Activists Jason Kirkpatrick & Kate Wilson, Belfast High Court, 7 February 2017

An undercover officer from a disgraced political policing unit infiltrated Northern Irish civil rights groups, including the Bloody Sunday march organisers.

Under the name ‘Sean Lynch’, the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad undercover officer infiltrated several organisations from 1968-74.

These included the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), Irish Civil Rights Solidarity Campaign and Sinn Féin (London). NICRA was the organiser of the Bloody Sunday march in 1972 when the British army shot dead 14 unarmed demonstrators.

The revelation came last week from the Undercover Policing Inquiry, which is examining the ‘spycops’ units that targeted political campaigns for 50 years from 1968. Officers lived for years at a time as activists; many were arrested and went to court under their fake identities. The majority of profiled officers had sexual relationships with women they spied on.

SPYING CROSSED BORDERS, SO MUST THE INQUIRY

Though spycops were mostly Metropolitan Police officers, some travelled throughout the UK and beyond. The public inquiry attracted criticism in 2015 when then-Home Secretary Theresa May limited it to events in England & Wales.

Former Northern Irish justice ministers Claire Sugden and David Ford have both backed the call to extend it to the whole UK, but to no avail. This week’s shock announcement may change that.

The fact of the SDS’ involvement in NICRA was not revealed to the Saville Inquiry of 2000-2010 that was supposed to fully examine Bloody Sunday. This mirrors the SDS’ spying on the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence but failing to tell the subsequent Macpherson Inquiry.

Officers have already been known to spy beyond the borders of England and Wales, but the fresh information about ‘Sean Lynch’, who is now deceased, shows the Met unit had an involved interest in the politics of Northern Ireland.

The Home Office has rebuffed repeated requests from the Scottish Government for Scotland to be included in the Inquiry. In March, Amnesty called for it to extend to Northern Ireland:

‘Activities of undercover police were not limited to England and Wales, so nor should the inquiry… The need for full transparency and accountability of policing in Northern Ireland must not be compromised.’

At that time only one spycops officer, Mark Jenner, was known to have been involved in Irish politics.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland say local forces were ‘completely blind’ to the SDS officers’ presence, and do not appear to have been given any information for use afterwards. PSNI’s Assistant Chief Constable Mark Hamilton said deploying undercover officers without local forces’ risk assessments would be ‘an act of madness’.

Eamonn McCann was a member of both the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association & Irish Civil Rights Solidarity Campaign, and later went on to have a seat in Northern Ireland’s Legislative Assembly.

Responding to the admission that his groups had been targeted by ‘Sean Lynch,’ McCann told Irish News:

‘It’s now obvious that undercover police officers, intelligence and security officers were infiltrating everything.’

ACTIVIST’S ACTION FOR ANSWERS

Environmental activist Jason Kirkpatrick has been granted core participant status at the Undercover Policing Inquiry due to being spied on by officer Mark Kennedy – in Northern Ireland as well as England.

In 2005 Kennedy took Kirkpatrick and fellow campaigner Kim Bryan on a speaking tour in Northern Ireland, with the officer paying the bills and driving them around. They held public events at Belfast City Church as well as a public ‘environmental pub quiz’ at Menagerie Bar in the Belfast Holy Lands.

Kirkpatrick has launched a judicial review of the decision to exclude Northern Ireland from the Inquiry. He feels his 16 month wait for the case to come to court is extreme, and this week’s announcement adds great weight to his case:

‘With these fresh revelations, it is clear that an arbitrarily limited inquiry that fails to take account of operations by their undercover police in Northern Ireland is nothing short of a whitewash. The wait caused by Home Office delays to my current Northern Irish Judicial Review case is becoming absolutely unbearable.’

Kim Bryan said there can be no excuse for keeping the details hidden any longer:

‘Discovering the spycops infiltrated civil rights campaigns changes everything. Bloody Sunday was a pivotal event and yet the Met hid their involvement from the Inquiry. This might be the tip of the iceberg. The truth is long overdue. The Undercover Policing Inquiry must be extended to Northern Ireland.’

Nobody thought that sort of thing happened in this country. For 40 years, the public were unaware of secret police units dedicated to infiltrating and undermining a swathe of political groups.

The spycops units were more counter-democratic than counter-terrorist. More than 1,000 organisations were targeted: peace campaigns, environmentalists, anti-racists, trade unions – even Labour MPs & the Young Liberals.

When undercover officer Mark Kennedy was unmasked in 2010, the lid was lifted. Spycops had lied to courts and withheld evidence. Kennedy alone was responsible for 49 wrongful convictions. If Kennedy is average, this means over 7,000 miscarriages of justice have been secured by the 144 spycops. Even if we conservatively say it’s only one per officer per year undercover, it’s around 600.

Spycops stole the identities of dead children to create their fake personas. Perhaps most shockingly, they deceived women they spied on into sexual relationships – many integrated into families with plans for a lifetime together. The women’s personal stories are absolutely harrowing.

PUBLIC SHOULD MEAN PUBLIC

These were not rogue officers; these activities were how the units operated. The spycops were trained, monitored and guided to do this, with their managers being drawn from earlier generations of the same unit. This was an institutional failing.

The police have thrown every obstacle into the path of victims seeking answers. It took four years for the deceived women to get an apology, admitting:

‘these relationships were a violation of the women’s human rights, an abuse of police power and caused significant trauma’.

The Met have since specified that they violated the right to a private life, and the right to freedom from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment – a fundamental right that officers are sworn to uphold.

In 2014 it was revealed they had spied on the family of Stephen Lawrence, and a full-scale public inquiry was ordered. Scheduled to finish in 2018, it has yet to formally begin; the ‘ambitious’ finishing date is now set for December 2023. The police have obstructed it just as they have the victims’ legal claims. They even applied to have the entire process held in secret, seemingly unable to understand the term ‘public inquiry’.

The Inquiry’s new Chair, Sir John Mitting, is steering it towards collapse. Before we can begin, we need the list of cover names spycops used so that people can identify infiltrators and report what they did. Victims have repeatedly made this plain.

But Mitting is granting maximum anonymity to many officers, asserting that those in long marriages are presumed incapable of misconduct. Mitting needs to be replaced by, or at least sit alongside, a panel of people with life experience relevant to victims.

THE LUSH POSTER IS SIMPLE

At this crucial moment Lush, with their history of supporting human rights causes, have worked closely with victims on their new campaign. The poster is simple – a face that’s half police officer, half someone else. The message is not hard to grasp, even if you divorce it from the words and other material that surround the image.

Mashing up two ideas to create a third is a basic device that children enjoy with collage. Those who claim not to understand this visual language must be very confused by other adverts, GIFs and emoji.

When the BBC abuse scandal broke, we understood that even though most 1970s presenters didn’t sexually assault anyone, and the BBC does a lot of good work, there was an institutional failing. This doesn’t mean every current BBC employee is an abuser. Yet some police officers are trying hard to pretend that’s what Lush is doing in calling out the spycops.

The response of officers who have intimidated Lush staff into taking down posters is an extension of what we’ve seen from their management over the last eight years.

If they care about the service being brought into disrepute, they should aim their anger at those who grossly abuse police power to violate citizens, lie to courts and undermine democratic groups, rather than those of us who point it out.

A slightly shorter version of this article appeared in The i Paper on 5 June 2018.

Former Special Demonstration Squad officer Peter Francis

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

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

Francis said:

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

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

THE SPY WHO STEPPED OUT OF THE SHADOWS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE SECRET PUBLIC INQUIRY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow Peter Francis on Twitter.

A woman who was deceived into a relationship by an undercover police officer is bringing a legal case to have him charged with Misconduct in Public Office as well as sexual offences, including rape.

‘Monica‘ was deceived into a relationship by undercover officer Jim Boyling when he was infiltrating Reclaim The Streets in the late 1990s.

She told the BBC:

‘At the time I thought he had genuine feelings for me. But now I look at that and I think actually this man was trained. He was a successful police officer. He was duping us all.

‘And I was encouraged to be intimate and sexual with somebody who I would never ever have got involved with if I had known who he was: if I had known his true motives and his true identity.’

In August 2014 the Crown Prosecution Service announced that it would not be charging Boyling or other spycops with misconduct or sexual offences. Monica is now taking the CPS to court to challenge that decision with a judicial review.

REVISITING THE FACTS

Jim Boyling whilst undercover in the 1990s

Monica began a civil claim against the Met in early 2016, in the mould of those already brought by other women who had been similarly deceived who have received an unpredented apology from the police. Whether what the officers did constitutes rape is a separate matter from such civil cases.

The fact that the women consented to sexual relationships at the time they happened is irrelevant – consent can be vitiated by later knowledge. There are several recent instances of women deceiving other women into having sex by pretending to be men, all of which have ended in convictions, including some with lengthy prison sentences.

Those circumstances are uncommon, but Monica’s situation is even more unusual. What these undercover police officers did is so rare – and its exposure rarer still – that we haven’t got a common perception of it, nor an established legal position.

Monica’s lawyer Harriet Wistrich compared it to the women who were convicted for sexual deceit:

‘At the time that relationship was a genuine relationship but subsequently the other person discovered who they really were. Those women were prosecuted by the CPS and imprisoned for those offences. We’re saying, what is the essential difference in a case like this?

Indeed, Wistrich says the spycops are even more culpable for their actions:

‘In this case the officers knew full well what they were doing, they weren’t mentally vulnerable, they were using the resources given to them by the state for an improper purpose, ie for their own gratification, to advance their career, and to make their undercover operation successful.’

In 2014, the CPS cited case law it considered before making its decision. They mentioned that a court decided that a man’s failure to use a condom after he’d said he would could be rape and he should be brought to trial. In another case where a man promised to withdraw before ejaculation, but failed to, it was also decided as being capable of amounting to rape. These cases give us an indication of the threshold of criminal sexual deceit, yet they said the spycops’ deceit wasn’t of the same ilk.

In other words, the CPS expected us to believe that Jim Boyling’s profound, prolonged sexual deception of three women is not worthy of a court case, but that they would prosecute him if he had once failed to use a condom as promised.

It’s plainly nonsense, insulting the intelligence of those who hear it. It betrays the women who were abused and a society that wants to see sexual abuse taken seriously.

BOYLING v POLICE

After his relationship with Monica, Boyling began another relationship with ‘Rosa‘. After his spying ended and he left, a distraught Rosa looked for him for a considerable time.

After she found him he admitted being an undercover police officer:

‘The new tales he told me – of being the partner I knew and slept next to every night, the misunderstanding of his deployment, that he was the only one, that our country doesn’t spy on peace or green movements, of being a turncoat and needing my help to escape the police – they were more believable than the truth.’

‘The unlikely truth was this: my life partner was fabricated by the state. He never existed. I was pregnant within two weeks of his reappearance and bore children by the actor, a random police officer, who had played my partner.’

They rapidly married and had two children. The marriage broke down quickly as he was controlling and physically violent. She fled with the children to a women’s shelter.

When the spycops scandal broke in early 2011 and Boyling’s relationship with Rosa was made public, he was suspended from the police. He faces disciplinary charges for not informing his managers of the extent of the relationship and for revealing secret information to her.

This week, more than seven years into his suspension, his disciplinary hearing is going ahead. He has chosen not to attend, nor contest the charges in any way.

However, he has given an angry interview to Police Community (for the website’s account-holders, but readable here without signing up), saying:

‘The disciplinary charge from the Met specifies that I had a relationship which constituted misconduct because it was ‘without a police purpose’. The position of the Met appears to be that a relationship entered into as an operational tactic is acceptable, but a genuine one resulting in marriage and children constitutes misconduct.’

As Boyling well knows, even with his glossing of the facts, no form of relationship between undercover officers and the women they spy on is acceptable.

Chief Constable Mick Creedon unequivocally explained in 2014:

‘There are and never have been any circumstances where it would be appropriate for such covertly deployed officers to engage in intimate sexual relationships with those they are employed to infiltrate and target.

‘Such an activity can only be seen as an abject failure of the deployment, a gross abuse of their role and their position as a police officer and an individual and organisational failing.’

The Met have since gone further, conceding that these relationships were a violation of human rights, including the right to privacy and the right to freedom from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment.

With such a shocking admission, it is outrageous that nobody is being held responsible. If these men were not police officers they would surely already be in jail.

Monica said:

‘I am appalled by the hypocrisy of police and government, who on one hand wring their hands, apologise, say this was terrible and must never happen again, yet on the other provide no disclosure, protect the perpetrators, and hold no one to account. The whitewashing of these serious human rights abuses must stop.’

Sajid Javid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LAWRENCES STILL SHUT OUT

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

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

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

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

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

NOT JUST THE LAWRENCES

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

Rolan’s father Richard Adams said:

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

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

NOT JUST THAT SPYCOP

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

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

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

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

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

JUDGING THE JUDGE

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

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

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

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

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

Doreen Lawrence backed the walkout:

‘I want to know the names of the police officers who spied on me, my family and our campaign for justice. The chair is not allowing that, in my view, for reasons which are completely unjustifiable and unreasonable. Theresa May, then Home Secretary and now Prime Minister promised me a truly thorough, transparent and accountable inquiry.

‘This has turned into anything but that and before any more public money is spent on an Inquiry which does not achieve this, the chair should resign or continue with a panel which is not naive or old fashioned and which understands my concerns about policing and what I went through. Anything less than this will lead me to consider carefully whether I should continue to participate in this inquiry.’

A LAST REQUEST

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

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

Neville Lawrence explained:

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

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

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

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

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

Special Demonstration Squad officer Jason Bishop

The Undercover Policing Inquiry has just released six more names of officers from Britain’s political secret police units.

These are the fake names used by officers who took on fake identities and lived for years at a time as one of the activists that they spied upon.

Whilst infiltrating a huge range of campaigns, pressure groups and political parties, many of the spycops acted as agents provocateur, stole the identities of dead children, deceived women into long-term intimate relationships.

The newly confirmed officers are all from the Special Demonstration Squad which, founded in 1968, was the longest running of the two main spycops units.

Covering a period of 38 years, in chronological order of deployment, they are:

Barry Morris
Vietnam Solidarity Campaign
1968

Gary Roberts
International Socialists/ Socialist Workers Party, International Marxist Group
1974 – 1978

Tony Williams
Revolutionary Communist Tendency, Direct Action Movement
1978 – 1982

Malcolm Shearing
Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist/Leninist), Revolutionary Communist Party
1981 – 1985

Dave Evans
Socialist Workers Party, London Animal Action, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty
1998 – 2005

Jason Bishop
Reclaim the Streets, Earth First!, Disarm DSEi.
1998 – 2006

These names come a fortnight after another six officers were named by the Inquiry:

David Robertson
Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, Banner Books
1970 – 1973

Bill Biggs (deceased)
Socialist Workers Party
1977 – 1982

Alan ‘Nick’ Nicholson
British National Party
1990 – 1991

David Hagan
Socialist Workers Party, Class War, Movement Against the Monarchy, Movement for Justice
1996 – 2001

Jaqueline Anderson
Reclaim the Streets, Earth First!, WOMBLES
2000 – 2005

Ross ‘RossCo’ MacInnes
United British Alliance
2007

SDS officer David Hagan, aka N81

Not all of this is news. Jason Bishop was exposed in 2013, which had indicated that his flatmate Dave Evans, who travelled with Bishop to the 2005 G8 protests in Scotland, was also an undercover officer. AR Spycatcher, who documents spycops’ infiltration of the animal rights movement, named and profiled Evans in February 2014.

David Hagan is the officer formerly only known by the cipher N81. He is the officer that was described by the 2014 Stephen Lawrence Review as ‘a spy in the Lawrence family camp’. With his insider knowledge of the campaign by Stephen’s loved ones, Hagan was summoned by the Met’s management to brief them at the conclusion of the public inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder in 1998.

WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE US?

We have updated our How Many Spycops Have There Been? page to show the new spycops – we now have the cover names of 45 out of a total of at least 144 undercover officers.

Yesterday the Undercover Research Group published the results of a meticulous sift of the names released so far. They project that, at the current rates, the Inquiry will be granting full anonymity to around 25% of Special Demonstration Squad officers.

The Inquiry’s list of cover names shows the groups they infiltrated. More than fifty are now listed, and all but two are left wing or animal rights. The Inquiry’s gives an average of two groups per officer. Last year they admitted that more than 1,000 groups were spied on, which is at least seven per officer.

More cover names are due to be released, but without a contemporaneous photo or the true list of groups infiltrated, it is very hard to identify many of the people spied upon.

Why aren’t they giving us the real list? Why aren’t the groups being told in their own right? It is another instance of the Inquiry restricting information even as it publishes. It is the secret public inquiry.

Stephen Lawrence

Today, the public inquiry into undercover policing published the cover names of six more officers from Britain’s political secret police units.

One of them is ‘David Hagan’, the officer known as N81, who spied on anti-racist campaign Movement for Justice and who the Ellison Review described as ‘a spy in the Lawrence family camp’.

Movement for Justice have issued this statement:

Today the Undercover Policing Inquiry finally releases the cover name used by the most notorious of the police spies that infiltrated anti-racist organisations during the explosion of anger sparked by the murder of Stephen Lawrence, and at the time of the subsequent Stephen Lawrence Inquiry.

This officer, referred to as N81 and part of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), operated under the name of ‘Dave Hagan.’

Movement for Justice (MFJ) was one of the organisations he was sent to infiltrate. For us, his partial exposure serves as a reminder of the fears of our enemies, and that racism is increasingly the most important tool of the rich and powerful.

The activities of ‘Hagan’ and the SDS can’t be treated and ‘apologised’ for as part of a sad history – any more than the detention, deportation and attempted deportation of black British people of the Windrush generation can be apologised for as ‘mistakes’ (as in Amber Rudd’s forced ‘apology’ yesterday). They both shed a light on the brutal racism that still lies at the heat of the British state, on its ruthless cynicism and duplicity, and its fear of the struggles of the black, Asian, Muslim and immigrant communities for justice and equality.

Those have been the most dynamic and powerful struggles of the exploited and oppressed over the last four decades, and therefore the biggest threat to our oppressors. It has always been and remains quite clear to black & Asian people that racism is a constant part of day-to-day life in Britain: in the workplace, in the targeting of black youth by police, in the violent deaths of black people at the hands of the police, in the constantly expanding, racially-defined anti-immigrant laws etc.

What is being exposed now, before a much wider audience, is the obsession of the state with trying to sabotage every justice campaign and anti-racist organisation that shines a light on police and state racism. 

Stephen Lawrence was murdered by a racist gang in Eltham, south-east London twenty-five years ago this month. His murder was a massive flashpoint for action by the black community and for youth in the fight against racist & fascist attacks AND against police racism and cover-up. It became the most famous case to highlight both those expressions of white racism, and the links between them.

It followed a series of racist murders and attacks of which the most high-profile were the murders of Rolan Adams in Thamesmead and Rohit Dougal in Erith, and the savage attacks on Quddus Ali and Mukhtar Ahmed in Tower Hamlets – areas targeted by the fascist BNP at the time.

A few weeks after Stephen’s murder tens of thousands of youth joined an angry, militant demonstration, called by Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE), that marched on the BNP head-quarters in Welling. In the following autumn a 60,000-strong national demonstration confronted the police in Welling.

From the start, the people involved in the struggle were the targets of police frame-ups (most notoriously of Duwayne Brooks[1], Stephen’s friend and a victim of the same attack) and of infiltration by police spies and agents provocateurs.

When four years later, in 1997, the newly-elected Labour Government announced a public inquiry into the Stephen’s murder, which began its public hearings the following year, the police campaign of obstruction, frame-up and infiltration went into overdrive. It was during that period that ‘Dave Hagan’ became involved in MFJ (disappearing 2 or 3 years later). Though we were not aware of his role then, our evidence before the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry at the time perfectly summed up the police motivation for his infiltration…

“…the police would not publicly acknowledge the racist nature of Stephen Lawrence’s murder because they see racism as a ‘public order’ issue, as shown by their concern about the two massive anti-racist demonstrations in the area in the six months following the murder. That is to say, they see black and Asian people, and their response to racism, as the main public order ‘problem’.”
– From Oral testimony given to the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry in Tower Hamlets by MFJ on 15/10/1998[2]

During the Lawrence Inquiry, on the first of two days when the five racist gang members who killed Stephen Lawrence were forced to give evidence, MFJ called and led a demonstration that reversed an attempt to reduce public access. An overflow room with video link was opened, and by day two more people came to watch every word. When the racists finally left they were subjected to an angry reception by many hundreds of mainly black youth fighting for justice[3]. It was a crucial turning point in that inquiry.

Several years after the Inquiry, Peter Francis publicly exposed the role of the SDS, of which he had been part. Francis had briefly been an undercover officer in the Kingsway College Anti-Fascist Group (a forerunner of the MFJ) at the time of the second Welling demonstration, and was then moved to infiltrate Militant Labour (now the Socialist Party) the organisation that established the YRE. While his speaking out began the systematic exposure of the operations of the SDS that led to the present Undercover Policing Inquiry, it has been the tireless determination of all the individuals and groups spied upon who have relentlessly held the police to account and demanded an end to the cover up.

MFJ bases itself on the real, historic importance of the struggle against racism in Britain, on its inspiring character for new generations of youth, and on the social power of black, Asian, Muslim and immigrant communities. Peter Francis, ‘Dave Hagan,’ and various other provocateurs we have dealt with since then have not been capable of diminishing that fight. 

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/26/duwayne-brooks-lawrences-answers (coverage of the police campaign against Duwayne Brooks)

[2] http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~justice/ (our full submission to the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry)

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zs5oObxg4R0 (footage of the demonstration on the second day when the killers of Stephen Lawrence left the inquiry)

Undercover police officer Andy Coles, 1991

Former undercover police officer Andy Coles has finally broken his silence with a startling lie. Despite three women testifying about his sexual predation, he has flatly denied it.

Having refused to comment since he was exposed as a member of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) in May last year, his hand was forced by when the Undercover Policing Inquiry confirmed his identity last month.

Coles was in the SDS from 1991-95. During that time he was sexually aggressive to a number of women he spied on, and groomed a vulnerable teenager – known as ‘Jessica‘ – into a year-long sexual relationship.

As the Met’s Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt made plain in 2015:

‘Some officers, acting undercover whilst seeking to infiltrate protest groups, entered into long-term intimate sexual relationships with women which were abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong. I acknowledge that these relationships were a violation of the women’s human rights, an abuse of police power and caused significant trauma.’

Jessica has been granted core participant status at the public inquiry into undercover policing. She is also bringing legal action against the Met for Coles’ abuse.

As soon as Coles was exposed in 2017, he resigned as Cambridgeshire’s Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner. However, he has clung on to other positions of public trust, including his Peterborough City Council seat and his governorship at two schools in the city.

He has locked all his social media accounts and refused to comment on the issue at all. Coles only broke his silence last month when the public inquiry confirmed he had been an SDS spycop.

NO ADMISSION

In a statement to the Peterborough Telegraph, Coles conceded only what the inquiry has said, that he was an SDS officer.

‘I am pleased at last to be able to confirm that in my past I was deployed as an undercover police officer to infiltrate some of the most committed and violent animal liberation extremists operating in the UK in the early 1990s.’

He knows there is no excuse for spycops deceiving women into sexual relationships, so he has taken the only option to shore up his social prestige, a path well-trodden by other infamous sexual abusers with a public profile to protect. He claims it didn’t happen.

In a second statement he says that there simply was no relationship with Jessica.

‘The allegation the ALF activist known as “Jessica” makes that I had a sexual relationship with her for over a year while undercover are completely untrue.’

He refuses to admit anything further, hiding behind the Undercover Policing Inquiry.

‘The right place to make further comment in this case is in the Public Inquiry where I welcome the opportunity to give my evidence in due course.’

Coles speaks as if he had been prevented from commenting, and as if the public inquiry is a court that will examine all the evidence of his deployment and come to a judgement. He knows none of that is true.

The public inquiry is not a criminal court, it is perfectly proper to discuss what it will examine. Indeed, several spycops have given extensive interviews to the media, including his former manager Bob Lambert.

SCARE QUOTES

Andy Coles’ SDS Tradecraft Manual author credit

He exaggerates the threat from the animal rights activists he infiltrated (who mostly leafleted and occasionally freed some animals from breeders), and fails to mention the peace campaigns he spied on.

The most well-known photo of him whilst undercover was taken after a day of protest at the US air force base at Fairford, where Coles and comrades had tied peace symbols to the fence.

Just after his deployment ended in 1995, he wrote the SDS’ Tradecraft Manual. He devoted a section of it to infiltrating pacifist organisations.

It was something he was well acquainted with – the author credit on the manual said he infiltrated ‘environmentalist & pacifist’ groups as well as animal rights.

In his rush to justify himself by making the people he spied on appear scary, Coles excludes any mention of this aspect of his deceit.

If the activists he spied on really were as terrifying as he now claims, why didn’t he get them arrested? To this day, Jessica does not have a criminal record.

After his statement last month, Coles was commended on Twitter by the Countryside Alliance’s hunting campaign.

Coles replied:

‘Thank you. I now know from personal experience how it feels to be targeted by the anti-democratic radical fringe I infiltrated. I look forward to giving my evidence at the undercover policing inquiry.’

It’s notable that his statement speaks about the violence of animal rights activists and welcomes the support of hunters, as it’s the opposite of what he told his colleagues at the time.

Extract on hunters from SDS Tradecraft Manual written by Andy Coles, 1995

His Tradecraft Manual doesn’t give details of violence by activists, but he does talk in damning terms about violence done to them by uniformed police and hunters.

‘I know that in the future I will have nothing but contempt for fox hunters and in particular their terriermen.’

In his tweet, Coles said he infiltrated ‘the anti-democratic radical fringe’. It is a peculiar term for him to use. Pressure groups that Coles infiltrated, such as the London Boots Action Group who leafleted outside Boots shops in protest at animal testing, are a key part of democratic culture. Democracy is much more than political parties.

SPOILING THE PARTY

That said, the SDS spied on political parties too. They targeted at least ten Labour MPs including Jeremy Corbyn, Jack Straw, Bernie Grant and Diane Abbott. They began spying on Jenny Jones, Green Party member of the Greater London Assembly, after she was elected and continued for over ten years. These are all democratically elected public figures.

They spied on numerous trade unions, including the Fire Brigades Union and Communication Workers Union. They illegally gave information on citizens to a blacklist of construction workers that unlawfully prevented thousands of people from getting work. Again, there is no clandestine activity nor threat to public safety. It is the deliberate undermining of people exercising their democratic rights. The Special Demonstration Squad was a counter-democratic organisation.

IMPLAUSIBLE DENIAL

After they have been unmasked as members of the disgraced secret police units, many spycops hide from the public. The few who do speak tend to follow the same pattern of admitting a few of the more innocuous details, denying their more serious abuses no matter how many witnesses saw it, and demonising the people they spied on.

Bob Lambert issued an apology to one of the women he deceived into a relationship, Belinda Harvey, but he omitted any mention of his two-year relationship with Jacqui, with whom he had a child and shared a home.

Mark Kennedy sold his story to the Mail on Sunday under the headline ‘I Fear For My Life’. He testified to parliament but insisted he had only had two sexual relationships with women he spied on whilst an undercover officer. The Met have already apologised to and compensated four who had significant relationships with him, and those who knew him can name many more.

Andy Coles has chosen this route, admitting some details but denying the most damaging details even though, as with Kennedy, everyone around him at the time saw him do it.

The Met’s self-investigation into spycops, Operation Herne, was very clear in 2014:

‘there are and never have been any circumstances where it would be appropriate for such covertly deployed officers to engage in intimate sexual relationships with those they are employed to infiltrate and target. Such an activity can only be seen as an abject failure of the deployment, a gross abuse of their role and their position as a police officer and an individual and organisational failing.’

Coles, however, thinks differently. His Tradecraft Manual for undercover police officers gives tips on how to handle a sexual relationship with people being spied on.

‘you should try to have fleeting, disastrous relationships with individuals who are not important to your sources of information.’

This is an explicit instruction to cause anguish and distress. It is premeditated, calculated abuse. Coles is drawing from his own experience here. Whilst a year is scarcely ‘fleeting’, the relationship with Jessica was certainly disastrous.

Specifying ‘individuals who are not important to your sources of information’ is particularly callous. Nobody deserves to be treated this way. Indeed, the Met have conceded it breaches the right to freedom from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment – an absolute right that it cannot ever be justified to breach.

Even if the officer has the warped disdain to believe the targeted activists deserve it, Coles specifically instructs officers to go for more peripheral figures around the group being spied on, as Lambert did with Belinda Harvey.

What Jessica and the others are saying is very damaging to Coles’ social standing – Andy Coles is violator of human rights and sexual abuser of women. English libel laws are notoriously biased towards the subject; they do not have to prove an allegation false, instead their accuser has to prove the claim is true. Why doesn’t Andy Coles take legal action? Instead, it is Jessica suing the Met for Coles’ abuse.

His total denial of his relationship with her comes from an inhuman, degrading and calculating place. Well aware that it cannot be justified, he tries to shield himself from accountability by pretending the public inquiry is some sort of court case, and that it would prejudice a trial to speak about ongoing criminal proceedings. He knows this is nonsense.

He must surely be aware that, in doing this, he is compounding the damage he has done to Jessica and other women. This is not something that can be dismissed as something from long ago, this is the measure of the man’s character today.

Here is Jessica talking about Andy Coles’ abuse. Decide for yourself who you think is the liar.

See the Sack Andy Coles campaign site (and follow them on Facebook and Twitter) for more.

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

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

MITTING THE POINT

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

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

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

It was ignored.

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

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

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

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

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

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

PROTECTING THE GUILTY

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

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

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

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

‘Andrea‘ explained:

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

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

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

PUBLIC HEARINGS TURNING THE PUBLIC AWAY

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

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

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

PUBLICATION UNSEEN

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

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

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

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

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

NAMING THE OFFICERS, A BIT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NO RESPONSE

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

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

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

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

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

‘Tweets will not be responded to.’

END THE CULTURE OF SECRECY

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

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

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

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

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

Poll Tax Riot pamphlet cover

Twenty eight years ago today, 31 March 1990, Trafalgar Square hosted a major demonstration against the poll tax that became a riot.

The Conservative regime’s plan to change local government funding property rates based on the value of the house to a charge per person had caused uproar. Eventually, it would be overturned, and take Thatcher’s premiership with it.

Among the crowd on the March 1990 demonstration was John Barker, aka Special Demonstration Squad officer John Dines.

Maintaining character, Dines later designed, printed and sold a benefit poster for those arrested on the day. He also wrote an account for the subsequent Poll Tax Riot pamphlet.

Many officers from Britain’s political secret police were agents provocateur both in deed and in the written word. Just last week Roger Pearce was identified as the author of what the Undercover Policing Inquiry called ‘virulently anti-police’ articles for Freedom Newspaper in the early 1980s. Twenty years later, Mark Kennedy was a frequent contributor of such invective to Indymedia under the name Lumsk.

In between, in 1990 John Dines penned this:

MR. SWEENEY AND ME

As I lay face down in a gutter in Whitehall, with a policeman’s boot in the back of my neck and his two mates wrenching my arms from my shoulders, their macho sergeant bawling instructions on how best to incapacitate me, I briefly pondered my ‘wrongdoing’ in trying to prevent someone I‘d never met before from being arrested for shouting his opposition to the Poll Tax. The kick in the forehead diverted my thoughts and l was bundled into one police van, manacled so tightly my hands went blue, then dragged across the road, booted and thumped as l was pushed into a second van.

We sped off horns, sirens blaring madly, through red traffic lights, along the wrong side of the road and up pavements. l was sure that the guy I had tried to help who was being trampled upon by his captors must be the world’s most wanted fugitive. None of it, this was just members of the world’s finest police force maintaining the Queens’ Peace.

SDS officer John Dines whilst undercover as John Barker

l was one of the thousands and thousands of people who had left Kennington Park about an hour earlier. I was with a group of friends, all much like me, not really poor but no spare cash at the end (or beginning) of the week.

Some of us were working, some of us on the dole, some on housing benefit, some squatting because they couldn’t afford to pay for a reasonable home, others because there aren’t any homes available, some folks had worked all their lives to provide for their families, some had never been able to find work.

We all had something in common – we were all working class, and in today’s wonderful British society we had become part of the growing, but powerful underclass. The Poll Tax was another financial burden to us. like all the other benefit and welfare cuts we’ve experienced, particularly in recent years. We’ve got no money left to pay now though, but “ode seems to listen or care. Well, we came to bloody shout it loudly enough so that we couldn’t be ignored. and didn’t we shout?

I was surprised by the huge, vast crowds who had turned up to demonstrate their opposition to the poll tax. Sure, there were many politicos espousing the virtues of other terms of extremist control. But overwhelmingly those present were ordinary families, pensioners, community groups, disabled folk, there were musicians, there was dancing, there were balloons, there was anger, annoyance and frustration – but our march was peaceful. There were ‘suits’ in the crowd, there were cops in the air, they were high on buildings with their telescopic sights and their focused binoculars, their videos were running and soon so were they, for this was going to be our day.

Such was the enormity of the crowd that the march eventually bottlenecked from Trafalgar Square to Lambeth Bridge. And then the realisation – we were stopped opposite Downing Street, the home of our democratic leader, “dear Maggie”.

Nevertheless we stood in reverence, the occasional ribald comment of course, but there were no bricks, there was no barrage, there was no onslaught on the thin blue line guarding the entrance to No. 10. After all, we had no weapons, no truncheons, we had no specially designed riot overalls, no helmets and visors, no jackboots, no leaders directing operations, we didn’t come charging on horseback, our dogs were strictly anti-Poll Tax mongrels.

I remember children spilling onto a nearby glass verge, somebody uncoupling fencing to prevent us blindly falling over it, people sitting in the roadway, nowhere to move, penned in by barriers manned by cops. In front of us thousands of marchers, behind us many thousands more.

Obviously the Metropolitan Police Force’s expertly trained riot cops couldn’t handle such a confrontation. Passivity could not be tolerated. A foray by six brave Constables led by an Inspector was easily repelled. We weren’t going to be arrested for sitting on the bloody ground. Not to be defeated (not yet anyway), a charge by about 20 cops, truncheons out, fists, boots flying into kids, women, the old, whoever got in their way – l was soon to meet the gutter.

There were five of us in a cell made for one; 63 on a corridor of cells cosily constructed for 10 people. Food, no problem there. We each got a packet of custard cream biscuits after seven hours – shame I don’t eat them! Drinks, yep as much water as your bladder could hold, because the toilet didn’t flush. Air, sure, we swapped the contents of each other’s lungs for about 14 hours. Solicitor. I’m definitely allowed one of them, just a shame he wasn’t bloody interested. He reassured me that I could be charged with causing an affray even if I was acting on my own. There was nothing he could do for me however and it wasn‘t worth his while coming to the station (his words). He must have known I’d be on legal aid.

What about speaking to the lay visitors? Well, why not. Why indeed, these middle aged arseholes clad in Harrods’ latest fashions, blue rinses, adorned with jewellery, 1 lb. of plums in their gobs, just out of the ‘Upstairs…’ part of Eaton Square, they’ll understand how I feel, they’re in touch with local issues. The scumbags could hardly bring themselves to inhale the putrefied air in the cell corridor. Someone further along just beat me in telling them to go back home, only I think she said “why don’t you fuck off?”

‘Disarm Authority Arm Your Desires’ – Poll Tax Riot poster designed & distributed by undercover police officer John Dines to raise funds for those arrested in the riot on 31 March 1990

Cellmates: a traveller got himself arrested for shouting and using a profane four lettered word. A shoe salesman who protested to a senior police officer about the manner in which a person was arrested quickly found himself on the floor of a police van with a black eye. Still, the salesman was black, so guess he must have deserved it! An engineer was amongst a group of peaceful protesters who were charged at by cops on horses, he was one of those who fell over so he must have been guilty of something.

And, finally, through the cell door walked this man mountain. 18 stone, 6’4”, beer belly, flash leather jacket, mohair trousers, crocodile skin shoes, Armani shirt – must be a fraudster – not at all. “I was on my way back home”, his story goes, “when I walked into this riot. Never have liked cops, so thought I’d have a bit of action”. This colossus found a half brick and with deadly aim caught a cop on the back of the head; out like a light he said. He was then jumped on by two riot clad officers, but our hero threw them off and eventually it took six of the bastards and burst eardrums to restrain him.

Tarzan could well understand their anger however, for he had once been a paratrooper and had served the good old British Army on the streets of Belfast, eh! A philosophical individual, but he was upset on two counts: firstly, his mum would go apeshit when she found out, secondly, having been arrested for “incitement to riot”, he was bound to lose a new job he was due to start the following month – he was to become a Prison Officer! Amongst other things, this character merited some in depth discussion, but I was halted from discovering the reasons for his actions, bearing in mind his former and intended employment, when he simply said “I fucking hate cops”.

Some 14 hours after being arrested, I was taken to the custody centre where some young Sweeney type ’intellectual’ asked me if I was a member of Militant, what an insult, and then suggested I must be “some sort of socialist”, before letting me go, warning me not to fail to turn up at court to answer my charge.

Well, l did fail to turn up, so bollocks Mr. Sweeney. As I walked home I saw iron barricades still strewn along the length of Whitehall, a crushed cop’s cap lay amongst the rubbish on the pavement, hundreds of ’No Poll Tax’ placards were discarded everywhere, some decorating the Cenotaph, that meaningless monolith in the centre of Whitehall.

The scale of the events I had missed were becoming excitingly apparent. The stench of burning wafted down Whitehall and as I reached Trafalgar Square I saw the ashen remains of buildings in Northumberland Avenue, the smell of wasted Portakabins was now overpowering, smoke still billowing around Trafalgar Square, fire fighters still dousing neighbouring premises. The shattered windows of the South African Embassy further lifted my spirits and I couldn’t resist an ear to ear grin as a mob of miserable cops walked towards me, peering out from under the brims of their helmets, hunched shoulders, literally ’plodding’ along. Though l had missed it, I knew the bastards had taken a real good hiding.

Whilst undercover, John Dines deceived activist Helen Steel into an intimate relationship. They moved in together, living in a house he had found for them. It backed on to the home of Winston Silcott’s family, who were campaigning for Winston’s conviction to be overturned after he and others were framed by the police for the death of PC Keith Blakelock in 1985.

Soon after after Silcott had his conviction quashed in November 1991, Dines’ undercover deployment ended and he disappeared from his activist life.

His abuse of Steel was one of the cases in the Metropolitan Police’s landmark apology of 2015. He now lives in Australia, training police in infiltration and surveillance of political activists.

Here’s Helen Steel talking about her relationship with Dines in 2014: