Undercover Policing Inquiry Weekly Report 1 2-6 November 2020
After five years of waiting, the Undercover Policing Inquiry finally got off the ground in earnest this week. This first round of hearings will be split in two parts. First, Opening Statements from all the core participants. Second will be actual evidence for the period 1968 to 1972.
The Opening Statements are a chance for the various parties to essentially lay out how they view things. They began with the Counsel to the Tribunal, David Barr QC, presenting a general overview of where we stand.
This was followed by barristers for police and those who were once in the world of police but are no longer. Finally came the non-state/police core participants, whose statements will continue into this coming week. In this report we will try to summarise what was a lot of material, and reflect upon the words of the lawyers.
Barr noted that much of what the spycops did during their deployment is already public knowledge:
• deceived more than 30 women into long-term intimate relationships
• fathered children with some of these activists
• stole the identities of dead children to provide convincing cover stories
• deceived grieving families, and worked to prevent them learning the truth
• undermined anti-fascist, anti-racist, environmental, and other social justice campaigns
• were responsible for the blacklisting of thousands of workers for wanting safe working conditions or being politically active
Despite acknowledging this, it is disappointing that Mr Barr failed to properly credit the activists. The women deceived into relationships were a fundamental part of exposing the spycops. The existence of this Inquiry is based on their work.
This phase will also look at various documents and hear evidence from 1968–1972. It does not cover the actions of spycops while outside England and Wales, despite them being active in around 20 other countries during their deployment.
There were also some surprising pieces of previously undisclosed information, and statements from people previously unheard from.
How and why was the Special Demonstration Squad set up?
Police on horseback charge demonstrators against the Vietnam War, Grosvenor Square, London, 17 March 1968
Following the windows of the US Embassy being broken during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in March 1968, Special Branch attempted to gather information on the next demo. Their usual tactics being unsuccessful, they created the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) who went deep undercover, living as activists among various anti-war groups.
The next demo in October 1968 was less volatile, and this was taken as a sign of the new unit’s success. Mr Barr has stressed that the Inquiry must decide not if it was successful, but if it was a necessary or disproportionate response.
The SDS rapidly widened its scope and began investigating subversion and demonstrations and disruptions of public order. Any organisation seeking social change could easily be said to be covered by their remit. By the early 1970s, the SDS was aiming to profile anyone ‘within weeks’ of first showing interest in ‘extremist ideas’.
One of the police barristers, Oliver Sanders QC (representing 114 spycops, the majority of former and current undercovers), stated that the main function of the SDS was to assess public order threats. In the period currently being examined by the Inquiry, 1968-72, many of these came from political protests. Their secondary function was providing intelligence on ‘subversion’ to MI5.
What was the role of MI5 and the Home Office?
Since the story of the spycops surfaced, the events have been framed as the work of one rogue officer, then several rogue officers, then rogue units. Those higher up unfailingly point the finger at those lower down.
It is now clear that from the very beginning, the SDS was funded by the Home Office and reported to MI5.
Sanders provided new information:
• MI5 and spycops were so allied that MI5 considered funding the SDS
• They liaised to ensure they didn’t duplicate spying, which might have resulted in spying on each other’s officers
• MI5 recommended tips to SDS spycops, and they asked for specific info
• Most SDS intelligence reports were copied to MI5 with the file reference numbers of the people / group already added
• the SDS weren’t in a position to question MI5’s focus, thinking and efforts, but were just following orders. ‘The SDS was a politically neutral cog as part of a much larger apparatus,’ he said.
Despite the Home Office directly funding the unit for over 20 years, a 2014 report commissioned on the link between the two institutions noted the key file was suspiciously missing. However, a lot of SDS reports have been retrieved for the Inquiry from copies sent to MI5.
How are the police lawyers attempting to portray the actions of the SDS?
It is now clear the various police lawyers are switching tactics and actually trying to justify the actions of the SDS. They describe the spycops as a benevolent and useful group, indispensable to the safety of the public, who only wanted political information so that demonstrations could be effectively policed.
Claim: Police never intend to harm anyone, including the women deceived into relationships
Peter Skelton QC, for the Metropolitan Police, told the Inquiry that the Met is ‘aware of continuing anger and distress of victims of spycops’. He said the Met stands by its 2015 apology to women deceived into relationships by spycops (despite the fact that it still won’t let women see their files, and is delaying civil claims by some of them).
Richard Whittam QC, representing a smaller group of undercovers and managers, also mentioned the apology naming such activity as ‘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. The apology should be seen ‘in context’, by which he seemed to mean it should be disregarded.
This echoed other police lawyers, who have implied that it was acceptable to abuse people because times were different then, and it was all done for the greater good.
Claim: Spycops are better than the alternative
Blair Peach
Repeatedly, police noted that people have been killed on protests – citing two cases from the 1970s, Blair Peach and Kevin Gately – and there would be more death and injuries if it wasn’t for the undercovers ensuring demos were policed properly.
Contemptuously, they failed to mention that Blair Peach and Kevin Gately actually both been killed by the police; Gately in 1974 on an anti-fascist protest organised by heavily spied-on groups, and Peach in 1979 as a member of the most spied-on group of all, The Socialist Workers Party, on an anti-racist protest.
Discussing spycops stealing of dead children’s identities, Sanders said that though it was regrettable, it was necessary to prevent risk of exposure. The alternative to spycops with stolen identities was paramilitary police on demonstrations, he said. This is a patently ridiculous excuse.
Claim: Intelligence must be gathered indiscriminately
Spied-upon groups which were newly named this week include Justice for Rhodesia, Croydon Libertarians, and the St Pancras & Camden United Tenants Association. This contrasts strongly with police insistence that spycops saved the public from violent riots, murder and mayhem by infiltrating these groups; that it was necessary to spy on people who were committing no crimes in order to get to the ‘real criminals’.
The SDS essentially turned belonging to groups such as Hackney United Tenants Ad-Hoc Committee into a valid reason for the state to target you for surveillance. A report from 1973 gives the names of three people who had merely asked about the International Marxist Group.
They did, however, say they found it difficult to infiltrate black power movements; a rather telling sign that they were lacking in Black police officers.
Claim: Even though they’re bad, we can’t judge them because it was a long time ago
Essentially, police lawyers found various ways to say ‘what the spycops did may have been bad but it was a long time ago, lessons have been learned, it’s different now, nobody need lose their job or pension, move on, there’s nothing to see here’.
This directly contradicts documents that make clear the government was aware from the very beginning that what they were doing was deeply unethical, and would cause public outrage if discovered. Even by the standards of 1968, the spycops’ behaviour was blatantly immoral.
This refrain was accompanied by police barristers stating that other types of undercover work keep the public safe from paedophiles and terrorists. This is of little relevance to the activities of political secret police.
It ignores that the spycops of 2010 – long after the supposed new regulatory framework of the Human Rights Act, and Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act – were, if anything, committing even worse abuses than their 1968 counterparts.
The Inquiry also heard from representatives of the groups and individuals who were spied on
Families of the dead children whose identities were stolen
The Grave of Mark Robert Robinson whose identity was stolen by spycop Bob Lambert
Sanders said this procedure was invented in an earlier time when people felt differently about death and risk (once again using the ‘it was a long time ago’ excuse), yet the practice continued until the 1990s.
Additionally, one family whose living child’s identity was stolen has been informed.
Justice campaigns of grieving families, represented by Richard Parry and Jane Deighton
These were families in mourning who just wanted answers about what had happened to their loved ones so that they could have at least some closure; in many cases the parents and relatives of people who were barely more than children, and died violent deaths under traumatic circumstances.
Instead, their efforts were blocked and police were openly hostile to them and spycops infiltrated their campaigns for the truth. Police resources that should have been spent catching killers were instead spent on obstructing justice.
As a teenager in 1993, Duwayne Brooks survived a racist attack in which his best friend Stephen Lawrence was murdered. Brooks was spied upon in an attempt to discredit his evidence. He said this week that he won’t testify unless he can see his whole police file first.
Skelton said the Met is ‘grateful’ for Duwayne Brooks’ and Stephen’s mother Doreen Lawrence’s work.
Workers with trade unions and/or politically active workers who were blacklisted
Dave Smith
Reports show that trade unions were targeted and spied on from as far back as 1973. Yet, Sanders 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, he claimed. These are lies, with ‘collateral damage’ as an excuse. Whether accidental or deliberate, it’s still spying.
Three wives (now ex-wives) of spycops, represented by Angus McCullough QC
For all but one of the wives of the undercover officers, it is the first time their words have been heard. In most cases they are now ex-wives, such was the stress their relationships were subjected to due to the activities of their husbands.
There can be no doubt that they were deceived and abused as badly as any other victim of the spycops. They were told that their husbands were gone for long periods in the interests of national security, not that they were on holiday in Thailand or Crete with women they’d manipulated into believing were the loves of their lives.
McCullough described how although they were vetted as support for their husbands, the wives and their children were offered no support during the periods of deployment. Nor were they years later, when the Met knew that the stories were about to hit the press and yet did not deign to warn them.
The officers themselves were flatly told that there would be very little support during deployment. They were given no prior warning of the psychological impact that going deep and long-term undercover would have on them. They received even less support than they’d been promised.
Skelton admitted the Met ‘hasn’t always understood’ how to support the spycops officers. Their wives, all of whom are mothers with children to care for, were used by the SDS and the Met as free, unqualified, in-house emotional support and therapy for their officers.
Peter Francis, represented by David Lock QC
SDS whistle-blower Peter Francis
Peter Francis, the only spycop whistle-blower to have come forward, was an SDS officer from 1993-98.
This week he requested a cast-iron guarantee from the Metropolitan Commissioner of immunity to prosecution for information about spycops he revealed prior to the Inquiry starting. Under the Inquiry’s terms, witnesses including Peter Francis cannot be prosecuted for anything that he says during the proceedings.
However, he could be charged under the Official Secrets Act for his previous public statements. His pension hangs in the balance, and he will not testify without absolute confirmation he will not be charged.
It should be obvious that without his evidence, this cannot be a properly informed inquiry. Under the current timetable, the Inquiry doesn’t intend to take evidence from Francis until 2023.
People from a vast range of groups targeted for their political beliefs and activism, overwhelmingly from the left
This week, they revealed the previously unknown names of just 44 of them. This comes too late for members of those groups to ascertain which of their friends or intimate partners never really existed, let alone participate in their only current chance for some kind of justice.
New photos of SDS officers published
The Inquiry also published previously unseen photos of various officers. Only one was a spycop; the rest were mostly back office staff, apparently all at the same festive event in 1968.
People are excluded from the Inquiry, including core participants
Lawyers for the non-police side noted that without names and photos of spycops it is impossible to reach all the people who were their victims. It is grossly unjust that they will not be represented through the deliberate choice of the Inquiry to exclude them.
There are a great many people who, even though they know they were spied on and have come forward, will also be excluded. Another deliberate choice by the Inquiry is to refuse to livestream the proceedings.
After this week, the hearings will be conducted in secret. Despite that fact that secure livestreams have been set up due to Covid-19, only the text will be made available after the proceedings have finished.
As already stated, over five years into the Inquiry many victims still have no documents. Many more have no names or photographs that would answer otherwise impossible, unanswerable questions.
People giving evidence who were spied on during this time were only provided with relevant documents – a total of 5,263 pages – five weeks ago. Attempting to read all of them before the start is roughly equivalent to reading all of Lord of the Rings twice a week for five weeks straight.
No diversity, no understanding
Sir John Mitting
The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, is not just preventing the victims’ access to full understanding, he’s determined to prevent his own. From the very beginning, calls have been made for a diverse panel of people with relevant life experience to advise and guide the Inquiry. This is standard practice for other inquiries, yet Mitting refuses to follow precedent.
The goal of this Inquiry should be to unflinchingly and honestly deal with institutional sexism, racism, and attacks on workers’ rights and the conditions of the disadvantaged. As an old white cis male Knight of the Realm who is a member of the men-only Garrick Club and finds the Macpherson definition of institutional racism ‘controversial’, comprehending these realities is beyond him.
As Ruth Brander, representing the Non Police/ State Core Participants, told him this week, ‘With respect, the concern is you, sir’.
A wise and impartial man would ask for help. Instead, Mitting refuses the offer of information that would increase the chances of a fair conclusion to the proceedings.
What next?
After two more days of opening statements from victims of spycops, the Inquiry’s first evidence hearings (Phase 1 of Tranche 1) will start on Wednesday 11 November. They will cover the formation of the Special Demonstration Squad in 1968, in response to protests against the war in Vietnam, and why it continued beyond that. They will continue until Friday 20 November.
The next set of hearings after that, taking evidence of events from 1973 to 1982, are expected in spring 2021. The Undercover Policing Inquiry has no set end-date, but is expected to perhaps conclude around 2026.
COPS will be live tweeting every hearing, producing a summary every evening, and a weekly report like this one at the weekend.
For more information including an FAQ, see the links on our UCPI Public Inquiry page.
It was a day based around trade unions who were spied on by the political secret police.
James Scobie QC (Core Participants represented by Paul Heron)
James Scobie QC
It began with James Scobie QC, speaking on behalf of those represented by Paul Heron from the Public Interest Law centre.
RICHARD CHESSUM & MARY
Scobie explained that he represented two people who were spied on the period covered by ‘Tranche 1’ (1968-72) – Richard Chessum and ‘Mary’ – as well as others who were spied on many years later.
He said the controversial tactics used by these units were introduced right at the start, and allowed or actively encouraged in the years that followed. These weren’t due to a handful of ‘rogue officers’, or something that only developed slowly over time.
The State knew from the start that the spycops were being sent in to impede and slow the work of democratic organisations fighting for positive social change. They were systematic and systemic. The Governments of the day knew must have known how these units were operating, and we want to know the extent to which these abuses were endorsed and instigated at the highest level.
Either the spycops were endorsed by the Government, or successive administrations were powerless to prevent these secret police operating with impunity: which is most frightening?
Scobie also spoke of the impact on victims of this Inquiry, its many lengthy delays and the continuing lack of disclosure, even to Core Participants. He questioned whether it was the police or the state obstructing the work of the Inquiry. If the state was unable to force its own police to cooperate with the Inquiry, or whether the failings were the fault of the Inquiry itself.
Scobie pointed out that none of his clients were serious criminals, or violent, and the spycops knew this, but targeted them anyway. The State subjected victims to wholesale manipulation and exploitation and, in the case of ‘Mary’, sexual violation.
The Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) was set up in 1968, ostensibly to deal with public order situations. But within a short period of time it was being used to curtail the activities of many peaceful, democratic organisations whose aims were supported by significant sections of society.
TARGETED YET PROVEN RIGHT
History has proven that many of the activists were right and their causes just. Both ‘Mary’ and Richard Chessum campaigned against the use of internment without trial in Northern Ireland; they campaigned about the events of Bloody Sunday; they campaigned against apartheid. History has proven them right time after time. They worked to highlight the institutional racism of the police: something that was only officially accepted many years later. However, the spycops set out to undermine their campaigns, and therefore to prolong the violence.
The organisations they were in that were infiltrated (the Troops Out Movement and others) were open to the public and posed no threat to anyone. But they did oppose state policies, and for this, they were targeted by deceitful spycops. This was political policing, not criminal policing.
It was overwhelmingly left-wing groups who were spied on. ‘Mary’ recalled watching the National Front smash up a meeting while the police looked on. Rather than concentrating on groups that fracture community cohesion, the spycops went after those who were campaigning for better conditions for everyone. According to the list made available by the Inquiry, up to the end of the 1970s we only know of three right-wing groups who were reported on.
Conrad Dixon, the SDS founder, instructed his officers to be ‘followers not leaders’ in the groups they infiltrated: to avoid taking office, chairing meetings, initiating actions, making leaflets or speaking in public.
Despite his specific prohibitions, it is now clear that by 1974, these guidelines were being ignored. From 1974 to 1976, ‘Rick Gibson’ (real name Richard Clark, now deceased) was a London organiser in Big Flame, and chaired meetings. He then became joint National Secretary of the Troops Out Movement, undermining the group.
Clark’s reports were sent to Special Branch and MI5 by senior officers, so it is clear that his activities were sanctioned by the state, and it is not credible to suggest that the government wouldn’t have known about this intelligence gathering. Let’s be clear, inhibiting groups of this kind equates to inhibiting democracy itself.
We heard more details of one of the victims, Richard Chessum, who was described as a decent, caring person, a committed Christian who campaigned for peace, was involved in CND as well as the Labour Party, and now works to help homeless asylum seekers.
SPYCOP INSTIGATOR
Chessum was targeted by Clark, who socialised with him, encouraged him to set up a local Troops Out branch, but reported on him, his sister and his partner. Why was Chessum’s trust betrayed in this way? And why was this done to numerous others like him in the decades that followed?
Chessum had no criminal record. Despite this, the information gathered by Clark was passed to the security services, and Chessum found himself refused employment multiple times. From academic and research posts to a Royal Mail sorting office where he scored 86% on the entry test, time and again, he was refused. When he asked why Royal Mail rejected him, he was told that they were “not at liberty to say”. That is utterly Orwellian.
Thousands of people found themselves blacklisted for their political views. In 2013, it was confirmed that intelligence gathered by the spycops had been used to create the blacklist.
‘Mary’ knew Chessum in the 1970s. She was a student at Goldsmith’s and a member of the Socialist Society (campaigning for student welfare, creche provision, supporting trade unionists) as well as a supporter of the Troops Out Movement. This is why she was targeted by Richard Clark, who deceived her into a sexual relationship. She is adamant that she would never have had a relationship with him if she’d known he was a police officer.
We know that Clark had at least four sexual relationships (including one long-term one) while undercover. Clark’s exit strategy was similar to that used by later officers. He wrote a letter to his long-term partner after his deployment ended, with more lies.
The spycops had total disregard for the women sexually exploited in this way. This was a deliberate tactic used extensively by multiple spycops from the 1970s onwards. It was “part of the DNA of political policing” in the UK, and nothing less than state rape.
Scobie went on to mention the theft of dead children’s identities by officers creating their cover names. The police lawyers prefer to refer to them “using” the names, rather than “stealing” them. But it was done dishonestly, with no consideration of the likely impact on these dead children’s families.
At the beginning of the SDS, Commander Dixon referred to officers needing “to obtain necessary papers”, implying that they had to do this for themselves, with no written guidance. However by the 1990s, this had become long-established practice, as we can see in the SDS’s Tradecraft Manual.
Unfortunately for ‘Rick Gibson’, suspicious activists found ‘his’ death certificate, and challenged him. Clark was rumbled.
Instead of changing their tactics after this failure, the spycops continued committing identity theft.
While both ‘Mary’ and Richard Chessum say that Clark did not incite criminality, we know that other spycops certainly did in later years.
LOIS AUSTIN & HANNAH SELL
Lois Austin and Hannah Sell had their lives infiltrated in the 1990s. They’d joined the Labour party together, and were leading figures in Militant Labour (which became the Socialist Party in later years). They were instrumental in setting up Youth against Racism in Europe (YRE), a mass organisation advocating peaceful change: jobs and homes, not racism.
There was a spike in violent racist attacks in South East London after the British National Party set up its infamous bookshop/ headquarters there. This included at least one racist murder every year. As a result, local anti-racists like Lois and Hannah campaigned to shut the bookshop down. This is when spycop Peter Francis was sent to spy on YRE.
PETER FRANCIS & CARLO SORACCHI
SDS officer Peter Francis, undercover in the 1990s
Peter Francis’s deployment lasted for five years. It started within YRE but followed Hannah Sell and Lois Austin over the years into Militant Labour. Francis was followed into Militant Labour, which was by then known as the Socialist Party, by another officer, ‘Carlo Neri’ (real name Carlo Soracchi).
Francis and Soracchi followed the SDS playbook to the letter. They used the whole array of dirty tactics that had been in play for at least 20 years. Francis became secretary of the Socialist Party’s Hackney branch. He and Soracchi realised that holding office in the organisation meant he was able to attend regional and national conferences.
Both officers infiltrated social groups. Both had at least two sexual relationships with women they were spying on. Their victims remember both of them encouraging and engaging in criminal behaviour.
For example, Francis repeatedly tried to incite YRE members to physically attack fascists, Sell and Austin used to respond to him by arguing that defeating fascism required patient campaigning. Sell has no doubt that this was a deliberate attempt on his part to encourage them to commit offences for which they could be arrested.
SDS officer Carlo Soracchi, undercover in the 2000s
Soracchi repeatedly attempted to persuade his ‘comrades’ to take part in even more serious criminal activity: arson. He actually took activists to a shop in London, which he told them was owned by an Italian fascist (Fiore, implicated in the 1980 Bologna bombing), and suggested they burn it down. They refused to do so. It was in a residential street. This was not the only time when a spycop seriously advocated the tactic of arson to those they were spying on, something that would have resulted in long jail sentences.
Questions must be asked. Why did they do this? Was it to discredit the campaigners? To maintain their cover? To justify the spycops units’ very existence by making them seem like they were infiltrating dangerous groups?
The CHIS Bill (currently going through parliament) would legitimise tactics of this kind; is its introduction an attempt to pre-empt any findings from this Inquiry?
Peter Francis and Carlo Soracchi didn’t just infiltrate pressure groups, they both infiltrated a political party, and this is interference in democracy. It is known that other spycops infiltrated the Labour Party, the official party of opposition at the time.
DAVE NELLIST
Dave Nellist served as the Labour MP for Coventry South East from 1983-1992. During this time, he had one of the highest voting records in parliament. He set himself a salary equivalent to the average wage of a skilled worker in his constituency, and gave the rest of his parliamentary allowance away to good causes. He made himself unpopular with his colleagues when he campaigned against pay-rises for MPs!
Despite being named ‘Backbencher of the Year’ in 1992, in that year he was expelled from the Labour party for his opposition to the unpopular poll tax. He went on to launch the Socialist Party after this.
Dave Nellist was being spied on while a serving Member of Parliament. He was targeted because of his views, his beliefs, his steadfast and long-lasting opposition to the Government of the day.
According to whistle-blower spycop Peter Francis, there was an MI5 officer spying on Militant/ the Socialist Party. Cabinet papers from 1984 show an awareness in government of of Militant members in various trade unions – including the civil service union, CPSA, now known as the CPS, which Lois Austin is a member of – which was viewed with alarm by MI5. Thatcher said the state should be “very ready” to sack such subversive employees.
We now know that MI5 asked West Midlands police to spy on Nellist. The Chief Constable must have been asked.
How would they have been in a position to put a spy into his constituency office?
Who would the spycop have been accountable to?
Who would have authorised this arrangement? The police, or the Home Office, or both?
Which Home Secretary authorised the spycops to target an MP?
Was this done with or without the knowledge of the Prime Minister?
We know that the SDS was funded directly by the Home Office until 1989. We know that when the unit was first set up, the Home Secretary was put under pressure “from above” to do so. We know that the Home Secretary feared the public exposure of spycops. There are many questions for this Inquiry to answer.
So far the only disclosure we’ve had from the Inquiry has consisted of police files. There are no Government records. It is clear that this Inquiry cannot reach the truth or genuine accountability if they rely on the police to provide full records.
Supposedly there are zero documents about the SDS in the entire Home Officer archives (even though the Home Office provided all the funding for over 20 years). What exactly has the UCPI done to discover how high this scandal goes?
There appears to have been a high level of collusion and collaboration – the Metropolitan Police, MI5, the Home Office, other police forces around the country were all involved – but will the spycops be left to ‘carry the can’ alone?
TELL US WHO & WE’LL TELL YOU WHAT
It is possible to uncover some information about government interference in trade unions. The Shrewsbury 24 campaign has – on a far lower budget than this Inquiry – managed to unearth documents that prove this.
Though more than five years that have passed since this Inquiry was first announced, the majority of Core Participants have yet to receive a single document relating to the spying they suffered. Even those involved in this first tranche have not been given access to witness statements, which we know are relevant to them.
Giving us the names of the people who spied on us decades ago, without any other details or a contemporaneous photographs, is not enough to jog memories. Why has this Inquiry chosen not to share the material we need if we are to engage effectively?
The only disclosure so far has consisted of heavily-redacted intelligence reports, but nothing relating to policy. If the Inquiry has these documents, why have they not been shared with us? If the Inquiry still doesn’t have these documents, what does that tell us about the government and the police, and the likely outcome of this (expensive) process?
We are left wondering how many people have been spied upon, and had their lives changed irrevocably by the spycops, because the state didn’t like their politics.
We still haven’t been given the exact number, and the names, of the groups known to have been reported on. How can this be described as an ‘open’ or public inquiry? How can the public understand the industrial scale of these abuses without information?
We don’t just want to see a few individual (and, to the state, expendable) spycops’ necks on the block in order to save the reputations of the guilty people higher up. This Inquiry must properly investigate, and find out who was responsible. It must ensure that the victims of these abuses are fully included, otherwise the Inquiry will just mirror the disdain shown by the spycops themselves.
We don’t just want a condemnation of certain methods used by these units; we want an end to all political policing.
The next speaker was Ruth Brander, who represents all the Non Police/ State Core Participants (NPSCPs) at the Inquiry, apart from families of police officers, and whistle-blower officer Peter Francis.
She started by saying the core participants want to know what was done to them personally, and how spycops were allowed to undermine civil society in the UK and beyond for over 50 years. They think that the Chair is not exactly helping them to get there.
LIVE-STREAM THE EVIDENCE HEARINGS
Almost every decision taken by the Chair has reduced his prospect of getting to the truth.
Brand then made a strong plea for live-streaming of the witness hearings, which start on Wednesday next week:
As soon as the evidence phase begins, she said, public access to the hearings will be restricted to just 60 people, many of whom will be lawyers. It is stretching credulity to suggest that there would be any significant risk to any of the officers if their evidence were be live-streamed, as these particular hearings address events of 50 years ago. Besides, other Inquiries – such as the Child Sexual Abuse Inquiry – have proper security in place to prevent information being wrongly released by live-stream. It can be done, so the refusal is a choice rather than a necessity.
Spycops get anonymity at the Inquiry to protect their comfortable life in old age and their social reputation, not their security. Some have spoken publicly before and nothing untoward has happened to them. Moreover, anonymity was granted to spycops several years ago, when we expected a public hearing. But the pandemic has changed the situation completely, it means we don’t get to be present, and if we don’t get live-streaming, this would make the public inquiry a private inquiry. Reading a transcript is not the same thing.
Brander then explained the victims of undercover officers have four big concerns:
1. Significant resource for the Inquiry
When the Inquiry was announced we hoped the victims would be at the heart of the process and would at least see their files. But more than five years later, almost nobody has received anything at all. Requests have been dismissed by the Chair as “unhelpful distractions”. Not only does this run contrary to the Inquiry’s obligations under the Data Protection Act 2018, it is counter-productive. It will affect Inquiry’s ability to get to the truth.
Given disclosure, victims of spycops would be able to help the Inquiry to fulfil its purpose. But the Inquiry hasn’t searched thefiles the Met holds on those named as core participants. Incases the Inquiry was told people were indeed mentioned in Special Branch files, the Inquiry failed to ask for the full file. Victims are appalled by this.
2. Give us the names
Brander then challenged the false distinctions being drawn between various individuals and groups by the Inquiry. The Chair refuses to make disclosure to those NPSCPs whom he deems not to have a “direct interest” in a particular period. This means that those CPs and their lawyers do not get access to the hearing bundles of documents until after the hearing at which the evidence is given. The Inquiry is effectively shutting out the active participation of victims, and thus undermining public confidence in the eventual conclusions.
Also, the Inquiry has done little to inform people who’ve been spied on (apart from some of those deceived into sexual relationships). For instance, the Inquiry intends to give only six of the names used by the 21 officers of the NPOIU (the unit of Mark Kennedy).
People spied on can’t come forward if they don’t know which of their old friends was in fact an undercover officer. We have repeatedly asked the Inquiry to publish a list of all of the groups that were spied on so that members of the public will know if there is a possibility that they were targeted.
How can the Chair evaluate if spying was justified when he only talks to the spies? Those who were spied on will not get an opportunity to give their account, if the officers’ cover names are restricted, or if there isn’t full disclosure of group and personal files
How is the Chair equipped to decide which campaigns were justified targets, especially the more recent ones where issues remain contentious?
Publishing the list of groups that were spied on would also increase public understanding of the issue because it would demonstrate the reach of undercover political policing. It is still a common public misperception that undercover policing has been limited to groups and individuals involved in serious criminality. Publication would dispel that impression.
By not being more proactive in its search for non-state evidence, the Inquiry is likely to miss significant information, in particular, in respect of its task of assessing the scope of undercover policing and its effect on the public.
The Inquiry is still a very, very long way from a position that would enable it to benefit properly from full participation by non-state core participants.
3. Don’t trust the police to self-disclose
The Inquiry relies on police to be the principal source of evidence, while they are the very body under investigation. In cases where cover names are restricted, they will be the ONLY source of evidence. This happens in the context of units whose entire ethos was to keep everything secret, who have a woeful history of non-disclosure, and who have have committed significant wrongdoing, including, numerous admitted human rights violations.
In an inquiry into their wrongdoing, they cannot be trusted to tell the whole truth.
Lied to the Inquiry: Undercover officer James Straven, 1998
Undercover officers deployed in the political policing units knew, from the outset, that it was very unlikely that they were ever going to have to account for their actions. This led, inevitably, to a culture of impunity.
This culture of secrecy is so ingrained in these units that it is incomprehensible that the police records and evidence should now be approached by this Inquiry as a reliable – and in many cases, exclusive – source of information about their activities.
Discovery that ‘James Straven’ lied to the Inquiry, twice, in signed witness statements in support of his application for restriction orders, does not appear to have altered the Chair’s approach to other spycops denying they engaged in intimate relationships whilst deployed.
Documents relevant to the Undercover Policing Inquiry were shredded by Metropolitan Police personnel in May 2014, after this Inquiry had been announced and after a command circulation had been issued specifically stating that such material should not be destroyed.
HM Inspectorate of Constabulary made this point themselves in their 2012 report.
The culture of impunity was reinforced by the units collecting intelligence rather than evidence, and consequently their methods were never scrutinised in a criminal trial. Where they did have interaction with courts, undercovers lied and misled.
The SDS undermined the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, and the the Met also withheld evidence of police corruption from -, as detailed in Mark Ellison’s report from 2014.
We can’t trust the police to be their own honest archivists. Moreover, the victims have no confidence that the police will give the Inquiry proper disclosure beyond tactical damage limitation.
4. Install a panel
The Inquiry’s terms of reference require it to reach decisions about the motivation and justification for undercover policing operations. In respect of the vast majority of the groups spied on by the Special Demonstration Squad and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, those are inherently political questions. The Chair has already made comments which are indicative of a dismissive view of groups whose political ideologies differ from his own. This is a matter of real concern.
In case she wasn’t already clear enough, Brander said to Sir John Mitting “with respect, the concern is you sir”.
The NSPCPs have real concerns about the Chair sitting alone to determine the issues of fundamental importance in the Inquiry.
The Inquiry will have to confront the extent of political policing, institutional (and individual) racism, sexism, class and political bias in the targeting and conduct of spycops operations.
The Undercover Policing Inquiry’s Chair has no experience of sexism or racism. He needs a diverse panel to advise him, but refuses to appoint one.
If the Chair continues to sit without a panel’s assistance, he has the heavy burden of challenging his own biases. It’s made harder by the secrecy around the evidence he will examine.
We urge the Inquiry to:
• facilitate proper public access to proceedings;
• enable non-state core participants to participate meaningfully and effectively by giving them disclosure;
• publish the full list of groups spied on;
• publish photographs and cover names of all undercover officers.
Without these it’s hard to see how the Inquiry can fulfil its purpose of getting to the truth.
With that, Brander concluded. Inquiry Chair Sir John Mitting responded: ‘all I can say is that I hope to prove you wrong’, dismissing everything Brander had given reasoned, evidenced points for. He may hope to prove her wrong, but with that offhand dismissal he proved her right.
Mitting’s immediate, offhand dismissal of all the reasoned and evidenced proposals is utterly repellant, exactly the sort of thing she was saying needs to change, and in keeping with what we’ve been used to from Mitting and the police. It’s why we have so little faith in the process.
Lord Hendy QC spoke for the Fire Brigades Union and Unite the Union
The first thing Hendy pointed out that his two clients were far from the only trade unions believed to have been targeted by spycops. The Communication Workers Union, National Education Union, National Union of Journalists, Rail Maritime & Transport Union, Public & Commercial Services Union and the GMB all have good reason to be here too.
TRADE UNIONS: FROM ILLEGAL TO INDISPENSABLE
Hendy began with a detailed history of trade union rights. Trade unions have been around for about 300 years, just trying to improve conditions for working people, but they had to fight to become lawful.
Trade unions were illegal under the Combination Acts until 1824, but even after that they had stringent limits. A trade union’s leverage comes from the possibility of industrial action, but collective bargaining remained illegal as a ‘restraint of trade’. Over the 19th century, they became lawful and accepted, though the threat of a strikes and pickets was held to be unlawful conspiracy until 1885.
It was not until the Trade Disputes Act 1906 that unions were truly free to threaten or take industrial action. By the end of the first world war collective bargaining became the policy of government, and remained so with all governments up until 1980.
Trade unions are involved in political campaigning beyond their direct interests because, through the experience of working under poor conditions, they have seen that poverty anywhere constitutes a danger to prosperity everywhere.
There can be no legitimate infiltrating of trade unions acting in their usual functions. Regulation of trade unions is a civil issue, not a criminal one, so it should have nothing to do with police. If some trade unionists act criminally, that’s a specific individual issue, it doesn’t in any way justify infiltration of unions by spycops.
The right to strike & picket is protected by a raft of international treaties to which the UK is a signatory. It is part of civic life. Union activity cannot be treated as a threat.
Trade unions act as a balance to the power of multinational corporations. Today’s unions ensuring protection of workers during the pandemic shows they are as needed, and benevolent, as ever.
SPECIAL BRANCH INDUSTRIAL UNIT
It’s only now, five years in, that the Undercover Policing Inquiry is starting to take evidence. Worse than the delay is the paucity of documents.
Hendy said his clients have seen a grand total of two documents from the Inquiry. Yet we know there has been long term spycops focus on unions.
Beyond the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) and National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), the two undercover units with which the Inquiry is primarily concerned, it’s worth noting that the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch had an Industrial Intelligence Unit from 1970. It plainly existed to spy on unions.
The Inquiry says there’s no evidence of spying on unions in the early years of the SDS, 1968-72, which it will examine in these first hearings. We note that the police lawyers’ denials of SDS spying on unions didn’t mention the Special Branch Intelligence Unit’s spying. Its very existence shows spying happened. We want to know more about the Special Branch Industrial Unit, especially its relation to that other Special Branch unit, the SDS.
In 2015, whistle-blower spycop Peter Francis admitted that he had personally reported on members of five unions when he was an undercover officer in the 1990s. His colleague Mark Jenner was a member of construction union UCATT.
Additionally, Helen Steel, Donna McLean, and ‘Alison’ were all trade union representatives when undercover officers deceived them into long-term intimate relationships.
1973: SPYCOPS TARGETING UNIONS
A Special Branch report dated 28 November 1973 details a conference held by the International
Socialist party earlier that month in Manchester.
In the report, spycop John Clinton records the names & addresses of attendants at a conference, naming their union membership or allegiance.
The report has given each of the unions have their own code numbers. Specifically, the prefix 400 seems to refer to trade unions in the spycops’ filing system. It must have already been an established part of the intelligence gathering.
The 1973 report also refers to the Shrewsbury 24, members of UCATT and other unions, who were charged with Conspiracy to Intimidate by police during the 1972 Building Workers Strike. Several of them were jailed.
Nearly 50 years on, earlier this year the Criminal Cases Review Commission decided to look at the convictions, and it seems they may well be quashed.
The SDS’ early annual reports we’ve seen from 1968-74 show that its main targets were left-wing groups. There is no reference in these reports to trade unions, despite trade disputes being the backdrop of the groups being spied upon.
The 1974 SDS annual report says the Shrewsbury 2 Defence Committee had been penetrated. It will have been trade unionists, successor to the Shrewsbury 24 Defence Committee.
What justification was there for spying on this campaign at all? Where was the risk of crime? The infiltration was surely to monitor whether the Shrewsbury campaign was having any success in proving police had fitted up those who were convicted.
POLICE & BLACKLISTING
Jack Winder was a senior official with blacklisting firm the Economic League. In 2013, Winder told the Scottish Parliamentary Affairs Committee that he’d had regular meetings with police officers, and even with the Employment Minister. These had continued right up to when the League was forced to close in the early 1990s.
After the collapse of the Economic League, one of its employees, Ian Kerr, set up a construction industry blacklist called the Consulting Association. Like most blacklists, the Consulting Association wanted to prevent active trade unionists gaining employment.
Ian Kerr ran this illegal operation with the help of 44 construction companies including many household names such as Balfour Beatty, Costain, Skanska, Laing O’Rourke & McAlpine. When it was raided by the Information Commissioners Office in 2009, it was found to have files on 3,213 people.
The information hadn’t only come from construction firms. An ICO senior investigator said ‘the information was so specific and it contained in effect operational information that would not have formed anything other than a police record.’
In 2013, the Independent Police Complaints Commission said it appeared that every constabulary’s Special Branch unlawfully passed personal information about citizens to the Consulting Association. No police officer or construction firm has ever faced any charges of sanction for their involvement with the Consulting Association.
It’s been established that senior NPOIU spycop Gordon Mills met the Consulting Association in 2008, just before the construction of the London Olympic Park at which blacklisting was rife.
Under the aegis of Operation Herne, a forerunner of the Undercover Policing Inquiry, Chief Constable Mick Creedon mounted Operation Reuben, an investigation into police and blacklisting. Completed in 2016, his report found that ‘police, including Special Branches and the Security Services, supplied information to the Blacklist funded by the country’s major construction firms, The Consulting Association and/or other agencies’.
IT’S NOT WHAT THEY KNOW, IT’S WHO YOU KNOW
Creedon cited a specific example. An individual sought work with a television company making educational videos. The company also did work for the construction industry and so contacted the Economic League to vet the application.
The Economic League said the applicant was a left wing sympathiser and therefore decided to contact the Met Special Branch’s Industrial Unit, due to the perceived risk of having a lefty involved in education.
Special Branch replied saying there was a possible link to terrorism which, despite the lack of any evidence or detail, the Economic League took at face value. Unsurprisingly, the person was denied employment. The prospective employer told them it was due to ‘being blacked by the security people’.
This episode only came to light because the person concerned was related to a retired Chief Superintendent who took the matter up with their former employer and had it all straightened out.
That a private blacklister could so readily get police to check their files and share secret, defamatory (and false) information is astonishing. How many people did it happen to, who don’t happen to have a police relative to put it right?
Just having a Consulting Association or Economic League file prevented employment, irrespective of the content of the information or its veracity, and lives were ruined.
Blacklisters and police are so intertwined that such firms should be part of the investigations of this Inquiry.
THE CHIS BILL
The Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill, or ‘CHIS Bill’, currently before parliament will allow police to authorise their spycops to commit literally any crime. This Inquiry is being pre-empted, the government is not waiting for its recommendations on the future of undercover policing.
It means any officer refusing to commit a crime will be disobeying a lawful order and so face disciplinary charges.
The CHIS Bill specifically allows spycops to commit crime to protect ‘the economic well-being of the UK’, which can easily be made to apply to legitimate trade union activity.
Some 14 trade unions general secretaries, 20 Labour MPs and a number of campaigning organisations including the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance, have signed a joint statement against the CHIS Bill.
RELEASE THE NAMES, OPEN THE FILES
Finally, we must be given all the names used by spycops if the people who were spied on are to be able recognise them and so come forward and testify. Without the cover names of spycops being published, the Inquiry cannot fulfil its remit.
Finally, we heard from Gareth Peirce, representing the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).
Peirce said that the NUM shared many of the views expressed by other trade unions in this Inquiry.
NUM members and their families experienced sustained assaults on their civil and political rights as the state set about destroying their industry and their communities, particularly during the decade from the early 1980s to the early 1990s. Many of these unlawful actions were perpetrated by the institutions of the state, not just the police.
Peirce explained the history of the NUM. Miners had been organising politically since the 18th century, and fighting collectively for better conditions. The NUM was established in 1945, just before the coal industry was nationalised in 1947.
In the early 1970s, the NUM took industrial action in order to secure more reasonable pay and safer conditions. They were committed to improving working conditions, which remained grim. They were able to contribute to a wider trade union movement.
This strength made them a target for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who came to power in 1979. The security services and police conspired with the newly elected government, and selected media, to secretly attack the NUM. Some of these operations have come to light recently, many must remain as yet undiscovered.
MANUFACTURED DESTRUCTION
The Tories’ long-term aim was the de-nationalisation of the coal industry and the closure of UK pits. As the NUM sought to defend its members, the British state unleashed its full power against miners.
During the miners’ strike of 1984-85, the NUM faced an unprecedented show of state power, and a militarised police force, deployed nationwide. They openly used all manner of hostile tactics, introducing the practice of ‘kettling’ a crowd, extreme violence, and mass arrests to crush the strike.
Behind the scenes though, the establishment was also running its own covert campaign. There is already evidence – some obtained under the thirty year rule from government departments, some gathered from a long series of court cases, including a preliminary Independent Police Complaints Inquiry, some the work of investigative journalists over the years.
There is also clear evidence of the use of informers, infiltrators, provocateurs, bugging and surveillance, on a huge scale. Police violence was premeditated, union members were wrongfully arrested, evidence was fabricated by the police, and manipulated in an attempt to implicate senior NUM officials in criminal acts.
Nobody has been sanctioned for their part in this unlawful intrusion, and these unprecedented assaults. ‘National security’ was invoked to maintain secrecy and prevent accountability.
These false accusations were given a lot of publicity. The militaristic language of the government was parroted by senior police – talk of “battles”, “the enemy within”, “enemies of the state” – and mining communities viewed as a threat to society.
The government declared itself “at war with the NUM”. Although secondary picketing and large assemblies were not offences, the police routinely stopped vehicles and tried to disperse groups of pickets. They went so far as to seal off entire villages, impose curfews, sometimes even occupy them with police horses, which affected (and terrorised) the whole community, not just the striking miners. The police used harsh bail conditions to control those they’d arrested.
Police forces shared officers with each other, creating a de-facto standing armies. There were over 11,000 arrests over the course of that year, 7,000 pickets injured, hundredsof people imprisoned.
THE BATTLE OF ORGREAVE
At Orgreave, on 18th June 1984, 95 miners were arrested. Their trial (almost a year later) had to be abandoned when it became obvious that there had been mass fabrication of evidence by over 100 police witnesses.
The most senior police witness at the trial, Assistant Chief Constable Clements, admitted that the police had assumed ‘exceptional powers’ – never debated nor authorised by parliament – and had sent in cavalry charges alongside baton-wielding foot-soldiers whose orders were to ‘incapacitate’ the miners and their supporters. The victims of this brutality likened it to a ‘war movie’.
The police also admitted that Orgreave had been pre-selected as a battleground, just like Southall in 1979, which left hundreds of anti-racist protestors injured and Blair Peach dead.
The recently released Cabinet papers proved something that had been long-suspected – that the events of 1984-85 had been deliberately provoked by the state in order to privatise what was left of the coal industry, and also to demonstrate its ability to crush a union as strong and seemingly invulnerable as the NUM. It was thought that this would help them eradicate the rest of the trade union movement.
The government and National Coal Board lied to the miners all along. They sought to create divisions amongst the miners, to undermine the NUM, and ultimately to ‘fragment the public sector’. They drew up their plans well in advance. They planned to starve the striking miners and their families, withdraw social security benefits, and force the NUM to its knees financially.
The government knew that pit closures on the scale they were dreaming of (75 pits to close by 1985) would cause the loss of 70,000 mining jobs, and have a huge economic impact in many areas of the country. They knew this was a sensitive subject, so stipulated that these plans should not be put in writing, and their discussions not recorded or minuted. The government and National Coal Board continued to lie about their intentions, and accuse the NUM of scaremongering.
FIND THE MISSING PIECES
The Government wanted the strike to take place. They demanded that the police make more arrests, that the courts impose more severe sentences, and that more publicity was given to those harsh sentences. They suggested that cases were moved from Yorkshire to more ‘friendly’ courts elsewhere. According to the disclosed Cabinet papers, Ministers sought to use the courts as a political weapon of the state; the courts and due legal process were inappropriately intertwined with political imperatives.
The NUM strongly suspect there was collusion with the spycops. They know that their members were surveilled and spied on by the state. They don’t know whether this was done by the SDS or other agents. However, there was talk of a secret intelligence unit, that could go “beyond Special Branch”.
MI5 expanded during the miners’ strike, and the line between them and the police sometimes blurred. The NUM only possess fragments of the truth, and hopes that the Inquiry can help to assess the motivation, scale and impact of covert policing during the strike.
When we look back at the year of the miners’ strike, we remember the hardship faced, but also the extraordinary solidarity shown. The state was explicit: the miners were the enemy. This meant that all of those who chose to stand in solidarity with the miners were volunteering for the ‘enemy’ side. ‘Public order’ was used as an excuse for these abuses of power.
What was done to the NUM was outrageous, it was unlawful, and it went beyond any possible justification.
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.
Rajiv Menon QC(Core Participants represented by Richard Parry and Jane Deighton)
Matthew Ryder QC (Core Participants represented by Mike Schwarz, Simon Creighton, Tamsin Allen & Jules Carey)
Donal O’Driscoll (Category L [Social and environmental activists] Core Participant, appearing in person)
Rajiv Menon QC (Core Participants represented by Richard Parry and Jane Deighton)
Rajiv Menon QC speaking for some of the spied-on people, finished the statement he started yesterday.
He spoke of two people who were spied on during the very early years of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) 1968-72, the period that will be the focus of this phase of the hearings.
TARIQ ALI & ERNIE TATE
Tariq Ali
Tariq Ali, activist for over 50 years, will be the first to give witness evidence next week. Ernie Tate was due to give evidence but is now too ill. He is yet another victim of the delays to the Inquiry.
Tariq Ali was born in Punjab in colonial times and is now 76. He’s been in many political and campaigning organisations including the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC), International Marxist Group, and Stop the War. He has written more than a dozen books on history and politics. He was President of the Oxford Union in 1965 when Special Branch opened their file on him.
Ernie Tate was born in Northern Ireland. Tate was a founder of the original target of the SDS, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, and was on its national council until 1969 when he emigrated to Canada.
The fact that the VSC was an open, non-violent organisation did not stop it from being targeted. Tate was also a founder of the International Marxist Group where he became a friend of Tariq Ali. He’s said he’s always been open about his politics, so there was no need for subterfuge to reveal his views or activities.
In the VSC, Tate and Ali organised the 1968 demos against the Vietnam war that led to the foundation of the SDS.
Menon said that the Inquiry had viewed TV news reports of the March 1968 protest that ended in trouble, but the pro-police commentary is at odds with the visuals. Instead of steering the demonstration along its agreed route, police corralled the head of the march near the US Embassy. Police then failed to contain the crowd – who fanned out across the green – and the police ended up sending in the horses.
The injuries that were caused were the result of the police’s actions. The demonstrators were prevented from handing in a letter to the US embassy even though that had been agreed with the police in advance. This was all explained at a VSC press conference the following day.
It has become already become a oft-repeated fable at the Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings that trouble at the March 1968 demo was due to a failure of intelligence. This lie was the original sin that led to the founding of the SDS.
The lack of trouble at the subsequent VSC demonstration in October 1968 was claimed as a success by the new unit, but it was really due to better stewarding, and the intentions of the protesters. This is not mere speculation on our part, the press at the time reported this.
But credit was given where credit was not due. Commissioner Waldron gave a bottle of champagne to SDS officers.
A PERMANENT ARRANGEMENT
The SDS expected to be disbanded after the anti-war protest in October 1968, but MI5 saw the value of spycops having a permanent and much wider remit. The Home Office gave the scheme their blessing and successive governments provided funding year after year.
There should be no mistake. Whilst this squad was kept secret from the public, it was completely integrated into the established security apparatus of the British state, with a chain of command through the senior ranks of the police to the highest levels of government. Documents show the Prime Minister and Home Secretary expected advance reports on the Vietnam demos. The spycops were secret from the public but well known to government.
The SDS spread its attention to other ‘subversive’ groups. Police bragged that new entrants to groups were being identified and reported on within weeks. They were told to cast a wide net.
Their objective was to prevent positive social change, keep people in their places, and allow the established order to thrive.
If people are persuaded that socialism is a better alternative to rampant capitalism, should they not be allowed to exercise their democratic right to pursue such politics without being spied on? The State would say an unequivocal ‘no’.
The International Marxist Group grew to around a thousand members. Its office was burgled by the SDS after spycop ‘Dick Epps‘ was trusted with the keys and made copies.
Only one SDS officer, ‘Alan Nixon‘, admits to brief interactions with Tariq Ali. Ali wants to hear condemnation of the unwarranted spying, but expects instead to hear justification.
Ali is proud to be a revolutionary. He is a proud socialist for peace but is unashamed to say that violence is justifiable if, say, you are a Vietnamese person fighting invaders or a British soldier fighting the Nazis. This does not make him a valid target for spycops.
PIERS CORBYN
Piers Corbyn is in his 70s and still protesting. He has always been open about his politics and has nothing to hide. He attended VSC rallies in the late 1960s and joined the IMG in 1971. He also joined antifascist, Irish and trade union causes, but it seems squatting is what got him spied on.
Police claim they don’t know what cover name the relevant officer (code number HN338) used! Why was Corbyn asked about spycop Alan Nixon, yet officers aren’t asked about him? Corbyn can’t say how he was spied on because neither police nor the Inquiry will say who the spies were.
ADVISORY SERVICE FOR SQUATTERS
The Advisory Service for Squatters (ASS) has been advising people on housing rights since 1975 and has sold more than 150,000 copies of the Squatters Handbook since 1976. Squatting in residential buildings was criminalised in England and Wales in 2012, but ASS was spied on long before that.
Tenants and housing groups seem to have been spied on since at least 1971. SDS called squatting ‘the nursery of extremists’. The ASS say the state spying on them was indefensible. They have only been given two documents by the Inquiry and have no details of why or how they were spied on.
FRIENDS OF FREEDOM PRESS
Freedom Press is the largest anarchist publisher in the UK, and the oldest in the world. It was set up, with the blessing of William Morris, in the 19th century. It was constantly raided by police during world wars for producing Freedom anarchist newspaper.
Spycop Roger Pearce infiltrated Freedom Press from 1979 to 1984. He was actively involved, writing articles for them. Pearce later went on to manage the SDS (and write cheesy police-based novels). Another spycop, ‘Doug Edwards‘, also attended Freedom Press meetings.
Freedom Press’s headquarters was firebombed by fascists in 1993. Did spycops know about it? Did they know it was coming and decide not to stop it?
Freedom Press have had 11 intelligence reports from 1974-77. They have not been asked for a witness statement, nor been officially told which officers spied on them, so cannot possibly comment properly.
One stalwart Freedom Press member died last year, another person failed by Inquiry delays.
JUSTICE CAMPAIGNS
ROLAN ADAMS’S FAMILY
Rolan Adams
South London couple Richard and Audrey Adams’s oldest son Rolan was studious, about to take GCSEs, and a talented footballer scouted by West Ham, and also passionate about writing music.
In February 1991, racist attacks were on the rise in the area since the British National Party moved their headquarters to the area in 1989. One evening a gang of 12-15 racists chased and stabbed Rolan. His brother Nathan escaped and returned later to find Rolan dying. The gang called themselves Nazi Turnouts. Police knew who they were, and allowed them to walk free.
Neither the police nor the CPS admitted the crime was racist, an ongoing problem of British institutions dealing with such violence. They had a racist stereotype of there being no innocent black boys. Instead of being treated as a victim of crime, Nathan was instead harassed and criminalised by police, repeatedly arrested and searched.
The CPS frequently uses ‘joint enterprise’ against groups of people involved in a crime, yet didn’t prosecute any other attackers with murder. One attacker was sent to jail, and the judge asserted that the crime was indeed racially motivated.
Rolan’s parents started a campaign for justice. They made links with others in similar circumstances. Police were hostile to the campaign, intercepting people coming to the Adams’ house, clearly with advance knowledge of the visits. The family were being harassed but got no protection. They had to leave their home for their own safety three months after Rolan was killed. If police had focussed on the attackers rather than the family perhaps this could have been avoided.
The Adamses family are still angry and grieving. They are angry at the lack of charges, and at the culture of denial of the racist culture that led to Rolan’s murder. If police had taken decisive action, and used intelligence against racists rather than justice campaigns, perhaps they could have prevented later racist murders in the area. Instead, as racist murders rose, more young black men were arrested.
Richard Adams says the Inquiry appears to be a damage limitation exercise for spycops. There is no good reason for the ongoing refusal to live stream the future hearings. The family are cncerned that the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Moitting, is not assisted by a diverse panel. Whose side is the criminal justice system on?
DUWAYNE BROOKS
Duwayne Brooks
Duwayne Brooks was 18 in 1993, living in South East London, training to be an electrical engineer. Stephen Lawrence was his close friend. In April 1993 they were attacked by racists and Stephen was murdered.
His courage exposed the racist nature of the attack, yet police were hostile to him. Whistle-blower SDS officer Peter Francis has described combing through hours of footage of demonstrations and vigils to see if he could find something with which to charge Brooks.
It mirrored the Adamses’ experience; a racist attack with victims treated like criminals and subjected to spycops surveillance. Brooks did everything asked of him. He assisted three investigations. He gave evidence in court when medically unfit. Brooks has since helped numerous police bodies with their work on racism.
Despite – or because – of this, Brooks has been targeted by the police. He was prosecuted on trumped-up charges, a meeting with his lawyer was bugged by the Met, and he has had to face the truth trickling out over many long years. He has received more information than most about his spying, but has received nothing at all from this Inquiry.
Brooks won’t get to see the hearings via live-streaming. The Chair sits without a diverse panel to advise him.
When Brooks is given FULL disclosure he will address the Inquiry, but not before. He refuses to be treated like a suspect all over again, answering the Inquiry’s questions in advance, as if the burden is on him to establish that there was no good reason for the police spying on him.
KEN LIVINGSTONE
Ken Livingstone
Ken Livingstone led the Greater London Council (GLC) from 1981 until its abolition by Margaret Thatcher, but was active long before. He joined the Labour Party in 1969, and soon held office locally, focusing on housing issues.
Livingstone has received limited disclosure from the Inquiry, but has not been told why he was spied on. As soon as he was elected Leader of the GLC he faced relentless vilification from his opponents and in the press.
Special Branch had intelligence of threats to his safety. Having said there’d be no peace in Northern Ireland without a negotiated settlement, he was told that an Ulster Defence Association assassin had been sent to kill him but was called off at the last minute. Livingstone says this is an example of a legitimate use of undercover policing, dealing with a proscribed organisation involved in serious and violent crime.
After the GLC was abolished, Livingstone entered parliament in 1987, something he described as ‘like working in the Natural History Museum except not all the exhibits are stuffed’. Whistle-blower spycop Peter Francis named Livingstone as one of the people he knows was spied upon when they were an MP. Like the other spied-on MPs, he wants to see his file.
Livingstone has been involved in mainstream political life for 50 years, always in public. He can’t see any justification for targeting by spycops, either before or after he was elected.
WHY WERE THE SPYCOPS THERE?
The SDS was a weapon in the arsenal of the state from 1968-2008, with other units doing the same things after, to keep people in their place and allow the established order to thrive. Its unofficial motto was ‘by any means necessary’ but, to address a point made by the police lawyers, the ends DO NOT justify the means.
The victims of spycops aren’t just those who were spied on. In the broader sense, all who want to see an open, democratic, and fair society have suffered for what the spycops did.
We’re here to try to shine a light, let the world see into the dark den of police spies. We hope our participation will allow people to see at least a little of the truth.
In 1962, Martin Luther King said the guardians of the status quo are always on hand with oxygen tents to keep the old order alive. We hope the Undercover Policing Inquiry will not prove to be such a guardian.
(Core Participants represented by Mike Schwarz, Simon Creighton, Tamsin Allen and Jules Carey)
Matthew Ryder QC
Matthew Ryder QC speaks for lawyers representing the majority of non-state core participants, more than a hundred individuals and groups whose targeting by spycops was inappropriate, improperly regulated, and abused their rights. They were spied on over a period of more than 40 years, and range from community activists to a Peer who was once a Secretary of State. They all deserve answers. Officers must be called to account, as must the system that permitted it.
Spycops weren’t just out of control. They had political bias that affected the whole process. It included racial bias, and we expect an assiduous exploration of that in the Inquiry.
Spycops targeted many groups who did not seek to overthrow the ‘established democratic order’ unless we take it to mean basically any political or social change. It’s the antithesis of what political culture should be about.
SDS founder Conrad Dixon said a ‘firm line must be drawn between follower and leader’: that spycops mustn’t speak in public, take office, draw leaflets or anything else active in a campaign. These instructions were swiftly ignored. Spycops got deeply involved in stimulating the very groups they were meant to be surveilling, influencing the direction they took and the means of protest they employed.
We’ll never know the true cost of diverting and hindering the targeted campaigns. Voices that should have been amplified because their cause was right were selected for silencing. So many anti-racists, environmentalists and others who were spied on have been vindicated over the years by history and science.
Many were wrongfully convicted, encouraged into acts by spycops whose involvement hidden from the courts.
Most people who were spied on have not seen any documents from the Inquiry, which is a disgrace. Victims are keen to know the life-changing details that have been kept hidden for so long. They want fullest disclosure. They’ve had basically none so far.
Four of the people Ryder speaks for are in Tranche 1 of the Inquiry, which looks at 1968-82. Three of them were anti-apartheid campaigners. The fourth is Celia Stubbs, partner of Blair Peach, an anti-racist campaigner killed by police in 1979, who was spied on for her justice campaign.
ANTI-APARTHEID CAMPAIGNERS
Anti-apartheid campaigners opposed one of the most repulsive racist regimes of the 20th century. Yet the SDS targeted those who opposed apartheid, not its often-violent supporters.
The anti-apartheid movement was mentioned in the first annual report of the SDS. Black power groups were also of particular interest to the new unit. Sporting boycotts were a key part of protesting against apartheid, and were therefore targeted by spycops.
Three core participants – Ernest Rodker, Jonathan Rosenhead, and Peter Hain – were active in the Stop The Seventy Tour (STST) campaign opposing the all-white South African rugby and cricket teams. They made a real contribution to wider anti-racist movement.
Anti-apartheid campaigns helped to bring democracy to South Africa. In December 2015, STST’s role was recognised at the highest level by the South African government when they awarded Peter Hain the Tambo National Award in Silver for his excellent contribution to the freedom struggle.
Yet the police lawyer’s opening statement to the Inquiry this week talked of target groups having ‘totalitarian objectives’.
The three anti-apartheid campaigners were seemingly targeted by spycop Mike Ferguson, but we don’t know for sure because the Inquiry is protecting his identity even though he’s dead. As a Cabinet Minister in the 2000s, Peter Hain has been entrusted with the most serious secret information of state, yet is still not being told which spycops targeted him in his own home 50 years ago.
We do know that Mike Ferguson wasn’t a rogue officer. His colleagues knew about him and have testified about what he did. This wasn’t police using informants, this was police trying to take control of a political movement, a serving officer placed in the group to help direct activity.
We may yet hear explanations from police at the Inquiry. But it appears spycops retro-fit excuses for their surveillance. If there aren’t records to support a given justification the Inquiry should remain sceptical.
Ryder then spoke about some other core participants.
LONDON GREENPEACE
Bob Lambert handing out the McLibel leaflet, McDonald’s Oxford St, 1986
London Greenpeace (LGP) was founded in 1971 to encourage people to take action to preserve the ecosystem.
LGP initially promoted home composting, turning off lights not in use, putting bricks in cisterns to save water, and planting trees. It remained a small, leaderless group and encouraged others to create similar networks. A 1981 LGP leaflet describes itself as nonviolent and libertarian.
In the 1980s Bob Lambert infiltrated LGP. Lambert’s behaviour is truly shocking. He had multiple relationships with women he spied on including fathering a child. He encouraged activists to join actions, and even drove them there. He was still undercover in 1987 when fellow spycop John Dines joined the group.
Dines became LGP treasurer, gave lifts to members (in order to find out their addresses), and deceived one member, Helen Steel, into a long-term cohabiting relationship. Lambert deceived more than one woman into a relationship while he was in LGP. It was unjustifiable by any measure.
People who were part of LGP are concerned about spycops steering the direction of the group, including towards the anti-McDonald’s campaign, which Lambert vigorously encouraged.
The way intelligence was collected was a serious infringement of the subject’s life, and they have no idea what was gathered and how it was used. But we do know it was shared with private companies such as McDonald’s.
Some LGP members are on the construction industry blacklist despite never having worked in the industry. Were their details supplied by the spycops?
It can’t be claimed it was necessary for Lambert to infiltrate LGP to prevent serious crime, when Lambert himself admits they weren’t involved in any such activity. It was a violation of democratic rights.
Former SDS officer Peter Francis says that Lambert’s undercover career was ‘regarded as hands down the best tour of duty’ in the history of the unit. After his deployment he was promoted to running the SDS.
We don’t know which other officers infiltrated LGP, but a Cabinet report suggests it was being spied on in the late 1970s, long before Lambert arrived. So LGP calls for all files to be opened and all officers’ cover names published so those who were spied on can realise what happened and give evidence to the Inquiry.
RECLAIM THE STREETS
Reclaim The Streets was founded in the late 1990s to challenge the noise, pollution, and dominance of cars in our public spaces, and many of the group’s ideas have now been taken up across society. It shows the role of protest groups in inspiring progressive change in society.
Reclaim The Streets was infiltrated by spycops Jim Boyling, Jason Bishop and Jackie Anderson. There may well be others. During the infiltration, spycops were arrested and prosecuted under their false identities.
Reclaim the Streets, London 1995
Boyling was arrested for a protest in 1996 in support of striking tube workers, occupying the office of London Transport office. He and Bishop were both arrested on the Mayday 2000 anti-capitalist protest.
It appears Bob Lambert was Jim Boyling’s direct supervisor. Many of Lambert’s tactics in LGP were used by his charges: active involvement in steering campaigns, sharing intelligence with private firms, and abusing women.
Boyling had at least 3 relationships while undercover, with huge impact, and went on to have two children with Rosa. There can be no justification for this tactic. The fact that it echoes Lambert’s treatment of women shows it was institutional.
From 1999-2005, Bishop was very actively involved in campaigning against the DSEI arms fair. Again, this was a case of an undercover officer encouraging and steering a group.
ALDERMASTON WOMEN’S PEACE CAMP
For the last 35 years, Aldermaston Women’s Peace Camp (AWPC) has been based at the UK’s main nuclear weapons factory. It is a purely political campaign against militarism. It’s one of the few women-only protest spaces in the UK. Spycop Lynn Watson infiltrated AWPC in the years 2003-2004.
Lynn Watson was at Aldermaston at the same time as other groups, and we have to presume that she would have reported on them, espeically as she attempted to infiltrate some of then. However they have been refused core participant status at the public inquiry.
CLIMATE CAMP
In 2006, the first Climate Camp took place at Drax coal-fired power station in North Yorkshire.
There were further camps until 2010, all sited near high-carbon locations, such as power stations and airports, bringing hundreds of campaigners together to educate each other and protest.
Spycops officer Mark Kennedy was deeply involved in planning Climate Camp, attending five of them and being arrested twice. He was in the secret planning group that made the earliest and largest decisions about the Camps, as well as organising all logistics.
Spycop Lynn Watson also attended and helped organise the first Climate Camp, where she engaged in sexual activity with an activist. Like Kennedy, she was part of a secret group which organised the occupation of the site, and gave briefings to the group in her living room in Leeds.
DR HARRY HALPIN
Dr Harry Halpin is a global academic expert in infomatics who worked at MIT. He travels the world, giving talks to the likes the UN, the OECD and the European Parliament.
Halpin is also an environmentalist, who was spied on at the Kingsnorth and London Climate Camps in the late 2000s, since when he’s had repeated problems when travelling, including being detained under terrorism legislation.
It’s plain to see that Harry Halpin has been blacklisted for his environmentalism at events infiltrated and organised by British spycops.
CARDIFF ANARCHIST NETWORK
Mark ‘Marco’ Jacobs
Cardiff Anarchist Network was a group of about 20 people active from 2005 to 2010. The network consisted of autonomous collectives in opposition to all forms of exploitation and capitalism. Their campaign tactics included direct action.
It was infiltrated by spycop ‘Marco Jacobs’, who got involved in the group’s administrative tasks. He caused discord and fractiousness among the group, and deceived two women into relationships.
Jacobs formed close friendships, attending funerals of family members of the people he spied on. It was a gross invasion of their personal lives.
DEFEND THE RIGHT TO PROTEST
Defend The Right to Protest aimed to respond to the criminalisation of young protesters after the anti-cuts and student protests around 2010. It was an identified target of the National Domestic Extremism Unit. Spycop Simon Wellings was deployed 2001-07.
Wellings spent four years as part of the controlling group of Globalise Resistance. He outed himself by accidentally dialling one of the group while in a police meeting identifying the people he spied on, where he could be heard sharing personal information about activists in photographs he was showing to another officer.
MARK KENNEDY INCITING AND TRAVELLING
In 2009, spycop Mark Kennedy approached anti-militarist campaigner Kirk Jackson to organise UK activists going to Germany.
Jason Kirkpatrick was spied on by Kennedy on numerous occasions between 2005 and 2009, at his home in Berlin and in several other countries as he toured to give talks about protests against the G8 Summits. Politicians in some of these places – Germany, Ireland, Northern Ireland – have called for answers, but the Inquiry seems likely to disregard these as its remit only covers the spycops’ activities in England and Wales.
POLITICAL POLICING WITHOUT LIMITS
This was political policing. There was no constraint to comply with the law, not even the basic rights of those targeted. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 did not restrain spycops – we’ve seen how they carried on well into the 2000s.
The collection, retention and use of data is a major concern. This went on with no legal framework in mind. There was no meaningful system of oversight. Courts and prosecutors were deceived even as they carried out legal processes.
Senior officers either failed to control, or gave approval to, inexcusable acts. This continued for decades under various managers. It was institutional.
The Inquiry limiting access to data – and even the names used by the infiltrators – means victims are prevented from engaging meaningfully with the Inquiry meaningfully.
RACIAL JUSTICE CAMPAIGNS
Spycops targeted family justice campaigns and community organisations. The preponderance of black campaigns shows how their race was part of the threat they were seen to pose.
Celia Stubbs’s partner Blair Peach was killed by police in 1979. Lee Lawrence’s mother Cherry Groce was shot by police in 1985. Myrna Simpson’s daughter, Joy Gardner, died after restraint by police in 1993. Bernard Renwick’s brother died in 1999, again after being restrained.
Beyond those killed by police, Sukhdev and Tish Reel lost Ricky Reel after he was attacked by racists. Michael Menson died after being set alight by white youths.
Other core participants here are Winston Silcott, who was wrongly convicted of the murder of PC Blakelock, and Stafford Scott, who supported those arrested in the aftermath of the Broadwater Farm disturbances in 1985.
Sharon Grant’s late husband, MP Bernie Grant, supported many such campaigns, and was spied on. All these people were merely seeking justice over police malpractice.
CELIA STUBBS
Blair Peach
Blair Peach was a teacher and trade unionist who attended a protest against the racist National Front in 1979.
Eleven witnesses saw six police get out of a van and one of them give Peach a fatal blow to the head. The determined cover-up that followed lasted decades. Police officers refused to answer questions. Commander Cass’ investigation said officers were ‘clearly obstructing’ the investigation.
Cass was clear that a police officer had killed Peach, but officers wanted to maintain the cover-up. All officers present claimed not to remember details. Cass’ report was kept from the inquest and went unpublished for 31 years, until 2010.
The coroner wrote to politicians before the inquest had even finished, saying the idea Peach was killed by police was a political lie. He therefore indicated to the Home Office that the investigation was biased. Blair’s partner, Celia Stubbs, knew none of this.
Stubbs says it can’t be expressed how exhausting it is to suffer bereavement then face such official intransigence. The guilty officer has been identified. Nobody has ever been charged.
Stubbs helped to establish Inquest for people in similar positions. Stubbs knew her phone was tapped but never suspected she was being spied on in person by undercover police. There would have been no justification for it. There were no secret meetings.
She finds it especially distressing that there was undercover reporting at Blair’s funeral.
Stubbs says spycops lost all sense of the fact that Blair was killed by police. His loved ones’ distress was criminalised. Stubbs has had no explanation for why she was spied on, nor why it was kept secret – no officer blew the whistle.
Spying on the Blair Peach campaign was a gross abuse of the trust given to police. They wanted to stay one step ahead of the campaign to assist the police in frustrating the attempts to secure accountability.
Stubbs got an apology from the police in 2015. It is not enough, it must just be a starting point.
The opening statement by police lawyer Oliver Sanders on Tuesday cited the deaths of Kevin Gately and Blair Peach. This was an offensive comment. Peach was not killed by protest or protesters. His killing does not stand as justification for spycops. Blair was killed BY police, and the truth covered up for decades.
What would have saved him was restraint of police brutality against a campaigner against racism. It’s an outrageous way to start the Inquiry.
LEE LAWRENCE
Cherry Groce
In 1985, Lee Lawrence saw his mother Cherry Groce shot by police at their home by Officer Lovelock. She used a wheelchair for the rest of their life.
In 2014, an inquest found that the shooting had contributed to her death.
Mr Lawrence has sat on advisory boards helping police improve tactics. His positive attitude has built bridges, yet he was spied on.
MYRNA SIMPSON
Joy Gardner
In 1993, Joy Gardner was at home with her three year old son when there was a raid by police and immigration. Her hands were bound to her sides, her legs strapped together, and 13 feet of tape was wrapped round her head. She was asphyxiated.
Three officers were acquitted of manslaughter.
Joy Garner’s mother Myrna Simpson was spied on by the SDS. We do not know why.
RICKY REEL
Lakhvinder ‘Ricky’ Reel
Ricky Reel’s family have been campaigning for an investigation into his racist murder in 1997, which police treated as an accident. The police investigation disregarded the racial harassment of Ricky Reel immediately prior to his death. They decided it was accidental death before the investigation was complete.
The police investigation was subject to two inquiries, but the reports are confidential. The family were told in 2013 that they had been spied on by the SDS.
For the Reel family to find out they were spied on on top of Ricky’s death and the failed police investigation has had a horrific impact. Resources weren’t available to investigate the death, but were available for spying on those who were left behind.
MICHAEL MENSON
Michael Menson
On 21 January 1997, Michael Menson, a 30-year old black man, was discharged from hospital where he had received treatment for mental health matters. A week later he was found in the street, having been set alight. He was taken to hospital where he said he’d been attacked. He died of his injuries on 13 February 1997.
Police treated it as self-immolation; the family said it should be murder. The inquest ruled it an ‘unlawful killing’.
In 1999, three men were convicted of the murder in two separate trials. A Cambridgeshire police investigation found negligence and racism, with one police officer saying ‘I don’t know why they’re so worried, this only concerns a fucking black schizophrenic’.
Michael Menson’s family was told in 2014 that the SDS had spied on their campaign. They saw heavily redacted files. The family grieved for Michael, and were let down by the police investigation. To this day, they don’t know the full truth.
ROGER SYLVESTER
Roger Sylvester
On 11 January 1999, Roger Sylvester was acutely unwell with a mental health episode. He was taken away by police and was restrained in a way that killed him.
The inquest jury ruled it an unlawful killing, but this was overturned by the High Court.
Roger Sylvester’s family have seen redacted reports on the funeral. Why was that even reported on, and what was redacted?
WINSTON SILCOTT & BROADWATER FARM
Winston Silcott
In October 1985, a few weeks after police shot Cherry Groce, police entered the North London home of Cynthia Jarrett, and she died from a heart attack. People on the Broadwater Farm estate felt unsafe in their own homes. A protest the next day developed into a disturbance, and PC Keith Blakelock was stabbed to death.
Winston Silcott was convicted of the murder, despite not even being at the scene. Officers had fabricated incriminating notes.
Spycop John Dines lived in a house overlooking the Silcott family home as Winston’s appeal was pending. Alcott’s conviction was quashed in 1991. He was spied on for up to ten years afterwards.
After the Broadwater Farm disturbance, Stafford Scott worked to support people arrested. Scott was arrested during the investigation into the death of Blakelock, and the police later had to compensate him for their mistreatment. He has devoted his life to supporting victims of police malpractice.
The Broadwater Farm Defence Campaign suffered a series of ‘burglaries’ and it is thought spycops are responsible. Spycop John Dines attended at least one protest in support of the Campaign.
HACKNEY COMMUNITY DEFENCE ASSOCIATION
Dr Graham Smith was part of the Hackney Community Defence Association in the 1980s and 90s, along with Mark Metcalf They supported victims of police brutality and abuses of power.
In 1993, Smith and Metcalf established the Colin Roach Centre, which hosted anti-racist, police accountability, civil rights and trade union activists. It too was burgled, and its computers destroyed.
In 1995, spycops officer Mark Jenner infiltrated the Colin Roach Centre. He became very active in it, including writing for its bulletin.
Jenner was privy to confidential information about cases against the police. He then turned his attention to trade union activity, even becoming chair of one group. He also deceived a woman known as Alison into a long-term relationship.
SHARON & BERNIE GRANT
Bernie & Sharon Grant with Tony Benn, 1994
Sharon Grant is the widow of Bernie Grant, MP for Tottenham 1987-2000. In 1987, Bernie was one of three black MPs elected, the first time such a thing had happened in the UK. He supported some of the cases mentioned including the Broadwater Farm Defence Campaign. He challenged police stop and search practice, he opposed apartheid, and frequently travelled abroad for his anti-racist work.
As well as being Bernie’s wife, Sharon was his office manager and an activist in her own right. Was she also targeted by spycops? What justification was even given at the time for spying on an MP? Who else saw the intelligence – the press who vilified him?
DIANE ABBOTT
Diane Abbott was elected at the same time as Bernie Grant, the first black woman in the Commons. She’s been a leading anti racism campaigner for decades, supporting many campaigns including those of Blair Peach and Stephen Lawrence. Whistle-blower spycop Peter Francis says Abbott was spied on while an MP.
Joan Ruddock has supported many progressive causes and was an MP and minister. She too was spied on whilst an MP.
Unjustified, unregulated political policing like this distorts the ability of the public to engage with the political process.
None of these campaigns should have been spied on, nor the MPs. It wasn’t merely insensitive to grieving families. It was police shielding other officers from legitimate criticism and exposure of police wrongdoing.
The targeting of black campaigns and MPs mirrors the very complaints community campaigns were making. For simply seeking accountability by lawful means, they were subjected to the kind of intrusive spying people would think was reserved for serious and violent criminal activity.
Victims were treated as perpetrators. We want to know not just who did it, but who sanctioned it? What level approved or failed to prevent it?
This has a particularly disturbing aspect: unaccountable police undermining campaigns for police accountability. All the people I speak for, irrespective of their own ethnicity, want the Inquiry to be unflinching in exposing the racism of this policing.
MISCARRIAGES OF JUSTICE
Spycops took part in direct action protests and caused miscarriages of justice. They influenced and planned actions, including encouraging unlawful activity for which participants were convicted and even jailed. This was entrapment.
Managers who should have been providing oversight were tolerating, even encouraging this unlawful behaviour. Courts weren’t told. Proper disclosure and integrity of evidence were disregarded. It’s not only contempt for the spied-upon but for the legal process and rule of law .
Home Office guidance was clear – undercover officers mustn’t be agents provocateur, nor ever mislead a court [as cited in our post about spycops and miscarriages of justice]
The SDS Tradecraft Manual actively discouraged spycops from admitting their real identity to arresting police. Spycops arrested on protests were party to defence meetings with their lawyers, breaching legal privilege.
Spycop ‘Mike Scott‘ infiltrated a 1972 anti-apartheid demo, and was arrested and convicted under his fake identity. It is described here by one of those wrongly convicted, Professor Jonathan Rosenhead:
‘Mike Scott’ withheld evidence that exonerated the activists convicted – he knew they weren’t on a public highway as his uniformed colleagues had alleged. The spycops Tradecraft Manual itself warns of the risk of being ‘fitted up’ by uniformed officers.
ANDREW CLARKE & GEOFF SHEPPARD
Andrew Clarke and Geoff Sheppard were animal rights activists in the 1980s and 90s. Sheppard was convicted three times, and each a spycops officer was involved.
Clarke and Sheppard were convicted of planting incendiary devices intended to set off sprinklers in Debenham’s.
At their trial, Clarke and Sheppard had been convicted of joint enterprise, even though they may not have planted all the devices. There was no evidence of Clarke planting any. The Crown said a third person planted one.
In 2011, they found out the third person in their group, ‘Bob Robinson’, was actually spycop Bob Lambert, and appealed their convictions.
Clarke and Sheppard served long sentences. Lambert’s role was kept secret. He went on to run the SDS and get an MBE for services to policing.
Spycop John Dines was involved in Sheppard’s second conviction, when flour was thrown at a hunters’ ball. After that, spycop Matt Rayner encouraged Sheppard to acquire a shotgun, for which he was then convicted.
It seems that neither prosecutors nor the courts were aware of any spycops’ involvement. These officers had access to the defendants’ legal activity. This is secret police overriding the rule of law with nobody approving it but themselves.
Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) was a group campaigning to close Huntingdon Life Sciences vivisection labs. Several activists were convicted of blackmail in 2013. Numerous spycops, including Rod Richardson and Mark Kennedy, were involved, plus a corporate spy called Adrian Radford.
Spycops gave witness statements to court for Debbie Vincent’s trial, and we believe it happened in Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty trials as well.
JOHN JORDAN
John Jordan was convicted in 1997 for a Reclaim the Streets action – all other defendants including spycops officer Jim Boyling were acquitted.
Jordan’s conviction was quashed in 2014 but without disclosure of any evidence. The judge said it would come out at the current Inquiry.
RATCLIFFE CLIMATE TRIAL
In April 2009, 114 climate activists were arrested planning a protest to shut down Ratcliffe on Soar power station. Eventually, 26 were charged with conspiracy. In a first trial, 20 admitted the plan but said it was justified, and they were convicted in 2010.
In a second trial, six people denied being part of the conspiracy. Just before their trial began, they discovered that their fellow-arrestee ‘Mark Stone’ was actually spycop Mark Kennedy. They asked the prosecution to comply with their obligation to hand over all evidence, including Kennedy’s reports. On the day the trial was due to start in January 2011, the Crown Prosecution Service dropped all charges.
The Ratcliffe 20 then had their convictions quashed. The judge said future inquiries such as the current one would make everything clear.
DRAX CLIMATE TRIAL
A year before the Ratcliffe arrests, in 2008, 29 climate activists were arrested for stopping a coal train on its way to Drax coal-fired power station in North Yorkshire. The activists acted totally peacefully and with impeccable health and safety considerations. They were convicted.
In 1996, hunt saboteurs went to Good Easter in Essex. They were stopped and searched on the way, and several were arrested. In a similar instance nearby, another person was arrested after being stopped by police.
The police were extremely aggressive. This treatment of animal rights activists chimes with spycop Andy Coles’ contribution to the SDS Tradecraft Manual. In it, he told of the low opinion he’d developed of uniformed officers dealing with animal rights activists, saying it was ‘often out of proportion to your behaviour’.
Those arrested later received compensation. But one of the other ‘activists’ present was in fact a spycop, Jim Boyling. Boyling gave a witness statement about the police’s unlawful behaviour, but as this was believed to be coming from just another hunt sab, it carried no weight.
FAIRFORD COACHES
NPOIU officer known as Rod Richardson
Protesters travelling on coaches to RAF Fairford to protest against the start of the Iraq War were turned back by police, who then shut off all exits from the motorway to London. They said it was because a protester group known as WOMBLES were on the coaches, allegedly intent on disorder.
One of the passengers, Jane Laporte, brought a judicial review which found in her favour and against the police. This went to the High Court and House of Lords. Police had said they had ‘no basis for distinguishing between passengers’.
But spycop Rod Richardson was on one of the coaches. He knew who was on there, and their intentions. He would also have known who was and wasn’t in the WOMBLES. Spycop Jason Bishop had helped organise the coaches, and would also have known about the passengers.
Police misled the highest appeal court in the land, claiming not to have intelligence they clearly had.
LONDON ANIMAL ACTION
London Animal Action was a collective of animal rights groups founded in 1994. Numerous spycops joined; Andy Coles, Matt Rayner, Christine Green, Dave Evans, and possibly more. Bob Lambert was manager of some of these. All but Evans are known to have had intimate relationships with people they spied on.
We know corporate spies infiltrated London Animal Action. Did they get intelligence passed to them from spycops?
THE COMMON PLACE
In 2005, The Common Place social centre was founded in Leeds. Its first treasurer was spycop Lynn Watson. She complied with the legal obligation to file accounts – but did so under her false name. After she left and this was realised, the centre had to close.
HOW MANY MORE?
Mark Ellison and Alison Morgan’s 2015 report found spycops routinely withheld evidence from courts when they were involved in cases.
All spycops miscarriages of justice cases that have been reviewed have been the result of those convicted raising concerns, not from the police coming clean
Ellison & Morgan’s report also said that the lack of surviving records means we can’t tell what evidence once existed that would have changed court cases.
Ellison & Morgan identified 26 SDS officers arrested on 52 occasions. But it couldn’t identify all potential miscarriages of justice. This is extremely disturbing – the secrecy of the spycops means the facts of what they did were deliberately withheld from courts and some miscarriages of justice can never be rectified.
The refusal of police and the Inquiry to release documents, and pictures of spycops, are obstacles to discovering more.
Those spied upon, who have done better than police or CPS on this issue, must be given a central role at the Inquiry.
WHY WE NEED THE TRUTH
Core participants targeted by spycops are not confident the Inquiry will reach the truth. After years of asking, they’ve been told almost nothing. It makes it hard for them to properly contribute.
Speaking for the police at the Inquiry, Oliver Sands QC said criticism of spycops misses the point because if there were a right to be heard without the police knowing in advance, it would have to apply to everyone regardless of their politics, and that result in ‘pandemonium’.
We think the right to be heard without police knowing in advance is a human right of freedom of expression, it should not apply to those whose politics are deemed officially acceptable.
The behaviour of the spycops was consistent with what they were told was acceptable and encouraged to do; it was systemic, not rogue officers.
Exposing the truth about spycops has come at huge human cost. The spied-on did the work themselves to find out the truth, which is traumatic in itself. But it’s made harder because of the obstructions by police.
Had it been left to the police alone, we would never have heard of it. Discovering for themselves they have been spied on has had profound, long lasting and damaging impacts on the activists themselves.
One of the core participants who exposed Mark Kennedy said:
‘It was worse than a bereavement. When a loved one merely dies they go away forever but, unlike a spycop, they don’t undo all the shared experiences that made you love them when they were here. He should never have been in our lives and families. But more than that, we should not have had to find the truth for ourselves, and by chance…
‘But speaking to others who can’t be sure which of their friends were spycops, I realise I have been spared something even more damaging. The thing worse than knowing is not knowing.’
Undercover policing of this kind must never happen again. Even at this early stage of the inquiry, we should be looking for what changes the Inquiry will recommend for the future. We want to know what the purpose of the spying? Was it tainted by racism or other prejudices? Is the purpose a retrospective excuse that can’t be verified?
What framework did the spycops work to, and is there any evidence of it being adhered to? If it existed at all, why did it fail to protect victims?
The Inquiry itself is a test of whether an inquiry process can deliver justice and explanations to the wronged. It must deliver the truth we all deserve and have waited so long to hear.
Donal O’Driscoll
(Category L [Social and environmental activists] Core Participant
Donal is representing himself at the Inquiry. He was involved in numerous campaigns targeted by spycops, and is a researcher for the Undercover Research Group. This is a summarised version of his statement, you can read the full thing on their site.
It appears the Inquiry believes it can do its work without the non-state non-police core participants if needed, that it can interpret the moments and movements we were part of by hearing the words of those whose core training was to lie, people who were willing to pervert the course of justice.
Disclosure of material the police had years to pore over, we are given at the eleventh hour, with insufficient time to process properly.
Trauma, pain and injustice are at the heart of the matter. The undercover policing scandal has its impact because this is what it caused, in myriad different ways. People were abused. Democracy was attacked by ideologically motivated units, yet we are told they are the ones who need protecting with anonymity. The police committed serious crimes, and are clearly approaching the Inquiry as an adversarial process. The constant prioritising of police’s desires exacerbates the pain we all feel.
I’ve seen some of the information spycops police kept on us. I know how extensive, personal and vile it is, and the lies and inaccuracies within. The Inquiry will not get through the layers of deception where the police have covered their tracks, leaving documents that deliberately obscure the truth if they left any record at all.
I grew up in Northern Ireland aware of state sponsored murder gangs and shoot to kill policies. We knew what the British state is capable of and what it is willing to cover up or justify to itself.
So, I come to this with no illusions. However, I will not stand by when the Inquiry tells me it can get to the truth without letting me know the names of the undercovers who spied on me. When the Inquiry insists on withholding those basic facts from myself and others, it is not getting to the truth, it is helping cover it up.
In 1998, I was hospitalised, pushed under a moving car by a police officer during a demonstration, a deeply traumatising moment that still affects me. In the subsequent months I was targeted by police which furthered that trauma. I now believe spycop Christine Green would have been around for that. I want to know what reporting she and other undercovers made in relation to that period, and how that impacted on the civil claim I was then preparing against the police.
PERSONAL HISTORY
In the late 1990s I was placed on construction industry blacklisters The Consulting Association’s so-called ‘greenlist’ of environmental activists and experienced the impact of that, having job offers withdrawn last minute.
In the 2000s, I was involved in defending animal rights groups against civil injunctions that sought to undermining their right to protest. I now know that not only were the domestic extremism units overtly active around this, they were covertly active as well, including one corporate spy now known to have passed material to police. I want to know to what extent undercovers active at the time, at least one close to me, were disrupting our legal defences and who sanctioned that.
During one of the injunction cases, it emerged that Superintendent Stephen Pearl head of the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (NETCU), a sister unit to the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), handed over to lawyers representing a number of private companies the names, details and convictions of 52 individuals including myself.
It was clear that this type of assistance was done as a matter of course and the practice only emerged when they sought to formalise it for proceedings. I managed to successfully intervene on that occasion, but the question remains as to how much other material, including that gathered by undercovers, was being passed over to private companies.
Superintendent Pearl went on to become a director of a vetting and security firm, Agenda. It raises the question of just how seriously should we take claims of risk facing NPIOU officers when, as of yesterday, he was listing his NETCU role and business interests on LinkedIn, along with a photograph of himself.
Around 2010, I was with Debbie Vincent talking to the pharmaceutical giant Novartis, negotiating in good faith regarding their injunction. However, we were not talking to Novartis as we’d been led to believe, but to undercover officer James Adams. I was arrested for conspiracy to blackmail, something I believe was done to undermine my work on the injunctions more generally. The charges were later dropped.
A PROUD ACTIVIST
I would like to make it clear that, as an animal rights activist, environmentalist, anarchist and anti-fascist, I remain proud of all I have been involved in and continue to be committed to those causes. I regret very little. I am sure the state will happily label me a criminal, but that does not bother me.
I have always fought for and been motivated by a sense of justice. It is at the core of who I am, that one does not stand idly by in the face of cruelty or oppression. Positive change comes only through people standing up to the powerful. I will not accept such criticism from a state that gives its agents, unchecked powers to abuse, rape, even murder, and will spend millions to cover for them. Whatever I have done that some might find disagreeable, it is nothing compared to the police.
In October 2010 I was among the first to get the phone call, a friend telling me they had just confirmed my friend Mark Stone was in fact the undercover Mark Kennedy. Over the next few months I watched the pain and tears. I watched good friends and colleagues being broken. I knew a number of those he had relationships with, and could only try to console them as they processed that horror.
In the last decade I have spoken to over 150 people who had been targeted, from all forms of campaigns and groups. Probably better than most, I know how far and deep the emotional scars of this scandal go.
Campaigning is hard enough, causes enough burnout and trauma in itself, without knowing there are those working alongside you to directly undermine all you are seeking to achieve.
It is apparent the undercovers had access to medical records and were willing to use health issues to facilitate access to people. They were close to people suffering serious medical trauma and inserting themselves in their lives and care.
SPYCOPS TRAUMATISING CHILDREN
In a number of cases, spycops were involved in the lives of children of activists. I have listened parents tell of the guilt at leaving their loved ones in the care of people who didn’t really exist, the doubt about their own judgement, and the anger toward the police that sanctioned this.
I’m also very aware of how much it impacted those children, some having to live with parents processing the trauma, others damaged by the knowledge that someone they thought was a friend was lying to them about everything.
Spycops pointed the fingers at other people, alleging them to be police or informers. How many people were wrongly accused in this way, effectively driven out and denied their ability to partake? This is a profoundly cynical, destructive and anti-democratic thing to do, and the interference with their rights should not be glossed over. None of any of these were one-off cases.
INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSIBILITY
The spycops units were not rogue. They were known of at the highest levels and their activities condoned. Many went on to senior management which tells us that knowledge permeated the police. Any investigation must find how far that knowledge went, but also how much there was wilful blindness to the abuses.
The police want to focus on the alleged criminality of protestors to justify the undercover deployments. But these units were ideologically motivated, individually and systemically racist and sexist, with little interest in the rights of those they targeted.
They didn’t send the officers in to tackle the alleged criminality of one or two people, they targeted groups wholesale for exercising their rights to protest and seeking positive social change. In doing so, they effectively criminalised these communities, and once that was accepted practice, it became reason enough to justify everything else.
The notion of “collateral intrusion” has no place in this Inquiry. These units saw nobody as collateral, but reported on everyone regardless.
Even if it management claim they did not know of individual abuses, they do not escape responsibility for creating a culture where anything went and they were content to fund it, and signed off on the choice of targets.
We know that undercovers and their managers went on to work for private firms, taking their knowledge and experience with them. In doing so they perpetuated the same intrusion and abuses they carried out as undercovers. It is not simply a matter of whether they worked undercover subsequently, but whether they also took information with them or used contacts back into Special Branch to obtain that information.
Ironically, many of the spycops make out it is they who are at risk. What they are most worried about is being held responsible. Hiding behind anonymity orders is a cowardly refusal to acknowledge they had no right to carry out their political, sexist, racist and anti-democratic policing.
There is no doubt it is still going on. We know domestic extremism units continue to exist and monitor protests to this day. The fact that they remain embedded in Counter Terrorism Command shows nothing has fundamentally changed in how they view campaigners.
Changing unit names has not altered the ideological foundation that gave rise to the abuses in the first place. These counter terrorism units are merely a rebranding of Special Branch while their Special Project Teams continue to deploy undercovers. The spycop scandal is not an issue of the past; it remains relevant right up the current moment.
People cannot and will not be fobbed off. Growing up aware of the injustice of the Widgery Tribunal’s whitewashing of the Bloody Sunday massacre in itself is, in part, is why I am here today. As with Shrewsbury, Orgreave, blacklisting, and so many family justice campaigns, the issue of spycops will not go away until answers are had, in public.
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.
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.
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.
‘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.
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”.
‘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.
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’
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.
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.
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.
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.
When the powerful are caught doing the unjustifiable, they follow the same sequence of responses:
– Ignore it
– Deny it
– Delay the reckoning
– Declare too much time has past, it’s a different era, we can’t do anything now
Today was a day of police lawyers’ opening statements at the Undercover Policing Inquiry. ‘What the spycops did may have been bad but it was a long time ago, lessons have been learned, it’s different now, nobody need lose their job or pension, move on,’ paraphrased over and over again.
The morning had representatives of four agencies basically saying what their agency does. It was like listening to someone reading Wikipedia. Nobody has ever relished hearing the word ‘ninthly’.
There was very little of relevance to the scandal of the political secret police, but lots of stuff about how other undercover work keeps us safe from paedophiles and terrorists, implying that spycops aren’t that bad in the greater scheme of things.
Peter Skelton QC (Metropolitan Police Service)
Peter Skelton QC
Skelton says the Metropolitan Police have ‘absolute commitment’ to the Inquiry, which is news to those of us who’ve seen their myriad delays and obstructions over the years.
He said the Met doesn’t seek to justify but to admit and improve; but undercover policing is important, though must be within legal and ethical boundaries.
He told us that substantial changes have already been made in law and in police structure. We were told this in the past about the Human Rights Act 1998 and Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, but the spycops units just ignored the rules.
Skelton assured us that sexual relationships while undercover are prohibited under new rules. However, the police have been very clear that this was always the case. Similarly, his saying that participation in criminal activity must be ‘necessary and proportionate’ is no comfort, as this too is a long-established and long-ignored standard. The problem is in who defines necessary and proportionate.
Skelton told the Inquiry that the Met is ‘aware of continuing anger and distress of victims of spycops’, though he stopped short of saying they were sorry.He mentioned spycops deceiving women into relationships and quoted at length from the 2015 Met apology to some of these women. He said the Met stands by the 2015 apology, despite the fact that it still won’t actually give any answers or let women see their files, and is still delaying settling civil claims by some of the women.
Spycops’ involvement in crime was downplayed as merely ‘joining in’, seemingly trying to deflect from the fact that they were agents provocateur and took instigating roles.
There ‘may’ be some deployments which were not justifiable, he told us, and cited the spying on Stephen Lawrence’s family. The Met ‘appreciates’ the length of time Stephen Lawrence’s loved ones have waited for answers –the Met has stonewalled them for decades – and Skelton said the Met is grateful for Duwayne Brooks and Doreen Lawrence’s work.
It wasn’t to be the last time this hearing that we were astonished at the gall of the police in talking about a justice campaign they spied on.
LONG AGO & FAR AWAY
Having admitted what is already well established, Skelton lauded the dedication, professionalism and bravery of undercover officers. With his gift for understatement, he described how the Met ‘hasn’t always understood’ how to support the spycops officers – while it basically pushed them into a PTSD generator. They knew full well it damaged officers, and they chewed them up and spat them out knowing there’d be more to replace them.
The SDS Tradecraft Manual from 1995 has a mocking section on dealing with post deployment anguish. Whistleblower officer Peter Francis asked for help, received none, and then sued the Met and received a settlement for his PTSD, 25 years ago. The SDS did not start to work on a welfare policy until the late 1990s.
Skelton moved into the ‘long time ago’ trope, saying policing now is unrecognisable from 1968. This ignores the fact that the spycops continued operating long after 1968, and their activities got more reprehensible as time went on.
There was emphasis on how undercover policing helps combat child abuse, human trafficking, modern slavery and more, so we should recognise the bravery of undercover officers, specifically including those who were in the spycops units that are the focus of the Inquiry.
Skelton treated us to a long ramble about the historic context of the period the Inquiry is about to examine, citing the advent of the pill, legalisation of abortion (as if that didn’t happen after a lot of campaigning and protest), and the assassination of Robert F Kennedy as if they had some relation to policing left-wing groups and peace campaigns in the UK.
He told us it was important not to judge the spycops of the past by modern standards. In doing so, he contradicted a point made yesterday by the Counsel to the Inquiry: he pointed out that in the early days of the SDS, the Home Secretary desperately feared embarrassment if the truth of the unit’s methods came out. This shows they knew it was very much against the morality of the time.
We were told that although some intelligence gathered by spycops may have been ‘retained unnecessarily’ by modern standards, it would have been hard for them to know what would turn out to be useful information until some time later, so gathering anything and everything was fair enough. While individuals named may not be bad, they may know people who are, so we can’t criticise spycops for targeting people and groups who were harmless. Apparently the Met ‘recognises’ the strength of anger felt by such targeted people.
US AGAINST THEM
After painting a picture of benign public servants vs dangerous activists, Peter Skelton QC claimed “a simplistic narrative of ‘us against them’ – whether malign spy vs innocent civilian, or benign public servant vs dangerous activist – does not do justice to anyone”. In doing so, he sidestepped the key factor of institutional power being on one side of those relationships. We’re not talking about a malign spy, but about a malign institution that trained people to act harmfully over a period of decades.
After Peter Skelton finished, the Chair, Sir John Mitting, asked if he was correct in inferring that the Met, and police generally, no longer regard it as part of their task to assist MI5 with investigation of subversion; that it is no longer viewed as part of the police’s role to infiltrate those ‘who would be regarded by the majority as politically extreme’; and that it is no longer part of the police’s task to infiltrate single issue campaigns which cause disruption, but not serious disorder of the kind caused in 1968. And, if this were true, when was that view formed, by whom, and for what reason? (is this an exact quote? Or can it be?)
Skelton had ten minutes to think about it and came back with a ‘neither confirm nor deny’ answer that wouldn’t comment on present arrangements..
Gerry Boyle QC (National Police Chiefs’ Council)
Gerry Boyle QC
Gerry Boyle explained what the National Police Chiefs’ Council is. The NPCC coordinates 43 police forces of England and Wales, doing what the Association of Chief Police Officers did until 2015. It doesn’t act for individual officers. It is involved in the Inquiry because it helps formulate policy and practice for undercover policing.
The NPCC is involved in the redaction of documents for the Inquiry, and has done risk assessments for spycops to see if they need anonymity at the Inquiry. It’s been liaison between the Inquiry and all English and Welsh forces except the Met.
The NPCC has these functions: coordination of national operations; command of counter terrorist policing; coordination of police response to national emergencies; implementing standards and policy as set by College of Policing and government.
It was the successor body to the Association of Chief Police Officers, which oversaw the later spycops unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), from about 2006 until it was subsumed into Counter Terrorism Command in 2011.
In keeping with the pattern of the day, implying that spycops somehow deal with significant threats to life and limb, Boyle didn’t even leave it two minutes before mentioning terrorism.
Boyle said many NPOIU officers had experience of major investigations and usually returned to their original constabulary after their undercover deployments. Because they are more likely to have dealt with terrorism and organised crime than the SDS, more of them need anonymity at the Inquiry.
He went on to praise the role of undercover police in dealing with paedophilia and terrorist atrocities, giving detailed examples of these and other things that have nothing to do with spycops, a speech that only serves to insult spycops’ victims by association.
Undercover work has ‘not been without controversy’ but it’s all so much better now, he assured us.
Boyle laboriously listed all the regulations that govern and constrain undercover work, without reference to why they had been institutionally ignored by the spycops units. He said that inspections under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 ensured compliance with the rules, ignoring all the spycops’ outrages since 2000 that prove otherwise.
Richard O’Brien (National Crime Agency)
The National Crime Agency’s Richard O’Brien, like Gerry Boyle, spent time explaining what the agency he represents does. Once again, the state’s representative talked about undercover work against paedophiles and terrorism and used it as an implied excuse for what the spycops did.
O’Brien managed to say ‘serious and organised crime’ in three consecutive sentences. Shortly afterward he said it twice in a row, as the end of one sentence and the start of the next.
The NCA took over the role previously held by the National Crime Squad, and before that various regional crime squads. The NCA has a wider remit than its predecessors, combating organised crime, cyber crime, human trafficking and more. Undercover operations are key to all that the NCA does.
The NCA’s interest in the Inquiry isn’t due to having any relevant spycops itself –it didn’t even exist at the time the Inquiry is examining – and it doesn’t infiltrate political groups. It is in the Inquiry to learn, and is especially looking at the final Module where recommendations will be made for the future. It won’t really be involved in the first two modules as they look at historic issues.
O’Brien said he wasn’t not allowed to say much about what NCA does with undercover officers but it involves weapons and explosives dealers, human trafficking and paedophiles. He did not say why it was relevant to the spycops. There’s an implication that spycops were also involved in such things, therefore their targets were deserving victims, or if not then it was still a fair price to pay for protection against the serious and organised crime he described.
Nicholas Griffin QC (Home Office)
Nicholas Griffin QC
Griffin began by quoting then-Home Secretary Theresa May telling parliament in 2014 why the Inquiry is needed, which you can see at the start of this video on our YouTube channel.
He then explained that the Home Office is especially interested in role of undercover policing in protection from crime, and the legal and regulatory framework for it.
Although the Home Office directly funded the Special Demonstration Squad for its first 21 years, when Steven Taylor was commissioned to report on the link between the two institutions in 2014, he searched Home Office archives but failed to find a single document about it.
The Taylor report unsurprisingly found little evidence of any Home Secretary knowing about spycops, and no evidence of them having knowledge of the various outrages committed by officers.
Griffin said the Inquiry will bring further scrutiny of Home Office role, and they will cooperate.
Oliver Sanders QC (Designated Lawyer Officers)
Oliver Sanders QC
The final statement for the day came from Oliver Sanders QC, representing 114 mostly ex- (though some current) spycops. They are predominantly from the SDS, but some from the later NPOIU, and they include both undercover and back room staff. Some of them became managers later. In total, it’s around 60% of all SDS staff (around 70% of those still alive).
In contrast to Nicholas Griffin’s brevity, Sanders settled in for a long, repetitive speech. He spoke like someone who is paid by the hour at a very high rate, which is probably the truth of the matter. It was reminiscent of ‘Just A Minute‘, with no comic factor at all. Imagine ‘Just An Hour‘, and no other players.
Sanders basically had three demonstrably untrue points:
– police never intend to harm anyone
– spycops are better than the alternative
– even though they’re bad we can’t judge them because it was a long time ago
He just kept making them over and over with avalanches of pointless details.
Sanders said the SDS was just one cog in much larger machine of security and intelligence, established and overseen by central government, with the Home Office at the top. The Home Secretary sets functions for MI5 as well as overseeing police (the Met in particular). The Commissioner of Met is appointed on Home Secretary’s recommendation. The Home Office mandated Met Special Branch, of which the SDS was a sub-unit. As Nicholas Griffin had already said, the Home Office funded SDS from 1968 to 1989.
Like a droplet of oil hitting water, Sanders suddenly went wide on the philosophy, history and function of policing. The first duty of police and any police officer is keeping the Queen’s peace, he said. Public order is paramount, key to the functioning of a civilised society. Lord Scarman said maintaining normal society is the very function of police.
This became a motif, making a point then reiterating it, citing what he appeared to feel were impartial sources, who were all senior figures of State such as judges and senior ministers.
The right to protest is in conflict with a right to continuous calm, Sanders explained. Balance must be struck that allows protesters to do their thing without impacting on the majority. Cities don’t exist as blank canvases for protests to be imposed upon. As the police have to deal with many communities and keep the peace, they must have information about what’s going on. Hence intelligence units likethe SDSwho, unlike other police, don’t make arrests.
Sanders said the Met Special Branch existed mainly to provide public order intelligence to uniform branch, and intelligence on ‘subversives, terrorists and extremists’ to MI5.
So, he asserted with perhaps the most daring understatement of the day, the SDS was just doing normal Special Branch work but in a specialised way. This intelligence then helped police to ‘manage’ major public order events.
THE SOUND OF THE CROWD
Returning to the overarching theory of the role, Sanders told us that police are simply ordinary members of society undertaking public service. No matter the strength of one’s feeling, it doesn’t include the right to attack other citizens just because they’re in uniform.
But crowds can behave in ways that single members wouldn’t; in groups,people are more prone to volatility. Peaceable individuals you wouldn’t have thought worth spying on might decide to get rowdy. Protesters can enjoy the effect as disorder can demonstrate strength of feeling, create public alarm and political attention, and give the opportunity to provoke police in the hope the public will regard it as police brutality.
Public order situations were worsening in 1968 because there was a generation of young adults that hadn’t had a world war or national service, Sanders said with a straight face. In 1968, when the SDS was formed, such eruptions were coming from far left and anarchist organisations, rather than the far right, he claimed.
Sanders explained that most intelligence is necessarily acquired indiscriminately, and its value can only be appraised later on. He did not address the fact that he’d just made the argument for a complete surveillance state, without saying there should be any constraints.
This casual, chilling perspective was reinforced by saying that ‘the question is whether the ends justify the means, rather than judging the means on their own terms’, an excuse any torturer would be able to give.
THEN AND NOW
Like the Met’s representative Peter Skelton QC earlier in the day, Sanders cited the assassinations of Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King, then went on a long detour about life in 1968, telling us a pint of beer was 1 shilling and 2 pence, and there were only three TV channels.
So, of course, policing was different in 1968 too, they had whistles but no training on dealing in public disorder. Laws were different too so, again like Skelton, Sanders said we shouldn’t not judge the spycops by modern standards.
As he well knows, laws against identity theft and sexual assault were long established in 1968.
He said it was a tumultuous time compared to 2020, a conclusion nobody who’s lived through this year could draw with the slightest degree of honesty.
Comparisons with 1968 are a diversion – surely deliberate – to distract from the facts of the spycops’ abuses. The spycops are not an event in that year, that was merely the start of an institutional process that went on for decades and, crucially, got worse as time went on. The spycops in 2010 – long after the supposed new regulatory framework of the Human Rights Act, etc – were, if anything, committing even worse abuses than their 1968 counterparts.
Sanders then went on to explain that spycops weren’t really that bad, as worse policing was possible.He conjured scenarios of water cannons and baton rounds being used because spycops hadn’t collected advance intelligence and warned the uniformed police that a protest might end in trouble.
He justified spying on all manner of groups, because you never knew who’d become worth spying on, or which insignificant group would splinter into one they wanted to monitor, or which group would attract members of target groups. He mentioned members of the Communist Party of Great Britain and Socialist Workers Party joining CND with the aim of ‘taking it over’. He said that Rock Against Racism and others were worthy targets because they were just fronts for the SWP.
These groups had a right to pursue their beliefs, he insisted, but police just wanted to understand what was going on in order to create threat assessments. Sinn Fein made Marxist statements, drawing support from far left groups of interest. Advocating the end of internment without trial was lawful, he acknowledged (ignoring the fact that the internment was itself a violation of human rights).
After 1968 demonstrations increased in number, scale and intensity, he said.
MAKING A KILLING
He then made perhaps the most shocking assertion of the day. Oliver Sanders had the gall to list injuries at protests in the 1970s and singled out the deaths of Kevin Gately and Blair Peach, two men who were killed by police.
Gately was on an anti-fascist demonstration, the organisers of which included the Communist Party of Great Britain, the International Marxist Group, and the International Socialists, three groups Sanders himself cited as main targets for spycops.
Peach was in the Socialist Workers Party, the spycops’ most targeted organisation; there can be no claim that he might have lived if only the spycops had been more involved. The officer who killed Peach has been identified, but was never charged. Peach’s partner, Celia Stubbs, ran a justice campaign after his death which was targeted by spycops. She is a core participant at the Inquiry.
Sanders had been rattling on about the need to use police resources efficiently, yet spycops expended huge resources to undermine dozens of justice campaigns like Blair Peach’s. Resources that should have been spent catching killers were used to obstruct justice.
For Sanders to use the death of Blair Peach this way shows foul and venomous contempt for Blair, Celia, and everyone else involved in groups targeted by spycops.
HOW THE SDS FUNCTIONED
Sanders then spoke a little about the SDS’ internal organisation. The SDS had a back office for organisation, and two safe flats in changing locations where back office and undercovers could meet. Around 10-12 officers deployed at a time in far left, anarchist, Irish and far right groups.
Officers in this period (1968-82) would spend some months in the back office preparing their legend and learning about their targets, arranging cover accommodation and vehicle. Once undercover, they would have twice-weekly meetings in safe flat and daily phone calls. The average deployment in the earlier days was 3-4 years.
The SDS’ roles were intelligence gathering, and counter subversion work for MI5. While it monitored a large number of groups, a much smaller number were actively infiltrated.
Sanders insisted they had to report on ‘softer outer circles’, and at times when little was happening, in order to be in place for more serious events. Some campaigns come up without warning in response to events, so they wanted spycops to be in place already. By its nature this meant infiltrating groups that didn’t seem to be worth it.
Intelligence was recorded in reports then catalogued. As hard copy reporting was slow in the days before electronic communications, much of what the SDS did was face to face or on the phone, rather than written. And much of what was written wasn’t retained. The extant files are a fraction of what was made.
A lot of SDS reports have been retrieved for the Inquiry from copies sent to MI5. However, officers remember certain reports that haven’t been found. It may just be they weren’t sent to MI5, or not retained. MI5 had a big subversion clear-out in the 1980s. Sanders explained that this is nothing untoward, no blame to anyone, it’s just the nature of what happens with documents from so long ago.
Sanders emphatically asserted that there is no basis for the suggestions of deliberate shredding of older SDS files to destroy incriminating evidence. Surely spycops would never do such a thing.
Sanders will complete his opening statement on Wednesday morning, covering the functioning of the SDS itself and its operational contribution to public order and counter subversion.
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.
Chief Inspector Conrad Dixon, founder of the Special Demonstration Squad, c.1968
Tranche 1, Phase 1, Day 2
2 November 2020
Evidence from:
David Barr QC, Counsel to the Inquiry
The opening day of the Undercover Policing Inquiry was wholly taken up with David Barr QC, Counsel to the Inquiry, spelling out what the Inquiry is, and explaining the foundation and early years of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) undercover political policing unit.
There were some surprises – many new targeted groups were named and several officers’ photos were published. Whilst these are welcomed, leaving it so late it means the people in those groups, or who would recognise the officers, are only just getting a chance to learn they were spied on. As a method of disclosure, it seems designed to exclude affected people from being able to contribute to the Inquiry.
WHAT THE UCPI IS ABOUT & HOW IT WILL WORK
Barr made it clear that while there was a significant focus on left-wing groups, the SDS’s remit went beyond them very early on in its history, encompassing those opposing race and gender discrimination, campaigns for disarmament, and justice campaigns such as the family of Stephen Lawrence. Spycops, Barr confirmed, had been involved in the blacklisting of politically active workers.
Spycops stand accused of being agents provocateur, including Bob Lambert, accused of firebombing a Debenham’s store in 1987 while undercover. (The Metropolitan Police’s investigation into this, begun in April 2016, four years after the allegation was made, has still not concluded!)
The Inquiry, he assured us, will make facts public wherever possible, drawing on historic documents as well as testimony made directly to the Inquiry.
He then ran through a chronology of the scandal: basically one myopic whitewash report after another, interspersed with increasingly outrageous revelations from activists and journalists until the public inquiry was called. Unfortunately, there was a lack of recognition from him of the activists, notably the women deceived into relationships, who did most of the major work exposing the officers. Without them, none of this would be happening.
Barr ran through the Inquiry’s terms of reference, as laid out when it was commissioned in 2015.One of the limitations mentioned is this is an Inquiry into the actions of police officers in England and Wales, even though the spycops are known to have travelled to around 20 other countries, undermining campaigns and violating human rights.
The immunity of witnesses was mentioned – no document produced at the Inquiry will be used against people in future criminal proceedings (unless it’s about giving false evidence to the Inquiry itself), though documents produced by others for the Inquiry aren’t covered by this.
The Inquiry has told 19 families that their dead children’s identities were stolen by spycops. Additionally, one family whose living child’s identity was stolen has been informed.
THE NEW SCHEDULE
When Sir John Mitting took over as Chair in 2017, he cited his predecessor’s desire to discover the truth – that’s not necessarily the same as revealing the truth to the public though.
The Inquiry is divided into Modules, subdivided into Tranches and Phases, which you can see explained in our UCPI FAQ. Sir John Mitting will preside alone over the evidence, then a panel will be appointed by the Home Secretary for the final module that will look at making recommendations for the future (which the CHIS Bill seemingly makes irrelevant).
Although originally scheduled to report in 2018, the Inquiry is now looking like it’ll finish in about 2026. The pandemic is slowing the delayed process even further, as they say that classified documents can’t be worked on at home.
There was dismay at the new protracted timetable for the Inquiry. Tranche 1 Phase 2 (SDS 1973-82) is now expected to be in March or April 2021. They expect the Tranche 2 (SDS 1983-92) hearings will happen in the first half of 2022, Tranche 3 (SDS 1993-2007) in the first half of 2023. As for Tranches 4 (NPOIU), 5 and 6, who knows?
THE FIRST EVIDENCE HEARINGS
The first evidence hearings (Phase 1 of Tranche 1) will start next week. They will cover the formation of the Special Demonstration Squad in 1968, in response to protests against the war in Vietnam, and why it continued beyond that.
There is no evidence in any documents that the earliest SDS officers (1968-72) had sexual relationships with women, nor that it was standard to steal dead children’s identities. However, these things do emerge in Phase 2 (1973-82), the hearings due to take place in early 2021.
Witness statements have been taken from 18 SDS officers for Phase 1 (1968-72), eight of whom will give evidence. For the targeted people, Tariq Ali from the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign will give evidence, and Dr Norman Temple from Irish National Liberation Solidarity Front will have his statement read for him.
The Inquiry will examine documents including Home Office Circular 97/1969, which specifically said spies must never incite crime, and if there’s ever a possibility of misleading a court the spy must be withdrawn (which is cited in our post about spycops and miscarriages of justice).
In covering who was responsible in the early period, Barr listed Home Secretaries and Metropolitan Police Commissioners. It’s worth noting that the huge delays in starting the Inquiry mean that three Met Commissioners (collectively in charge 1977-1993) and two Home Secretaries have died since the Inquiry was announced.
STOPPING THE ‘STOP THE WAR’: HOW THE SDS BEGAN
Special Demonstration Squad officer Dave Fisher, c.1968
A March 1968 demonstration in London against the Vietnam War ended with windows being broken at the American embassy. Eager to avoid a repeat at the October 1968 demo, police came up with the idea of deep-cover intelligence officers, and the Special Demonstration Squad was born.
The Inquiry was then shown a contemporary ITV report of the March protest, featuring lots of pushing at police lines and officers kicking people on the ground, two officers carried away on stretchers, several fireworks and some incidental damage to shrubbery. It was overdubbed with continual crowd noise that doesn’t change when the scene cuts, and a voice-over about the wild violence of protesters in “a riot such has Britain has never before witnessed”.
Internal police reports allege foreign demonstrators were catalysts and agitators, though Barr said that Tariq Ali from the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign contests the accuracy and validity of this focus.
Chief Inspector Conrad Dixon of Special Branch resolved to prevent a repeat. Dixon’s report of April 1968 said no intelligence had shown anyone planning violence at the demo, and yet it happened. Implied in this is a common police belief that things have a rigid command structure similar to their own, and if that can’t be seen it must be because it’s being well hidden.
The Inquiry went through a number of contemporaneous documents. They showed a few that said Special Branch had gone to a degree of effort to find out the scale and nature of the March 1968 demo. One Special Branch document describes Special Branch attending a Vietnam Solidarity Campaign meeting but being recognised and asked to leave. Another attempted to attend a private meeting was aborted due to cops not knowing anyone and dressing like cops. Special Branch clearly felt a problem in not being able to get into meetings of anti-Vietnam War activists.
There’s very little contemporaneous documentation of the formation of the Special Demonstration Squad, but it appears to have been founded on 30 or 31 July 1968. Early SDS documents stated its intention as being solely to gather intelligence ahead of the 27 October 1968 Vietnam demo, using publications, informants, technical devices, and undercover police officers.
It rapidly moved from this multi-method narrow-remit approach to the very opposite – just using deep-cover police for a wide, ill-defined range of ‘subversives’.
As the anti-Vietnam War movement factionalised, the SDS infiltrated the various groups. Officers ‘Don de Freitas’ and ‘Margaret White’ posed as a couple to infiltrate a group. One black power leaflet they came across led to prosecution and imprisonment of its distributor, and the officer gave evidence in her real identity.
The spycops had been deployed into a variety of groups, even taking active roles in the organising.
THE OCTOBER 1968 DEMONSTRATION
By the time the October 1968 Vietnam demo came round, Chief Inspector Dixon saw all the factions and anticipated less trouble than had been seen in March. He was correct, but David Barr said that’s not the point. The Inquiry must ask was this necessary? Was it proportionate? Could intelligence have been gained without the use of spycops?
On 29 October 1968, the US ambassador congratulated Special Branch for a less volatile demo than in March. One has to wonder if there would have been such a strong reaction to March demo if it had been at a target that didn’t embarrass the UK in front of the USA.
We were then shown another contemporaneous news report. As with the earlier one, there’s a striking difference between the pictures and the commentary – the ‘Maoists’ / ‘anarchists’ (the words are used interchangably) are violent for linking arms and walking into police, police ‘keep their cool’ throwing punches and kicking.
Again, Barr recounted the police’s narrative seemingly from a position of accepting it as fact, describing how they regarded the comparatively peaceful nature of the Oct 1968 Vietnam demo as a big success for the policing tactics.
It’s unclear if the Inquiry is taking all this at face value. The October 1968 demo was always intended by the organisers to be more peaceful, and the International Marxist Group stopped a large attempted breakaway to the US embassy.
Certainly, it was used as the pretext for making the SDS a permanent arrangement with a much wider scope. Barr talked about the dual role of SDS, covering demonstrations/public order and subversion, but pretty much every organisation seeking any social change could be seen to fit into either category (or both).
The conflation of the former with the latter gave an excuse for state surveillance of almost all protest groups. Within a fortnight of the October demo, spycops boss Chief Inspector Dixon had proposed long term infiltration of the relevant organisations. Funding was requested from the Home Office. Home Office wasn’t overly keen on permanence but paid up anyway.
DEEPER POCKETS, WIDER NET
Special Demonstration Squad officer Helen Crampton, c.1968
The documents make clear that the Home Office reticence wasn’t due to any ethical principles. Rather, Home Secretary Reginald Maudling was very afraid of personal impact of exposure.
The fact that the government was terrified of spycops being public knowledge indicates a belief that the public would be outraged, as indeed they were once the truth came out in 2010. They always knew it was profoundly unethical, that it was abuse of citizens and unwarranted curtailing of political dissent.
Funding was granted for the calendar year in 1970 and 1971, but in 1972 it moved to the financial year, indicating that the old temporary spying on Vietnam War protesters had become permanent and broader. A vague mention of spycops in the press yielded no serious opposition from public or civil liberties groups, leading to increased confidence in making the unit permanent, continuing and expanding their roles.
Early 1970s documents show the unit’s stated aims being forecasting the scale and mood of demonstrations, identifying organisers, and ‘gathering information for long-term intelligence purposes’ with people profiled ‘within weeks’ of first expressing interest in ‘extremist ideas’.
WHO WAS TARGETED
David Barr then read out lists of groups targeted according to the SDS’ first few annual reports. Some we knew from the Undercover Research Group/ Guardian list, but almost 50 were new.
Certainly, the breadth of interest was extraordinary. It included groups from Hackney United Tenants Ad-Hoc Committee to Croydon Libertarians, Justice for Rhodesia to the Independent Labour Party. The Undercover Research Group posted the full list.
The reports lamented the ‘obvious problem’ of finding it hard to infiltrate black power movements. “Coloured and foreign organisations, because of their exclusivity, continue to be resistant to penetration”.
The SDS said that the Communist Party and extreme right wing groups weren’t covered by its remit, but was up for doing it if they were told to. This is essentially asking for sanction for mission creep.
Big Flame were among the groups described as “penetrated to a lesser degree”, but this somewhat arbitrary distinction doesn’t mean the involvement is minor. They were targeted by Richard Clark, aka ‘Rick Gibson’, but the group became suspicious of him and discovered that he was using the stolen identity of a dead child. They confronted him and he left. The story was unpublished at the time
Clark deceived at least four women he spied on into relationships. One of them, Mary, gave a powerful statement to the Inquiry in 2018:
“I came from South Africa, thinking I had escaped that kind of interference by the state in the life of its citizens. To find that the police and the state in the UK operate in a similar fashion is very disturbing”.
Chief Inspector Dixon laid down some rules. He wanted recruitment by personal approach, and daily supervision of officers, with a maximum of 12 months (the average ended up being 4-5 years). He was firm that officers should not get actively involved in groups, drafting leaflets, etc. This, as has already been mentioned, wasn’t adhered to even then, and it went right out of the window shortly after.
None of the officers the Inquiry has spoken to recalls formal training. There is little evidence of specific guidance on criminal activity, sexual relationships, breaching legal privilege. Unsurprisingly, most say they didn’t commit any offence when undercover.
The Inquiry then published photos of various officers, all seemingly taken at the same event (one has to suspect the 1968 SDS Christmas party). Most of the officers whose faces are shown were backroom staff, rather than actual undercover officers. The Undercover Research Group posted all the pictures of the 1968 spycops.
EXAMPLE DOCUMENTS
The Inquiry concluded the day by showing a range of documents to illustrate key themes.
A report on large public meeting of Vietnam Solidarity Campaign from 1968:
Routine form for early SDS work reporting on events. It lists all the officers present at the meeting (which included Dixon, the head of the SDS, and Saunders, second in command), all of whom were able to vote at the meeting. The document is noted as having been copied to MI5. It’s a clear illustration of spycops having influence on the organisations they spied on, and that this was known at the very highest levels.
A report from officer ‘John Clinton‘ on the April 1972 International Socialists conference:
Almost 400 people attended, and the report is lengthy. This was followed by another from same officer, on the results of International Socialists national committee election, noting specific person’s politics. These two were the basis for the next document, a cover note saying managers were very pleased about the reports on International Socialists, that it proves the value of the SDS, and reports have been copied to MI5. This is proof that such reporting wasn’t a rogue officer but within the remit of the SDS.
A 1969 report from officer ‘Bill Lewis‘ on the International Marxist Group’s summer camp in Scotland, attended by 42 people. This shows spycops acting across borders and jurisdictions very early on, and makes a mockery of the Home Office limiting the Inquiry to England and Wales.
A 1971 report by ‘David Robertson‘, reporting on a Maoist couple, including personal details about financial affairs, home life and child. This kind of intrusive, unpolitical detail was commonplace in such reports.
A 1968 document from ‘Don de Frietas‘ and ‘Margaret White‘, officers who pretended to be a couple to infiltrate the Havering branch of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. The report covers a meeting in a pub with details of all nine attendants.
A 1971 report from ‘John Clinton’ on a member of the International Socialists, who wants to get fellow members to work within a trade union. This was followed by another Clinton one from 1973 reporting on membership changes in International Socialists, noting their locality and trade union. These illustrate the attention to trade unions even in the early days of the SDS.
A 1973 report of officer HN338, noting names of three people who’ve asked for information on the International Marxist Group. This shows that one didn’t have to be an activist or even a member of a target group in order to have a spycops file.
A 1971 report also from HN338 on a Black Defence Committee talk entitled ‘Rhodesia and the racist problem in Britain’. Opposing those things was a threat to the political establishment.
A 1971 report by ‘David Robertson’ on Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) meeting addressed by a delegation that had visited China, but includes details of industrial action and remarks about the ethnicity of certain attendees.
A 1971 ‘Robertson’ report, submitting a Women’s Liberation Front leaflet that advocated an end to exploitation and repression of all kinds, equal pay without regard to gender, access to contraception and abortion. The report has been stamped as copied to MI5.
A 1971 report from officer HN338 reporting on a meeting of editorial groups of an activist publication called Indo-China, showing active involvement in steering groups. Numerous spycops wrote articles whilst undercover, encouraging the political activity they were ostensibly there to undermine.
A 1973 report from officer HN338, reporting on meeting about police oppression by International Marxist Group, Socialist Labour League and International Socialists. Example of police regarding well-earned threats to their reputation as seriously as any other threat.
Finally for the example documents, a report from 1974 by ‘John Clinton’ reporting on a Socialist Worker rally for the Shrewsbury 24 and their families. This clearly shows spycops working to defending the reputation of the police against those who’d expose miscarriages of justice.
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.
On Monday 2 November, the Undercover Policing Inquiry begins after five years of preliminary work.
The opening session will be a three week set of hearings, divided into two parts. The first half will be the presentation of Opening Statements from the core participants. The second will be the start of the actual hearing of evidence, which we will cover in a later post. For now, we will just look at the Opening Statements and why they are important.
A core participant is a person or organisation which has been accepted as such by the Inquiry. This is because the Chair has agreed that they have a particular interest in the proceedings, in that they are particularly affected by any outcome, or potentially facing criticism.
One of the benefits of being a core participant is that they are consulted on matters and make representations. In theory at least. Many of the Non-Police/ State Core Participants (NPSCPs) feel they are being ignored in favour of the police, something that has caused considerable bitterness (which the Opening Statements will refer to in many places).
One benefit of being a core participant is the right to make an opening statement to the Inquiry prior to the beginning of evidential hearings. The purpose of this statement is to set out your case – your expectations and hopes for the Inquiry, or to challenge where it is going wrong. It is also a place where you can make admissions or defend your position if you are expecting criticisms. As such, they are considered to have considerable importance and watched carefully by all involved.
However, making an opening statement is not a requirement and some NPSCPs have chosen not to do so, as has spycop Mark Kennedy. A number have not made written submissions but will be making oral ones.
Over the next few days we will hear from the barristers representing the Inquiry itself, state agencies, undercovers, other parties such as whistleblower Peter Francis, and the families of undercovers.
Finally, several days will be given over to the NPSCPs, with different days focusing on different classes within them, such as women targeted, family justice campaigns, etc. Several NPSCPs who are representing themselves without lawyers will also be speaking.
The proceedings will be entirely online, live-streamed by the Inquiry, and placed on the UCPI YouTube channel.
As each speaker goes live the text of their written opening statement (if they have made one) will be made public by the Inquiry. However, opening statements will at times be responding to what others have said, so they may differ from the prepared written versions that are published.
TIMETABLE FOR THE UCPI OPENING STATEMENTS
Here is a timetable for Opening Statements.
As things go live, we will add the appropriate links so you can find them easily.
Day 1 (Mon 2 Nov)
10:00 AM: David Barr QC (Counsel to the Inquiry)
2:00 PM: David Barr QC (Counsel to the Inquiry)
Day 2 (Tues 3 Nov)
10:00 AM: Peter Skelton QC (Metropolitan Police Service)
11:30 AM: Gerry Boyle QC (National Police Chiefs’ Council)
12:00 Noon: Richard O’Brien QC (National Crime Agency)
12:30 PM: Nicholas Griffin QC (Home Office)
2:00 PM: Oliver Sanders QC (Designated Lawyer Officers representing undercover officers)
Day 3 (Wed 4 Nov)
10:00 AM: Oliver Sanders QC (Designated Lawyer Officers)
2:00 PM: Richard Whittam QC (Slater & Gordon Clients representing individual undercover officers)
2:30 PM: David Lock QC (Peter Francis)
3:45 PM: Angus McCullough QC (Category M Core Participants)
Day 4 (Thus 5 Nov)
10:00 AM: Rajiv Menon QC (Core Participants represented by Richard Parry & Jane Deighton)
12:15 PM: Matthew Ryder QC (Core Participants represented by Mike Schwarz, Simon Creighton, Tamsin Allen and Jules Carey)
2:00 PM: Mathhew Ryder QC (Core Participants represented by Mike Schwarz, Simon Creighton, Tamsin Allen and Jules Carey)
5:45 PM: Donal O’Driscoll (Category L Core Participant [appearing in person])
Day 5 (Fri 6 Nov)
10:00 AM: James Scobie QC (Core Participants represented by Paul Heron)
12:15 PM: Ruth Brander (Non-Police, Non-State Core Participant Group)
2:00 PM: Lord Hendy QC (Fire Brigades Union and Unite [Category E Core Participants])
3:45 PM: Gareth Pierce (National Union of Mineworkers [Category E Core Participant])
4:15 PM: Dave Smith (Blacklist Support Group [Category E Core Participant])
Day 6 (Mon 9 Nov)
10:00 AM: Phillippa Kaufmann QC (Category H Core Participants represented by Birnberg Peirce, Hickman & Rose and Hodge Jones & Allen)
11:45 AM: Helen Steel (Category H and L Core Participant [appearing in person])
2:00 PM: Heather Williams QC (Category H Core Participants represented by Bindmans)
3:15 PM: Heather Williams QC (Category F Core Participants)
4:30 PM: Phillipa Kaufmann QC (Category H and J Core Participants instructed by Harriet Wistrich [excluding Newham Monitoring Project])
Day 7 (Tue 10 Nov)
10:00 AM: Imran Khan QC (Baroness Doreen Lawrence [Category G Core Participant])
10:30 AM: Heather Williams QC (Neville Lawrence OBE [Category G Core Participant])
12:00 Noon: Imran Khan QC (Mike Mansfield QC [Category G Core Participant])
12:30 AM: Andrew Trollope QC (Azhar Khan [Category I Core Participant])
2:00 PM: Andrew Trollope QC (Azhar Khan [Category I Core Participant])
2:30 PM: Dave Morris (Category L Core Participant [appearing in person])
3:00 PM: Imran Khan QC (The Monitoring Group [Category J Core Participant])
3:45 PM: Pete Weatherby QC (Category J Core Participant [Newham Monitoring Project] and Category K and L Core Participants)
UCPI CORE PARTICIPANT CATEGORIES
Categories are the groups into which the Inquiry divides core participants. Many NPSCPs would argue they are members of more than one category. For instance, many of the women deceived into relationships also consider themselves first and foremost political campaigners. For ease of use, we set them out below:
A: Police
B: Government
C: Police officers
D: Political organisations and politicians
E: Trade unions / Blacklist Support Group
F: Relatives of deceased individuals
G: Family of Stephen Lawrence, Duwayne Brooks & Michael Mansfield, QC
H: Individuals in relationships with undercover officers
I: Miscarriages of justice
J: Justice campaigns
K: Political activists
L: Social and environmental activists
M: Families of police officers
The public inquiry into Britain’s political secret police is, at long last, about to start.
Nearly seven years after the Home Secretary promised it, the first phase of Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings will take place over three weeks, starting on Monday 2 November.
The Inquiry will examine the actions of around 140 officers lived deep undercover as activists in political groups since 1968. These first hearings cover the earliest period, from 1968-72.
Because of measures to restrict the spread of Covid-19, the hearings will not be held in an open venue, but will instead be happening virtually.
The first few days will be spent hearing opening statements from the various parties involved. These will be live-streamed by the Inquiry. It’s presumed it will be linked from their evidence and hearings page, possibly on their YouTube channel.
After that, from Wednesday 11 November, the hearings will be taking evidence from witnesses. These hearings will not be live-streamed. Instead, there will be a live transcription with a ten-minute time delay.
From that point on, the Inquiry is hiring a venue – the Amba Hotel in Marble Arch, central London – where up to 60 people can watch a video stream, with a ten-minute time delay on what they’re allowed to mention to the outside world. In order to be present, people had to register their interest with the Inquiry before 23 October, going through the whole process for each day they want to attend, and even then registration does not guarantee entry. It’s just another of the Inquiry’s needless obstructions that we’ve grown used to over the years of preparation.
The Inquiry intends to post full transcriptions and audio files as soon as possible after a hearing has finished. At preliminary hearings, transcriptions have been published either the same evening or next morning, so we can expect something similar for the evidential hearings.
In addition to the official channels, COPS and others who represent victims of spycops will be providing coverage. On our Twitter account we will be live-tweeting the hearings (using the hashtag #SpyCopsInquiry), and providing background information and sources for topics under discussion.
We’ll also be posting daily summaries of the hearings on our Facebook page and here on our blog. We will also do a weekly update on the blog, or you can get them direct by subscribing to our email newsletter in the box at the bottom of the sidebar on this page.
There will be a socially distanced demonstration outside the Amba Hotel on the first day of the Inquiry’s restricted hearings, Wednesday 11 November, from 8-9am.
Before that, join us on Monday 2 November, the opening day of the hearings, for an online protest to make your voice heard. Take to social media, share your placards and pictures, your memories of campaigns and the spycops who infiltrated them, your hopes and fears for the Inquiry.
Show the Inquiry and the abusers it’s examining that we are watching and that we demand truth and justice.
HOW ARE THE SPYCOPS INQUIRY HEARINGS ORGANISED?
The first ‘tranche’ of hearings is taking evidence about the activities of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) from its formation in 1968 to 1982. The tranche has, in turn, been broken into three phases.
Phase 1 evidence will cover 1968-72. These are the hearings in the upcoming session from 2-19 November.
Phase 2 will examine the SDS from 1973 to 1982. These evidence hearings are expected to start on 25 January 2021.
In Phase 3, the Inquiry will hear from SDS managers 1968-1982. Dates for phase 3 haven’t been suggested yet.
The subsequent tranches will examine:
Tranche 2 – Special Demonstration Squad officers and managers and those affected by deployments (1983-1992)
Tranche 3 – Special Demonstration Squad officers and managers and those affected by deployments (1993-2007)
Tranche 4 – National Public Order Intelligence Unit officers and managers and those affected by deployments
Tranche 5 – Other undercover policing officers and managers and those affected by deployments
Tranche 6 – Management and oversight (including of intelligence dissemination) by mid and senior rank officers, other agencies and government departments
WHERE CAN I FIND OUT MORE?
For further information about the Undercover Policing Inquiry, see our UCPI FAQ.
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.
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.
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:
Albert Beale
Alice Cutler
Alice Jelinek
‘AN’
Asa Winstanley
Atif Choudhury
Ben Leamy (aka ‘Mark Morgan’)
Ben Stewart
Blacklist Support Group
Brian Healy
Ceri Gibbons
Chris Dutton
Claire Fauset
Claire Hildreth
Cllr Shane Collins
Dan Glass
Danny Chivers
Dave Morris
Dave Nellist
Dave Smith
David Kaplowitz
Debbie Vincent
Dr Donal O’Driscoll
Donna McLean
Emily Apple
Frank Bennett
Frank Smith
Gabrielle Bosley
Gerrah Selby
Grainne Gannon
Guy Taylor
Dr Harry Halpin
Hunt Saboteurs Association
Indra Donfrancesco
Jane Laporte
Jason Kirkpatrick
John Jordan
Professor Jonathan Rosenhead
‘Jane’
‘Jenny’
‘Jessica’
Juliet McBride
Kate Wilson
Ken Livingstone
Kirsty Wright
Kristina Goodwin-Jones
Leila Deen
‘Lindsey’
‘Lisa’
Lois Austin
London Animal Action
London Greenpeace
Martin Shaw
Martyn Lowe
Matt Salusbury
‘MCD’
Mel Evans
Merrick Cork
Reverend Dr Michael Carroll
Michael Zeitlin
Michael Zeitlin on behalf of Advisory Service for Squatters
Despite grave reservations from civil liberties groups and those who have been targeted by Britain’s political secret police, the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill passed its third reading in the House of Commons yesterday and will now go to the Lords.
It will allow police and a range of other state agencies to self-authorise their agents to commit any crime at all.
This is not about foiling deadly terrorist plots, as laws and agencies already exist to do that. Instead, it will give carte blanche to the spycops to abuse citizens campaigning for social change. It specifically includes protecting ‘economic wellbeing’, which would make strikes, boycotts, blockades and pickets legitimate targets for the most serious crimes.
Human Rights Defeated in Parliament
Labour introduced a number of amendments to limit the powers of the Bill, including outlawing the infiltration of trade unions, deceiving people into sexual relationships, and the use of children in spying. All amendments were defeated. Nonetheless, Labour whipped MPs to abstain.
All Plaid Cymru, SDLP and Green MPs voted against it, as did most SNP and Liberal Democrat MPs and one Conservative, Adam Afriyie.
Additionally, a total of 34 Labour MPs defied their leadership to vote against the Bill. Seven of them had to resign positions to do so; shadow schools minister Margaret Greenwood, shadow Treasury minister Dan Carden, and Parliamentary private secretaries Navendu Mishra, Kim Johnson, Mary Foy, Rachel Hopkins, and Sarah Owen.
Many of us have been shocked by the failure of Labour to oppose this attack on democratic freedoms, personal security, and the labour movement in particular.
The targeted MPs were from the full width of Labour’s political spectrum. Several of them made outraged statements to parliament at the time, demanding to see their files.
Here are a few excerpts from that afternoon (with transcripts and closed captions for accessibility).
Peter Hain
Peter Hain was an active anti-racist campaigner in the 1970s and 1980s before he became a Labour MP in 1991. He was a minister for more than a decade following Labour’s 1997 election victory. He is a core participant at the Undercover Policing Inquiry.
In March 2015, he listed his fellow Labour MPs known to not only have been spied on as earlier campaigners, but having it continue while they were MPs who were supposedly protected by the ‘Wilson Doctrine’, a convention that prohibits the security services from targeting parliamentarians.
Peter Hain:
‘Would he pass on to the Home Secretary my request that she ensures that the remit of the public inquiry she’s announced into the operations of the Special Demonstration Squad includes surveillance of MPs publicly named by Peter Francis when he was an undercover officer between 1990 and 2001?
Is she aware – and is he aware – that aside from myself he saw a Special Branch file on my Right Honourable friend the member for Blackburn [Jack Straw] who was actually Home Secretary for four of these years, and files on my Right Honourable friends the members for Camberwell and Peckham [Harriet Harman] and Lewisham Deptford [Joan Ruddock] and my Honourable friends the members for Hackney North and Stoke Newington [Diane Abbott], Islington North [Jeremy Corbyn], and Bolsover [Dennis Skinner], as well as former colleagues Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone and Bernie Grant?
Did this monitoring affect our ability as MPs to speak confidentially with constituents? What, if any, impact did that have on our ability to represent them properly? We know for example that the campaign to get justice for Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager murdered by racists, was infiltrated by the SDS [Special Demonstration Squad], and that the police blocked a proper prosecution.
Did police infiltrators in the Lawrence campaign exploit private information shared by constituents or lawyers with any of us as MPs? Will the Home Office in order the police to disclose all relevant information and to each of the MPs affected our complete individual personal registry files?
It is hardly revelatory that the Special Branch had a file on people like me dating back forty years ago to anti-apartheid or Anti-Nazi League activist days because we were seen through a cold war prism as subversive. Even though we vigorously opposed Stalinism that didn’t stop us being lumped together with Moscow sympathisers. But surely the fact that these files were still active for at least ten years whilst we were MPs raises fundamental questions about parliamentary sovereignty and privilege, principles which are vital to our democracy.
It is one thing to have a police file on an MP suspected of crime, child abuse, or even co-operating with terrorism, but quite another to maintain one deriving from campaigns promoting values of social justice, human rights and equal opportunities which are shared by millions of British people. Surely, Mr Speaker, that means travelling down the road that endangers the liberty of us all.’
Jack Straw
The spycops didn’t just target members of the government who were supposedly their superiors, but they specifically spied on Jack Straw when he was Home Secretary and therefore ultimately in charge of the police.
Straw noted the sinister implication that it may well have been motivated by a desire to prevent police being held to account over the institutional racism that enfeebled their investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
Jack Straw:
‘Does the Minister accept that if these allegations are correct then we have an extraordinary situation where I as Home Secretary – and for three years from ’97 to 2000, was the police authority for the Metropolitan Police – not only knew nothing whatever about what appears to have been going on within the Metropolitan Police but may also have been subject to unlawful surveillance myself as Home Secretary? That ought to be looked at.
But the trigger, what appears to be the trigger, which is much more serious ought to be looked at, which was my decision, taken against a lot of reluctance by the Metropolitan Police, to establish a full judicial inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. And what is completely unacceptable was that it appears that elements of the Metropolitan Police were themselves spying on the bereaved family of Stephen Lawrence.’
Joan Ruddock
Like Peter Hain, Joan Ruddock was spied on earlier campaigning work, in her case the peace movement. She was weeks away from stepping down as an MP and lamented the lack of leverage she had to force answers from the police.
Joan Ruddock:
‘Thank you, Mr Speaker. In 1981 I was elected the chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and two years later an MI5 agent, Cathy Massiter, blew the whistle on the surveillance the phone taps and the collection of Special Branch reports had been undertaken on me. She cited political interference in the service. She said what had happened was illegal and she resigned.
Now, in ’87 I became a member of this House. I took the loyal oath. In 1997 I became a minister. I subsequently signed the Official Secrets Act. How is it that surveillance was carried out on me all of that time? I want to know, and get the Minister to understand, who authorised that surveillance? On what grounds was the surveillance authorised?
And he needs to answer those questions because this is a political issue, it is his responsibility, the Home Office’s and Home Secretary’s responsibility.
Mr Speaker, I am leaving this house. I can do no more than make these points, put in an FoI [Freedom of Information request] to the commissioner, write to the Home Secretary. But frankly, it is something that affects all MPs, and even though I leave he needs to do something and the future government of this House needs to ensure that there is a proper investigation. This should never ever have happened to members of this House.’
David Davis
From the other side of the chamber, Conservative MP David Davis emphasised the fact that spycops is not only a historic scandal, and insisted that the Undercover Policing Inquiry must examine activity right up to the present.
David Davis:
‘Thank you, Mr Speaker. In the last year there have been a number of revelations about the police improperly hacking into journalists’ telephone calls, improperly breaching legal privilege, and using the information they obtained from breaching legal privilege of suspects, and the government has been very coy about responding to my requests about the current state of the Wilson Doctrine.
If these allegations that have come out now are true, it indicates the Wilson Doctrine was broken in spirit if not in the letter.
Can he make sure that the inquiry actually comes right up to date in terms of what it looks into, and that it is drawn broadly enough to ensure that none of these risks exist today?’
Harriet Harman
Two MPs demanded to see the release of their files; Harriet Harman, then-Duputy Leader of the Labour Party, and a relatively unknown but long-serving backbencher by the name of Jeremy Corbyn.
Harman had been an MP for more than thirty years at the time she spoke in 2015. Not for the first time, she defended the right to political dissent without interference from spycops and demanded to see her full file.
Harriet Harman:
‘I’d like to ask the Minister – it’s more important than just feeding in our views to an inquiry, the question is what he decides – and I would like him to assure me that he, the government, will let me see a full copy of my file.
In the 70s and the 1980s when I was at Brent Law Centre and then at Liberty, I was campaigning for the rights of women, for the rights of workers, and the right to demonstrate. None of that was against the law. None of that was undermining our democracy. On the contrary, it was actually essential for our democracy.
The security services do an important job, and the government of course should support them, but if they overstep the mark the government must hold them to account. So can I repeat a request I made to the previous government that was turned down and make it again to this government in the light of these new revelations.
Will he give me an assurance that this government will release to me a full copy of my file?’
Harriet Harman is still an MP. She voted for several of the amendments to the CHIS Bill but, after they failed, she abstained on the final vote.
Jeremy Corbyn
Jeremy Corbyn is the other spied-on Labour MP who is still in the Commons. He defied the leadership to vote against the CHIS Bill last night.
Back in 2015, Corbyn’s outrage at the injustice was palpable as he spoke to the House.
Jeremy Corbyn:
‘Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m pleased that this story has finally come out and as members of parliament we’re in a position to raise questions with the Home Office and demand the truth come out. Unfortunately many, many others unknown to us who were under surveillance do not have that opportunity.
The question is one of accountability of the Metropolitan Police. Who authorised this tapping? Who knew about it? Did the Home Secretary or successive Home Secretaries know about it? If they did, why didn’t they accept the Wilson Doctrine in respect of MPs? Why did they allow this covert operation to go on within the Metropolitan Police?
And I’m very surprised that, in his answer a few moments ago, he said the files might be released to us but they may have to be redacted for security reasons. If I’m under surveillance, or the late Bernie Grant or any of my friends are under surveillance, and whatever meetings we were at they were presumably there, whatever phone calls we made they were presumably recording, I think we have a right to know about that.
We represent constituents. We’re in a position of trust with our constituents. That trust is betrayed by this invasion of our privacy by the Metropolitan Police and I ask the Minister again can we each of us have a full unredacted version of everything that was written about us, every piece of surveillance that was undertaken of us, our families and our friends?’
Still No Answers, What Next?
All their requests to see their files were, like everyone else’s, ignored by the police. Five years later and those MPs, like the rest of us, are still waiting for answers.
The public inquiry into undercover political policing finally starts on 2 November, seven years after it was promised by the Home Secretary. It has granted anonymity to most spycops officers, so even if it does reveal some truth, there is little chance of proper accountability.
A major part of the Inquiry’s remit is to make recommendations for the future. But if the CHIS Bill becomes law, it turns the Inquiry into an academic historic exercise, with the spycops of the future able to commit the most heinous abuses with impunity.
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Undercover Policing Inquiry
Tranche 1, Phase 1, Day 5
On Monday 2 November, the Undercover Policing Inquiry begins after five years of preliminary work.
Despite grave reservations from civil liberties groups and those who have been targeted by Britain’s political secret police, the