Two lawyers involved in the undercover policing scandal were honoured at the Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year awards last week.

Mike Schwarz of Bindman’s won criminal defence lawyer of the year. He represented two groups of climate protesters, the Drax 29 and Ratcliffe 20, who were convicted and then had the judgements quashed after it was revealed that the prosecution had withheld vital evidence of undercover police officer Mark Kennedy from the court.

Elkan Abrahamson of Jackson Canter won the outstanding achievement award for his representation of many families of Hillsborough victims. Several of them were active campaigners who report having their phones tapped. Abrahamson’s firm also have a documented case of a Hillsborough campaigner being ‘shadowed like terrorists,’ as Steve Rotherham MP put it.

Speaking after the Home Secretary announced the judge-led public inquiry into undercover policing in March, Abrahamson said, ‘It will, of course, focus on Lawrence, but the Hillsborough tragedy should equally be subjected to the same scrutiny on this subject of spying’.

Somewhat ironically, the judging panel included Kier Starmer QC who has had involvement on both sides of the undercover police issue. He worked pro bono for the McLibel defendants who, despite occupying courtrooms for the longest trial in English history, were kept ignorant of the fact that at least two of their group were undercover police officers. One of them, Bob Lambert,  co-authored the offending leaflet that triggered the trial.

Starmer was also the barrister who represented a group of hunt saboteurs in 1996 who had an eager witness called Jim Sutton, now known to be undercover officer (and Lambert’s protegé) Jim Boyling.

But by the time Sir Christopher Rose’s report into Mark Kennedy and his unit was published in December 2011, Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions. The report said the Ratcliffe 20’s case was a one-off based on innocent errors and there was no systemic problem. Even then it was a highly dubious proposition, yet when Starmer was challenged on the point by Channel 4 News and Newsnight he fended off suggestions of a wider problem, asserting that Rose’s finding was good enough.

However, the Drax case had already happened a year earlier in near-identical circumstances. The subsequent overturning of the Drax judgements indicates that there is indeed a systemic problem. Certainly, it leaves the Rose report discredited alongside the pile of piecemeal partisan investigations so far,  underlining the need for a single, credible independent public inquiry into all aspects of Britain’s political secret police.

With the help of tenacious lawyers like Schwarz and Abrahamson unpicking the cover-ups, the truth may come.