The Undercover Policing Inquiry is about to resume hearing live evidence. The week starting 1 July will see Opening Statements from Core Participants delivered online. Live witness evidence will begin on 8 July (and victims of police spying will be holding a press conference – see below).
This second tranche of hearings will cover the 1980s and 1990s, which saw a massive escalation in the use of abusive police tactics, as police spying expanded to include civil society groups such as CND, London Greenpeace, Freedom Press and the Socialist Workers Party, who will all be giving evidence this summer.
This period also included some of the most controversial deployments, including (but not limited to) officers such as Bob Lambert, Andy Coles, John Dines, and ‘Matt Rayner’, who all deceived women into long-term intimate relationships.
Lambert fathered a child whilst undercover, and is accused of planting an incendiary device in a department store to further his undercover ‘legend’, before withdrawing from the field to take over management of the entire Special Demonstration Squad (SDS). Coles went on to write the training manual for the SDS and train officers in the later undercover unit, the NPOIU.
INQUIRY IN CRISIS
However, the Inquiry is facing a growing crisis. Hearings about the most controversial deployments in Tranche 2 have already been postponed due to the inquiry’s ongoing failure to provide full disclosure of the underlying police documents, and tens of thousands of pages of evidence are being published at the absolute last minute.
This makes it impossible for the victims (or indeed journalists) to effectively respond, or properly analyse the material to expose the full extent of police wrongdoing, which was the original purpose of this Inquiry.
After spending nine years and over £82 million on lengthy processes behind closed doors (plus Metropolitan Police spending an additional £62 million to defend the indefensible), Britain’s most secretive ‘public’ inquiry appears to be running out of time and political will.
Having heard only the first decade’s worth of evidence in an investigation that ought to span fifty years, the Chair published an interim report in June 2023. His findings were absolutely damning. The secret political policing operations were unjustifiable and should have been shut down in the 1970s. Instead they were covered up and sanctioned at the highest levels of government.
AFTER THE DELAYS, THE RUSH
Following that report, the government is bringing intense pressure to bear on the Inquiry to hasten its investigations to an end. The Inquiry is now required to hear all remaining evidence and deliver a final report by the end of 2026, leading to an apparent rush to judgment. Corners are being cut, and the victims of these police abuses are being held to impossible deadlines, or simply squeezed out altogether.The public inquiry into Britain’s political police, having wasted years in dealng with police delays and granting guilty officers anonymity, is now being rushed to finish, excluding many of the key campaigns that were infiltrated.att
Core Participants are becoming increasingly restless. It is clear, as we move towards the investigation of more recent police practices in the 21st Century, that the Inquiry barely intends to scratch the surface.
Tranche 3 disclosure has already begun, but the Inquiry has said it intends to focus on individuals and will not be providing disclosure or seeking evidence about spying on some of the most influential political groups: environmental direct action groups such as Climate Camp, Earth First!, Greenpeace or the Newbury Bypass and other road protest campaigns; Disarm DSEi and anti-war campaigners; social centres, such as the Sumac Centre or squatted social centres in London.
All of them will be excluded from the investigations despite having been specific targets of multiple undercover operations over many years.
JUSTICE RUSHED IS JUSTICE DENIED
At the start of this Inquiry, Lord Justice Pitchford, the original Chair, said:
“My overall duty in the conduct of the Inquiry is to act fairly.”
That duty of fairness has now been sacrificed to a new Home Office imperative of closing the book on uncomfortable revelations as fast as possible.
However, we, the victims of these abusive policing operations, will not allow the truth to be sidelined. So if you are finding it all a bit hard to follow, do not despair.
Campaigners and victims of spycops abuses will be picketing the inquiry venue and on the first day of in person hearings, and we will hold a press briefing at 9am on 8 July, outside the International Dispute Resolution Centre, 1 Paternoster Lane, St. Paul’s, London EC4M 7BQ.
For more about the Undercover Policing Inquiry, see our UCPI FAQ.
A Metropolitan Police investigation has upheld a complaint by a woman deceived into a relationship by former undercover officer Andy Coles.
The Met have found Jessica’s claims credible and ruled that Coles would face charges of gross misconduct if he were still a serving officer.
It’s a huge blow to Coles, who has consistently denied Jessica’s account of his abuse as he tries to shore up his crumbling credibility as a city councillor and public figure.
ANDY COLES: LYING THEN
Andy Coles was a member of the Metropolitan Police’s disgraced Special Demonstration Squad. In the 1990s he spent four years undercover as peace and animal rights activist ‘Andy Davey’. Like many other officers in Britain’s political secret police, Coles abused his role to deceive women into sexual relationships. The most significant of these was a woman known as ‘Jessica’.
Jessica was, as Coles knew, a vulnerable teenager at the time. He told her he was a 24 year old who shared her worldview and became her first proper boyfriend. In reality, he was 32 and married, paid to be sent into her life to betray the values she held dear.
The relationship lasted a year. Two other women, Emily and Joy, have also spoken about being the target of his unwanted sexual attentions during his deployment.
Coles went on to have a career in Special Branch, managing and training other officers for the same role as he’d held.
He retired from the police in 2012, about a year after the spycops scandal broke. In Peterborough he became a Conservative member of the City Council for Fletton and Woodston ward, and was appointed to the post of Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for Cambridgeshire.
When he was exposed in 2017, Coles resigned as Deputy PCC within hours without explanation. However, seemingly believing lower standards apply to councillors than Deputy PCCs, he did not step down as a councillor. Every council meeting since then has seen protests calling for his resignation. His seat will be up for re-election in May this year.
ANDY COLES: LYING NOW
A year later, in 2018, the Undercover Policing Inquiry confirmed that he had indeed been a Special Demonstration Squad officer. Coles released twoprepared statements to the press, which only confirmed what the Inquiry had said, and flatly denied what he called the ‘lurid allegations’ made by Jessica:
‘The allegation the ALF activist known as “Jessica” makes that I had a sexual relationship with her for over a year while undercover are [sic] completely untrue’.
The Undercover Policing Inquiry, which has access to secret police files, had already granted Jessica ‘core participant’ status in August 2017. They have only given that designation to around 200 of the most seriously affected victims of spycops. Clearly, they find her account credible too.
Through his lawyer, he told the media yesterday that he still denies having ‘an inappropriate relationship’ with Jessica.
Now that the relationship is officially regarded as credible, he is perhaps trying to insert some room for manoeuvre and suggests that even if he did have a relationship it was somehow ‘appropriate’. That quite plainly cannot be true, as has been repeatedly and unequivocally established by a range of senior officers and official investigations.
NEVER APPROPRIATE
Chief Constable Mick Creedon produced a series of reports on the political secret police under the aegis of Operation Herne, and in 2014 he was clear:
‘There are and never have been any circumstances where it would be appropriate for such covertly deployed officers to engage in intimate sexual relationships with those they are employed to infiltrate and target. Such an activity can only be seen as an abject failure of the deployment, a gross abuse of their role and their position as a police officer and an individual and organisational failing.’
When the Metropolitan Police gave their landmark apology to women deceived into relationships in 2015, two years before Jessica found out the truth about Coles, they said:
‘some officers, acting undercover whilst seeking to infiltrate protest groups, entered into long-term intimate sexual relationships with women which were abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong… these relationships were a violation of the women’s human rights, an abuse of police power and caused significant trauma. 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’.
‘It is grossly unprofessional. It is a diversion from what they are there to do. It is morally wrong because people have been put there to do a particular task and people have got trust in them. It is never acceptable under any circumstances… for them to engage in sex with any subject they come into contact with.’
When his deployment ended in 1995, Andy Coles updated the Special Demonstration Squad’s Tradecraft Manual to incorporate his experience and methods, including tips on conducting the kinds of relationship he now denies having.
After this, he trained the first undercover officers in the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), a new sister unit to the Special Demonstration Squad, teaching them to steal the identities of dead children. He went on to become Head of Training for the NPOIU’s oversight body ACPO-TAM as they deployed a number of the most notorious spycops who committed the same kind of abuses, such as Mark Kennedy.
WHAT’S HE GOT TO HIDE?
During the Met’s investigation into Jessica’s complaint, Coles was interviewed twice under caution and both times he supplied a prepared statement. He refused to answer questions.
Why did he resign as Deputy PCC? Why did he refuse to answer questions put to him by his old colleagues at the Metropolitan Police? Why does he continually refuse to comment, except to confirm what’s officially concretely established and deny the rest?
These are not the actions of someone who believes they have done nothing wrong. They are more like the response of someone who is desperately trying to hide from the truth.
The fact that his old colleagues at the Met, not known for their bias against themselves, have found Jessica’s report of a relationship credible makes Coles’s desperate denials appear transparently false.
‘The Metropolitan Police has taken no further action against me’
That’s an extraordinary response to the Met upholding a complaint against him and announcing that they would bring the most serious disciplinary charges against him if only it were still in their power to do so.
Despite the Met’s investigators having spoken to many people who knew Coles and Jessica at the time, and seen documentary proof such as contemporaneous letters, Coles desperately repeats his lie:
‘I deny the accusations made completely. I denied them when they were first made, I deny them now’
While his current friends and colleagues on the council may forgive his abuse of a woman thirty years ago, if he admits it happened it means he has been lying to them since 2017. They would not look so benevolently on that. So he goes on, as the evidence piles up all around him, lying to his peers and compounding the damage he has done to Jessica.
STALLING AS HIS LIES ARE FALLING
Coles is still refusing to answer, merely saying through his lawyer that ‘it would not be appropriate to respond outside of the Inquiry’.
He talks as if the Inquiry is a court and he might prejudice a fair trial. It’s yet another deceit he is playing on the public. He knows full well that the inquiry process does not restrict him at all and that he is at liberty to say what he wants. Any number of former spycops have given interviews to television and press, made public appearances, one even hired a publicity agent.
Coles knows this is merely a way to kick the can down the road. Though the Inquiry is not a court of any kind, it is as slow as any process in the judicial system. Initiated six years ago and originally scheduled to conclude in summer 2018, it has yet to begin. There are no dates set for officers from Coles’ era to give evidence, and the whole thing is not expected to finish until 2025 at the earliest.
It leaves Coles continuing in his respected public role while Jessica – and the wider public – still wait for the truth about full extent of Britain’s counter-democratic secret police units.
‘I’m pleased the complaint was upheld however I am disappointed at the lack of accountability. Andy Coles was allowed to retire in 2013 at a time when the revelations about undercover officers having sexual relationships and even children with unsuspecting women had started to come out. I would like to know what his superior officers knew or ought to have known about our relationship. Was he properly supervised?
‘Kate Wilson is in court later this week fighting to find answers to what happened to her. Her relationship with an undercover police officer happened a decade after mine. This is not historic abuse. It’s systematic and institutionalised sexism in the police.’
Men who abuse their public roles to violate women should not be in positions of civic trust. This isn’t just about what he did 30 years ago, appalling as that was. This is also about his unrelenting deviousness and lack of integrity today.
And whether you can be at the protest or not, please sign and share the petition launched by one of Coles’ fellow councillors calling on him to resign.
What: Demonstration outside Peterborough City Council meeting calling for former abusive spycop Councillor Andy Coles to resign.
Where: Town Hall, St Peter’s Road, Peterborough PE1 1YX (rear entrance; the main Bridge Street entrance is not usually used)
When: 6pm, Wednesday 6 March 2019
Why: Andy Coles deceived a teenager into an intimate relationship when he was an undercover officer. He is a city councillor in Peterborough, a position unfit for someone who abuses a role of public trust to violate fundamental human rights.
“Although not legally underage, I feel that my youth and vulnerability were used to target me. I was groomed by someone much older, and far more experienced… I was manipulated into having a sexual relationship with him. I didn’t even know his real name.”
It is entirely inappropriate for someone who has committed these admitted human rights abuses to be in a position of respect and authority. Andy Coles has resigned his post as Deputy Police & Crime Commissioner, and he must now step down from his post as Councillor as well.
Previous demonstrations have seen a broad spectrum of people attending, and calls for his resignation have attracted cross-party support on the council.
It is important that the Andy Coles and the Council see the public outrage at these revelations. Without this, they may be able to sweep it under the carpet.
Coles is one in an ever increasing line of undercover police revealed to have abused women in this way, and it is essential that we demand accountability for these actions.
Join us outside the next Peterborough Council meeting on Wednesday 6 March at 6pm, ahead of the council meeting at 7pm.
Human Rights Abuser Andy Coles banner made by Jessica, Peterborough Town Hall
What: Demonstration outside Peterborough City Council meeting calling for former abusive spycop Councillor Andy Coles to resign.
Where: Town Hall, St Peter’s Road, Peterborough PE1 1YX (rear entrance; the main Bridge Street entrance is not usually used)
When: 6pm, Wednesday 23 January 2019
Why: Andy Coles deceived a teenager into an intimate relationship when he was an undercover officer. He is a city councillor in Peterborough, a position unfit for someone who abuses a role of public trust to violate fundamental human rights.
“Although not legally underage, I feel that my youth and vulnerability were used to target me. I was groomed by someone much older, and far more experienced… I was manipulated into having a sexual relationship with him. I didn’t even know his real name.”
It is entirely inappropriate for someone who has committed these admitted human rights abuses to be in a position of respect and authority. Andy Coles has resigned his post as Deputy Police & Crime Commissioner, and he must now step down from his post as Councillor as well.
Previous demonstrations have seen a broad spectrum of people attending, and calls for his resignation have attracted cross-party support on the council.
It is important that the Andy Coles and the Council see the public outrage at these revelations. Without this, they may be able to sweep it under the carpet.
Coles is one in an ever increasing line of undercover police revealed to have abused women in this way, and it is essential that we demand accountability for these actions.
Join us outside the next Peterborough Council meeting on Wednesday 23 January at 6pm, ahead of the council meeting at 7pm.
Human Rights Abuser Andy Coles banner made by Jessica, Peterborough Town Hall
He spent four years undercover infiltrating peace and animal rights campaigns, and deceived a vulnerable teenager, ‘Jessica‘, into a year-long relationship. Such activity by the Special Demonstration Squad is one of the darkest parts of Metropolitan Police history, and Met lawyers admit it breaches the fundamental right to freedom from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment.
When his deployment ended, Coles wrote the Special Demonstration Squad’s Tradecraft Manual, which gives instructions on how to conduct sexual relationships with women they’re spying on, and how to steal the identities of dead children.
On exposure on May last year, he locked all his social media accounts. Though he resigned as Deputy PCC, he retains his seat on Peterborough City Council. He has still given no interviews to explain himself, merely several short prepared statements.
However, in recent months he has unlocked his social media and now he is booked to speak on policing issues to the AGM of the Longthorpe and Netherton Residents Association.
Astonishingly, he is speaking alongside the person who took over the Deputy PCC role after Coles was forced to resign, Ray Bisby.
Men who abuse their public roles in order to violate citizens should not be in positions of civic trust. Most especially, they should not be seen as credible voices on the work of the very institution whose power they abused.
Join us to protest about Coles’ continued role in public life.
DATE: [scheduled for 19 December, now postponed]
PLACE: St. Jude’s Church, Cranford Drive, Peterborough PE3 7EW
Former undercover police officer Andy Coles has finally broken his silence with a startling lie. Despite three women testifying about his sexual predation, he has flatly denied it.
Coles was in the SDS from 1991-95. During that time he was sexually aggressive to a number of women he spied on, and groomed a vulnerable teenager – known as ‘Jessica‘ – into a year-long sexual relationship.
As the Met’s Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt made plain in 2015:
‘Some officers, acting undercover whilst seeking to infiltrate protest groups, entered into long-term intimate sexual relationships with women which were abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong. I acknowledge that these relationships were a violation of the women’s human rights, an abuse of police power and caused significant trauma.’
Jessica has been granted core participant status at the public inquiry into undercover policing. She is also bringing legal action against the Met for Coles’ abuse.
As soon as Coles was exposed in 2017, he resigned as Cambridgeshire’s Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner. However, he has clung on to other positions of public trust, including his Peterborough City Council seat and his governorship at two schools in the city.
He has locked all his social media accounts and refused to comment on the issue at all. Coles only broke his silence last month when the public inquiry confirmed he had been an SDS spycop.
‘I am pleased at last to be able to confirm that in my past I was deployed as an undercover police officer to infiltrate some of the most committed and violent animal liberation extremists operating in the UK in the early 1990s.’
He knows there is no excuse for spycops deceiving women into sexual relationships, so he has taken the only option to shore up his social prestige, a path well-trodden by other infamous sexual abusers with a public profile to protect. He claims it didn’t happen.
In a second statement he says that there simply was no relationship with Jessica.
‘The allegation the ALF activist known as “Jessica” makes that I had a sexual relationship with her for over a year while undercover are completely untrue.’
He refuses to admit anything further, hiding behind the Undercover Policing Inquiry.
‘The right place to make further comment in this case is in the Public Inquiry where I welcome the opportunity to give my evidence in due course.’
Coles speaks as if he had been prevented from commenting, and as if the public inquiry is a court that will examine all the evidence of his deployment and come to a judgement. He knows none of that is true.
The public inquiry is not a criminal court, it is perfectly proper to discuss what it will examine. Indeed, several spycops have given extensive interviews to the media, including his former manager Bob Lambert.
SCARE QUOTES
Andy Coles’ SDS Tradecraft Manual author credit
He exaggerates the threat from the animal rights activists he infiltrated (who mostly leafleted and occasionally freed some animals from breeders), and fails to mention the peace campaigns he spied on.
The most well-known photo of him whilst undercover was taken after a day of protest at the US air force base at Fairford, where Coles and comrades had tied peace symbols to the fence.
Just after his deployment ended in 1995, he wrote the SDS’ Tradecraft Manual. He devoted a section of it to infiltrating pacifist organisations.
It was something he was well acquainted with – the author credit on the manual said he infiltrated ‘environmentalist & pacifist’ groups as well as animal rights.
In his rush to justify himself by making the people he spied on appear scary, Coles excludes any mention of this aspect of his deceit.
If the activists he spied on really were as terrifying as he now claims, why didn’t he get them arrested? To this day, Jessica does not have a criminal record.
After his statement last month, Coles was commended on Twitter by the Countryside Alliance’s hunting campaign.
Coles replied:
‘Thank you. I now know from personal experience how it feels to be targeted by the anti-democratic radical fringe I infiltrated. I look forward to giving my evidence at the undercover policing inquiry.’
It’s notable that his statement speaks about the violence of animal rights activists and welcomes the support of hunters, as it’s the opposite of what he told his colleagues at the time.
Extract on hunters from SDS Tradecraft Manual written by Andy Coles, 1995
His Tradecraft Manual doesn’t give details of violence by activists, but he does talk in damning terms about violence done to them by uniformed police and hunters.
‘I know that in the future I will have nothing but contempt for fox hunters and in particular their terriermen.’
In his tweet, Coles said he infiltrated ‘the anti-democratic radical fringe’. It is a peculiar term for him to use. Pressure groups that Coles infiltrated, such as the London Boots Action Group who leafleted outside Boots shops in protest at animal testing, are a key part of democratic culture. Democracy is much more than political parties.
SPOILING THE PARTY
That said, the SDS spied on political parties too. They targeted at least ten Labour MPs including Jeremy Corbyn, Jack Straw, Bernie Grant and Diane Abbott. They began spying on Jenny Jones, Green Party member of the Greater London Assembly, after she was elected and continued for over ten years. These are all democratically elected public figures.
They spied on numerous trade unions, including the Fire Brigades Union and Communication Workers Union. They illegally gave information on citizens to a blacklist of construction workers that unlawfully prevented thousands of people from getting work. Again, there is no clandestine activity nor threat to public safety. It is the deliberate undermining of people exercising their democratic rights. The Special Demonstration Squad was a counter-democratic organisation.
IMPLAUSIBLE DENIAL
After they have been unmasked as members of the disgraced secret police units, many spycops hide from the public. The few who do speak tend to follow the same pattern of admitting a few of the more innocuous details, denying their more serious abuses no matter how many witnesses saw it, and demonising the people they spied on.
Bob Lambert issued an apology to one of the women he deceived into a relationship, Belinda Harvey, but he omitted any mention of his two-year relationship with Jacqui, with whom he had a child and shared a home.
Mark Kennedy sold his story to the Mail on Sunday under the headline ‘I Fear For My Life’. He testified to parliament but insisted he had only had two sexual relationships with women he spied on whilst an undercover officer. The Met have already apologised to and compensated four who had significant relationships with him, and those who knew him can name many more.
Andy Coles has chosen this route, admitting some details but denying the most damaging details even though, as with Kennedy, everyone around him at the time saw him do it.
The Met’s self-investigation into spycops, Operation Herne, was very clear in 2014:
‘there are and never have been any circumstances where it would be appropriate for such covertly deployed officers to engage in intimate sexual relationships with those they are employed to infiltrate and target. Such an activity can only be seen as an abject failure of the deployment, a gross abuse of their role and their position as a police officer and an individual and organisational failing.’
Coles, however, thinks differently. His Tradecraft Manual for undercover police officers gives tips on how to handle a sexual relationship with people being spied on.
‘you should try to have fleeting, disastrous relationships with individuals who are not important to your sources of information.’
This is an explicit instruction to cause anguish and distress. It is premeditated, calculated abuse. Coles is drawing from his own experience here. Whilst a year is scarcely ‘fleeting’, the relationship with Jessica was certainly disastrous.
Specifying ‘individuals who are not important to your sources of information’ is particularly callous. Nobody deserves to be treated this way. Indeed, the Met have conceded it breaches the right to freedom from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment – an absolute right that it cannot ever be justified to breach.
Even if the officer has the warped disdain to believe the targeted activists deserve it, Coles specifically instructs officers to go for more peripheral figures around the group being spied on, as Lambert did with Belinda Harvey.
What Jessica and the others are saying is very damaging to Coles’ social standing – Andy Coles is violator of human rights and sexual abuser of women. English libel laws are notoriously biased towards the subject; they do not have to prove an allegation false, instead their accuser has to prove the claim is true. Why doesn’t Andy Coles take legal action? Instead, it is Jessica suing the Met for Coles’ abuse.
His total denial of his relationship with her comes from an inhuman, degrading and calculating place. Well aware that it cannot be justified, he tries to shield himself from accountability by pretending the public inquiry is some sort of court case, and that it would prejudice a trial to speak about ongoing criminal proceedings. He knows this is nonsense.
He must surely be aware that, in doing this, he is compounding the damage he has done to Jessica and other women. This is not something that can be dismissed as something from long ago, this is the measure of the man’s character today.
Here is Jessica talking about Andy Coles’ abuse. Decide for yourself who you think is the liar.
Victims walk out of the Undercover Policing Inquiry, 21 March 2018
It’s been such a hectic week in the spycops scandal that nobody can have properly kept up!
In no particular order, here’s a list of twelve key events and revelations in the last six days:
1) Roger Pearce – who was spycops officer ‘Roger Thorley’ – was revealed as having written what the Inquiry called ‘virulently anti-police’ articles for Freedom Newspaper, who have now been granted core participant status at the public inquiry.
2) The announcement of the Secret Spycops Ball, a comedy benefit on 8 July for Police Spies Out of Lives, featuring Stewart Lee, Evelyn Mok, Mark Steel & Rob Newman. Be quick, most tickets have already been sold!
3) A new spycop has been named – Special Demonstration Squad officer ‘Michael Scott’ infiltrated the Young Liberals, Anti-Apartheid Movement, and Workers Revolutionary Party, 1971-76.
This means political parties targeted by Britain’s political secret police include:
Liberal Party
Labour Party
Green Party
Socialist Party
Independent Labour Party
Socialist Workers Party
Workers Revolutionary Party
British National Party
4) Kate Wilson, who was deceived into a relationship by undercover police officer Mark Kennedy, secured an admission from the Met that Kennedy’s managers acquiesced to the relationship. This is surely the death knell for the claim by senior police that such abuse was ‘rogue officers’ acting on their own initiative.
5) In Paris, after ten years the Tarnac defendants have finally come to court. Originally arrested for terrorism after security services linked them to damage to a train line, and an anonymous anarchist book, the accused have garnered huge support in France.
Under public pressure, the terrorism charges have been dropped, but the case still partially rests on unreliable intelligence from British undercover police officer Mark Kennedy. The Canary published secret police files, including excerpts from Kennedy’s notebook.
6) The Undercover Policing Inquiry finally confirmed Andy Coles was a spycop, a year since he was exposed as another one who deceived a woman into a long-term relationship, and was forced to resign as Cambridgeshire’s Deputy Police & Crime Commissioner.
7) Having been officially outed, Andy Coles ended his silence and not only defended his deployment but went full Rolf Harris and simply denied his year-long relationship with Jessica ever happened!
Having resigned from his post as Deputy PCC, he is desperately clinging to his Peterborough City Council seat and school governorship. He must step down from these too – men who abuse their power to sexually exploit the citizens they’re supposed to serve should not be in positions of public trust. Follow the Sack Andy Coles campaign for more info.
8) Victims of spycops and their entire legal team walked out of a hearing of the public inquiry, having told the Chair, Sir John Mitting, that he should resign or get a panel of people who understand the issues. We published the full blistering speech to Mitting by the victims’ counsel, Philippa Kaufmann QC.
9) As organisations who were spied on, both the Fire Brigades Union and Unite the Union issued statements supporting the walkout from the Inquiry.
Doreen Lawrence also gave a strong warning to the Inquiry about Mitting:
‘Theresa May, then-Home Secretary and now Prime Minister promised me a truly thorough, transparent and accountable inquiry. This has turned into anything but that and before any more public money is spent on an Inquiry which does not achieve this, the chair should resign or continue with a panel which is not naive or old fashioned and which understands my concerns about policing and what I went through. Anything less than this will lead me to consider carefully whether I should continue to participate in this inquiry.’
10) The Met finally admitted that Special Branch officers illegally supplied info on political activists for construction industry blacklisting. Thousands of people were denied work for asserting their legal rights, such as union membership or wanting proper safety equipment.
Most major construction firms supplied and used the list, and police added to the blacklist’s files with information on citizens’ political and union activity. It’s has been known for some time that Special Demonstration Squad officer Mark Jenner was an active member of construction union UCATT, and here is Carlo Neri on a construction industry in 2004.
11) A less redacted version of the Special Demonstration Squad’s tradecraft manual was released, a book dripping with disdain for not only those spied upon but every other person that spycops into contact with. Officer Andy Coles was named as the author.
12) Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb, aka the Green Party’s Jenny Jones, challenged the government in the House of Lords about the failure of the public inquiry.
‘the cases we know about are only the ones we have heard about: those are the only police names in the public realm. Until we know all the names of the undercover police we will not know how many victims there were.’
At the end of the busiest week ever in the spycops scandal, with demands for justice coming from ever larger numbers of people, the push for truth has never been stronger.
There are two new names on the list of known officers from Britain’s political secret police; Christine Green and Bob Stubbs.
The Undercover Research Group published a profile of Christine Green on Sunday. She infiltrated South London animal rights groups from 1994-2000, seemingly as a replacement for Andy Coles.
She became a regular hunt saboteur and protester, as well as editing London Animal Rights News and helping out at an animal sanctuary.
After her deployment ended, she started living with a man she had spied on called Tom, who had served a prison sentence for violence against a hunter (which he emphasises was an act of self-defence). More than a decade later, they are still together.
She is the first woman officer known to have had a long-term relationship with someone she spied on, although it is unclear if the relationship began whilst she was still undercover.
WEASEL WORDS
This story, already odd even by the standards of the spycops scandal when it was published on Sunday, took a swift turn for the bizarre.
On Tuesday the Metropolitan Police issued a public apology to Hampshire police. It turns out Christine Green had been authorised by the her Met Special Demonstration Squad managers to take part in a raid on a Hampshire mink farm in 1998.
Around 6,000 mink were released into the wild. Hampshire police launched an investigation at the time, though no charges were ever brought. With their new information they’ve looked into it again but decided there is still no chance of a successful prosecution.
‘STOATS AMAZE BALLS-UP: How the Met kept a (muste)lid on its spycop’s involvement in a huge mink release from a site on a neighbouring police force’s patch’
BOBBING UP
With a little less drama, the Undercover Policing Inquiry added another name to the list on Tuesday: ‘Bob Stubbs’ infiltrated International Socialists/ Socialist Workers’ Party 1971-76. The Inquiry decided in November not to publish Stubbs’ real name.
It can be very difficult to do anything with sparse information such as this. Asking people if they remember a bloke called Bob from 40 years ago is often met with an understandably hazy reply. If the Inquiry really wanted the people who knew an officer to come forward, it would locate and publish a photo of the officer along with the cover name.
It would not significantly increase any risk to the officer. With the passage of time, whatever they looked like then will be substantially different to their present appearance. There is no chance of someone seeing a picture from the mid 1970s on the Inquiry website then recognising that person in the street.
WHO ELSE WAS SPIED ON?
The Inquiry has finally instated a list of officers on its website. It gives their cover names, the groups that may have ‘encountered’ the officer, and the dates it happened. So far 16 are named, with an average of two groups each.
This means there should be an average of more than eight groups per officer, rather than just two.
Who else did the named officers spy on? Why isn’t the Inquiry telling us? Is it because they are withholding names, or are the police not supplying the full facts to the Inquiry? If it’s the latter then we have to wonder what else the police are not revealing.
Whistleblower SDS officer Peter Francis is listed as spying on two groups, Youth Against Racism in Europe and Militant (now called The Socialist Party).
Activists may have also “encountered” me as spycops from 1993 to 97 as a part time student at Kingsway College Anti Fascist Group (KAFG) Which whilst I was spying er sorry ‘encountering’ on it, became the Movement for Justice (MFJ)
Every one of the thousand-plus groups has a right to know. If the inquiry would publish the full list of groups, those spied upon could be contacted and asked about infiltration. Until that happens we cannot get to the truth of what was done.
Demonstration against Andy Coles, Peterborough Town Hall, 11 October 2017
Former undercover officers from Britain’s political secret police are demanding anonymity from the public inquiry.
They claim having their real names published puts them at risk of harassment and physical harm from those they spied on, and also presents ‘a real risk to employment and reputation’.
Though police give the media details of countless accused but unconvicted citizens every day, they seem to feel officers from these disgraced units are a breed apart who deserve much greater privacy.
The spycops say they fear they may become the target of the kind of harassment experienced by exposed officers Bob Lambert, Andy Coles and Jim Boyling. Except this is not harassment.
Boyling has not been subjected to any organised campaigning. Rather, he complains that on two occasions people he spied on have bumped into him and briefly remonstrated with him, and even he says that isn’t actually intimidation, let alone violence. He suggests that when two cars in his street got damaged it might have been the work of vengeant activists, even though there was nothing to indicate who did it or that it was aimed at him.
ORGANISED CAMPAIGNS
Bob Lambert and Andy Coles have both been the subjects of organised campaigns. The focus has not been them as individuals, but them being in roles which are wholly inappropriate – the list of incidents compiled by the police’s own lawyers plainly shows this.
Meanwhile, Lambert complains that he has been called a rapist. Whether his, and other spycops’, sexual abuse amounts to rape is something that is still untested in law. However, many of the deceived women have made it clear that they did not and could not give informed consent.
Jacqui, who was deceived by Lambert into a two year relationship and having a child, said:
‘I was not consenting to sleeping with Bob Lambert, I didn’t know who Bob Lambert was… it is like being raped by the state. We feel that we were sexually abused because none of us gave consent.’
The rest of the things on Lambert’s list of supposed intimidation he’s suffered all happened to him in his public roles, with the possible exception of two incidents of being ‘confronted by hostile activists while travelling to work’. He says himself that, like Boyling, he has not been subjected to any violence.
It seems both Lambert and Coles failed to tell their employers about their past, implying that they knew the people hiring them would take a dim view of it. In other words, they know the reasonable citizen is likely to see them as abusers. As soon as he was exposed in May this year, Coles resigned as Cambridgeshire’s Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner without any prompting.
This is not about officers being hounded by rabid activists out for revenge, it’s an unwillingness to face the justified shame and scorn they would receive as people who have committed appalling acts.
We don’t see people in other walks of life even attempting this sort of thing. No bank robber has been found guilty and then asked to be kept anonymous as it will upset them if their neighbours find out or it might make future employers think they’re untrustworthy. The spycops aren’t asking for protection from harassment, they are really demanding immunity from accountability.
Another one is John Dines, who abused Helen Steel whilst undercover in the 1990s. Because she knows his real name, Steel discovered he is training political undercover police in Australia.
Helen Steel (right) confronts ex-spycop John Dines, March 2016
These men all grossly abused their positions of power to violate the citizens they are supposed to protect and undermine the democracy they are supposed to serve. No other public servant could act so shamefully, so far from the intended purpose of their agency, and expect to be shielded from the discomfort of public opprobrium.
The other exposed officers, despite having perpetrated similar abuses which many would think justifies their being confronted, have been not challenged like this at all – quite the opposite.
The activists who exposed Mark Kennedy went to great lengths to protect the identities of his family (which Kennedy then published when he sold his story to the Mail on Sunday). The group who exposed Carlo Neri withheld his real name to protect his children. They have even withheld the full cover names of officers ‘RC‘, Gary R and Abigail L.
Numerous officers’ current whereabouts are known to activists and researchers. As far as we know, none of them have been threatened with any physical harm and no effort has been made to confront them in their private life. They have only been targeted if they are in roles for which, as one journalist put it, they are ‘uniquely unqualified‘.
If anything, the campaigners have engaged in the lawful democratic processes that the spycops sought to suppress and undermine. The institutions Lambert and Coles are involved in have been leafleted and spoken to, dealing in facts. Since Lambert resigned from his teaching roles he appears to have been left alone. The same is likely to happen to Andy Coles once he bows to the inevitable and relinquishes his remaining positions of civic trust.
THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH
Publishing a spycop’s cover name still leaves the officer hidden, but it lets those who knew them while undercover come forward and tell us what happened. It is the essential prerequisite to getting the truth.
Just having a cover name published does not lead to an officer’s real identity being known. Indeed, that is the whole point of a fake identity. Long-exposed officers such as Rod Richardson and Lynn Watson are still living in anonymity because, unlike the others, they did not give their real names. But when an officer remains unknown to the public, what else is being hidden?
Without the real names, we would never have known that Lambert was using his disgraced past as a platform to pass on his ideas to his successors. We would not know that Andy Coles, who groomed a naive teenager for sex, has positioned himself in inappropriate roles in which he’s endorsing agencies trying to protect older teenagers at risk of sexual exploitation. Who knows how many other ex-spycops are still perpetuating their abuses?
The Catholic church has been condemned for its former practice of dealing with abusive priests by paying off victims and moving the offender to a new parish where the unaware congregation was left vulnerable to further abuse. Withholding spycops’ real names has a similar effect.
Even if we believe exposing them really would put them at risk, it is still not necessarily a reason to grant them anonymity. As Phillippa Kaufmann QC pointed out to the Inquiry last month, the state is used to dealing with such things in witness protection schemes, providing assured security for people at far greater risk – and a lot less guilty – than spycops.
Doreen Lawrence, whose family’s campaign was spied on, said:
‘They were doing the deception. Why should they be allowed to be anonymous while people like me had their faces all over the newspapers ? These people were not innocent. They knew what they were doing.’
Those officers who have done nothing wrong have nothing to fear. Those who have done wrong should be held to account. It cannot begin to happen without the release of the cover names. It cannot properly happen without the release of the real names.
Andy Coles, aka Special Demonstration Squad officer Andy Davey
What: Demonstration outside Peterborough City Council meeting calling for former abusive spycop and current Tory Councillor Andy Coles to resign.
Where: Town Hall, Bridge Street, Peterborough, PE1 1HF
When: 6pm, Wednesday 13 December
Why: Andy Coles deceived a teenager into an intimate relationship when he was an undercover officer.
In May, Andy Coles, the then Deputy Police & Crime Commissioner for Cambridgeshire, and current Peterborough Tory Councillor, was exposed as a former undercover cop. It was revealed he had deceived then teenager “Jessica” into an intimate relationship, telling her he was 24 years old, when he was 32. “Jessica” has said she feels like she was groomed:
“Although not legally underage, I feel that my youth and vulnerability were used to target me. I was groomed by someone much older, and far more experienced… I was manipulated into having a sexual relationship with him. I didn’t even know his real name.”
It is entirely inappropriate for someone who has committed these admitted human rights abuses to be in a position of respect and authority. Andy Coles has resigned his post as Deputy Police & Crime Commissioner, and he must now step down from his post as Councillor as well.
Previous demonstrations have seen a broad spectrum of people attending, and calls for his resignation have atracted cross-party support on the council.
It is important that the Andy Coles and the Council see the public outrage at these revelations. Without this, they may be able to sweep it under the carpet. He is one in an ever increasing line of undercover police revealed to have abused women in this way, and it is essential that we demand accountability for these actions.
Show your disgust at Andy Coles’ actions, and join us in calling for his resignation.
Come to the demonstration, bring banners & placards.
Make a noise about it on social media.
Talk to your friends
Human Rights Abuser Andy Coles banner made by Jessica, Peterborough Town Hall
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