UCPI Daily Report, 25 Nov 2025: Karen Doyle evidence

Tranche 3 Phase 1, Day 18
25 November 2025

INTRODUCTION

On Tuesday 25 November 2025, the Undercover Policing Inquiry heard evidence from Karen Doyle.

Doyle was a student at Kingsway College in London in the 1990s when she got involved in its anti-racism group. She developed an interest in class politics and was part of Movement For Justice which was infiltrated by Special Demonstration Squad officer HN81 ‘David Hagan’.

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 units who deployed long-term undercover officers into a variety of political groups: the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS, 1968-2008) and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU, 1999-2011). Spycops from these units lived as activists for years at a time, spying on more than 1,000 groups.

Doyle’s questioning is part of the Inquiry’s Tranche 3, examining the final 15 years of the Special Demonstration Squad, 1993-2008.

She has given the Inquiry a written witness statement [UCPI0000038051] and a short supplementary statement [UCPI0000039407] though, at the time of writing, the Inquiry hasn’t published either of them.

The Inquiry’s page for the day has videos and a transcript of the live session.

Doyle was questioned for the Inquiry by Sarah Hemingway.

BACKGROUND

Doyle’s family moved to London from Ireland in the mid 1980s when she was a small child. She was subjected to a lot of bullying for her Irishness, including teachers making her stand up and say words so that she could be shamed for her Irish accent.

Having tried to lose her Irish identity, in secondary school an inspirational teacher taught her not only about Irish history but also the Russian Revolution, the Indian independence struggle and apartheid in South Africa.

‘Then I saw the Guildford Four case and people who had been fitted up by the state and I made a decision to always stand on the side of the oppressed.

I became resolutely for Irish reunification, I became proudly Irish. I was someone who is going to stand against colonialism, I am going to be one of those people that I learnt about in history that stood for justice and freedom and equality.’

In autumn 1993 she enrolled at Kingsway College, joining its Students’ Union and the Kingsway Anti-Fascist Group.

The Kingsway Anti-Fascist Group (KAFG) aimed to stop racists by political campaigning, community self-defence, and occupying places fascists were intending to hold a rally, surrounding them to prevent others joining.

At the time Doyle first heard of KAFG, it was generating support for the large protest against the British National Party’s headquarters in Welling, South London, on 16 October 1993.

However, Doyle didn’t go to the protest. It was only a few weeks after she had started college; she was 16 and scared of confrontation with fascists and police.

Shortly after Doyle started at Kingsway College, a fellow student, 17 year old Shah Alam, was horrifically injured in a racist attack by a gang of a dozen white youths armed with bats and knives.

It was not long since Stephen Lawrence had been murdered by racists in South London. Doyle describes both incidents as part of a relentless pattern of racist violence at the time. Some of it got widespread publicity, some didn’t, but local people who were concerned, like Doyle, knew about it all.

There was a large meeting at the college with KAFG, the student union, and the family and friends of Shah Alam. There was a palpable urgent desire for practical action to protect the communities.

‘And I remember the moment that kind of sealed it for me was some member of a left group, can’t remember who exactly it was, but they got up and said, “No, what we really need, there’s going to be a massive Trades Union Congress demonstration in five months’ time, or three months’ time, we need to throw everything into building that demonstration because that’s the most important thing”.

And I just remember thinking, that’s ridiculous, I don’t want to do that. What we need is to solve the immediate need, and the immediate need is community defence.’

FOUNDING THE MOVEMENT FOR JUSTICE

The Shah Alam campaign organised a march, public meetings, press conferences and court pickets to get the racist attackers convicted. The campaign failed. The attackers walked free from court. However, the recognition that the attack and the response to it from state agencies were both facets of a wider problem led to the campaign becoming permanent as Movement For Justice (MFJ).

‘There had to be something more than a family campaign just responding to these racist deaths and deaths in custody. There had to be a movement that was much broader and bigger, and making the wider points about racism, because at that time everyone was losing in the courts.

Everyone was losing, all the victims of racist attacks, all the victims of police violence, everyone was losing in the courts, and we needed something more.’

Doyle was among the founder members of MFJ, along with several others who have appeared at the Inquiry including Alex Owolade and ‘Lewis’.

Special Demonstration Squad officer HN43 Peter Francis ‘Peter Black’ / ‘Peter Johnson’ / ‘Peter Daley’ enrolled at Kingsway as part of his cover, and says he too was a founder member of MFJ.

Doyle says MFJ’s membership and leadership was diverse:

‘It was kind of hardwired into the politics of Movement For Justice that we were an integrated organisation, committed to the leadership, developing the leadership, of our Black members, of our Asian members, of our gay members. We were a fully integrated organisation at all levels.’

By this time, Doyle had joined the Revolutionary Internationalist League (RIL), and she sustained her membership for many years. RIL was a Trotskyist political education group with a membership of five to ten people.

Doyle says that, while people from RIL were in the MFJ leadership, MFJ itself was far larger and involved people of a range of political persuasions. Some of those agreed with RIL, some were wholly opposed.

Doyle points out that if, as spycops alleged, MFJ was just a front for RIL, then RIL would have been far bigger than it ever was.

MFJ’s stated aim was to bring together people of different backgrounds and perspectives to campaign together on the common ground of justice for victims of racism.

Yet the spycops wrote reports infused with the bizarre idea that people in the campaign who don’t believe in Trotskyism would suddenly pivot to believing in it if the people leading the campaign told them to.

It is a reflection of the police’s own structure in which instructions are given from on high and orders must be followed without question. The officers carrying out the orders don’t care if it makes sense, they don’t care if the orders do more harm than good, they don’t even care if the orders are the polar opposite of previous orders.

It stems from a complete faith in authority and a personal moral bankruptcy that is mercifully absent in most other organisations, and certainly in ones such as MFJ and family justice campaigns.

MOVEMENT FOR JUSTICE ACTIVITY

Doyle started as MFJ secretary, and was later treasurer. The group had no formal membership structure. Anyone who agreed with the campaign could come to meetings. The campaign’s three main concerns were police racism and deaths in police custody; justice for victims of racist attacks; and rights for immigrants and asylum seekers.

The meetings were held in Brixton on a weekly basis, attracting between six and thirty people. A number were students but the majority weren’t. It was a broad mix of people from different backgrounds.

MFJ also did a stall outside Brixton station every Saturday, handing out leaflets and talking to people. Everything they did was public.

They ran a campaign against the Metropolitan Police’s use of CS spray, and supported individuals who’d been attacked or harassed.

Their first major campaign was for non-co-operation with the 1995 Asylum and Immigration Bill which required landlords, employers, healthcare professionals and others to check the immigration status of the members of the public they dealt with.

The campaigning involved petitions, lobbying MPs, demonstrations, marches, stalls, and knocking door-to-door.

In November 1995, aged 18, Doyle was one of four people who threw paint and flour over Conservative Party chair Brian Mawhinney as he left the opening of parliament, in protest at his racist public pronouncements about ‘immigrants flooding the country’.

Although it attracted a lot of publicity, Doyle wasn’t prepared for the huge effort of the legal defence campaign and court case. She found it took time away from campaigning that had more tangible results, and the group did everything they could to avoid getting arrested again. Doyle hasn’t had any convictions since.

‘BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY’

Hemingway asks about the Movement For Justice’s prominent use of the term ‘by any means necessary’.

Doyle says it was added to the end of the group’s name a while after it was set up. It was lifted from Malcolm X and the American civil rights movement. MFJ were trying to find a way to mark themselves out as different, campaigning for real change on the ground and not having the local council or the state set the agenda and timetable.

Hemingway asks overtly: does the phrase imply use of violence? Doyle is categorical:

‘Never. Never in terms of any that was initiated by us; the only times that I can think where there was violence was instances of police violence, and this is the thing: when people talk about violence in the context of our movements, it completely ignores the absolutely extreme violence that Black and Asian communities were facing at that time, extreme violence from fascists.

Joy Gardner had 13 feet of tape wrapped around her head by immigration police. That’s violence.

The most that we did was on the frontline of a demonstration if there was a line of police we maybe didn’t move and we’d get pushed by the police. That’s it.’

That detailed and heartfelt answer would be enough to settle it for most people. But not for Hemingway, who asks the same question again. It is met with another clear answer from Doyle:

‘No. No, and if we were saying that we would’ve said that in our publicity. If that was our politics we would’ve said it…

I went through all of my documents that I had from back in the 1990s onwards, and I’ve supplied this Inquiry with reams of it. And nowhere do we promote or say that this is the method that we will use.’

It’s notable that the Inquiry has raised this point persistently with MFJ members, using it as part of their ongoing theme of ‘but you were secretly wanting violence weren’t you?’

And yet, Peter Francis has reported that the SDS unofficially also had the motto ‘by any means necessary’, but the Inquiry hasn’t dug into what exactly they meant by it. It hasn’t been used to imply a lust for violence among police officers.

And, unlike with civilian witnesses and protest violence, police witnesses have not been asked if they support any of the many instances of their side’s violence that have been recounted at the Inquiry.

It is yet another example of the Inquiry’s bias towards the police. If police officers do something, there’s probably a good reason, whereas if citizens oppose any police action they’re probably deranged thugs.

Doyle makes a distinction for self-defence and gives an example of what she means:

‘Derek Bennett was shot multiple times in the back on an estate in Brixton and murdered by police. We held a demonstration, after that demonstration there was an uprising by local youth. And Alex [Owolade from MFJ] was in the media the next day saying we want the charges dropped.

There is no comparison between people expressing their frustration, their anger, at police violence, at racist violence, at fascist violence, there is no equating that with someone being shot in the back multiple times, you can’t equate it.

We did a campaign to get all the charges dropped and we were actually successful, there was no one charged in the end for that.’

Hemingway, unrelenting, tries to summarise this as:

‘A certain amount of violence or physical confrontation is justified so long as it doesn’t meet the violence that police impose on others.’

Doyle says it’s not about scale, it’s about instigation versus what’s necessary for defence.

SECRET SUBVERSIVES

Spycops often portray large and/or more moderate groups as being secretly controlled by a dangerous and subversive small clique. This is pretty much never true.

Special Demonstration Squad officer HN81 ‘Dave Hagan’ infiltrated Movement For Justice. He made numerous allegations about who controlled it, and about MFJ seeking to control other groups such as the Stephen Lawrence family support campaign.

Long after his deployment, in 2013, Hagan spoke to the police’s internal investigation into the spycops scandal, Operation Herne [MPS-0721941]. He described MFJ as:

‘a Trotskyist organisation with the ultimate objective of revolution “by any means necessary”.’

Doyle scoffs at this and completely dismisses it. She reiterates that MFJ was about justice, and you don’t need a revolution to achieve justice.

Asked whether MFJ was subversive, defined as agitating for the overthrow of parliamentary democracy, Doyle is emphatic:

‘Movement For Justice stood in local elections. Movement For Justice attended police consultative group meetings that the police regularly attended. We met with chief police inspectors, we campaigned in elections. We lobbied MPs and met with MPs. We marched, we protested.

All of these things are deeply democratic endeavours. They are not subversive. So I absolutely reject the assertion.’

Doyle and MFJ were also reported on by SDS officer HN43 Peter Francis. Doyle has no memory of him at all, under any of his three pseudonyms.

In his written statement to the Inquiry, Francis says he knew about the plan to throw paint at Brian Mawhinney, and that he made sure the interests of the police were protected during the legal proceedings.

Doyle is disturbed by this, saying it’s hard to see his words as having any meaning other than intervening in the judicial process in some way.

SPYCOP HN81 ‘DAVE HAGAN’

We move on to look in detail at HN81 ‘Dave Hagan’. An SDS note dated 24 June 1997 [MPS-0247148] describes Hagan being given an extraordinary open-ended brief to infiltrate Brixton. No specific group, just the notably multicultural geographical area was felt to be suspicious enough to warrant a spycop.

Hagan reported back that he’d discovered London Greenpeace. This was scarcely news as they had been spied on as far back as the early 1980s by numerous SDS spycops. London Greenpeace’s notorious McLibel trial, the longest court case in English history, had concluded just a few days earlier so they’d been in the press a lot too.

Hagan had also discovered Movement For Justice who, as mentioned, had already been spied on by Peter Francis.

The document says Hagan reported that MFJ was an entirely Black organisation, which is completely untrue. He also said he was keen to be deployed to the area.

Hagan’s own report on his findings [MPS-0000422], dated 24 June 1997, said the MFJ stall staff he encountered were only giving leaflets to ‘coloured passers by’.

Doyle, a mixture of disgusted and confused, says MFJ would never have done such targeting. She adds that if that were true then Hagan, as a white man, wouldn’t have got the leaflet he was given.

‘It shows their own obsession with race… the whole thing is just outrageous, it’s just wandering around Brixton and seeing who gives you a leaflet!’

She explains that this meant it was hardly an effort for Hagan to infiltrate MFJ. They would encourage people who took leaflets to come to meetings. Their activities were all publicly advertised and open to anyone. It’s a world away from the clandestine quasi-terrorist groups the SDS claim to have been infiltrating.

The group knew there was a possibility of police attending undercover, but as an open, mass, democratic public campaign, they felt they couldn’t do anything to prevent it. Occasionally someone would come who seemed like they might be an agent provocateur, disruptive and proposing violent things, and they were asked to leave.

Asked about Hagan’s demeanour, Doyle paints a vivid picture:

‘He was a very depressed person, he seemed down lot of the time. He was quite calm, he was quiet, most of the time.’

He said he’d come from Hereford which he’d found to be very racist. His story claimed that, once in London, he’d joined the Socialist Workers Party, become disillusioned and turned to anarchism, then became disillusioned with that too and arrived at MFJ.

He came to meetings and demonstrations, but didn’t do things like going door to door, and he never held a position of influence in MFJ.

The group didn’t socialise together, let alone have the vibrant array of sexual interactions that spycops have claimed is endemic to the left wing.

‘His laser focus was on police and fascism, he wasn’t remotely interested in our asylum work. Because we were a local-based organisation, we also supported campaigns, like against the cuts to the local playgrounds, to the adventure playgrounds, or to special educational needs provision and we’d go along with parents to lobbies of the council.

He wasn’t interested in any of that. It was overwhelmingly police and fascism. Even though we didn’t do much anti-fascist work actually in that period, he was always pushing us to do more.’

HAGAN’S LIES

The Inquiry showed the minutes of a Lambeth Movement For Justice meeting on 23 October 1997 [UCPI0000038054]. There was discussion of a local youth workers’ dispute. It records that Hagan then raised the danger of MFJ trying to take on too much and losing focus on police brutality.

Doyle confirms this was a common intervention he made when any other topic was discussed.

Hagan’s SDS report of the meeting [MPS-0000643], which gets the date wrong, says the three ongoing central themes of campaigning agreed by the meeting were:
1. opposition to police harassment and intimidation
2. opposition to racist asylum and immigration policies
3. support of ethnic minority issues

Doyle dismisses it as highly unrepresentative, and adds that the group was actually opposed to the term ‘ethnic minorities’. Hagan’s reports often noted the race and gender of attendees. It all shows him having an obsession with race, and concocting lies to impress his superiors.

Later in the same report, Hagan talks about MFJ having big ambitions for the group to spread nationally. This is further exaggeration.

Doyle confirms that, despite wider support from sympathisers, there were really only two branches. The Lambeth one would have a maximum of 30 people at meetings, the Kingsway College no more than 20. At this time the group as a whole had £61.

Three weeks later, on 17 November 1997, Hagan reported on an MFJ march [MPS-0000688]. Around 70 people attended, which was regarded as a good turnout. There were no arrests or disorder of any kind. Hagan said the main purposes of the march were to recruit and get money.

Doyle condemns the claim as ‘ridiculous’, and wryly notes that a drive for funds would have left them with more than £61 in the bank. She also takes issue with the term ‘recruit’. It’s another instance of spycops trying to portray political organisations as regimented and cult-like.

In reality, there was no formal membership of MFJ. People came and went, campaigned more on the things that mattered to them and less on the things that didn’t. There was no commitment or coercion of any kind.

STOP AND SEARCH

Hemingway moves on to ask about MFJ’s campaign ‘Don’t Walk On By’, encouraging people to observe and assist when they saw people stopped and searched by police in Brixton and Lambeth. We’re shown a leaflet they distributed [UCPI0000038060].

There was some intensely racist use of ‘stop and search’ going on. Doyle recounted an instance of a 12 year old Black schoolboy who’d been stopped three times in one day, and described how being searched was a very isolating experience for anyone.

The campaign advised being calm and cooperative, and for witnesses to not impede but to observe and get the details of the person so they could be checked on to see if they were alright. This was something that people were already doing, and the MFJ campaign made it more conscious and commonplace.

Hemingway highlights the leaflet’s text saying ‘the police may threaten you with obstructing an arrest, but you have every right to observe what is going on’. She asks if this means MFJ were encouraging people to obstruct the police.

Doyle patiently explains that, as the leaflet says, they were not saying any such thing. Rather, police being observed would threaten the observers with arrest for obstruction to scare them away. MFJ were being clear that was an empty threat. As with other questions from Hemingway, Doyle points out that if that’s what MFJ were saying, you’d see it in what they were writing.

And, as with many of her previous queries, Hemingway responds to a clear reply by repeating the same question. Doyle says, again, that MFJ were absolutely not encouraging people to physically touch officers.

POLICE CONSULTATIVE GROUP

MFJ would also participate in the Lambeth community and police consultative group. This was an initiative set up after the Brixton uprisings of 1981 and the following Scarman report, wherein police would have an open forum to hear community concerns.

In July 1999, MFJ used this to ask Chief Superintendent Foy about the legality of Operation Shutdown, a police scheme to video people in public who were suspected of being criminals. He promised to respond at the next meeting.

Hagan reported on this and suggested that Brixton police ensure the questions were answered [MPS-0002285]:

‘Movement For Justice do not anticipate many people will attend this meeting in three week’s time, however if only 20 or 30 appear and Foy does not recognise their legitimacy or refuses to meet, he will be providing ammunition for the Movement For Justice to use in their propaganda campaign.’

After briefly taking issue with the connotations of ‘propaganda campaign’, Doyle was almost flummoxed by the fact that the spying was going on:

‘It blows my mind that Hagan was providing advice to the local police on how to interact with us and with members of the community who were raising legitimate concerns about police harassment.’

She points out that statistics already showed that stop and search was used disproportionality against Black and brown people, and that the practice did not reduce crime. They were simply asking that the police be lawful and fair.

Hagan’s report continued:

‘If Foy cannot provide effective answers he will be accused of not having control over his officers, who have proven to be institutionally racist.’

Hemingway asks if the argument of being institutionally racist was something MFJ were using to ‘batter’ Foy.

Doyle plainly says that the police were institutionally racist. This was not something MFJ were having to contrive or wield. And that being so, the stop and search and video activities were also racist:

‘It’s valid to say that an institutionally racist police force exercising discretion is going to exercise it in a racist manner. I mean, I think that’s fair comment.’

‘A ZERO POLICE TOLERANCE ZONE’

In his written statement to the Inquiry [MPS-0748738], Hagan asserts that his spying on MFJ was valid because the SDS were concerned with public order issues, and he reckons MFJ’s campaigning on stop and search was a public order issue.

There was no disorder around the campaign whatsoever.

Hagan continues with his fanciful justifications for infiltrating MFJ:

‘I do not believe that the suggestion of creating a zero police tolerance zone was lawful.’

Doyle is insulted and outraged:

‘It’s ridiculous! It’s ridiculous, we weren’t having a “zero police tolerance zone”, we weren’t creating no-go areas for the police.

We were creating a situation where the police couldn’t carry out racist harassment. It was a zero tolerance to police harassment campaign.

The fact that Hagan omits that from his report is telling about his intentions and the SDS’s intentions and their views.’

In his 2013 statement to Operation Herne [MPS-0721941], Hagan said that MFJ caused ‘most of the difficulties for the Brixton police’.

However, he says his reports meant the local uniformed police could ‘deal effectively with the chaos generated by MFJ’ whose campaigning on stop and search was ‘a vehicle to promote violent opposition to the police’.

Doyle bats it all away as ‘rubbish’. MFJ were publicly and peacefully holding the police to account for racist harassment, and asking them to do more for people who had been victims of racist attacks.

She cites a specific successful example, of a couple who were subjected to brutal racist attack which the police were reluctant to investigate. MFJ brought them to the police consultative meeting, took the Chief Inspector aside afterwards to speak to them, and this resulted in a prosecution.

At the Inquiry’s morning break, Tom Fowler discussed the hearing with Heather Mendick:

Doyle is disparaging of Hagan’s relentless implications of underhand behaviour and trying to cause gratuitous chaos:

‘Everything about the way these reports is phrased is through the institutionally racist lens of the SDS and their undercover officers. It does not reflect Movement For Justice’s beliefs, perspective or what we did.’

Hemingway asks if it was ever an aim for Movement For Justice to break down the relationship between police and local people.

‘It was already broken! It was broken years before Movement For Justice was set up…

It was broken by years, decades, of failures to go after the racists who were attacking people and brutalising people and murdering people… and years… of stop-and-search, of racist targeting of Black communities and fitting up of people. It was already broken’

A Hagan report of 22 May 2000 [MPS-0003397] stemmed from a London Tonight documentary that followed Brixton police around. A shop had been raided for handling stolen mobile phones, but there had been no evidence of the crime actually happening.

The business owner sought legal advice from Bindman’s solicitors, themselves the subject of Special Branch spying with their own Registry File, according to the witness statement of Peter Francis [UCPI0000036012]. Bindman’s recommended that the shop owner ask local Chief Superintendent Foy for a letter of apology. He also went to MFJ for advice.

Hagan reported:

‘Armed with such an apology they will then seek to sue the police for damages and should no such letter be forthcoming then they anticipate many years of legal wrangling with an uncertain result at the end.’

Hagan using ‘armed’ is yet another indicator of his gladiatorial approach to people trying to hold the police to account for demonstrable failings.

But more than that, this has nothing to do with the SDS remit. It’s Hagan attending meetings and gleaning details of a legal strategy concerning a citizen who’s done nothing wrong, and then trying to help shield the police from a damages claim.

Doyle is astonished:

‘He’s essentially telling the police, “Don’t do the letter of apology because if you do it opens you up to civil liability”. I mean, he’s giving the police [a] heads-up on a legal strategy that someone brought to our meeting, which is pretty disgraceful.’

CS SPRAY CAMPAIGN

Hemingway moved on to MFJ’s campaign to ban police CS spray, also known as tear gas, which restricts breathing and vision by severely irritating the mucous membranes and eyes.

Starting in 1998, this was a successful local campaign involving protests, lobbying the Lambeth community police consultative group, public meetings, lobbying MPs and suchlike.

CS spray had been given a six month trial by the Met, starting on 1 March 1996.

On 16 March, Ibrahima Sey died at Ilford police station. He had been detained under the Mental Health Act and cooperatively accompanied police.

When police refused to let his friend come in to the station, Sey objected and around six officers set upon him, dragging him to the ground and handcuffing his hands behind his back. They pulled him up to his knees and CS sprayed him in the face.

Sey was taken to the custody suite and put face down on the floor, where four to six officers held him down for at least 15 minutes, until he stopped breathing.

Ibrahima Sey’s case is one of those covered in the 2001 film Injustice, documenting a number of Black people’s deaths in police custody, and the campaigns for justice by their loved ones (see the full film on Vimeo).

A number of medical professionals said CS may well have contributed to Sey’s death. In October 1997, an inquest jury unanimously found that he had been unlawfully killed.

Where there is an unlawful killing, there is an unlawful killer. And yet, none of the officers who killed Sey was prosecuted. This increased the fear that police could use CS spray to kill with impunity again.

On 14 December 1997, Hagan reported [MPS-0000717] on a meeting of the Lambeth police consultative committee. MFJ were wanting to delay the issuing of CS spray to officers at Brixton police station until there had been a consultation.

Hagan says most of the attendees were happy for the consultation to happen after rollout, but ‘stoked by MFJ’, they became angered and turned against it:

‘The events were seen as a success by the Movement For Justice. Essentially, the meeting was paused. The disorder was pre-planned by them, with the main protagonists during the evening being “Lewis”, Karen Doyle, Tony Gard and Alex Owolade.’

Doyle is emphatic that it’s not exaggerated, it’s actually complete fiction:

‘There was no disorder! It’s completely false! We went there with a list of demands calling for CS spray to be withdrawn. The whole entire purpose of those Lambeth police community consultative groups is for people to intervene, and people frequently raise motions and raise demands and ask for things to be done. There was no disorder.’

Hagan wasn’t done. Ever keen to drop in words that intensify the sense of danger, he said:

‘Movement For Justice hope to mobilise public concern against the spray and build effective street opposition against it.’

Doyle is flummoxed:

‘What does it even mean? “Build effective street opposition”, what are they talking about? This bears no relation to what the Movement For Justice was doing.’

As antifascist Dan Gillman had highlighted at an earlier Undercover Policing Inquiry hearing about a different spycop, they throw in ‘street’ because it has connotations of street violence and riots. They do it even when, as in this instance, they’re talking about ordinary democratic lobbying of accountable people in authority.

In February 1998, Hagan reported [MPS-000833] on another consultative meeting. The police put a case for the spray. Alex Owolade then played a ten minute Channel 4 News report critical of the spray, after which a doctor specialising in cancer gave a damning analysis. The meeting held a vote, the result firmly called for the withdrawal of the spray.

Hagan said MFJ ‘view it as a fantastic propaganda base’. Again, he’s inserting connotations of inauthentic underhand behaviour.

Doyle says there wasn’t a single arrest during the campaign, no disorder, just universally acknowledged legitimate campaigning activities such as demonstrations, meetings, experts’ reports, and lobbying of MPs. She adds that this is what ‘by any means necessary’ is about, local campaigns using every democratic tool to achieve wins for the community.

BROOMFIELD SCHOOL 3

Next, Hemingway turned to the Broomfield School 3 campaign.

On 20 October 2000 a gang of armed men entered Broomfield School in North London and hospitalised a Black student.

Shortly afterwards, a group of students spotted the attacker and told a nearby police officer. When the officer was uninterested, they got angry. More police came and arrested the students. Several were charged.

There were meetings held to defend the students. In his written witness statement, Hagan recalls one:

‘While the meeting took place in a private home, it was a public meeting and I think about 20 people attended, including significant figures from the Socialist Workers Party.’

Doyle is completely certain that he’s wrong. She says there was no way a public meeting would have been held in a private home, as publicising the address would lay it open to fascist attacks.

Either way, it was a police officer in a private home without a warrant. That is unlawful.

Six weeks after the attack, on 1 December 2000, Hagan reported on the campaign [MPS-0004771]:

‘The agitating parent reported that many of the other parents are refusing to support them, but nevertheless they seem to be building a small but volatile support base and, especially with the input of Movement For Justice, the court hearing is likely to be confrontational.’

That one sentence has so many hallmarks of spycop exaggeration, inventing division and danger where none exists. MFJ are characterised as intrinsically hostile, bringing aggression wherever they go.

Doyle is affronted at the tone and insinuation:

‘This is another example of the deeply offensive reporting … parents of children who are facing life-altering criminal charges are reduced to “agitating parents”. It’s just despicable…

It’s denigrating parents and children who are facing racism and who have faced attack from both a racist and from the police, who denigrate them as just confrontational and violent, agitational. That’s fundamentally racism, the police throughout all of these reports, the focus on Black people.

There was a report where he talks about a demonstration and says, “Oh it was mostly white, so there will be no trouble on it”. All the reports drip with their prejudice.’

Predicting a guilty verdict for the children, Hagan says:

‘Unlike many cases that Movement For Justice have been involved with, there does not seem to be anything glaringly wrong with the police’s action.’

Doyle says this is a backhanded compliment, implicitly admitting that most of their cases had merit and merely sought justice for people mistreated by police.

LOOKING THROUGH A LENS OF RACISM

Doyle highlights further examples of Hagan’s skewed worldview when we see a report he filed on 2 December 1997 [MPS-0000740].

It concerns the Ivorian Relief Action Group, which met in the same building as MFJ and had similar politics. Its members had been in a militant student union in Cote d’Ivoire and came to the UK after being subjected to repression.

Hagan says:

‘If this association can be developed the Movement For Justice will stand much more of a chance of connecting with young black men (in the political sense).’

Doyle is exasperated. It’s another implication of people trying to gain power by nefarious means, it’s oblivious to the concepts of altruism and solidarity. She points out that Hagan’s own previous reports undermine what he’s trying to insinuate here:

‘It’s ridiculous, and again it’s this SDS obsession with race. That didn’t reflect the reality of what Movement For Justice was.

Movement For Justice was integrated, he’s just described multiple meetings that were actually majority Black! We didn’t have to “stand more of a chance”.

This is not us, this is Hagan, this is SDS, this is their delusion.’

Doyle is in full flow now, articulating her affronted disgust with eloquence and passion. She turns to another Hagan report [MPS-0006198] which describes MFJ as:

‘a white or mixed organisation headed by a homosexual, they have no standing among the young black community that they continue to target.’

Doyle rips into it:

‘It’s just deeply offensive, it’s offensive on so many levels! It’s offensive alleging that the Black community is somehow more homophobic than every other community.

It’s saying that Movement For Justice was a white organisation. It wasn’t a white organisation, it was an integrated organisation with Black leaders, with gay leaders, with lesbian leaders, that was what our organisation was.’

She attacks the ‘lens of racism’ through which the SDS peer, seeing Black people as intrinsically threatening, and MFJ as trying to recruit them.

She rattles off a list of white people harmed by police whose cases they supported. They were literally a Movement For Justice, for anybody who was subjected to unlawful police action.

ACTUAL DISORDER 1: REPORT OF INTENT TO TAUNT & SPIT

Hemingway asks about three instances where there was reported to be disorder at an event MFJ were part of.

Firstly, a Hagan report [MPS-0001769] on a stewards meeting for a national civil rights march in 1999. MFJ were hoping 500 people would attend.

Hagan wrote:

‘Certainly the crowd will be encouraged to voice their anger and taunting and spitting at the police will be acceptable.’

Doyle is unapologetically clear on the primary purpose:

‘All our demonstrations voiced anger, that’s the purpose of a demonstration, to voice anger.

We wouldn’t have told people to taunt police officers, we have chants. There’s a whole row of chants that we say and we have everyone focused on the chants, which usually have our demands in them if we can.’

As for spitting? ‘Absolutely not!’

But Hagan is deep into another familiar riff; there is no such thing as justified anger towards the police. Anyone expressing any criticism of police wrongdoing is considered to be opposing policing in general and all police officers personally.

The police are essentially saying they see the racism, brutality and corruption as integral to their role and institution.

Hagan does, however, concede that MFJ aren’t up for violence. Doyle re-emphasises that, saying it was counterproductive on several levels.

‘The goal of what we want in a demonstration, in a march, is for that march to feel powerful. We want it to feel strong.

That strength and power come from the size of the march, it comes from the demands of the march, it comes from the chanting of the march and it comes from the goal of the march…

Do those people go away feeling more powerful than they did before they went on that march? And do they go away with a plan of action for what else we can do to build our movement? That’s the purpose of a march.’

ACTUAL DISORDER 2: BEING PUSHED BY POLICE

Second in the disorder rundown, we’re shown Hagan’s report of 7 May 1999 [MPS-0002043].

Doyle says that, having been given around 500 police documents pertaining to MFJ, this is the only one that could legitimately be said to describe any disorder.

It concerns that year’s May Day march in London celebrating workers’ rights. It was common for there to be several feeder marches that converged. That year, just before May Day, there had been three nail bombs planted in London by fascist David Copeland.

MFJ marched from their home territory in Brixton, where the market had been the site of the first bomb, to Old Compton Street where the Admiral Duncan LGBTQ pub had been bombed. Once there, they were to wait for another feeder march from East London, but the police told them it wasn’t coming so to go back to Trafalgar Square.

Part of the way back they saw the East London march, so went back to Old Compton Street. Doyle has read Hagan’s report and observed:

‘He calls it a mêlée, but he’s not specific. Like, what it would’ve been was the police trying to push us back and people standing still. That’s it. That’s the extent of it.

That incident was directly caused by the police intervention, by the police lying to us about this other march…

I don’t even class that as disorder, it’s just something that happens on demonstrations quite a lot. No-one’s throwing anything, no one’s getting injured.’

She adds that this wasn’t something that an intelligence officer could have foreseen. Hagan’s deployment was utterly pointless. Throughout its whole span, there were no arrests on any MFJ actions.

ACTUAL DISORDER 3: SPYCOP KICKS OFF AT COLLEAGUES

Finally, regarding actual public order issues, we turned to a National Front ‘Keep Bermondsey White’ protest on 7 April 2001. Several antifascist groups were there including MFJ, and Hemingway says they charged police lines.

Doyle says that the point of being at an antifascist counter-protest is to stop the fascists marching, and if that fails then at least to make it hard for others to join them. Doyle said it’s never been properly confrontational, she’s never actually had contact with fascists at a demo.

She rejects the word ‘charging’ in this instance, saying it was more that they were up against a police line and both sides would have been pushing.

She vividly recalls having to grab hold of one MFJ comrade and pull him back from the police line because he was being extremely aggressive and risked arrest. That comrade? Dave Hagan.

There’s a photo of that moment [UCPI0000038672]. Hagan is facing the camera, identitifed with a red circle. Doyle is on the left in a light T shirt and glasses, with her arm on Hagan’s shoulder, pulling him away from the police lines. A uniformed police officer’s hand is on Hagan’s forearm, just below Doyle’s elbow, indicating that Hagan was close to arrest at this point.

A Hagan report of 14 May 2001 [MPS-0005927] says that later that day as the fascists dispersed into an estate, people from MFJ wanted to give chase with the intention of beating them up.

Doyle says only one of them was actually wanting to do that: Hagan. The rest all wanted to leave. Hagan called Alex Owolade a coward for not doing it.

During the lunch break at the hearing, Tom Fowler discussed the evidence with Zoe Young:

On 5 December 1998, Hagan reported [MPS-0001572] that a small group from MFJ and Class War were going to protest against a National Front rally in Dover. It’s not a grand claim, but even this was an exaggeration.

He had been talking to people individually, trying to get them to go, but nobody was interested. Doyle took pity on him:

‘I was trying to be supportive and encouraging of someone who wanted to do something and so I said, okay, I’ll go with you to Dover, and it was literally me and Hagan in his car and him driving us to Dover. The “small group” was me and Hagan, that’s it!’

It’s almost amusing, but when they arrived something more sinister happened.

‘We didn’t actually join the anti-fascist demonstration… We just kind of walked around the area, and I have a vivid memory of walking along the seafront with Hagan, and a senior police officer walking towards us and saying “Alright, Karen”.’

It was discombobulating for Doyle at the time, but now it seems obvious that uniformed police had been given a detailed briefing because Hagan’s report said the volatile and riotous MFJ were coming.

SLURS – VIOLENT USURPERS

In March 1998 Hagan reported [MPS-0001111] on what he described as an anti-IRA march in Whitehall:

‘A number of skirmishes developed through the course of events, primarily led by Karen Doyle and Alex Owolade, although nobody was either arrested or appeared badly hurt by the scuffles.’

Doyle highlights the contradiction: if there really were skirmishes and violence there would have been injuries and arrests, yet Hagan says there weren’t. If Doyle had ever thrown punches at police or told others to throw bricks then it would have been reported. But it wasn’t, because nothing like that ever happened.

A Special Branch note of 10 December 1998 [MPS-0748392] describes groups supporting the Stephen Lawrence campaign:

‘The Movement For Justice are not afraid to instigate disorder should it be politically advantageous…. they will call for “community action” against the five suspects.’

It’s an exaggerated lie with a bonus on top in the implication that when MFJ talks of ‘community action’, it’s a euphemism for serious violence.

The report continues with another misdefinition:

‘The Movement For Justice are not likely to seek to start disorder on the march. Rather, they are hoping to build a mood of militancy that will attract other extremist groups.’

Doyle picks up on the use of ‘militancy’ to mean something akin to a lust for violence. She cites Lois Austin’s eloquent evidence on this exact topic. Like Austin in Youth Against Racism in Europe, MFJ used the term in its labour movement context, defining those who weren’t afraid to have demonstrations, go on strike and stand on picket lines.

With the decline in trade unionism, particularly after the 1984-5 miners’ strike, it was no longer a part of the everyday lexicon and so, just like the Militant Tendency, MFJ stopped using it.

But whatever the definition, Doyle says it didn’t apply to MFJ’s support for the Lawrence campaign:

‘We were concerned with building a mass movement. We didn’t believe that change can come only from court hearings and public inquiries, we believed it took a molecular mass protest of people organising on all fronts to win justice, to win change. And history proves that truth.’

An SDS management document from 11 January 2001 [MPS-0004973] reiterates the view that MFJ aren’t ‘overtly’ violent but will encourage others to be violent and then join in, and are trying to use popular local issues to recruit people who aren’t aware of the hidden agenda.

Despite Hagan being part of the group for several years, no evidence appears in any of his reports to support such assertions.

Doyle says that MFJ were holding protests that challenged police wrongdoing, and this is regarded as actual disorder because we’re not supposed to challenge the police no matter what they’ve done.

She is infuriated by the slurs, not just because it’s so far from the truth but because it casts aspersions on the integrity of MFJ and the sincerity of its desire for justice.

She reels off a list of justice campaigns MFJ supported, saying they didn’t run any of them, nor seek to. Their role was to ‘signal boost’ them and to see the connections between others like them so that there would be a bigger campaign and better chance of justice being done.

‘Movement For Justice came out of the defeat of what was a family campaign for justice, the Shah Alam campaign. We lost. Movement For Justice didn’t want to lose, didn’t want anyone to lose. Movement For Justice wanted people to win.

We were just painfully aware that the problem that family campaigns often have is they’re thrown into this protracted and lengthy horrifying legal process that goes on for years, and then there’s the inquiries and they go on for years, and we firmly believe that justice delayed is justice denied…

But we were building a movement. A movement is not just one thing, it’s a molecular process. You’ve got the family campaigns, you’ve got Movement For Justice and what we were doing, you’ve got the police consultative group, you’ve got the youth workers who are organising, you’ve got the trade unions.

It’s like all of those component parts, that’s what wins in the end.’

Hemingway brings out a 2013 interview with notorious spycop HN10 Bob Lambert [MPS-0721934]. He was undercover in the 1980s, in which time he personally perpetrated all the main outrages for which the spycops are infamous. He was then promoted to being SDS manager in the 1990s.

Lambert described the typical demeanour of the left wing activist that he assumed for his undercover persona:

‘You were optimistic that there could be a flashpoint to trigger the level of public disorder which you as a revolutionary wanted, you believed that this was the prelude to the revolution that you lived and breathed. And so that was the world that the SDS field officers on the far left lived in.’

Doyle can’t contain her incredulous laughter. She apologises for laughing and says that, just taking facts from Hagan’s reports, MFJ were writing questions for the Chief Superintendent of Brixton police, meeting with police officers, going to Lambeth police community consultative group meetings, having a stall at the tube station.

And conversely, there is no report of anyone even being arrested. It’s hardly the fomenting of civil unrest that Lambert describes.

SUPPORT NOT CONTROL

Turning to the allegation of the whole campaign being a scheme to take over family justice campaigns to advance a different agenda, Doyle becomes much more serious.

The family campaigns that were spied on have been repeatedly told they weren’t directly targeted; it was just that there was legitimate spying on the dangerous groups who supported them, so the families were incidentally reported.

We’ve already seen that this is a lie. There was extensive direct reporting on family campaigns.

Doyle is outraged at the portrayal of MFJ as duplicitous feral thugs in order to excuse the SDS’s racist spying and avoid accountability:

‘We would never want to take over a family campaign, that was the polar opposite of why Movement For Justice was set up…

We didn’t win for Shah, his attackers walked free. We set up something that was about something different, that was about building a movement that could win justice, that could see Stephen’s murderers jailed, that could see Rolan Adams‘ murderers, more than one, jailed. That could see the victims of racism and racist attacks being treated as human beings and not criminals. And that’s what we wanted. That’s what we wanted.

It really upsets me that the family campaigns have been shown this evidence suggesting that this is what Movement For Justice’s aims were. It really upsets me that they would think that that’s our aim. It wasn’t. It wasn’t.

This is the SDS delusion and racism, and how they viewed the Black community. Movement For Justice is a convenient scapegoat, that’s all we are. And what the police have done when they’ve apologised to those Black families and they’ve said, “Oh we’re really sorry, but you were just collateral damage, it was this violent group over here”.

That is shameful gaslighting of those families, because it is not true. Those apologies mean nothing because it is not true. None of this is true about Movement For Justice’s intentions and our politics and what we did. And in fact, the reports back that up.’

At this, the public gallery burst into applause.

An SDS file on Hagan [MPS-0728625] says that it came to a point where MFJ was run by himself, Doyle, and Alex Owolade. Doyle stops herself from swearing, and declares it ‘absolute nonsense’.

Hagan himself denies steering MFJ to the Lawrence campaign but says it was valid policing [MPS-0721973]:

‘I didn’t suggest it, but I didn’t dissuade them from getting involved. It was really good news they were going to it. It was going to be valuable intelligence with regards to public order issues… All intelligence is good.’

In his 2013 interview for Operation Herne [MPS-0721026], Hagan said he was at the Lawrence inquiry to ‘stop the likes of MFJ taking over’.

Doyle says it shows their awareness of their guilt. They’re saying it because they knew spying on the Lawrences was wrong, and they were attempting to justify it, trying to defend the indefensible.

WHAT IS RACISM?

Hagan claimed he was selected for his undercover role precisely because he wasn’t racist. Doyle has no truck with this. She says that racism isn’t individual acts of conscious hatred. It’s pervasive, often unconscious, and in Hagan’s case it runs through his entire reporting.

She says that the police reporting on hunt saboteurs and Reclaim the Streets never said ‘this is a majority white meeting’. The reports on Black people mention race because the officer writing it is racist. The mentions of a protest being expected to be peaceful because it’ll only have white people; the ‘agitating parents’ of Black children; the continual insinuation of violence and volatility; it’s all racism.

To explain further, Doyle recounts a campaign against a racist white employer who was treating Black workers unfairly. The person concerned said she couldn’t be racist because she was married to a Black man.

‘Men marry women, they can still be sexist, misogynist and violent. The social proximity and your own perception of yourself does not make racism, racism is expressed in a million different kinds of social interactions and prejudices. Someone who considers themselves not racist can still be racist.’

Like many spycops, Hagan would report on hostility and confrontation between groups that were actually cooperating. He said that MFJ were ‘barely tolerated’ by the Lawrence campaign.

MFJ were invited to make a presentation to the Lawrence inquiry. Hagan forewarned his bosses [MPS-0001398]:

‘Owolade will use the opportunity to rubbish the inquiry and call for the formation of a civil rights movement. Shah Alam, a victim of racial violence, will take the microphone from Owolade in an attempt to advertise his case…

Any attempt to prevent Owolade or Shah Alam from speaking may be aggressively challenged.’

There’s a catalogue of loaded words there, ‘rubbish the inquiry’, ‘attempt to advertise’, ‘aggressively challenged’.

Doyle is again incensed and amazed at the disconnection from reality:

‘Why would we be prevented from speaking? We were invited to speak!’

She condemns the minimising language that belittles what happened to Shah Alam and by extension all those who experience racist violence.

She also berates the miserly poverty of mind that underpins the SDS’s attitude, with them seemingly unable to conceptualise anything outside of adversarial regimented organisations.

HOW MUCH WAS HE SPYING ON THE LAWRENCES?

Hagan told his bosses that the Lawrence campaign was taking up most of MFJ’s time. Doyle refutes this, pointing out that she’s supplied contemporaneous documents showing they had other campaigns going on including the CS spray one.

Doyle points out that most of Hagan’s reports on MFJ activity are only a couple of paragraphs, whereas the ones on the Lawrence campaign are multiple pages recording everything that everyone said. He did that even when nobody from MFJ spoke in the meeting.

‘This was not about Movement For Justice. This was a decision to spy on the Lawrence inquiry and the Lawrence family.’

Spying on the Lawrence family is one of the most controversial incidents in the whole spycops scandal. Within that, the standout element is Hagan’s meeting in August 1998 with Richard Walton from the team crafting the Met’s submissions to the Lawrence inquiry.

It was brokered by SDS manager HN10 Bob Lambert, and took place in his garden. Lambert reported [MPS-0728625]:

‘It was a fascinating and valuable exchange of information concerning an issue which according to RW [Richard Walton] continues to dominate the Commissioner’s agenda on a daily basis.

RW thanked WT [‘Windmill Tilter’, aka ‘Dave Hagan’] for his invaluable reporting on the subject in recent months. An in-depth discussion enabled him to increase his understanding of the Lawrences’ relationship with the various campaigning groups, like Movement For Justice.’

There was pretty much nothing for Hagan to have reported though. As we’ve seen, it was mostly exaggeration and lies. But Hagan knew what his bosses wanted to hear.

Meeting a senior officer like Walton who says the Lawrence campaign ‘dominated the Commissioner’s agenda’ gave Hagan a huge incentive to come up with detailed reports. Like so many other spycops, he thought nobody would ever check the veracity of what he said. And he was right, at least until the recent inquiries looked into what he was doing.

The Commissioner, Paul Condon, was planning to hold public forums on the issue, with Lambeth town hall being one suggested venue. Hagan told Walton not to go to this one as it would be vulnerable to disruption from MFJ and ‘local Black youth’.

Doyle is annoyed by this smear, pointing out that MFJ never disrupted such activities. It’s just demonisation of the group and racist stereotyping of ‘local Black youth’ as a threat. She notes that, once again, Hagan’s threat assessment bears no relation to what his own reporting said actually happened.

Hagan himself has subsequently said [MPS-0721973] he was guilty of ‘bigging up’ his role to his superiors. He rejects the Ellison Review’s description of him as ‘a spy in the Lawrence family camp’.

It seems Ellison was going on what Hagan had told his superiors and what they believed. Hagan’s exaggeration of his role won him praise at the time, but it has latterly put him in a position of condemnation.

Having now heard testimony at the Undercover Policing Inquiry from the activists involved with Hagan and the Lawrences, it seems clear that he really wasn’t a ‘spy in the Lawrence family camp’.

He was, however, spying on the Lawrence inquiry and campaign. His fanciful intelligence fed into the Met’s response to the Lawrence inquiry.

As the inquiry took its afternnon break, Tom Fowler talked to Emily Apple about what they’d heard:

HAGAN’S EXIT

In accordance with standard practice for spycops, when it came time for Hagan’s deployment to end he feigned a mental breakdown. This gave officers a plausible excuse for disappearing from people’s lives.

After having to be dragged away from his confrontation with uniformed police at Bermondsey, he came to fewer events. In summer 2001, Doyle contacted him and found him profoundly depressed.

They met up and he confided in Doyle about his supposed depression and disillusionment. As was also standard for spycops, this lie had a significant emotional impact on the people they’d befriended. Doyle says:

‘He had the demeanour of someone who was potentially suicidal, to be honest…

I was worried for him. He sounded genuinely despondent and was talking about going back to a situation that I knew was really bad for him, and I felt bad for him.

I shared with him some of my own struggles with mental health. As a way of trying to encourage him to, I don’t know, keep going. I was genuinely worried about him.’

It turns out that Hagan reported Doyle’s mental health issues [MPS-0006208]. Doyle has had that section of the report redacted:

‘I went back and forth about that privacy redaction, because on the one the hand I’m not ashamed of the fact that I’ve had mental health struggles, and it’s something I’ve talked about a lot.

But the way he put it was so sarcastic and demeaning I kept the privacy notice of that in. I just found it demeaning, it’s horrible.’

Doyle notes the irony that Hagan is now using his own mental health issues as an excuse not to give evidence at the Inquiry.

His report also gave other personal details of Doyle’s, including her living circumstances, her parents and their employment, her childhood and more.

She is disgusted at this, saying it is deeply intrusive and wholly unnecessary for the stated purpose of the SDS. Huge amounts of personal information, with a variable level of accuracy, was being logged, seen and used by unknown people.

In truth, of course, Hagan wasn’t going back to Hereford, he was returning to Scotland Yard. His bosses recommended him for a Commendation. A document dated 2 October 2001 [MPS-0728625] mentions his key successes that warrant such an honour.

The first is ‘high-grade pre-emptive intelligence on a range of local extreme left-wing groups’.

Doyle says Hagan was a bit more anarchist than others in MFJ. He took MFJ leaflets to the Anarchist Bookfair and said he’d been on a Reclaim The Streets protest, but didn’t seem active in any other group.

Secondly, Hagan is given credit for providing uniformed police with daily indications of the ‘political temperature’ in Brixton.

Doyle is withering:

‘What an utter waste of resources. There were countless people telling the police what they were doing wrong with the Black community. There were countless people saying what was happening.’

Thirdly, Hagan is commended for his thorough interactions with the Met’s Stephen Lawrence review team tasked with damage limitation in that public inquiry, by reporting on what groups like MFJ thought.

But, Doyle points out, this wasn’t secret information that needed an undercover infiltrator, this was stuff that they were putting out on leaflets and posters, telling anyone who’d listen.

IMPACT

Asked about the impact of finding out about Hagan’s spying and lies, Doyle is overcome as she contemplates an answer.

She says the admin of it all has been a herculean task. The Inquiry sent her the police files, and before she could make sense of them she got out all her old MFJ documents, put them in order and created a timeline that she then compared against the police account.

The Inquiry gave her deadlines that were difficult to meet. The process took her four months, alongside her physically and emotionally demanding day job.

She was confounded by the police reports, repeated more recently in the media, that MFJ was a danger to everyone and that’s why it was the real intended target.

‘Family campaigns were being met with by the police and were being told that the real target was this violent subversive group and maybe shown some of these documents.

And then reading these documents that bear no relation to the reality of our politics and what we did and what we achieved during that period. I’m very, very proud of the work we did during that period.

It is horrible, it is genuinely horrible, and that label, violent, subversive, is on me now. And it bears no relation to who I am and the work that I’ve done. And the commitment that I have made in my life to stand against injustice and against racism.’

She says Hagan had no impact on MFJ’s work, he was only ever peripheral. The MFJ worked on many different issues, and she sees it as successful.

‘That whole movement during the whole period of the 1990s, it was successful at pushing back the racists, at making it known that the police are institutionally racist, making people afraid to be racist, people didn’t want to be racist.’

At the end, Doyle reiterated her central point: that the excuse for the SDS spying on justice campaigns was because of the support of the supposedly violent and subversive MFJ, which was absolutely untrue. This, then, meant the apologies to families are worthless because they maintain that lie. The lie itself is evidenced by Hagan’s own reporting which doesn’t record any violence or subversion.

HAGAN: SUCCESS IS FAILURE IF IT’S NOT VIOLENT

Doyle says there’s one additional point that hadn’t come up in her questioning, which she feels is an important illustration of the racism inherent in Hagan’s reporting.

MFJ held a demonstration in North London in support of the Saturday Mothers, a group who were campaigning about ‘disappearances’ of political dissidents in Türkiye, deaths in police custody and racist attacks. It brought the Turkish Kurd community and Black community together.

It was an important new alliance:

‘It was absolutely what we were trying to do. We were trying to bring people together in a united struggle, that we shouldn’t be fighting each other, that we should be fighting together for a better life, a better future. For justice.’

Hagan’s report, however, said it was regarded as a terrible mistake for MFJ because it wasn’t militant enough for the young Black people who they were trying to recruit.

Doyle says this is emblematic of the ‘fundamental SDS delusion’ that left wing groups were obsessed with violence for its own sake, that Black people were intrinsically violent, and that the groups were trying to encourage it.

Doyle refers back to her political studies in MFJ and quotes from Martin Luther King’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail, which she says encapsulates MFJ’s perspective.

Though now feted as a champion of non-violence, when he was campaigning Martin Luther King was mischaracterised as too militant, and his confrontations were deemed violent and subversive.

In his letter, King wrote about how those who diagnose and tackle a problem are not responsible for causing it:

‘Actually, we who engage in non-violent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with.

Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.’

Doyle’s enduring pride in MFJ’s work is apparent as she talks about its basis:

‘We did not shy away from the legitimate anger of victims of racism and police violence. It was not our job to calm people down and tell people to be quiet and wait for some later date or some far-away court hearing or the possibility of a public inquiry in the future. That was not our job.

Our job was to expose the truth of the racism that people were suffering and bring it to the air of national opinion. That’s why we engaged in the Lawrence Inquiry, because that’s what the Lawrence Inquiry did, it brought that truth to the surface…

I’m immensely proud of everything that we did in Movement For Justice and everything that we achieved. And the people that we helped along the way, the people that we empowered along the way to know that they weren’t alone and that their anger was justified. It was absolutely justified.’

For the second time that day, the public gallery applauded her.

See the full speech here:

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, thanked Doyle for immense trouble she took in responding to it all. He said he wouldn’t offer her what he termed ‘a pointless apology’ for the scale of the task. Seemingly affronted by her criticism of the deadline she was given to process the files and respond, he insists that the Inquiry team are doing their best.

He adds that he is very grateful that she stepped up to the task, and thanks her for giving evidence with such determination.

After the hearing finished, Tom Fowler discussed it with Donal O’ Driscoll.