rollo Watts.

Robertson’s written statement has more details of this SDS deployment-ending meeting. He says that Phil Saunders was a ‘gentleman and he would have dealt with it appropriately,’ but was not present, and suggests that Gilbert and Watts were only concerned with any damage the incident would do to their own careers.

Robertson knew he could not stay in the SDS after this incident. In all of the annual SDS reports and accompanying letters to the Home Office, the dangers presented by exposure of the work of the unit are repeatedly emphasised.

Although this compromise led to his deployment ending, he says it did not harm his career in the police force. He went to work elsewhere, returning to the SDS to assist with admin in the 1980s.

Sir John Mitting

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, then appeared on-screen with a question of his own. He asked for more details about Robertson’s ‘duff’ accommodation. This appears to be in reference to inconsistency in his account of his SDS accommodation.

Robertson described it as a room in a ‘filthy’ house in West End Lane, run by a ‘large Irish lady’. He said that no, he was not aware of any other police housing nearby at that time.

Quite how this tallies with Ethel’s account is unclear. He says he never saw Ethel again, not that evening or since.

Mitting then returned to the screen to say that he has not received a copy of Diane Langford’s dissertation (which he only requested from her approximately 21 hours ago). It is unclear what this has to do with anything. This Inquiry has been running for years, has had months to avail themselves of her dissertation, or any other useful evidence.

Phillippa Kaufmann QC, representing victims of spycops, then appeared on screen. She got as far as saying that she sought some clarification from the Chair before Mitting rudely shut her down immediately, saying ‘I am not here to answer your questions’.

This is in accordance with the disrespect that he has shown Non-State Core Participants’ legal representatives on other occasions.

Written witness statement of ‘David Robertson’ HN45

‘Alex Sloan’

(HN347, 1971)

We heard from ‘Alex Sloan‘ (HN347, 1971) in the this afternoon. He infiltrated a number of groups, including the Irish National Liberation Solidarity Front (INLSF) that we heard about yesterday. He also submitted a written witness statement.

Sloan says he has no recollection of being recruited to the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) spycops unit. His witness statement says that he had no formal training. Asked how he knew what was expected of him, he asked if this was in ‘moral terms’ or otherwise.

Sloan knew, from his time in Special Branch, that they ‘would be interested in anything that was subversive to the State’.  He said that those who joined the Branch were ‘probably politically aware anyway’.

Asked if he understood what was considered ‘subversive’, he came up with an answer that already starts to sound familiar:

‘It wasn’t for me to judge… I would just listen… and relay the facts to my senior officers.’

He thought Special Branch were quite intelligent, and would make well-considered decisions.

Sloan was quick to add that he never committed any criminal offences and this would have been against his nature. He conceded that some officers might have done something ‘minor’ , but never something that was ‘serious and violent’.

He then volunteered his Thought of the Day:

‘You can remember the truth easily but to remember your lies is very difficult sometimes’

This provoked some laughter in the Inquiry’s hearing room.

NO GUIDANCE, NO ADVICE

Sloan was then asked a series of questions that once again underlined how little guidance and preparation the undercovers could expect.

During his deployment he had a rent book in his fake name, but no pay slips or library card. He told everyone he worked as a mechanic, but nobody ever asked to see his driving license. In fact, he doesn’t recall using any documents to back up his cover story. The use of fake identities was something that evolved further after he left the unit.

He was never asked to write an autobiography for ‘Alex Sloan’. He was not given any guidance about what to do if his cover was blown. He was not told about ‘legal professional privilege’, which means that he should not have been present at any legal discussions between lawyers and their clients. He thought that if an undercover was offered a responsible position of a target group (like treasurer or secretary) they should accept it, but admitted that he didn’t receive any instruction on this from his managers.

He also admitted that he didn’t fully consider the risks at the time, but looking back now, he sees that this work could have been ‘pretty dangerous’.

HOUSING

Looking at a memo on the SDS’ expenditure in 1971 [MPS-0730521], Sloan’s cover accommodation – which he describes as a bedsit – cost £20 every 4 weeks.

He then described the flat where the spycops met – he remembers a large lounge but says he doesn’t remember what other rooms it had or even if it had a kitchen. Attendance at the meetings varied – 6-8 undercovers at the most – plus the two senior officers.

There is some confusion about whether the bedsit of ‘David Robertson’ (HN45, 1971-73), which is listed as costing the same amount, and thus could not have been much larger than Sloan’s room, served as an SDS safe house, but Sloan accepted that he may have been confused about this.

We learnt a little more about the spycops unit’s regular meetings. Sloan says he can’t remember writing stuff down, so may have memorised intelligence before passing it on. He can’t remember who typed the reports. He saw the weekly meetings as a social gathering, a chance for the undercovers to get together and relax.

They obviously didn’t have mobile phones, but in many cases didn’t have landlines either, so would use phone boxes.

This weekly meeting was often the main time when they could communicate directly with their managers.
Sloan confirmed that he felt able to vent about issues at these meetings, and seek advice from his colleagues. He said they were ‘very open meetings’.

Asked if these offered an opportunity to speak privately with managers, he responded:

‘If I remember rightly, you could ask to talk to them privately, take them to one side, and perhaps go in the kitchen…’

At this point it seems to have dawned on HN347 that his memory had magically returned so he ended the sentence with ‘….if it was there’.

Sloan said he was ‘not terribly socially close’ to his colleagues:

‘It may come as a surprise, but being a Scotsman, I wasn’t interested in having a drink. So yes, we just sat there and discussed things.’

They sometimes talked about upcoming demonstrations. Like HN45 told us this morning, they also talked about admin stuff and settled their expenses.

ACTIVE UNDERCOVER

He described his weekly routine. The groups he was infiltrating would often meet/ be active until late at night, so Sloan would sometime sleep at their homes, rather than at his bedsit.

The SDS’s weekly meeting was on Monday, and he has said that he usually spent Tuesday and Wednesday at home and then sold newspapers every Thursday and Friday.

Sloan provided a bit more information about this. He said that they would meet up on a Friday night, and then hawk the papers around Irish pubs and dance-halls, on Saturday nights as well, not just in London but in other cities like Birmingham and Coventry. They would travel up there in minibuses, so he spent a lot of time with other members of the group. They generally sold the paper in pairs.

The Irish National Liberation Solidarity Front (INLSF) met every Sunday afternoon, and Sloan confirmed that these meetings lasted 3-4 hours, ‘probably too long’ in his words.

Asked if he ever tried to influence the direction of the groups he spied on, he said ‘you have to be very careful what you do’ and he explained that he would have checked in with his senior managers first.

When he was in Special Branch, before joining the SDS, he would often attend political meetings at places like Speakers Corner and Red Lion Square. However this was just done in plain clothes, not using any sort of undercover identity. According to his Freudian slip, ‘you garnish a lot more information’ from being inside a group in the way that SDS officers were.

PERSONAL WELFARE

Sloan explained that his wife was ‘very, very supportive’. At the time she worked and they had no children. He understood concerns about welfare – he had colleagues who were deep undercover who may have had more difficulties with their work-life balance – however the spycops’ lifestyle suited him OK.

He was then asked about the Stephen McCarthy campaign – set up after the death of this young man in 1969 (after he’d been arrested and injured by the police). According to a March 1971 report from Sloan [MPS 739483], there were a number of demos about this.

Sloan says he doesn’t remember the name Stephen McCarthy and doesn’t remember the demos, even though relatives of Stephen were arrested at them. He also says he has no recollection of meeting these relatives. Whatever, it is clear that this is an early example of spycops reporting on a family justice campaign.

Another report [MPS739317], from May 1971, includes an update on the McCarthy case. Sloan confirmed that he wasn’t given any advice about reporting on justice cases and campaigns like this that involved complaints against the police. However, he said that he felt he had a duty to give a heads up to the uniformed police if he became aware of any potential public order issues.

Sloan said he doesn’t remember all the demonstrations he attended, but would have gone out on a demonstration if Edward – very much ‘the boss’ of the group – told them to do so. Sloan then made the astonishing assertion that Davoren would have joined the National Front if he thought they would make him leader, ‘because that’s all he was interested in’.

Asked if the INLSF cooperated with the police, Sloan said ‘well, I was there’ <#spycops ‘joke’ alert>.

He agreed that the group had ‘revolutionary aspirations’, but considered it unlikely that these would ever be realised, calling them ‘Mickey Mouse’. He said the demonstrations organised by the group were small. They ‘never had the muscle or the manpower or the will’ for disorder/ riotous behaviour.

When asked if the group would have caused any public order problems for the police if he hadn’t infiltrated them, Sloan said the group ‘would have died a death eventually’, and went on to say that the activists involved ‘were never scary at all’:

‘They never gave off the vibes that they would cause aggravation to anyone, or any person or property.’

He realised that this meant there was little justification for infiltrating them, so was quick to add that it was really important that the police kept an eye on such groups ‘just in case’.

Sloan said he didn’t know much about the INLSF’s relationship with the Black Unity and Freedom Party, or about contact with the Chinese Legation. He didn’t take part in the trip to Ireland (detailed by ‘David Robertson’ earlier in the day), and in fact didn’t even know about it until he recently received the documents as evidence from the Undercover Policing Inquiry.

He was clear that he was never part of the group’s ‘inner core’, so wouldn’t have been present at their discussions. He remembered nothing about any controversy over claims of the INLSF enjoying the support of the Provisional IRA. In his estimation, the IRA would have looked at this group and thought ‘you’re of no interest to us whatsoever’.

ACCUSED OF BEING A SPYCOP

There was an ’emergency conference’ of the INLSF at the end of June 1971. Prior to this, two members of the inner circle had been expelled, and a paper had been circulated within the group. At that emergency meeting, more members walked out.

Sloan’s recollection of that meeting is that Davoren stated that another member of the group, O’Neill, had accused Alex Sloan of ‘being a pig’.

He recalls that he was sitting in the circle when this statement was made, that he feigned anger and raised his fist, and threatened O’Neill verbally, saying something along the lines of ‘don’t you ever say that about me again’.

(He made a comment first about not wishing to incriminate himself, and Barr explained that he didn’t need to fear that, due to an ‘undertaking’ from the Attorney General. He made sure to say ‘I didn’t touch him, I just threatened him’ so it is unclear why he was worried about self-incrimination.)

He says that after the meeting, he went out for some food with some of the group. He said Davoren told him, ‘I never once thought you were a pig, Alistair… or Alex’ which sounded like Sloan making a slip of the tongue, accidentally revealing his real first name.

NO INFLUENCE, NO EXPLANATIONS

Sloan strongly refuted any suggestion that he’d ever tried to influence the politics of the group. Referring to Davoren’s headstrong character, he explained:

‘What could I do to destabilise Ed Davoren?’

He says that he didn’t even realise there was a split of some kind between O’Neill and Davoren until that June 1971 meeting.

He had no explanation as to why there was such a delay between his withdrawal (at the end of June) and the report of the emergency conference (dated 16th July), and this report being produced (in August).

Next report was from August 1971 [UCPI0000007824], submitting the complete mailing list of names and addresses of the INLSF. When asked if he was ever given praise for this, he chuckled:

‘I don’t think I ever had any praise in my police service.’

Faced with a query as to whether he ever felt that he was being asked to report on groups when it wasn’t really necessary, Sloan repeated what we expect to become a returning theme in this Inquiry. He said he just tried to provide a clear picture of the groups that he spied on through his reports, and presumed that his managers would make decisions about which groups needed to be targeted.

The evidence from ‘Alex Sloan’ ended there.

The Chair, Sir John Mitting, thanked ‘Alex’ (or ‘Alistair’) for giving evidence, adding:

‘it is fascinating to me listening to honest witnesses describing unusual events 50 years ago from slightly different points of view. It brings them to light in a way that things on paper don’t.’

It is noticeable that Mitting has never thanked any of the non-State witnesses for their honesty.

Written witness statement of ‘Alex Sloan’ HN347

EMERGENCY BREAK OUTS

Spycop Mike Ferguson, possibly

During the day, there were several ‘emergency break-outs’, with the transcript and the audio of the hearings suddenly grinding to a halt. Each time, it was entirely unclear what was the matter, for people listening at home and for us in the hearing room as well. Even the Inquiry staff present there had to wait until frantic deliberations behind the scenes had been resolved.

Any party can complain to the Chair when something allegedly breaking restriction orders is being said and broadcasted. The first time it happened was the most serious one. ‘David Robertson’ mentioned the name of HN294, the second manager of the SDS.

After a break of some 20 minutes, Mitting issued a brilliantly worded restriction order, specifying the officer by naming the other half of his leadership team; we were forbidden to mention ‘the name of the manager not being Phil Saunders’.

The second time the police hit the red button was when ‘Robertson’ was asked if he remembered fellow spycop Mike Ferguson (HN135). ‘Oh yes,’ he replied, ‘his nickname was Gimli’ – the name of a character who appears in the Hobbit and in Lord of the Rings, a dwarf with a beard so long he wore his belt over it. We‘re guessing the nickname is perhaps beard-related, rather than due to deadly prowess with an axe.

Mitting did not see a reason to keep this detail from us, or the name ‘Alistair’, so didn’t issue any more restriction orders.

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