What is the Undercover Policing Inquiry?

The Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) is an independent, judge-led inquiry into undercover policing in England and Wales.

Its main focus is the activity of two undercover units who deployed long-term undercover officers into a variety of political groups: the Special Demonstration Squad (1968-2008) and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (1999-2011).

Officers from these units lived as activists for years at a time. More than 1,000 groups were spied on, though the Inquiry has named less than 100. Activist researchers have produced a more complete list of those targeted.

Beyond collecting information personal details about people’s lives, officers often:

• stole the identities of dead children
• took key roles in the organisations they infiltrated
• encouraged and participated in illegal activity
• formed emotional relationships with children of people they spied on
• supplied personal information for illegal blacklists of politically active workers
• orchestrated wrongful convictions of activists
• deceived women they spied on into long-term intimate relationships

When was the Undercover Policing Inquiry set up?

On 6 March 2014, after more than three years of escalating revelations, the Home Secretary announced in Parliament that there would be a full-scale public inquiry under the terms of the Inquiries Act 2005.

The process began on 28 July 2015, with opening remarks on the purpose, remit and intent from the Chair, Lord Pitchford.

Following Lord Pitchford’s death in October 2017, Sir John Mitting was appointed as Chair. Despite the serious reservations of victims, he remains in the post.

Who will be giving evidence at the Undercover Policing Inquiry?

The witnesses will include officers and people that they spied on. The Inquiry will publish a draft list of witnesses giving evidence at least four weeks before the hearing.

In these first hearings, we’ll be hearing from officers deployed in the Special Demonstration Squad, their managers and some of the people they spied on, from the squad’s inception in 1968 until 1982.

We won’t get to see the files that are going to be cited and discussed in the hearings until the day they are mentioned.

How will the Undercover Policing Inquiry take evidence from witnesses?

The Inquiry tries to avoid being an adversarial format with witnesses feeling cross-examined by hostile lawyers. Instead, all the lawyers involved – representing police, victims and the inquiry itself – hand in questions the would like a witness to answer.

A witness is then questioned by one neutral lawyer, the Counsel to the inquiry. At the end of questioning, there is a short break while Counsel checks with the various lawyers if they feel anything has been missed or needs answering in more detail.

How will the Undercover Policing Inquiry organise its investigation?

The Inquiry’s investigations will be broken into three modules:

Module 1: Examination of the deployment of undercover officers in the past, their conduct, and the impact of their activities on themselves and others.

Module 2: Examination of the management and oversight of undercover officers, including their selection, training, supervision, care after deployments, and the legal and regulatory framework within which undercover policing was carried out.

• Module 2a will involve managers and administrators from within undercover policing units.

• Module 2b will involve senior managers higher in the chain of command as well as police personnel who handled intelligence provided by undercover police officers.

• Module 2c will involve other government bodies with a connection to undercover policing, including the Home Office.

Module 3: Examination of current undercover policing practices and of how undercover policing should be conducted in future.

Module 1 has been broken down into six ‘tranches’.

Tranche 1 hearings will be taking evidence about the activities of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) from its formation in 1968 to 1982.

Tranche 1 has, in turn, been broken into three phases:

Phase 1 evidence covered 1968-72.

Phase 2 examines the SDS from 1973 to 1982.

In Phase 3, the Inquiry will hear from SDS managers 1968-1982.

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

What are the dates for the Undercover Policing Inquiry?

The first hearings of Tranche 1 took place between 2 and 19 November 2020.

Tranche 1 (Special Demonstration Squad 1968-82):

Phase 1, 1968-72. These hearings took place in November 2020.

Phase 2 1973-82. These hearings took place in April & May 2021.

In Phase 3, the Inquiry will hear from SDS managers 1968-1982. Dates for phase 3 are expected to be in the first half of 2022.

Tranche 2 (SDS 1983-1992) hearings are expected in the first half of 2023.

Tranche 3 (SDS 1993-2007) hearings are expected in the first half of 2024.

There is no timetable for the later tranches as yet.

Why are there such large gaps between hearings at the Undercover Policing Inquiry?

The Inquiry is handling hundreds of thousands of vintage files, collated from police, Security Service and other sources. It takes a long time to analyse these formulate lines of enquiry, and decide which people to call as witnesses. The witnesses then have to have the documents to be discussed. Everyone’s lawyers have to feed into the process of producing questions for witnesses.

Then, after the hearings, the evidence gathered has to be analysed and considered so the Inquiry can draw conclusions in their own right, as well as contributing to the approach of the next round of hearings.

How much will the Undercover Policing Inquiry cost?

Up to the end of 2020, the Inquiry had already cost £36,219,100. This will increase substantially as time goes on.

How long will the Undercover Policing Inquiry last?

The Inquiry was originally expected to publish its final report in summer 2018.

After a huge amount of deliberate delay from the police, the schedule was drastically revised. In May 2018, the Inquiry announced an ‘ambitious’ timeline that planned to deliver the final report to the Home Secretary in late 2023. A redacted version would have been expected to be published some time in 2024.

The Inquiry had already fallen a year behind this schedule before the Covid-19 pandemic. That postponed the initial hearings by five months. Additional delays have set it back a further seven months, putting it two years behind the ‘ambitious timeline’ of 2024.

When we’ll see the final report is anyone’s guess, but 2026 or 2027 seems plausible.

Where will the Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings be held?

Preliminary hearings were held at the Royal Courts of Justice. The evidential hearings were due to be held at 18 Pocock Street, London.

However, due to Covid restrictions, the hearings will be held in a virtual format for the foreseeable future. While there are these virtual hearings, the Inquiry is providing a live-screening venue in London, with space for around 50 people who pre-register.

Will the Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings be live streamed?

The first part of tranche 1, seven days in which those involved are giving opening statements to the Inquiry, will be live-streamed.  After that, because the Inquiry is wary of releasing anything that might breach secrecy rules or the privacy of those involved, there will only be a live-transcription that has a ten-minute time delay. Additionally, the Inquiry will upload transcripts and audio files soon after the hearings.

At the preliminary hearings, the Inquiry published a transcript within a day or two. It’s been in weirdly formatted PDFs that are not that easy to read, but at least they’re there. It’s expected that the same will happen with the evidential hearings.

Where will I find out what’s going on?

We will be live tweeting on the COPS Twitter account, and publishing daily reports and weekly summaries on our blog, Facebook and email list (which you can join at the bottom of the sidebar on this page). Tom Fowler, an activist who was spied on by undercover officer Marco Jacobs, usually does opinionated live-tweeting too.

We also expect coverage from our friends at Police Spies Out of Lives (who represent women deceived into relationships by spycops) and the Undercover Research Group, with incisive comment and analysis.

In the mainstream media, Rob Evans and Paul Lewis at the Guardian, who have covered the scandal since it began and co-wrote the Undercover book, are highly likely to be doing quality reporting too.

On 25^th March, the Undercover Policing Inquiry will hold its second hearing into how it is affected by the General Data Protection Regulations – GDPR.

It’s more than five years since the Inquiry was announced and we are still quibbling over legal points that require specialist barristers to be brought in. The evidence-hearing phase, arguably the most import section, has been put back yet again, probably to 2020.

From the beginning, those spied on have consistently demanded to see their Special Branch files. Only then would it be possible to understand how the undercovers infiltrated their personal lives, and in too many cases, people’s beds, or destroyed their ability to get jobs.

Sir John Mitting, the Chair of the Undercover Policing Inquiry, has replied, saying it would be too much work and would delay the inquiry further. It’s a slap in the face to all who have waited through years of wilful police delays, which Mitting has readily acquiesced to. Indeed, many find it grimly ironic that he is now talking about wasting resources given the amount squandered on police anonymity orders.

The Non-Police/State Core Participants (NPSCPs), the victims in all this, are treated as second class people. They object to police and ex-police being given access to their files while not knowing what personal content is in there, or how accurate it may be. They object to the Inquiry deciding what is and what is not important in those files and thus what the victims will get to see.

Challenging the Secrecy

From the few released Special Branch files it’s clear that political undercover police misinterpret events, they exaggerate, and they lie. People’s lives are ruined on the basis of biased or false information.

What the Inquiry proposes, is that the people whose files are at the centre of things will be the last to see that material, and even then only part of it – that is, only those bits the Inquiry decides is relevant to its work. The NPSCPs only get a say over how some of it is made public, and even then only after everyone else has had a go first. From the NPSCPs’ point of view, what Mitting is proposing will only increase the emotional stress many of them are already currently subject to.

So, last year, the NPSCPs raised the point that under the new GDPR regulations they did actually have rights over their data in the hands of the Inquiry, and such rights were over all such data, not just what the Inquiry decided was important. What matters is not what the Inquiry wishes but what are the rights protected in law.

The Inquiry clearly realised there was an issue as they quickly ordered a hearing. That took place at the end of January, and it was a bit of a shambles. Only the NPSCPs’ lawyers effectively grasped the issues, necessitating a second hearing to address the legal points that had been raised.

The rest of this article sets out the legal points which will be discussed (links to all submission documents are here). Hopefully, it will assist anyone seeking to follow the arguments on the day and give a quick reference to the various paragraphs and articles which will be cited.

Welcome to the GDPR

The GDPR has a number of articles which set out conditions for processing data, rights over that data and what exceptions to those rights and conditions which may exist. The Data Protection Act 2018 codes all this into UK law, updating previous acts. The regime is tougher and more comprehensive than previous legislation; it is also relatively new, which means interpretation of the finer points still have to be worked out in the courts. Some reliance can be placed on previous case law arising from the 1998 Data Protection Act, but it does not always apply.

There is also the issue of what sort of body the Undercover Policing Inquiry is. It is not a court but is in fact established by a piece of stand-alone legislation, the 2005 Inquiries Act. It may seem like semantics, which for the most part such discussions are, but in this case it is an important question.

So, the GDPR Articles of most relevance for the hearing of 25^th March are:

• 13: Information to be provided where personal data are collected from the data subject.
• 14: Information to be provided where personal data have not been obtained from the data subject.
• 15: Right of access by the data subject.

Several others which might play a role are Articles 16 (the right to correct), 17 (the right to be forgotten) and 18 (the right to restrict processing). These are not likely to be a focus of attention as it is accepted by core participants that to get to the truth, the Inquiry and those involved need to have access to the information gathered by the police as it was, in order to understand the abuses that went on.

A particular complication is how to share documents where more than one person is named. In some cases – such as a small, tight group where everyone knew everyone else – this is not likely to be that much an issue. However, quite a few documents name multiple people, not all of whom will know each other. In the jargon, this is called ‘third party rights’, and can be used to restrict material, for example where giving you your data may cause a third party’s data to be revealed. In this case, you both lose out.

This becomes more focused when looking at what is called ‘special category’ data. This is material considered sensitive and of a highly personal nature – family life, addresses, sexuality and so on. Even political opinions are caught here. It is a balancing exercise, but NPSCPs are aware such material is in police documents, and the prospect of further sharing of them without a chance to check over it is compounding their violation and pain. For this reason, the Inquiry is becoming part of the problem.

Exemptions from Disclosure

The files, whether personal files, intelligence reports, or others, all fall under Article 14 as the Inquiry is processing data it got from the police. Under normal conditions the Inquiry would be required to give the data subjects notice and what data it holds before it can process it, such as passing it on to retired police officers. However, there are exceptions, two of which the Inquiry seems keen to rely on.

Clause 5(b) of Article 14, ‘the paragraph 5 exemption’, says that the data controller (in this Inquiry, Mitting) is exempt from his obligations if ‘the provision of such information proves impossible or would involve a disproportionate effort’. However, it is still required to protect the data rights of the individuals.

The second is known as ‘paragraph 7(2)’, and comes from the Data Protection Act 2018. The Act states the data controller can claim an exemption from complying with the data rights where complying would ‘prejudice the proper discharge’ of the function the data is being processed for. Provided that function is ‘designed to protect members of the public against dishonesty, malpractice or other seriously improper conduct’ and is ‘of a public nature, and is exercised in the public interest’.

The extent to which the Inquiry can rely on these two exemptions are central points for the Inquiry’s hearing on March 25^th.

Both the Inquiry and, unsurprisingly, the police say they can rely on them, and furthermore they are ‘blanket exemptions’ which cover all cases. So if and when the Inquiry decides they are available to it to use, then it’s effectively game over. The Information Commissioner’s submissions say that the Inquiry can rely on them, but they are not blanket exemptions.

Victims Claim Their Rights

The NPSCPs say it is far more nuanced than that, and even where the exemptions apply, it is only on a case-by-case basis, and does not excuse the Inquiry from all its rights. There are measures it can and should be taking which will alert people to the fact that they may be named in documents – for example through their presence at a certain meeting, or role in a group.

The NPSCPs are also emphatic that they should be seeing their information much earlier on in the process so that they can make representation over sensitive material that might be in the files (and finally get to see what has been said about them).

The Inquiry is arguing that NPSCPs should only see their files only after all the other redactions have been made in terms of national security, protection of police tactics and so on, and that early disclosure to the NPSCPs will delay getting statements back from the undercovers and their managers. This is where it is supposedly disproportionate and would cause delays.

NPSCPs say this is not good enough; it is the Inquiry’s fault for letting the police cause delays for the last three years and now this is being thrown back in in the victim’s faces. It is granting privileges to the police that it doesn’t give to those who were inappropriately spied upon, and implies the latter can be treated with less concern for their rights.

The NPSCPs also do not accept that the work that will have to be done in providing disclosure to them first is disproportionate. Looking at the greater volume of material handled by other public inquiries which also require extensive redactions, it is clear the Inquiry is overstating the impact. Nor does the Undercover Policing Inquiry make the effort to actually justify its claims. The Inquiry simply relies on broad statements with very little supporting material.

The NPSCPs want the Inquiry to succeed, so they accept compromises have to be made; but they want to be respected also. To this end they have accepted a curtailment of their rights and put forward pragmatic proposals that would have some impact on the Inquiry, but bring them into it in a way that will help the Inquiry in the long run. The core of what they propose is a re-arrangement of the order of things, not anything new.

The Judicial Exemption

There is a second route where the Inquiry can argue it is given an exemption from complying with its obligations under the GDPR. If it can successfully be argued that the Chair is not acting in a “judicial capacity” in ’judicial proceedings” then the Inquiry can say it is exempt. Simple, eh?

Well, this is where the lawyers earn their money and it all goes down the technical hill from there. It’s not that straightforward as “judicial proceedings” is not explicitly defined and the meaning of the term itself relies on a lot of case law rather than legal statute. Nor does the Inquiries Act make it clear what the case is.

So, while on the surface the Chair does appear to be acting in a judicial capacity, there are various problems. For instance, an Inquiry is not necessarily judge-led, and unlike other tribunals, it only makes recommendations and deliberately doesn’t have the power to consider liabilities. The key point is that while the Chair will report to the Home Secretary (and may make referrals to other bodies), he does not have the power to make binding decisions and has no powers of enforcement.

Any Rulings are made under the Inquiries Act and are not necessarily court derived, even though they can be judicially reviewed. But then, many decisions not just court ones can be judicially reviewed. And so on.

The good news is that the Information Commissioner agrees with the NPSCPs on this and they have put that in their submissions (see below).

The Submissions to the Inquiry

With the exception of one or two, most of the police / state submissions for the new hearing continue the bare-bones approach that lead to the January debacle. Despite the many thousands of pounds being spent on this, it is clear that barristers are prepared to rely on broad-stroke assertions that make little effort to unpick the arguments. Naturally such an approach suits the police who want to ensure as little as possible reaches light of day.

All brush any sense of nuance under the carpet; their willingness to trust it all to Mitting is indicative of how on side their they clearly consider him to be. Thus there is no attempt to actually consider the non-blanket approach, to reason through the wider obligations presented by the GDPR, which the law requires.

Even where there are exemptions allowed, data rights do not vanish like that; they still exist and so have to be properly considered. That means paying attention to the nuance to develop a working framework that meets everyone’s needs, not just the side of the abusers.

And let us remember, it was the Metropolitan Police who admitted that its officers were engaged in human rights abuses.

Victimising the Victims

The NPSCPs accept the situation is far from ideal but are willing to work with the Inquiry to find a way forward. In not asserting their rights entirely, there needs to be a quid pro quo. Unfortunately, the Inquiry is more determined than ever to keep the victims at arm’s length from the process, treating them as an irritant with little to contribute.

The NPSCPs argument is that it should be the opposite, that the Inquiry is causing itself these problems by this attitude. If instead, it sought to work properly with NPSCPs it could have avoided reaching this point in the first place.

As once core participant told us:

“We have practical and pragmatic solutions that would prevent further pain and contribute to the process, while recognising our legal rights. In sticking to the hypocritical mantra that it would only delay the process, that the police have absolute right to see everything but we only get scraps, Mitting places himself firmly on the side of the police. His farce is our pain”.

If you can, please support the crowdjustice fundraiser for women targeted by spycops to take their cases to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal and the UN.

Marc Wadsworth, spycops People’s Inquiry, 8 July 2018

On 8 July 2018, people targeted by Britain’s political secret police held a ‘people’s inquiry’ at Conway Hall in London.

Exasperated by the state public inquiry’s bias towards secrecy as it drags on for years without even formally starting, the victims of spycops held this theatrical event to envision what an effective inquiry would look like.

It was part of a weekend of activities celebrating 50 years of progressive political campaigns achievements despite being infiltrated by counter-democratic police.

Our Youtube Channel has three short videos from the People’s Inquiry session.

This first one has an overview of the People’s Inquiry event, showing the kind of first-hand testimony that was heard from a diversity of people whose lives were invaded in a wide variety of ways, and it also shows thirst for justice in those present.

One of the people giving testimony was veteran anti-racist campaigner Marc Wadsworth. In the 1980s he led the Labour Party’s black section, and in the 1990s he was leader of the Anti-Racist Alliance.

Asked by Stephen Lawrence’s family to help build their campaign for justice, Marc was targeted by officers from Britain’s political secret police. He is a core participant at the Undercover Policing Inquiry.

At the end of the afternoon the panel gave a list of recommendations for an effective inquiry, a list of demands to remedy what is absent from the increasingly pointless, expensive and secret state inquiry

Our 13 Recommendations following the Peoples Public Inquiry:

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 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 relevatnt ot 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 & 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 non-compliance with the inquiry

13. Investigation into collusion between police and corporate spies

Three people spied upon by Britain’s political secret police are bringing a crucial legal case in an attempt to steer the public inquiry away from its bias towards secrecy and protecting abusive police officers.

They have launched a crowdfund appeal to raise the funds.

PUBLIC INQUIRY FAILING VICTIMS

Announced in 2014, the Undercover Policing Inquiry has yet to formally begin. Since the original Chair, Lord Pitchford, stepped down for health reasons in June 2017, it has been under the stewardship of Sir John Mitting. There were concerns about his suitability at the time, especially his background in secret courts that almost invariably find in favour of state spies, but victims gave him the benefit of the doubt.

In September 2017, a group of 13 women deceived into relationships by undercover police officers wrote to the Home Secretary with concerns that Mitting and the Inquiry were not recognising the institutional sexism of the Met’s spycops.

Nearly 200 of the most significantly affected victims of spycops have been granted core participant status at the Inquiry. In October, the majority of them wrote to Mitting expressing their grave fears about the direction in which he was taking the Inquiry.

As one of them, Kim Bryan, explained at the time:

‘As Core Participants we are rapidly losing confidence in the Inquiry and in the abilities of John Mitting. He is rowing back on commitments made by the previous Chair, Christopher Pitchford, who stated the inquiry’s priority is to discover the truth and recognised the importance of hearing from both officers and their victims along with the need for this to be done in public as far as possible.’

None of it has made any difference. Mitting has been granting full anonymity to around 30% of spycops, even when the police’s own risk assessments say there is little danger in publishing the name, and when the officer’s objection rests on fear of embarrassment.

In his first public hearing in November 2017, Mitting said he would not comply with the Met’s dodging tactic of saying they ‘neither confirm nor deny’ any details about undercover deployments. Mitting unequivocally stated:

‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny has no part at all to play in Special Demonstration Squad deployments’

But by February 2018 he was granting full anonymity to officers without explanation, repeatedly telling victims they would ‘meet a brick wall of silence,’ and saying:

‘it is not a Neither Confirm Nor Deny approach. It is stronger than that. It is a flat refusal to say anything about the deployment in the open.’

This led to victims walking out of court and boycotting all subsequent hearings on anonymity for officers.

Sharon Grant – widow of Bernie Grant, one of ten Labour MPs known to have been spied on – accompanied Stephen Lawrence’s father Neville to hand deliver a letter to the Home Secretary demanding change.

It’s plain that Mitting is to gullible and biased to be at the helm of the Inquiry. For the process to function, he needs to be replaced, or at least sit alongside, a panel of people with life experience relevant to the victims.

Phillippa Kaufmann QC, lawyer for the victims, told Mitting of the urgent need for a panel of:

‘individuals who have a proper informed experiential understanding of discrimination both on grounds of race and sex. Two issues that lie absolutely at the heart of this Inquiry…

‘The core participants – the non-state, non-police core participants – do not want this important Inquiry, something that they so richly deserve to have conducted in an efficacious way, to be presided over by someone who is both naive and old-fashioned and does not understand the world that they or the police inhabit.’

Neville Lawrence is clear that the appointment of a panel of people from different backgrounds is make-or-break. If it the Inquiry doesn’t get that, he said:

‘I will withdraw from it. I will leave it alone because it’s a waste of my time. I’ve wasted two years already.’

THE LEGAL CHALLENGE

Three core participants at the Inquiry want to bring a legal challenge to the refusal to appoint a diverse panel. They need to raise £5,000 to get a hearing to apply. If the win that, they will need a further £50,000 to bring the full case.

The three are:

1) The family of Jean Charles de Menezes; a young, innocent Brazilian man, was gunned down at Stockwell tube station on 22 July 2005 by police officers in a botched surveillance operation after he was wrongly deemed to be one of the fugitives involved in failed bombing attempts the previous day.

Over the next decade, the family endured the stress of two IPCC complaint investigations, an inquest, a civil claim, a further complaint and two legal challenges in their quest for justice for their loved one. In 2014, they were devastated to learn that their justice campaign had been spied upon by undercover police. They demand to know why and will not be denied justice again.

2) ‘Jessica’ (a pseudonym) was an inexperienced, vulnerable 19 year old girl with a love of animals. Her first real sexual relationship was, she believed, with Andy Davey,a 24 year old, socially awkward, fellow animal rights activist who shared her values.

Last year she found out that he was Andy Coles, a 32 year old, married, undercover police officer, tasked by his senior officers to spy on her and her friends. Jessica would never have consented to sex or intimacy if she had known his real identity.. She feels violated and humiliated. She wants to know the truth about his deployment and his relationship with her, particularly whether her clear vulnerability made her easy prey.

3) John Burke-Monerville’s 19 year old son, Trevor, was held at Stoke Newington police station in 1987 during which time his family believe he was beaten and in consequence suffered brain damage. A Justice for Trevor campaign was mounted, supported by the Hackney Community Defence Association. Trevor and members of his family were thereafter harassed by the police. Tragically, Trevor and his brother were murdered in separate incidents years apart. No one was prosecuted for the murders because, the family believe, of failures in the police investigation. Mr Burke-Monerville has learned that the justice campaign meetings were subject to surveillance by the Special Demonstration Squad.

The loved ones of Jean Charles de Menezes and Trevor Monerville are just two of 18 such campaigns that the Met admit spying on. Resources that should have caught killers were spent preventing justice.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

The people launching the appeal have spelled out their aim to have an Inquiry that simply fulfils its remit:

‘Our fear is that if it continues in its current trajectory that the Undercover Policing Inquiry will be a whitewash. We have been forced to initiate a legal challenge to the Home Secretary’s decision to refuse to appoint a panel with the skill and diversity required.

‘Our aim is to restore public confidence in the Undercover Policing Inquiry and its ability to get to the truth. Join us by contributing now and sharing this page on social media.’

The Crowdfund page is here.

Please share the link and, if you can afford it, donate.

Former Special Demonstration Squad officer Peter Francis

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

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

Francis said:

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

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

THE SPY WHO STEPPED OUT OF THE SHADOWS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE SECRET PUBLIC INQUIRY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘We are not prepared actively to participate in a process where the presence of our clients is pure window dressing, lacking all substance, lacking all meaning and which would achieve absolutely nothing other than lending this process the legitimacy that it doesn’t have and doesn’t deserve.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow Peter Francis on Twitter.

Sajid Javid

As Home Secretary, Amber Rudd’s intransigence brought the Undercover Policing Inquiry to crisis point. Will her successor Sajid Javid open his ears and undo her damage?

The country was shocked to learn of Britain’s political secret police units infiltrating more than 1,000 groups over 40 years, violating human rights, orchestrating miscarriages of justice and undermining democratic dissent.

When Theresa May’s choice of Chair for the public inquiry, Lord Pitchford, resigned for health reasons in May 2017, Amber Rudd appointed Sir John Mitting.

Mitting displays huge gullibility and misplaced faith in the integrity of the trained liar police officers whose wrongdoing is the subject of his Inquiry. He has ignored the sustained, increasingly desperate pleas of victims as he steers the Inquiry deeper into crisis of confidence.

Rudd stonewalled repeated appeals from victims to intervene. Women deceived into relationships by spycops and Neville Lawrence asked to meet her but the requests weren’t even acknowledged.

Victims who have been granted core participant status at the Inquiry are clear that Mitting must resign, or at least sit with a panel alongside him. Alison, an activist deceived into a five-year relationship by Special Demonstration Squad officer Mark Jenner, explained:

‘At the heart of this inquiry are the politics of race, sex and class. If we’re ever to get to the bottom of what’s been allowed to happen with undercover political policing in this country, we need an inquiry led by people with sensitivity, experience and real understanding of these issues.’

LAWRENCES STILL SHUT OUT

As we passed the 25th anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence last week, Theresa May announced an annual Stephen Lawrence Day.

Just as she had commissioned the Undercover Policing Inquiry but restricted it to events in England and Wales, so May’s government gives an elevating hand to Stephen Lawrence’s memory then slaps it back down.

Whilst the annual commemoration may help people examine his legacy, Stephen’s loved ones are still being denied answers about what happened. The state is still protecting the corrupt police involved in spying on the family.

In 1998, five years after Stephen’s murder, the Macpherson inquiry examined the case and came to the famous conclusion that the Metropolitan Police were ‘institutionally racist’. Macpherson was meant to get to the bottom of the matter, but it was never even told about the Lawrences being spied on by undercover officers from the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS).

Spycop Peter Francis had been tasked by his SDS managers to ‘find dirt’ with which to discredit the Lawrence family and their associates. Later, at the time of the Macpherson inquiry, he suggested the unit should come clean to the Macpherson inquiry but was overruled by his superiors.

NOT JUST THE LAWRENCES

Stephen Lawrence’s campaign is just one of dozens of similar groups spied on and undermined by the SDS who worked hard to ensure the failings and racism of uniformed officers went unchecked. There had been a spate of racist attacks in South London before Stephen was killed. Two years earlier, 15 year old Rolan Adams had been murdered.

Rolan’s father Richard Adams said:

‘There is no doubt that had Rolan’s murder been investigated properly, Stephen Lawrence may still have been alive today.’

Instead, as with the Lawrences, the police resources that should have caught the teenager’s killers were spent instead on undermining the family’s quest for the truth.

NOT JUST THAT SPYCOP

The establishing of Stephen Lawrence Day cannot be meaningful while the state is still withholding the truth from Stephen’s family. It’s not just that the Home Secretary has repeatedly refused to meet Neville Lawrence. Last month we were finally told the fake name of SDS officer HN81, previously described as ‘a spy in the Lawrence family camp’. He was deployed as David Hagan.

But what was David Hagan’s real name? What did he report? Who else spied on them with him? Which other groups did Hagan spy on? What has he done since? Who ordered him to spy on the Lawrences?

The head of the SDS at the time of its spying on the Lawrences was an officer known only as HN58. Mitting has granted him full anonymity at the Inquiry, saying that because he has been married for a long time he is presumed to have been incapable of wrongdoing.

The spycops’ swathe of crimes, human rights abuses and counter-democratic stifling of campaigns has shocked all those who have heard of it. Yet, we only have partial details on a minority of officers. There is much, much more still below the waterline waiting to be revealed.

Though they are numerous, the black justice campaigns were a comparatively small proportion of the 1,000+ groups that were were spied on. Scores of people were fitted up with wrongful convictions and dozens of women deceived into long-term intimate relationships.

JUDGING THE JUDGE

All the victims deserve answers, as do the wider public whose democracy has been undermined by these agents paid out of public funds. To be effective, the Inquiry needs to understand what it means to be in a marginalised group and, under Mitting’s sole stewardship, it cannot do that.

The Macpherson inquiry had a panel of lay members whose experience was directly relevant to the issue. It is plain that Mitting should resign and hand over to a panel, or at least accept a panel to sit alongside him.

As the victims’ lawyer Phillippa Kaufmann QC told Mitting at an Inquiry hearing in February:

‘We have the usual white upper middle class elderly gentleman whose life experiences are a million miles away from those who were spied upon.’

With Mitting credulously granting police anonymity on dubious grounds and refusing to act on responses from those who were spied upon, Kaufmann led her legal team and the victims out of the February hearing.

Doreen Lawrence backed the walkout

‘I want to know the names of the police officers who spied on me, my family and our campaign for justice. The chair is not allowing that, in my view, for reasons which are completely unjustifiable and unreasonable. 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.’

A LAST REQUEST

Having expressed their concerns to both the Home Office and Mitting himself, last week victims delivered a letter to the Home Office calling for a panel to be appointed.

Three women who were deceived into relationships by undercover police officers – Andrea, Alison & Jessica – went with Neville Lawrence and Sharon Grant (widow of Bernie Grant, black Labour MP who was spied on) to personally hand the letter in.

Neville Lawrence explained:

‘We were grieving and someone felt it necessary to send people into my house to spy on us. The crime was outside my house but they spent the money to send undercover police into my house, that money could have been spent on finding the people who carried out the murder. I want answers.’

Mitting’s inclination towards secrecy makes the appointment of a panel all the more urgent; he has held more hearings in secret than in public. We need credible, independent people in there to hear the evidence rather than an uncritical judge drawing on his career of rubberstamping state surveillance.

Neville Lawrence is clear that the appointment of a panel of people from different backgrounds is make-or-break. If it the Inquiry doesn’t get that, he said:

‘I will withdraw from it. I will leave it alone because it’s a waste of my time. I’ve wasted two years already.’

With Amber Rudd’s departure from the Home Office, lawyers for spycops’ victims have already written to Sajid Javid. Will he meet with victims and restructure the Undercover Policing Inquiry so it can fulfil its purpose and reveal the truth about Britain’s political secret police?

The public inquiry into political undercover policing is in crisis, but has it ever been functional? It is as if they want to technically publish information whilst keeping it effectively secret.

Despite being set up more than three years ago with a projected finishing date of 2018, the Undercover Policing Inquiry is still in its preliminary stages. This waiting period has been so long that we have seen key figures die, including two former Home Secretaries, a former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, core participant victims of spycops and the Chair of the Inquiry itself, Lord Pitchford.

MITTING THE POINT

Pitchford promised to have ‘a presumption for openness’. There was alarm that the new choice of Chair, Sir John Mitting, would incline the opposite way due to his background in secret courts that almost invariably comply with government surveillance agencies.

The fears were well-founded, and a majority of the victims given core participant status at the Inquiry appealed for change in November 2017.

‘We are rapidly losing confidence in the Inquiry and in the abilities of John Mitting. He is rowing back on commitments made by the previous Chair, Christopher Pitchford, who stated the inquiry’s priority is to discover the truth and recognised the importance of hearing from both officers and their victims along with the need for this to be done in public as far as possible.’

It was ignored.

Mitting has shown himself to be gullible, taking police assertions at face value despite the fact that the Inquiry is into wrongdoing by trained police liars.

Last month victims and their lawyers walked out of a preliminary hearing on granting officers anonymity, saying:

‘We are not prepared actively to participate in a process where the presence of our clients is pure window dressing, lacking all substance, lacking all meaning and which would achieve absolutely nothing other than lending this process the legitimacy that it doesn’t have and doesn’t deserve.’

Victims are desperate for the Inquiry to fulfil its purpose. Keenly aware that the Met would like nothing more than a boycott that let them protect their secrets, the walkout was not a permanent move. Rather, it is an act of desperation as the victims’ good faith has been eroded by a process that goes out of its way to ignore them.

We want to tell our stories of being spied upon, but we cannot do it until we all know which of our friends and comrades was actually a police spy. We come eager to participate but the Inquiry’s acquiescence to police demands for secrecy means we are blindfolded and hogtied.

Stephen Lawrence’s father Neville has declared his loss of faith in Mitting and the Inquiry, and Doreen Lawrence has threatened to boycott the entire process if Mitting stays in charge.

PROTECTING THE GUILTY

Mitting grants anonymity to undercover officers even when the ‘independent risk assessor’ (a fellow police officer) says the risk of harm if they are named is low.

A few days ago we learned that officer HN15 – whose risk assessor said the danger of harm is high – is in fact Mark Jenner. He has had his real and cover names in the mainstream media along with his photo for over five years without, as far as we know, coming to any harm.

How can other officers’ risk assessments still be taken seriously? How can we trust in a Chair who believes such twaddle and then acts to shield abusers from accountability?

Last week, thirteen women deceived into relationships by spycops have demanded change from the Home Secretary.

‘Andrea‘ explained:

‘the Chair holds the rights of perpetrators in higher regard than the rights of victims. He clearly sees the officers’ human rights as sacrosanct, withholding the names of the spycops who invaded our homes, our families and our intimate lives…

‘Secrecy pervades this so-called ‘public’ inquiry, where officers who abused our rights are granted private hearings with the Chair to convince him to protect their privacy.’

But the Inquiry’s bunker attitude pre-dates Mitting’s appointment and goes beyond what he makes rulings on.

PUBLIC HEARINGS TURNING THE PUBLIC AWAY

The hearings have been held in the Royal Courts of Justice, with a public gallery that can’t quite squeeze 100 people in. With 200 significantly affected victims designated as core participants, most of them are physically prevented from attending the hearings, even before any of the wider public want to attend.

So far, only one preliminary hearing has had to turn people away – perhaps because the Inquiry won’t cover travel costs for victims who want to attend – but that will surely increase as the Inquiry moves towards hearing evidence.

Last month’s hearing took place on the same day as one for the Grenfell Tower inquiry. The Grenfell one was livestreamed, but the spycops Inquiry chooses not to let the world see what it is doing. The best it does is issue a transcript a day or two later in a bizarrely formatted PDF.

PUBLICATION UNSEEN

Much of the Undercover Policing Inquiry website is pages with links to dozens of PDFs bearing uninformative titles like ‘Detailed consultation document,’ ‘Chairman’s note on risk assessments,’ and ‘Ruling on undertakings’.

When scrolling through the list – one page is already at 66 different PDFs, some with the same name as each other – bear in mind that the Inquiry process hasn’t properly begun and the site is a small fraction of the size that it will end up.

A huge proportion of the PDFs on the site are ‘flat’, ie made of pictures of documents rather than text, which means they can’t be wordsearched and the contents won’t appear in websearches.

The search function on the website doesn’t assist. It claims there is nothing on the site about undercover officer Mark Kennedy.

A search of the site via Google turns up 56 results.

NAMING THE OFFICERS, A BIT

There was some hope of relief when they published a page listing undercover officers. However, that only lists four items of information about each officer:

• Cover name
• Herne nominal (without explaining what the term means)
• Groups they infiltrated
• Years of deployment

As ‘Alison‘, who was deceived into a relationship by a man she knew as Mark Cassidy said:

‘There is no restriction order on his real name: Mark Jenner. Yet his real name – and the real names of other confirmed officers – are not listed on this table, making it hard for the public to keep track of who’s who. It feels as if they’re always trying to keep as much hidden as possible.’

There is no link to an officer’s statements, independent assessments or anything else that is buried elsewhere on the site.

For the officers as yet unnamed, there is a link to one document that includes a ruling about them. Once the officer is named, they remove that one link and leave the reader with nothing but the four categories.

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

Even within that, the information is incomplete. Looking at the groups they infiltrated, they average less than two per officer. The Inquiry has previously admitted that more than 1,000 groups were spied on which, divided by the number of officers, means it must average as at least seven each. Every infiltrated group has a right to know. Why can’t we see the full list?

With the named officers, we can even name some of the other unmentioned groups they infiltrated, yet the Inquiry won’t admit it.

Whistleblower officer Peter Francis has publicly said his list is incomplete, as it omits Kingsway College Anti Fascist Group, which became Movement for Justice whilst he was infiltrating it.

Mark Jenner’s list doesn’t mention anything to do with trade unions, yet he was known to be a member of construction union UCATT and targeted other unions including the RMT, Unison, CPSA and TGWU. He was also a regular at meetings and on picket lines.

NO RESPONSE

The list of officers is incomplete in other ways. The section on those whose cover names won’t be published (‘Table Three : Where The Cover Name is Restricted’) only has has three officers, code-numbered HN7, HN123 and HN333.

It does not include others who belong in it, for example, HN23, HN40, HN58 and HN241 who were decided upon on 20 February 2018.

This is not a matter of the page not being updated, as ‘Table Two: Where the cover name is not known’ includes officers who were decided on in the same ruling (HN322 and HN348).

We emailed the Inquiry about this on 18 March. They have ignored it.

Trying to contact them on social media would be equally futile as their Twitter bio specifically says:

‘Tweets will not be responded to.’

END THE CULTURE OF SECRECY

The Undercover Policing Inquiry has already cost over £9m and despite its glacial pace, exclusion and secrecy, it insists it does not need extra staff. If it believes it is competent, that implies it is this way by design.

This is not just an overpaid underskilled worker making a bad website. The Inquiry site, the one-way social media and the refusal to livestream hearings are all online symptoms of a wider fundamental belief that the Inquiry does not have to properly engage with the public. The only substantial information it has given has been about officers already exposed by the people who were spied on.

Mitting has had more secret hearings than public. He not only refuses to answer key questions but rebuffs requests to explain his refusal, saying ‘I know more than you do’.

It is all an extension of his and the Inquiry’s belief in themselves as establishment overseers, which gives the process an inflated trust in the police whose wrongdoing the Inquiry is supposed to expose.

Enough is enough. The clue is in the name – it is a public inquiry. It takes the public’s money, it exists to make public the truth about the abuses of Britain’s political secret police. Nothing less will do.

Last Wednesday, 21 March 2018, Jenny Jones (aka Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb) probed the government about Britain’s political secret police in the House of Lords.

Her question had been submitted in advance, and it focused on what the government knew about the disgraced spycops units.

The Special Demonstration Squad was directly funded by the Home Office for its first twenty years. The government must have wanted something back for the millions it spent, and it received reports from the SDS.

But when the government commissioned ex-Audit Commission director Stephen Taylor to investigate and report in 2015, he couldn’t find a single document anywhere in any of the Home Office archives.

How much the government knew of the detail of the units’ tactics, such as the psychological and sexual abuse of women, is unknown. With that in mind, Jones challenged the Home Office Minister, Baroness Williams of Trafford.

As there had been a mass walkout of the victims and their legal team earlier in the day, other lords took up that issue to highlight the crisis of confidence in the public inquiry.

Here is the full video and transcript of the session (the video has closed captions):

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (Green Party): I beg leave to ask the question standing in my name on the order paper [To ask Her Majesty’s Government what communications they have had, over the last 30 years, with police forces regarding the tactic of undercover police officers forming sexual relationships to develop their cover stories].

The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Conservative): My Lords, as part of its terms of reference the undercover policing inquiry is investigating ​the state of awareness of undercover police operations of Her Majesty’s Government since 1968.

The Home Office is a core participant in that inquiry and is in the process of making disclosure to the inquiry of material relevant to the terms of reference. The inquiry will report its findings once all the evidence has been reviewed.

Baroness Jones: Well, I thank the noble lady for her response which, of course, is not an answer to my Question.

I’m not sure if she is actually aware that, over a period of 24 years from 1985 to 2009, almost every single year there was a state-sponsored sexual relationship between a police officer and a woman who at no point was accused of doing anything illegal – not arrested, not accused – I just don’t understand how the Minister can sit there and think that this is alright.

This strikes at the heart of the ethics and the integrity of our police forces, and of course our security services. I must stress that the cases we know about are only the ones we have heard about, those are the only police names in the public realm. We don’t know all of them. Until we know all the police undercover names we won’t know how many victims there were.

I am also concerned about the Inquiry. The Minister may know that there was a walkout today by the whole legal team of the women involved and the women themselves. So how is the Government going to restore the credibility of that inquiry?

Baroness Williams: The noble lady refers to ‘state-sponsored’. I would refer her to the actual terms of reference of the inquiry, which is to ‘ascertain the state of awareness of undercover police operations of Her Majesty’s Government’. That is precisely what the inquiry was set up to do.

In terms of the walkout of today, I have been made aware of that walkout, and I am aware that the hearings are still ongoing. I would encourage all core participants – indeed, anyone impacted by undercover policing – to participate fully in the inquiry so that we can learn the lessons and get to the truth.

Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Labour & Co-operative Party): My Lords, can the noble lady confirm this is a very serious matter? Notwithstanding anything that comes out of the inquiry and the recommendations that follow, that she is absolutely confident that robust procedures are now in place and that it can never happen again?

Baroness Williams: My Lords, I would love to stand at this Dispatch Box and say that certain things could never happen again, but nobody can legislate for the odd rogue undertaking or the malicious intent of people. Therefore, one cannot be absolutely certain that it could never happen again. What one can do is put measures in place to try and mitigate as far as is possible [so] that it never happens again.

Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate (Non-affiliated): Does the noble Minister agree that undercover policing is an essential tool in the fight against terrorism and crime and that, provided it is properly regulated and standards are adhered to, we shouldn’t judge the majority of very brave police officers that go undercover by the misdeeds of a few?

Baroness Williams: I must completely concur with the noble Lord. He is absolutely right, so much crime has been unearthed by the use of undercover policing. As I say, there are now strict rules in place to mitigate unacceptable behaviour from going on and I couldn’t agree more with him.

Baroness Burt of Solihull (Liberal Democrat): We know that this inquiry has already taken three years, and it’s expected to take another year before the victims get answers – campaigners walking out in protest today notwithstanding. We also know that the Special Demonstration Squad has been disbanded. But it would be naive to think that all embedded undercover work has ceased.

What assurances can the Minister give that the culture, practice, instructions to and supervision of undercover officers have already changed to ensure that, as far as is humanly possible, no man or woman will ever be subjected to these practices again?

Baroness Williams: The noble lady makes a very helpful point, because the policing Code of Ethics makes it clear that police officers should not use their professional position to, ‘establish or pursue an improper sexual or emotional relationship with a person with whom you come into contact in the course of your work’. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 provides the legal framework for the lawful deployment of undercover officers as covert human intelligence sources [CHIS]. We also have the 2014 CHIS codes of practice.

In relation to the point she makes about the length of time that the inquiry has taken, the slight extension to the length of the inquiry is due to purely the sheer number of pieces of information the inquiry has to look at.

Lord Faulks (Conservative): My Lords, I understand that the walkout from the inquiry was because of a sense that it was important that the individual police officers were actually identified by name.

I think my noble friend the Minister confirm that, by definition, undercover police officers have a cover name, and that, whatever the importance of getting to the bottom of what went on in this inquiry, it is important that they retain that anonymity, because that is a pre-eminent part of what they do.

Baroness Williams: My noble friend is absolutely right, and of course it protects the safety of those people as well.

Lord Soley (Labour): So, to confirm, this is not just a matter of rules and regulations? If it went on for so long, there must have been a serious management failure, because if there is the relationship between a senior officer and the person doing the job, that relationship is crucial in terms of keeping a check on their behaviour. That seems to me, as an outsider, not to have happened, and it’s what we ought to focus on.

Baroness Williams: I wouldn’t like to speak for the chair of the inquiry, but I am sure that some of the institutional failures that happened way back in the day will what the inquiry looks at.

Lord Scriven (Liberal Democrat): In the walkout today, the leading QC who was representing the victims said that the walkout was due to the legal teams not being able to participate in a meaningful way. How have we got to a position where this has been going on for three years, cost £9,000,000 and senior QCs feel they cannot participate in a meaningful way?

Baroness Williams: My Lords, the people who walked out will have their reasons for walking out, but I know that the Home Secretary has full confidence in the chairman to carry out the inquiry in a way that gets to the truth of what happened.

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.

The recent hearing of the Undercover Policing Inquiry was a world away from the stereotype of legal proceedings. Whilst other courtrooms seize up with the stale formality and impenetrable legalese, this session was awash with dramatic force that engulfed everyone present. And not in a good way.

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, was sitting in for his second public hearing after taking over from Christopher Pitchford. Concerns victims had about the Inquiry under Mitting’s predecessor have only multiplied as the bias towards police secrecy becomes markedly worse.

NEITHER TRUTH NOR JUSTICE

Mitting said that he would not tolerate the Metropolitan Police’s former tactic of ‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny‘ (NCND) being used to withhold from the public any information about large numbers of officers.

In his first public hearing in November 2017, Mitting unequivocally stated:

‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny has no part at all to play in Special Demonstration Squad deployments’

Yet he has essentially continued the Met’s policy of NCND, rebranding it by saying that revealing any details about a spycop is ‘a potential breach of an officer’s Article 8 rights’, the human right to a private life. This has been the basis of Mitting issuing blanket anonymity to batches of undercover officers in recent months.

Effectively, Mitting is saying the rights of violators are more important than the rights of the violated. Because he regards the officers’ human rights as paramount, the public won’t be told the names of these spycops who invaded citizens’ lives and breached Article 8 rights – as well as Article 3 (freedom from torture), Article 6 (the right to a fair trial), Article 10 (freedom of expression), Article 11 (freedom of assembly and association) and Article 14 (freedom from discrimination).

The overprotection of police privacy is now Mitting’s standard procedure. He looks at what the police officer says, and then at a risk assessment performed by another police officer, then he publishes redacted versions of these statements and issues a ‘minded-to note’ of his intentions.

Dutifully, we then go to hearings where Mitting basically goes along with what the police have recommended. He appears oblivious to the possibility that an officer might want to be anonymous because they have something to hide.

The one exception was the U-turn on Rick Gibson, whose real name is to be released, but only because the Undercover Research Group presented shocking new information about him deceiving women into relationships. Without his erstwhile comrades coming forward with the name the officer had used, the groups he infiltrated and when, this investigation would have been impossible.

NO NAMES = NO EVIDENCE = NO TRUTH

This is the fundamental issue of the Inquiry – we need to know the cover names used by officers in advance, so that those spied upon can give testimony on what the officers did. Without that, the Inquiry is reduced to the police selectively self-reporting.

The hearing earlier this month was concerned with seven officers, all of whom Mitting was intending to grant full anonymity.

Counsel for the victims, Phillippa Kaufmann QC, began bluntly:

KAUFMANN: ‘We are in no better position now than we were before the last hearing. On the contrary, we feel the situation has got worse…

‘these oral hearings, or the invitation of written submissions from us in advance, look increasingly like window dressing and look increasingly pointless in terms of actually having any realistic prospect of having any influence upon your decision-making. That is a matter of great public concern’

RUNNING INTO A BRICK WALL

Two of the officers were known by the code numbers HN23 and HN40. We are offered the bare minimum of information about them, basically just telling us that they existed. Mitting claims publishing their cover names could lead to the real names being discovered which, in turn, could lead to the risk of serious violence against the officers.

HN23 was deployed against one group and reported on other groups in the 1990s. They fear their friends and family will feel betrayed that they kept their spycop past a secret.

HN40 was deployed against two groups in the last decade of the existence of the SDS (ie 1998-2008). They were prosecuted under their false name. Despite this evidence of perjury and perverting the course of justice, the Inquiry seeks to fully protect the officer.

Kaufmann said the refusal to say anything at all amounted to Neither Confirm Nor Deny. Mitting responded:

MITTING: ‘With respect it is not a Neither Confirm Nor Deny approach. It is stronger than that. It is a flat refusal to say anything about the deployment in the open.’

Kaufmann then asked, if we can’t know about the officer can we at least be told why that decision has been taken?

MITTING: ‘I am afraid that HN23 as HN40, they are examples of deployments where you are going to meet a brick wall of silence.’

KAUFMANN: ‘It strikes us as extraordinary that we cannot even be told, for example, was this officer engaged in a deployment in relation to left wing groups or right wing groups. How on earth can the disclosure of that fact alone put that officer at risk?

Mitting was aloof and unrelenting, waiting for her to finish speaking and simply repeating himself.

MITTING: ‘I am afraid you are meeting a brick wall in these two cases and others.’

Maya Sikand, representing whistleblower SDS officer Peter Francis, spoke next about HN23.

SIKAND: ‘We come here, we hope to assist but we are not assisting because you will say, “Well, actually, no, this is a brick wall”. So it does beg the question as to why it is we are invited here’

Sikand then raised the stakes, saying that Peter Francis knows who HN23 is and the groups that were infiltrated.

She said of HN23:

SIKAND: ‘This is an officer who would have valuable evidence to give you about the nature of his deployment and what he was asked to do would be something that he needs to give evidence to you about, because it is likely that there was a level of violence authorised by Special Demonstration Squad managers in his deployments.

‘The difficulty with not disclosing his cover name is that you cannot have his evidence properly tested other than by those with whom he possibly perpetrated that violence or who were witnesses to it, in that group that he infiltrated. So that’s why we say it is of particular importance that you do disclose this cover name.’

Moving on to HN40, Sikand added:

SIKAND: ‘It is Peter Francis’s view that once more this officer would have valuable evidence to give you about the violence that was permitted by Special Demonstration Squad managers to be used by Special Demonstration Squad officers.’

At this point Peter Francis interjected in person.

PROFESSIONAL LIARS

Francis started by reminding Mitting that he and his fellow SDS officers lied professionally, that they had been trained to make whatever they say sound plausible.

Rising to his feet, Francis contrasted the dangers faced by SDS officers with those of former drugs squad officer Neil Woods who was sitting in the public gallery. 

Pointing Woods out to the court, Francis expounded:

FRANCIS: ‘This man here is a former undercover officer himself, Neil Woods, the author of “Good Cop, Bad War“. He personally has led to more imprisonment of individuals totalling approximately 1,000 years for his deployment from 1993 all the way to 2007…

‘That one man has led to more imprisonment than the entire Special Demonstration Squad from 1968 to 2008. He is sitting here in his own name. I am sure he doesn’t mind saying he’s actually brought his wife along today. He walks in society freely and yet there is hundreds upon hundreds of people who would like to pay that man back…

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

LAWRENCE SPYMASTER IS PRESUMED FLAWLESS

The court moved on to what Mitting conceded is ‘the problematic case of HN58’.

HN58 was the senior manager at the SDS during a crucial period in the late 1990s. It was five years after Stephen Lawrence was killed, and the Macpherson inquiry was investigating corruption and racism in the Metropolitan Police’s murder investigation. That inquiry was supposed to get to the truth and be the last word on the issue. But unbeknownst to them, the SDS was spying on the Lawrence campaign for justice, effectively trying to undermine the inquiry.

Mitting gave a clear statement in November 2017, saying that he wants this Inquiry to succeed where Macpherson and other previous processes have failed.

Peter Francis, who as an SDS officer was tasked to ‘find dirt’ with which to discredit the Lawrences and their campaign, said it is essential that HN58’s real name is released so his role can be discussed. Francis explained to the court:

FRANCIS: ‘I personally have promised Mr Lawrence, as in Stephen Lawrence’s father… that I would do absolutely everything for him because I and the Special Demonstration Squad let him down in the last Macpherson Inquiry.’

But withholding the real name is not the only issue with HN58. Like most SDS managers, he had previously been an undercover officer. We want the cover names published. With HN58, where there is evidence of wrongdoing as a manager, it suggests possible wrongdoing when he was an officer. His cover name must be published to allow the people he spied upon to come forward with their experiences.

REAL MEN DON’T LIE

But Mitting intends to withhold HN58’s real and cover names for three reasons:

1. ‘There is no known allegation of misconduct against him’.

This is absurd. How can we make any allegations against an officer if we don’t know who they are? Tell us the name and let those they spied on come forward to say if there was misconduct, otherwise Mitting is conducting his own mini-trials based solely on police evidence. Kaufmann bluntly told Mitting, ‘it is not a reason that actually makes any sense’.

2. ‘The nature of his deployment’.
This is impossible to comment on without knowing any details, but it’s clear that officers exaggerate the danger of their deployments.

3. ‘What is known of his personal and family life make it unlikely it would be necessary to investigate possible misconduct even if details of his deployment were made public’.

This is even weirder than point 1, and nobody seemed to understand what Mitting was alluding to. When challenged, he replied ‘I know more about this man than you do’.

Exactly what he meant had to be teased out of him. Eventually he said it.

MITTING: ‘We have had examples of undercover male officers who have gone through more than one long-term permanent relationship, sometimes simultaneously.

‘There are also officers who have reached a ripe old age who are still married to the same woman that they were married to as a very young man. The experience of life tells one that the latter person is less likely to have engaged in extra-marital affairs than the former.’

There were gasps of incredulity around the court. Does Mitting really believe that if a man has stayed married to one woman for a long time he will not have deceived women he spied on into sexual relationships? And that we can be so confident of this that we don’t need to check if it applies in every case?

The idea that men do not hide affairs from their wives, or have arrangements where affairs are tolerated, is utterly bizarre. It is patently untrue, as we already know from other spycops. Several are known to have stayed married to the same person (at least until the truth was exposed by those they spied on), including the infamous Mark Kennedy who had relationships with four women who have now reached legal settlements with the Met.

A man possessed of opinions such as Mitting’s has no place running an Inquiry with sexual abuse of women and institutional sexism at its core.

CRIMES IGNORED

This moment also made clear that Mitting had been using ‘misconduct’ exclusively as a euphemism for ‘deceiving women into sexual relationships’. He had already made the women a special case at the November hearing, saying they deserved full answers, but not mentioning any other groups of victims.

It’s important to remember that sexual abuse was only one element of the spycops’ criminal misconduct. Assault, identity theft, incitement, burglary, perjury and perverting the course of justice were all commonplace. Mark Ellison QC found that not only did spycops lie to courts and spy on lawyer-client meetings, they also withheld evidence that could have exonerated accused people.

Officers have admitted to the Inquiry that they were arrested and prosecuted whilst undercover, yet Mitting has apparently decided this is not misconduct worthy of consideration, let alone telling the victims about.

As Alison, who was deceived into a five year relationship by SDS officer Mark Jenner, wrote in the Guardian last week:

‘Rather than one senior judge, this inquiry requires an independent panel of experts, along the lines of the one that advised Sir William Macpherson in the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, or the Hillsborough Independent Panel.’

WHAT’S THE POINT?

Helen Steel was deceived into a two year relationship by undercover police officer John Dines. He was only exposed through her diligent research.

Having represented herself in the same courts for the McLibel trial, the longest trial in English history, Steel is now representing herself at the Undercover Policing Inquiry, but in effect she spoke for many:

STEEL: ‘Frankly the way that the Inquiry is currently conducting this process gives the core participants absolutely no faith that it is interested in learning the truth because it is basically believing everything the police says and saying, “I don’t need to hear you because you haven’t got anything you can tell us”…

‘it is just a pointless waste of money if we are not being told enough information to effectively participate this Inquiry. It is not going to get to the truth and the whole purpose of this Inquiry is to stop the human rights abuses that were being committed by these units. You can’t do that without our participation and it is a joke that we are being excluded from this process. It is an insulting joke.’

The victims should be heard. They – the people who brought the issue into the light – are the most keen to have the truth publicly established, but they are repeatedly running into Mitting’s brick wall. His excessive faith in police integrity, and refusal to be substantially swayed from that trust, is steering the Inquiry far from its goal.

Last week the Inquiry announced that, despite all that was said at the hearing, it will withhold the real and cover names as intended (with the exception of probably releasing the real name of the now-deceased Rick Gibson). In other words, if an officer is still married to the person they were with at the time of deployment then they are assumed to be blameless and will be protected from scrutiny.

The Inquiry cannot fulfil its purpose like this. Something fundamental must change if there is to be any point in it at all.