They express shock and deep concern at the Government’s proposals to curtail the Inquiry, and the perverse use of the Public Office (Accountability) Bill (the ‘Hillsborough Law’) to justify weakening a statutory public inquiry before the legislation has even been enacted.
‘We were so excited about the progress of the Hillsborough Law, and the promises it makes for survivors of state abuse. But the very next day the Home Office did this.
It may be no coincidence this consultation was launched in the last days of Starmer’s government: he’s implicated in covering up undercover operations during his time as Director of Public Prosecutions and may have questions to answer himself.
But we have a new government now, under Andy Burnham. He built his political career on the fight for justice after Hillsborough. Is denying us truth and accountability really going to be one of the first things his government does?’
The letter is accompanied by submissions from Peter Weatherby KC, who acts for a number of the victims and helped draft the Hillsborough Law. He argues the Inquiry’s statutory powers are essential to uncovering the truth, and describes the consultation as ‘misconceived’, joining calls for it to be withdrawn.
Since public hearings began in 2020, the UCPI has exposed serious police abuses – sexual misconduct, criminal behaviour, agents provocateur activity, interference in democratic processes, misleading the courts, unlawful intrusion into the lives of thousands of people, and catastrophic failings that go all the way up the chain of command.
However, some of the most significant evidence is yet to be examined, such as the work of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), who deployed Mark Kennedy; abuse by undercover officers in criminal investigations (such as the case of ‘Mary’); and failures in the policing of racist criminal gangs.
These, more recent, operations took place under the Human Rights Act and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act—the very legal framework that is supposed to protect the public today. Core Participants say it is essential the Inquiry completes its work in order to make recommendations and prevent future abuse.
Dave Morris of the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance said:
‘It’s no surprise that the state wants to shut down this Inquiry – it is a disaster for the Metropolitan Police. Just yesterday, ex-Commissioner Baron Condon said in evidence that these were not isolated incidents but a result of systemic failures and a “culture of paranoia” in Special Branch.
The public deserves the full truth, and the Home Office must not bow to vested interests seeking to prevent that.’
The letter calls on the Home Office to withdraw the consultation, appoint new leadership to the Inquiry, ensure adequate resources to complete its work, and urgently meet with Core Participants to discuss ways forward.
Core Participants have been seeking to make recommendations about the Inquiry process since 2019, and have been asking to meet the Home Office since 2024, but have been rebuffed.
Jodie Gibson, Head of the Home Office Sponsorship Unit, told them in an email dated 23 December 2024:
‘It would not be appropriate for officials in the Home Office Sponsorship Unit to meet with you to discuss the functioning of the Inquiry. The Inquiry is operationally independent, and it is really important that we maintain those lines of independence.’
The Core Particpants group is aghast that the Home Office have refused all contact but now, without requesting our input, have published a misconceived, multiple choice ‘consultation’.
The group is asking people not to fill in the consultation, and will publicly oppose any attempt to curtail the Inquiry and will continue campaigning to ensure that the full truth about undercover policing is uncovered.
We are shocked and surprised by the announcement and deeply concerned that this is an attempt to shut this Inquiry down. We have been requesting a meeting with the Sponsor Department of the Home Office for more than a year and have been stonewalled.
Now, we are presented with this multiple choice survey which clearly demonstrates that they have already considered the options without listening to us. We wish to stress that the delays and costs incurred by the Inquiry to date are entirely the result of applications for secrecy and lack of candour by the state agents taking part.
The timing of this consultation (in the middle of Inquiry hearings, and at the start of the summer break) will exclude many of those affected from being able to properly engage. The options on offer have real implications for how — and whether — the truth gets established, and we are considering the survey carefully.
We are calling on supporters not to fill it in until we have had a chance to respond.
The UCPI has been running since 2015, investigating abuses by undercover officers spanning five decades. One of the most expensive and longest running public inquiries in British history, it has been hampered by the death of its first Chair and the imminent retirement of its second, with no replacement in sight.
So far it has only considered a single police unit, the Special Demonstration Squad,and is yet to consider some of the most important evidence, relating to abuses that took place under the existing regulatory framework that is supposed to protect us today.
Police actions to disrupt and stall proceedings (using tactics such as ‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny’, making numerous anonymity applications, and demanding extensive redactions of documents) prevented the Inquiry from even starting to hear evidence for the first six years, and continue to cause delays. We believe that had there been a Hillsborough Law in place when the UCPI started it would have saved much time and expense.
Since its hearings started in 2020, the UCPI has uncovered evidence of sustained misconduct and corruption. Some of the most important revelations of our time about secret state (and Home Office) interference in our political freedoms.
The constant stream of revelations has caused considerable embarrassment and led to multiple public apologies from the Metropolitan Police. We have no doubt that there are powerful interests who would want it shut down.
However, the Inquiry has yet to consider units such as the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), who employed one of the most notorious officers, Mark Kennedy. Many victims are still waiting for answers, and the Inquiry must properly consider all the evidence before key recommendations can be made.
We call on the Home Office not to hamper the search for truth and justice, and to allow the spycops inquiry to do the job it was called on to do. We will continue to hold the police and public officials to account.
St Georges Hall, Liverpool, with Truth and Justice banners in April 2016 after inquests found those who died at Hillsborough had been unlawfully killed
Survivors of spycops’ abuses welcome the news today that the The Public Office (Accountability) Bill has passed the Commons. It marks a significant moment in the long struggle to ensure that the state can no longer evade accountability when it harms the people it claims to serve.
This ‘Hillsborough Law’ is a testament to the extraordinary persistence of the Hillsborough families, whose decades-long campaign has transformed the national conversation about truth, accountability and justice. Their achievement means a lot to anyone who has faced institutional denial, concealment and abuse.
We recognise these patterns all too well. For decades, police officers operating undercover deceived women into intimate relationships as they unlawfully spied on political groups, trade unions and justice campaigns. They stole the identities of deceased children, acted as agents provocateur, hoovered up personal information on thousands of people, kept illegal employment blacklists and lied in their intelligence reports; while Special Branch commanders avoided discipline for their officers and kept everything in house to cover up corruption.
Those abuses are now being investigated and evidence is coming out. We are ‘core participants’ in the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI), but the Inquiry itself has become an illustration of why this law is so badly needed.
More than ten years since the inquiry was announced, many of us are still waiting for answers, and progress is constantly hampered by institutional resistance, incomplete disclosure and police witnesses who have shamelessly lied, treating the inquiry process with the same contempt they showed the criminal and civil courts during their operations, leading to dozens of miscarriages of justice.
Having heard from many former undercover officers, and those who they spied upon, the Inquiry has now turned its attention to the senior officers and government departments who authorised, supervised and oversaw these operations, but the drive to conceal police misconduct behind a wall of institutional secrecy has continued right up the chain.
Over the next two weeks the Inquiry will hear from former Metropolitan Police leaders, including former Commissioner Lord Paul Condon, and the key question is no longer what undercover officers did, but who knew, who approved, who benefited from the intelligence gathered on political campaigners and community organisations, and who helped to conceal the truth?
No law can undo the harm already caused, but the Hillsborough Law would make obstructing and lying to this inquiry a criminal offence.
By creating meaningful consequences for those who deliberately mislead or frustrate investigations, this law has the potential to effect real change for us, as the Undercover Policing Inquiry rumbles on. The search for truth should never depend on the persistence or resources of victims and bereaved families.
This legislation strikes a blow against the culture of cover-up and impunity that has characterised so many public scandals, and we congratulate the Hillsborough families on their historic achievement and thank them for the example they have set. Their determination will have lasting consequences for us all.
– Core Participants in the Undercover Policing Inquiry
Content warning: this report contains a graphic description of child sexual abuse.
On Tuesday 24 February 2026, Donna McLean gave evidence to the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI). From 2003 to 2005 she was deceived into a two-year cohabiting relationship by undercover police officer HN104 Carlo Soracchi ‘Carlo Neri’. He was deployed from 2000 to 2005, infiltrating socialist and antifascist groups in London.
The 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.
McLean’s evidence was given as part of the UCPI’s ‘Tranche 3 Phase 2’ hearings, examining the final 15 years of the Special Demonstration Squad (1993-2008). McLean was not a member of any group targeted by spycops, she was a trade unionist who was friends with some of the people Soracchi spied on.
In 2022 she published a memoir about the relationship, Small Town Girl: Love, Lies and the Undercover Police. The book was used as evidence in the hearing, with McLean clarifying that its account is true but not exhaustive. She has also provided a short written statement to the Inquiry [UCPI0000039712].
McLean begins by confirming that she wasn’t a political activist in the 1990s. She grew up in a Scottish, working class socialist family. She became an outreach worker in mental health, homelessness and substance abuse treatment.
The vocation committed her to social justice, and to justice for the under-served. There was a general left-wing slant to those involved, and a great sense of camaraderie among her coworkers. She became particularly good friends with one of them, Dan Gillman, a socialist and antifascist who was spied on by Soracchi (and who gave evidence to the UCPI in November 2025).
She was briefly a trade union representative, as was Joe Batty, who she met on a training course as they worked in similar jobs. Batty was also spied on by Soracchi (and gave evidence to the UCPI earlier in February 2026).
MEETING CARLO
The very first time McLean met Soracchi was brief and uneventful. In early 2002, Gillman had borrowed some boxes from McLean as he was moving house. Soracchi, as was standard for spycops, had been equipped with a large vehicle to make himself useful and ingratiate himself into his target group. He gave Gillman a lift to McLean’s to return the boxes.
Special Demonstration Squad officer Carlo Soracchi
McLean first met Soracchi properly on 28 September 2002, when she went to a huge protest in London against the Iraq War.
She had intended to find friends from her union but the crowd was too large. Gillman and Batty were often stewards for socialist and union groups on demonstrations, and this occasion was no exception. McLean spotted Gillman in his hi-vis and stayed with him and the other stewards, who included Soracchi in his undercover guise as ‘Carlo Neri’ the socialist, antifascist and locksmith.
After the demo ended they all went to the pub together, then out for dinner. A few of them went on to a bar afterwards, and gradually the group dissipated down to just McLean and Soracchi.
They went back to hers together. The sexual relationship began that night. Soracchi stayed over, briefly popped back to his own flat the next day to get clean clothes, then came back and stayed a second night.
FULL SPEED AHEAD
It was the start of a whirlwind romance that got very serious very quickly, as McLean explained:
‘We got on really, really well. I had just come out of a 12-year relationship, I had no expectation that I would meet someone that I really liked…
But I think when I met Carlo, I was just surprised…
We agreed on so much. We liked talking about the same things, he was very family orientated, we liked music, we liked films, and it just felt that he was right. It felt like we were right together.
In a way that was surprising, but I also didn’t question it, I trusted it.’
This is a common story among women deceived into intimate relationships by spycops. The officers had been trained to ‘mirror’ people, responding with the same tastes and preferences so that an instant bond of recognition and trust is created.
Whistleblower spycop HN43 Peter Francis has described how officers would sometimes be briefed in advance of meeting a target so that they’d immediately have subtle but powerful points of personal connection.
Even by the standards of the spycops, Soracchi’s targeting of McLean is extraordinary. His first interaction with McLean was on 28 September 2002, and by New Year they were living together and engaged to be married. In actuality, he was already married.
In contrast to all this, Soracchi’s witness statement to the UCPI [UCPI0000035550] denies a lot of the facts in an attempt to downplay what he did.
He says he expected it to be a one night stand but McLean kept contacting him after. He says he can’t even remember if they actually had sex that first night.
McLean is affronted at this. She points out that they weren’t drunk from some kind of pub crawl, they’d been for a meal. They’d had a conversation about old relationships and contraception. His witness statement claims he used condoms; she says he never did.
McLean goes on to say that they were instantly effectively cohabiting as a couple at her flat:
‘He “went to work” in the day, I went to work in the day, and every evening and weekend we spent together.
So my expectation was that this was a very quick but very, very solid and very grounded relationship. Because he seemed like a very grounded person. He seemed like a very loving and caring and generous person.’
She says he told her he loved her every day. It felt like it would last forever.
Soracchi’s witness statement openly admits that McLean was not part of any groups he was spying on, and says he was just using her for comfort:
‘The motivation for starting a relationship with Donna McLean was that it was shortly after the death of my mother and I was at a low ebb and not thinking very clearly at the time.
I sort of fell into it with Donna. She was a nice person. She was not a political activist as far as I knew and she provided me with a bit of solace at a time when I needed it.’
He goes on to say he thinks it is merely ‘unlikely’ that she would have had the relationship if she’d known the truth about who he was.
Again, McLean is aghast at his gall. She says it was obvious that she’d have never let him near her if she’d known he was an undercover police officer.
She adds that Soracchi wasn’t just deceiving her for his comfort, either. It was also that she was an established, trusted friend of people he was spying on. Being her partner gave him a kind of credibility and made him more readily accepted.
PART OF THE FAMILY
Their relationship wasn’t just between them domestically and seeing friends socially. Soracchi rapidly and eagerly integrated himself into McLean’s extended family.
Carlo Soracchi with Donna McLean’s sister, stepfather and mother, Robin Hood’s Bay, Yorkshire, March 2003.
McLean told him that she’d had a violent abusive father, he’d said his father had been like that too. She says this created empathy and a bond. It made them feel closer to one another.
Soracchi was keen to meet her extended family. He would instigate phone calls with them and spend a long time talking to them.
They first went to Scotland together to visit McLean’s family around the time they started living together, in November 2002. Her relatives were still in shock from the recent death of her grandmother. Soracchi immediately blended in with them, taking a three year old relative off to read stories while the family discussed a choice of headstone.
The child asked him about his favourite children’s books. His description of The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business was met with enormous enthusiasm. A few weeks later, on his next visit to Scotland with McLean, he brought the child a copy.
McLean is horrified:
‘I think it’s incredible that he could do it. That this was actually part of his work. This level of intrusion and this complete disregard for any safeguarding of anybody or anything.’
This is another one of the many things Soracchi denies in his witness statement: he says he was never left with a child in the absence of a parent. McLean says he’s lying, as numerous family members involved can readily confirm.
Her family had been surprised that McLean was in such a serious relationship so soon after the end of her previous one, but Soracchi’s warmth, generosity and openness made them completely accept him and be genuinely happy for her.
However, Soracchi did embarrass himself at McLean’s sister’s graduation ceremony. When God Save The Queen was played, Soracchi reflexively stood up.
Carlo Soracchi at Whitby harbour with Donna McLean’s sister, March 2003.
Nonetheless, he was welcomed into the family. He collected snowglobes from around the world. McLean’s mother started getting ones for him from places she went.
Later in the year, Soracchi drove McLean and others to see a Stiff Little Fingers gig in Scotland. They could have gone to the London date, but Soracchi said it would be good to see her family again as they were still dealing with the bereavement. As with the previous time, they stayed at McLean’s mother’s house.
When on this second trip to Scotland, staying with her family, he started crying during a cab ride. He told McLean that he had an estranged son, and said wanted to tell her because his relationship with her was becoming serious.
He said he wanted to be able to be able to put pictures of his kid up in McLean’s flat. During that night’s deep conversation, McLean says she suggested moving in as he was there all the time anyway. He moved in a few days later. It was late November or early December. They had been seeing each other about two months.
In contrast, Soracchi’s witness statement claims he only stayed at McLean’s ‘on occasion’ prior to fully moving in with her in January 2003. This, she says, is another lie. He was there full-time and gave up his own flat before Christmas 2002. She is certain of this, remembering him being insistent that they had a real Christmas tree.
COVER STORY
The Christmas tree Carlo Soracchi insisted he and Donna had, 2002. He now denies even living with her at the time.
The backstory Soracchi told McLean wasn’t just vaguely drawn from his real life. He actively included the true specific details of a lot of it. Having told her he had a son, he put a photo of the child on the bookcase in her flat. It was his real son, and he used the boy’s real forename.
He put more photos up, too: his real father feeding his real son spaghetti in Italy, his mother, his sister. In the end, there were pictures of all his actual close family, apart from his wife.
He said that his son had been born from a brief fling. The mother had become pregnant and wanted to keep the baby but be wholly independent of Soracchi, not having a relationship or receiving financial support from him.
Soracchi, playing the role of the caring, emotionally mature man, said he was trying to resolve the difficulties with the mother so he could build relationship with his son. He went away one weekend a month, supposedly see the child in Cornwall.
In reality, he was making the short journey across London to his wife and son. He made his wife pregnant with their second child while he was in the relationship with McLean.
McLean is astonished at his brazenness, that he took her to places where his real family could have seen them, as well as the depths of his dishonesty:
‘It’s hard to find a word that’s strong enough, because “fraudulent” just doesn’t quite match it.’
Soracchi talked to McLean a lot about his sister. As with his son, he had a picture of her on display in the flat and used her real forename. He said she lived in Peterborough, and was isolated and depressed. He would go away saying he was visiting her, but always giving an excuse why McLean couldn’t accompany him. Presumably these were in fact more visits to his wife and son.
After she found out the truth of who Soracchi was, McLean readily found his sister on Facebook. His sister has a successful career and seemingly happy family, the complete opposite of the impression Soracchi had given.
Soracchi, his father, his sister and her husband are all directors of the family’s Italian food import business and an associated deli. The public details were easily found, and the forenames matched those that Soracchi had told McLean.
Beyond the personal deception, McLean says it is proof that the spycops’ existence was based on a lie. They claimed to be monitoring these quasi-terrorist subversives who’d maim their enemies given half a chance. Yet spycops like EN12 Mark Kennedy, HN15 Mark Jenner and particularly Carlo Soracchi needlessly left huge clues to their real identities with the women they deceived into relationships.
McLean scoffs at them:
‘I had all that information because he gave it to me. The idea that we are somehow dangerous people, us trade unionists and people on the left are dangerous – he gave me all that stuff.
He made it part of our lives for his own benefit and he was using them as well.’
THE RENT SCAM
There was an unexpected moment of real courtroom drama when Counsel tried to clarify the date that Soracchi moved in with McLean. Counsel said that Soracchi was added to the rental agreement in January 2003.
McLean said there was no rental agreement for him to be added to. She was subletting from a person who was abroad for three years, it was approved by the housing association that owned the flat, but there was no formal documentation.
Counsel said:
‘Maybe we are talking at cross-purposes. The rent book, his name was put on the -’
McLean interrupted to say there was no rent book either. Nothing official was written.
Counsel looked perplexed and brought up a rent book that the Inquiry has been given among Special Demonstration Squad papers [MPS-0527068].
McLean has never seen it before. Counsel says it was found in an SDS filing cabinet. It should have been included in the documents shown to McLean before the hearing, but the Inquiry is increasingly failing to function properly, especially in showing civilian witnesses the documents that pertain to them.
Page from Carlo Soracchi’s rent book, 2003. It shows £685 per month, and huge differences in the way Donna McLean’s initials are written.
The rent book is labelled ‘Tenant: Carlo Neri’ and dated 30 January 2003. Under ‘rent collector’, it names both the landlord and McLean. The landlord’s name is spelt incorrectly.
There are payments of a month’s deposit of £685, and monthly rent payments thereafter up to October 2003. They are initialled as received by McLean and the landlord.
But McLean’s landlord was in the USA for the entire duration of her tenancy. She never met him, neither did ‘Carlo Neri’. The rent on the flat was actually only £320 per month. It was paid by standing order from McLean’s bank account. There was no deposit.
The only explanation is that Soracchi created this rent book and used it to fraudulently claim the rent on his expenses.
McLean laughs at the poor quality of Soracchi’s forgery of her signature. Each iteration of the D is different.
Soracchi never formally paid rent to her. Instead he gave a variable amount, around £150, to McLean in cash every month or so.
He was already being paid overtime to live with someone who wasn’t an activist and who provided no intelligence. He then forged a rent book and fiddled his expenses to increase his wages still further.
The complete lack of integrity, the remorseless corruption of spycops is truly astonishing. They betray their targets, their families and the police themselves.
Soracchi’s relationship with McLean was characterised by his seeming generosity, bringing home many items of quality and taste. He often bought her jewellery, as well as high-value items for the kitchen, laying flooring and installing blinds.
McLean is shocked and still laughing at the shoddiness of the rent book forgery. Then she wryly observes:
‘I know where my presents came from now.’
HOLIDAYS AND KIDS
Spycop Carlo Soracchi on holiday in Bologna, February 2003.
The couple went on holiday to Bologna in February 2003 for Valentine’s Day. As Soracchi had said it was his birthday on 12 February, McLean paid for the trip.
In reality, his birthday was in January and, as was standard tradecraft for spycops, his fake age was younger than his real age.
They stayed in a high-class hotel in the city centre. The itinerary was all down to Soracchi as he knew the city well and spoke Italian.
McLean recounts sightseeing, including a visit to the railway station where a plaque commemorates the victims of the 1980 bombing of the station by fascists. The trip involved lots of gourmet food at Soracchi’s favourite restaurants and bars.
McLean says Soracchi was in his element:
‘He acted as he always did, very caring, very warm, very loving. He seemed very happy to be there.’
Soracchi had said his father lived an hour or so away. Despite him being a frequent and capable driver, they didn’t visit him. Soracchi said the family had some significant problems and he didn’t want it to spoil the romantic holiday. McLean was annoyed about the excuses.
The following month, March 2003, they went to Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast for McLean’s birthday. Her family came down from Scotland and they all stayed in one house together.
Soracchi was once again the genial host, in charge of music and drinks, generous and compliant with whatever the rest of the party wanted to do.
During this visit he told McLean’s mother that he wanted to have a child with Donna. Her mother thought this was great, though Donna herself said she wanted to wait until they had a more stable life and accommodation. This prompted them to discuss getting a more permanent home together.
Once again, this is something Soracchi denies in his witness statement:
‘Donna McLean claims that I encouraged her to have a child. I did not. I was with Donna for a period of approximately 14 months. I made it clear at that time that I was not interested in having any more children.’
LYING THEN, LYING NOW
It is extraordinary that Soracchi is trying to downplay a few details as if that will somehow make it alright. And expressing a wish to have children with McLean is no small detail.
It’s something we’ve seen from many of the spycops giving evidence. They don’t seem to realise that even if all their minimisations were somehow taken as wholly true and accepted, it’s tinkering at the edges. What they admit they did was still totally unjustifiable, appalling, unlawful and cruel.
As it is, it’s obvious that they’re lying, so by making these claims they change their status from ‘inexcusable scumbag’ to ‘inexcusable scumbag liar’. More, they’re not just exposed as having been deceitful, self-serving and arrogant decades ago as undercover officers, they’re showing themselves to be of the same disposition today.
In Soracchi’s particular case, McLean is incredulous at his denials as they are about things he said in front of numerous witnesses. He actually told her family that he wanted to have three children. She says it was a subject that they spoke about frequently.
He even contradicts himself. His claim to only have been with McLean for 14 months is undermined in the same witness statement that concurs with the timeline McLean has recounted. They both say it started in September 2002 and ended in November 2004.
McLean emphasises the totality of his integration into her family:
‘People – and I am talking about my family members and I am also talking about close friends – they were sharing really intimate details of their lives.
They were talking about how they felt after bereavements, friends talking about how they felt after a relationship break up.
They would cry in front of him. He would comfort them. He would be there to comfort people when they needed help…
It’s not just a social thing, it goes much deeper, it’s a real emotional intimacy…
Trying to explain how bizarre that is in this context is really difficult, because it’s so enmeshed. And there is no understanding of why he needed to do that to all these people.’
For his part, Soracchi’s witness statement resorts to a term beloved of spycops, ‘collateral intrusion’. It’s used when they’ve invaded lives and events that not even they can claim had any policing value:
‘I accept that coming into contact with Donna’s family was to some extent collateral intrusion. At the time I felt that there was very little if anything I could do about that to avoid risking compromising my cover.’
McLean rejects both the assertion and its minimising terminology. Far from merely ‘coming into contact’, he had chosen to move in with someone he wasn’t actually spying on, and then actively embedded himself into her extended family.
McLean points out that Soracchi’s excuse doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. Lots of people’s partners don’t want to go to every occasion with their in-laws, so there was no need for Soracchi to do so to make himself seem plausible.
She picks out the term itself with particular revulsion, saying it is trying to cloak what is actually an admission of guilt:
‘This “collateral intrusion”, it is a term that I really detest. I find it very, very offensive and very upsetting, because there is a recognition there that you have done things to people very, very much unnecessarily.’
THE REAL TARGET – DAN GILLMAN
The couple visited Cornwall twice in the first half of 2003, with Soracchi wilfully intruding into another family’s life. Dan Gillman and his partner wanted to visit Gillman’s dying mother, so Soracchi drove them and McLean all the way there.
McLean believes Soracchi targeted her because of her closeness with Gillman. Having heard Gillman’s testimony to the Inquiry recently, and that of others who knew him, she is more sure of this than ever.
Soracchi seemed very close with Gillman, and also with Joe Batty and Frank Smith. McLean admired Soracchi for his male friendships, it indicated that he was capable of emotional openness and closeness which made him seem very grounded and sound.
After their first two months together, Soracchi told McLean he was going to Italy for Christmas without her. In reality, he will presumably have been with his wife and son.
NEW YEAR’S PROPOSALS OF MARRIAGE AND ARSON
He returned for New Year’s celebrations. At his suggestion, the couple had a New Year’s Eve party at their flat, which was attended by about 20 friends. Soracchi proposed marriage to her at it.
Carlo Soracchi with Donna McLean’s mother, March 2003.
He went down on one knee and asked ‘will you marry me?’. She said yes, he stood up and picked her up. People gathered around them. Soracchi then said they should phone McLean’s mother to tell her the good news.
In the aftermath, Soracchi said he and a friend of McLean’s would choose an engagement ring for her, as this was the traditional Italian way of the bride-to-be getting her ring.
The couple received cards from numerous friends and co-workers, and witnesses have told the Inquiry under oath that they witnessed the proposal.
Soracchi now denies it all in his witness statement, and says he never proposed to McLean at any time. He claims he was not even at the party on New Year’s Eve.
He has other reasons for denying even his presence there. As Batty and Gillman have told the Inquiry in some detail, at the party Soracchi got a few of them together and went out to a nearby charity shop which he said was owned by Italian fascist leader Roberto Fiore, who was using the shop as a fascist front. Soracchi suggested petrol bombing it.
The friends said that wasn’t their style at all, and they were more interested in going back to the party.
It seems Soracchi was acting as an agent provocateur, trying to set up Gillman and others with an arson charge. It’s something that his boss, HN10 Bob Lambert, had done to people he spied on when he was undercover in the 1980s.
McLean remembers Soracchi taking people into the bedroom without her and that he looked at her strangely as he went. She suspects the proposal may have been to distract her from asking about it.
The Inquiry took a break, during which Tom Fowler made this video with Zoe Young of Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance:
In early 2003, Soracchi and McLean talked a lot about their wedding and plans for living together afterwards. They contemplated moving up to Scotland, but they also had to accommodate Soracchi supposedly building a relationship with his son.
He said he wanted to introduce the boy to McLean, and have him come to stay regularly. McLean was keen for this to happen, so they knew they’d need a two-bedroom place to live.
The couple had planned a fortnight’s holiday for July 2003, following the Tour de France:
‘This was something he liked, it was not something I was particularly interested in but I loved France so it sounded like a really, really nice plan.
And also it was going to be a two-week trip, which was quite a significant chunk of time so that had been booked off work.’
Soracchi told her he’d booked everything. But the day before they’d been due to go, he said that his father had had a stroke and he was going to Italy instead. Soracchi rang McLean every day and promised to make it up to her.
In retrospect, it seems likely that this was time he planned to spend with his real family and no holiday with McLean was ever booked.
As the relationship went on, Soracchi said he’d changed jobs. He had originally told everyone he was a locksmith. He would say to activists that their locks were substandard and then he’d change them as a favour. Thus, he was able to give keys to Special Branch and whatever other government agencies might want to unlawfully enter the homes undetected.
After a while, again drawing on his real family, he said he was working in his family’s Italian food import and export business. He would bring a lot of gourmet foods back to his home with McLean. Knowing the truth as we now do, and in light of his rent fraud, we have to wonder whether he was claiming that on expenses, diverting police funds into his and his family’s pockets. Or perhaps he was stealing from his family as well.
By the end of 2003, their wedding was still on the cards, but finding new place to live had become the main priority. McLean was getting restless, wanting to meet his son and integrate that side of his life. She says it was altering the nature of the relationship:
‘I think there was a small shift, but it wasn’t enough to make me alarmed. It just was not progressing quite the way I wanted it to, or expected it to.’
ABUSE ABOUT ABUSE
For the festive season Soracchi said he was going to Italy to see his supposedly ailing father for Christmas and then return to be with McLean for New Year again. Over Christmas he rang to say he would be staying in Italy longer as his father was more unwell than he’d realised. In the early hours of New Year’s Day, Soracchi phoned McLean at a party at Gillman’s house to say that his father had died.
It was all a lie. McLean later found documents showing that Soracchi’s father was still alive and well, living in London in 2011.
But back then in the first few hours of 2004, she was devastated. She offered to go over but Soracchi said to stay in England and he’d come back after the funeral. She forced herself to accept it:
‘It was a huge thing, but it was also a continuation of the not being involved in his family life, when he was so embedded in my family life, and that just felt a bit lopsided.’
Soracchi had sounded genuinely on edge and upset in the phone calls, as was to be expected from someone who was supposedly bereaved.
When he returned to McLean a fortnight later, in mid-January, he didn’t just sound different:
‘He didn’t even look like himself, and this was the thing that really struck me. He looked a bit haggard. He’d let his beard grow out, and he always had his hair quite closely cropped, he’d let it grow out as well. So he looked a bit dishevelled.
He looked like he had lost weight and he also just looked – it’s weird – his eyes looked different, there was kind of a glaze to them, like he wasn’t quite there, he wasn’t quite present.’
He was much less affectionate and tactile with McLean. Then he revealed why. He told her that after the funeral, his sister revealed that their father had sexually abused her as an adolescent. He was very specific about his sister’s abuse, saying his father had raped her anally and orally in order to avoid pregnancy.
He specifically told McLean not to tell anyone else. She says it is difficult to contain such traumatic knowledge, but she honoured his request and kept it to herself. She later found out he’d told the story to Joe Batty as well.
He’d said all along his that father had been violent to his mother, but this was something entirely new. He added that it explained his sister’s self-isolation and depression.
He also described feeling bad about himself, that he felt guilty for not having prevented the abuse and protected his sister. He used the words ‘dirty’, ‘broken’ and ‘guilty’ a lot.
He told her he was no longer the person she’d fallen in love with, that he needed space, but also that it was only temporary and she should wait for his recovery, saying:
‘I still love you, we’ll get through this because I love you so much.’
MALICIOUS CRUELTY IS TRADECRAFT
McLean was hugely concerned about his mental state. She needn’t have been. Astonishing as it sounds, this was standard spycop tradecraft.
Donna McLean and Carlo Soracchi at Whitby Abbey
The spycops invent details about abuse in their family for several reasons. It gives the person being told a sense of intimacy and trust, which encourages them to trust the spycop in return. It also gives the spycop an excuse for not introducing people to relatives.
Additionally, it feeds into the tactic Soracchi was using here, feigning severe mental distress as an excuse to end a relationship and leave at the end of his deployment.
We have heard extensive evidence about this tactic. How they keep up the charade continuously for months on end, convincing all those around them that something is very, very wrong.
Having little understanding of empathy, it doesn’t seem to occur to them that their behaviour will provoke intense worry in the partners and friends they have curated under their false identities.
When other spycops have used this tactic prior to their deployment ending, it’s resulted in worriedex-partners ended up travelling the world to search for them afterwards, hoping to help, not realising they’re looking for a person that never actually existed, a fictional character with a false name played by someone living with a family a few miles away in London.
McLean is utterly disgusted with Soracchi for this outrage:
‘I think it’s one of the cruellest things that he did, actually. I think it’s a real cruel thing, I think it’s really malicious. And I think when Carlo uses terms like “collateral intrusion” – that’s not collateral intrusion, that’s deliberate psychological harm being inflicted.’
Soracchi denies that it was all his doing, and that he ever mentioned sexual violence, let alone in such horrendous detail. His witness statement asserts:
‘The breakdown of our relationship was a two-way thing…
I told Donna that my sister had suffered violence at the hands of my father, but I did not say to Donna this was sexual violence… I did say that I was going through a lot of mental anguish. This was partially true, but also partially a part of my exfiltration strategy.’
She’s emphatic that the relationship breakdown was all his doing, and that she didn’t want it to end at all. She, again, points out that this was something witnessed by others, so his recent denial is provably a lie.
When he said he wanted to move out in May 2004 he repeatedly reiterated that he still loved her, they’d work it out, and it definitely wasn’t the end of the relationship.
A few days later, McLean came home from work and he had gone. He had taken everything he’d bought, apart from flooring, blinds and a dressing table. Not just his clothes, books and CDs but a vast amount of kitchen equipment, even the cabinet that the TV stood on.
This, too, is met by a pointless downplay in Soracchi’s witness statement, claiming he only took ‘a few books, some clothes and some cooking utensils’.
HE’S GONE, BUT HE HASN’T
McLean had no contact from him for two weeks after he left. Then he rang and said he really missed her and wanted to meet up. After that, they saw each other two or three times a week. He was very affectionate again, saying he wanted to sort it out and asked for her patience. They restarted the sexual relationship. She thought he might move back in.
Carlo Soracchi giving evidence at the Undercover Policing Inquiry, 3 March 2026
McLean had to move out as her tenancy was up, and Soracchi helped her move in to stay with a friend. After three months there she moved to another friend’s. He helped her move again.
She believed the massive trauma he’d described would take a long time to resolve. She knew that she would have to put the time in and be patient. But his behaviour consistently gave her solid grounds for hope. He was still affectionate, he talked about their future together, he was buying her presents again. There was no indication he wanted to end it.
They talked at length about his discovery of sister’s supposed abuse. McLean still believed she was the only one that this poor man was opening up to, so she did her best to support him, but it made her mental state increasingly fragile.
McLean last saw Soracchi in November 2004. They’d been to see a film together, an Italian one he’d chosen. She’d anticipated that, as usual, they’d decide to go back to one or other of their homes afterwards. Instead, he called her a cab:
‘He put me in the taxi and then he threw some money at me for the taxi. And it was like, “what is this? What is this behaviour?”
It was so kind of off and so dismissive. It was horrible and I felt horrible.’
Shortly afterwards, he sent a short email to her work address. He said the relationship was over, he couldn’t make it work so he was moving on, adding ‘I loved you more than you will ever know.’
McLean was shattered. Despite his unbalanced behaviour and the taxi incident, she’d believed the problems were all external to their relationship, so it was not in peril.
Two weeks later she received an envelope and recognised his handwriting immediately. Inside was a note saying he would always love her and a voucher for an expensive spa day.
Five months after that she emailed him as she was going to Italy, asking for travel advice. He just replied saying he had none. That was their final contact.
The friend passed the book to McLean who found it not just compelling but chillingly familiar. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up as she read about the detective work of women who’d been deceived into relationships by spycops and she realised it sounded like her Carlo. He had everything from the love bombing, the childhood trauma, and being useful with a large vehicle to the breakdown prior to leaving – but why on earth would he have targeted McLean, who wasn’t an activist?
The following year, in 2015, McLean met up with Gillman and some of the others who’d known Soracchi. They had amassed convincing evidence and were certain he had been a spycop.
Asked about the impact, McLean says that the disjointedness of a spycop’s life becomes contagious:
‘It’s mind blowing, because you have kind of got two lives. You have got the life that you have lived believing that that was the relationship and that was how it ended. And then you have the retrospective life of going back and saying, actually, this was the life.
So it’s like someone with a dual identity has created a dual life for you, and you have to try to piece that together. And it’s so hard.’
She says her family and friends are still having realisations that certain things they did or places they went weren’t of their own making but were manipulated by Soracchi. They’re all still trying to figure out how much of their lives were real and their own.
She had never suspected anything about Soracchi and, as a mental health professional, felt foolish at being duped by his feigned breakdown. Though it has to be said, out of all the suspicions that spied-on people have reported having about spycops, nobody saw through that part. They were phenomenally, and frankly disturbingly, convincing at behaving in a profoundly unbalanced way, as if they were finally letting some genuine warped feelings manifest.
McLean dug deep into the spycops scandal, obsessively searching for the details. She wanted to know his real name.
It took its toll on her health:
‘Having an autoimmune disease, there are several factors that impact on it, and stress is one of the biggest ones.
And that stress was so huge and so sudden and so bizarre, that that just kind of sent my immune system – because my immune system attacks itself.
So my body attacks me basically, so I had a huge flare and I was very physically unwell, but also mentally very fragile at the same time, which is not a good combination.’
Over the years that followed, she suffered nightmares and intrusive thoughts, became distant from her children, and struggled working with people with mental health problems. Counsel adds McLean’s concern at being followed to the list of paranoid reactions, but she’s clear that was no illusion. She really was followed.
She also noticed logins on her Facebook account in Bury St Edmunds, a place she’s never been to. She remembered seeing on the news that the Anonymous activist hacker Lauri Love’s computers were taken to the police IT headquarters at Bury St Edmunds. If they’ll get into your life, your home, your bed and your body, then your social media accounts are not beyond their bounds.
‘My body was used against my will. I did not consent to being a sexual experiment. I did not consent to being a mistress, I did not consent to being fucked all over the world by a man who did not exist.’
Asked if she feels the same way today, she says more than ever as she see that it happened to so many others as part of an overarching strategy.
‘I think angry wouldn’t be a strong enough word. It’s malicious and cruel and unnecessary, and a deceit that’s just beyond anything that we understand to be human or humane.
My personal belief is that the level of the intrusion of this entire scandal is very underestimated by people outside rooms like this, because they don’t see how deep it is, and they don’t see how the impact just goes on and on and on. Because it doesn’t make any sense, to anyone.’
That concluded the questions in the morning’s public hearing.
McLean was asked if she had anything to add that hadn’t been properly covered. She replied with characteristic insight:
‘Our bodily autonomy was stolen from us. And not just in the fact that we did not give consent, but also the time that we chose to have children, whether we have children, how difficult that became, the relationships that we ended up in, the issues of trust that came for that, and that spans your whole life. It doesn’t stop.
There is the period of the relationship itself. There is the period when you find out. There is the aftermath. There is, you know, doing all this stuff [the public inquiry], which is quite difficult.
But the entire autonomy of your own body has been stolen in a way that was strategic, and I think that’s something I just want to highlight as an overarching thing.’
The Inquiry then took a break, during which Tom Fowler made this video with Dan Gillman:
Much of the afternoon hearing was held in secret as it dealt with private matters.
During this, Tom Fowler made another video, this time with Chris Brian from the Undercover Research Group:
When it was made public again there was some discussion of the detail of Soracchi’s fraudulent rent book.
After this, the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, concluded the hearing and thanked McLean effusively:
‘I can only express my admiration for the good humour with which you’ve fulfilled this difficult task.’
After the hearing finished Tom Fowler made this video with Lois Austin who was a political comrade of Dan Gillman’s and other friends of McLean’s:
Reclaim the Streets party protest at the M41, London 13 July 1996. An attendee holds a sign reading ‘street festival temporary road closure’.
On Tuesday 3 February 2026, the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) questioned ‘Monica’. In the 1990s she was an activist with Reclaim the Streets. Monica was deceived into a long-term sexual relationship by an undercover police officer who infiltrated the group, HN14 Jim Boyling ‘Jim Sutton’.
The 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.
Monica’s evidence was given as part of the UCPI’s ‘Tranche 3 Phase 2’ hearings, examining the final 15 years of the Special Demonstration Squad (1993-2008). She has provided a written witness statement to the Inquiry [UCPI0000038662].
Monica has been given a high level of anonymity at the Inquiry. Monica is not her real name, and her testimony was broadcast audio-only, without her face being shown.
Monica was questioned by Sarah Hemingway as First Junior Counsel to the Inquiry. The first 15 minutes of her evidence were not published and cannot be reported due to a restriction order. That is, they are kept secret in order to protect the privacy of those people mentioned.
BACKGROUND
Reclaim the Streets, Camden High Street, 14 May 1995
Monica was in her mid-20s when she moved to London in the autumn of 1995. Her boyfriend at the time was already involved in the anti-roads movement and its urban arm, Reclaim the Streets (RTS).
These campaigns sought to challenge the dominance of car culture and shift the balance of urban planning and living back to being more people-centred.
Monica had met her boyfriend at a protest against a new road near where she lived. She moved to London with him, and he took her to an RTS meeting. They were a couple until July 1996, and remained close friends afterwards.
Special Demonstration Squad officer Jim Boyling was deployed undercover from June 1995 to September 2000, infiltrating animal rights and environmental groups, predominantly Essex hunt saboteurs, Earth First!, and RTS.
He started coming to RTS meetings around the same time as Monica, his first police report being filed about the group on 21 November 1995.
Boyling was known to some as ‘Grumpy Jim’. Monica says this wasn’t a proper nickname, but it was nonetheless accurate as he seemed less empathetic than the rest of the group:
‘There is a characteristic that is hard to define that stood out among us, that we kind of recognised in that in him.’
Monica thinks that she and her boyfriend would have seemed kind and welcoming to Boyling, a soft touch for an entry point into the group.
Jim Boyling whilst undercover in the 1990s
Counsel asks several times about monogamy – whether Monica was monogamous with her boyfriend, whether monogamy was commonplace among RTS activists.
It’s not clear what this is about, unless it’s at the behest of spycops who want to imply that not being monogamous means someone was fair game for the relationships that the Met themselves have already condemned as ‘abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong’.
Monica says that she and her boyfriend were monogamous, and she wasn’t aware of the relationship status or philosophies of others in the group. It wasn’t something that came up as they were just having one meeting a week about political campaigning, attended by a cross-section of society.
Spycops have said that they had to deceive women into relationships in order to fit in with the group, that men who didn’t have a relationship would have been somehow suspicious. Monica dismisses this completely.
Counsel has Monica spell it out; becoming single in July 1996 did not suddenly make her in any way suspicious, and the same was true of her now ex-boyfriend. The spycops’ excuse is a lie.
She does say that coming to the meetings with a partner who was already known to the group helped her integrate more easily. However, this is not what Boyling did. He was already part of the group when he set out to deceive her.
RTS and allied campaigns brought together a diverse range of people who worked with each other in good faith:
‘I think humans want to trust each other. And groups like Reclaim the Streets at the most central part relied on trust, relied on commitment, being on the same page, wanting to have the same discussions, wanting to raise the same issues.’
RECLAIM THE STREETS
Monica talked about the formation and purpose of RTS. There had been protests at rural sites of new road building schemes since the early 1990s.
Twyford Down roadbuilding machinery occupied by protesters, 9 December 1992
Twyford Down in Hampshire had seen the first significant camp occupying the land and taking direct action to obstruct the building work of the new M3 motorway route.
RTS began a couple of years later, around the same time as the protest against the building of the M11 Link Road through East London. It had a lot of the same concerns as the protests about rural landscapes, but also about localised air pollution and the way roads divide communities and bring dangers.
RTS organised ‘street parties’ with an urban street blocked off for an afternoon, cars excluded and replaced by music, celebrations and a carnival-like atmosphere. It was, Monica explained, intended to give a glimpse of how urban space could easily become something much more humane than the car culture allows:
‘You take over a space that’s often divided. People are divided by the car, and you create a different place where different things are possible.
There are banners, there is a sandpit, there are decorations, people are connecting to each other, people are talking. That’s an expression of something that’s different, some way of living that’s different.’
All these movements stemmed from a belief that consumerism was unsustainable and capitalism was an engine of destruction and misery.
The SDS Annual Report of 1996/97 [MPS-0728967] describes this in the exaggerated and sneering terms common to spycop documents:
‘Reclaim the Streets is a group of extremists with the potential and the ambition to cause serious disorder and disruption in London and elsewhere in pursuit of their primary belief that the motor car is evil and their subsidiary belief that big business, the establishment et cetera is also evil.’
Monica felt a strong sense of connection and purpose in her activism and moved into a squat in Hackney with like-minded people.
She said RTS was focused on direct action, which she defines as putting yourself in the way of something harmful or creating something good, rather than having an easily ignored protest march asking others to make changes. She says that some of this was illegal, such as subvertising amendments to billboards.
As for causing ‘disorder’, Monica says it’s a matter of perspective:
‘That desire for the street party was to create a different narrative and to create a different experience of what a road could be, and how roads enclosed people and separated people. How hard it is for someone to cross a six-lane road, that kind of thing.
So you could call that public disorder, but you could also call it an expression of something else. In a way it’s a little bit of both.’
Boyling’s witness statement to the Inquiry is in classic spycop format, describing events and adding exaggeration and lies. As well as blockading roads he claims ‘damaging vehicles and smashing windows was common’. It was nothing of the sort.
TARGETING MONICA
Boyling deceived Monica into a relationship in 1997. Between January and October 1996 he spent more and more time with her, going to pubs together after meetings. She believes he was deliberately targeting her, using the ‘mirroring’ technique that other deceived women have described which makes it feel like extraordinary mutual attraction.
‘I think he was probably behaving in ways that he had been trained, and wanting people to feel comfortable and safe with him, so I did. Because it was rare for me to feel comfortable with people.’
Monica’s mother was gravely ill at the time, and died in April 1996.
Like a large proportion of spycops, Boyling had a vehicle to make him useful to the group. He would generously give people lifts home, thus learning everyone’s addresses and eavesdropping on unguarded conversations.
He also came with a typical spycop backstory of a disturbed childhood. It is a tactic that garners sympathy and trust, and in turn makes people open up to the officer more. He told Monica he was adopted but didn’t want to know who his biological parents were.
At the same time, Monica was going to the Newbury tree protests, where more than 30 camps occupied trees along the nine mile route of a new bypass road around the Berkshire town. From January to April 1996, bailiffs worked to remove the protesters. Monica was at a camp when it was evicted, and was charged with obstruction of bailiffs executing a sheriff’s order.
PARTY ON THE MOTORWAY
On 13 July 1996, Reclaim the Streets held a huge street party on the M41, a mile-long stretch of urban motorway in West London.
Huge crinoline dress at the Reclaim the Streets protest party, M41, 13 July 1996
Thousands of people came and danced to the sound systems in the sunshine. Several people in huge crinoline dresses provided cover for one of them to shelter a person underneath, drilling up the tarmac and symbolically planting a tree.
Both Boyling and Monica had roles in preparation for the event, though as the planning was secret neither knew what the other was doing.
Monica made banners and décor, Boyling had used his van for the recce to check the site, and also driven supplies to the motorway on the day.
Uniformed police had clearly decided to let the event go ahead rather than create confrontation and chaos with so large a moving crowd. Boyling reported on the event [MPS-0246485] and describes the mood in the crowd as ‘jubilant’.
Monica describes a particular moment:
‘There was a woman in a lovely dress and she was playing a cello and singing Amazing Grace and there was this policeman smiling and joining in with her.
It was a really precious moment because it showed how things could shift and showed how commonality could arise, even if it was just a policy of the day. It was something that has always stayed with me. It was very beautiful and meaningful.’
Boyling’s witness statement to the Inquiry describes himself as one of the main organisers of every RTS action from the M41 street party of July 1996 to the Carnival Against Capitalism event in the City of London on 18 June 1999. A Special Branch note of 12 March 1997 says Boyling is ‘a leading figure’ in RTS with contacts throughout Europe.
However, another RTS activist known as ‘Ruth’ has given a witness statement to the Inquiry rubbishing this. Ruth says there was no explicit formal structure within RTS and Boyling was regarded as a bit of an outsider, and he only maintained proximity to the most active organisers through her. Monica essentially confirms Ruth’s description.
This exaggeration of their position and influence, sometimes augmented with exaggeration of the risk they faced, has been a continual feature of spycops at the Inquiry.
PRIVATE SPIES
The road protesters had been subjected to surveillance by private detective agencies. It was intrusive, intimidating and arguably unlawful. In August 1996, Monica took part in an action against one of the agencies, Pinkerton’s in Richmond. This was to be an ‘office occupation’ where activists enter an office and thus disrupt the working day.
The meeting point the night before had been announced at an RTS meeting. Monica was a bit surprised to see Boyling there. He asked what the plan was, but nobody could give him a detailed answer because there wasn’t one as such. They were just going to walk into the office. Boyling got very irritated at the lack of a formal plan and stormed out. The extremity of his reaction left Monica anxious and agitated:
‘It really affected me… I took it as a personal rejection, as something wrong, I have not done something that I should be doing, and I am responsible and I have to make this work.’
As she tried to enter the Pinkerton’s building, Monica was grabbed by a female employee who pushed her. Monica pushed back. The police were on the scene immediately and she was arrested for causing Actual Bodily Harm.
At the police station, Monica admitted that the workers hadn’t wanted her in the building, and that she’d touched the woman. She agreed to plead guilty to a charge of using violence to enter premises. It’s something that has affected her employment applications ever since.
Asked about the use of political violence, she gives a considered response:
‘I don’t think you can create positive change with violence. I think the only way we can really change ourselves is if we learn to live in peace, but I think that takes a hell of a lot of effort and commitment as a species to find a way to do that.
But violence exists everywhere in our society. It’s how it operates, in many ways.’
Boyling reported on her arrest [MPS-0246565] and said that her home address was ‘even more squalid than the usual squat’, something Monica vehemently denies. It is another example of the general spycop disdain for activists and their denigrating stereotyping of them. Curiously, Boyling does not report on his attending the meeting that he stormed out of the night before the arrest.
Shortly afterwards, a Special Branch report [MPS-0246569] says Monica is to be co-ordinator of a Newbury protest support action on 20 August, but she refutes this. After her arrest she was too shaken to be organising.
STOP THE PARTY
There was an RTS street party in Brighton on 24 August 1996. This one was met with police violence. Boyling’s report [MPS-0246589] says about 800 people were there (though Monica thinks it was less) and that uniformed police confiscated most of the equipment before the event could begin.
This resulted in activists not having a focal point during the day and there were a number of flashpoints around the city, with 80 people arrested. Monica’s ex-boyfriend was one of them, dragged down the street and sustaining injuries to his back.
Boyling added notes to his reports bluntly explaining that allowing street parties to go ahead created a contained space and minimised disruption to the rest of the city, whereas the Brighton response caused chaos. Monica confirms the truth of this.
It’s a perspective further illustrated by Boyling’s report on the Oxford street party on 31 October 1996 [MPS-0246780], at which police simply directed traffic around it. Boyling describes this in cynical terms:
‘It is literally just a street party, devoid of the necessary element of political significance.
Nevertheless, as with all such previous events, it was hailed a success by most of the London Reclaim the Streets contingent.’
Monica takes issue with this sneering, pointing out that creating an alternative space for people to connect in a joyous way, showing how being car-free was better, was the actual point.
On 28 September 1996 there was a protest in Liverpool titled Reclaim the Future. Lots of activists from the RTS and road-protest milieu were showing support for striking Liverpool dockers.
The dockers’ dispute was initially about the overtime pay of five workers who then picketed the docks. Dockers refused to cross a picket line and were sacked. This sparked a wider strike. It was widely understood to be about something more, the de-unionisation of the docks workforce.
Asked about the groups organising Reclaim the Future, Monica has no answers, as by that time she was living at the Fairmile road protest camp in Devon and wasn’t attending London meetings. She stayed at Fairmile until early 1997.
NEVER MIND THE BALLOTS
On her return, she found there were preparations for a major event called Never Mind the Ballots on 12 April 1997, just over two weeks before the general election. Monica remembers it in Trafalgar Square as a street party atmosphere but now, seeing Boyling’s spycop documents she realises the full extent of plans for the day.
Cover of spoof newspaper Evading Standards, produced by Reclaim the Streets, April 1997
A report from Boyling is shown [MPS-0000279], detailing the intention to occupy an abandoned Department of the Environment building for several days and hold workshops and meetings.
Monica hasn’t seen this document before and did not know the plan. She asks for time to read it and becomes emotional, stopping Counsel to explain that it appears to have been a well thought out plan to get people together and consider what the election is compared to what it could be. There was to be a space for people to really get to grips with who controls politics, and how things could be different. It was much more than something for leisure, it was outreach, it was communication to stimulate thought and change.
RTS had produced ‘Evading Standards’, a free newspaper that spoofed the format of the Evening Standard, to be handed out on the day. Police seized all 20,000 copies to prevent those ideas being shared and arrested three activists. These were wrongful arrests and the police later had to pay compensation, but the harm was done and the police can afford it.
Monica says that though the election was about to bring a change in the party of government as Tony Blair’s Labour Party swept to victory, it was just a continuation of neo-liberal capitalism, nothing significant was actually changing and crucial issues continued to be ignored.
She knew that Boyling had been one of the three RTS organisers of the day:
‘It makes me want to cry because, as I say in my statement, Boyling was one of the three main organisers of this and I was really proud of him. I had thought he really stepped up.
But obviously he and the police who employed him made this not happen, and I am angry and upset about that in this moment.
It is heartbreaking, and it is so effective, isn’t it, at limiting the debate and controlling the options, because no one is allowed to actually express anything that is different.’
She remembers Boyling mocking one of the other three organisers for being nervous on the morning of the events. She is now disgusted by this. Unlike the others, Boyling wasn’t an activist who believed in what he was doing, taking risks to try to create a better world. Of course he wouldn’t be nervous, because none of it mattered to him.
Monica had a role herself, creating the flags that would have helped direct some of the marchers to the Department of the Environment building.
One of the red, black and green flags at the Never Mind the Ballots party protest by Reclaim the Streets and Liverpool dockers, Trafalgar Square, London, 12 April 1997.
A central gathering in Trafalgar Square with a sound system was one of the parts of the wider plan that had been permitted to go ahead. Monica was there and describes a typical positive street party mood for much of the day. Later on though, tensions started to rise. They had been penned in by uniformed police. She saw one person throw something at the line of officers.
Then over by the sound system, for the first time in a long while, she saw Boyling. He told her he was worried that the sound system would not be allowed to leave and would be impounded. She reassured him and held his hand.
The system was allowed egress and the crowd began to disperse. Monica was quite buoyant about the afternoon, but met a friend who’d known more about the failed plans who was disappointed. They went to a pub and she saw Boyling there, who seemed pleased to see her.
THE SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP
Numerous spycops have claimed that it was essential to deceive women into relationships in order to gain credibility and not seem like an oddball. It is nonsense and, as Counsel notes, Boyling had been successfully infiltrating RTS for 18 months at this time without sexually violating anyone.
Yet in his witness statement, Boyling says:
‘It is difficult to sustain the image of a single bloke living alone within activists’ groups, where relationships are made and unmade very easily and almost all activists were in a relationship with another known activist.’
This is simply not true. A significant number of activists don’t have relationships with other activists. Many spycops before and after Boyling successfully completed their deployments without deceiving women into relationships.
Monica looks at it from an additional angle, suggesting that if you can’t do spying without violating women’s bodily autonomy and human rights, then you shouldn’t be spying at all.
Spycop Jim Boyling with his van. Vans were commonly used by spycops as a way to make themselves useful to a group to the point of indispensability.
She says clearly that it is obviously possible to spy on people without having sex with them, and sex should never be used to bolster an undercover identity.
The evening after Trafalgar Square, she left the pub with Boyling. They sat on a wall and she kissed him. She asked to go home with him and he readily agreed. He went to collect his van then drove them to his one-bedroom flat in East Dulwich. They smoked cannabis mixed with tobacco.
This was a very significant moment for Monica. She had been a heavy smoker from the age of 14, and had recently seen her mother die from a smoking-related illness. She had developed severe bronchitis and had managed to give up at the start of the year, but this smoking with Boyling renewed her addiction.
She says in her witness statement [UCPI0000038662] that she deeply resents him for this, and also for laughing at her for the resulting breathlessness when she ran.
Smoking the cannabis was entirely unnecessary. It was fairly common in those social circles but a large proportion did not indulge. This was just Boyling gratuitously enjoying the criminal perks of the job.
MAKING IT CONTINUE
They had sex, and the next morning cemented it into an ongoing relationship. Counsel again asks if his action was somehow socially necessary, and again Monica says it wasn’t. If he had said he didn’t want a relationship or had a girlfriend or given some other reason not to continue, she would have thought badly of him for not telling her the night before, but it wouldn’t have been a big deal.
Boyling claims he was compelled to start the relationship because she’d kissed him in front of other activists and he would have looked suspicious had he not responded positively. Monica says neither part of that is true:
‘I don’t think I would have kissed him in front of other activists if they had been stood around the pub. I think we were alone. He could have just said, “Look, sorry, love” and for me that wouldn’t have been a big problem.’
She adds that the attitudes in the network were actively supportive of people’s right to be themselves and make their own choices outside of social coercion.
The two of them lived in very different parts of London, so she kept a toothbrush and clothes at his flat:
‘We had an intimate relationship for six months between April and October 1997 and during that period I considered him my boyfriend, as it would have been, and that I saw him regularly.
I went back to his flat after Reclaim the Streets meetings. If I wasn’t going anywhere else or leaving London for any other reason, then I spent time with him.’
Counsel interjects to say that Boyling’s various accounts have been inconsistent, but at its shortest he says the relationship lasted for a few weeks in the summer. In his witness statement [UCPI0000036294] he claims Monica only stayed at his flat on a few occasions, and they probably only had sex about a dozen times. He claims Monica was seeing other people at the time, something she flatly denies.
It really is pathetic of him to try to weasel out of it by downplaying it and truncating the dates. It’s the fact that he deceived her and abused her that’s the problem. Even if his version were wholly true, it doesn’t absolve him of anything.
BOYLING’S WANTON CRUELTY
Many women deceived into relationships by spycops have said that the officer acted as if they were their perfect partner. But Boyling, once his mirroring had ensnared Monica’s affections, did not maintain such a pretence. She describes a nasty side to his treatment of her.
As already mentioned, despite the fact that she had bronchial issues, he laughed at her for her level of physical fitness. She worried about people talking behind her back, and he mocked her for it. She speculated about alien lifeforms coming to help human civilisation and he not only ridiculed but shouted at her for it.
They drove up in his van to the 1997 Earth First! summer gathering in Strathclyde. En route they stopped for the night in the Lake District. Monica woke up cold and told him, but Boyling – toasty warm in his expensive Snugpak sleeping bag – just turned over and left her to it.
Once at the gathering, Monica went to a women’s-only meeting where there was a man in the space which created some debate. Afterward, she discussed it with her supposed boyfriend, Boyling, who, it now appears, deliberately antagonised her:
‘I went back to the van and was talking to him about this, because it had been quite intense. And he just was mocking me about the need to have women’s only spaces, because this man being there had disrupted the space…
I kept trying to explain, earnestly explain, what that meant. Like, from my lived experience in that moment. And he kept just mocking it and going, “should have men’s only spaces”…
You know when you are really trying to explain something to somebody that means a lot to you and they don’t listen and they don’t hear, and actually they keep taking their position in a degrading way?…
I think he was playing with me, in truth, now. I look back at that, I think he was playing with me.’
She says that after finding out the truth about who he was, she had trepidation at the prospect of seeing his police reports about her. He had manipulated her affections but his cruelties at the time had shown he also felt disdain, and the stark reality was something she dreaded:
‘I had been afraid of knowing what he really thought of me, a lot, because I think he had contempt for me. There might have been other things there, but there was contempt.
And there was a sense of me being lesser than him and a bit of an idiot and inferior, because he is this high-profile ever-so-good Metropolitan Police officer.’
ACTIVISM TOGETHER
In her witness statement, Monica says that she and Boyling discussed RTS activities with each other as a couple. She describes him as focused on what was the right direction to take in the movement; he was motivated to organise, take part in actions, and willing to take risks.
About a month after they got together, Boyling filed a report on a court appearance of Monica’s [MPS-0000365]. She had been part of a group who’d visited the home of the Transport Secretary and dug up some grass. She says it was just ‘a publicity stunt’. A similar action had been done before without convictions, so she was surprised that digging up turf and putting it back counted as the offence of criminal damage.
Spycop Jim Boyling while undercover, 1997
Another month afterward, on 21 June 1997, there was an RTS street party in Bristol. Boyling reported on that [MPS-0000417] and names Monica as one of those attending.
The report includes her Special Branch Registry File number, meaning that she had a ‘live’ file; she had already been reported on a number of times and was considered worthy of ongoing monitoring.
The following week, the couple attended Glastonbury Festival together. Boyling’s witness statement says that Monica slept separately in her own tent, but she says they stayed together in his van.
Again, it appears that Boyling thinks if he can slightly tone down minor details it will somehow make him look like less of a manipulative abuser.
He did lend her a tent later that summer, when she was planning to go to Buddhafield festival in the hope of finding the spiritual strength to overcome her tobacco addiction.
A fortnight after Glastonbury, the couple travelled up to the previously mentioned Earth First! Summer gathering in Strathclyde, held 9-15 July 1997.
In his witness statement, Boyling says he doesn’t remember attending the gathering and says his reporting on it was from second or third hand information. In most of his reports on events he lists ‘Jim Sutton’ as attending, but has not done so for this one.
Monica is certain they were there together. She remembers the sleeping bag incident en route and the women’s workshop argument with great clarity. She suggests that Boyling is seeking to understate his activity and, as he isn’t mentioned in the list of those attending, is trying to get out of it.
Her perspective is reinforced by the fact that the Inquiry has a copy of his managers’ authorisation to travel to the event [MPS-0527813].
Monica was involved in organising ‘Strike Oil’, part of 100 days of action against the oil industry in the run-up to the crucial Kyoto climate change summit where world leaders would try to agree a plan for cutting carbon emissions. Boyling filed a report about it on 3 September 1997 [MPS-000519] and again on 9 September.
The report describes Monica and Jay Jordan as the organisers, which she accepts. Jordan knew of her relationship with Boyling and was surprised by it, telling the Inquiry:
‘”Monica” was a brilliant, politically intellectual, sharp person and Boyling gave the impression of not being interested in politics.’
She thinks perhaps Jordan was more perceptive than she:
‘One of the things that I took at face value of Jim was his being a vegan. I’m quite easily duped and quite naive. I take people at face value. So that had quite a big impact, he’s vegan, he’s “hunt sab Jim”, so he must be in the same place.’
She doesn’t disagree with Jordan’s description of her, but does say that her political abilities didn’t extend to great practical skills, which was something she learned in the Strike Oil process. In the end, the action didn’t go ahead as planned.
The Inquiry took a break, during which Tom Fowler made this summary and analysis video with Jay Jordan:
ENDING THE RELATIONSHIP
In October 1997, six months into her relationship with Boyling, Monica ended it.
‘I think his snidey behaviour, sometimes his way of treating me, was probably having an effect as well, which I think was probably intentional of him.’
A while afterwards, they had a phone call where Boyling was crying and saying that, despite having previously wanted to split up, he was now missing her.
After the split, they met up and she told him about an activist she liked and had sex with. Boyling chose to react by emotionally blackmailing Monica for sex.
‘Anyone who knows him, how he presented, he used to look up with his eyes, his little doe eye things, and he kind of said that would it be all right for him if we had sex. And I didn’t really want to, but because he did, I did.
Because that’s the kind of unconscious aspect of my personality, I tend to do what I think other people want me to do.’
Asked how she felt afterwards, she is very definite:
‘I didn’t feel good. It didn’t feel good. It didn’t feel right.’
She had always sensed a kind of vulnerability in Boyling. It might be him mirroring her feelings back at her, but she suggests that it may be something else instead:
‘I pick things up without knowing. So I think maybe I did pick up on the vulnerability of living a complete lie and betraying everyone that you knew…
It must be incredibly hard to be playing such a game. To not only play the game of being a really well-thought Metropolitan Police officer, who everyone thinks is amazing, but you are also lying to all the people around [you] in order to deceive them.
It’s not a game I could play. It is quite a full-on game, it must feel quite lonely on some level, never to be able to be your real authentic self, whatever that is, with anyone around you. So maybe I picked up on that.’
DISENGAGING FROM RTS
Leaflet for the Reclaim the Streets protest party in London, 13 July 1996
On 24 October 1997, Boyling reported on RTS [MPS-0000601] saying that the Strike Oil plan had been dropped, there was low morale, and a split between the ‘core group’ and the wider attendees of weekly meetings.
Monica doesn’t see it in those terms, saying that any creative group contains clusters of people who bond over shared intent and experience, but this doesn’t necessarily make factions who oppose one another.
Monica says that the huge street party on the M41 in July 1996 had garnered a new influx of attendees at the weekly RTS meetings. There was a common desire to turn this groundswell of enthusiasm into action, but a number of different ideas about how to do it.
It is common among spycops to report in terms of hierarchies, command structures and ranks, describing people competitively jockeying for status and control, even when nothing of the sort is happening. It’s like they take the police’s institutional model and project it on to all groups, unaware that things can actually be done differently.
A week later, on 31 October 1997, Boyling reported [MPS-0000638] that some RTS activists were going up to the site of the planned Birmingham Northern Relief Road (now called the M6 Toll). This would have been somewhat premature as the contract for building hadn’t yet been awarded to any company, and the route wasn’t going to be cleared until 1999.
Monica says it wasn’t a formulated plan, just an idea discussed. She had grown up in the area, she and her father used to walk their dog there:
‘It was a rare space of nature and that road was going through it. So I used to, in my mind and my passion, used to fantasise about protecting that space.’
Her mother had recently died. Monica was struggling with life in London, and contemplating moving back to the area and spending time with her father.
Boyling wrote of the activists discussing the visit:
‘It’s widely presumed that they just want to spend the winter up a tree.’
Monica is disgusted by the arrogance and inhumanity:
‘When I look at it, I think it’s part of my passion being expressed to someone I thought was a close person to me, then being recycled into the sneery intelligence report…
They are in a position where they know things and they also totally believe themselves to be superior to us, hence the term “wearies“, and hence the way they look at us in degrading inferior ways, like the ‘squalid squats’ and all this kind of stuff.’
Also on 31 October 1997, Monica was part of a protest at an open-cast coal mine in Derbyshire. The Inquiry refers to it as Stonebroom, but this is an error in Boyling’s reporting; the site was Doe Hill Quarry, near Tibshelf. Several of those attending wrote reports for Earth First! journal Do Or Die.
Security around the action had been tight: people met at a pre-arranged point, were taken by coach, and the location of the target was only disclosed at the last minute, in person. Boyling’s report sounds impressed, albeit prefixed with an inevitable backhanded swipe:
‘In stark contrast to recent shambolic environmental protests, this was a well-planned and meticulously prepared event.’
Around 200 people occupied the mine, did considerable damage to the mining equipment, and left, all without uniformed police even turning up.
On the coach back to London, Monica sat next to Boyling and fell asleep on him. She asked to stay at his and he agreed. It wasn’t sexual at all, but rather that she felt safe with him and wanted company.
LEAVING, YET SPIED ON ALL THE MORE
Boyling reported on an RTS meeting on 8 December 1997 [MPS-0000730], listing Monica as one of three people who ‘attended but have now been excluded from the group’.
Spycop Jim Boyling giving evidence to the Undercover Policing Inquiry, 10 February 2026
She explains that this is another exaggeration and projection of factionalism. Nobody was excluded, it’s just that there was a section who were up for taking on organisational roles who decided to have separate meetings.
Monica was struggling personally at the time so did not opt to be a part of that. She adds that it was not long after the formation of that group that Boyling deceived ‘Ruth’ into a relationship.
Monica was arrested in early May 1998 as part of a group attempting to squat a former Department of Social Security building in Dalston. As a government location, its alarms were linked to the police, who turned up in large numbers and in a bad mood.
Monica was among those arrested. Two of her comrades were convicted of assaulting police officers, but these convictions were later quashed on appeal when an expert on the Sitex metal screening covering the windows proved that the police’s story, which rested on the squatters impossibly moving the screens, was a lie.
Immediately afterwards, a Special Branch briefing note [MPS-0730815] says RTS activists were seeking locations for future street parties. It lists Monica as one of the North London planning group, gives a lot of personal details including a physical description, and requests further personal intrusive surveillance:
‘As part of Operation Larder, a general lifestyle surveillance of “Monica” would be beneficial. Together with any information concerning her involvement in the planning of the above event, such as the reconnoitring of potential sites and meetings with other environmentalists.’
It appears that, despite becoming less involved in activism, she had become a person of such significant interest that she was assigned her own code name for Special Branch reporting, ‘Perpetual Motion’.
In the summer of 1998, Monica left London and RTS-style activism behind. She had attended a June 1998 street party and felt alienated. Seeking other ways to balance her relationship with herself and do practical good, she turned her focus to meditation and permaculture. Her social circle continued to include a lot of people who had an activist background and had been on many of the same campaigns and protests as her.
Reclaim the Streets banner ‘the earth is not the casino of the rich’, London, 18 June 1999
Monica is mentioned in two further reports. One, from 1 March 1999 [MPS-0001845], reports that on 23 February activists including Monica had occupied the London offices of Kvaerner, the company that had been awarded the contract for the Birmingham Northern Relief Road.
As that project was especially close to her heart, she had returned to London for the action. The action itself was fairly brief and unremarkable. The report lists her as an organiser, which she doesn’t recall doing at all.
She’s also named as the organiser of a protest for the Justice for Simon Jones campaign, which she wasn’t, she only made a banner.
Again, this is a pattern we’ve seen in reports by other spycops: once an activist is considered to be a key organiser, they have significant roles falsely attributed to them. It’s unclear why this is, unless it’s just a way to for spycops to impress their managers by supplying intelligence on the people that are supposedly the commanders of a movement.
OPENING THE FILE
The Inquiry then brings up Monica’s Special Branch Registry File [MPS-0720800]. An entry dated 2 August 2000 talks about comprehensive enquiries made regarding her, and she’s described as a dedicated and prominent environmental activist.
The file has extensive personal details: her date and place of birth, her parents, and her childhood address. There is a photograph, a physical description, and her current whereabouts. Special Branch have added information from state agencies such as the DVLA, electoral roll, and Police National Computer. The latter lists her sentences for five offences; a caution, two fines, and two conditional discharges.
Monica objects to the phrasing, especially for the first two which were the result of the Newbury Bypass tree protest:
‘I was contextually protecting woodland from being destroyed. So I don’t call that an offence in a way…
I also think that protecting nature or ecology, the living systems of this planet that support all of life, from being destroyed by the voracious need of capitalism to consume all the resources for this unending progress of consumerism, I don’t think that is an offence.’
She also corrects the file’s repetition of her and another person being co-organisers of the Justice for Simon Jones protest. Monica was asked to make a banner and she agreed to do it, that was it.
In her witness statement [UCPI0000038662], Monica expressed her outrage at the fact that the spying extended to her parents:
‘Seeing my dad’s name and job discussed in a Special Branch file has been one of the most impacting things of this whole Inquiry process, and I am very angry about this.
Dad died in 2022, and fortunately I did not have to make a decision about whether to tell him about this invasion of his privacy, owing to this unwarranted characterisation of me as a threat to the British State…
He would never have imagined that my efforts to make the world a better place had led to such intrusion into his life. I am glad in a way that I have been spared having to tell him that he had been abused and violated in this way.’
Seeing her file, Monica is incredulous at the narrow-minded short-sightedness of its authors:
‘It seems that the way we are supposed to think, to not be considered subversive, is quite limited by the MI5, the Home Office, the Metropolitan Police.
It almost feels like we will be spied on if we stand up for justice, or stand up for how we perceive justice to be, whether that is protecting people from having fascists beating them up or protecting the ecological system from destruction.
For wanting to live in different ways that aren’t just as consumers of a capitalist system that serves very few people and serves the people who spy on us and infiltrate us.
So it is a little bit like “this person could still be dangerous or could still be considered to be subversive, because she cares about a living system of the earth which gives her life”.’
She says that the Extinction Rebellion protests were focused on the right issues, but it was depressing to hear the media refuse to listen to the real purpose. She adds that she couldn’t think of participating in anything like that, knowing the truth about Boyling and spycops.
‘It is heartbreaking to see the level of delusion that the human race is acting, the level of sociopathy, psychopathy and narcissism that runs our world and how our voices are still being silenced…
So I live as simply as I can and as kindly as I can and I do my best, because there is nothing else that I can do. But I still have hope.’
IMPACT OF THE TRUTH
Monica says the discovery of Boyling’s real identity was life changing for her personally.
‘It is a patriarchal entitlement fundamentally, if you really look at it. It is like “men have needs” – which is something I know that he said once – and I, my body, doesn’t have an individual right. My human rights don’t exist because I am a woman.
It is such a violation and it is such a cold, calculated way of using people….
It’s such a negation of self, it is a negation of agency, they knew we would not consent, but it doesn’t matter because it serves their cause.’
She expands on this to say that it was also a collective violation of the activists by the police.
When asked about how it impacted her to have an intimate relationship with Boyling, she takes issue with the term:
‘I didn’t have an intimate relationship with him, really. He had sex with me for whatever reasons he did. I thought I had an intimate relationship with him, but I didn’t. I had something else altogether, but I wasn’t aware of it…
Of course he gave no thought for me. I was irrelevant to his startling career, wasn’t I? I was irrelevant to his commendation. I was irrelevant to how well he was doing in infiltrating this group of wearies.’
As the hearing approached its conclusion, Monica was asked if there was anything else she wanted to add.
She says that she was just the first woman Boyling deceived into a relationship. He then moved on to ‘Ruth’, and then to ‘Rosa’ with whom he had two children. That meant abuse on scale far beyond what he did to Monica. And we’re getting answers now not because the police wanted to come clean but because those they victimised did the detective work:
‘I walked away from this car crash. “Rosa” didn’t. And unless the women who were so traumatised by these men suddenly leaving their lives hadn’t tried to look for them, we wouldn’t be here now.
And, actually, if it wasn’t for the fact that it came to light that the Special Demonstration Squad had spied on the Lawrence family, and the Lawrence family had already been through several abuses by the state that it became such a question, we wouldn’t be here now… before that happened, we didn’t count.’
Monica expresses gratitude for the work of the Inquiry, and for the activists reporting on it. Even though she’s been so profoundly violated by a spycop, she’s still shocked at what she’s seen and heard in the hearings, and at the emotional poverty of the officers who appear unable to feel any remorse or even see those they spied on as fully human:
‘They don’t care about anyone else. They don’t have empathy. That’s how it seems. And these are the people who are controlling us. These are the people who are running society.’
NO EMPATHY, FEW CONSEQUENCES
Boyling is the only officer involved in the spycops scandal to lose their job. A tribunal ruled in 2018 that his behaviour in relation to Rosa amounted to gross misconduct and deserved dismissal.
In July 2023, a second police disciplinary tribunal found that Boyling’s abuse of Monica was also gross misconduct, but not to a sackable degree. The key difference seems to be that he identified fellow spycops to Rosa. His abuse of the women was of secondary importance to the tribunal.
Monica’s legal case to challenge the Crown Prosecution Service’s refusal to prosecute Boyling failed, with judges ruling the CPS had acted properly.
It’s clear that the lack of empathy extends far beyond the spycops.
Monica sets the small-heartedness of the spycops and their defenders within the biggest picture:
‘We live in a vast universe beyond measure and we are conscious, and this society is what we do with it? We could be so much more. We could tend the earth, we could garden. We could live in peace.’
The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, praised Monica for having the courage to come and face public questioning and thanked her for doing so.
After the hearing ended, Tom Fowler made a summary and reaction video with two former RTS activists, Zoe and Dave:
Austin has since seen further disclosure of evidence about another undercover police officer, HN104 Carlo Soracchi ‘Carlo Neri’, who was deployed from 2000 to 2005, infiltrating socialist and antifascist groups in London. She has therefore produced a second witness statement, and is being called back to give evidence about that.
Spycop Carlo Soracchi
The UCPI is an independent, judge-led inquiry into undercover policing in England and Wales.
Spycops from these units lived as activists for years at a time, spying on more than 1,000 groups.
Austin’s evidence was given as part of the UCPI’s ‘Tranche 3 Phase 2’ hearings, examining the final 15 years of the Special Demonstration Squad (1993-2008).
She has produced a written witness statement for the Inquiry [UCPI0000037774] however at time of writing (four months after she gave her evidence) it has not yet been published online.
Austin began by describing the protest in London on 1 May 2001. The protest was just one of many annual Mayday demonstrations that happen throughout the world every year. Austin explained:
‘The trade unions in London have a regional May Day demonstration every year… I am a trade unionist, I am a socialist, I attend, along with comrades, friends, family.’
On 30 April 2001, the night before the Mayday protest, Soracchi filed a report [MPS-0005795] about antifascist group of No Platform alleging that:
‘Should the opportunity present itself for an attack on property or the police then they will take part.’
Austin explains that this is a wild exaggeration of the kind we see over and over again in SDS reports:
‘It is absolute rubbish and nonsense. What we were doing on that day was about politics. It was a political intervention…
So it’s not reliable. No, it’s not reliable pre-event intelligence’
Around 20-30 Socialist Party members joined the protest, to give out flyers and sell newspapers. They stayed together as the protest went down Regent Street and reached the Nike shop at Oxford Circus.
Austin takes up the story:
‘So we arrived at Oxford Circus probably just before 2.00 pm…
There were lots of police around. Lots of protesters. Very peaceful, carnival atmosphere, people with musical instruments. I was outside Nike Town, I think, giving out leaflets about child labour and the fact that Nike use child labour in the Third World.’
At around 2pm, 6,000 police officers moved in and surrounded the crowd. About 3,000 people, including Austin, were held there, penned in by police, for seven and a half hours.
People were tightly packed, there was no water, food or toilets provided, and there was a level of distress in the crowd. No one was allowed to leave until 9:30pm.
This was the first time the Met used this now-common tactic, known as ‘kettling’. It caused outrage not only among those invovled but among civil rights groups too.
‘Q. You didn’t see any incidents of violence, did you, while you were in that cordon?
A. No, I didn’t. What I saw was people tired, frustrated. People with medical conditions like diabetes, you know, we had a couple of young women with us who were on their period. There were no toilet facilities.’
Spycop Carlo Soracchi, who infiltrate the Socialist Party and associated groups, was also in the crowd that day with Austin and around two dozen other Socialist Party members. He was held inside the kettle along with everyone else.
Austin describes how the police cordon closed in on the crowd, which she felt was both dangerous and reckless.
‘At a certain point they tightened the cordon, and the normal uniformed police officers stepped back and then rows and rows of riot police move in and they tighten and tighten the cordon.
I can remember saying to the police near me at the time, “Why are you tightening the cordon? Why are you doing that? That is dangerous, are you attempting to create a crush? Because people are getting frightened. You are creating a crush”.
As it is, we are already quite tightly packed into Oxford Circus’
Austin had a baby in creche that day, less than one year old. She was breast feeding and needed to get back to collect her child. She explained this to police but they refused to let her leave.
‘I was scared and frightened. I was frightened when they tightened the cordon.
I was upset when they wouldn’t let me leave to collect my daughter and I got really scared when it got dark and we were getting hardly or no announcements from the police about what was going on’
THE OXFORD CIRCUS KETTLING CASE
In 2005 Austin brought a civil claim against the Metropolitan Police over their use of the ‘kettle’ that day.
Police kettling Mayday protesters at Oxford Circus, 1 May 2001 (pic: Brian David Stevens)
She was represented by barrister Kier Starmer, among others, and hers was the first of a potential 150 claims for false imprisonment brought by people unlawfully detained by police at Oxford Circus on 1 May 2001.
We now know that Soracchi was tasked with briefing the legal team representing the Met in that case, giving insider information about the police’s legal opponents..
Documents have emerged in this Inquiry which reveal that Soracchi met with John Beggs, the lead barrister representing the Met, the night before Austin was cross examined.
Soracchi was still deployed in 2005. We were shown an authorisation [MPS-0526804] which stated that his deployment was for the prevention and detection of the crime or public disorder.
Yet this was a civil claim, not to do with crime. Furthermore, it had nothing to do with dosorder, Austin and the others had acted entirely lawfully, it was the Met who didn’t.
Soracchi’s authorisation says that he was tasked with infiltrating antifascist groups No Platform and Antifa. Counsel asks if there was crossover between them and the Socialist Party.
Austin points out that she has given evidence on this before, and that she doesn’t know what else he was doing:
‘I just thought he was an ordinary member of the Socialist Party.’
There is no sign of any SDS reports by Carlo Soracchi about the legal briefing he gave to Beggs, however there are bullet points in an internal SDS document about it, and a later authorisation document for Soracchi (using his code name ‘Craggy Island’) mentions that he was able to provide briefings in a civil case to legal counsel, noting:
‘Undercover officer Craggy Island’s intelligence and assessment for MPS counsel in relation to the recent May Day action was of significant value.’
Evidence of what was said in that briefing can be found in the notes made by officers who interviewed Soracchi in 2013 for Operation Herne, the Met’s investigation in to spycops [MPS-0726931, MPS-0738088].
Two different officers took notes of Soracchi’s description of the meeting with Beggs and record it as follows:
‘Brief description given of Lois and what would wind her up because of the type of person she was.’
And that Soracchi was:
‘asked to brief… in relation to her character. I know she was a South London girl who could easily get wound up.’
At the trial itself, Austin gave evidence for two days, and she says the cross examination was very hostile. She describes how it was evident from Beggs’ tone that he was trying to discredit her as a witness:
‘The questions I was asked at the start of when I gave evidence about Irish people, I was asked: “There were a lot of Irish people in the Socialist Party contingent, wasn’t there? Your partner is Irish, he was active in politics in, I think, Belfast in the 1990s.”
And I remember asking the question to Mr Beggs: “Are you allowed to ask questions about that? Is that not racist? What are you trying to say about Irish people?”
So that makes me think that maybe that’s the information that Carlo had given Mr Beggs, to say, well, Lois is married to an Irishman, she’s got Irish friends. That may be something that’s going to wind her up.’
Beggs has submitted a witness statement about this incident to the Inquiry [UCPI0000039326] in which he claims that he brought up the presence of Irish people at the Mayday 2001 protest for ‘forensic reasons’, however he does not explain what they were.
Soracchi has also given a statement to the inquiry about the briefing he gave to Beggs [UCPI0000035550] but a large section is redacted.
INSIDE INFORMATION
Irrespective of what the briefings and meeting involved, there was a police spy in a group that was involved in legal action against the police. This is exactly the situation that scandalised the nation when it was revealed that police had done this to the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, an outrage that forced the Home Secretary to set up the Undercover Policing Inquiry.
Beggs has told the Inquiry that he remembers being briefed by Soracchi. He describes being provided with written briefings about Lois by the SDS, and says he didn’t want to rely on them for his cross examination because they were untested.
‘[the briefings] seemed to portray Lois Austin as some kind of wild radical, possibly involved in very serious matters.
I was asked whether I wanted to meet with the undercover officer. I said yes because (as stated) I was sceptical about the written briefings.’
We are told by Counsel that these briefings may have been produced by Soracchi’s managers at the time, HN58 or HN36 Michael Dell. Beggs goes on to conclude that the briefings were unfair and inaccurate, saying:
‘I remember contrasting the hyperbole of the written briefings with the mundanity of his [Soracchi’s] direct oral briefing to me.’
However Austin disputes this:
‘I think this is Mr Beggs trying to cover his tracks… is it lawful or is it misconduct?
If it is not unlawful, is it misconduct for a barrister to meet an undercover informant, or undercover police officer, the night before a trial and -’
Hemingway cuts Austin off:
‘I don’t think that is something we can comment on this morning.’
It is important to remember that Soracchi’s account of the meeting is that he was specifically asked by Beggs to give information about what would ‘wind her up’.
Austin describes her experience in court on the second day:
‘A lot of the cross-examination was about violence, whether I was violent and about violence generally…
Carlo knew that I wasn’t a violent person and Carlo admits it here, says it here, that Lois was not a violent person.
So the Metropolitan Police… have been told by one of their sources that I am not a violent person, why was I cross-examined… so vigorously by Mr Beggs about violence and whether or not I was a violent person?…
Not only did Carlo know that I wasn’t a violent person… he knew that I had a baby…
I can’t imagine that he was in that kettle for seven and a half hours and at no point had spoken to his handlers.’
Again, Counsel interrupts Austin to shut her down, saying that uniformed police wouldn’t have been able to know whether she was lying about having a baby and insisting:
‘We are not going to back and re-litigate and we are not going to look at the reasoning of the judge here.’
This seems unnecessarily hostile, particularly given the questions Counsel went on to ask.
Counsel takes us to Beggs’ second witness statement [UCPI0000039591] in which he says that he believed Austin and other witnesses were going to perjure themselves by denying membership of the Socialist Party.
Counsel then seems to re-ask many of Beggs’ cross examination questions, seeking to establish whether or not witnesses to the Mayday 2001 civil case were secretly members of the Socialist Party, and very much giving the impression that she does actually want to re-litigate the case.
At the trial in 2005, Beggs was working for the police alongside George Thomas KC. He has given a statement to the Undercover Policing Inquiry [UCPI0000039464], saying:
‘Mr Beggs sets out in stark terms the seriousness of the allegation that witnesses disclaiming any personal involvement with the Socialist Party were in fact members of it…
This was not a case of the defendant seeking to take inappropriate advantage of information learned from a secret source about the other side’s legitimate litigation tactics: the information, if true, indicated serious wrongdoing, and possible illegality.
If it was not true, or could not be proved, it would lead nowhere.’
Counsel recognises that it did, in fact, lead nowhere, and Austin points out that was because it was untrue.
Austin laughs at the idea that she would ever hide her membership of the Socialist Party – she was in the party leadership and stood in elections:
‘I mean the world and his dog knows that I was a member of the Socialist Party!’
ACCUSED OF LYING
She confirms that Beggs did ask her repeatedly about the other witnesses and called her a liar for saying she didn’t know them.
‘I was cross-examined on it and I was asked specifically about names of individuals, and whether or not they were Socialist Party members and whether I knew them. At the time I can remember thinking: why is he asking me about these people that I had never heard of?’
Austin is shown the list of 150 claimants-in-waiting for the Mayday 2001 kettling case. She is asked how many were Socialist Party members and she replies that, including her, there were three.
Asked about the list of the ten witnesses that were called by claimants in the civil case, she says none of them were Socialist Party members except her partner, although one was a friend in the Socialist Alliance.
Lois Austin on a Youth Against Racism in europe lobby of the Home Office, 1993. Pic: Tim Bolwell
However, Austin also points out that if the number of Socialist Party members among the witnesses had been twenty rather than two, it would not have made any difference to the legal strategy.
The fact is that the police were using their secret political spies to gain litigation advantage in a civil claim.
Another lawyer who represented the police, whose name is restricted, has made a witness statement saying it was ‘standard practice’ to try and get background information about the other side’s witnesses. They refer to an email from Beggs after the meeting which states that he has acquired some ‘useful general information about the nature of the beast’.
Soracchi claims he did not pass on any information that would be subject to legal professional privilege, i.e. he says he didn’t disclose Austin’s legal strategy. That seems unlikely, and even if it were true, the fact that an undercover officer was briefing the police legal team was never mentioned in disclosure at the time.
Soracchi was not only in a position to know about Austin and what might wind her up. As a member of the Socialist Party at the time who had been there on the day, Soracchi was also contacted as a witness to the 2001 kettling, and invited to be part of Austin’s case.
As Austin says, he had been present in the crowd on the day, and he ought to have had important evidence to give to the court that supported her description of events:
‘Carlo would have been a very good claimant. Because he would have said, “I saw no violence and people were bored and fed up and frustrated and people wanted to go home”.’
Austin makes clear that the Inquiry needs to put it to Soracchi that he knew full well that the things that were said about her during cross-examination were untrue.
While there was a short break in the questioning, Tom Fowler made this video with Donal O’Driscoll of the Undercover Research Group:
DISORDER ORGANISED BY SPYCOPS
During the trial in her civil claim, Austin was cross-examined for hours about violence, including being shown videos of disorder at ‘J18’ protests in June 1999, and Mayday 2000.
She reminds the Inquiry that she wasn’t at either of those events. It is very clear from the evidence heard in this Inquiry, that the SDS officers HN14 Jim Boyling ‘Jim Sutton’ and HN3 ‘Jason Bishop’ played a significant role in organising those events. If there was any crime involved, the spycops had far more to do with it than she did.
That would obviously also have been relevant disclosure to be made in her case, if Beggs wanted to use those events as evidence against her.
‘I feel very upset that I was a young mum, two small children, cross-examined for two days in the most hostile fashion about events that we now know were set up and orchestrated by undercover police officers.
And used as an excuse to contain me for seven, seven and a half, eight hours, in Oxford Circus, no access to the toilet.
I was lactating at the time so I was actually in physical pain and needed to feed my daughter…
[I was told] that I was not credible when I said that there was no violence or I saw no violence, when actually a member of the Metropolitan Police, Carlo Soracchi, who was with me in the containment, also said that he saw no violence. But that was never disclosed to the court.’
Austin further says that she does not accept the claim that police witnesses were not briefed by Soracchi. She points out there were confirmed telephone briefings of witnesses by Beggs after he met with Soracchi, and we are shown another authorisation document which states:
‘The undercover officer Craggy Island has been in a position to provide background briefing to both Metropolitan Police legal advisers and SO12 [Special Branch] senior management in the current May Day 2001 civil case.’
Austin points out that senior management within Special Branch at the time included Detective Chief Inspector Alan Mitchell, who was a police witness during the trial.
It is frankly appalling that a spycops officer was briefing barristers for the Met to help them defend a civil case at all.
Hemingway drew Austin’s attention to the fact that undercover officers were mentioned in Alan Mitchell’s evidence in her case, but Austin explains how that was understood:
‘I would have thought, you know, police that were maybe turning up to the odd meeting in the run-up to the protest…
What I certainly did not consider or think was at all possible in what is supposed to be a democratic society, that undercover officers were deep infiltrators.
That someone like Carlo had actually joined the Socialist Party, was deceiving women either who were members or on the sort of fringes, or friends of members of the Socialist Party into intimate sexual relationships, and that they kept the sort of information on us that they did…
They took leadership positions in the organisations that they infiltrated.’
LOSING THE CASE
The judge ultimately found against Austin in the civil claim. He added that even if he had found in her favour, he would have only awarded nominal compensation of five pounds.
Austin points out that if the judge had been made aware of the role of the SDS in the case, and the intelligence and briefings provided by Soracchi, he may well have taken a different view.
‘I know that you have said we are not talking about the bigger issue about as to whether the containment was lawful or not, but surely knowing what we now know about undercover police officers setting up J18 and the events of May Day 2000, surely we do have to ask the question: was the containment lawful?
Because if Jim Boyling and ‘Jason Bishop’ hadn’t done what they had done, then that was given at the trial as the justification for the seven to eight-hour kettle in Oxford Circus on May Day 2001.’
Austin points out how terrible the ruling was in the civil case.
‘We appealed because the judgment was so bad and so awful… we couldn’t allow the idea that it was completely okay to kettle protesters for hours with no food, no water, no toilet facilities…
Whether or not we thought that we could win an appeal, I think we knew that it was problematic because there had been a big attempt… to criminalise protesters to say that all protesters are violent… but I think we felt that we had no choice.’
We are shown an intelligence report by Soracchi about the civil case [MPS-0043049]which claims that Austin did not give a good ‘performance’ in court and notes that the police were able to discredit her, as well as reporting the intention to appeal.
‘Q. Specifically, how do you feel about that being reported back to the police, given that they were part of the litigation?
A. Well… I mean… I am not a lawyer. But is that allowed?… is it lawful for a police officer?
Q. I can’t answer that question’
Austin is asked how it makes her feel that an undercover officer was used to brief the opposing legal team and that information was not disclosed to her in the civil case:
‘Very upset. Very angry… undercover officers should not be allowed to infiltrate and attempt to subvert democratic organisations like the Socialist Party or trade unions.
The fact that they were all talking about me, gathering evidence on me, I find very, very upsetting…
I have never been arrested. I have never even been cautioned… So the fact that the Metropolitan Police have a huge big file on me, that they are having all sorts of conversations about me that I don’t know about… I think is alarming and it should not happen in a democratic society.
If I have done something wrong, then please, arrest me and bring me before a court and say “We have this big file on Lois Austin, because we think she’s a criminal and we think she’s done all these things that are a breach of the peace or she’s been involved in violent disorder.”
But there is no such evidence and, as I said, I have never been arrested. What’s happened instead is I think I have been the subject of a terrible injustices. I have been beaten, I have been kettled. I have been spied on.
The organisations that I am a member of, which are public organisations, have been infiltrated. And I am very angry and upset about it.’
This was a short hearing, dealing with this one event, and it was over before lunchtime.
The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, thanked Austin for coming back to give evidence for a second time.
After Austin’s questioning ended, Tom Fowler made this video with Austin’s partner Niall Mulholland, and Donal O’Driscoll of the Undercover Research Group:
As the public inquiry into Britain’s political secret police continues, we’re given glimpses and reminders that the spycops scandal extends beyond the police into the corporate arena – and that some people straddle both worlds. This guest post from the Undercover Research Group investigates one of them.
Former Nottinghamshire Assistant Chief Constable Susannah Fish, who authorised deploying Mark Kennedy as a spycop, presents Stephen Beels with a security industry award, c.2019
Detective Sergeant Steve Beels served with Special Branch for 31 years. His last posting was as a back-office sergeant and cover officer with the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS).
Since then, he has enjoyed a profitable career in the private sector, utilising the surveillance skills and knowledge he had gained during his police career.
A crucial part of this evidence concerns a 2001 trip to Venice that Soracchi took with ‘Lindsey’ (an alias), whom he deceived into a year-long relationship.
Whilst Lindsey thought at the time this was an extremely romantic weekend away together, Beels both authorised the trip and accompanied Sorrachi and Lindsey to Italy.
While Sorrachi was showing Lindsey around Venice, Beels was waiting on the phone in Verona to hear any reports and provide backup if necessary. What Sorrachi was telling Beels, and what Beels knew about the trip’s true purpose, is unknown.
The evidence begs further questions about this Metropolitan Police-funded holiday for Soracchi and Beels.
‘Lindsey’ was dismayed to learn that Beels supervised their supposed romantic break. If this was the case, she said, Beels must have known about her sexual relationship with Soracchi. Beels enjoyed a free trip to Verona, raising the question of whether the two police officers colluded to secure a nice trip to Italy – at the taxpayers’ expense.
THE REVOLVING DOOR
Fast forward seven years from that trip to Venice, to January 2008 and the closure of the SDS. By this time, Beels had served 31 years with the Met and had retired. That month, he began to work in the private sector.
However, Beels’ impressive LinkedIn CV omits his position at C2i International/Lynceus Consulting, the security firm he joined in February 2008 as head of business intelligence.
C2i International was a ‘special risk-management and ‘investigation company active between 2003 and 2009. Lynceus Consulting was founded in 2007 and concentrated on the defence and ‘homeland’ security market. Both companies had the same chief executive officer, Justin King, and merged in 2007.
Beels worked with Lynceus from February 2008 until at least 2009 and was not the only former Special Branch officer employed at C2i/Lynceus. Another was Wilf Knight, who worked for Special Branch in the 1970s and went on to work with TV companies as a technical advisor for shows incluing The Bill. Knight is perhaps best known for outing HN135 Mike Ferguson as a spycop in True Spies, the BBC documentary about the Special Demonstration Squad spycops.
Toby Kendall (left) and his manager at C2i, Rebecca Todd (right)
One of C2i International’s revenue streams was surveillance of activist groups for corporate clients.
C2i International entered the public domain when the media exposed Toby Kendall, who attempted to infiltrate campaign groups Plane Stupid and Hands-Off Iraqi Oil (HOIO) by posing as ‘Ken Tobias’.
Kendall’s activities became known after campaigners from the two groups exposed them.
Kendall’s line manager at the time, Rebecca Todd, was also later discovered to have infiltrated environmental campaign groups while working for C2i and as an independent contractor through her own company, Vericola.
In late 2017, The Guardian reported that C2i had monitored the calls of relatives of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old activist killed in 2003 while trying to stop the Israeli army bulldozing a Palestinian home in Rafah, Gaza.
The Guardian investigation found that C2i was working for US manufacturer Caterpillar, which supplies construction and demolition equipment to the Israeli military.
Beels was the author of several pitches to potential corporate clients, including German energy firm E.on, car maker Porsche and Canary Wharf plc. The vast majority of Beels’ proposals promised these companies to get ‘real-time’ information about activist and protest groups.
C2i Weekly Threat Report, November 2007
C2i/Lynceus was not the first, or the most successful, company seeking to profit from large, exploitative multinationals worried about their reputations. And Beels was far from the only in the latest Inquiry hearings. HN3 ‘Jason Bishop’ was one of several former undercover officers to mention ‘commercial agents.’ One of Bishop’s targets, Emily Apple, was also spied on by corporate spy Martin Hogbin at the same time.
OVERLAP
Next month, we will finally see reports from HN66/EN327 ‘Dave Jones’, who spied on climate campaign group Rising Tide between 2005 & 2007, while C2i was also surveilling them. The overlap in targets by the state and corporate spies is startling.
C2i prepared reports on other campaign groups targeted by the SDS, including Camp for Climate Action, Cardiff Anarchist Network, Clown Army, Dissent!, and Earth First!, amongst many others.
C2i/Lynceus went out of business in 2012, having failed to capitalise on the corporate world’s interest in the activists who opposed them. Beels’ reason for missing them out may be connected to the organisation’s failure, perhaps partially due to the negative publicity around Toby Kendall.
This summer, the Undercover Policing Inquiry will hear from SDS managers from ‘Tranche 3‘ (the Special Demonstration Squad 1993-2008) and so hopefully we will hear from Beels’ on this and other questions. Including, we hope, how he came to know of C2i in the first place, and them him.
Joe Batty giving evidence to the Undercover Policing Inquiry, 2 February 2026
The Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) resumed for a new set of hearings on Monday 2 February 2026. Designated as ‘Tranche 3 Phase 2’, these hearings examine the final 15 years of the Special Demonstration Squad (1993-2008).
This opening day was devoted to questioning Joe Batty, a trade unionist, socialist and anti-fascist activist who was spied on by undercover police officer HN104 Carlo Soracchi, cover name ‘Carlo Neri’, who was deployed 2000-2006.
Batty has provided a written witness statement to the Inquiry [UCPI0000037742].
The 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.
Tim Salisbury, Deputy First Junior Counsel to the Inquiry.
Batty grew up in Greater Manchester in the 1970s and was first politicised by the National Front leafleting his school. He and some friends made counter-leaflets to distribute to pupils. He went to some Anti-Nazi League meetings but did not become a member or activist with any group at the time.
As a young adult, he got a supermarket job and joined the GMB, as membership of the union was mandatory at his workplace. This involvement drew him to socialist politics and he became a GMB branch president, representing workers in disputes and negotiating with employers and government officials.
He went to Oxford University’s Ruskin College, and on to the University of Kent for a degree in British labour history and modern politics. While there, he became friends with Dan Gillman, who gave evidence to the Inquiry in November 2025.
The pair held office in the university’s Labour Club and significantly built up its membership. They also organised coach travel to the large demonstration against the British National Party (BNP) in Welling, South London, on 16 October 1993. Batty and Gillman took responsibility for stewarding the people they’d brought to the protest.
In response to the rise in far-right activity, including attacks on local people, they created Kent Anti-Fascist Action Committee:
‘When I was at Ruskin College and at the University of Kent, I studied fascism. It wasn’t something new to me. I understood what it meant.
I also understood the history of fascism in the UK and what it had done over the historical period. So it was natural that I would want to make sure that it didn’t go off the political agenda.’
In 1993, Batty began working in homelessness, first in Cheltenham and then in London. He remained an active trade unionist, and also helped Youth Against Racism in Europe with stewarding of meetings and protests.
Over the next couple of years, fascist activity died down, yet Batty did not reduce his antifascist activity:
‘Myself and Dan and others recognised that history tells us when the far right is no longer successful electorally, it retrenches to violence.
You know what, I hate to say I am right, but that’s literally what they did, with the bombings that Copeland and his cohort – because I don’t believe he acted alone – were involved in.’
NO PLATFORM
At the end of the 1990s, Batty helped to found No Platform. As we’ve heard so many activists do at the Inquiry (with debatable levels of success), Batty explained that it was wrong to think of his group as a formal organisation:
‘There were about a dozen people or so who may have been the mainstays of it, but it really wasn’t a static organisation with cards and the constitution.
So we drew from people who were interested in being involved in one thing and one thing only, and that was stopping the far right having control of communities in the streets.’
These people had a variety of social backgrounds and political perspectives, united by that sole criterion.
We’re shown a police report by Carlo Soracchi [MPS-0003710], dated 1 August 2000:
‘Frank Smith, a member of the Socialist Party away team has helped to form a new anti-fascist organisation entitled No Platform. The group comprises disaffected members of London Anti-Fascist Action and members from the away team…
The aim of the group is to provide a powerful stewarding arm for left wing public order protests and to undertake the targeting of right wing individuals.’
For so few words, this elicits quite a lot of unpacking by Batty. Firstly, it shows that the spycops, even more than the Inquiry, can only think of groups as regimented and hierarchically structured institutions with official membership. This is not how most activist groups work.
Batty flatly rejects the allegation of targeting right-wing individuals. He also questions the use of ‘away team’ as denoting a formal group, saying it’s only become familiar to him recently from seeing the paperwork at the Inquiry. It was a loose term used occasionally to describe event stewards, yet spycops talk like it was some defined loyal gang of hardened hooligans.
Batty adds that there were indeed some people in No Platform who’d done Anti-Fascist Action work, but ‘disaffected members’ is another inaccurate description.
The group was named No Platform after an existing strategic understanding, aiming to deny the far right legitimacy by preventing them from speaking on public platforms or becoming part of the regular discourse.
STOPPING THE FASCISTS GATHERING
Batty gives examples of the work: shutting down gigs of fascist bands, and occupying the ‘redirection points’ where fascists met prior to going to meetings at secret locations.
BNP leader Nick Griffin in Barking
He says there would be ‘handbags at paces’ – posturing and taunting – but he doesn’t remember any physical violence.
Often the police would see potential conflict and clear the area entirely, which No Platform were happy about as it meant the fascists couldn’t meet up.
He stresses that they wanted to avoid violence as it would be counterproductive in a community they were trying to defend, and to make it clear that the fascists were the troublemakers.
Simply by turning up at the secret meeting point, No Platform made it apparent to the fascists that they had informers in their midst. This sowed distrust and helped the groups to disintegrate.
Batty is emphatic that these tactics prevented the spread of far-right activity. He points out that when anti-fascists stopped being active in Barking and Dagenham there was a groundswell of far-right support and soon afterwards a BNP presence on the local council, leading to a concerted effort by the party to get their leader Nick Griffin elected there.
He adds that the majority of No Platform work was just stewarding events and involved no confrontation at all.
Batty worked with No Platform on about thirty events over the space of five years until he left London around 2005. The work would generally involve being aware of meetings or protests that might be attacked by fascists and making sure that they had proper stewarding to ensure things happened safely.
Soracchi joined the stewarding groups and befriended Batty. Soracchi’s witness statement to the Inquiry [UCPI0000035550] describes Batty as the ‘main organiser’ for both No Platform and the Socialist Party away team. Batty says the latter is absolutely untrue.
As for Batty’s position within No Platform, a Soracchi report [MPS-0010730] says that Gillman has stepped down and Batty is now its ‘leading activist’. Batty again highlights the fundamental misunderstanding in the phrase, and explains that there was no leadership at all, just people who were consistently available, organising together.
The Inquiry showed a spycop report, presumably Soracchi’s [MPS-0005753], about an anti-fascist counter-demonstration in central London on 14 April 2001:
‘Current No Platform tactics are to locate the meeting point for fascists and then to attack them before they get anywhere near the location of the march.’
Batty hasn’t seen the document before. With the Inquiry now rushing, it is no longer providing witnesses with all the relevant documents, and it has started hearing evidence even though the hearing bundles are incomplete, undermining the potential for getting considered answers.
Special Demonstration Squad officer Carlo Soracchi
Batty takes issue with the report’s incendiary terms, saying that they would go to disrupt the meet-up by being at the meeting point, but this is a long way from ‘attacking’, something he declares impossible anyway as No Platform would have only had a dozen people at most.
Some of No Platform’s information about fascist activity came from Searchlight, a group that specialised in gathering intelligence about the far-right.
This exchange was done on an informal basis, though Soracchi’s reports [MPS-0009903] characteristically misrepresent it as being much more formal, as if Batty and Smith had organised delegations to some kind of Searchlight briefing meetings, and furthermore [MPS-0010590] were ‘relishing’ the prospect of going to occupy fascist meeting points.
Batty is clear that the work was not something done with glee or as a fun leisure activity:
‘That would make you sound like you were waiting and willing for some sort of action and that we were addicted to fighting with the fascists. I have to tell you, I have never been particularly a great fan of fighting with anybody.’
EXAGGERATION OF VIOLENCE AND DANGER
After Soracchi’s deployment ended, he compiled a timeline of his activity [MPS-0071194]. In it, he described how No Platform would put stickers and posters up in an area where fascists were present, and would then target fascist election canvassers.
Once again, Batty recognises some of the descriptions but rejects Soracchi’s claims of deliberately seeking aggression and violence. This isn’t just a No Platform principle or about trying to avoid arrest and its impacts on employment and personal lives; he points out that it would be counter-productive too:
‘If we were to engage in assaulting candidates, that would then turn into a huge political issue that would, I am sure, garner sympathy for the very people we were campaigning against. So as a tactic, it’s just not right.’
Pressing the point, Counsel shows another Soracchi report that the Inquiry had failed to disclose to Batty in advance, dated 18 June 2001 [MPS-0006121]. It specifies a plan to target the BNP in Bethnal Green. Batty is aghast and dismayed:
‘I don’t know where to begin with this statement. I don’t know where he comes up with this sometimes. I mean, I spent literally hours with Carlo… talking through the political processes as to why violence of this ilk is just counter-productive…
The legitimate process, which I have said time and time again now, is occupying spaces for a defensive purpose to enable the community to feel safe and to enable us to feel safe about going about our business.’
He explains that attacking fascist candidates’ homes would provoke retaliation on their own homes. It would create more fear and violence in the community, the exact thing that they were seeking to dispel.
He points out that part of Soracchi’s backstory was that he’d been involved in the Italian Red Brigades, a group notorious for kidnappings, kneecappings and other serious crime. Batty and others had repeatedly explained to Soracchi that such things have no commonality with the British socialist movement.
Counsel asked about No Platform’s disruption of the BNP’s ‘Red White and Blue festival’ in 2001, a neo-Nazi event held on BNP leader Nick Griffin’s land in Wales [MPS-0006469].
No Platform did not intend to attack the event in any way (apart from anything else, they were outnumbered and they feared the violent neo-Nazi group Combat 18 would be providing security). The plan was simply to picket the entrances, to show that there was opposition to fascism that would be present wherever fascists gathered.
They didn’t manage it because they were turned back by police. Batty is scathing about this acceptance of fascist action with the police stymieing opposition. There were racist attacks and bombings in London, and the BNP spawned National Action, a group that was eventually proscribed under the Terrorism Act, yet the police targeted the antifascists.
The Inquiry took a break, during which Tom Fowler made this video of summary and analysis with Dan Gillman:
Early in his undercover deployment, Soracchi shared a flat in Homerton with another SDS officer, HN77 ‘Jackie Anderson’. Soracchi says that his comrades believed he and ‘Anderson’ were in a relationship, but Batty has no memory of her at all. Anderson was deployed 2000-2005, infiltrating anarchist groups such as the W.O.M.B.L.E.S. and Earth First! (EF!), and worked alongside NPOIU officer Mark Kennedy.
Both EF! and the W.O.M.B.L.E.S. have applied to be included as core participants in this Inquiry, but so far that has been refused. It seems that neither the police nor the Inquiry have been able to contact Anderson at all since the Inquiry began.
FIRST CONTACT
Soracchi’s deployment timeline [MPS-0071194] records that he first made contact with Batty and others on an asylum seekers’ rights march in central London in June 2000.
Special Demonstration Squad officer Peter Francis revelaed how spycops were briefed on key activist targets before they were deployed
Batty’s first memory of Soracchi is a social visit to the second flat Soracchi had while undercover, on Narrow Way in Hackney.
Whistleblower spycop HN43 Peter Francis has described how, before being deployed, an officer would be briefed on particular people they wanted to get close to. These people would often be respected activists, targeted because their acceptance of the spycop would make others in the group more likely to be immediately welcoming and trusting.
The briefing would include details of the targeted person’s personal taste outside politics. By pretending to share their interests, likes, and dislikes, the spycop manipulated an instant bond of affinity into existence, encouraging friendship beyond being just another comrade.
Over the course of the Inquiry and in the bookswritten by women deceived into relationships, we’ve seen a lot of evidence that this was standard spycop tradecraft.
Batty says he initially bonded with Soracchi over a shared passion for cycling, and Soracchi had a bike on a trainer treadmill in his flat.
Soracchi was a welcome addition to the social group and their stewarding of events:
‘Having a steward on a demonstration who is, you know, heavy and heavily set, is an asset because you don’t want the group to be attacked. So it’s another barrier between us and trouble.’
We moved on to a report by Soracchi from nearly 18 months later, 26 November 2001 [MPS-0007391], in which he describes a No Platform meeting and names ten people and their formal roles in the organisation.
He is not only, yet again, making it sound much more formal and rigid than it really was, he also lists himself as having been appointed as ‘volunteer to assist with communications’.
Batty is baffled by it, saying that the meeting happened but that the details are wholly false.
THE INDISPENSABLE DRIVER
Spycop Jim Boyling with his van. Vans were commonly used by spycops as a way to make themselves useful to a group to the point of indispensability
Batty adds that Soracchi did have a specific responsibility for transport, as he was the only person there with a large, reliable vehicle.
This too is standard spycop tradecraft. Sometimes (as with Soracchi) it was an estate car, but more commonly it was a van. This was SDS practice as early as HN354 Vince Miller ‘Vince Harvey’ who was deployed in 1976, and it continued all the way through to EN12 Mark Kennedy ‘Mark Stone’ (2003-2009). HN2 Andy Coles was so useful with his that he was known among those he spied on as ‘Andy Van’.
Activists were generally not well off, so a dependable functioning vehicle was very useful. The driver would be the one of the first to be told about any plans for which travel was needed. They would pick people up and drop them off, thus learning all the home addresses.
More than one SDS officer deliberately dropped a target off last in order to spend time alone with them and get more information. HN10 Bob Lambert ‘Bob Robinson’ did that with ‘Jacqui’, and other officers are also known to have done this as a way of initiating intimate and sexual relationships.
Spycop Mark Kennedy driving
Beyond all this, having a vehicle and being involved in logistics gave spycops a subject to talk about in detail that didn’t require any political understanding.
Batty says Soracchi was diligent about attending meetings, which were then reported on, but less motivated to attend events. As the group was so small, around a dozen pepople at most, Soracchi inevitably helped to influence and steer its direction.
Soracchi’s written witness statement to the Inquiry [UCPI0000035550] claims that the groups he spied on were criminal, including committing Actual Bodily Harm and Grievous Bodily Harm. Batty rejects this outright.
Counsel seemingly enjoys collecting rebuttals on the exact same topic and returns to a report of Soracchi’s [MPS-0010730] which claims Batty wants to make No Platform into a secret terrorist organisation:
‘Batty is aware that London No Platform needs a successful public action to attract numbers to the group, but is very much taken by the notion of a small committed cadre carrying out raids ‘in the living rooms’ of the far right.
He is aware that the state might well regard such acts as terrorism and react accordingly, but the recent rise in popularity and street presence of the extreme right wing might, he believes, leave anti-fascists with no other option.’
Batty patiently reiterates to Counsel that not only is it untrue but – as he’d also explained to Soracchi at the time – on a tactical level it would undermine the purpose of the group because such activity invites reaction in kind, including attacks on his and his comrades’ families, something he wanted to avoid at all costs.
‘It is just a nonsense. It looks like he’s justifying his placement within No Platform and within the left wing in general.
I really don’t recognise that statement and I take offence at it being written about me.’
THE COCK TAVERN INCIDENT
Counsel moved on to discuss a series of Soracchi’s reports. The first of these was about disorder at The Cock Tavern on 16 December 2000. It was a venue used by the left wing and the Irish community, and the National Front held a demonstration at it.
Batty describes a callout among left wing and antifascist groups who had a sizeable turnout outside the pub. Temporary steel barriers separated them from the fascists over the road, with police ensuring the two were kept apart.
Spycop Carlo Soracchi on holiday in Bologna at taxpayers’ expense while undercover
Batty is clear that this wasn’t some kind of difference of legitimate opinion, but rather one group that was seeking to destroy community cohesion, challenged by another that felt a civic duty to defend the community from hatred and division.
Batty and around ten others went round the back of the fascists, intending to create a noise and make the police feel it was too difficult to keep the fascists isolated and so make them disperse.
He’s clear that they weren’t going to attack in any way as there would be hardened fascist thugs present as well as police. The plan worked.
Soracchi has said he was there, but Batty is pretty sure that’s not true. A spycop report from Soracchi’s information [MPS-0004904] says Batty was ‘satisfied’ with the event because of the ‘attack’ on the fascists. He corrects the version again – ‘attack’ has a number of meanings and implies physical interaction, which wasn’t the plan and did not happen.
The police did arrest a number of antifascists, but none were convicted and one received compensation from the Met for wrongful arrest.
However, the personal details of those arrested were published in far-right journal The Flag. The only way this could have happened was that someone with fascist sympathies at the police station took the information and passed it on.
This is not the first time we have heard evidence of the police passing anti-fascist activists’ details to the far right. Activist Mark Metcalf told the Inquiry how he provided a bail address that was a school, which later appeared in a far-right newspaper even though the only people who could possibly have that address for him were the police.
MORE LIES
Counsel shows another Soracchi report that they failed to disclose to Batty in advance [MPS-0005529]. It’s about No Platform’s response to the BNP standing for election in Beckton, East London, in March 2001. Soracchi reports that No Platform were going to attend the vote count:
‘Activists are intending to single out the British National Party security team for attack.’
Batty is now weary of repeating the same point:
‘I have explained already pretty much ad nauseam that we are not against the electoral system, we are against the far right, and we wouldn’t attack anybody standing in an election.
There was instances of the far-right attacking canvassers in Barking and Dagenham and it was really not a good look.
It doesn’t help the legitimate candidates who are standing to have people who often are supporting them beating people up in front of the count. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s not what we would do.’
Batty does recall a separate occasion where antifascist leafleters bumped into BNP canvassers. They had a verbal exchange but nothing physical. And certainly, it was not a premeditated ‘attack’ of the kind that Soracchi repeatedly claimed they were planning.
Moving on to two documents that refer to No Platform in the Bradford Riots of July 2001 [MPS-0006264 and MPS-0029169], Batty explains that while there were people in Bradford using the name of No Platform, they weren’t a branch of a national organisation. There was no ownership of the name, it was used by anyone of roughly the same standpoint.
In March 2001, Batty and several friends went for a couple of sessions at a gym, Batty reviving an earlier interest in boxing. They only went a couple of times and it did not become a habit. Despite this, Soracchi reported on it through his ever-present lens of imagined political violence [MPS-0005536]:
‘The group has been in training for the past four weeks and believes it will be useful in any confrontation with the fascists.’
Soracchi reported [MPS-0527773] that Batty and Dan Gillman had invited him to accompany them to a Socialist Party event in Leuven, Belgium in July 2001, and then go on to Genoa in Italy to join large protests against the G8 summit. Soracchi, unusually, specifically says the group did not intend to get involved in any confrontation in Genoa.
But Batty says that he wouldn’t have been able to go for any reason. It was hard enough to get time off work for the Leuven trip, an extra week would not have been possible for him even if he’d wanted it.
DEFENCE IS NO OFFENCE
The Inquiry showed Soracchi’s quarterly review for the end of 2001 [MPS-0007737] which describes the target group:
‘No Platform was formed in late 2000 and is in effect a coming together of militant anti-fascist street fighters whose common link is the willingness to carry out violent assault on individuals or groups belonging to the extreme right wing.
Although activists are drawn from differing strands of the far left and anarchist tradition, they are united in the belief that violent confrontation is a key strategic element in beating fascism.
To that end, No Platform has on a number of occasions in the past year put that belief into violent action against members of the National Front and also police officers acting to prevent disorder.’
Batty totally rejects this description, both of No Platform and of himself personally:
‘I have already said it previous times. This is always a defensive action. The way it is being worded “street fighters”, “militant”, “attacking”, “far left”. I never considered myself far left. I never considered myself a street fighter. I never considered I was particularly militant…
I don’t understand where this sort of characterisation comes from. Unless you are trying to legitimise an ongoing situation of undercover policing when you can’t actually report on anything of substance.’
He adds that none of them were ever arrested for anything like this, which would be very odd if they really were a group who were running about maiming police officers.
It’s notable that Soracchi, like many spycops before him who made stuff up, says his group has been involved in serious crime yet is unable to provide specific examples.
Jumping ahead to 27 October 2003, Soracchi reported on No Platform’s supposed plans for the protests against the visit of US President George W. Bush [MPS-0029555]:
‘They see the visit as the first opportunity in a very long time for a situation where mass public disorder can develop.
Most of the group are not strangers to protests of this kind and have experience of being able to agitate and aggravate a developing situation.
Joe Batty and Frank Smith are particularly good in these situations.’
No Platform weren’t relevant to Bush’s visit. On the day, Batty and others stewarded the Socialist Party section of the protest. In stark contrast to Soracchi’s fanciful imaginings, it all went off peacefully.
Batty adds that the only times he’s seen real violence on a protest were the Poll Tax protest of March 1990, and the anti-BNP march in Welling in October 1993. He adds that both of these demonstrations were turned into riots by police action.
Finally on this topic, we were shown a document authorising the continuation of Soracchi’s deployment [MPS-0526932]. As one might expect from something that decides whether he could continue in the role he enjoyed, Soracchi employed some extra-special made up exaggeration, referring to ‘leading Antifa activist Joe Batty’.
DECEIVING WOMEN INTO RELATIONSHIPS
Counsel then moved on to what Batty knew of Soracchi deceiving women into relationships.
Spycop Carlo Soracchi and Donna McLean
In 2001, Soracchi initiated a relationship with ‘Lindsey’. Batty knew Lindsey beforehand, and thought of her as personable and intelligent. She was a Socialist Party member but was not involved in No Platform.
He remembers the relationship going on for some time, and that it was certainly known to the wider social group.
He became concerned at Soracchi’s poor treatment of Lindsey towards the end of the relationship. He spoke to Soracchi about it repeatedly and at length at the time – of course, being wholly unaware of the truth. Lindsey is due to give evidence to the Inquiry on 25 February 2026.
In September 2002, Soracchi was stewarding an anti-war march where he met Donna McLean. As with Lindsey, Batty knew McLean, though not especially well. She was a good friend of his comrade Dan Gillman, and they all had jobs in related work. Soracchi instigated a whirlwind romance and, just three months later, at a New Year’s Eve party at McLean’s, they got engaged. In reality, Soracchi was already married.
At the same New Year’s party, Soracchi told Batty and several others that a nearby charity shop was actually a front for Roberto Fiore, a notorious Italian fascist widely believed to be involved in the 1980 bombing of Bologna railway station that killed 85 people.
Soracchi suggested firebombing the shop. Several of them – though not Soracchi himself, as far as Batty remembers – took a drunken walk to the location. Batty banged on the window and they lost interest and went back to the party.
A few days later Soracchi gave Batty a lift and drove past the shop, pointing it out.
‘I can remember telling him that there is a philosophical reason why we are not involved in terrorism. It is really simple. It alienates everybody and wins no arguments.
So I am not sure if that part of his legend was he wanted to try and persuade us in a different direction, but it really disappointed me that he never actually picked up on that.’
Nothing further happened with the shop.
The Inquiry took a lunch break, during which Tom Fowler made a summary and analysis video with antifascist and blacklisted trade unionist Dave Smith:
In November 2002, Soracchi and Batty were among a group of five who planned a trip to Florence for the European Social Forum, a conference of anti-capitalist groups. Soracchi reported on it a few weeks beforehand [MPS-0010591], and the timeline created at the end of Soracchi’s deployment [MPS-0071194] describes it in more detail.
Batty remembers a huge march in Florence and Soracchi pointing out that they were passing the home of Dario Fo, Nobel Prize winning playwright, author of Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! and Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Fo was waving to the crowd, and even though he was exactly the kind of person the SDS would view as dangerously subversive and warranting spying on, Soracchi’s write-up for internal police use described the venerable writer as a genius.
Soracchi’s reporting says he stayed in a squat with an anarchist he knew, and reported on ‘an emerging connection between UK and Italian extremists’. Batty doesn’t remember anything that fits this description.
THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPENED
Soracchi filed a report [MPS-0062785] claiming that Socialist Party activists were closely involved in the campaign for justice for Jean Charles de Menezes. Batty does not remember this being the case at all.
Jean Charles de Menezes, shot dead by police on 22 July 2005
Jean Charles de Menezes was a Brazilian electrician who was shot dead by police at Stockwell tube station in July 2005 after being mistaken for a possible Islamist suicide bomber.
Rather than try to establish and admit the truth, police sought to take the minimum of blame for the killing, and gave off-the-record briefings to journalists.
The public were told that de Menezes was wearing a bulky jacket on a hot day, that his jacket had wires sticking out, that he vaulted the barrier at the tube station, that he ran down the escalator, and ignored police shouts to stop; that he was in the country illegally and that he was a sex offender. Not one of these things was true.
De Menezes was living with his cousin at the time, Patricia da Silva Armani, and she has campaigned for truth and justice ever since. She is due to give evidence to the Inquiry on 12 March 2026.
This became another justice campaign that the police regarded as hostile and sent spycops to spy on. In claiming that his target group was actively included in the campaign, Soracchi knew he was delivering what his managers wanted to hear.
In his witness statement [UCPI0000035550], Soracchi also claims to have been arrested (but not charged) after violence between No Platform and the BNP at Gants Hill. Batty has no memory of the event or arrest, nor can he remember Soracchi ever being involved in any political violence or other criminal activity.
There was one incident of violence but it wasn’t political. Batty and a friend had been out drinking with Soracchi. It was late in the evening and, as Batty phrased it, ‘we were towards the end of our sobriety’ when they were attacked in the street for no apparent reason. There was an altercation but no arrests were made and nothing came of it after.
Batty agrees with Soracchi’s description [MPS-0010097], apart from taking issue with the officer’s drastic underestimate of the level of drinking.
CLOSE FRIENDSHIP
Batty describes how he was close friends with Soracchi for more than four years from late 2000, spending a lot of recreational time together:
‘Steam baths, dinners, meals, going out for drinks. Drinking absinthe. You get the scene. We were going out socialising properly.’
Soracchi arranged for Batty and his partner to visit Bologna where they were met by someone they believed to be a relative of Soracchi’s, though they now realise it was probably a police officer.
Batty describes Soracchi as the instigator of many of the social activities, and the glue that held the friendship group together. Soracchi also helped Batty move to Manchester, and while doing so he stayed at Batty’s parents’ house:
‘My mum, being my mum, really made him welcome. She loved the fact he was Italian, was always going on about food and all this sort of stuff, so she enjoyed his company.’
While Batty was away in Manchester for about four months, he arranged for Soracchi to be able to stay in his London flat. We’re shown the documents making the arrangements with the City of London Corporation, including the receipt of a deposit paid by ‘Carlo Neri’ [MPS-0527068].
On 26 August 2004, while paying the rent on Batty’s London flat, Soracchi filed an entire report on Batty’s marriage titled ‘Joe Batty experiencing marital problems’ [MPS-0036399]. In it, Soracchi says that Batty’s partner, ‘Fawzia’, has not enjoyed living in Manchester and wants to leave:
‘Batty is very pessimistic about the current situation. He feels that his partner has not given the move a chance and is very upset about her behaviour.
“Fawzia” has always been the more dominant part of the relationship, but if Batty is pushed too far he will become extremely intractable, the future does not look rosy for the relationship, even if both were to return to London.’
Batty confirms that there was some discussion about staying in Manchester permanently, but it was nothing like the loggerheads described (and indeed he and Fawzia are still together). He wasn’t in touch with Soracchi at the time, so has no idea where the information would have come from.
He is affronted at Soracchi’s level of invasiveness:
‘He really had no right. And the Met had no right to try and weave a narrative of what is going on in people’s homes with what they are doing in their political life.
I am offended by this, and I am also offended by the fact that I had never seen that. I have not had my police record, I never had anything. So I didn’t know until this was made available very recently that this had been said.
And I think it’s a violation. That’s what it is. I feel violated, and I feel quite viscerally about that.’
INVENTING ABUSE FOR SYMPATHY
Like many spycops, Soracchi had invented a backstory featuring distressing details of abuse in his family.
Spycop Carlo Soracchi
Doing this serves several purposes. It creates a sense of trust for the person the spycop was telling, and that would likely be reciprocated.
Trusting the officer on confidential matters of activism, but also with intimate personal matters, made the target activist easier to influence and manipulate.
These stories of abuse or childhood hardship also gave the spycop good reason for not introducing people to their family, and for sometimes acting in inexplicable ways or ‘needing time away alone’ (when they are visiting their real family).
This pretence of a troubled mind also leads to people being ready to accept the standard story at the end of a spycop’s deployment, where they feign a mental breakdown and say they’re permanently moving somewhere far away.
Soracchi told Batty and others that after his mother had died, his sister had told him that their father had been sexually abusing her. Soracchi showed Batty a photo of his supposed perpetrator father.
The friendship group were all concerned for Soracchi, and they collected money to help him with incidental costs of the aftermath of his mother’s supposed death:
‘Our friendship was such that towards the end of his time with No Platform I felt I could counsel him when he confided in me about personal issues.
I believed at the time that his sister had been a victim of sexual abuse and that this had surfaced around the period when his mother was either dying or had just passed away.
I remember spending a lot of time talking to him about these issues, offering empathy and support…
A lot of the work that I did with rough sleepers was about trauma, and so I wanted to be there for somebody who has obviously gone through trauma – his mum passing away, which as you know is no easy thing for anybody – and then to find out this revelation at that pretty painful time was something that I thought he wanted to talk about.
So we talked about it. We spent a lot of time talking about it.’
We’re shown a document from 2 January 2006, late in Soracchi’s deployment, where he methodically lists the activists he spies on, the kind of contact he has with them, and how frequent it is [MPS-0704577].
Batty is second on the list, and seems primarily perplexed by the reason for the spying to be happening at all when his activism was open and public.
PERSONAL INTRUSION
On at least ten occasions, Soracchi reported personal details about Batty, including personal and work contact details and domestic living arrangements. He also reported in April 2004 [MPS-0034066] that Batty had lost his job and wages owed when his employer went into liquidation. Batty describes confiding in the man he thought was a trusted friend:
‘What I was expecting had all gone. I had a domestic situation with my mum being unwell. There was a lot of things that happened at the same time. Of course it was deeply personal.
The liquidation by the way was a fraud, and I would rather the police had investigated the fraud than me, but there you go.’
When the Independent Police Complaints Commission was established, Batty and a friend applied for jobs there. Soracchi reported on this in alarmed terms on 29 March 2004 [MPS-0032327]:
‘It is viewed as an opportunity as to really cause damage to the Met Police.’
It’s the same police conflation of accountability with hostility that led them to infiltrate and undermine various justice campaigns.
Batty never even received a reply to his application and laments a missed opportunity.
‘I wanted to use my experience – and I know another person wanted to use their experience – in working with vulnerable adults to ensure that they were also getting justice or were heard. So by inferring that we were doing it for nefarious reasons, it undermines us doing it.’
BETRAYAL AND ONGOING MISTRUST
In concluding, Batty reflects on how his working life with homeless people necessitated a lot of positive working with police. But since learning about the spycops and how he was personally spied on, his feeling towards working with the police have soured:
‘I brought that forward, what had happened, and the experience of what had happened, to my last job, which I worked for eight years with the community of North Kensington that was affected by the Grenfell fire.
And throughout the period that I was involved in that, I really, really, really, struggled to not say to people in their campaign groups, “you really ought to be careful, because the police will be sitting in your meetings, recording the things you do and invading your personal life”.
And that for me was really horrible, and I told them, just as I will say now, that I hope you get justice from your inquiry system, just like I hope that this will provide justice for people.
Because if not, why do people at the bottom end of the scale believe there is ever going to be any justice? And that, for me, it really hurt me. It hurts me now.’
At the end of the hearing, the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, spoke to Batty. His manner was markedly different from the way in which he’s treated other left-wing witnesses. He seemed to regard Batty as something akin to an equal. Perhaps Batty’s mention of being a Freeman of the City of London had some effect.
Mitting asked Batty about his personal history. Batty detailed a long and impressive career working with vulnerable people, particularly rough sleepers. It involved working with numerous agencies, and giving direct help and advice as well as designing management strategies to improve the lives of those affected.
He says this leads him to the conclusion that his employment chances at the Independent Police Complaints Commission were deliberately stymied:
‘I just outlined my CV, as it were, and that makes me a really good candidate for a number of those areas because I understand the milieu of working with people who are vulnerable when they interface with the police or drugs services or the other.
So the fact that I never got a response to being able to be an interface between the community and people who have complaints about the police does show me that somebody definitely sat on it.’
Mitting expresses thanks to Batty, saying that the testimony was especially welcome as the Inquiry has had a huge amount of testimony about the personal impacts on women who were deceived into relationships by spycops, but far less about the people who were close platonic friends. With that, the hearing finished.
Immediately afterwards, Tom Fowler made this summary and reaction video with Zoe Young from Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance:
Carlo soracchi is due to giveevidence to the Inqruity on 2-5 March 2026.
J18: anti-capitalist protesters in the City of London on 18 June 1999 (Pic: Andrew Wiard)
On the afternoon of Wednesday 4 February 2026, the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) heard from a person known at the Inquiry as ‘GRD’. He was a hunt saboteur and London Greenpeace activist who was spied on by undercover officer HN14 Jim Boyling ‘Jim Sutton’ in the 1990s.
GRD has been granted core participant status at the Inquiry, and also a significant degree of anonymity. He is referred to only by the intials, and his evidence was broadcast audio-only, without his face being seen.
Don Ramble
The 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.
GRD has produced a written statement for the Inquiry [UCPI0000037735], which was read into the evidence.
Additionally, he is a signatory to the Good Easter hunt sab group witness statement, a case that appears to be a miscarriage of justice due to spycop Jim Boyling’s involvement and his evidence being withheld from the subsequent court case.
However, GRD was not present for the events involving Boyling on that day, and Ramble made clear they would not be asking about that statement in this hearing.
In sharp contrast to Roger Geffen’s evidence earlier in the day, GRD’s answers were short and to the point. It was clear that he had little time for the Inquiry asking nonsense questions that sought to justify the deployment of undercover cops.
HUNT SABBING AND VIOLENCE
GRD first met SDS officer Jim Boyling with the East London hunt saboteurs in 1995 when they travelled together in a minibus. They really got to know each other on 17 February 1996 on a large sabotage of the Duke of Beaufort hunt, when they became separated from the rest of their group:
‘It was right at the beginning of the meet. And I don’t think either of us realised how many riders and supporters there were with this particular hunt.
So, we were holding the gate closed for a very long time and the whole field, as it’s referred to, kind of rode over us…
You get spat on, getting hit with whip and sworn at… And that’s the first time I kind of really had any real connection with him.’
GRD didn’t see Boyling again after that incident until more than a year later, in the summer of 1997. Nevertheless, Ramble asks him a series of questions about his activities while sabbing and any possible justifications for police spies targeting the hunt sabs.
GRD got involved in the Harlow hunt sabs in 1992. He started the North London hunt sab group a year or two later and remained involved until 2006. He is clear that the only violence he ever saw while sabbing was by hunters, hunt supporters and the police – especially in Essex:
‘We would generally not sab them. It was too dangerous, too risky…
It’s just too violent, you’d get your vehicle smashed up or the police operation would be so considerable that you’d all be arrested by midday.’
This was was exactly what happened on the day of the Good Easter arrests, 10 February 1996. GRD witnessed the arrest of a fellow core participant at the Inquiry, Brendan Mee, but not the arrests of Ben Leamy, Brendan Delaney and Simon Taylor who were with Boyling that day.
Spycop Jim Boyling whilst undercover in the 1990s
The Inquiry will need to ask Boyling about his role in those arrests and also his offer to act as a witness on behalf of the defendants whose lawyer was Keir Starmer, a name that just keeps coming up in the Inquiry files.
GRD is also asked about links between the hunt sabs and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). The ALF was a clandestine group that broke into farms and laboratories, liberating animals and damaging property. They were seen by the police as the apex of the animal rights movement, and were portrayed as something akin to terrorists.
A document recording Boyling’s initial deployment into the East London hunt sabs said that he ‘will be following an essential and authentic route towards acceptance by ALF activists’.
The targeting strategy document for SDS officer HN16 James Thomson ‘James Straven’ [MPS-0526929], whose was deployed into hunt sabs slightly later, further refers to Boyling’s deployment as follows:
‘originally earmarked for long-term deployment in the ALF and he has provided first rate intelligence on violent hunt saboteurs based in East London and Essex and indeed valuable assistance to Operation GANT and SO-13 investigation into a series of crude ALF incendiaries in East London.’
GRD says that doesn’t make sense, he doesn’t know any sabs who associated with the ALF and the hunt sabs never used, or planned to use, incendiary devices. He rejects the idea that sending an officer to infiltrate the hunt sabs was justified.
MCLIBEL SUPPORT GROUP
In 1990, McDonald’s brought legal proceedings against London Greenpeace for the claims made in a factsheet titled ‘What’s Wrong With McDonald’s?’ that detailed the company’s appalling environmental, employment, animal welfare and marketing practices.
The McLibel 2, Helen Steel and Dave Morris, at the Royal Courts of Justice (Pic: Nick Cobbing)
The ensuing court case took seven years, with the defendants attracting huge support and backfiring badly on McDonald’s. It was revealed that McDonald’s had sent two separate lots of private detectives to infiltrate London Greenpeace who were unaware of one another.
GRD first became involved in the McLibel support campaign in 1995 due to fellow hunt sabs being involved in the McSpotlight website. The McLibel Support Group office ended up being in GRD’s flat at one point. He says it was mostly a storage headache, as storing all the T-shirts and other merchandise took up space.
He met Boyling again while he was running a McLibel Support Campaign stall at the 1997 Glastonbury festival.
‘He was there with Reclaim The Streets and they were on the other side of the Green Futures Field… it had a lot of activism, eco-activism, and animal rights campaigns, veganism, vegetarianism…
Jim used to come over and hang out in the McLibel Support stall, tent as it was, for most of the days, from my memory.’
GRD hadn’t seen Boyling since they were attacked by hunters together in early 1996, but after Glastonbury they continued to bump into each other at squats and events around London.
The last time GRD saw Boyling was in a squat in December 1999. The intense experience they had together as hunt sabs meant that GRD considered Boyling a friend. He trusted him and they would socialise together.
GRD describes these encounters in his written statement:
‘We were a little bitchy about other activists and like to take the mickey out of them, but not to their face. We had a laugh together like mates.’
Looking back on this he finds it depressing and feels betrayed. He also points out that this piss-taking could be weaponised as a means of sowing division.
Boyling claims he had no inside knowledge of the McLibel matter, but GRD says that’s untrue. After Glastonbury 1997 he would have had access to all the materials which were often scattered around GRD’s flat:
‘I was uploading daily material onto the McSpotlight website… So I’d have stuff all over the place. I’d have correspondence, and I would have you know other stuff associated with the campaign.’
LONDON GREENPEACE
London Greenpeace (a small group unrelated to Greenpeace International) campaigned on a broad range of environmental and social justice issues. GRD describes himself as a key London Greenpeace activist and he ended up running the office, because he lived very nearby.
London Greenpeace’s ‘What’s Wrong With McDonalds?’ leaflet which triggered the longest trial in English history
We are shown an intelligence report by Boyling [MPS-040634] dated 31 October 1997, which refers to a meeting to ‘relaunch’ of London Greenpeace.
GRD says that Boyling would have been aware that London Greenpeace was restarting from the conversations they had at Glastonbury festival in 1997. The ‘source comment’ from Boyling on the report ironically notes that the relaunch will include all the old members ‘though presumably not the private detectives’.
This seems to be the only one of Boyling’s reports that references GRD, something he found surprising. He would have thought he’d be mentioned more, given his long-term involvement with Boyling.
EARTH FIRST! AND GENETIC MODIFICATION
In 1998 Jim Boyling and others gathered at GRD’s squat in King’s Cross to discuss the feasibility of liberating ‘Dolly’, the world’s first genetically modified sheep.
Looking back, GRD says he thinks Jim was trying to get him on board for future plans he might have had. In his reporting, Boyling describes GRD as a hunt sab organiser in North London, and a McLibel and occasional Earth First! activist.
GRD says only the first two are correct. He was also active in the Genetic Engineering Network (GEN) between 1997 and 2002. There was some crossover between GEN and Earth First! Nevertheless, his only connection to Earth First! was through things that Jim Boyling organised.
Around the same time as the meeting about Dolly the sheep, GRD recalls that Boyling asked him to drive Boyling to collect some Reclaim the Streets posters from the printers. When he got home his flat had been burgled. A camera and some two-way radios used for hunt sabbing were taken, along with some pictures, some cash, and GRD’s turntables.
‘There was only one person knew that I was going to be out all day, and that was Jim.’
Another action Boyling was involved in organising was the first ever destruction of a field of genetically modified crops in Ireland. Ramble tells GRD that the Inquiry is not interested in what happened in Ireland as it falls outside of the Inquiry’s Terms of Reference, which are limited to events in England and Wales. However, this is certainly an interesting and significant action nonetheless.
In his written statement to the Inquiry [UCPI0000036294], Boyling says he destroyed a genetically modified crop in Ireland when he had no other option than to participate or being exposed.
GRD says this is not true, and that the action in Ireland would not have happened if Boyling had not done the planning and logistics, both in the UK before travelling and in Ireland, pushing the group to do it.
GRD is very clear that Boyling would have found it very easy to back out of the genetics action, even once they were in Ireland. The UK group wasn’t even meant to carry out the action, and there were too many people in the van so it would have been easier, logistically, to have fewer people.
RECLAIM THE STREETS
Although GRD attended a great number of Reclaim The Streets (RTS) public events, he only attended two of the group’s meetings.
Boyling, in contrast, claims to have been involved in the core organising group. He insists he walked a fine line, as an undercover officer, taking part in meetings without suggesting or proposing any specific action. GRD says this is completely false and contradicts his experience of Boyling.
Leaflet promoting J18, the Carnival Against Capitalism in the City of London and around the world
Boyling approached GRD in 1999 and asked if he could hold an important meeting at GRD’s flat. It was about driving vehicles into the city of London for the J18 Carnival Against Capitalism to be held on 18 June 1999.
There were four people present, Boyling, GRD and two others, and Boyling set out his plan, which was to use cars to block two roads. This was entirely Boyling’s idea, and no one else in the meeting had been involved in coming up with it.
After the meeting they got in a vehicle and drove the routes the cars would take. Boyling encouraged them all to wear hi-vis jackets and walk the routes regularly to memorise them.
Boyling said he had purchased four cars and four pay-as-you-go-phones with enough credit for use on the day. He handed them all a phone.
The night before ‘J18’, each of the drivers stayed in new and unknown locations organised for them by Boyling in order to prevent police following them on the day. They were directed by Boyling to park the cars at specific car parks prior to driving them to the action.
On the day, GRD and another activist blocked the road by crashing the cars together at one end of the street, while Boyling and one other did the same at the other end of the street.
GRD is very clear he would have never been involved in the car action if he had not been approached by Boyling. He wasn’t really involved in Reclaim The Streets at the time. He says once he had completed his mission of crashing the cars, he spent the rest of J18 partying.
‘Let London Sprout’ – the Reclaim the Streets guerilla gardening event, Parliament Square, 1 May 2000
The Inquiry played footage of the J18 Carnival Against Capitalism, featuring the cars Boyling organised to block the road.
Ramble listed titbits of events that happened on the day, most of which GRD only heard about afterwards, and there were lots of happy memories for those of us in the public gallery.
Ramble then put it to GRD that is was justified to deploy Boyling into the groups organising J18. GRD replies that Boyling himself was integral to the organising of J18.
On 21 June 1999, Boyling filed a report titled ‘Debrief – Stop The City – June 18’ [MPS-0302210] which says the organisers were pleased with the outcome. GRD says he can’t say he was an organiser, but it was very good day.
It is very frustrating that none of the people who did organise the event have been asked to give oral evidence by the Inquiry.
‘JASON BISHOP’ AND MAYDAY 2000
GRD is also asked about another SDS officer, HN3 ‘Jason Bishop’, who was deployed 1998-2005.
GRD says he met him in the Reclaim the Streets office, and saw him around at RTS parties and activist events. Bishop also borrowed GRD’s van twice.
Most significantly, on 1 May 2000, Bishop was arrested in GRD’s van. He was stopped while transporting manure and seeds on his way to the Reclaim The Streets ‘guerrilla gardening’ event in Parliament Square.
The van was seized by police, and GRD describes getting it back:
‘I just packed my kit in it, loaded it up and then drove off to Hampshire… driving down the motorway, [the wheels] just felt odd and a bit weird…
The vehicle was in a very good condition when lent to HN3. It is possible the wheels were loosened during its time in the Met Police pound.
The experience left me distressed as I thought I was not going to be able to turn up for my first big event with the new lighting company… it was a very well maintained Mercedes panel van. It’s not usual for a considerable amount of the wheel nuts to be loose all at the same time.’
IMPACT
GRD says it was always Boyling who approached him to take part in actions, not the other way around, and he would have never suspected he was a cop.
He was shocked to hear that there was even a suggestion that ‘Jim Sutton’ had been an undercover officer. He didn’t believe it at first – activists can be paranoid – but it turns out they were right.
He had found Boyling convincing because of the human connection they had. He trusted him, and he feels set up and used. He has developed trust issues as a result, and he says it is difficult to put it into words. He feels cheated.
Asked if there is anything else he would like to tell the inquiry, GRD is characteristically succinct:
‘I’m alright, thanks.’
The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, thanked GRD for giving evidence and the hearing closed for the day.
Roger Geffen giving evidence to the Undercover Policing Inquiry, 4 February 2026
Roger Geffen gave evidence to the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) on the morning of Wednesday 4 February 2026.
Geffen is a long-standing environmental campaigner who was involved in the anti-roads movements and groups like Earth First! and Reclaim the Streets from their inception in the early 1990s, as well as more conventional campaigning for the rights of cyclists and sustainable transport.
His campaigning activities led to him being awarded an MBE for services to cycling. They also led to him being spied on by SDS officer HN14 Andrew James Boyling ‘Jim Sutton’, NPOIU officer EN12 Mark Kennedy ‘Mark Stone’, and probably other undercover officers over the past thirty years.
The 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 (or ‘spycops’) 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.
INQUIRY CHAOS
The barrister acting for the Inquiry (known as the Counsel to the Inquiry) who questioned Geffen was Lennart Poulsen, who appeared to be very unprepared.
That is not entirely surprising as the Inquiry has gone ahead with these hearings when they have barely processed the evidence. In his Opening Statement to this phase of hearings, David Barr KC (lead Counsel to the Inquiry) noted:
‘Numerous and considerable challenges have led to the preparation of the T3P2 Hearing Bundle taking longer than planned.
We recognise that this has meant that documents have not been circulated to core participants as soon as we would have wished and that the process of circulating documents to core participants and publishing them on our website is taking place over an extended period.’
As is so often the case with public statements by the Inquiry about its work, this actually significantly understates the utter chaos surrounding disclosure, where much of the evidence has not yet been circulated to Core Participants preparing their evidence, and that has evidently also impacted on the ability of the Inquiry’s own barristers to prepare.
Geffen has produced a witness statement [UCPI0000038772] and he also contributed to the Reclaim the Streets (RTS) witness statement [UCPI0000038295]. Both were read into the evidence at the start of the hearing, and you can hear Geffen and other core participants involved in drafting the RTS witness statement talking about that process in episode 47 of the Spycops Info podcast:
Geffen’s evidence began with how he became involved in environmental activism. After leaving university he began working as a classical music record producer. He moved to South East London in the late 1980s and became a cyclist.
London traffic was wildly congested and dangerous at that time and he became involved in the London Cycling Campaign, and later a campaign against plans to build a road through Oxleas Wood, a piece of 8000-year-old ancient woodland close to where he lived.
‘This was an interesting time in environmental politics because the year after I got involved in London Cycling Campaign in 1989, was the year at that climate change really first came into public consciousness when the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, went to the United Nations Summit and declared that, as a scientist, she was convinced of the need to take action on climate change, but her government then announced what they called “the biggest road-building programme since the Romans”.’
Poulsen asks how Geffen became involved in direct action and he answers, explaining that he was influenced by Gandhi:
‘I’d seen the film Gandhi earlier in my teens and the idea was that there are times when you do need to break the law in order for justice to prevail.’
He also explains what direct action meant to him:
‘When the system of democracy and public input and all the rest of it breaks down… you just have to effectively take action directly… to highlight the problem to confront it directly and thus push for a resolution… you look to confront the root causes of the problem directly’
TWYFORD DOWN
One of the first schemes from the government’s 1989 road programme to start construction was the joining up of two sections of the M3 through Twyford Down, a heavily protected area of chalk downland just outside Winchester in southern England.
Protesters had set up a small camp on the route of the road, which Geffen visited in December 1992.
Twyford was a defining experience for Geffen. He began organising minibuses to take people from London to support the campaign and his first ever arrest occurred while taking action there.
He explains how that experience empowered him to take direct action:
‘I realised that the world hadn’t ended… and I felt proud of what I had done.’
He has seen very little reporting about the Twyford Down campaign, however he points out that the Inquiry’s disclosure of police documents indicates a Special Branch Registry File was opened on him in 1993, which coincided with his actions at Twyford Down and the early months of No M11 Link Road campaign.
Protesters occupy excavating machinery, Twyford Down, early 1990s
He points out that neither he nor anyone else involved in this Inquiry has received sight of those Special Branch Registry Files, and it is evident that there is more to be discovered about the extent of the spying than is apparent on the face of the disclosure he has seen.
Geffen therefore poses a number of questions for the Inquiry:
His name was on the Consulting Association’s ‘green list’ (an illegal employment blacklist of environmental campaigners). It is known that a private detective firm, Bray’s, was employed to spy on protesters at Twyford Down – filming and keeping files on those regularly taking part.
Geffen asks the Inquiry to consider what kind of collaboration existed between private companies like Bray’s or the Consulting Association and the Special Demonstration Squad at this time.
Geffen also points out that the Secretary of State applied for an injunction against a large number of activists, seeking to prevent them from trespassing on the worksite at Twyford Down. What role did the SDS play in that process? Or in the proposed civil action, suing protestors for damages, which should theoretically have followed on from the injunction but which the Government never pursued.
Here, Poulsen points out that six activists were jailed for breaking that injunction. Geffen agrees and talks us through the appeal of those injunction breakers against the length of their sentence:
‘It was before Lord Justice Hoffman and he came out with a wonderful quote … that really kind of solidified my own understanding of what I doing.
He talked about “the honourable tradition of civil disobedience in this country” and he added that “those who take part in it may well be vindicated by history”…
It wasn’t my words, but I think that very much crystallises the philosophy that led me to do what I was doing.’
Indeed, the road protesters of the 1990s certainly were vindicated by history. In Geffen’s words:
‘Twyford Down ended up being a noisy defeat for the direct action movement, and Oxleas Wood became one of the first of a large number of quiet victories.’
Two-thirds of the government’s proposed new roads were ultimately dropped, and it is clear that Geffen is still very proud of the role he played in those campaigns.
NO M11 LINK ROAD
After Twyford Down, Geffen and others’ campaigning focus shifted back to London, and the campaign against the M11 Link Road.
Geffen describes this as a ‘Cinderella project’ because unlike Twyford Down, Oxleas Wood, or the later Newbury Bypass, this was not a road that was set to destroy precious natural habitats. Instead it was being run through a residential community that had been purposefully run down by government compulsory purchase of the houses.
As such, the No M11 Link Road campaign moved the debate about road building on. Rather than just being about protecting the natural environment, it also became focused on the destruction of communities and the choices we make about the use of our urban space.
Geffen talks the Inquiry through a number of the actions and strategies that the campaign used, such as ‘Operation Roadblock’ and the squatting of Claremont Road.
Operation Roadblock was a plan to hold daily direct action on the worksites of the M11 Link Road, coordinating people coming from all over the country. Each day was preceded by a brief training session on the principles, practicalities and legal implications of non-violent direct action. This enabled and empowered people to make informed decisions about how far they were prepared to go to stop the diggers:
‘We were exhausted by the end.’
Claremont Road was the last fully intact street on the route. All the houses on the street had been compulsorily purchased, bar one.
Dolly Watson was 93 years old. She had been born in that street and she wanted to die there. One by one, protesters squatted the homes around her, creating a little self-contained car-free community, and she welcomed them into her road. Geffen explained:
‘Defending Claremont Road would be strategically crucial.’
With the homes being decorated and children playing in the street, it became a rolling street party that lasted for six months, and something of a prototype for the concept of Reclaim The Streets.
Claremont Road E11, occupied by anti-road protesters, mid 1990s
Poulsen was not very interested in the power of the community campaign, however, and instead pressed Geffen about any possibility of criminality, asking him about the times he was arrested.
Geffen very sensibly wrote his own statements about these arrests at the time, to support his defence. He has exhibited these to his statement to the Inquiry and is able to take Poulsen through the reasons why he considers them wrongful arrests. When charges were brought at all, he was found ‘not guilty’ over and over again.
A Special Branch report [MPS-0739546] describes one of the arrests, and Poulsen asks Geffen about the mood of the security guards on the day.
Geffen explains that some were very confrontational, while others were sympathetic and were just doing a job.
Protesters made friends with some of the security, but sadly it was the aggressive and confrontational guards who got promoted, so the make-up of the security team got worse over time.
Poulsen points out that the SDS report that ‘police conduct in the circumstances was restrained’. Asked if he agrees, Geffen’s short, dry, understated, ‘no’ was met with laughter from those in the public gallery who had been at present at the protests.
Geffen did a great deal of police liaison throughout the M11 campaign and says the police sergeant in question was quite honest in how he portrayed the campaign, in sharp contrast to the much of the SDS’s ‘intelligence’.
‘Q. Neither he nor other officers involved in the last phase of the M11 campaign tried to present you as anything but peaceful. Is that right?
A. Yes.
Q. And do you accept that those officers’ observations contrast with some of the SDS reports about you and the group’s actions?
A. Absolutely… and I think that would be a really good question to put to the SDS’s management. Why was it that they were so out to smear us, tarnish us with this label of being violent when we absolutely were not?’
Poulsen exhibited a flyer from the No M11 Link Road campaign, for an action on 22 January 1994. The image appeared on two dozen computer monitors all over the room, creating a beautiful juxtaposition between the raw energy of the campaigns Geffen was talking about and the sterility of the hearing room.
No M11 link road campaign leaflets, December 1993 and January 1994
However, Poulsen’s concern is that fliers like these might have encouraged ‘activists of a more militant and violent persuasion’ to get involved.
Geffen points out that things like that may or may not have been discussed at the time, but the key point is that it never happened.
The next exhibit was an iconic image of a banner action on the roof of the home of the then Transport Secretary, John MacGregor.
‘While we were out taking direct action on one of their work sites [the contractors] effectively came behind our backs and took the roof off one of the houses on Claremont Road…
We had this conversation where somebody kind of laughing said, “Oh, we should go and smash up the roof of John MacGregor”.
They weren’t serious, but you know it kind of prompted this idea that we should do that symbolically, by painting this banner that you can see there that effectively showed a road going through John MacGregor’s own home.
So, yeah, this was a piece of direct action that worked incredibly well in in media terms… peaceful direct action on the roof of the Transport Secretary on whose behalf bailiffs were smashing up other people’s homes um to really just highlight the injustice of what the Transport Secretary was doing.’
Poulsen asks how Geffen knew the address of John MacGregor and suggests that he was creating a security issue for the Transport Secretary’s family.
Geffen points out that the action was a peaceful protest that called attention to the very real violence being faced by the residents of communities affected by the M11 Link Road.
‘After all, cabinet level secretaries are expected to have a certain amount of thick skin and they’ve got the weight of the state behind them to protect them, whereas the residents of Claremont Road had nothing of the sort.’
Poulsen again tries to suggest the action was reckless:
‘What steps did you take to ensure no one would destroy his property?’
He suggests to Geffen that this action was ‘going too far’. However, again, Geffen simply points to what actually happened on the day. Although those arrested were charged with causing alarm, harassment and distress, they were found not guilty, because:
‘This had been an entirely peaceful protest that had been conducted safely, precautions had been taken, and this was again in that “honourable tradition of civil disobedience”, confronting the root cause of the problem in a peaceful way.’
Geffen also describes another similar protest against the Criminal Justice Act, which took place in the garden of the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, noting that both actions attracted very positive media coverage, and stressing that:
‘Our networks were very solid on that common philosophy of believing in non-violent direct action.’
QUESTIONS ABOUT VIOLENCE
Twyford Down after the road was cut through it. (Pic: Jim Champion, used under GFDL and CC-By-SA-2.5)
Nevertheless, Poulson repeatedly presses Geffen on the question of violence, in between reprimanding him for giving overly complex answers to what are in fact very open questions about topics like the philosophy of direct action, attitudes towards breaking the law, violence and non-violence, and even whether activists ‘wasting’ the government’s road building budget had considered the affect that might have on the public purse.
Geffen points out in answer to this last question that, although additional policing and security was estimated to cost around £2m, they actually helped save the public purse around £18bn as a result of road building schemes being cancelled, not to mention the additional carbon emissions that were prevented as a result.
Poulsen asks a number of direct questions about ‘attitudes towards violence’ in Earth First! and Reclaim the Streets, and about Geffen’s own belief in the rule of law, before delivering what he appears to think is a ‘gotcha’ moment, saying that despite claiming to believe in the law, Geffen has supported people who have broken it.
Geffen is unfazed by these questions and simply explains again:
‘I believe that the rule of law is an important principle, but I also believe – and I do not believe there is a contradiction – that there are times when when the rule and the process of law and of public inquiries ultimately fails and that bad laws sometimes need to be broken.’
Poulsen continues to complain that Geffen’s answers are too long, and observers in the public gallery began to wonder whether the problem is that Poulsen lacks the attention to listen to long answers.
He is certainly doing the Inquiry no favours with this approach, and the overall impression is of a barrister tied to his list of questions, unable to adapt to thoughtful answers to what are obviously complex questions, instead just asking the same questions over and over again in different forms.
We are well into the questioning by this point, but Poulsen has not asked a single question about the undercover police infiltration of these groups or the behaviour of the spycops.
EARTH FIRST!
The Earth First! (EF!) network was very prominent at Twyford Down, where the focus was on the defence of beautiful landscapes and ancient woodlands.
As a group, EF! was infiltrated by a great number of undercover officers, including:
EF! applied for Core Participant status in this Inquiry but it was refused, and the group has not been given disclosure in this Tranche. Poulsen nevertheless asks Geffen not only about his own role in EF! but also about the wider attitudes and actions of the network.
Geffen offers a short history of how Earth First! came to be launched in the UK and the close relationship with Reclaim the Streets, saying is was often the same people wearing different hats. He explains both groups were non-violent.
RECLAIM THE STREETS
Geffen first met with Reclaim the Streets (RTS) in 1992 when they were planning a sit-down protest on Waterloo Bridge in London. He attended this action, but didn’t feel confident enough to sit down in the road and face arrest.
There were a number of actions after that, including stunts at the Birmingham and London motor shows and painting cycle lanes onto roads in Lambeth where the council had neglected to do so.
Geffen explains the aims of some of these actions:
‘to highlight the problems of a society that is overdominated by dependence on motor vehicles and lacks sustainable transport alternatives to enable people to get around without depending on motor vehicles…
alternatives that would be better for our health, better for our air quality, better for our climate, better for social justice, better in so many ways, and yet the motor manufacturers sell us this dream that we all have to depend on our cars…
[while the way] the government spends its transport budget is contingent on perpetuating car culture rather than providing the alternatives.’
Geffen explains that Reclaim the Streets paused its activities in summer 1993 to focus on the No M11 Link Road campaign, but re-emerged in 1995.
At this point, Poulsen finally asks his first question about an undercover officer, establishing that Jim Boyling attended his first weekly meeting of Reclaim the Streets in November 1995.
Geffen rejects Boyling’s claim that these meetings were closed, and is very clear that they were open to anyone to attend. He suggests Boyling be questioned about this when the Inquiry brgins the spycop in for questioning.
During a break in the hearing, Tom Fowler made this reaction video:
In the early 1990s, the Metropolitan Police started deploying Forward Intelligence Teams, groups of officers with very high quality film and video camera who would document people attending political events.
We hear how Geffen was followed by members of the Met’s Forward Intelligence Team to his workplace. They then arrested him there on a dubious pretext, so they could offer him the opportunity to become a police informant.
A Metrpolitan Police Forward Intelligence Team, an intimidating presence at political events in the 1990s and 2000s. (Pic: Nicky Dracoulis, used under CC BY-SA 2.0)
This was shortly before Boyling began attending RTS meetings and Geffen suggests the Inquiry investigate the relationship between this failed attempt to recruit him as an informant and the decision to deploy Boyling into the group.
Geffen points out there were other police informants in the movement, and asks what the relationship was between them and the undercover police.
Geffen talks us through the tactics used by RTS, such as taking two old cars to be crashed into each other to block the street and make it safe for party-goers. RTS parties were incredible, vibrant, family-friendly events.
However, on a number of occasions they were attacked by riot police late in the day when people began to disperse. Poulsen incredibly asked Geffen whether he accepts that the police had a duty to ‘pick a fight’ with RTS in order to reopen the road.
Geffen disagrees, pointing to the nature of the events and the disproportionate levels of violence used by the police:
‘With hindsight, one of the things we learnt was that we should have made sure we had a plan for how how to end without allowing the police to do that.’
He adds that in fact that is exactly what RTS did at the next street party event on the M41.
Poulsen nevertheless asks (for the sixth time!) whether Reclaim the Streets street parties were violent or disorderly. He uses the fact that RTS would warn party-goers about the possibility of police violence or arrest, as though that somehow demonstrated that they were not themselves peaceful. It was incredibly frustrating to listen to, but each time these questions are asked, Geffen offered a sensible, detailed and patient response.
HN14 JIM BOYLING IN RECLAIM THE STREETS
It is remarkable how few questions Poulsen asked Geffen about the role of the undercover officer Jim Boyling who, using the name ‘Jim Sutton’, was tasked to spy on Reclaim the Streets.
Spycop Jim Boyling. Vans were commonly used by spycops as a way to make themselves useful to a group to the point of indispensability
Poulsen did refer to some of Boyling’s reporting and Geffen sets out in detail how inaccurate some of it was, highlighting ‘sexed up’ intelligence which pretended that RTS were attempting far more dangerous or disruptive actions than was in fact the case.
Geffen also points out how Boyling exaggerated disputes within RTS, noting that the spycops seemed obsessed with trying to drive wedges within the movement.
One example of this is a report claiming that Geffen was ‘excluded’ from a meeting about the Selar open cast coal mine.
Geffen says he has no recollection of this, but would have had no interest in attending that meeting if he had known about it, as he had no local knowledge to contribute to the discussion.
This is pattern also emerged in the evidence of ‘Monica’, with Boyling’s reports emphasising and exaggerating divisions within the group that the genuine people who were there simply do not recognise.
Boyling was far from unique among spycops. The Inquiry has seen that one spycop after another exaggerated the danger they were in, and exaggerated or simply invented the plans of the infiltrated group. These lies were further exaggerated by office staff who collated the reports, which in turn were exaggerated to an even greater degree by managers seeking to impress the Met’s top brass and the Home Office.
RTS IN LATER YEARS
Cover of spoof newspaprt Evading Standards, produced by Reclaim the Streets, April 1997
Asked about anti-capitalist activism in the late 1990s, Geffen explains how as time went on, Reclaim The Streets sought to widen the agenda from car culture to the fossil fuel economy and capitalism more generally.
It forged links between the environmental direct action movement and related workers’ struggles such as the striking Liverpool dockers, or London Underground workers campaigning against the privatisation of the tube.
However, Geffen stresses that he himself was not very involved in those later years. He points out that while he is grateful for the opportunity to give evidence, he feels that the Inquiry has failed to call the people who are best positioned to speak about that period when SDS spying on the group was at its most intense.
We do get to hear about yet another wrongful arrest though, when Geffen and two others received several thousand pounds in compensation after being arrested while preparing to distribute a spoof newspaper, the ‘Evading Standards’, on the eve of the March for Social Justice, shortly before the 1997 general election.
All 10,000 copies of the paper were seized and destroyed by police, and Geffen points out the seriousness of the police taking this kind of action simply to prevent a political group distributing its ideas.
‘It does look like another act of political policing – not the only one in Reclaim the Streets’ history – where the purpose of the arrest seems to have been to prevent us from getting our message out, rather than to prevent disorder.’
Poulsen seeks to ask Geffen about preparations for ‘J18’, the Carnival Against Capitalism in the City of London on June 18 1999, and Boyling’s role in it, including the purchase of several cars that were crashed to block the street. But Geffen again points out that he is not the correct witness to talk about this.
The Inquiry should be asking Jay Jordan, one of Geffen’s co-authors of the RTS witness statement to the Inquiry, who has important evidence to give about a number of issues.
Jordan worked on the production of the ‘Evading Standards’ newspaper, they were arrested and prosecuted alongside Boyling (who was using his false name ‘Jim Sutton’, even in court!) and they worked closely alongside Boyling throughout 1998 and 1999 on the planning of J18. It is hard to comprehend why Jordan has not been called to give evidence.
Nevertheless, we will undoubtedly hear more about SDS spying during those later years of RTS when questions are put to Boyling himself.
MARK KENNEDY AND CLIMATE CAMP
Mark Kennedy’s deployment will not be investigated until the Inquiry examines the SDS’s parallel unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit. These hearings, ‘Tranche 4’, have no date set but are not expected until the second half of 2027 at the earliest.
It is unusual for the Inquiry to question witnesses about other tranches. Nonetheless, Poulsen does ask some questions about Geffen’s role in the Climate Camp (or Camp for Climate Action, to give it its proper name), and his interactions with Kennedy there.
Geffen offers a potted history of the progression towards the Climate Camp, setting out how J18 influenced anti-capitalist movements targeting the summit meetings of global capitalist institutions like the International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization and the G8, leading to the camp against the 2005 G8 meeting in Scotland.
Spycop Mark Kennedy with a bicycle D-lock round his neck locking him to the gates of Hartlepool nuclear power station, 29 August 2006
In turn, that experience led to action camps being adopted as as tactic by climate change campaigners, and Camps for Climate Action took place outside Drax Power Station (2006), Heathrow Airport (2007), Kingsnorth Power Station (2008), the financial centre of London (2009) and the Royal Bank Of Scotland’s headquarters (2010).
The early Climate Camps were in fact targeted by officers from both the SDS and the NPOIU, and the Climate Camp legal team is a core participant in the Inquiry, and has submitted a witness statement for Tranche 3.
Geffen is just asked about NPOIU officer Mark Kennedy, then known to everyone at the Camps as ‘Mark Stone’. Kennedy was involved in the Climate Camp’s land group, the core secret subgroup that identified sites for the camps. Geffen says he was unaware of this at the time.
Kennedy was based in Nottingham while Geffen was based in London, so he did not know Kennedy well beyond being a familiar face.
Geffen was part of the Climate Camp legal team at the inaugural Drax camp in North Yorkshire, taking care of anyone arrested at the event. Kennedy was part of a large group of people at an action a long way away, at Hartlepool nuclear power station.
Kennedy had locked himself to the gates and was among those arrested. They were released very late at night, and Geffen organised the transport to get them all back.
Geffen says it is highly likely Kennedy was party to conversations between activists about their arrests:
‘Particularly given that he was arrested himself at this action… I’ve little doubt that he was party to conversations with his co-arrestees about the circumstances of their arrest.
And I would really urge the Inquiry to ask him what information he gleaned from conversations like that because I’ve little doubt that would have taken place.’
When they arrived back at the camp from Hartlepool, Kennedy was driving, and he drove the van straight at a police officer standing in the gateway, forcing him to run out of the way for his own safety.
Geffen says he didn’t confront Kennedy over his behaviour, but it did strike him as odd.
‘It just struck me as: he is showing off…
he was known for regularly wanting to kind of incite more disorder, a more confrontational attitude, and this was just a part of a pattern of Mark Kennedy’s behaviour.’
Like Boyling, Kennedy’s traits were not unique. The Inquiry has heard numerous descriptions of undercover officers being more aggressive than the rest of the group, and being disparaging about those who are less bellicose.
Geffen is also asked about the second Climate Camp, which took place at Heathrow in 2007. BAA, the owners of the airport, took out an injunction, which Geffen describes as:
‘another example of a strategic law suit against public participation…
it included injuncting people and organisations who were involved… which included groups like the National Trust – Patron, the Queen.
It would have ultimately meant that the Queen was not allowed to travel on the Piccadilly line to Heathrow…
It was that absurd in the scope of what was prohibited under the injunction.’
This use of civil law and injunctions to prevent protest is an important theme that emerges in the Inquiry’s Tranche 3 era (1993-2008), and non-state Core Participants have asked the Inquiry to really look at the appropriateness of any role undercover officers might have played in these processes.
Finally, Poulsen asked Geffen about the raid of school in Nottinghamshire where 114 people had assembled for a briefing, prior to a planned action at Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power station.
Spycop Mark Kennedy under arrest in the Ratcliffe power station protest planning venue, Nottingham, 13 April 2009
Geffen was arrested there, alongside spycop Mark Kennedy, and 112 others.
Geffen points out that most of these people were not charged with anything, presumably to hide that fact that one of the arrestees was a police officer – prosecuting him would have presented problems for the police so, despite his key role, Kennedy was not charged.
Twenty people were convicted though, but their convictions were later quashed when it emerged that the prosecution had deliberately withheld recordings made at the briefing by Kennedy. These would have supported their defence that they were genuinely seeking to prevent carbon dioxide emissions by shutting down the power station.
It is noteworthy that the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time was Keir Starmer, who helped ensure that CPS staff and spycops avoided accountability for orchestrating these wrongful convictions – a number of core participants, including Geffen, have called for Starmer to give evidence to the Inquiry.
A significant number of core participants were arrested at Ratcliffe and it is likely to be a significant issue for the Inquiry in when it covers Kennedy’s deployment in Tranche 4.
OTHER QUESTIONS
Geffen is asked a number of other questions, such as whether he knew undercover officer HN78 Trevor Morris. Geffen has no memory of him, however it is evident that Morris reported on him, including recording his bank details.
This prompted Geffen to ask further questions about whether there is other relevant reporting from other spycops such as Morris, HN2 Andy Coles or HN43 Peter Francis that the Inquiry has not shown him.
Poulsen also asks about a spycop’s report stating that Geffen once gave the judge a Nazi salute in court. He explains that this was a reaction to an abuse of process where the magistrate repeatedly extended their bail conditions, and questions why this petty anecdote is being raised at all:
‘I do wonder firstly, why is that question relevant to an inquiry on police spying? Was a rather silly gesture of contempt for the magistrate a justification for undercover policing?
And secondly, who was the police officer who recorded the intelligence about that and… what legally privileged information he might also have been party to on that occasion.’
Asked whether he ever used pseudonyms, Geffen explains that it was common practice for pseudonyms to be used when talking to the media in order to avoid stories becoming personalised or focusing on the individuals rather than the issues.
Finally, Geffen is asked about the impact of being spied on. He explains that it’s unsettling, especially knowing that they were right at the heart of our social networks, and again he wonders why some of the people who were much more closely affected have not been called to give evidence.
CLOSING SPEECH
At the end of his evidence Geffen delivers a very eloquent speech setting out all the questions he feels the Inquiry has not addressed, which we encourage you to watch in full:
He talks about police informers, particularly the convicted paedophile Edward Nicholas Gratwick who infiltrated environmental campaigns in the 1990s and 2000s. Geffen asks how much the police knew about the child abuse offences their employee was engaged in.
He asks the Inquiry to investigate the police tactic of confiscating huge numbers of leaflets, not only in the Evading Standards incident, but also in the run up to Reclaim the Streets’ Mayday 2000 demonstration where disclosure of police fiels reveals a detailed police plot to harass and specifically target RTS’s printed material, even contemplating raiding the print shop where the material was being produced.
Geffen asks why the police created so much disruption and discord, and why the police repeatedly tried to conflate Reclaim the Streets with terrorism, citing an incident where police planted an incendiary devices on an activist which went off in his home, following a protest against the Terrorism Bill.
The media were given detailed, entirely fabricated, stories along these lines. The Sunday Times reported that, ahead of a protest on 30 November 1999:
‘At least 34 containers of CS gas and four stun guns capable of delivering a 50,000 volt electric shock were purchased by Reclaim the Streets.’
RTS took the issue to the Press Complaints Commission who agreed there was no basis for the story but, as RTS wasn’t a formal organisation, it couldn’t be defamed and so rejected the complaint.
Leaflet for Carnival Against Capitalism, organised by Reclaim the Streets on June 18 1999 in the City of London. Spycop Jim Boylinjg was a planner yet his information wasn’t passed to City of London police.
Geffen also sets out the evidence (examined in more detail in the RTS witness statement to the Inquiry) that the police were actually using the intelligence gathered by the SDS to make disorder more likely.
Why was evidence collected by Boyling about the plan for J18 not passed on to City of London police who were responsible for public order policing on the ground?
Geffen asks the Inquiry to call police force commanders of the time, such as Anthony Speed and Perry Nove from the Met and City of London police respectively, to explain what happened.
Geffen concludes by saying that there was simply no justification at all for what the SDS did. They knew the intentions of the RTS to hold family-friendly events, yet they acted as agent provocateurs and painted us as terrorists.
He points out that only a week ago the government had to publish a report from its own national security services about the grave security implications of the current climate and ecological crisis – a report that the government had balked at publishing due to the severity of the facts, and had been forced into releasing a redacted version by concerned citizens using a Freedom of Information process.
Geffen asserts that the real threat to national security was the SDS who went to such lengths for so long to prevent us from getting our message across.
The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, rather awkwardly thanks Roger Geffen for attending, adding:
‘We’re a free country. Um, despite all the difficulties that, uh, I am examining. Thank you.’
This was met with laughter from the public gallery.
Immediately after the hearing concluded, Geffen spoke to Tom Fowler:
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