Tranche 1, Phase 1, Day 9

12 November 2020

Evidence from:

Officer HN 329 aka ‘John Graham’
Ernest Tate, anti-war & Marxist activist (written statement read in full by Nick Stanage)
Officer HN 218 aka Barry Moss (summary of evidence)
Officer HN 334 aka ‘Margaret White’ (summary of evidence)

The morning was taken up by that first police witness, officer HN 329 aka ‘John Graham’. After many years of waiting, we finally heard a former undercover officer speak from the witness box. Unfortunately, most people could not see or hear as only a near-contemporaneous transcript was broadcast.

‘YOU WILL BE SILENCED’

With the very first police witness giving evidence at the Undercover Policing Inquiry, barrister for the victims of spycops Rajiv Menon QC wanted to ask a series of questions. But the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, cut him off lest it be stressful for the spycop. When Menon tried to debate the matter, Mitting told him to obey or ‘you will be silenced’.

This outburst was just an unruly version of what we’ve seen from Mitting all along – the prioritisation of the comfort of spycops over the desire of victims and the public to know the truth. He ignores the fact that this is an inquiry into police wrongdoing and is clearly affronted at the impudence of those who would challenge a police officer.

Most of the afternoon was devoted to lifelong anti-war and left-wing activist Ernest Tate, on of the organisers of the 1968 demonstrations against the Vietnam War that sparked the founding of the Special Demonstration Squad and, as such, events to which the Inquiry is giving a lot of attention.

At the end of the day, there were summaries of the statements from two former spycops who aren’t giving evidence in person, then brief details about the careers of six deceased officers.

Officer HN 329, aka ‘John Graham’

[Note, throughout this we refer to the officer by his cover name, John Graham].

Graham principally spied upon the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) of whom protest organiser Tariq Ali’s testimony we heard yesterday.

The questions were put by David Barr QC, Counsel To the Inquiry. He began by asking him some questions about joining the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS). Specifically, he was asked whether he volunteered or if he volunteered by someone else. He replied that he thought he was told to join the new unit in 1968.

He had joined Special Branch early on, initially working for the ‘naturalisation inquiries’ section, which gave him insight to the sort of reporting Special Branch generally wanted. Senior officers would check over work to ensure nothing ‘irrelevant’ was included.

Prior to joining the SDS, he also worked in ‘C’ Squad in Special Branch – responsible for monitoring communists and this involved ‘normal’ plain-clothes Special Branch work with no undercover name or persona used.

UNDERSTANDING SPECIAL BRANCH 

There were a number of questions that Graham could either not help with or gave unhelpfully vague answers. These included what Special Branch’s definition of extremism was.

He was a little more helpful on Special Branch’s duty regarding the ‘Security of the State’ – or at least his earlier written statement was. There he suggested that by collecting information covertly, Special Branch would be able to find out about any violent intent on part of protesters.

Expanding on this line, Barr again referred to the officer’s written statement, eliciting about the Special Branch’s role vis-a-vis policing political groups:

‘I understood the role of Special Branch to be carrying out enquiries concerning the security of the State, in other words gathering intelligence on activities that sought to undermine the status quo, the government of the day and the political establishment’.

The conflation of national security with the convenience and policy of the government has always been a central factor in what spycops do.

TRAINING & ACTIVITIES

On training, he explained that his time in Special Branch had already given him a good idea of what was expected, and what kind of information they would have been interested in collecting. For instance, they would have been interested in personal details, any distinguishing features. It also included info about the dynamics of the group he was reporting on and any analysis that he thought useful. He left any ‘filtering’ of the information to someone else.

Graham explained that there wasn’t much of a difference between normal Special Branch duties and those within the SDS in terms of attending political meetings. As part of the ‘general inquiries’ section of Special Branch, he would attend in plain clothes.

Once he joined the SDS, he would just wear ‘nondescript clothing’. He said that sometimes people who were dressed smartly might be regarded with suspicion (and asked to leave a meeting) but ‘if you were scruffy.. nobody bothered you’.

A REVOLUTIONARY PERSUASION

Graham infiltrated various VSC branches in North West London, attending meetings in Camden, Hampstead, Kilburn, and Willesden. He added that the Camden group was ‘considered prominent as it contained Geoff Richman’. (Geoff and Marie Richman were prominent in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign itself, and Geoff, a medical doctor, was a member of the Socialist Medical Association.)

Graham describes the Richmans as ‘nice people’. A question might have been put here whether this made the officer feel uncomfortable in spying on them. However, there was no hint of regret or remorse at any point in Graham’s oral hearing.

Barr asked Graham about the revolutionary sentiment he found in Camden that was apparently so in need of infiltration and monitoring:

Barr: You describe the Camden VSC in terms which suggest they were revolutionary but they were not going to use violence to try and achieve their ends. Could you describe in what sense you understood them to be revolutionary?

Graham: Well, they – they wanted to change the government.

Barr: And if they were not going to use violence, how were they going to seek a change of government?

Graham: To try and persuade people to their point of view.

Graham said that the Camden VSC group once did a performance in a market, but apart from that they only really went on the big demonstrations. None of the groups he spied on tried to do anything secret, he said.

He confirmed that SDS boss Chief Inspector Conrad Dixon sometimes attended these VSC meetings too. Most of the time Graham was alone at these meetings. However, if more than one SDS officer was in the same meeting, they would play it by ear, and maybe not even acknowledge each other saying.

A PUBLISHED AUTHOR

Next a publication called ‘Red Camden’ (UCPI0000007701) was referred to. This was the journal of the Camden VSC. In one 1969 issue was an article which was attributed to the name ‘John Grahame’, which spoke of him attending a Vietnam Solidarity Campaign Working Committee meeting, where he was expecting political infighting.

Graham had no recollection of writing it, but said it was possible that it had been written by Dixon or another SDS colleague, and his name added to it. A clearer copy can be found on the Undercover Research Group’s profile of John Graham.

Another document referred to was a report from a VSC meeting at Conway Hall on 17th September 1968. Barr noted that this was attended by at least seven members of the SDS. As well as John Graham, this list included squad head Chef Inspector Conrad Dixon, DI Saunders, DS Wilson, DS Fisher, DS Creamer and DC Moss.

The obvious question of why so many police attended the same meeting, to which Graham could only reply:

‘It may have been a question of, that there was nothing else on, so people felt that they ought to be doing something.’

Even among the extreme stories of the spycops, this was an extraordinary moment.

Last week police lawyers emphasised that the SDS was established because 1968 was a volatile time with feral subversives everywhere. Today we’re told seven of them went to the same anti-war meeting because of a lack of work. They’d rather spy on the undeserving than not spy at all.

Graham also explained that this might have made it easier for the undercovers’ to remember stuff (as they couldn’t make any notes during the meeting) and to identify attendees (who were numerous). This explanation doesn’t ring true, as if it were it would be common practice.

Graham was asked if he and fellow SDS officers would take part in ballots at meetings, and thereby influence the results? Not understanding the significance of this obvious interference with the political process, Graham just said he voted on motions without giving it much thought:

‘it’s just a question of sticking your hand up with the majority once you knew which way the vote was going to go anyway.’

The next meeting mentioned involved the Anti-Imperialist Solidarity Movement. In this context, Graham was asked why he felt the need to record the ethnic origin of attendees, or use the word ‘coloured’ to do so? Only answering the second part of the question, He said that it was common to do so at the time.

ACTIVE PARTICIPATION

Barr then moved on to the officer’s attendance at a much smaller meeting, of the VSC ‘working committee’ – by this time he had been embedded in the group for many months, and so was able to access these less public discussions, that took place in private homes.

In his first written statement, Graham states that none of these meetings were ‘closed’ – you just had to have had attended a previous open meeting to know about it. He claimed not to recall much about his participation in these meetings – said that he probably just went along with the majority opinion as to the most ‘sensible and safest tactic’ and that no guidance was given about meetings in private homes, or in travelling outside of the Met’s jurisdiction.

MOBILE ESPIONAGE

On this, he said he said he attended an event in Sheffield in May 1969. When asked if it was common for SDS officers to travel to other areas, he said he had ‘no idea’ as ‘everyone was working separately in their groups.’ This illustrates the lack of day-to-day oversight of these early deployments.

A protest of particular note in the evidence was an early 1969, Australians and New Zealanders Against the War in Vietnam organised a meeting at Australia House then marched along the Strand in London to the Savoy Hotel, where the Australian prime minister was staying.

Graham remembered that event as he was punched in the ribs by a security guard while being ejected. He expanded on this, saying the rest of the group had got up to shout in defence of one guy who was being ejected from the building, so Graham felt he had to partake to maintain his cover saying: ‘I thought I better get to my feet and I remember saying ‘let him speak’. He was grabbed and dragged out and recalls he pretended to resist.

DINNER DATES & GHOST WRITERS

The next questions were about Graham inviting a woman activist out to dinner, and going through on it even though by this time he was aware he was being withdrawn as an undercover officer. He said he couldn’t remember why he had done this, or really anything about it at all, though his statement noted he hadn’t wanted to let her down. He denied there was any sexual motivation for the date. This still leaves the puzzle of why he invited her out in the first place, or why he did not cancel it.

When asked about the possibility of signing his name to any reports which he hadn’t written, which had been written by another undercover, Graham said in general ‘I wouldn’t have signed anything I didn’t know to be true.’

More then was asked about the ‘ethos’ of the SDS – ‘were you open with each other or secretive with one another’, to which he replied that ‘In the main, I suppose we were open’. On the stresses and strain of being undercover, Graham was blasé, neither finding his deployment stressful or felt that he needed any special support.

SIMPLY THE BEST

Finally, when asked for his view of those early days of the SDS, Graham said:

‘The original group, from Conrad Dixon down, were the finest representatives of Special Branch. And they were excellent officers who did exactly the proper job.’

This was the end of David Barr’s questions, which were thought unsatisfactory by many watching as issues raised were not followed up in the search for more firm answers.

‘YOU WILL BE SILENCED’

Tariq Ali’s barrister, Rajiv Menon QC, then rose, requesting permission to ask supplementary questions. He wanted to ask Graham about:

1) the political motivations of the VSC in those early days;
2) the selection and targeting of the VSC, and some more detail about what the officer was told to do;
3) the general methodology of the SDS, and what happened at these near-daily or daily meetings at the unit’s ‘safe house’ (the rented flat used by the SDS away from New Scotland Yard to spend their daytime and write up reports, as the political meetings they spied on tended to take place in the evenings)
4) what information the officer had collected that made a difference, particularly resulting in a lower level of public disorder in the October 1968 Vietnam demonstration than there had been in March;
5) the use of ‘Box 500/MI5’ (how much intelligence was passed to the security services)
6) and finally, some questions in relation to one of the documents already exhibited – the meeting attended by 7 SDS officers.

Menon added that the early finishing of Barr’s questions meant there was sufficient time before the next witness. What happened next was truly shocking. Mitting refused Menon’s request, saying it would repeat questions that Barr blatantly had not asked, and that it may be uncomfortable for Graham. Mitting’s words were:

Mitting: ‘That may be so, but I have to keep order in the proceedings and to ensure not merely that this witness is not troubled by questions that have already adequately been covered by Mr Barr and by his statement and by the documents, but also that this does not set a precedent for future such requests.

‘Of the seven topics that you have given to me, one and one only may give rise to a question that can rightly be posed to this witness, and that is the last one: the meeting where the vote was taken about the route that was to be adopted on 27 October. You may ask about that, but not about other topics.’

Some what perplexed, Menon began to ask for clarification:

Menon: ‘But, sir, I’ve highlighted -‘

Instead of giving him a civil reply that the point deserved, a visibly agitated Mitting interrupted:

Mitting: ‘You may ask about that but not other topics. That is my ruling.’

Menon accepted and sought to clarify, saying:

Menon: Very well, sir. Can I make it clear that I cannot understand –

At which point Mitting cut straight across him with a threat of censorship:

Mitting: No, you may not. I’m sorry. You may ask your questions, or you will be silenced.

This outburst from Mitting was met with shock, but for many core participants is symptomatic of the general hostility and downright contempt with which the Chair has treated the non-state participants in both his decision-making and his attitude throughout the Inquiry. Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance have since issued a media release questioning Mitting’s behaviour.

A PERMITTED QUESTION

The only question that Mitting was prepared to allow was the one about the VSC meeting when a vote was taken about the route of the 27 October Grosvenor Square demonstration. Menon asked the officer about the voting that took place at this meeting. His explanation (earlier on) was that if he hadn’t voted, he would have stood out like a sore thumb. So he must have put his hand up but has no recollection of it.

When asked whether this vote discussed later on, back at the flat, Graham claimed not to remember how he’d voted, or any discussions with other undercovers afterwards about how they had voted. He also said that they would have all gone off on their separate ways, and that other SDS officers who were normally back office staff wouldn’t usually have come to the flat anyway.

Asked about whether the information the police spies gathered would have made it into other officers’ reports, he answered ‘it would have assisted at some stage with identifying people’.

After the stormy and frustrating end to the questioning of the first police witness, the Inquiry broke for lunch.

The accompanying first written witness statement of officer EN329 and the second written witness statement of officer EN329

Ernest Tate
Political activist
(written statement read in full by Nick Stanage)

Ernest Tate was unable to give evidence in person, his statement was read for him by Nick Stanage QC.

Tate was born in Belfast in 1934. He emigrated to Canada at the age of 21 and worked in mechanical engineering.

Politically active all his life, Tate has written a memoir of his activism in the 1950s and 1960s, relating to his time in the International Group (a section of the Fourth International, as founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938) which, in Britain, became in the International Marxist Group (IMG).

Tate was in Britain for almost five years between 1965 and 1969, and in that time was heavily involved in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC), which was set up in 1966.

Returning to Canada in 1969, he became involved in the trade unions and for many years was Chief Steward and Vice President of a major local of the Canadian Union of Public Employees. He is now retired, and living in Toronto.

ERNEST TATE, FILE 402/66/451

The Undercover Policing Inquiry had sent Tate a ‘Witness Pack’ of 23 Special Branch intelligence reports dated between 8 February1965 and 3 March 1969 in which his name is mentioned. The Inquiry asked him to answer questions about his activity in general and the documents in particular.

The reports were based on on activity of officers of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch’s undercover political unit, founded in 1968 as the ‘Special Operations Squad’ (SOS), and re-named the ‘Special Demonstration Squad’ (SDS) around 1972-3.

Tate’s Special Branch ‘Registry File’ has the reference number 402/66/451, which indicates it was opened in 1966. Such reports were routinely copied to MI5. Like many others targeted by spycops, Tate’s full file remains ‘Top Secret’. The fact that he left the UK over 50 years ago and the groups he was in no longer exists make no difference to the secrecy.

The few reports given to Tate are only a fraction of the secret surveillance files held on him, the International Marxist Group [RF 400/58/152] of which he was a full time organiser, and the
Vietnam Solidarity Campaign [RF 346/65/15], in which he was was also heavily involved.

FEW FACTS, FEWER ANSWERS

The Inquiry has made it harder for Tate to contribute, because it has chosen not to let him see any of the Witness Statements made by any of the SOS officers who spied on him, nor any statements from managers or an appropriate officer who could provide evidence on behalf of a deceased officer.

Additionally, he hasn’t been shown any photographs of officers in their undercover guise, save for one of Chief Inspector Conrad Dixon.

The undercover officers who have been identified as having spied on him are:
• TN0039 Chief Inspector Conrad Dixon
• HN299/342 ‘David Hughes‘ (despite the Inquiry website saying he was only deployed from 1971, more than a year after Tate had left the country)
• HN321 ‘William Paul “Bill” Lewis‘
• HN329 ‘John Graham‘
• HN326 ‘Douglas Edwards‘
• HN332 whose details do not yet appear on the Inquiry website

The path to clarity is further obstructed by the failure of the Inquiry to ask the Metropolitan Police to provide Position Statements, which would set out exactly why the SOS was set up, what its operational parameters were, and why it was necessary to begin more intrusive surveillance, including forming intimate relationships with targets.

Tate presumes the State will argue that this clear breach of the basic human right to privacy was justified due to a threat of serious violence from those groups or individuals spied on. In which case, the Met should have to explain why the SOS was allowed to continue to operate after the 27 October 1968 demonstration against the Vietnam War had passed off largely peacefully.

Tate completely refuted the notion that he, the VSC, or the IMG, threatened violence, especially serious violence. Equally, he rejected any suggestion that any of them deserved to be targeted because infiltration would allow the police to monitor others.

He asserted that there is no justification for the gross intrusion by the police into people’s private lives on the basis that a person’s, or group’s politics is frowned upon by the State, unless there is a real, not fanciful, threat of serious violence. The UK had been a signatory to the European Convention of Human Rights for many years by the time the spycop unit was formed, and the Article 8 of the respect for privacy, private and family life, should be applied to any judgment about the legitimacy of its actions.

SECRECY WITHOUT END

Special Branch records from 1887 onward are subject to almost complete secrecy regardless of age. A few documents were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by journalist Solomon Hughes 10 years ago in an attempt to establish what happened in 1968, and these were put onto the Special Branch Files Project website.

The advent of the Inquiry has seen the release of some spycops’ documents, but it’s a sliver of what was created. It means it’s almost impossible for Tate and other core participants at the Inquiry to counter any narrative given by the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police

Tate then turned to the specific questions the Inquiry had asked him, saying:

‘It is clear in my mind that these questions focus very narrowly on the issue of violence, hence it appears to me that this will be the justification used by those in charge of SDS throughout the period…

‘The other major interested parties, the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office who oversaw the wrongdoing of SOS officers, have full access to every file they want’

He pointed that, in contrast to the clandestine and secretive nature of the British State, he has nothing to hide. The Inquiry, the Police and members of the public can read what he has written about his activities in his two-volume memoir, Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 60s, Ernest Tate, A Memoir’ (Volume 1 Canada 1955-65, and Volume 2, Britain 1965-1970).

Tate was asked to clarify his role in the VSC. He was one of its founders in June 1966. He was a member of its National Council and its executive committee, from that date on until April 1969. The executive committee, a sub-committee of the National Council, provided leadership to the VSC between National Council meetings and was responsible for its national functioning on a day-to-day basis. Beyond that, Tate publicly wrote and spoke for the VSC.

A million people perished in the Vietnam War, including 50,000 US soldiers, most of whom were teenagers. Tate explained that the VSC aimed to build a solidarity campaign with the Vietnamese against the American aggression, calling for its immediate end and the withdrawal of all of American forces, and the end of British collusion with the Americans. It also called for support for the Vietnamese National Liberation Front.

It sought to achieve this through building broad united-front coalitions of like-minded organisations and individuals to create mass mobilisations on the streets against the war.

NOTHING TO HIDE

There was no vetting of members, they merely had to agree with the broad aims, provide funds and attend meetings. The political debates were quite open, and as a result, at the founding conference in 1966, a large number of Maoist delegates withdrew to a separate location and formed the rival Britain-Vietnam Solidarity Front (BVSF). The anarchists also held separate conferences, as they wanted to be clear they were ‘neither Washington nor Hanoi’.

There was no secrecy of any kind. All VSC business and policy meetings were open to all members, though not to the general public. They knew the police were interested in what they were doing, but because none of it was illegal they didn’t worry about infiltration. They specifically warned members against pointing fingers of suspicion at anyone, knowing how that had been used in other groups in the past to divide and destroy the movement.

The Inquiry asked if there was violence planned for, or witnessed at, the March 1968 demonstration.

Tate unequivocally affirmed that there was none planned. He described how the march, tens of thousands strong, tried to enter Grosvenor Square, they were met by hundreds, if not thousands, of uniformed police, many on horseback, who in aggressively confronted them in order to prevent anyone getting near the American Embassy. Violence erupted with many police and demonstrators injured and/or arrested, the blame for which Tate lays firmly with the police.

INTERNATIONAL MARXIST GROUP

Tate also described the IMG and his role there. He helped to organize the group and was a member of its National and Political Committees. His primary loyalty was to the IMG, rather than the VSC. The IMG was primarily responsible for the creation of the VSC, its members functioned as an open caucus to prepare for its various conference and activities.

He confirmed that the IMG was a revolutionary group, and gave a series of refreshingly direct and concise answers.

Inquiry: Did the IMG believe that revolution would, or might, require the use
of force?

Tate: Yes.

Inquiry: Did the IMG believe that force should be used to bring about revolution in 1968-1969?

Tate: No.

Inquiry: Did the IMG believe that public disorder would advance its cause?

Tate: No.

Inquiry: Did the IMG believe that breaking any laws was justified or necessary to advance its cause? If so, which laws and for what purposes?

Tate: The IMG did not believe in breaking the law, but if a particular law was oppressive or dangerous to our democratic rights, and there was mass opposition in society to it, then the IMG might have explored ways to challenge that law.

Tate declared the infiltration of the VSC and the IMG and scandalous:

‘It reveals how far democratic tights in Britain have been abused over the past fifty years. It has become the norm, it seems to me, for the State to put the boot to anyone it doesn’t like. If you’re a socialist or Marxist or someone who has different ideas about how the economy and society should be organised, should we expect dirty tricks from those who are supposed to protect us?’

A HANDFUL OF FILES

The Inquiry then ran through the documents it had revealed to Tate, and asked for his opinion on their accuracy. He criticised the selection of documents as a ‘bizarrely selected and highly partisan package of material’ that had the huge absence of the great bulk of contemporaneous relevant documents that must have been created. What have the Met and the Home Office got to hide?

‘if this is really meant to be a Public Inquiry then the public – journalists and academics, historians and those of us who were involved at the time – should be allowed to see the material.’

Tate went through the documents methodically, giving a facinating insight into how much the spycops targeted one person. The documents included:

MPS-0739885: This was a report of a meeting on 8 February 1968.

According to Special Branch officer “David Hughes’ (HN299/342), it was an open public meeting attended by about 70 people at Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel to show the film ‘American War Crimes in Vietnam’. One of the future protests mentioned was against Dow Chemical in Wigmore Street, London, the manufacturers of the notorious substance napalm which burnt people alive and was being extensively used by American forces in Vietnam.

What is interesting is that this routine report is prior to the formation of the covert SOS/SDS unit. This shows that Special Branch were easily able to access the meetings and report on everyone without the need for deeper-cover infiltrators.

Tate highlighted the lack of any witness statement from ‘David Hughes’ in his Witness Pack, in which ‘Hughes’ might have explained the difference between his routine Special Branch duties in monitoring these meetings and his later doing the same thing within SOS/SDS.

No photograph of this officer, who was then presumably in his twenties, has been supplied to assist Tate in trying to recall him and his activities. But ‘Hughes’ has been granted anonymity at the Inquiry.

In a decision typical of the orders that are allowing the overwhelming majority of spycops to get away unnamed, the Inquiry ruled that:

‘publication of his real name would risk unwelcome media attention and the attention of those who maybe disposed towards him within his small community… The interference with his right to respect for his private life which it would risk would not be justified’.

Tate wryly replied:

‘I am pleased to see that the Inquiry is underlining the importance of the right to respect for private and family life. and I trust this same important right will be afforded to the people who were spied on when and if any judgments are reached concerning the gross interference with this right as practiced by the Metropolitan Police Special Branch and others.’

MPS-0739886: Report of a private meeting of 35 people on 15 February 1968, though ‘David Hughes’ was there again to report on it which, said Tate, indicates that it would have been an open meeting for anyone who wanted to be involved in VSC activities.

The report says that towards the end of the meeting some people present said they intended breaking windows at the US embassy and were prepared for a ‘punch up’ with the police; others said they wanted a sit-down protest.

Tate responded:

‘To be clear, VSC policy was always non-violent, we were only too aware that the violence was a particularly strong attribute of the State. The officer’s assessment that a ‘fair amount of violence’ could be expected at the forthcoming solidarity demonstration in March 1968 was not an assessment I would have shared at the time.’

MPS-0730911: This report of the 17 March 1968 demo was submitted by the Special Branch
Commander to the Director of Public Prosecutions. This means that, rather than gathering intelligence, it was explicitly prepared for the sake of supporting prosecutions by the State, presumably of the VSC leadership.

It is surely unusual that Special Branch officers (including the later head of SDS, Chief Inspector Conrad Dixon) were tasked to take ordinary witness statements from members of the public. It would help to have a witness statement explaining the reason for this report too, but there is none.

It details two particular incidents that resulted in the confrontation with police in Grosvenor Square, firstly the initial refusal to allow the letters of protest to be delivered to the Embassy, as had been agreed with the Met beforehand; and secondly the fact that the march was blocked by police at the corner of North Audrey Street, in such a way that the demonstrators were very compressed and so burst forth.

This created panic among the authorities which, in turn, led to the formation of the SOS/SDS in the summer of 1968. And yet the answer to this militancy is given in a leaflet enclosed with the report, which described how the mood and temper of the demonstration was determined by the American aggression, and that it was impossible to remain calm and peaceful before the barbarism of American aggression in Vietnam.

MPS-0722106: This report of 2 April 1968 by Chief Inspector Conrad Dixon, signed off by Chief Superintendent [name redacted, presumably A Cunningham] is another report into the March
1968 VSC demonstration.

Noting that the author was the founder and head of the spycops unit, Tate mused:

‘I think that Conrad Dixon is an important player in the history of the SDS and it is a shame that he is now deceased as I am sure he would have plenty to say. In his 1999 obituary in The Times it is stated that he was the leader and founder of SOS, having been born into an army family, educated at Oxford and joined the Royal Marines. At Special Branch he apparently “specialised in anarchists, Trotskyists and anarcho-syndicalists”.’

When setting up the unit, Dixon had legendarily asked for men, a budget, and a free hand. Tate homed in on this point:

‘I would like to emphasise the words “a free hand” as this suggests a complicity at higher levels with the SDS being allowed to thrive in a culture that broke the rules. I also note that his obituary is quite open about his role in SDS, in contrast to the institutional secrecy of the Metropolitan Police.’

Though Dixon’s report suggests there were proposals for violent action at the demonstration, he also said:

‘it is not possible to use these sources for evidential purposes, and no evidence of violent intentions was obtained by police officers who gained entry to some of these closed meetings.’

Tate laid the contradiction wide open and, having already shown that Special Branch had infiltrated the VSC, speculated that we may have found the real reason the spycops unit was established:

‘This can only mean that there are existing Special Branch reports (perhaps filed in RF 361/68/12 Ad Hoc Committee?) that detail these supposed discussions. I would like to see them… This all sounds like make-believe; Cl Dixon obviously knew what his masters wanted to hear. One wonders if the future creation of SOS/SOS was not out of desperation to try and find this supposed ‘evidence’ that was so sorely lacking.

‘The truth is there was not the slightest evidence that VSC planned any form of violence. VSC only believed in lawful resistance to police violence (i.e. lawful self-defence). It seems clear to me that this Special Branch report is obviously expressing and reflecting the political prejudices of the British government of the day and the police, it is utterly self-serving and the Inquiry should beware of placing too much weight on it.’

Tate said the Inquiry should examine the dossier compiled by the National Council for Civil Liberties, that provided independent observers on the day of the demonstration. This dossier is referred to by Peter Jackson MP in his speech to parliament on 4 April 1968. His account supports Tate’s.

MPS-0741312: Documents, placed in the files in July 1968 for Chief Inspector Dixon to action, are the first that are dated after the creation of the Special Operations Squad. They include copies of the minutes of a VSC Executive meeting held on 5 July 1968, and the VSC National Council on 10 July
1968. There is nothing in these meetings or minutes that was secret.

MPS-0738746: A report of a VSC meeting at Conway Hall on 20 August 1968, seemingly from Detective Sergeant Roy Creamer. Tate noted that Creamer is absent from the Inquiry’s list of officers. Who exactly was he?

Since the Inquiry started, it has posted this report and one other document by Creamer, as well as a photo of him that it did not send to Tate in its Witness Pack.

The report is was marked ‘Box 500’, meaning it had been copied to MI5. Tate notes that the Registry File numbers have been redacted, as well as what is presumably the word ‘Secret’ at the top of the document.

MPS-0730063: This is another significant report, dated 10 September 1968, by the head of the new SOS unit, CI Conrad Dixon. It written up just a few days after the VSC National Council meeting in Sheffield on 7 September 1968 – about which there is inexplicably no report disclosed – which confirmed the route of the October demonstration.

Tate described it as:

‘an utterly superficial and very opinionated police summary of contemporary British radicalism… very distorted, but just what I would expect from a secret policeman. His characterization of Tariq Ali as a “mob orator” and Ralph Schoenman as a “notorious agitator” and the general tone of the report suggests a policeman with a deep loathing of his subjects: he is perhaps aware that his career is better assisted by producing alarmist reports of this nature for his superiors than more carefully considered ones: the creation of SOS had to be justified.’

‘As for the supposed rumours or reports about the acquisition of (fire)arms and the preparation of Molotov cocktails, these are the product of a febrile imagination; even he admits have no evidential basis. He even accepts that the anarchist conference of 8 September 1968 in London condemned ‘senseless violence’.

‘I believe that there was a deliberate State tactic to foment public hysteria to frighten people away from joining future demonstrations – notwithstanding that the increased publicity may have actually had the opposite effect.’

MPS-0738815: A report of a meeting of the NW London Ad Hoc Committee on 11 September 1968 at the Friends House in NW3. Two officers were present, CI Dixon and a Detective Inspector HN 332 whose identity has still not been disclosed. Tate has no memory of the meeting.

UCPI0000005782: A report of PC Barry Moss and CI Dixon dated 19 September 1968 attaches a report, said to be written by Tate, on the Revolutionary Socialist Students Federation. Unfortunately the copy is almost completely illegible and impossible to read. Whatever was in it, it was sent to MI5.

MPS-0722099: A report on a meeting of 32 people of the VSC Lambeth branch at the ‘Duke of Cambridge’ pub on 26 September 1968, authored by ‘William Paul Lewis’.

Tate agrees with the report detailing his attempts to secure the support of the working class and trade unions for the demonstration. As for ‘Lewis’ himself, Tate observed that the Metropolitan Police applied in July 2017 for his cover name to remain anonymous, despite the fact that this is meant to be a Public Inquiry.

The application said that he did not steal his identity from a deceased child, but aside from this we know nothing. Again, the absence of the officer’s statement in the Witness Pack has constrained Tate’s ability to comment.

The Inquiry’s decision to grant ‘Lewis’ anonymity has some curious elements:

‘It is likely that disclosure of his real name would prompt intense and unwelcome media interest in him and so would give rise to serious interference with his and his family’s right to respect for their private life under Article 8 of the European Convention which would not be justifiable under Article 8(2). Closed reasons accompany this note.’

Why would the media be especially interested? What are the ‘closed reasons’ that we’re not allowed to know?

MPS-0730096: Another report by CI Conrad Dixon, this time dated 3 October 1968 and described as a ‘regular weekly report’ on the preparations for the national demonstration three weeks hence. Tate is mentioned as an IMG member and member of the VSC executive.

Interestingly, this document was made public in 2008, obtained by the journalist Solomon Hughes – but paragraph (b) was redacted for some reason; it mentions a supposed attack by London School of Economics (LSE) students on the Stock Exchange and an occupation of the LSE itself.

According to his Times obituary in 1999, Dixon was involved as an undercover officer in that occupation on 25 October and seized the telephone exchange. This is presumably the reason for the redaction.

Dixon said students have provided the bulk of the support for the VSC demonstrations thus far, and ‘their behaviour on demonstrations is largely spontaneous’.

Tate concurred with this assessment, adding that it actually proved his point:

‘there was never any plan for violence from the IMG or the VSC, rather the complete opposite, we wanted a huge but peaceful demonstration. Insofar as the Maoists wanted a more militant approach by confronting police in Grosvenor Square, we in the VSC were opposed to this and the three Maoist-controlled VSC local branches had been disowned by the National Council for this reason.’

Dixon says the Maoist contingent was said to number no more than 100 people. He concludes that it is the people who are not represented on the VSC – anarchists, Maoists and ‘foreign elements’ – who are most likely to use violence and be hostile to the police. In saying this, Dixon completely undermines the supposed reason for infiltrating the VSC at all. If it wasn’t about violence, it must have been about politics.

When all this is considered, it’s pretty clear that police and organisers only expected a tiny number of people who were desirous of a clash with the police, and any such situation that arose would be largely spontaneous. All that undercover policing made not the slightest difference to the
manner in which events transpired on 27 October 1988.

The Times obituary of 1999 gives Dixon credit for advising that the police lines needed to be thicker to prevent demonstrators breaking through. It did not take undercover police, or indeed any police at all, to come up with that idea, it’s just obvious crowd control stuff.

MPS-0730091: This is Cl Dixon’s next weekly report, dated 16 October 1968, and signed off by Chief Superintendent A. Cunningham. It notes both Tate and his partner Jess MacKenzie as being prominent in VSC affairs.

MPS-0730093: This appears to be the definitive police report of the 27 October 1968 VSC demonstration, submitted by Chief Superintendent A. Cunningham.

Tate refuted the claim the VSC was ‘to a considerable extent responsible for the violence which occurred at the demonstrations in London on October 1967, March and July 1968’, and wondered why, if the July demo was of interest to the police, no documents have been shown to him:

‘It is unfair to characterize the approach of the VSC and myself as simply ‘paying lip service’ to
the concept of an orderly demonstration. This is what we wanted. We did disagree with the Maoists and excluded them. His statement that ‘the majority were well disciplined and acted in an orderly manner under the direction of the VSC marshals’ is correct and rather belies his earlier dire warnings of considerable public disorder being likely.’

MPS-0731634: A report on an IMG meeting of about 30 people held in ‘The Earl Russell ‘ pub on Sunday 3 November 1958, to discuss the political situation in Northern Ireland, where Tate is from. ‘William Paul Lewis’ wrote the report, and had presumably become an IMG member. A copy of this report went to MI5 and another copy to ‘B Squad (“Irish Extremism”).

Tate commented:

‘The context was that the first Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) march had
taken place on 24 August 1958 in Dungannon, drawing 4000 people. This passed off peacefully, but on 5 October 1968 another NICRA march was attacked by police officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), this was the start of what became known as The Troubles.’ Once again, the serious violence was from the police not the protesters.’

MPS-0730768: A report by Cl Dixon of a meeting of the VSC at Conway Hall on 11 November 1968. 100 people came to discuss the 27 October demonstration.

Further undercover officers were present:
TN0034, a Detective Sergeant;
HN321 ‘William Paul Lewis’;
HN329 ‘John Graham’;
HN326 ‘Douglas Edwards’.

No witness statements of any of these officers were included in Tate’s Witness Pack.

Tate then returned to the Inquiry’s questions. They asked, having seen the reports, what additional access to the VSC would the use of undercover police officers, as opposed to plain clothes detectives, have given to the police?

Tate said, ‘I don’t know, It probably made it easier for them to steal membership lists.’

The Inquiry went back to the report dated 30 July 1966 (MPS-0738693) in which Tate is described as a ‘dove’ on the question of violence by comparison to the ‘hawk’, ‘Albert’ Manchanda.

Tate’s response was at once exasperated and dismissive:

‘This is gossip I have never heard before. My disagreements with Manchanda were fundamentally political, about what should be the program of the VSC. I did not know at that time what his views were about violence in relation to the Vietnam protest movement, I never ever discussed this issue with him. I never trusted him. He led a splinter group which tried to wreck the founding conference in 1966. The Maoists formed a separate organization, the Britain-Vietnam Solidarity Front (BVSF).’

The Inquiry also highlighted a report’s claim that ‘the more cautious representatives of International Socialism and International Marxist groups paid lip service to the vision of a peaceful demonstration’.

Tate rebuffed the sneering insinuations:

‘This is gossip from sources that were not involved in the campaign. We in the leadership of the VSC and the Ad Hoc Committee, were totally committed to peaceful demonstrations, and if violence took place, it was incidental and outside of our control. This is why we did not go to Grosvenor Square on 27 October 1968. It was mainly a peaceful event, much to the surprise of the police, who by that time had frightened the authorities into a state of panic.

‘I and the rest of the leadership of the VSC suspected the Maoists would make an effort to hijack the demonstration as it made its way past Trafalgar Square; that’s why we stopped the demonstration in the middle of the street when they tried to divert it to Grosvenor Square. We effectively policed our own demonstration.’

Responding to a list of tactics which spycops regarded as having been suggested at branch, but not national level, Tate was equally disparaging:

‘This is the product of the fevered imagination of the security services who seemed to be out to frighten their superiors and the Wilson Labour Government. It looks like every little piece of scary information from whatever source, or whatever they invented, was used for this purpose.

‘We, the organizers of the demonstration, wanted the largest mobilisation possible, one to which the participants could bring their families without the fear of being exposed to violence. That’s why the Ad Hoc Committee adopted a march route that ended up with a rally in Hyde Park. What happened on that day highlights the wisdom of that decision. Over 100,000 people turned out.’

The Inquiry moved on to ask Tate about the impact of the spycops revelations. He cited the Canadian McDonald Commission (1977-81), which had comprehensively dealt with a similar scandal there, while the American Church Committee (1976) had done a similar job with the comparable COINTELPRO affair. At the time these bodies were delivering their damning verdicts, the SDS was escalating its activity in Britain. It’s time for a reckoning.

He summed up his position:

‘The Inquiry has to decide whether it will simply protect the interests of the police and the State, even after all these years, or whether it will come down on the side of civil liberties and the right of people to have a private life free from intrusion by State security forces. I hope that the Inquiry will lead to legislation and public oversight that will limit their ability to harass those who happen to be critical of society or are fighting for social change.’

The accompanying written witness statement of Ernest Tate

For the last session of the day, the Inquiry then had one of its own staff present a summary of evidence supplied by two early SDS officers, HN218 (Barry Moss, aka ‘Barry Morris’ or ‘Barry Morse’) and HN334 (‘Margaret White’).

Officer HN 218, aka Barry Moss
(summary of evidence)

Moss was in the SDS from its formation in July 1968 until late September 1968. He returned to the SDS as a manager in 1980. His real name is Barry Moss, and while undercover he used Barry Morris or Morse. He had been a detective constable in Special Branch for only several months when he was told by Detective Chief Superintendent Arthur Cunningham that he and a dozen or so others, were joining the newly formed SDS.

He recalls:

‘I didn’t opt into it and I don’t think it occurred to anyone there that we could opt out. There was no formal training or guidance provided for the role.’

He used a cover flat merely as an address to write on attendance lists at meetings. He did not live there. He used his own vehicle registered in his own name to attend those meetings.

He believed the unit had a short term remit, gathering information about the upcoming October 1968 demonstration against the Vietnam War. In his witness statement, Moss noted the only real difference from Special Branch work was actually joining groups instead of just attending meetings.

SDS boss Conrad Dixon told him which groups to spy on, but not how to do it. However, while undercover, he had almost daily contact with his cover officer, Detective Inspector Phil Saunders.

He joined the Maoist Britain-Vietnam Solidarity Front (BVSF). He does not recall joining the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) which was something of a rival group, but reports on the VSC include his name.

The reports mention five different groups; the Joint Committee of Communists, the Committee for Solidarity with Vietnam, the VSC’s Ad Hoc Committee, and two branches of the VSC.

MIXING WITH THE MAOISTS

He remembers people being in several of the groups at the same time and there may have been a shared Maoist ideological connection (even though the VSC had a significant ideological split with Maoists).

His reports show a mix of public and private meetings mostly concerned with planning for the October 27 demonstration, including, banner making and choosing slogans. On 24 September 1968 at a meeting of the October 27 Committee for Solidarity in Vietnam, it was recorded that a decision was made to break away from the main demonstration to target the American Embassy.

Moss confirmed at that some meetings there were SDS officers and ordinary uniformed officers not working together. At other meetings there would be more than one SDS officer, simply because their respective groups had attended the same meeting.

NINE OFFICERS VOTING

At a public meeting of the VSC’s October 27 Ad Hoc Committee, nine police officers are stated to have been present, including the majority of the SDS’s senior officers. According to the report, the significant occurrence at the meeting appears to have been a vote against the proposal made by Maoists to march to Downing Street on 26 October and then to Grosvenor Square (home to the US Embassy) on 27 October 1968. Presumably these nine officers all voted to avoid looking conspicuous.

Moss said some of the meetings raised ‘of particular interest to Special Branch’. Reports have detailed descriptions of branch members, including those with no previous trace or Special Branch record, notes of speakers expressing political opinions, and reporting of contacting journalists to arrange a private meetings.

ANTI-ANTI-APARTHEID

After he left the SDS, Moss wrote a report analysing the support of the Anti-Apartheid Movement.

Moss was the first spycop to leave the SDS, withdrawing even before the 27 October demonstration the unit had been set up to target, in order to attend an accelerated promotion course. He thinks he may have made up a family incident that required him to leave London as part of his withdrawal strategy.

Before he left, he introduced his replacement – Detective Constable Mike Tyrell HN335 – who he introduced as his “best pal” to a meeting of the Earls Court VSC. Tyrell’s cover name is unknown and he is now deceased. He is absent from the Inquiry’s list of SDS officers.

Moss said he didn’t actually see any subversive activity whilst undercover, stating:

‘The group I joined wasn’t really trying to overthrow the government, they just wanted a big demonstration’

He does recall two pieces of information that ‘were probably passed on for use in policing’ in his two months undercover; the possibility of protestors carrying ball bearings to use on police horses, and women being told to flirt with officers on the frontline to try to win them over.

Moss said that, whilst his reporting alone would not have made a great difference to policing, he does think that the October demonstration was well policed and any disorder at it was controlled as a result of the intelligence provided by the SDS as a whole.

BACK TO MANAGE

He returned to the SDS as a Detective Chief Inspector in February 1980. He was promoted to the rank of Superintendent in early 1981, and left the SDS in December of the same year. In 1995, he became commander of operations in Special Branch, with a remit that included the SDS. He became Head of Special Branch in October 1996.

[Note: Moss will be heard from again in later tranches, not least because he was a pivotal officer in the founding of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit.]

Officer HN 334 aka ‘Margaret White’
(summary of evidence)

The Inquiry has granted anonymity to the real name of HN334 ‘Margaret White’.

Prior to joining the SDS, she was a Detective Constable in Special Branch. She remembers attending the same sort of political meetings, both as an officer serving with Special Branch and with the SDS. The distinction she draws between the two roles is the need for her identity to be completely secret as an undercover officer, unlike with Special Branch where she would give her name, if asked.

Neither her memory nor the documents can say exactly when she joined and left the SDS. Whilst in the unit, she attended meetings of the Havering branch of the VSC between 30 September and 29 October 1968. She does not appear on the list of the unit’s personnel in the document entitled ‘Penetration of Extremist Groups’ dated 26 November 1968 suggesting, in accordance with her recollection, that she left the unit shortly after the 27 October demonstration.

She does not remember having any training for the role. She created her assumed background over a couple of days, altering her appearance by wearing a long haired wig, adopting a cover name and cover employment, and finding a flat where she would stay occasionally. In her witness statement, she said she knew she would be on a short term deployment that concluded with the October demonstration.

DOUBLE TROUBLE

She was deployed to Havering VSC along with fellow SDS undercover HN330 ‘Don de Frietas’. They were instructed to act as a couple, attending all of the meetings together. She describes the group as having no formal membership structure or procedure. She understood that she was to report exactly what she saw and heard. She never attended any meetings alone, nor did she author the police reports.

She was tasked to this particularly group because senior officers thought that it would be a trouble-making group. From what she saw and heard, it was not.

The Inquiry holds reports relating to the branch dated between 30 September and 29 October 1968. They record small private meetings, mainly concerned with preparations for the October demonstration, including discussions about the composition, printing and distribution of leaflets, lines to take with the press, elections for the post of secretary and treasurer and the likely maximum size of the Havering contingent (about 100 people).

Apart from them considering doing some fly posting, she gives is no evidence of any intention to break the law, or a militant attitude.

EXIT STRATEGY

In addition to information about preparations for the October demonstration, the reports record information about political activity of an individual in the Labour Party.

The final report concerning a meeting held on 29 October 1968 contains the officer’s account of the views of her group about the demonstration, that it had been ‘a complete and utter disaster’. The officer used this as an excuse to leave the group. She then withdrew from her service with the SDS and returned to Special Branch.

She only remembers infiltrating the one group during her time. Any other Special Branch reports by her were, she said, the result of specific tasking whilst a member of Special Branch and not in her SDS undercover identity.

One report authored by her in August 1968 concerned an individual and her correspondence in connection with the funding of an art college’s October 25 revolution account. Other reports from the same period have her and another SDS officer HN68 ‘Sean Lynch’, attending a private meeting of the Camden Branch of the International Socialists. The subject of the meeting was ‘Negro struggles in America’, with associated information about activism for racial equality.

Five reports in the hearing bundle relate to her work in Special Branch after leaving the SDS. They relate to groups on which the SDS did report and appear to be examples the SDS working from other sources of information such as informers on those groups, such as the Women’s Liberation Workshop and the anti-apartheid the Stop The Seventy Tour Committee.

Details of Deceased Spycops

Beyond the hearing today, the Inquiry also published documents relating to deployments of six other former SDS officers who are now deceased.

HN 68 – ‘SEAN LYNCH’, REAL NAME NOT PUBLISHED
1968-1974
Also held a managerial position in the SDS 1982-1984.

‘Lynch’ targeted the International Socialists (forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party) and Irish campaign groups, including the Irish Civil Rights Campaign, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and Sinn Fein. His real name is withheld by the Inquiry to protect the privacy of his widow.

HN 331 – COVER NAME UNKNOWN, REAL NAME NOT PUBLISHED
1968-1969

This officer infiltrated the Notting Hill branch of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. His cover name is unknown. He was killed in road traffic accident in the 1970s. His real name is withheld by the Inquiry to protect the privacy of his widow.

HN323 – HELEN CRAMPTON, COVER NAME UNKNOWN

Crampton also infiltrated the Notting Hill branch of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign.

HN327 – DAVID FISHER, COVER NAME UNKNOWN

Fisher infiltrated the Notting Hill and Croydon branches of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign.

HN318 – RAY WILSON, COVER NAME UNKNOWN

Wilson infiltrated various manifestations of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, including the north-west London Ad Hoc Committee, the Notting Hill, Croydon and Earl’s Court branches, plaus the North-West London Ad-Hoc Committee and the October 27 Ad Hoc Committee, as well as the libertarian left. Previously referred to by the Inquiry as ‘back office/ management’ rather than undercover, implying an additional later role. Author of ‘Special Branch: The History 1883-2006’.

HN335 – MIKE TYRELL, COVER NAME UNKNOWN

Tyrell infiltrated Maoist groups, plus the Earls Court branch of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, the October 27 Committee for Solidarity with Vietnam, the south-east London Ad Hoc Committee, the Britain-Vietnam Solidarity Front, the March 9th Committee for Solidarity with Vietnam, and the Revolutionary Socialist Students Federation.

 

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COPS will be live-tweeting all the Inquiry hearings, and producing daily reports like this one for the blog. They will be indexed on our UCPI Public Inquiry page.

<<Previous UCPI Daily Report (11 Nov 2020)<<

>>Next UCPI Daily Report (13 Nov 2020)>>

 

Tranche 1, Phase 1, Day 8

11 November 2020

Evidence from:
Tariq Ali, activist and writer

Today, after seven days of opening statements from the participants, the Undercover Policing Inquiry finally started to take evidence from witnesses.

And, after seven days of live-streaming, the hearings have moved to a format that excludes those trying to follow.

THE PRIVATE PUBLIC INQUIRY

Instead of a live-streaming the speakers, there is a live transcript that moves quickly and cannot be paused or rewound.

BBC reporter Dominic Casciani explained his exasperation:

‘This set up does not assist, at a very basic level, reporters to do their job of reporting a *public inquiry* established by the Home Secretary to *answer public concerns* about abuses by some officers’. I can’t type that fast to copy down everything.

‘If I could hear the audio – which we are not allowed to do – I could take down quotes in shorthand. We cannot scroll back to check quotes. 20 years ago at the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, we could do that.

‘The transcript is being posted as a document after any deadlines for daily reporting. This means that I and others are going to struggle to report the inquiry contemporaneously for evening deadlines. This basically means, from a practical perspective as a working reporter, that a public inquiry becomes largely impossible to report.’

COPS was among those who were able to live tweet, because the Inquiry has provided live-streaming at a venue in London. It’s a large, unventilated room with no windows containing socially distanced desks without power sockets. The live-stream there has no time delay, but the Chair has imposed a ten minute delay on tweeting what is said.

If these conditions don’t put you off and you would like to attend, tough. You had to apply weeks in advance, going through the whole process for each individual day you wish to attend. The Inquiry only confirmed who had actually been allocated places in an email sent at 10.16pm last night.

The Inquiry knows that victims are spread across the country, and indeed the world, and need to make travel arrangements. One of them, Tom Fowler, has had to travel from low-Covid Wales to lock-down London to live-tweet the hearings.

There can be no excusing this as being the fault of the emergency measures brought in due to Covid. The Inquiry has had an extra five months to make these arrangements. Today’s inadequacies reflect their original plan, of hearings without live-streaming, in a room that couldn’t even hold half of the significantly affected victims who have been designated ‘core participants’, let alone any interested members of the public. And the Inquiry has consistently rejected the suggestion of live-streaming.

EXCLUSION IS A CHOICE NOT A NECESSITY

Meanwhile, other inquiries such as Grenfell and Manchester Arena, which also have to ensure they don’t inadvertently release any sensitive information, have public live-streams. Why can we watch Grenfell hearings on YouTube yet the UCPI only gives us what amounts to speeded-up Ceefax?

Those who do follow the hearings are blindfolded by the Inquiry’s refusal to publish documents until after each hearing, meaning the transcript is examining and discussing things that those outside cannot see.

These are yet more ways in which this Inquiry demonstrates its belief that the victims are marginal and the public merely an irrelevant afterthought.

The Chair, Sir John Mitting, appears to believe himself capable of understanding it all – we plebs needn’t be bothered until he hands us his report. A man who believes he is impartial yet thinks the Macpherson definition of institutional racism is ‘controversial’. A man who thinks he understands how things work and will see through the lies, yet grants anonymity to spycops because he believes any officer who has been married for a long time is incapable of serious wrongdoing.

Mitting has rebuffed repeated demands for a diverse panel to assist him, something that has been standard at such inquiries for over 20 years, because he thinks himself incapable of significant unconscious bias.

FIRST WITNESS: TARIQ ALI

The opening phase of the Inquiry will be witness hearings over five days until the end of next week concerned with the earliest days of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad, 1968-72.

The unit was formed after trouble at a demonstration against the Vietnam War in March 1968, in which windows were broken at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London. The original aim was to have officers live undercover as activists to gather intelligence in order to prevent a repeat of the disturbance at a second demonstration in October of that year.

Tariq Ali is a 77 year old journalist, writer and broadcaster, who has been politically engaged all his life. In 1968 he was a key member of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC), and of the Ad Hoc Committee, which organised the London demonstrations against the war.

The Undercover Policing Inquiry devoted the entirety of this first day to questioning Ali.

MILITANCY OF HEART

David Barr QC, Counsel to the Inquiry, began by reading excerpts from Ali’s autobiography, Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties, that cover the events of 22 October 1967.

This included an account of demonstrators coming very close to entering the US Embassy during the demonstration.

Barr asked Ali to account for his use of the word ‘militancy’. He explained that other groups at the time were demanding peace in Vietnam, but the VSC didn’t want ‘the peace of the graveyard’, they supported the Vietnamese people in their struggle against the American occupation.

Barr QC asked if ‘militancy would include a “shoving through” to get to the embassy?’

‘No,’ Ali replied, the militancy was in reference to political support for the NLF [National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, aka the Viet Cong]’. Ali would not be drawn into the concept that being ‘a militant group’ meant violence, but rather a politically partisan position. In this case, a position that was supported by 25% of the UK population according to the opinion polls of the time.

Ali said that there were plenty of discussions about taking further direct action at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. He said they had dreamed of taking over the Embassy’s telex machine and sending a message of support to the Viet Cong in Saigon. The VSC discussed the idea of occupying the embassy, but some thought it was ‘foolish’ to imagine that the State wouldn’t try to prevent this.

As someone who had only been in the country for a short time, in the event of arrest Ali faced a risk of deportation as well as imprisonment.

Barr: Would it be true there were official aims and unofficial aims of the VSC?

Ali: Yes

Barr: Kept secret to a small circle? The Ad Hoc Committee?

Ali: Just the ones in London.

Barr: The desire to storm the embassy remained?

Ali: Yes, the first demo had been a missed opportunity.

Barr: Why didn’t you push ahead with the plan? Was it fear of your legal situation?

Ali: Yes.

Barr: So you were going to see on the day?

Ali: Yes.

Ali then recollected the composition of the VSC’s ‘National Committee’. Pat Jordan told the group that ‘every single one of my speeches had been noted and studied by Special Branch’.

OUTSIDE ASSISTANCE

The London VSC group was boosted by the support they received from American activists, politicians, Black organisers, and others. Among the American anti-war activists who were in the UK at the time, some of them dodging the draft, was 21 year old Bill Clinton.

As with many subsequent anti-war demonstrations, the protesters did not have overwhelming public support. Two thirds of the British population were in favour of the war in Vietnam, which was very different to other places like France.

Organisers of the March 1968 demonstration had no idea how many police to expect, but they knew that if they were heavily outnumbered there would be no chance of even a ‘token occupation’ of the American Embassy.

There had been a well-publicised rumour that American Marines were waiting inside the embassy on the day of the protest ready to fire live rounds into the crowd if they breached security.

Barr asked a lot of questions about the chances of violence from the protesters and whether the VSC encouraged it, or was at least unable to prevent it. He said that ‘come armed’ stickers had been put on some leaflets for the demonstration.

Ali dismissed the stickers as ‘childish nonsense’ and said that nobody in the VSC or the other groups active against the War behaved in this way, and that at the time he wondered if these stickers were the work of agents provocateur. Ali said he has a very clear memory of the VSC denouncing these stickers at the time.

MAOISTS & ANARCHISTS

Barr asked about the other groups that existed at the time, for example the Maoists.

Ali explained that he had very little to do with the Maoists – they acted autonomously on the whole, and only ‘grudgingly’ accepted any of the VSC’s ‘discipline’. He recalled an Irish Maoist group led by someone called Ed Davoren, ‘but I do not recall him saying anything particularly outrageous’.

The Maoists, Ali explained, tended to regard the VSC committee as ‘revisionists and class traitors and whatever else’.

He was asked about anarchist groups, but Ali said they were small, hostile to the VSC and often didn’t bother joining in with the demonstrations. The insignificance of these groups was such that Ali can’t even remember their names.

He remembered seeing the anarchist newspaper, Freedom, but felt the anarchists were ‘not too strong’ as they were small in number and apparently easy to identify due to their T-shirts [whatever that means].

EUROPEAN SOLIDARITY

The March 1968 demonstration is described on p.254 of Ali’s aforementioned book. It was, he wrote, ‘a marvelous display of colourful flags and banners’. These were people optimistic about a new world without the kinds of conflict they saw around them. They were aware of the Prague Spring going on, which brought hope of compassionate and effective socialism; there was a feeling that change was possible.

A large contingent from Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund, the Socialist German Student Union, came to London from Berlin to join the demonstration. They had a lot of experience of street demonstrations, and brought helmets and their own banner with them.

Ali described them linking arms as they marched, a display of solidarity that also defended them from police attacks, which the VSC hadn’t seen before. Ali said he had no memory of what exactly the Germans did that day, but doubts that they acted alone, they were all part of a huge protest. The tabloid press were not used to seeing Germans at demonstrations, so gave this a lot of coverage.

There was also a French contingent, but they were not mentioned, perhaps because they didn’t adopt visible identifiers like the helmets.

There were several attempts to break through the police lines that day, and it certainly wasn’t the work of the German students alone, ‘nice English students’ were involved as well. Ali does not think the presence of any one group warranted such emphasis.

Barr: Would the German Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund have followed the official position of the VSC on the protest?

Ali: Yes.

Barr: So if the balances of forces on the day had been right, they would have joined to storm the US embassy?

Ali: Undoubtedly.

LOSING THEIR MARBLES

The square and surrounding streets were full of people, there were scuffles, the police decided to send in the horses. Ali heard people shouting ‘the Cossacks are coming’. Barr questioned Ali about the throwing of marbles at horses. Ali did not witness this, but it was talked about afterwards.

He illustrated this with a story about support for the VSC not coming exclusively from the young, they were supported by people of all classes, some of whom supplied funding and valuable advice about more effective ways of dealing with horses (involving a string touching the horse’s knee).

Nonetheless, Barr laboured the point about marbles as well as smoke-bombs and other items that may have been brought to the demonstration by individuals.

Ali saw a small number of fireworks, ‘to increase excitement, not to harm anyone’. Barr countered that the VSC didn’t dissuade people from escalating action, something that wouldn’t have been organisationally possible in such circumstances.

Barr is focusing very directly on the role of the protesters in what was, as the vintage footage shows, a direct and deliberate attack on a crowd by the police.

The lack of any questions about police violence, the injustice of the war in Vietnam, the huge death toll of the war, and so on, show the priorities of the Inquiry. Ali was the only at the hearing one to mention the injuries, some serious, suffered by demonstrators on the day due to police violence.

UNDERLYING PHILOSOPHY

‘We wanted the toppling of regimes in Eastern Europe and their replacement with the Czech model, ‘socialism with a human face’, Ali explained. However, he was realistic.

Barr: Were your ultimate aspirations revolutionary?

Ali: Not in Britain.

Barr: You didn’t think the anti-Vietnam War protest would lead to revolution?

Ali: You’d have to be deranged to think that.

Barr: Given the air of change in the wind, you saw the demonstration as part of piece of the jigsaw for a world wide revolution and world wide socialism?

Ali, laughing: No, not really.

Ali and his comrades felt serious socialism was not possible in western Europe without democracy very firmly attached to it.

When he visited Vietnam, he asked North Vietnamese leaders if international brigades of volunteer troops would be a useful response of solidarity from other parts of the world. ‘This is not the Spanish Civil War. The last thing we want is for people like you to come and die here,’ he was bluntly told. ‘All we want from you is to build movements abroad’ to help to bring the war to an end.

Barr: You say that you thought that Parliament should be replaced by Worker’s Councils, is that true?

Ali: We used to think like that. We wanted something like what the Chartists advocated in the 19th century. We explored all these ideas.

The group’s politics evolved over time, but they were generally in favour of far more direct democracy. The current ‘first past the post’ system distorts election results, delivering a succession of governments who have only received a minority of the votes.

UNLIKELY SUPPORTERS

The first evidence to be shown on the screen was a Special Branch report, prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions, following the demo in March 1968. The group interrupted theater shows to talk about Vietnam.

The audiences were mostly sympathetic to the anti-war cause, but actors were hostile on the whole (with the strange exception of the Black & White Minstrel Show, something so unrelentingly racist that even in 1968 there were petitions to against it).

After the conflict at the March 1968 demonstration, both the VSC and police turned their thoughts to organising for the next demonstration in October. The Met created the what was first called Special Operations Squad, who went to live as anti-war activists.

NEWSPAPERS & PROVOCATEURS

The next picture was of a Guardian article from May 1968, entitled ‘Tariq Ali Talks of New London Demonstration’. There is a reference to Ali saying they planned to occupy the Bank of England. Barr suggest that even if was a joke, only uttered once in the press, it meant that the police were compelled to respond.

Ali’s book, on p.293, quotes an American woman from the Students for a Democratic Society (the third different ‘SDS’ mentioned in this hearing!) who said that the only way to defeat the war machine in her country was to emulate the Viet Cong guerrillas who had attacked the US Embassy in Saigon.

She was suggesting a bombing campaign against the corporations who were profiting from the war in Vietnam by producing chemical weapons and other supplies.

Ali explained that he argued strongly against this tactical approach, calling it ‘suicidal in every sense’. He added, ‘I had to think very hard whether the person who wanted to embark on such a course was deranged or a straightforward provocateur’.

Asked about what he knew at the time about police or Special Branch infiltration, Ali responded, ‘we had no evidence, obviously, but we had no doubt that we were under surveillance – there was hysteria in the press. On one occasion a postman dragged me out of the office and told me that our letters were opened every day’.

BLACK DWARF

Ali’s suspicions about provocateurs seem well founded. On one occasion, some ‘hippy anarchists’ spent the night at the Soho office of Black Dwarf, a socialist newspaper which Ali edited. Ali and the others were horrified to see the next morning that these guests had painted a large diagram of how to make a Molotov cocktail on the wall.

He described their response:

‘We covered their crude artwork with a poster. The very next day, the office was raided by the police – they went straight to the poster and pulled it down to uncover the artwork beneath’.

The office had often been made available as somewhere for comrades visiting from other places to sleep. But after this incident, the Black Dwarf group became more strict about letting people sleep in there.

Barr, welcoming a return to his recurring theme of violence, asked if Molotov cocktails were ever used at a VSC demonstration. Ali responded emphatically, saying that he had no knowledge of anyone ever proposing or intending to take a Molotov cocktail to a VSC-organised demonstration.

Ali questioned the police’s description of information gathered from infiltrating a national VSC meeting, and pointed out that this intelligence was not particularly ‘valuable’ or secret, there was no need to infiltrate the group in order to get that information.

He challenged the view that it was either vital or necessary. The route of the demonstration was publicly debated, and much contested by various groupings. Some people, he said, ‘wanted a punch-up in Grosvenor Square, which we were opposed to’.

The next document brought up as evidence was a Special Branch report on Black Dwarf, which reproduced a column published on the back page of the magazine in October 1968, entitled ‘Softly Softly’.

Although Ali was editor of Black Dwarf, he was often away traveling so did not personally oversee the content of each issue, just endeavoured to ‘cast an eye’ over it. He agreed that this particular piece was not especially well written.

The main message of the article was that the police should be given no excuse to stop the demonstrators from reaching their intended destination. ‘The coaches must get through!’ was in capital letters. It said not to bring anything that could be construed as suspicious, mentioning the marbles and fireworks that so preoccupied David Barr QC at the hearing.

Barr suggested that the article telling people not to bring things like marbles or fireworks, is in fact, an attempt to suggest people should bring them.

Barr cited contemporaneous leaflets from campaigns advocating provocation. Ali pointed out that ‘it’s one thing to write some nonsense… but a completely different thing to actually carry it out’. It wasn’t forbidden to write things, and at that time people were writing all sorts of things.

VIOLENCE AGAINST TEXTILES

After Barr’s ignoring of the police violence against protesters in March 1968, he seemed surprisingly concerned about violence against small pieces of textiles. He asked Ali about a public meeting that took place before the October protest, specifically whether a plain-clothes police officer would have been able to safely attend. Ali said it was.

Barr: This was peaceful, except for the burning of a flag outside Australia House.

Ali: That is still a peaceful act.

The October 1968 demonstration was planned by the VSC as a ‘peaceful show of strength’:

‘We don’t want mindless militancy. We want this to a be a politically militant demonstration of solidarity, not only with Vietnam but with each other’

Stewards were provided by all the organisations who supported the demo. They would have been briefed ahead of the day, short briefing that morning on the Embankment.

Asked ‘to what extent did the marchers exhibit “revolutionary self-discipline”?’ Ali replied ‘we were so relaxed that we forgot we were passing Downing Street – a police officer had to remind me’. He recollected having to scribble a ‘Dear Harold’ message to the Prime Minister of the day on a scrap of paper.

There was an attempt made to kidnap Ali, by a group of unknown men. They did this the night before the demo, probably with the aim of preventing him from attending it. This was in Carlisle Street in Soho, just outside the Black Dwarf office, and luckily was prevented by his comrades, who had noticed it just in time.

SPECIAL BRANCH REPORT: AUTUMN OFFENSIVE

The next document shown by the Inquiry was a Special Branch report from DI Dixon on the VSC ‘Autumn Offensive’ (i.e. the demo on October 27 1968) and the potential for violence. It describes the VSC as ‘Trotskyist-dominated’ and ‘the most influential’ of the extremist groups.

Ali was scathing and unequivocal, saying ‘it’s completely false. It’s fantasy land’.

Barr wasn’t persuaded. ‘Intelligence reports that show there wasn’t any secret agenda is useful in itself, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘No’ said Ali. ‘It’s not useful and it’s not intelligence’.

Ali was not in Grosvenor Square himself that day. He only got third-hand reports, largely from the press, of the events there. But certainly, it was no surprise to anyone that there would be police there.

The VSC had no authority over those who attended the protests, or how they behaved, and had no way of compelling them to act in a certain way.

Page 11 of the Special Branch report lists the number of arrests made before the demo (26, only three of whom received summonses), during the demo (17), and after the demo (one, someone who threw a bottle at the Embassy). Interestingly, it notes that ‘apart from three fascists, none had hitherto come to notice’.

Page 4 of the same document details some of the arrests made the night before the October 1968 demo. These included one German national arrested at St Pancra’s station with a gas pistol and an unspecified amount of cannabis resin. There was also someone who’d been found trying to gain entry to police stables at Hammersmith, it is thought that he intended tampering with the police horses stabled there. Additionally, ‘two youths stopped by police in Green Street, were found to be in possession of radio-jamming equipment and perspex eye shields’.

Barr, seemingly unaware that he was making a non-sequitur, asks if this proves that the spycops were useful. ‘Not at all,’ Ali replied, ‘this was done by normal police’.

The report self-justifies, saying that, despite the crowd’s wishes, there had been no serious disorder because of the intervention of spycops. Ali flatly refuted this, saying ‘this is false, the crowd didn’t have to follow our lead, they could have run riot, they didn’t’.

VSC ORGANISING

Referring to questions about the national organisation of the VSC, Ali got a chuckle from the room when he said ‘this is an eye-opener – I had no idea there were any Maoists in Nottingham’.

Ali’s book talks on p.329 of 1968 as being the ‘last big assembly of revolutionary forces’. What he thought was needed at the time was a unified youth movement, that united young people from all the different left-wing groups, including those who’d been expelled from the Labour party.

We saw a secret police report of the VSC’s 1969 national conference. Well, we almost saw it, it was a lot of fuzz on our screen. Even Ali complained that it was near-impossible to read this document as it was very faded.

According to the second paragraph, the credentials of both official delegates and accredited observers were checked at the door. Voting cards were issued to delegates only. It was a closed event, not open to the public.

Barr asked if the closed nature of the event meant that a plain-clothes (rather than an undercover) police officer would not have been able to gain entry to this conference.

Another SDS report, on a meeting 52 years ago to the day in Conway Hall, includes long quotes from Ali that ‘a real revolution could have taken place’. Ali dismissed the report out of hand, telling the Inquiry, ‘it’s a fabrication, I would never ever talk in these terms. At best, it’s an extreme exaggeration’.

INTERNATIONAL MARXIST GROUP

In the afternoon session, the Inquiry moved on to other parts of Tariq Ali’s long active life.

He was a member of the International Marxist Group (IMG), a British section of an international organisation known as the Fourth International, created by Trotsky in 1938 after he broke with Stalinism.

The IMG had branches in many towns and cities, including Birmingham, Leicester, Chesterfield, Manchester, London, Nottingham, Hull, Oxford, Norwich, Folkestone, Edinburgh, York, Glasgow, Reading and Crewe, and about 100 members at that time (though some branches may have had but a single member).

Ali explained that the Fourth International grew slowly, and it never became a truly mass movement except in Bolivia and Sri Lanka. In Europe, the French movement was perhaps the largest, with around 50,000 members at its peak.

In the UK, the IMG’s membership grew to a thousand at the most. It aimed to create left-wing Marxist parties to challenge Labour for the loyalties of the working class.

It’s interesting to note the questions that David Barr QC, Counsel to the Inquiry, asks about the group: Did the IMG use violence? Did members of the IMG commit serious criminal offences to further their aims?

Ali had to be emphatic that the IMG’s aims and tactics did not include violence, or any serious criminal activities. He said it was possible that the odd member did, but if that was the case it was certainly not known to him.

SPYING ON TRADE UNIONISTS

Next, the Inquiry was shown a special report, signed by officer ‘HN340’ – a Special Demonstration Squad officer using the name ‘Alan Nixon’- and countersigned by Chief Inspector Saunders.

The report describes discussions among North London Red Circle about the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders industrial dispute. Barr asked about a line that read ‘it was important that IMG activity within the unions ensured they could better exploit any future revolutionary situation’.

Ali said he feared that the capitalists would win that particular dispute. He very rarely attended these discussions, which were set up by the Red Mole newspaper and therefore often the first contact people made with the IMG. Paragraph 4 suggests that Ali was present, but he cannot recall this meeting at all.

Ali confirmed that IMG members’ involvement in trade unions was open and unashamed, rather than covert.

SPYING ON ELECTION CAMPAIGNS

On 14 April 1977, the IMG held a meeting at Southall Town Hall as part of their Greater London Council election campaign. About 50 people attended. It was suggested, by the spycops officer who reported on it, that many of the white attendees were not local to Southall.

Ali was asked for his reaction to the discovery that the police had been reporting on this. He said it was so unnecessary, what was going on was no big secret. It was a public meeting, anyone was welcome.

There was then more discussion of the Anti Nazi League (ANL) and its strategies for combatting racism. Ali reminded us of the slogan ‘self defence is no offence’.

SPYING ON A CONCERT IN A PARK

Another SDS report was shown to the Inquiry, listing 229 names of people identified from the 100,000 people attending the ANL’s Carnival Against the Nazis, a free concert in April 1978 – including Tariq Ali and fellow core participants at the Inquiry, Peter Hain, Colin Clark and Dave Morris.

The free concert featured The Clash, Steel Pulse, X-Ray Spex, and the Tom Robinson Band.

Ali said it was a pleasant day, with lots of children and music, and he could not recall any violence.

The next such report listed 69 named individuals who attended an ANL march and rally on 14 May 1978, including, again, Ali and Dave Morris.

KNOCKED OUT IN SOUTHALL

We then heard about a demonstration against the National Front in Southall on 23 April 1979. At the time, Ali was the Socialist Unity parliamentary candidate in that constituency.

Local organisers were worried about the possibility of racist attacks, and put Ali in a safe house to keep him out of any trouble. He was holed up with reggae band Misty in Roots when the police charged into the house, and pulled everyone out. An estimated £10,000 of damage was done to the contents of the house, including the equipment of Misty in Roots.

Ali and the others were made to run a gauntlet, and he was truncheoned so severely that he passed out. The skull of Clarence Baker, manager of Misty in Roots, was fractured and he was in a coma for five months. Ali woke up in a police vehicle, under arrest. Upon his eventual release, he had to walk home.

He said that the police’s treatment of them that day made him think of a colonial police manual from the days of the Raj. At the trial of one of those arrested, one of the police officers testified that ‘there was no overall direction of the police forces at this time’ and described it as ‘a free for all’. Needless to say, no police officers were charged with anything.

BLAIR PEACH

That was the same day that Blair Peach – who we have already heard about in this Inquiry – was killed by the police in Southall. When the police unit responsible had its lockers searched, weapons found included a crowbar, metal cosh, whip handle, stock ship, brass handle, knives, American-style truncheons, a rhino whip and a pickaxe handle.

This rather sets Barr’s suggestion that people shouldn’t be caught with marbles on their way to a demo into relief.

Unsurprisingly, the next report was on a meeting called by those campaigning for justice after Blair Peach’s death, which Ali attended.

Barr apologised for being repetitive in his questions, but asked Ali how he felt about being spied on at this event. Ali retorted:

‘What is the point of having a report like this except to keep people in work? Or to make my file heftier than it was, for absolutely no rhyme or reason?’

Ali was invited to speak at a wide range of public meetings over many years. He was involved in many groups on the left.

A much more recent document was produced at the hearing – a report into a meeting of the Stop the War Coalition steering committee on 15 March 2003. Ali’s name is listed, along with MPs including Jeremy Corbyn and George Galloway.

THE PERSONAL IS THE POLITICAL

The final three reports shown to the Inquiry had a more personal nature.

The first was an SDS report, dated 23 January 1980, about a man called Phil Evans. He is described as ‘a long-standing member of the SWP [Socialist Workers Party], who lives at [redacted], a single man, he is employed as a sub editor, at. a publishing firm called Engineering Today Ltd’ and the address is given.

The report continued:

‘Although a committed revolutionary socialist, Evans rarely plays an active part in SWP activities, but conveys his politics by means of cartoons submitted to left wing publications. He has recently completed a series of cartoons to be included in a book written by Tariq Ali, entitled Trotsky for Beginners.’

Despite admitting that Evans had no serious role in the SWP, he was spied on to a degree that the reporting provided details of his employer and landlord, and listed the same info about his partner, a fellow member of the SWP and a primary school teacher in Newham. A photo of Evans was also included.

Then we saw a report written by a Chief Inspector of the SDS, detailing a loan Ali had made to the IMG bookshop. It is stamped ‘BOX 500’, code for it having been copied to MI5.

Ali was confounded:

‘How could that be relevant to anything? It’s perfectly accurate. The IMG bookshop was in trouble, I’d got some royalties from book sales, et cetera, and I gave them a loan. Full stop.

TOTAL FICTION

The final SDS report shown was signed by a Sergeant Fisher of the SDS, countersigned by Chief Inspector Conrad Dixon, founder of the unit. As with the last one, it had been copied to MI5.

Dated October 1968, it reports ‘intimate contact’ between Ali and a young man second year student at a teacher training college, who had been president of his Students’ Union.

Ali was flabbergasted:

‘It is total fiction. I cannot believe it. To suggest that I had intimate contact with a male students’ union president is bizarre. I have never been gay or bisexual; there is no truth to it whatsoever’

Ali was asked if he would like to add anything else, now that he has seen the huge bundle of documents prepared for this ‘tranche’ of Inquiry hearings. These comprise 5,263 pages, and were served five weeks ago. Attempting to read all of them before the start of the Inquiry is roughly equivalent to reading all of Lord of the Rings twice a week for five weeks straight.

These are documents the Inquiry will have had ready to release ahead of the original pre-Covid scheduled start in June. Why were they not released earlier? Why, when the Inquiry says it has a million pages, are core participants seeing such a small fraction, yet served too late to be properly comprehended?

DEPRIVATION THEN DELUGE

It is a pattern familiar to many victims of state injustice. They are first ignored; then the injustice is denied; then disclosure is delayed; then, finally, comes an avalanche of irrelevance to overwhelm and thus deflect those who would hold the state to account.

Ali merely said that, unsurprisingly, ‘I haven’t been able to go through them all as thoroughly as I would like, because as you’ve already demonstrated, a lot of them are quite repetitive or irrelevant.’

Ali then shared an unsettling anecdote.

‘Around 1995 or 1996 I was going for a jog round Hampstead Heath and I was stopped by a person, a male, younger than me, and he “Are you so and so?”, and I said, I am. He said, “I’m sorry to interrupt your running, but I have something important to say to you.”

‘He said, “My wife used to work at GCHQ, and can I just ask you two questions to confirm you are the person? Did you, in 1980, break up with your partner and you had a young daughter, six years old?” I said I did.

‘And he said, “It is you. My wife was detailed to listen to all your phone conversations. And she listened quite a few days to your daughter crying, you crying, you reading stories to her, your daughter pleading with you to come back to your old apartment. And she finally couldn’t take it and said, ‘I didn’t join GCHQ to spy on people,’ and gave in her resignation.”

‘So I said, Well, give her a big hug from me. I’d had no idea that I was still under surveillance.’

The next questions were from Rajiv Menon QC, who sought to let Ali give some explanation of himself and his circumstances.

Menon asked Ali for his memories of the police raid on the Black Dwarf offices in 1968. It was the one mentioned earlier, when the police knew there was a diagram of a Molotov cocktail behind a poster. Ali said the police weren’t there long and did not seize anything.

TRUE SPIES

Menon then reminded Ali of the 2002 BBC spycops documentary True Spies.

Spycop Wilf Knight described a huge political phone tapping operation, and named Ali as a target. Ali said he and his friends knew their phones were tapped. They had even planned a fake rendezvous on the phone and when they checked, the police were there.

The True Spies documentary also revealed that – in addition to being raided, tapped and having his mail opened – Ali was spied upon further, as spycops had keys to the Black Dwarf office. This can only result from a copy being made by someone who was a trusted, integral part of the organisation.

Menon said that we now know that the person who copied the keys used the name ‘Dick Epps‘. However, Ali has no recollection of this person.

THE NEED FOR PHOTOS

Menon asked if seeing a photo of ‘Epps’ might help. Ali said it might well do. The Inquiry has not provided him with one, and so has missed out on any memories he may have.

A long time ago, the Inquiry promised to publish photos of spycops in their undercover guise. After much to-ing and fro-ing, it was provided with a number of such pictures by non state core participants, with all the stipulated copyright authorisations. It then decided not to publish them after all.

OPPOSING THE VIETNAM WAR

Menon asked Ali why he’d opposed the Vietnam War so actively.

Ali replied that it had been given extensive TV coverage, and the scale of violence and torture was obvious and astonishing:

‘What we saw every day was non-stop bombing, use of napalm, use of chemical weapons, the burning out of whole villages, with women and children rushing out screaming in agony. And I remember one CBS reporter Morley Safer describing and filming Marines burning a village, killing people, saying, “And this is what we are fighting for: freedom”.’

Menon returned to the March 1968 demonstration in London. Ali explained that the route had been agreed with police, and included Grosvenor Square, where the American embassy was located.

Ali explained that they were so surprised by the number of people present that they felt the agreed route wouldn’t work and asked the police to take it the other way round the Square, but this was refused.With the backing up of the crowd, people pushed against the lines, scuffles broke out, and the police line was broken.

Menon asked Ali what was different that day compared to earlier protests he had seen. Ali replied:

‘what was new about the March ’68 demonstration was that a very large number of people were insistent on determining their own agenda and not being pushed around. And the violence was actually minimal, compared to what happened later in the poll tax riots, or the Black ghettos. But that was enough to create shock waves, that this was actually happening in Grosvenor Square outside the US Embassy. That’s about it.’

Next, Menon showed a document and asked Ali about Mr A, who had been arrested for handing out a leaflet outside the meeting of the Notting Hill branch of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and was subsequently charged with incitement to riot.

Ali said he didn’t know Mr A well, but that he’d seen him with a Maoist group and a Black Power group.

SOUTHALL SURVIVOR

Menon asked about the brutality Ali suffered in Southall in 1979. Ali confirmed that he was never given any explanation for the raid on the house where he was sheltering with Misty in Roots, saying:

‘we were never told that, and no police officer felt the need to inform us. I don’t think anyone knew. Basically, I think that they had decided that they had to make an example of the anti-fascist demonstrators.’

Turning to the killing of school teacher Blair Peach on the same day, Menon showed the Inquiry a further Special Branch document, reporting on a public meeting of the Camden Anti-Nazi League entitled ‘Who Killed Blair Peach?’

Menon explained the code next to Ali’s name: “RF” stands for registry file, which means that there was a Special Branch or MI5 file opened on him. The number “65” indicates that that file was opened in 1965. Ali was still a student at Oxford at this time.

One of the other Special Branch reports released today reveals that Ali first came to the notice of police in 1964 when he took part in an anti-apartheid protest in Oxford.

A little further on in the ‘Who Killed Blair Peach?’ report, it shows that Blair Peach himself had a registry file, opened in 1978. It then said ‘the East London Teachers Association has come to the notice of Special Branch on numerous occasions.’ Spycops were targeting Peach and others in their professional capacity as teachers.

BUGS NOT TAPS

Menon returned to the report on the Stop the War Coalition steering committee from March 2003, as seen earlier. He established that, as the meetings weren’t open to the general public, the report must come either from someone on the committee or, perhaps more likely, from a recording device.

Mitting nearly jumped out of his chair. He warned Menon that the Investigatory Powers Act prohibits any reference to the use of intercept unless he deems it necessary in advance. ‘You will be committing an offence if you persist’,’ he intoned. ‘I would warn you not to’.

Menon explained that he was talking about a recording device, a planted bug, rather than an intercept of communications, so the Act doesn’t apply. Mitting apologised and retracted his lawyer-snaring mandibles.

Ali was baffled at why the Stop the War Coalition was so profoundly spied on when it has been completely open in what it’s doing and what its aims are. It was publicly set up, open to all and, as one might expect from a peace campaign, there has been no suggestion of any violence involved.

Concluding, Menon quoted from Ali’s written statement to the Inquiry:

‘my strong feeling is that this Inquiry is likely to be a monumental waste of time. This is because the direction of travel is clear from the questions – to dissect the politics of the victims of police spying, and therefore to turn the spotlight away from the actions of the police. This is the politics of ‘blame the victim’. And no doubt I and others will be declared guilty. Even 50 years on, the State is fighting exactly the same battle it was engaged in in 1968.’

Menon asked if, having been questioned in person today, he felt differently in any way.

Ali replied:

‘when I said “is likely to be a monumental waste of time”, I should have added “for me”, not for any of the other participants. But I don’t think it has been a waste of time for me, I think it’s been quite important, and I hope that the final report reflects the balance as we discussed today, that much of the spying and infiltration, in my opinion, was totally unnecessary.’

Mitting buttered Ali up to assist him further, by asking for a free history lesson on Trotskyism. We stopped tweeting at that point, but if you really want to you can find that bit at the end of today’s official transcript.

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Tranche 1, Phase 1, Day 7

10 November 2020

Evidence from:

Imran Khan QC (Baroness Doreen Lawrence)

Heather Williams QC (Neville Lawrence OBE)

Imran Khan QC (Michael Mansfield QC)

Andrew Trollope QC (Azhar Khan, Miscarriages of justice)

Dave Morris (Social & environmental activists, [appearing in person])

Imran Khan QC (The Monitoring Group, Justice campaigns)

Pete Weatherby QC (Newham Monitoring Project [Justice campaigns], & Core Participants who are Political, Social & environmental activists)

The final scheduled day of opening statements at the Undercover Policing Inquiry was centred around the moving stories of people who were spied on as part of justice campaigns. These are mostly families whose loved ones have died at the hands of the police, or whose deaths had investigations that were scandalously inadequate.

Several themes recurred from the spied-upon:

• the need for the Inquiry to centre their experience and knowledge;
• not taking police statements at face value;
• the need for a diverse panel to advise a rich, white, male Chair who cannot properly understand systemic discrimination;
• the need for live-streaming the hearings to stop it being a private inquiry, which is being done by other inquiries.

All of it seemed to bounce right off Sir John.

Neither Helen Steel (delayed from yesterday), nor Dave Smith’s statements (delayed from Friday) have been allotted new dates as yet.

Imran Khan QC
(Baroness Doreen Lawrence)

Imran Khan opened proceedings, representing Baroness Lawrence, campaigner and mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence.

Khan stated that Baroness Lawrence has lost confidence in the ability of the Inquiry to get to the truth of why her family was spied upon. She is also disappointed with the Metropolitan Police’s statement that they have undergone a substantial change in their. She thinks the Met remains institutionally racist.

Ethnic minority people are over policed and under protected. This is illustrated by disproportionate use of stop and search against young Black people today.

The 1998 Macpherson inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s death should have been the end of it. The Met claimed to have already given all evidence to Macpherson. This was a bare-faced lie.

CORRUPTION AND LIES

In 2012, it was reported that there was detailed evidence of one of the investigating detective’s criminality that was held back from the public, the Lawrence family’s legal team, and the Macpherson inquiry. These revelations led to the Ellison Review, which also found spycops had targeted the Lawrences.

Khan then outlined the well-known background of the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the incompetent and corrupt police investigation that followed. Stephen Lawrence was murdered at just 18 years old in 1993 in South London whist waiting for a bus. Justice was slow and by no means reached. Baroness Lawrence still mourns the death of her son.

Khan said that the same racism that led to the murder of Stephen and let his killers walk free, still exists. All the police involved with the botched initial investigation were promoted or have since retired, not one of them has been disciplined, let alone sacked.

Baroness Lawrence said:

‘To lose a child is unthinkable. To be fighting for justice for him 27 years later is inexcusable’.

Five years later, in 1998, Macpherson made his findings, which included the fact that police attending to the scene of Stephen’s murder did nothing to try to save him. Khan says it seems ‘the police did not want to get their hands dirty with a Black man’s blood’.

SPYCOPS DIGGING FOR DIRT

In 2013, they learned that police spied on the family’s campaign and ‘sought dirt’ to discredit them and their supporters. Undercover officer Peter Francis said he was just one of four officers tasked with doing so. However, the Lawrence family were law abiding, so there was no dirt for the undercovers to find.

Francis was then tasked to find dirt on people more peripheral to the campaign, using names passed on by the family liaison officers purportedly supporting the family. The police officer referred to as HN78 (‘Bobby Lewis’), interviewed in the Ellison Review, and picked up information on the Lawrence campaign.

The Lawrence family’s campaign was one of many such family justice campaigns targeted by undercover police. Police resources that should have been spent catching killers were instead used to obstruct justice in this way.

The Lawrences then wrote to the Home Secretary saying the Met hadn’t given a satisfactory explanation about the allegations of spying. They asked for a public, transparent inquiry. Home Secretary said no, unless the Ellison report recommended it. The report, when it came, did indeed recommend a public inquiry.

Baroness Lawrence said that a public inquiry was the only way to conduct a satisfactory investigation as internal police investigations cannot be trusted. Khan went on to outline the various investigations conducted – and the broken promises made by the police.

The Home Secretary finally ordered the undercover policing public inquiry in 2014, remarking that ‘it is deplorable the family have had to wait so long’. The irony isn’t lost on core participants, finding themselves nearly seven years later at the very start of an Inquiry that has swathed itself in secrecy.

HOLLOW PROMISES

In 2014, the Met Commissioner said all material about the spying on the family would be released. The Lawrence family have received absolutely nothing since then. They still don’t know why they were spied on. Should the police have given these files to the Inquiry in the meantime, Baroness Lawrence wants them to be handed over to her now.

Baroness Lawrence is exhausted by decades of hollow, hypocritical promises that are never delivered on. She wants to know the extent to which the Met’s Commissioner at the time, Paul Condon, knew about, or authorised the spying on the her family. On the one hand, she has been told there was no direct spying, yet on the other the Met have already apologised for it – what is the truth?

The culture of the police has played a part in creating miscarriages of justice and covering up racism. Public apologies aren’t matched by real reform. For instance, the one whistle-blower, Peter Francis, still faces the threat of prosecution for coming forward. While Francis’ spying was reprehensible, the Met’s intransigence and denials are much worse. He must be be given the assurances he seeks about immunity from prosecution.

JUSTICE DELAYED, JUSTICE DENIED

It is 27 years since Stephen’s murder, yet the senior police officers involved in the investigation were only referred for the possibility of misconduct charges last week.

Baroness Lawrence trusted Mark Ellison’s investigation as he’d secured the convictions of two of Stephen’s killers. His recommendations were clear. In contrast, she said, although the Undercover Policing Inquiry was supposed to be a ‘proper, transparent inquiry, rigorous in pursuit of the truth’ it has turned out to be secretive and ‘we should be able to see every officer who chose to spy on us’.

Khan contrasted the open way that Baroness Lawrence campaigned, despite hostility from the police with the anonymity granted to the police. She didn’t have the luxury of hiding, so neither should the undercover police. The Met, unless forced to do otherwise, will seek to avoid accountability and hide evidence. They can’t be trusted to simply offer it up to the Inquiry.

DIVERSITY OR FAILURE

The Macpherson Inquiry only succeeded with the help of a diverse panel advising. Khan also explained the vital context of the racism surrounding the spying. If the Chair doesn’t understand this, then surely point Baroness Lawrence makes is proven: a diverse panel is therefore needed.

The idea that the Special Demonstration Squad operated lawfully and in the public interest is nonsense. Clearly, there is no good reason to spy on any of Baroness Lawrence’s campaigning.

Khan concluded: ‘We must have the truth’, and then quoted Baroness Lawrence:

‘I was a happy married woman with three gorgeous children. Now I have lost a son and I am divorced, but that’s only a tiny part of what has changed. Unless you’ve lost a child you can’t understand the depth of heartache I’ve felt… and would give up all I have to go back to the seconds before Stephen died. I simply ask for justice’.

The accompanying written opening statement from Imran Khan QC on behalf of Baroness Doreen Lawrence

Heather Williams QC
(Neville Lawrence OBE)

Heather Williams opened by saying why she was here and, in a sense, why we were all here.

On 22nd April 1993 Stephen Lawrence was murdered by racists in Eltham while waiting for a bus. He was stabbed by a gang of white youths who used racist language. The initial murder investigation was completely inadequate; during it Dr Lawrence felt as if he was in a constant battle with police.

The Macpherson Inquiry decided that institutional racism was apparent in the police investigation into Stephen’s death and in his family’s treatment by officers. These failings meant that Stephen’s killers largely escaped justice.

This has impacted on all of Dr Neville Lawrence’s life. As the Macpherson Inquiry demonstrated, the police were not on their side. Despite that Inquiry’s historic recognition of institutional racism in the police, Dr Lawrence believes too little progress has been made. He feels the state has failed him.

Against this background, the allegation of police interference with his family has only further undermined his confidence in the police. Intelligence on Dr Lawrence was passed up the chain of command by police, and an undercover officer attended the Macpherson inquiry pretending to be a supporter of the family. The existence of this was also kept secret from Lord Macpherson.

How then can the public have confidence in policing of Black communities if resources are used like this against them? It appears to many that Black lives don’t matter to the police.

LONG TERM SPYING

Williams made it clear that Dr Lawrence doesn’t have confidence in the Inquiry. He wanted to participate in an inquiry capable of finding the truth and stopping these abuses from being repeated in the future. However, he, like so many victims of spycops, has had almost no disclosure of documents.

The Met didn’t just spy on the Lawrence family’s campaign in the immediate aftermath of the murder. Five years later, as the Macpherson Inquiry was heading towards its conclusion, the Met had a spy in the Lawrence family camp – a Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) officer using the name Dave Hagan.

The undercover officer met with Richard Walton who was part of the team who were providing the Commissioner’s response to the Inquiry, feeding them information on the family’s thinking. That meeting was brokered by SDS boss Bob Lambert.

In 2013, we learned from whistle-blower SDS officer Peter Francis that undercover police had targeted Black justice campaigns, including the Lawrences. Alongside that, the family liaison officers were gathering intelligence rather than concerning themselves with the welfare of the family.

However, it was not until 2016 that the truth about undercover police undermining the Macpherson Inquiry was revealed. Walton, by then, was running spycops operations as the head of Counter Terrorism Command. Like many guilty police officers who find themselves under investigation, he resigned to avoid disciplinary charges.

A SPY IN THE FAMILY CAMP

A document from the foundation of the SDS in 1968 says the unit was created to provide information on public order, and related intelligence. Twenty years later it said it was concerned with terrorism and politically motivated crime. Whichever, the grieving, devastated Lawrence family fell under none of these categories. Therefore there was no excuse for snooping around the Lawrences, whether directly or otherwise.

And yet, undercover police were circling the Lawrence family, looking to smear them instead of catching their son’s killers. Macpherson found the Lawrences were treated unfavourably because of their race. The 2014 Stephen Lawrence Review by Mark Ellison QC discovered undercover officer ‘Dave Hagan’ spied on the family campaign at a time when the family was taking legal action against the police. Hagan reported back personal details as well as the Lawrence family’s campaign strategy.

The police’s self-investigation into undercover policing, Operation Herne, started in 2012. Its 2014 report centred on allegations of spying on Lawrences. Like Ellison, they did not find ‘smoking gun’ documentation proving that there was an instruction to spy on the Lawrence family. But, in a unit where creating written evidence was often avoided, we cannot rely on documents. The Inquiry must rely on oral evidence.

SDS officers routinely ‘hoovered up’ all knowledge and retained it, ignoring issues of privacy, the third Operation Herne report was published in 2014. Numerous undercovers have confirmed they received no training on collateral intrusion and that they took no account of the issue.

A 2016 Independent Police Complaints Commission report said Lambert and Walton would face disciplinary charges if they were still serving. It was at this point that Lambert finally resigned from his academic posts. Walton is now working for an opaquely funded right-wing think tank that calls Extinction Rebellion extremists.

WHEN WILL WE GET THE TRUTH?

It’s plain there was no legal authority or justification for the intrusion on the Lawrence family. And, nearly seven years in, we’ve had almost no information from the Inquiry. It appears to have done nothing significant towards its purpose. Dr Lawrence has received no substantive disclosure.

The delays to the UCPI have increased the distress of victims. We are promised disclosure will happen, at an unspecified time, but we cannot properly contribute until that is done.

Dr Lawrence wants to know the full extent to which undercovers spied on him at the time of Stephen’s death and afterward. He has many questions that he wants the Inquiry to answer. He does not think a white family in the same position would have been treated this way.

Williams went on to say that the Ellison Report only focuses on 1993 and 1998, which missed out the period in between, including the time of Stephen’s inquest. This also leaves questions to be answered. For instance, why was Dave Hagan allowed to befriend the family and attend the Macpherson inquiry?

Further, what did Hagan tell Walton at the 1998 meeting? Was this information used at the Macpherson inquiry? Who else saw it? Who knew about the meeting? Lambert was Hagan’s handler, speaking to him several times a day. Dr Lawrence also wants to hear what he has to say, as well as Hagan’s other managers.

DON’T TRUST THE PREPETRATORS

Due to the police’s tendency to destroy records, the Inquiry should take control of all documents rather than trusting the police not to pre-sort the files to avoid incriminating themselves. Williams then went on to speak of Neville’s concern about particular officers being granted anonymity. These are HN109 who was Peter Francis’ manager, HN101 who was also involved in his tasking, HN86 the SDS boss 1993-1996 who gave the order to find dirt on Lawrences, and HN58, the boss 1997-2001 so who will have known about the 1998 meeting with Walton.

Heather Williams made the point that almost all non-state core participants have been making since the Inquiry began: if you give a spied-upon person a cover name, they are more likely to be able to give evidence about that person, but with just a number that is impossible and we only get the officer’s own account.

Williams then quoted Lord Bingham, a senior member of the judiciary: ‘Publicity is a powerful disinfectant’.

Beyond the secrecy, Dr Lawrence is, like Baroness Lawrence, particularly concerned by the lack of a diverse panel in the ‘fact-finding’ part of the Inquiry as well as the anonymity given to the undercover officers.

Where there’s evidence of racism, police must be held to account through the legal system if there’s to be any confidence in that system. Dr Lawrence has been failed badly by institutions over the years, and hopes that he will not be failed again at the Inquiry.

The accompanying written opening statement from Heather Williams QC on behalf of Neville Lawrence OBE

Imran Khan QC
(Michael Mansfield QC)

The Inquiry continued with the return of Imran Khan QC, this time speaking for Michael Mansfield QC, who a a core particpant due to his role as a lawyer representing the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence.

Khan started with reference to the situation today, saying the State acts with increasing hostility towards the legal profession, with sneering from the Prime Minister about ‘lefty human rights lawyers’ who are ‘hamstringing’ the criminal justice system.

The Home Secretary dismissed lawyers objectións to her similar comments, saying they should ‘get back to work’, even though she was actually objecting to their work.

When the State appears to be having a wholesale attack on lawyers, there are grave consequences.

Khan said:

‘It is chilling to consider that lawyers might have failed to take on cases or acted otherwise in accordance with their duty, in the knowledge that they might attract the unwanted attention of the State and its institutions.’

Mansfield wonders if we’re in an era where the legal profession is imperilled. The State has always tried to silence critics, but the scale of it varies and this moment is especially precarious.

MICHAEL MANSFIELD’S CAREER

Michael Mansfield has long been targeted by undercover police, as he has represented people perceived as a threat since the early 1970s, such as the Angry Brigade.

He continued to represent people who suffered at the hands of the police, e.g. (with Gareth Peirce) the Birmingham 6, families at the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, and the families of Jean Charles de Menezes, Pat Finucane and Stephen Lawrence. Among his clients are Ricky Reel’s family, who were targeted by spycops while Ricky’s killers walk free.

If you don’t have lawyers who are willing and able to challenge the State, you remove the right to challenge at all. Yet lawyers that bring such challenges are subjected to attacks and undercover operations.

The United Nations Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers say that states must ensure equal access to lawyers of people’s choosing, who must be able to work without intimidation or hindrance.

Undercover surveillance of Mansfield had no justifiable reason. There was no ‘public order’ or ‘public interest’ justification, and no criminality. However, if state sanctioned tactics of unlawful surveillance were designed to intimidate lawyers such as Mansfield, they failed.

LOW EXPECTATIONS OF THE UCPI

He does not have high hopes of this Inquiry, as it is held under the Inquiries Act 2005. Mansfield scathingly descibes the Act as ‘legislation that serves to undermine the rule of law, erode protection of human rights, shake public confidence, and lessen further the independence of the judicial and legal system.’

Furthermore, it was not properly debated, it repealed earlier, more effective laws, and it does not allow parliamentary scrutiny of Inquiry decisions. Also, arbitrary appointments mean such inquiries are never truly independent.

Similarly hasty and equally egregious is the CHIS Bill currently being rushed through Parliament will allow any state agent to be authorised to commit any crime, it’s an open invitation to damage and destroy lives.

RECOMMENDATIONS NOT ACTIONS

In conclusion, Michael Mansfield takes on cases that are uncomfortable to the state, but this should have no bearing on how he is treated. A lawyer is a lawyer. Mansfield is just one of many who have been spied on. This Inquiry must find out the full extent, why it was done, and who authorised it. Mansfield wants a sincere apology to him and to the other core participants.

There is a huge risk that the police will just ignore what they see as yet another set of recommendations. So many hard-won inquiries are just left to gather dust in the Home Office. If the Inquiry fails in this, fear and intimidation could replace fearlessness among lawyers, and we would lose the capacity for challenging state wrongdoing.

Mansfield will not go away quietly. He is clear that for an Inquiry to have real purpose it not only needs powerful and far-reaching guidelines and recommendations, but also their effective implementation. We must criminalise unjustified surveillance of lawyers.

The accompanying written opening statement from Imran Khan QC on behalf of Michael Mansfield QC

Andrew Trollope QC
(Azhar Khan, Miscarriages of justice)

Before lunch, the Inquiry heard from Andrew Trollope QC on behalf of Azhar Khan, a solicitor who was targeted by undercover officers and wrongly prosecuted.

In 2007, the Metropolitan police conceived a covert ‘sting’ operation, culminating in the arrest of Azhar Khan for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. This new and unique operation went beyond covert surveillance, and was a plan for undercover officers to pose as potential criminal clients in order to set him up.

SPYCOPS ENTRAP A SOLICITOR

Azhar Khan began his own solicitor’s practice in 2005, one of the few BAME lawyers to do so.
Settled in a deprived area’of London, he served important local needs, doing mostly legal aid defence work and working for local charities as well. He also worked to encourage BAME men and particularly women to get ahead in the profession.

For some reason police took exception to his work and launched Operation Castration or Castrol. This involved undercover officers posing as criminals to become his clients over a sustained period in order to try to induce him to commit crime. They would have themselves arrested as drug dealers or money launderers then request Khan as their lawyer. The ‘suspects’ were then released on bail.

This sting operation lasted 18 months and involved four spycops and the complicity of six other officers who made the staged arrests, as well as senior officers who reviewed the operation.

Khan’s ‘clients’ offered him the opportunity to launder £50,000, which he refused. They also showed him big bags of tablets, supposedly drugs, offering them to him. Posing as someone from organised crime, one of them kept ringing Khan, seeking meetings and repeatedly tried to lure him into criminal deals.

NO EVIDENCE

By September 2009, there was no evidence of wrongdoing at all. The officer in charge wanted to end the operations. But the spycops trying to dupe Khan said they’d had a meeting where he’d agreed to a crime – this was a complete lie – which led to a renewal of the authorisation.

The spycops were persistently trying to trap Khan into committing crime for a very long period of time, in the face of his impeccable integrity. There were no real grounds, nothing even alleged, that could justify it. It was plainly illegal.

At no stage did Khan agree to any of the various crimes they offered. Nonetheless, police raided his home and office in December 2009, charging him with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

The police later conceded that the staged arrests and procedures at the police stations were designed to deceive Azhar Khan in the course of his professional practice, in order to try and find evidence of criminal conduct by him.

ABUSE OF PROCESS

The objective of the operation was not to investigate any crime of which Azhur Khan was suspected. Rather, it was to ‘integrity test’ his conduct as a criminal defence solicitor by using undercover officers to suggest the commission of crimes to see how he would react’. Over and over again.

Trollope explained that ‘no evidence of any offence on the part of Azhur Khan was gleaned. The clear aim was to put him and his practice City Law Solicitors out of business.’

He continued, ‘one of the most legally and morally objectionable features of the operation was that these attempts were so persistent in the face of Azhur Khan’s repeated failure agree to the suggestions of crime.’

Eventually, the case was thrown out of court, the judge ruling it was abuse of process with no case to answer.

A RACIST OPERATION

The very basis of the operation was racist. As an Asian lawyer, it seems he was singled out in a way that would never have been done if he were white. All the undercover officers in the operation were BAME. Did they think Khan would be more liable to commit crime with them?

Where did they get the idea from? Who else has been treated this way? Which other officers might have given them tactics and advice?

This was spycops acting as agents provocateur, for a long period, against someone for whom there was no evidence of corruption. Khan was a victim of a miscarriage of justice. The Inquiry must find the full extent and justifications of this operation.

The accompanying written opening statement from Andrew Trollope QC on behalf of Azhar Khan

Dave Morris
(Social & environmental activists, [appearing in person])

Dave Morris has been a community and political activist for nearly 50 years. He’s best known for being one of the defendants in the ‘McLibel’ Trial along with Helen Steel, but his work encompasses many more issues beyond that.

Just as at the McLibel trial 30 years ago, he has no lawyer covering that period at the Undercover Policing Inquiry and is instead speaking for himself.

Morris opened by outlining his anarchist, workplace, environmental, community, and other activism.

In the 1980s, he was involved in London Greenpeace (a small collective founded in 1971, independent from the later-formed Greenpeace International) which was infiltrated by undercover officers from the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS).

The group began a publicity campaign focused on McDonald’s as an example of what all transnational corporations are doing – opposing their environmental destruction, promotion of junk food, treatment of workers, abuse of animals, exploitation of children, and more. They produced a leaflet called What’s Wrong With McDonald’s. The burger giant sued for libel, presumably expecting them to back down. It was a drastic misjudgement.

McLIBEL

What happened next was the stuff of fiction. Steel and Morris couldn’t afford lawyers and represented themselves in court (assisted behind the scenes by a young barrister prepared to work for free called Keir Starmer) against a large McDonald’s legal team led by a QC charging £2,000 a day. McDonald’s had objected to the whole leaflet, so Steel and Morris had to defend every word. It became the longest trial in English history. In the end there were a number of damning judgements against the fast food giant, and versions of the leaflet were being handed out in millions all over the world.

You can see more about the case in the McLibel documentary and at the campaign website from back in the day McSpotlight.org (which was one of the first of its kind in 1996).

The McLibel Support Campaign around the trial was also infiltrated by spycops. They didn’t know this at the time, so it never came up in court. The spycops weren’t just attending meetings, they played an active part. In 2011, Morris and Steel discovered that ‘Bob Robinson’, who had significantly contributed to the leaflet, was actually undercover police officer Bob Lambert.

PRIVATE SPIES

As well as undercover police infiltrating London Greenpeace, McDonald’s sent at least seven spies into the group, one of whom deceived a genuine member into a six-month relationship.

Sid Nicholson, McDonald’s Vice President and Head of Security, oversaw that spying operation. He’d come to the firm from being the former Metropolitan Police Chief Superintendant in Brixton, following a career in the police in apartheid South Africa. He had stated from the witness box that McDonald’s security department was wholly comprised of ex-police officers. Nicholson had admitted asking friends on the force for information on activists and having a two-way exchange, including home addresses, which was illegal.

Morris referred to footage, obtained from McDonald’s during the McLibel trial and shown in the McLibel documentary, of a London Greenpeace protest at McDonald’s HQ (East Finchley) in 1989. McDonald’s spy Michelle Hooker can be seen handing out anti-McDonald’s leaflets next to spycop John Dines, who scandalously developed a long, intimate relationship with Helen Steel. Sid Nicholson had testified that a Special Branch officer was given ‘a perch’ next to himself at the HQ to jointly observe that very protest in the film. It was later discovered that during the case, yet another spycop Matt Rayner also had an abusive sexual relationship with a woman living next door to Morris in Tottenham.

John Dines and Helen Steel lived together as a couple whilst she, Morris and Keir Starmer made pre-trial preparations. Dines then disappeared. How much privileged legal advice was Dines illegally privy to whilst living with Ms Steel, and what was passed on to McDonald’s?

Steel and Morris sued the Met for sharing their personal information with McDonald’s. The police choose to settle the case out of court, including apologising, paying compensation and committing to inform all London police officers not to do share confidential information to third parties.

The McLibel judgment found that McDonald’s had been responsible for industrial-scale breaches of employment laws and the welfare rights of animals. yet the people who were exposing this were the ones targeted by spycops.

In 2005, the European Court of Human rights found the McLibel case had violated their right to a fair trial and freedom of expression, and they were compensated by the British Government. The Court ruled:

‘The Government had contended that, as the applicants were not journalists, they should not attract the high level of protection afforded to the press under Article 10. However, in a democratic society even small and informal campaign groups, such as London Greenpeace, had to be able to carry on their activities effectively.’

Neither McDonald’s nor the police were ever held to account for any of this.

TARGETED FOR BEING PROGRESSIVE

Morris based most of the rest of his speech to the Inquiry on a statement on undercover policing signed by 90 of the Inquiry’s core participants, nearly half of all those in the non-police/state groups.

Since 1968, more than 1,000 groups campaigning in the UK for a better society and world have been spied upon and infiltrated, by secret unaccountable political spycops. They targeted a huge range of groups – environmentalists, trade unions, women’s rights, racial justice, LGBTQ rights, animal rights, as well as campaigning against war, corporate power, repression, and police brutality.

The groups represented in this Inquiry were not terrorists, but were pushing for positive social change in an overwhelmingly public and open way.

Many of the groups spycops targeted have been vindicated by history, their ideas have become mainstream orthodoxy, and some have resulted in legal and other formal recognition by society. Yet any group that challenged the established order seemed to have been deemed a legitimate target of the secret political policing units.

SPYCOPS’  CRIMES

Spycops weren’t merely observing, they infiltrated personal lives. Fake friendships were developed and exploited. Many people, especially women, were deceived into intimate and abusive relationships.

Children have been fathered and then abandoned, identities of dead children stolen to provide ‘cover’ names. Spycops actively influenced groups. Many arrests were made that resulted in miscarriages of justice. Family campaigns, people seeking justice for loved ones killed by police, were deliberately undermined by spycops.

Bugging a phone is recognised as a breach of human rights and police have to apply for a warrant. Spycops hacking people’s lives is infinitely worse and should be totally unacceptable to everyone.

Spycops weren’t aberrations or ‘rogue officers’. This spying was established and conducted with the full sanction of the state and supported by its apparatus and taxpayer funding.

By targeting such groups, spycops show institutional discrimination, racism, sexism and anti-democratic action, including industrial-scale breaches of laws and charters that protect basic human rights and the right to protest.

THE ‘THREAT’ OF SOCIAL JUSTICE, OR RETROSPECTIVE ‘JUSTIFICATIONS’ FOR SPYING?

If spycops are worried about political violence, why were fascists largely left to their own devices while we were spied on? The police plainly have political bias.

Why did the state see social justice as a threat to society? Why didn’t they put spycops into financial corporations, hedge funds, military elites, and power-mad establishment political parties? Such institutions employ and promote daily, mass institutional violence – war, poverty, exploitation of workers, colonialism and environmental destruction – reinforced by PR and manipulation of society for their own selfish ends. There’s your actual threat to public order and well being.

What should we count as ‘extremism’? The Climate Emergency, said Morris, is the most extreme threat we face. In 1968, the American Petroleum Institute commissioned scientists to investigate burning fossil fuels, they discovered ‘there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe.’ That was the same time spycops were set up. The oil industry has obstructed efforts to tackle it. Has the oil industry ever been targeted by spycops? If not, why not?

Morris however noted the public outrage at the beginning of 2020 over campaign groups being lumped in with fascist and other terrorist groups in police counter-terrorism documents. This included the Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement which had a few months earlier been blockading roads in central London for over a week calling for action to prevent climate catastrophe. In response to the controversy, the Minister for Security was forced to admit to Parliament that XR was not and should not be categorised as ‘extremist’. So just who are the real extremists?

Morris also tackled MI5’s seemingly dominant role over the secret police spying operations from the very beginning. He stated that MI5 was seeking information about, and the undermining of, groups and movements which are deemed to support ‘subversion of the State’. But Morris said they should look elsewhere – for the last 30 years mass subversion of the State, supported by successive Governments, has been systematically and continuously carried out by unaccountable multinational corporations seeking deregulation of laws protecting society from unrestrained profiteering, and taking over formerly nationalised industries and sectors so that a tiny few can profit from what were once State-run public services.

Adding insult to injury is the deliberate widespread use of ‘tax havens’ and other so-called ‘loopholes’ to annually avoid billions of pounds of taxes due to the State which could have been used for our struggling public services. Millions of people have suffered as a result. But have there been any undercover officers targeting of this serious, industrial-scale daily subversion of the State? He guessed never.

PROTECTING THE PERPETRATORS

It took five years of spycops revelations – largely from victims’ own research – to get the promise of the public inquiry, and five more for it to begin. Police and the Inquiry have consistently refused to release lists of officers, or groups targeted, or relevant documents.

Victims of spycops are dismayed by the Inquiry’s prioritising of the protection of the perpetrators’ privacy above the right of victims and the public to know the truth.
As the people who brought this scandal to public awareness, we’ve worked hard to get the justice we and the public are entitled to.

We remain determined to bring the whole murky political policing operation into the public spotlight where it belongs.

DAMAGE LIMITATION

This is supposed to be a public inquiry, but it’s more like a police damage-limitation exercise. The hearings are not yet publicly accessible and nor will they be live-streamed, which is the only way to ensure the public and victims can follow it.

Morris endorsed the 13 recommendations from the People’s Public Inquiry into Secret Political Policing, Conway Hall, London in July 2018 which, among other things, call for the release of all officers’ names & political files, an admission of institutional discrimination, and the permanent disbanding of the political secret police.

Having covered so much nefarious activity, Morris ended on an optimistic note. Despite being undermined by spycops, movements for positive change are still here and have had many successes. Such movements are needed now more than ever. A better world is possible and it’s up to all of us to support – rather than pay spycops to undermine – efforts for real change.

The accompanying written opening statement from Dave Morris

Imran Khan QC
(The Monitoring Group, Justice campaigns)

Imran Khan QC then spoke for the Monitoring Group.

 

The Monitoring Group (TMG) was founded by Suresh Grover, who is still a co-director. It is one of the oldest anti-racist organisations in the UK, carrying out advocacy work and supporting struggles for civil rights among ethnic minority groups and migrants. It occupies a unique place within the UK’s social justice network.

The organisation was founded in Southall, London, in the mid-1970s, and originally called the Southall Monitoring Group (SMG). It was inspired by national and global struggles against apartheid. It has made many achievements over 40 years, and has offered trauma support to more than 1,500 victims of racism over the last decade.

Its earliest campaigns were around the murder of Gurdip Singh Chaggar in June 1976 and Blair Peach, killed during an anti-racist demo in Southall in 1979. Peach’s partner, Celia Stubbs, and her campaign were supported by TMG. It was not until 2010 that the Met released the 1979 report that effectively admitted a police officer had killed Peach.

TMG supported Stephen Lawrence’s family campaign for many years. It also supported the family of Ricky Reel, who was murdered by racists in 1997, and whose family was then targeted by undercover police. Other families supported included that of Michael Menson, also killed in a 1997 attack which, as with Ricky Reel, police wrongly denied was racist in nature. As mentioned earlier in the day, at least 18 such justice campaigns were targeted by undercovers.

Given their involvement with so many spied-on campaigns, the TMG was surely spied upon too. The National Civil Rights Movement (NCRM) was founded by TMG’s Suresh Grover in 1999 to support such campaigns and to push for full implementation of the recommendations from the Macpherson inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence. Undercover police were at the NCRM founding conference. However, Suresh and TMG have had no formal admission they were ever spied on. After five years, they are losing hope that this Inquiry can be transparent and reveal the truth.

POLICE TARGETING OF THE MONITORING GROUP

The first revelation of police surveillance of the Group was made in a 1989 Guardian article. It said, that in 1987 the Southall Monitoring Group was the subject of a report written by Ealing police intelligence officer, PC J.E. Black describing them as a ‘political cell’ set up by the Greater London Council (GLC) to follow an agenda while purporting to be a community organisation.

Police saw anti-racism as being somehow anti-police, and seemed distressed about SMG’s ability to marshal support for causes and cases.

Thereafter, Grover noticed a reluctance from politicians to engage because they did not want to be spied on. There were unexplained burglaries of the office. Grover himself was targeted for arrest. This was not, as the police claimed last week, merely ‘collateral intrusion’ in family justice campaigns. It is a worry then, that Mitting takes the police’s word on that at face value. Operation Herne, the police self-investigation into spycops, effectively treated a lack of surviving files as an implication of innocence – absence of evidence as evidence of absence.

DISLIKE OF RACIAL JUSTICE GROUPS

It’s well established that numerous racial justice groups in the 60s were non-violent yet spied on by the British State fearing civil unrest. That unrest came in 1981, and for the reason the State had feared – ‘racial disadvantage’ was the phrase used by Lord Scarman in his report into the 1981 Brixton disturbances.

Scarman stated:

‘Urgent action is needed if it is not to become an endemic, ineradicable disease threatening the very survival of our society… racial disadvantage and its nasty associate racial discrimination, have not yet been eliminated. They poison minds and attitudes; they are, as long as they remain, and will continue to be a potent factor of unrest’.

The State took none of this on board, instead bringing in Sir Kenneth Newman as Met Commissioner to apply his Northern Ireland experience to Black, Asian and migrant communities in London. There was surely coordination with the Met’s sub-unit of undercover police, the Special Demonstration Squad.

Some people are core participants in the Undercover Policing Inquiry directly because of Newman’s legacy. They were not ‘collateral intrusion’, but deliberately spied upon.

After the 2005 London bombings, TMG worked in Beeston in Leeds, where more than one of the bombers had come from. Grover was twice contacted in the first week by MI5 to discourage him from interacting with the ‘suspect community’.

INQUIRY UNABLE TO INVESTIGATE

As other core participants have mentioned today, Mitting is simply incapable of investigating racism in the police and undercover police if he rejects the Macpherson report’s definition of institutional racism. There must be a diverse panel appointed to help the Chair before the Inquiry starts taking evidence. Otherwise, it cannot fulfil its remit, examining 40 years of undercover police who were guided by bias and discrimination.

Khan recounted psychological studies that show implicit biases even in those who consciously oppose discrimination. An object is more likely to be perceived as a weapon in a Black hand than if it’s in a white one. These studied have proven right those who report subtle discrimination, and people in Mitting’s kind of position would do well to take notice.

Racism does not stand still, it changes size, shape and function. When it becomes institutionalised we are not dealing with prejudice, but power and institutional practices.

By the time this Inquiry reports, it will be nearly 20 years since the Special Demonstration Squad was disbanded. Police will say it is now a historical issue, and that they’ve already learned their lessons. Such assurances cannot be accepted on their own terms, every such claim must be tested by the Inquiry.

To date, TMG has participated in three public inquiries. They initially encouraged people to get involved with this one. They even had the Inquiry’s legal team participate in a public conference they organised. However, the continuing secrecy has been disappointing and damaging to the Inquiry’s credibility.

CREATING ITS OWN PROBLEMS

The Inquiry’s difficulties are of its own makings. It agreed to give spycops anonymity without good reason, and it allowed police and other State bodies to delay it excessively. It has shown remarkable reluctance to address critical areas of racism and sexism because, in reality, it sees them as marginal, issues that are not worthy of its time.

Because of all this, the Inquiry has rejected the chorus of calls for specialist advisers to assist it. In doing all this, the Inquiry has created an uneven playing field tilted in favour of the perpetrators and against their victims.

Like Dave Morris, TMG endorses the 13 recommendations from the People’s Public Inquiry into Secret Political Policing of July 2018.

The Inquiry only exists because of the bravery and tenacity of core participants. It has substance because of the whistle-blower who exposed the skeletons in the first place and journalists who reported the horrors to the public. Its conviction derives from the unshakeable spirit of protestors – Black and white, women and men – who dared to dream for a better world. That dream will live on regardless of the conclusions of this Inquiry.

The accompanying written opening statement from Imran Khan QC on behalf of The Monitoring Group

Pete Weatherby QC
(Newham Monitoring Project [Justice campaigns], & Core Participants who are Political, Social & environmental activists)

Finally, we heard a tremendously powerful and incisive statement from Pete Weatherby QC, speaking for eighteen different core participants.

He began the show with a video clip, of spycop ‘Lynn Watson‘ (EN34) playing the clown.

No, seriously, footage of her being trained up by the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA) Leeds, and then taking part in a range of actions with the Clown Army. These included visits to a military recruitment centre, to the US spy-base at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire. It begins in the car park of Hilary Benn MP’s constituency office.

 

Weatherby asked ‘How on earth was that considered legitimate policing?’

He then showed a picture of spycop ‘Simon Wellings‘ (HN118) wearing a bright orange cardboard ‘tank’ he’d made while infiltrating Globalise Resistance – an anti-war, anti-capitalist network – at an anti-arms trade protest. ‘How was that legitimate policing?’

The absurdity of investing massive resources into groups of this kind illustrated what the debacle of the last fifty years of undercover political policing looks like; farcical yet deeply damaging.

Millions of pounds (which could have been spent on other public budgets) were mis-spent over the decades of State-sanctioned, clandestine activities by the police, monitoring justice campaigns, anti-racism and anti-police violence groups, environmental campaigns, community and solidarity networks, animal rights groups, and the political activism of rebel clowns, musicians, artists, campaigners, and others – the vast majority of them on the political left.

These images do not represent a light-hearted point. There is actually nothing funny to see here. These operations were profoundly sinister, and an affront to democracy itself.

More than five years in to the Inquiry, and none of the groups and individuals he represents have received any meaningful disclosure. It looks likely that they will have to wait until at least 2022 for the Inquiry to deal with their cases.

While ‘Lynn Watson’ and ‘Simon Wellings’ have their rights protected by the Inquiry’s restriction orders, the rights of his clients are treated as secondary. They are all being made to wait.

FACTS WITHOUT DETAILS

For example, the Newham Monitoring Project may have been spied on throughout their thirty year history (from 1980 onwards) but they have yet to be told who spied on them, or when.

His clients include an array of anti-war, anti-arms trade, environmental, anti-hunt, social justice and Palestinian rights activists – some of them know some details of their surveillance and infiltrations, but only because they exposed these undercover activities themselves.

They remain in the dark. The lack of transparency, and the enormous delay, has sapped the trust of non-state core participants, and risks undermining the credibility of the entire Inquiry. This Inquiry, Weartherby declared, needs to do better.

He noted that the live-streaming is due to be switched off tonight for the rest of the five years or so of the Inquiry. Mitting has ruled that ‘in-person access’ will be limited to those core participants who are able to attend in the current circumstances. Everyone else will be left with just a delayed transcript. Other Inquiries have securely broadcast their public hearings, and the refusal to do so here has left people feeling excluded and alienated.

The core participants’ ability to make opening statements has been substantially diminished, by the failure to provide them with even basic facts or disclosure. Did Parliament, when they made the Inquiries Act, ever envisage that an Inquiry would make its core participants blind to what was going on? Of course not.

SECRECY ABOUT SECRETS

Weatherby spoke of the palpable imbalance between State and non-state core participants. The former have all the information and the material, the latter have next to none. This is the very reverse of how a healthy public inquiry should be. The State should be compelled to show their hand, but have largely chosen not to.

That an Inquiry established to shed light on the secretive, undercover activities of the police against ordinary citizens, should itself perpetuate secrecy and obfuscation is beyond irony. This undermines trust, and also promotes failure.

Instead of seeking to side-line non state core participants, or to keep them uninformed, this Inquiry should embrace their knowledge and actively seek out their assistance.

Without their scrutiny, their full and effective participation, the Inquiry may assume that the evidence produced by the spycops and their managers is truthful, correct and reliable, and it will fail to get to the truth.

A public inquiry should be independent and rigorous, not deference to a State narrative, especially not one hell-bent on secrecy, on distortion, and on covering up its wrongdoing.

NOT ASKING FOR THE TRUTH

We have asked the Chair – back in 2019, and ever since – to require the State core participants to provide position statements, that ‘set out their stall’, by this stage of the Inquiry, to hold their hands up to what went wrong, and perhaps even apologise.

Sir John Mitting has the power to make such requests, but has refused to do so, despite his legal duty to maximise openness and disclosure (section 18 of the Inquiries Act), to act in the public interest and with candour.

The Chairs of other current Inquiries – including Grenfell and Manchester Arena – have insisted on position statements and specified the issues to be addressed in them.

The Met claimed just last week that “the Met would assist the Inquiry in every way it can”. Yet they do not intend to comment on the evidence until the very end of the process, many more years down the line. This is not assisting, or acting in the public interest; it only serves to defend the Met.

The police have had plenty of time to examine their own behaviour and, by now, really should be able to admit to their wrong-doings.

The Chair could compel the Met to provide a chronology, and more details of the deployments, who was involved and whether the Met now believes they were justified or not – this would save time and resources – but instead he seems to take the police at their word when they say they no longer use spycops for ‘counter-subversion’, and not insist on answers even to his own questions.

SWAGGERING ARROGANCE

How can all this be described as ‘helping the Inquiry’? This is the swaggering arrogance of an institution which cannot see beyond its own interests, a public body that is hopelessly institutionally defensive, that puts its own reputation above the public interest.

Candour is the oxygen of justice. This Inquiry has two choices: it can either back off, and let the police see what they can get away with, or it can step up, be more robust, and demand position statements.

It’s not just Mitting who wants answers; the core participants and the wider public need them, and are entitled to them.

The delays have already caused huge distress to those involved. Why not save time and money by compelling the State bodies to tell us all: Which undercover operations will they defend? Which will they admit were wrong? Taking this common-sense approach could help the Inquiry gain a valuable commodity – the confidence of non state core participants.

WON’T ADMIT WHAT THEY KNOW

During the last five years, the Met must surely have looked into the deceitful relationships that the spycops formed. Why is it so difficult for them to come clean about the extent of this? Why won’t they shine a light on these practices? And why will the Inquiry not require them to do so?

The Met have already conceded that this Inquiry is likely to find that some deployments were ‘not justifiable’. They must have reached this conclusion for themselves, and in that case they should be able to tell us more details.

Let the police provide their justifications. Let them explain to the public why the mass infiltration of campaign groups for over 50 years was justified. Let them tell us why they infiltrated a clown movement, or a samba band. Surely this is the correct starting point for any investigation into these abuses?

The State should be made to tell us what lessons they have learnt, and what they have undertaken never to do again.

Any pretence that ‘political policing’ only began with the Special Demonstration Squad in 1968 is wrong. The pretence that the police are ‘neutral’ is wrong. Political policing doesn’t just happen elsewhere.

The substantial violations of civil and political rights, and the individual human rights of those involved, are the same as we see in authoritarian regimes around the world.

The Inquiry should remind itself of the rhetoric used by repressive regimes around the world, which seek to silence political voices, which challenge the official narrative, while pretending to respect international human rights norms, including freedom of expression and assembly, and respect for personal autonomy.

HISTORIC WRONGS

Last week we learnt that the likes of the Croydon Libertarians and the Women’s Liberation Movement were spied on in the early 1970s, but this does not ‘beggar belief’.

It is well-documented that the women’s suffrage movement was targeted by spycops. Would the police now seek to justify the State’s infiltration of women campaigning for the right to vote, of anti-slavery campaigns in the 19th century, or other suffrage campaigns, from Peterloo to the Chartists?

Why are these more recent protestors – for nuclear disarmament, against fracking, against road-building and against hospital closures – fair game?

Dissenters are often the drivers of social change. Slavery was abolished as a result of mass campaigns, building on and amplifying slave revolts. Protest and radical dissent has always involved friction with the State, and the State uses this form of policing to undermine that dissent.

The suffragettes and the slavery abolitionists were on the right side of history, and so are those who oppose racism, fox-hunting, and illegal or immoral wars today. The institutional racism of the police, identified and campaigned against by the Newham Monitoring Project (NMP), is now broadly recognised. Though, as this Inquiry illustrates, it remains as entrenched as ever.

DISSENT ISN’T MEANT TO BE CONVENIENT

Civil rights don’t exist to protect those who are comfortable complying with the status quo. They’re not needed for that; they’re a bulwark against authoritarianism.

Demonstrations and protests are often perceived to be a nuisance, or inconvenient, or tiresome, by those who are unsympathetic to their aims. However, freedom of expression is a human right. Citizens don’t need the permission of the police to protest.

In response to the claim made at the Inquiry last week by Oliver Sanders QC, representing the majority of former spycops, it is not ‘totalitarian’ to do what the NMP have done: to call out institutional police racism, or to protect their community from racist attacks. The police claim neutrality, but it was mainly progressive, social justice and left-wing groups that were targeted by the spycops units.

It is not for any limb of the State to insert itself into, curtail or spy on political and social justice activists, nor insert itself into the minutiae of peoples’ lives because they disagree with government policy or campaign to change the law or for a better society.

Lord Hoffman stated that ‘civil disobedience on conscientious grounds has a long and honourable history in this country,’ and went on to recognise that history sometimes vindicated such activism. He talked of ‘conventions’ on both sides: ‘protesters behave with a sense of proportion, and police and prosecutors, on the other hand, behave with restraint’. But what restraint have the spycops shown?

Weatherby then explained more about the core participants he represents.

NEWHAM MONITORING PROJECT

Newham Monitoring Project was established in 1980, by Black activists & white anti-racists, to fight racism in East London. This included racism perpetrated by the police, and the police’s failure to properly investigate racist murders, like that of Akhtar Ali Baig.

In NMP’s own words:

“For NMP the term ‘Black’ was a colour of resistance; it included African, Caribbean, Asian and all other ‘people of colour’ in a political sense. Our enemy was a political enemy which oppressed across Black communities. We recognised the nature of that enemy and the need for unity in combatting it. Whilst we did not ignore the cultural differences which these days increasingly appear to divide the community, we rejected the way ethnicity was used to marginalise our communities”.

In its very earliest incarnation NMP was to be purely a resource for the community through which to collate and disseminate information about the nature and scale of racist violence in Newham. This limited role was very quickly overtaken by the political reality of racist violence. Racism and racist violence are politicising phenomena. Those who experience them are not passive recipients of the violence and the hatred. The experience radicalises and politicises.

NMP developed its political analysis, its understanding of how race and class were linked, and grew over the years. They were well-known and respected for their work, which included combatting racist violence around the home, and defending members of the community from criminalisation. Was this what made the spycops take an interest? NMP have no idea, as they have not been provided with any information as yet.

NMP also countered fascist attacks; less organised, ‘casual’, racist violence from white football gangs; and police racism and violence, including stop and search and the replacement of the ‘sus’ laws with low level Public Order Act prosecutions. Was this the reason they were infiltrated? Because they challenged the police’s wrong-doing?

They articulated and exposed the institutional racism of the police (and other public bodies) long before the Macpherson Inquiry. They highlighted police corruption, they called out police racism. Were they infiltrated because their work threatened to damage the police’s reputation? Were they targeted because they were a Black-led organisation?

Every annual report produced by NMP was sent to the local Newham Commander. These should have already been supplied to this Inquiry, if the Met have upheld their disclosure duties.

Like other non state core participants, NMP are deeply frustrated about the lack of disclosure. What might it show? Did the spycops infiltrate NMP in order to gather information about other justice campaigns? They were connected to many campaigns, some of which are also core participants, like the Lawrence family.

The local police disliked, even hated, NMP. They exposed ‘community policing’ as a lie, at odds with the truth how racialised communities were policed. In the 1980s and 1990s there was an “extraordinary” lack of police accountability, and police violence was routine. The Black Lives Matter movement of this century shows that the structural issues highlighted by NMP haven’t gone away. To what extent is that due to spycops undermining the work of groups like NMP?

HUNT SABOTEURS ASSOCIATION

The Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA) has campaigned against bloodsports since 1963, mainly by disrupting hunts.

Seemingly vindicated by the Hunting Act 2004, which banned the hunting of wild mammals with dogs, the HSA’s work has been forced to continue due to widespread flouting of the ban, and the badger cull.

The reasons why the HSA was targeted by spycops remain unclear. Was this due to political pressure, given the quintessentially ‘Establishment’ activity of fox hunting, and the status of those who support it? Or was it because the police sought to conflate the disruption of hunts – civil disobedience – with ‘violent extremism’?

There is a long history of violence, including serious violence, and harassment from hunt supporters against HSA activists. Even the SDS Tradecraft Manual contains a complaint from one undercover officer about the way in which his uniformed colleagues treated animal rights activists.

No fewer than nine spycops are now confirmed to have infiltrated the HSA, in the 19 years between 1983 and 2002. “The HSA doubt that they have been spared the attentions of the police before and after this time.

The targeting of a group like the HSA, who tended to use lawful tactics, cannot be justified. There is widespread public support for their main aim, which is why the law was eventually changed.

Why were they infiltrated by spycops? Was this done to disrupt and derail their efforts to change the law? Or to provide “n easy gateway for spycops to spy on other groups and individuals? Is this justifiable?

Another issue raised was miscarriages of justice. It appears that information supplied by spycops led to the arrests of hunt saboteurs. They failed to prevent (or prosecute) violence on the part of hunt supporters.

Were undercover officers told to look the other way? Was their involvement covered up? Did they encourage illegal activity as agents provocateurs? Did they supply hunt sabs’ personal details for illegal blacklisting?

Some of the officers who infiltrated hunt sab groups also deceived women into intimate relationships, and other activists into close personal ‘friendships’, even holidaying abroad with them (presumably under their false aliases, using false passports).

EMILY APPLE

Emily Apple has been an activist all of her adult life, involved in numerous campaigns. She was a founding member of the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) and of FITwatch (set up to counter the police’s ‘Forward Intelligence Teams’).

She has been arrested countless times, typically without basis. She was involved in campaigning against the arms trade (including the biannual DSEI arms fair), against war, and for environmental causes (including the Earth First! network).

She has encountered at least seven spycops while active in these groups. There are serious issues related to Apple’s arrests and legal privilege.

Apple was not just spied on by these police officers. During her time working with the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, she was also reported on by Martin Hogbin, a corporate spy, employed by BAe Systems.

RHYTHMS OF RESISTANCE/ NICOLA BENGE

Nicola Benge is a core participant in her own right, as well as being part of Rhythms of Resistance (RoR), a samba band that played at numerous protests in the 2000s. RoR still have no idea who spied on them, nor when, but suspect that they too might have been considered an easy gateway for spycops who wished to target other groups.

Benge was involved in other groups that are known to have been spied on in some way, for example the Advisory Service for Squatters’. But, like RoR, they have not yet been given any disclosure or details by this Inquiry either. She remains completely in the dark, as do the other musicians.

GLOBALISE RESISTANCE/ GUY TAYLOR

Guy Taylor worked as an organiser for Globalise Resistance between 2001-07. Founded with the aim of bridging the gap between the trade union movement and other activists, this network was infiltrated by HN118, known to them as ‘Simon Wellings‘.

Wellings deceived Taylor into what he believed to be a close personal friendship. As well as making the orange tank, Wellings got himself elected onto the group’s steering committee, and acted as the group’s photographer (presumably an ideal opportunity for his handlers to collect photos of many activists)

He travelled to other countries to attend protests with the group – including the United States, Spain and France – making a mockery of this Inquiry’s remit being limited to events in England and Wales.

He had access to, and influence over, Globalise Resistance itself but also other connected campaigns and groups. What did he feed back about trade unions – including the Communications Workers Union and Unison – and the Green Party? What was the justification for this? Why was he allowed to assume such a prominent role in the organisation? To what extent did he influence and derail the group? Why was he permitted to travel overseas?

Ultimately, Wellings was exposed by his own error – he mistakenly left a message on an activist’s phone, with a recording of a conversation between him and his spycops handlers.

Despite making several ‘Subject Access Requests’ to the Met, Taylor still has no disclosure relating to Wellings, which casts significant doubt on the police’s disclosure integrity.

‘NRO’

‘NRO’ is a medical professional and an academic. He is a deeply committed and life-long campaigner on matters related to social justice and freedom of expression. He wants to know why he was targeted.

In the 2000s, he was part of a broadly anti-capitalist group known as the WOMBLES (a distinctive presence at protests, they wore white overalls, padding & helmets to protect them from police violence). He knows that he was spied on by EN32 (‘Rod Richardson‘) and HN77 (‘Jackie Anderson‘) during his time with the WOMBLES.

‘NRO’ was also involved with Aktivix, who provide web services for activists, and Indymedia, an open, independent reporting/ publishing network used by activists.

Indymedia was set up as an alternative to the corporate media. At its peak, the network consisted of around 150 local collectives, spread across the globe. UK Indymedia had its servers repeatedly seized by the police.

‘NRO’ has questions – about spycops’ involvement in these server seizures, about the online surveillance of activists, about the spycops’ use of platforms such as Indymedia. Spycops used to post news and comments on Indymedia, and it is believed that spycops used Indymedia to post fake news stories (prsumably to undermine campaigns, or perhaps justify their deployments) , as well as to gather information.

INDRA DONFRANCESCO, MEGAN & MORGANA DONFRANCESCO

Indra Donfranceso has been active in environmental groups, including Earth First!, for most of her adult life. Morgana and Megan are her daughters; they attended numerous protests, campaigns, meetings, and related social events, throughout their childhood.

Mark Kennedy befriended the family in 2003, and was close to all three of them. He volunteered to be the photographer at her wedding in 2007, and they shared a 40th birthday party with others two years later. What happened to the photos?

Megan and Morgana both thought of ‘Mark Stone’ as an uncle figure. Learning that he was in fact an undercover officer has affected them badly. One of the women Kennedy deceived into a relationship, ‘Lisa‘, was a close friend of Indra’s.

How was befriending a family, including young children, justifiable? Are these the actions of a responsible, accountable police force?

Such corrupt and depraved behaviour shames not just the officer but those who organised and those who facilitated the system, as well as those who still seek to make excuses for the spycops now.

CLANDESTINE INSURGENT REBEL CLOWN ARMY (CIRCA)/ JENNIFER VERSON

This network was formed in 2003, by writers, educators, performing artists and other activists, in response to a State visit by George W Bush, and the war in Iraq. They obtained Arts Council funding to tour the UK and put on performances and workshops. They used humour and performance to make their points and sometimes mock the police.

For three years, Jennifer Verson was involved in training up new clowns, including at least one spycop, EN34, known as ‘Lynn Watson‘. CIRCA had close links with other groups, including RoR and the Dissent Network (opposing the G8 Summit in 2005).

How on earth could anyone believe that infiltrating a performing arts group was justified? It may seem obvious to us that this was a huge waste of public funds, but the fact that this was not obvious to those running the spycops unit must not be overlooked.

INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT (ISM)

The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is a Palestinian-led group, with branches around the world. ISM sends volunteers with the privilege of a foreign passport to Palestine, to bear witness and document, and where possible protest Palestinians from human rights violations, harassment and persecution.

The group’s activities in England and Wales just involved leafleting and stalls. What was the justification for surveillance? There is a suspicion that information gathered by the spycops may well have been passed to foreign agencies.

Asa Winstanley, an investigative journalist who writes about Palestine, got involved in ISM in 2004. Atif Choudhury and ‘MCD’ were also associated with the London ISM group. All three were devastated and deeply traumatised to learn about the infiltration of the group by spycop HN118 ‘Rob Harrison‘.

Choudhury considered ‘Harrison’ a close friend – he even DJed at the wedding of Choudhury’s sister. Harrison’s depravity did not stop there. He used his connection to Choudhury to deceive a young neighbour, ‘Maya’, into a sexual relationship, as we heard yesterday.

MCD’s activism has been motivated by her Quaker faith and commitment to active pacifism. All three of these core participants struggle to understand how this intrusion into their lives could possibly be justified.

‘VSP’

‘VSP’ has been involved in many campaigns and groups, including the Cardiff Anarchist Network (CAN). She has been arrested many times, and has been targeted by both overt and covert policing. She has been strip-searched, and mocked and jeered by officers whilst naked, and as a result has received several settlements from the police.

She was spied on by ‘EN1’ (Marco Jacobs) and Mark Kennedy. ‘Jacobs’ became close to VSP and her family, and initiated two sexual relationships with female friends of hers. He sowed so much disruption and division within CAN that the group stopped functioning.

He often put himself forward to travel abroad (sometimes alongside Kennedy) and represent CAN at activist meetings. Did they sabotage these meetings?

WHEN DO WE GET ANSWERS?

The victims have given up significant details of their lives and activities, in their core participancy applications, and in the written Opening Statement. However, none of them are mentioned in the Opening Statements of the police or the Counsel to the Inquiry, and they have yet to be provided with any further details of the spying on them. How much longer must they wait?

There was, and is, no justification for the undercover operations which intruded into their lives, their families and careers, nor is there any justification for the Inquiry to delay them being provided with information.

The Newham Monitoring Project pull no punches in their written Annex:

“It is essential that it be appreciated that we have no faith in this Inquiry. Characterised as it is by extraordinary secrecy, a total lack of accountability and transparency, all aggravated by the absence of adequate representation and constant delay, we are confident this is not a forum through which the actions of the police can be properly explored and scrutinised.

“Those quaintly described as ‘core participants’ are engaged, tantalised, and seduced by the promise of disclosure. This interest will, we believe, remain wholly unrequited. Any meaningful disclosure is unlikely to materialise in any real sense because the overriding priority appears to be the protection of those officers deployed. In any event, we have no faith that the relevant records have not already been destroyed. Yet the illusion must be maintained because the continued involvement of the ‘core participants’ adds infinitely to the credibility of a process that is already bankrupt.”

 

The accompanying written opening statement from Pete Weatherby QC on behalf of Newham Monitoring Project & Core Participants who are Political, Social & environmental activists

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Tranche 1, Phase 1, Day 6

9 November 2020

Evidence from:

Phillippa Kaufmann QC (Women deceived into relationships by spycops, represented by Birnberg Peirce, Hickman & Rose and Hodge Jones & Allen)

Heather Williams QC (People in relationships with spycops, represented by Bindmans)

Heather Williams QC (Relatives of deceased people whose identity was stolen by spycops)

Phillippa Kaufmann QC (Women deceived into relationships by spycops, and justice campaigns, instructed by Harriet Wistrich [excluding Newham Monitoring Project])

Helen Steel, who was in numerous spied-on groups and deceived into a relationship by an undercover officer, was also due to speak, but her opening statement is to be rescheduled.

The penultimate day of opening statements mainly heard the harrowing stories of women who were deceived into long-term intimate relationships by undercover police officers. There were also contributions of behalf of people whose children have died and whose identity was, or may have been, stolen by spycops.

Prior to the first speaker, Mitting had a meeting with Dave Smith and two of the lawyers representing women deceived by undercover police officer ‘Carlo Neri’ (real Name Carlo Soracchi). This was due to an objection made to the Inquiry regarding the use of Soracchi’s surname, which prevented Dave Smith giving his open statement on Friday afternoon.

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, decided that even though the name Carlo Soracchi has been in the public domain for a long time, he will ban anyone from saying it at the Inquiry until further notice.

Phillippa Kaufmann QC

(Women deceived into relationships by spycops, represented by Birnberg Peirce, Hickman & Rose and Hodge Jones & Allen)

Phillippa Kaufmann QC started proceedings, speaking on behalf of 21 different women who were deceived by spycops. Her written statement gives details of each woman’s story, but there are too many to include in detail in the oral statement.

This fact alone underlines the importance of what she says, and the fact that this abuse of women was absolutely systemic. Her oral statement focused mainly on the common issues and themes that the written statement addresses.

She began by saying that we now know of more than 30 women who were deceived in this way – some of them are represented by other lawyers in this Inquiry – with the earliest case that we know of dating back to 1975 (‘Mary’ and ‘Rick Gibson‘).

It is likely that there are still other women out there who have yet to discover that their personal lives were infiltrated in this way. The extensive anonymity given to former spycops by this Inquiry means that these women will continue to be denied the truth. In turn, this will also hamper the inquiry from reaching the truth.

Most of the women who were deceived were involved to some degree in political or campaigning activity – which is protected by law – challenging oppression and injustice, and seeking a better, more sustainable world. However, some of the women were not themselves political, they just happened to be useful to officers giving them ‘cover’ to gain entry to, or maintain ties with, political groups.

To the extent that there was any ‘legitimate policing interest’ at all in the groups with which the women were involved, it is out of all proportion to the devastation inflicted by the infiltration of their bodies, emotional lives, families and homes.

THE MOST COMPLETE INVASION OF PRIVACY

These relationships amounted to the most serious violations of the women’s human rights, including their rights to privacy, to freedom of expression and association, and most significantly, their right not to be subject to inhuman or degrading treatment. It is the most complete invasion of privacy that it is possible for the state to enact.

Kaufmann made it very clear: there was – and could be – no lawful excuse for such seriously abusive relationships. It is frankly insulting to suggest otherwise.

Talk then turned to the ‘institutional sexism’ that drove this practice – itself a reflection of deeply sexist attitudes that pervaded the police in general, and the spycops units in particular. The women were treated as objects, as props to shore up the officers’ fake identities, without any concern for the impact on their lives.

Kaufmann’s statement had profound power as it detailed so many women who have been so deeply, personally and cynically abused by undercover police officers. It is impossible for this report to summarise effectively, and we urge you to read the opening pages of the full written statement.

AN OVERVIEW OF SOME OF THE WOMEN’S STORIES

This began with ‘Lizzie‘ who met Mike Chitty and began a relationship in 1985 He disappeared suddenly, ‘to Florida’, then reappeared and tried to restart the relationship. It appears that he had finished his deployment and, without his managers’ knowledge, was returning to the people he’d spied on for social reasons.

Belinda Harvey had a two-year relationship with ‘Bob Robinson’ – spycop Bob Lambert – starting in May 1987. During this time, he confided in her and she tried to persuade him not to take part in the burning down of a Debenham’s shop in 1987. Lambert had her flat raided by Special Branch on the pretext of looking for ‘Robinson’.

Helen Steel was deceived into a relationship by undercover officer John Dines in 1990. She’s previously described it, saying:

“In a short space of time I fell absolutely madly in love with him in a way I had never fallen in love with anyone before or since. He said he wanted us to have kids”.

Helen spent years looking for John Dines after he vanished from her life.

‘Denise’ had a relationship with ‘Matt Rayner‘ between 1991-94. Although the officer has admitted it, the Inquiry Chair, Sir John Mitting, has reneged on the promise to tell all the deceived women the real names of the officers who abused them.

‘Bea’ had a relationship with ‘Bobby Lewis’ in 1992-93. She did not find out until 2019 that he had been one of the spycops.

‘Jessica‘ was just 19 when she was groomed into a year-long relationship by Andy Coles. He was her first serious partner. She thought he was a 24 year old single activist, but he was a 32 year old married police oficer with children. Coles is now a Conservative Party councillor in Peterborough.

‘Alison‘ was involved in anti-fascist and trade union politics when she met Mark Cassidy. They lived together for five years and he completely integrated himself into her life and family.

‘Monica‘ and ‘Ruth‘ were both involved in Reclaim the Streets when they were deceived into relationships by ‘Jim Sutton’, aka Jim Boyling.

‘James Straven‘ deceived three women into relationships: Wendy, Sara and Ellie. He has lied to this Inquiry not once but twice about his contact with Ellie.

Kaufmann also represents five of the women who were deceived into relationships by ‘Mark Stone’ – who we now know to be Mark Kennedy. This includes Kate Wilson, ‘Lisa‘ (who had a committed six-year relationship with him and uncovered his true identity in 2010), ‘Naomi‘, ‘Jane‘, and ‘C’. By the time ‘C’ got involved with Kennedy, he had already started working for a private security firm, Global Open.

‘Maya’ met ‘Rob Harrison‘ and began a relationship in May 2006 in which he was manipulative and controlling. He disappeared from her life but then reappeared much later in 2015, long after the spycops scandal was common knowledge and the public inquiry had been called, seemingly just to have sex with her once more before disappearing forever.

Many of their stories are also available in more detail at Police Spies Out of Lives.

ROSA

To illustrate the lengths and depths the undercover officers went to deceive and use the women, and the profound life-changing affects it has had on those women, Kaufmann went into some detail about ‘Rosa’ and her relationship with SDS officer Jim Boyling, who used the name ‘Jim Sutton’, as well as Rosa’s extraordinary investigatory efforts to get to the truth the State was denying her.

Rosa was deceived into a relationship by Boyling, who she met as a fellow activist in the urban environmental group Reclaim the Streets and became deeply involved with him in 1999. He disappeared suddenly from her life in the summer of 2000, after behaving erratically and sometimes abusively. He had appeared to be in a fragile mental state and told her that he was going to go off travelling alone, to Turkey, to find himself.

Boyling phoned Rosa and sent her a postcard. She was so worried about his safety that she contacted the Foreign Office. Rosa turned detective and tracked down some phone numbers Jim had called, but the men who answered seemed alarmed by her seeking Jim. She searched for years, but could not find any trace of the history of ‘Jim Sutton’. He continued to manipulate her by asking that she continue writing to him – in retrospect, Rosa thinks so he and his handlers could track her.

ROSA’S INVESTIGATIONS

She used all her savings trying to identify him. She went to South Africa, searching where he said he’d gone. But the digital fingerprints of his emails suggested he was actually in London, so she returned. She worked out his real name, Jim Boyling, and found his school records. Her weight dropped and her health suffered. Just as Rosa was getting close to the truth, Jim was sent back into her life as suddenly as he had vanished. Her relief after all her searching was overwhelming. He now told Rosa that he was an undercover officer, but also told her that he now hated the police and needed her help to escape them. Within two weeks of their reunion, she was pregnant.

She was already suffering serious psychological trauma, which he exploited. He convinced her to change her name by deed poll, oversaw the destruction of her address book, and pressured her to sever ties with her activist friends. Despite his promises, he continued working for the police, alongside Bob Lambert at the Muslim Contact Unit.

THREATS FROM THE MET

Boyling told Rosa that her old activist community was riddled with spycops. He told her about Helen Steel’s being spied on by multiple officers, including Steel’s partner John Dines. Boyling said that any attempt to tell people about it would be spotted before she managed to do anything. He told her she couldn’t be sure which of her old friends were who they said they were.

Rosa wanted to work out a way of getting a message to Helen Steel. Boyling’s behaviour had become worse, more erratic, more abusive, but Rosa felt trapped – she now had two children and Women’s Aid said that, as she was fleeing a police officer, they could not guarantee that their ‘safe house’ would offer enough protection.

Things only got worse after Boyling arranged for them to marry at a registry office. The children were both diagnosed with degenerative health conditions. As she watched her children lose their ability to communicate, she was angry that their brightest years had been stolen by the paranoia, fear and abuse that Boyling had inflicted.

Suddenly Rosa received a ‘welfare visit’ from two of Boyling’s police colleagues. One of them was Boyling’s manager Bob Lambert, the other was an unpleasant character called ‘Noel’. He had previously told her to call him if she needed any support. Now he told her that any attempt to reveal the truth would fail because she was up against the full might of Special Branch. She realised his previous offer of help had actually been manipulating her into giving him early warning of any intention on her part to leave.

ESCAPE TO THE TRUTH

Rosa finally felt able to flee in 2007. She got a letter passed to Helen Steel in 2010 and was finally able to meet up with activists later that year. Boyling remained a police officer until 2018, when he was eventually sacked by a disciplinary tribunal because of his relationship with Rosa.

The tribunal itself highlighted some of the lies and inconsistencies told by Boyling, to his managers as well as Rosa. He claimed in his defence that she was ‘an apolitical waitress’ when they met, while in reports made while undercover he described her as a ‘political organiser’.

Rosa wonders to what extent will this Inquiry be able to understand the abuses committed by these spycops units?

THE IMPORTANCE OF ACTIVISTS TO THE INQUIRY

Kaufmann went on to highlight just how important activists, and in particular the women who had the relationships, were in bringing the spycops scandal into the public domain. She highlighted how both opening statements last week statements by Counsel for the Inquiry and Peter Francis had severely underplayed their role.

For instance, Mark Kennedy’s cover was blown by ‘Lisa‘. She thought she was in a relationship with ‘Mark Stone’, but then she found a passport in his real name, and emails from children calling him ‘dad’. Having heard from other protestors about the doubts and suspicions around their comrades ‘Jim Sutton’, ‘Lynn Watson‘ and ‘Rod Richardson‘, Lisa gathered a small team of friends to do more research to uncover who he really was.

Some research had already been done by Rosa and Helen Steel, both of whom had figured out the truth about their relationships with spycops.

Helen spent long years trying to find Dines, and even travelled to New Zealand as part of her search. She worked out that he must have been a police officer, but people told her she was paranoid, ‘that such a thing would never happen in this country’.

These women used their persistence and skill, and their own resources. They uncovered information that brought them to the truth. That included ‘Rosa’ and Helen and ‘Lisa’, but also Belinda and ‘Alison’. In 2011, they and three other women began legal proceedings.

PATTERN OF ABUSE

The women clearly see that the catalogue of similarities in their cases proves that this wasn’t the work of individual officers lacking adequate supervision. The women are the ones who did the investigations, who are the most familiar with the details, and so are best placed to spot the patterns. This is why this Inquiry must allow them to participate meaningfully in the process and get to the truth.

Kate Wilson has brought a case in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the court that deals with surveillance infringing on human rights. She has had to do this alone, as women abused before the Human Rights Act 1998 cannot bring a case, nor can the seven women to whom the Met apologised in 2015, as the settlement bans them from further legal action on the issue.

Wilson’s IPT case shows how important the activist perspective is to get to the truth.

She pointed out that:

‘I have no criminal convictions, even for minor offences, and the only reason that these officers entered my life at all was because I was expressing my political views and exercising my right to protest.’

She has only received a fraction of the 10,000 pages the Met admit having on her, and even then it’s been heavily redacted. Yet still, she says:

‘even that tiny and over-redacted sample has answered more of my burning questions than seven years of police defence statements and admissions… it was not simply a lack of supervision, there was active collusion by management in the relationship and direct manipulation of my political activity.’

These were social and environmental campaigners, not terrorists. However, even if these women had been terrorists there is no justification in law for the practice of forming relationships. It inherently sexist, degrading, and cannot be justified.

These women fell in love with men who were seemingly perfect. The exit strategies used by spycops officers were cruel, caused huge amounts of worry and fear, and all of these women have been left dealing with massive trauma.

‘Lisa’ said that Mark Kennedy was placed into my life to deceive me by an employer who would inevitably one day pull him out. Finding this out has broken my heart, devastated my life and shattered my trust in people.’

The women all describe the deep pain caused by these officers, many years later. They talk about losing their trust, their sense of self, their sadness and grief, their anger, the debilitating effects, how this news has affected them, and the impossibility of finding closure.

When the state has put an imposter in your life that is hugely destabilising. Almost all of the women no longer feel able to participate in the campaigns and movements that were once such an important part of their lives.

These abuses have had an impact on their ability to form and maintain relationships ever since, and an impact on their families and friends, and especially on their children.

REFLECTIONS OF MANIPULATION

The spycops used a range of techniques to deceive and manipulate these women, including ‘mirroring’, a form of emotional manipulation where the deceiver pretends to have the same interests and experiences to initiate a coercive and abusive relationship.

Andy Coles told some of ‘Jessica’s’ friends that he had been adopted (like her); Mark Kennedy claimed to have grown up in Battersea (like Kate) when seeking a relationship with her, yetwhen courting ‘C’ he told her that when he was growing up he had spent time at the same local park in Norwich thatshe had gone to as a child. There are also indications that spycops shared knowledge about individuals with one another in order to facilitate mirroring.

Almost universally, the undercover officers told life stories of loss and bereavement, playing on the women’s emotions.

METROPOLITAN POLICE – DODGING ACCOUNTABILITY

Kaufmann also revealed the utter hypocrisy of the Met’s repeated claims that they’re keen to cooperate with this Inquiry (and connected court cases). In reality, they have deployed every obstructive and delaying tactic at their disposal. This has, as they are surely aware, prolonged and compounded the damage to the women they have abused.

In 2011, Kate Wilson, ‘Lisa’ and ‘Naomi’ brought a claim and the Met agreed to give disclosure of documents. They said it was a problem of ‘rogue officers’, who had not been authorised to do what they did.

Then in June 2012, the Met rescinded their promise of documents and tried to have the claim struck out. They said that the officers were authorised after all, as a way of taking the case out of open courts and putting it into the jurisdiction of the secret courts of the IPT.

In the same month, the Met replied to five more women saying that they’d just remembered they have an absolute policy of ‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny’ on anything to do with undercover work.

The Met then applied to strike out both cases on the grounds that ‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny’ (NCND) was an inviolable principle. Helen Steel, one of the five, performed a forensic dissection of that assertion, showing it to be a blatant lie, made to protect abusers and avoid accountability.

WHEN IS A SPYCOP NOT A SPYCOP?

It was pointed out that many officers had given media interviews confirming themselves to be spycops, and the Met Commissioner himself had confirmed Jim Boyling was a Met officer. The Met backed itself into the absurd position of admitting Boyling was one of their officers, but refusing to confirm he was an undercover officer, as if he might be a uniformed bobby who did all that activism under a false identity as some kind of hobby.

In 2014, the Met put forward their defence, that the relationships were the result of ‘mutual attraction and genuine personal feelings’ with no deceit involved, They said such relationships were neither unlawful nor even an abuse of power. And they still refused to admit John Dines and Mark Jenner were spycops.

The Met didn’t formally admit Mark Kennedy was a spycop until May 2015, more than four years after his press agent got him a front page feature in the Mail on Sunday.

Even the Met’s extraordinary apology to seven women in 2015 seems aimed to deny the plain fact they were routinely using relationships. Specifically, the apology said the relationships were not authorised in advance, nor would they ever be used as a tactic of a deployment; yet four years later, in the IPT, they were forced to disclose evidence and that led to far wider admissions.

The lawyers for some of the former undercover officers, Slater & Gordon, have continued to claim that such relationships may be justifiable, especially if they are ‘casual’. A fact which says more about those officers than they would want us to know. The Met continues to try to avoid going to court with the women, and to prevent any disclosure.

INVESTIGATORY POWERS TRIBUNAL

However, they have now admitted – in the IPT – that Kennedy’s cover officer knew about his relationship with Kate Wilson and acquiesced to it. From Kate Wilson’s IPT case, we know that to get to the truth, we need to force the police’s hand regarding disclosure. The women must be given personal police files, so they are able to unpick the stories they contain .

Kate has now received around 2000 heavily-redacted pages for her case – estimated to be about 20% of the material the IPT has on her – and she has already spotted many inaccuracies, examples of mismanagement, and police prejudices in the material. Everyone who comes into contact with the groups being spied on is almost automatically considered fair game for this kind of intrusion – in a submission to the IPT earlier this year, Kate said:

[the police] ‘appear to have adopted a ‘thought crime’ approach to breaching people’s rights… repeatedly stating that anyone they considered to be a “like-minded individual” was a legitimate target’.

It has now been established that Kate’s Article 8 Rights (to a private and family life) were breached by the spycops – not just by her relationship with Kennedy but by the less intimate spying of at least six other officers who spied on and reported on her. The implication is that potentially thousands of other people’s human rights have been breached in the same way. Yet here she is, ten years into her legal battle, with no clear answers.

It all adds up to a picture of the police as an organisation that is desperate not to account, let alone to account publicly, for the terrible damage it has permitted its officers to do to the women. It cannot be right that this is the organisation that dictates what information gets released, how quickly, and to whom.

THE NEED FOR ANSWERS

The women’s need for answers is no less burning now than it was when they first suspected or learned the truth. They no longer believe the Inquiry is fit to do that, but they persevere here because they desperately need definitive answers (about what was done to them and why; who authorised, condoned, or acquiesced to it; who knew about it; what information was shared and recorded about them; and what will be done to stop it happening to others).

They need to know whether personal information about their most intimate lives is still on a file somewhere. They need to know that it will not happen again.

The lack of disclosure has served to compound the trauma suffered by the spycops victims. Kaufmann noted the self-pity of Boyling mentioned in last week’s submissions from the police, where he complained of the heavy burden of being investigated for sexual offences. She says he, and the others should consider themselves lucky that criminal law views rape through a patriarchal lens.

The women have waited for over five years for answers. The extent and scope of the anonymity orders granted to spycops means that the women are never likely to know the full extent of the intrusion into their lives, nor even how many spycops were involved in their lives.

At the heart of what happened to these women lies institutional sexism. This is a complex issue that requires an exploration not just of the mind-set of the men involved in the undercover units but also of the institutional culture that developed and operated, and how the two are inter-related.

IS MITTING FIT FOR PURPOSE?

The women of the campaign group Police Spies Out of Lives endorse the concerns expressed by others last week that the institutional racism and institutional sexism that led to these abuses must be explored by people with the expertise and skills to do so.

For this reason, the Chair should accept the assistance of a diverse panel. The point was forcefully made that the Chair’s limited and privileged life experience mean that he cannot possibly understand the evidence he is presented with and gain a thorough understanding of the truth.

The women have had to discuss deeply personal matters with lawyers over the years. They have had an incredibly stressful experience participating in these cases and in this Inquiry. Their concerns also stem from the Inquiry’s a lack of sensitivity in failing to recognise the urgency of the need for disclosure about the relationships; in the manner in which ‘Lizzie’ and ‘Sara’ were notified that men they had intimate relationships with were spycops; in the way it put pressure on the women who had relationships with Carlo Soracchi not to disclose his real name; and in the stark contrast between the care shown for the privacy and concerns of spycops compared with that afforded to their victims.

As stated, the women remain involved because they are impelled to know the truth and stop this happening again to other women. To make sure this never happens again, the women want the Inquiry to recommend that the law is changed to prohibit undercover officers from engaging in sexual relationships while in their undercover persona, and that the police be required to suspend an officer and inform anyone deceived into a relationship by an undercover officer as soon as they become aware of the relationship.

The accompanying written opening statement from Phillippa Kaufmann QC on behalf of women deceived into relationships by spycops, represented by Birnberg Peirce, Hickman & Rose and Hodge Jones & Allen

Heather Williams QC
(People in relationships with spycops, represented by Bindmans)

 

Heather Williams QC, speaking for individuals in relationships with undercover officers who are represented by Bindmans.

Williams began by plainly stating that the people she represents have had their lives turned upside down as a result of spycops engaging in sexual and other intimate relationships, on a thoroughly deceptive and completely illegitimate basis.

There was never any operational justification for this grossly irresponsible and manipulative conduct, and the damage which it caused is profound. The officers created an illusion of genuine intimacy – via the projection of their fake identities – tricking, betraying and abandoning those who they used.

WHO WILLIAMS SPEAKS FOR

Williams first spoke about ‘Lindsey’, who was deceived into entering into a long-term sexual relationship with an officer the Inquiry refers to as HN104; he used the name ‘Carlo Neri‘, but his real name is Carlo Soracchi.

Soracchi was deployed by the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), 2002-06. He infiltrated the Socialist Party/Militant and No Platform/ Antifa. He then developed a focus on trade union activity.

Secondly, Williams speaks for Sarah Hampton, who was deceived into entering into a long-term sexual relationship with ‘Mark Stone’ – actually Mark Kennedy of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit – in 2005/6.

Thirdly, three members of the Cardiff Anarchist Network (CAN) – Tom Fowler, and two women known as ‘AJA’ and ‘ARB’ – a group which was infiltrated between 2005-09 by officer EN12, using the name ‘Marco Jacobs‘. AJA and ARB were deceived into having sexual relationships with him. Tom Fowler was deceived into believing that he was his best friend.

Lastly, Williams speaks for a man known as ‘TBS’ whose position is, as yet, unique at the Inquiry. TBS’s mother, Jacqui, had a long-term sexual relationship with undercover SDS officer Bob Lambert, posing at the time as an animal rights activist under the cover name ‘Bob Robinson‘.

Born on 23 September 1985, TBS is Bob Lambert’s son, who he abandoned when he “disappeared” in late 1988.

ABUSIVE, DECEITFUL, MANIPULATIVE & WRONG

The unsuspecting activists would never have agreed to or countenanced these intimacies if they had know the true identities of these men. The spycops pretended to be committed and like-minded activists.

As the 2014 ‘Operation Herne’ police report concluded:

“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 position as a police officer and an individual and organisational failing.”

In 2013, the Home Affairs Select Committee’s Interim Report on undercover policing said:

“…there are some lines that police officers must not cross… We do not believe that officers should enter into intimate, physical sexual relationships while using their false identities undercover without clear, prior authorisation, which should only be given in the most exceptional circumstances.

“In particular, it is unacceptable that a child should be brought into the world as a result of such a relationship and this must never be allowed to happen again. We recommend that future guidance on undercover operations should make this clear beyond doubt.”

It took until 2015 for the Met to accept that these sexual relationships were “abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong”, and a breach of the women’s human rights.

Like the first group of women to whom the apology was addressed, Sarah received a formal apology in January 2017. TBS received an apology from the police in April of this year.

In the Undercover Policing Inquiry’s opening statements last week, lawyers speaking for the police mostly accepted that these relationships were wrong but, in contrast, the officers represented by Slater & Gordon have continued to downplay, deny and dismiss their wrongdoing, in contradiction to the long- established position of the Metropolitan Police.

Those who have been victims of such fundamental deceit feel compelled to try to participate in this Inquiry. They are driven by a strong sense of responsibility to those whose lives have been intruded upon without justification and to the new generation of activists – protesting against climate change racial injustice – to ensure that they are not subjected to similar abuse.

The Inquiry must respect their commitment, and not shirk from its responsibility to hold police officers properly to account for the improper discharge of their public functions. It must not allow its task to be overwhelmed by practices ingrained within undercover policing, of protecting their own from legitimate exposure and attendant accountability.

This doesn’t just concern the Met – the Home Office, the National Crime Agency and the College of Policing – should all be called to account, and to answer the questions we raise.

‘LINDSEY’

‘Lindsey’ met Carlo Soracchi through mutual friends in the Socialist Party. The relationship was fun and sociable at first; Carlo said he worked as a locksmith (and used this as pretext for changing activists’ locks, in order to ‘improve their security’!). Carlo was the first to use the word ‘love’ in their relationship, and he made her believe that he was committed to her in the long-term.

She was shown the evidence that Carlo had been an undercover officer in October 2015. Since then, she has suffered sleeplessness, and feelings of anger and vulnerability. She has questioned her own judgment and suffered intense embarrassment. She has dwelt on other friendships and relationships, and doubted the motives and genuineness of people she knows.

SARAH HAMPTON

Sarah Hampton had a relationship with Kennedy. He acted romantically and attentively, and gave her the impression that this was a serious emotional relationship.

When she found out Kennedy’s true identity in 2010 she was shocked. She suffered huge stress, insomnia, flashbacks and severe depression. She suffered intense paranoia, she felt destabilised, and she felt guilty for introducing Mark to fellow activists and friends.

‘MARCO JACOBS’

After an aborted deployment in Brighton, National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) officer ‘Marco Jacobs’ moved to Cardiff in 2006, and integrated himself into a group of activists involved in Cardiff Anarchist Network.

Years later, the group worked out that he’d been a spy after Mark Kennedy was outed, and they noticed striking similarities in the extraction and other strategies used by the spycops.

Marco initiated a relationship with a younger activist, ‘AJA’. The relationship was built on a close friendship that had developed over the previous few years. Marco suggested that they take their relationship further, just two months before they travelled together to protest at the G8 summit in Germany, in the summer of 2007.

When she discovered the truth about his identity, AJA felt extremely betrayed and violated. She was physically sick. She remains plagued by intrusive recollections and a loss of self-worth in having been deceived by him.

INVADING FAMILIES

‘ARB’ (who also uses the pseudonym ‘Deborah’) first met Marco at a CAN meeting in 2005, when she was 26. She got the impression that he was attracted to her and she found him to be warm, funny, and attentive. They became close friends and would often meet for a drink after her work.

ARB was in a long term relationship with Tom Fowler when her father became terminally ill with cancer. Having woven himself into Fowler’s life as a best friend and confidante, Marco took the opportunity of ARB’s father’s illness to put make himself a great support, belittle Fowler, and sow discord.

Marco met ARB’s parents on a number of occasions, including her father when he was visiting Cardiff for cancer treatment. On another occasion he comforted ARB’s mother when she confided in him regarding the extent of her husband’s illness. He attended ARB’s father’s funeral.

Around the same time, in late 2006, Marco’s NPOIU colleague Mark Kennedy attended the funeral of Lisa’s father. Did the two spycops compare notes, evaluate the value and create a strategy for this?

Like many spycops, Marco gained sympathy and trust by claiming to have had a disturbed upbringing. When ARB’s father died, Marco told a detailed story about his mother dying when he was young and his own father dying more recently. She was made to feel guilty for not supporting him.

Marco then propositioned ARB for a sexual relationship. She turned him down but he persisted. Believing she was about to begin a serious relationship with the ‘truck driver’, she broke up with Fowler, only for Marco to suddenly lose interest.

It seems it was Marco’s remit to sow discord among the group, inevitably causing long term damage to friendships and the people who were in them.

Marco was exposed as a spycop in January 2011. It took more than four years of legal action before the Met even admitted Marco was an undercover officer (at a hearing presided over by Sir John Mitting, coincidentally).

TBS: SON OF A SPYCOP

‘Bob Robinson’ – SDS officer Bob Lambert – attended the birth of TBS in 1985, and lived with him and his mother, Jacqui, for the first few years of TBS’s life.

Lambert disappeared in late 1988. Having being involved in a group of animal rights activists, and apparently burning down Debenham’s in Harrow himself – he pretended to be an animal rights activist on the run from the police.

When Jacqui’s next partner wanted to formally adopt TBS, inquiries were made by the authorities. They said they’d found a former flatmate of Lambert’s and that, as a suspected criminal who’d fled the country, he wasn’t expected back. But who was the flatmate? Was this the police and security still lying to cover Lambert’s tracks – and so obviously knowing all about TBS’s existence – years after his deployment ended?

It was only by chance that Jacqui saw a news report about Lambert in 2012 and told TBS the truth she had just learned. She said what happened to her and the other women was:

“like being raped by the state. We feel that we were sexually abused because none of us gave consent”.

TBS is preoccupied with the fact that the Met were apparently prepared to let him go his whole life without learning the truth and having the opportunity to get to know his father. Jacqui said that she believes Lambert would have taken the secret with him to his grave.

TBS brought a claim for damages against the Met. As with the women deceived into relationships, the police did not seek to heal the harm they caused but instead tried to have the claim struck out. In a pattern familiar to so many who have suffered injustice at the hands of the state, he has suffered a second injustice of delays, denials and obstacles from the guilty institutions.

THE DAMAGE DONE

Those who were deceived into sexual and other intimate relationships have suffered intense psychological impacts, from which many will never recover. As well a pervading sense of violation and loss of dignity, they all have a paranoia and insecurity that has permeated every aspect of their private and personal lives.

They have suffered the anguish of being the unwitting conduit for these officers’ credibility among their friends and comrades.

All of these victims remember the way in which the spycops manipulated their emotions – they presented themselves as kind, attentive, helpful and full of empathy, the friend with endless patience for shared problems and confidences. They cynically ‘mirrored’ their victims’ interests, tastes and backgrounds. They went as far as making up stories of personal loss and grief to ‘mirror’ genuine tragedy suffered by the activists. This was all done with a total disregard for the well-being of those they targeted. The victims have suffered intense psychological harm, from which many will never recover.

Having quoted from the flippant, offensive advice given in the SDS’ 1995 Tradecraft Manual to have ‘fleeting, disastrous’ relationships, Williams pointed out that these relationships were anything but fleeting. They were constructed over time, painstakingly creating deep emotional commitment on the part of the victim, and often endured for a substantial part of a spycop’s deployment.

Mark Kennedy told the Home Affairs Select Committee in 2013 that his managers always knew his whereabouts (he even carried a tracking device), and that other spycops and informants would have been reporting back on him. Senior managers must have known what was going on and, at the very least acquiesced to it.

The similarity of the experiences from people across such a spread of time, distance and police units indicates the existence of a shared pool of knowledge, understanding, training or guidance that officers were all party to.

SO MANY QUESTIONS

Why did the spycops create these relationships?

Were they prompted by a twisted logic that they were necessary for maintaining cover? Were they a means of accessing and gathering “intelligence”? Were they for sexual gratification? Or a combination of all three?

How common was it for spycops to behave in this way?

To what extent were those who monitored and supervised these deployments aware of these relationships? What safeguards were in place?

Were officers either encouraged or discouraged from forming such relationships? If they were encouraged to do so, why was this?

What consideration, if any, was given to the collateral impact on family members and friends of the women?

Insofar as the spycops didn’t have to comply with the rules governing other areas of undercover policing, who made these decisions and what was the rationale?

How many children were fathered as a result of spycops’ deceitful sexual relationships with those that they spied on?

What, if any, guidance, training or instruction were they given about this possibility?

Was any consideration given to the impact upon a child who, as their father knew all along, would be abandoned as a toddler when the deployment ended? Were the interests of the child even considered?

If fathering a child was not an approved tactic, then what steps were taken against officers who did it? It doesn’t seem to have led to disciplinary action. On the contrary, after TBS was born, Bob Lambert was promoted. He went on to manage the SDS in the 1990s, overseeing the deployments of a number of the other abusive officers we’ve heard about today, including Jim Boyling, Andy Coles, and Mark Jenner.

When he left the police, Lambert was awarded an MBE for services to policing. He then held several academic posts, which he had to resign from after the truth about his career was made public in 2011.

PUBLIC SECRETS

The Inquiry’s first Chair, Lord Pitchford, said that women deceived into relationships by undercover officers deserved the fullest answers. His successor, Sir John Mitting, has failed to keep the spirit of that in the case of Carlo Soracchi. He has told the women the name and appealed to their ‘judgment and humanity’ not to upset Soracchi’s family by publicising it.

Despite Soracchi’s name being in the public domain for quite some time, Mitting is insisting that nobody can say it at the Inquiry, to the frustration and disappointment of Lindsey and others.

In the case of ‘Marco Jacobs’, Mitting has not even stuck to the letter of Lord Pitchford’s assurance. The officer has been granted anonymity by the Inquiry, and the women remain in the dark, despite the Met having admitted that these relationships happened and paid compensation.

Like fellow spycop Andy Coles, Jacobs knows his behaviour is unjustifiable, so he is flatly refusing to admit it despite the great swathes of proof.

The people represented by Heather Williams want a reliable official record of the chronology of events, and acknowledgment of the gross violation of their human rights and the impact that it had. It is one of the most serious breaches of human rights ever seen in this country. They don’t just want the state to learn meaningful lessons, but the implementation of tangible protections against future abuse.

Williams then added her clients’ voices to the chorus of affronted dismay that the Inquiry is still refusing to give public access to this public inquiry. It other inquiries can create a secure live stream, so can this one.

The accompanying written opening statement from Heather Williams QC of behalf of people in relationships with spycops, represented by Bindmans)

Heather Williams QC
(Relatives of deceased people whose identity was stolen by spycops)

One of the most difficult events to bear is the death of a child. Heather Williams’ clients were horrified to hear – years later – that the identity of their loved one had been stolen to provide a false identity for an undercover police officer.

With this strong observation, Heather Williams QC started her opening statement. She represents several people who have found out that the identity of a close member of their family had been used, and two who suspect they have been:

Frank Bennett and Honor Robson, are the bereaved brother and sister of Michael Hartley. He died on 4 August 1968 at 18 years of age, when he went overboard a fishing trawler. They found out in April 2018 that Michael’s identity had been stolen by HN12. The officer appropriated Michael’s identity between 1982 and 1985 when he infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party and the Revolutionary Communist Group. He is known to have committed crimes, and to have engaged in a sexual relationship.

Faith Mason is the bereaved mother of Neil Robin Martin. He died on 15 October 1969 at the age of six. His mother was only 22 at the time and brought up her remaining three children alone. The officer known as HN122 appropriated aspects of Neil’s identity and infiltrated Class War and the Revolutionary Communist Party between 1989 and 1993 as Neil Robin Richardson. She was informed by the Inquiry in January 2019.

She found the information impossible to absorb and at a subsequent meeting with the Inquiry team she found what she heard incapable to believe.. It felt like losing Neil all over again. She has lost sleep and is pre-occupied with distressing thoughts.

The Chair has granted anonymity to HN122 so his real name is not known. So far we only know he was deployed to spy on two un-named groups. According to his application for privacy, HN122 claims that releasing his real name would risk ‘interference in his public life’. Faith observes that the possibility that he is now prominent figure points in favour of openness and transparency, rather than against it.

Mr, Mrs and Ms Lewis, who are the father, mother and sister of Anthony Lewis. He died on 31 July 1968 at seven years of age. The officer whose cypher is HN78, used Anthony Lewis’s identity between 1991 and 1995 to infiltrate the Anti-Nazi League and the International Socialists/Socialist Workers Party. He was generally known as ‘Bobby’.

The Lewis family are appalled by what they have learnt so far. It has been revealed that HN78 had at least two sexual relationships and was involved in spying on the Lawrence family – as they were grieving and campaigning following the racist murder of their son.

The undercover officer who used Anthony’s identity was black, as are the Lewis family. The boy died of sickle cell anaemia; an illness that occurs predominantly in people of African and/or Caribbean descent; the family would later lose another child to it. The family wants to know how HN78 went about to find the identity of a black child: did he specifically for deaths attributable to sickle cell illness? Or did he rely on some other method to target black children?

Liisa Crossland and Mark Crossland are the stepmother and brother of Kevin John Crossland. He died on 1 September 1966 aged five in a plane crash. The officer known as HN16 used his name to infiltrate the Animal Liberation Front and the Brixton and Croydon Hunt Saboteurs between 1997 and 2002. The family only learnt details of this identity theft in June 2018.

The Crosslands now know of arrests for crimes committed during HN16’s undercover deployment, a misconduct investigation and a promotion (to Detective Sergeant). Also, of how he first refused to answer questions about sexual relationships, and subsequently lied to the Inquiry about having been involved with at least two women – “Ellie” and “Sara” – of whom we heard about this morning. Liisa and Mark are very upset by the Inquiry’s continued denial of their “moral right” to know the true identity of the officer who appropriated Kevin’s identity.

Not mentioned today, was the fact that HN16 had not one, but two covert identities. As an activist he was known as “James Straven” – a name that was invented for him by the SDS, while the one set up with the birth certificate seems not to have been used at all while he was undercover in animal rights groups.

Barbara Shaw is the bereaved mother of Rod Richardson. He died on 7 January 1973, when he was two days old.

The officer known as EN321 used Rod’s identity between 1999 and 2003, to infiltrate Class War and the Movement Against the Monarchy.

She was the first person to discover that her son’s identity had been used by the spycops units, after she was contacted by Rob Evans from The Guardian. In response to a police complaint, she received a heavily-redacted report that horrified her.

She was told by the police they would “Neither Confirm Nor Deny” as they needed to protect the tactic and the officer. Mrs Shaw complained to the Independent Police Complaint Commission but despite them upholding part of the complaint, she has yet to get any answers, let alone justice.

Gordon Peters is the father of Benjamin De Witt who died at a very young age of one week old, on 23 September 1979. He learnt about the undercover police practice of using dead children’s identities in 2014, and wrote to the Metropolitan Police to check if this had happened in his case. The police are yet to provide a meaningful answer.

“RDCA” is the mother of Jed Lacey Morris who died in April 1971, when he was one year old. She also wrote to the police, in 2013, asking for confirmation that her child’s identity hadn’t been used in this way. Her baby had been unlawfully killed by a driver in 1971. She was “surprised to learn that the MPS was unwilling to confirm the use of her son’s identity or alternatively to assuage her concerns” – it makes her feel “quite sick”.

There were differences between the children whose name was stolen – Michael Hartley was 18 years old when he died, Rod Richardson was just a few days old – but their relatives have very similar questions. They all want to better understand what was done by the officers using their identities

In 2013, the Commissioner issued an apology expressing regret for relying upon the identities of deceased children in general. No specific apologies to affected families families were forthcoming, again on the grounds that such communications would reveal the UCOs’ covert identities. (Though they have since been confirmed in multiple cases.)

Heather Williams QC stated that her clients feel the appropriate time for a formal apologies would be after the police have answered their questions. And they have many.

NOT USED AT FIRST, & NOT ALL THE TIME

The first question is: why would the police use this method? We do not believe there was any operational necessity for this disgusting practice. Williams explained that this practice was not used at first.

A memo from SDS supervisory officer, Detective Inspector HN294, dated 21 February 1973 stated:

‘one of the main… advantages…of a field officer assuming a fictitious name, using a cover address and employment and radically altering his appearance is that – unlike an informant – he can resume his proper identity and appearance at any time and immediately be “lost” to the extremists.’

In a July 2013 report, the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Herne identified 42 SDS officers who had relied upon the identity details of a deceased child, but also 45 spycops who had developed entirely fictitious covert identities.

Efforts to phase out the practice on grounds of operational ineffectiveness from 1995, but it was never the only thing available. Operation Herne identified an early instance where an officer had used an aunt’s surname instead.

Strikingly, the practice continued long after it had been discredited and obvious viable alternatives developed: HN16 and EN32 were deployed using the stolen identities of Kevin Crossland and Rod Richardson in as late as 1997 and 1999 respectively.

HOW SPYCOPS CREATED IDENTITIES

This practice concerned the collecting and storing of extensive personal details relating not only to the identity of the deceased children, their dates and places of birth, the dates and causes of their deaths, but also to the names, occupations and addresses of their parents and other family members.

The officers would have tried to gain familiarity with the child’s family, their home and sometimes even visited the area to get acquainted to it. Some of the bereaved detest the idea that they have been spied on themselves.

According to whistle-blower spycop Peter Francis, it was common practice to ‘weave one’s own memories with that of the child’. He acknowledged that in doing so, he ‘felt that he was stamping on their memory’. He also told Operation Herne that he had ‘no choice, either he used the identity or he would have had to leave the unit.’

The flippant and demeaning language used in the SDS’ Tradecraft Manual reveal a striking lack of insight and sensitivity.

– The officer’s task was characterised as one of “finding a suitable ex person, usually a deceased child…”
– Officers were advised to find a death that was “natural or otherwise unspectacular”.
– Checking whether the deceased child had living relatives was referred to as identifying their “respiratory status”.
– And the action of adopting a dead child’s identity was referred to as “assume squatters’ rights over the unfortunate’s identity”.

The text reveals an absence of any consideration for the relatives’ traumatic loss of a child or the potential consequences for them, senior officers have now admitted.

WILL WE LIVE LONG ENOUGH TO GET ANSWERS?

In July 2016, the families were told it would not take too long.

Four years later, in February this year, the Inquiry said that the investigations were still ongoing and that the Chair would provide an update as soon as he could. Asked for a clear timeline again on 15th September, the Chair responded that the review of cover names used by SDS officers was close to completion, but that they would then start on the ones used by the NPOIU.

Again, no clear timeline was provided.

This is completely unsatisfactory, Williams said. Our clients have been left waiting for a further unspecified period, with no certainty that they will ever receive a substantive answer from the Inquiry; and with the police playing a potentially decisive role in that determination.

Those of our clients who are elderly are concerned they may not live long enough to receive answers.

Heather Williams then set out a lengthy and detailed list of questions which they felt the police and Inquiry needed to answer first, if justice was to be done. Many of them focused on who knew about the tactic and how the practice was allowed to continue so long and across units. And what wrong doing was done in the name of their beloved ones.

THE FAMILIES WANT IT OUTLAWED

The secret use of identities of children who had died was done without any meaningful authorisation, without consideration of their rights or the possible consequences, without checks dan balances, and with an absolute absence of any (individual or institutional) accountability.

“We are incredulous that this was done without operational justification, and without any consideration for us.”

Heather Williams concluded: “Our clients seek a detailed public accounting for this abhorrent practice:

– including a formal record of how the practice was permitted to develop and continue;
– the full extent of the intrusion they suffered and the culture that surrounded it;
– together with a detailed historical record of the wrong that has been done to them and its impact.

They seek not only the learning of meaningful lessons, but also the implementation of tangible protections against future abuse, so that this can never again be permitted to become established policing practice.

The accompanying written opening statement from Phillippa Kaufmann QC on behalf of Women deceived into relationships by spycops, and justice campaigns, instructed by Harriet Wistrich [excluding Newham Monitoring Project]

 

Phillippa Kaufmann QC
(Women deceived into relationships by spycops, and justice campaigns, instructed by Harriet Wistrich [excluding Newham Monitoring Project])

Phillippa Kaufmann QC made her second opening statement of the day.

This time, she was appearing for John Burke-Monerville, Patricia Armani Da Silva and Marc Wadsworth, Core Participants who have been put into the Inquiry’s ‘Category J: Justice campaigns’.

Kaufmann opened by saying:

“All three were active in campaigns against police violence and racism and corruption. All three have reason to believe they or their campaigns were subject to undercover policing. But they have received no details of this. They are very concerned about the number of justice campaigns spied upon. They all want the Inquiry to confront the patterns that emerge from the repeated reporting on justice campaigns and the issues of institutional, structural and individual racism that underpin them. It is remarkable that the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] made no mention of racism in their opening statement.

“Given the clear benefit to the police of having information with which to undermine groups campaigning against police violence, racism and corruption, the Inquiry is asked to scrutinise very carefully, with a penetrating sceptical gaze, the purported explanations of the police.”

The Inquiry is urged to examine the use to which any information gathered was or might have been put; and to assess the role that racism, both individual and institutional, played in the undercover policing of justice campaigns. Kaufmann then went on to speak about her individual clients.

JOHN BURKE-MONERVILLE

After a long, hard-working life, John Burke-Monerville should now be enjoying his retirement with his wife, children, grandchildren and indeed great-grandchildren. Instead, he finds himself in a public inquiry fighting to discover why he and his family were spied on by the Metropolitan Police.

John’s son, Trevor, disappeared in suspicious circumstances at the very beginning of 1987 and was found unconscious in a car. After that he was arrested, roughly treated at the police station and then remanded. On 4 January 1987, he suffered fits and, on 6 January 1987, he was transferred to hospital for emergency surgery to remove a blood clot from his brain. On the same day, the Crown Prosecution Service dropped all charges against him.

His family and friends set up a campaign to find out what had happened to him. Trevor never regained his memory, before being stabbed and killed in 1994. Family members (including Mr Burke-Monerville’s then-79 year old father and 73 year old mother) were persecuted and harassed by the police. John’s wife was arrested and charged, then subsequently acquitted. She successfully sued the police for malicious prosecution. Another of their sons, Joseph, was shot and killed in 2013 – a tragic case of mistaken identity. A third son, David, was fatally stabbed outside his home in North London.

In 2014, Trevor was approached by Operation Herne, the police’s self-investigation into spycops, and told that they’d found evidence that his family justice campaign had been spied on.

He now says:

“I feel a responsibility to my sons, myself, my family and my community to ensure that this Inquiry comes through with some sort of answers about why we were spied on by the police. We have not been told the truth by anybody in authority about anything all along… I have no reason to be hopeful about the Inquiry. No one in authority has given me that.”

Movingly, he adds:

“I do remain hopeful. It is, though, my last hope and I am tired. I don’t want my surviving children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren to go through what we are going through.”

PATRICIA ARMANI DA SILVA

Patricia Armani Da Silva is the first cousin of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian man who was shot and killed by police at Stockwell underground station on 22 July 2005, when he was mistaken for a suicide bomber. Patricia has been campaigning for justice ever since his death. His family have had to continually correct the false narrative that Jean Charles contributed in some way to his own death.

The police have sought to deflect, distract and mislead the public. We know that they have leaked false stories to the media ever since they shot him. Later, Harriet Wistrich, the de Menezes family solicitor, received a call from a police officer saying that the police had leaked an allegation of rape against Jean-Paul – which was later to be proved false.

To this day, Patricia cannot prove that the police was the source of all of the false information (e.g. that Jean Charles was an illegal immigrant), but Peter Francis reported that undercover police were routinely tasked with finding info with which to discredit family campaigns like hers.

In 2014, her family was shown five intelligence reports by Operation Herne. These included information about individuals’ political beliefs. She was told that she could submit a request to the Metropolitan Police for details, but this was subsequently refused. Patricia has not, to date, been provided with any further information as to how or why the campaign for justice for Jean Charles de Menezes was the subject of undercover policing.

MARC WADSWORTH

Marc Wadsworth is a journalist, historian and campaigner. In 1991, he founded and led the Anti-Racist Alliance – Europe’s largest black-led anti-racism movement – that comprised faith groups, civil organisations, MPs from all the main parties, and trade unions. He had branches throughout the UK. It was seen by the police as a thorn in their side.

In 1993, Marc assisted the family of Stephen Lawrence to set up their campaign for justice and introduced them to the lawyer Imran Khan QC. He also facilitated a meeting between the Lawrence family and Nelson Mandela. He has made FOIA and SAR requests to the Metropolitan Police for the data held on him. So far, all he has received are one redacted document and one report.

Once again, the police have refused to either confirm or deny whether the ARA or its members were subjected to surveillance. All three of these Core Participants have an overwhelming need to know the truth: not just about how, why and by whom they were spied upon; but about the deeper systemic truths about the SDS.

They want to know the truth about Peter Francis’ allegations of the targeting of justice campaigns; and they want the racism inherent in the view of justice campaigns as trouble-makers to be recognised and addressed. The issue of racism as a motivation for some aspects of the SDS’ reporting and deployments must be at the heart of the Inquiry’s investigation, including in respect of the ‘direct penetration’ or ‘close monitoring’ of the Justice for Trevor Monerville Campaign.

WHY DID THEY DO IT?

Kaufmann questioned whether the spying was motivated by a desire to derail and discredit the campaigns, as they attempted to bring racist police brutality and harassment to light (as John Burke-Monerville fears)?

Or was it, as the police maintain, a case of so-called ‘collateral intrusion’, a by-product of the targeting of ‘extreme’ left-wing groups, who the SDS suspected of using the family justice campaigns (such as the Justice for Trevor Campaign) for their own ends?

She said:

“It will be impossible for the Inquiry to assess where the truth lies in respect of these competing motivations, without considering the underlying circumstances. The family have always suspected from the fragments they have been able to piece together, that Trevor was restrained and assaulted during his time in police custody- suggesting that the police has a motive for keeping tabs on the campaign’s search for the truth.”

The third Operation Herne report, from March 2014, identified 17 Black justice campaigns that were reported on. They are listed in SDS records covering the years between 1970 and 2005.

Peter Francis has described how the SDS infiltrated Black justice campaigns and effectively thwarted their activities:

“My presence in the groups made that justice harder to obtain… once the SDS gets into an organisation, it is effectively finished.”

According to Francis, his superiors wanted him to collect ‘dirt’ about the Stephen Lawrence’s family, to undermine public sympathy for them.

He said:

“Had I found out anything detrimental – and newsworthy – about the Lawrence family, the police, using the media then, would have used that information to smear the family. My superiors were after any intelligence of that order.”

The absence of written records makes it hard to get to the truth. Mark Ellison QC carried out a review, and in his report said: “In light of the limited records available, little weight can be attached to the absence of a record.” We know that many instructions were delivered to undercover police verbally, rather than put in writing.

Given the context, an absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. The Inquiry has largely excluded non-state core participants from meaningful participation: by restricting cover names; by compartmentalising non-state CPs into narrow categories of ‘direct interest’, determined by the Inquiry; and by holding, at least, the initial hearings in circumstances where only a tiny number of non-state CPs and members of the public will be able to see and hear the evidence.

INSTITUTIONAL RACISM

Another huge issue for these clients has been the Inquiry’s ability to explore and assess the issue of institutional racism. There can be few people nowadays, including in the field of dispensing justice, who have not heard of the term ‘unconscious bias’. Many different types of biases have been identified, but some are of particular importance concerning the issues, of racial and sexual inequality and political policing, which arise in this Inquiry. ‘Ingroup bias’ (meaning that we tend to unfairly favour someone from our own group) is informed by the wider social and cultural forces at work.

At a meeting with Burke-Monerville in December 2018, the Chair’s response to these concerns of conscious or unconscious bias illustrated precisely his lack of awareness of how his background and life experiences shape the way he sees the world.

Mitting claims that he will take the “approach of a historian”. But Marc Wadsworth, himself a historian, has grave concerns about this view of historical analysis as an objective process, not shaped by the culture and society in which the historian was raised.

Kaufmann accused the Chair:

“You have displayed a lack of understanding of these issues and refused to recognise your own biases. Despite a lack of knowledge of Burke-Monerville’s case, you made a huge assumption by saying you broadly accepted the police’s own narrative of ‘collateral intrusion’.”

Burke Monerville commented:

“It is painful for me to read about my own children being killed. I read that you don’t need a panel to help you understand racism properly. You do not know much about racism…I’ve read some of the comments that you made about racism. I think you need additional people to look at the evidence with you and to help you make decisions especially relating to racism….I would like to know why you think you can do this without help when you have no experience of racism and no discrimination training.”

Mitting’s response at that meeting provided yet another illustration of his deep lack of understanding – he likened the family’s losses to deaths in wartime.

“Whilst well-meaning, the Chair’s analogy with wartime loss misses such a critical aspect of Mr Burke-Monerville’s loss – that it did not occur in conditions of war, but on the streets of London, where he and his family ought to be able to expect a reasonable level of protection and police investigations capable of identifying suspects and bringing them to trial; but he does not have that, because of the colour of his skin”

“For all of these reasons, Mr Burke-Monerville, Ms Armani Da Silva and Mr Wadsworth wish formally to record that they hold out little hope for this Inquiry’s ability to get to the truth.”

Mitting made yet another patronising and insensitive comment, saying that of all the CPs, Burke-Monerville has the “largest cross to bear”, and ended today’s hearing.

The accompanying written opening statement from Heather Williams QC on behalf of relatives of deceased people whose identity was stolen by spycops

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COPS will be live-tweeting all the Inquiry hearings, and producing daily reports like this one for the blog. They will be indexed on our UCPI Public Inquiry page.

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Undercover Policing Inquiry
Weekly Report 1
2-6 November 2020

After five years of waiting, the Undercover Policing Inquiry finally got off the ground in earnest this week. This first round of hearings will be split in two parts. First, Opening Statements from all the core participants. Second will be actual evidence for the period 1968 to 1972.

The Opening Statements are a chance for the various parties to essentially lay out how they view things. They began with the Counsel to the Tribunal, David Barr QC, presenting a general overview of where we stand.

This was followed by barristers for police and those who were once in the world of police but are no longer. Finally came the non-state/police core participants, whose statements will continue into this coming week. In this report we will try to summarise what was a lot of material, and reflect upon the words of the lawyers.

Barr noted that much of what the spycops did during their deployment is already public knowledge:
• deceived more than 30 women into long-term intimate relationships
• fathered children with some of these activists
• stole the identities of dead children to provide convincing cover stories
• deceived grieving families, and worked to prevent them learning the truth
• undermined anti-fascist, anti-racist, environmental, and other social justice campaigns
• were responsible for the blacklisting of thousands of workers for wanting safe working conditions or being politically active

Despite acknowledging this, it is disappointing that Mr Barr failed to properly credit the activists. The women deceived into relationships were a fundamental part of exposing the spycops. The existence of this Inquiry is based on their work.

This phase will also look at various documents and hear evidence from 1968–1972. It does not cover the actions of spycops while outside England and Wales, despite them being active in around 20 other countries during their deployment.

There were also some surprising pieces of previously undisclosed information, and statements from people previously unheard from.

How and why was the Special Demonstration Squad set up?

Following the windows of the US Embassy being broken during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in March 1968, Special Branch attempted to gather information on the next demo. Their usual tactics being unsuccessful, they created the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) who went deep undercover, living as activists among various anti-war groups.

The next demo in October 1968 was less volatile, and this was taken as a sign of the new unit’s success. Mr Barr has stressed that the Inquiry must decide not if it was successful, but if it was a necessary or disproportionate response.

The SDS rapidly widened its scope and began investigating subversion and demonstrations and disruptions of public order. Any organisation seeking social change could easily be said to be covered by their remit. By the early 1970s, the SDS was aiming to profile anyone ‘within weeks’ of first showing interest in ‘extremist ideas’.

One of the police barristers, Oliver Sanders QC (representing 114 spycops, the majority of former and current undercovers), stated that the main function of the SDS was to assess public order threats. In the period currently being examined by the Inquiry, 1968-72, many of these came from political protests. Their secondary function was providing intelligence on ‘subversion’ to MI5.

What was the role of MI5 and the Home Office?

Since the story of the spycops surfaced, the events have been framed as the work of one rogue officer, then several rogue officers, then rogue units. Those higher up unfailingly point the finger at those lower down.

It is now clear that from the very beginning, the SDS was funded by the Home Office and reported to MI5.

Sanders provided new information:

• MI5 and spycops were so allied that MI5 considered funding the SDS
• They liaised to ensure they didn’t duplicate spying, which might have resulted in spying on each other’s officers
• MI5 recommended tips to SDS spycops, and they asked for specific info
• Most SDS intelligence reports were copied to MI5 with the file reference numbers of the people / group already added
• the SDS weren’t in a position to question MI5’s focus, thinking and efforts, but were just following orders. ‘The SDS was a politically neutral cog as part of a much larger apparatus,’ he said.

Despite the Home Office directly funding the unit for over 20 years, a 2014 report commissioned on the link between the two institutions noted the key file was suspiciously missing. However, a lot of SDS reports have been retrieved for the Inquiry from copies sent to MI5.

How are the police lawyers attempting to portray the actions of the SDS?

It is now clear the various police lawyers are switching tactics and actually trying to justify the actions of the SDS. They describe the spycops as a benevolent and useful group, indispensable to the safety of the public, who only wanted political information so that demonstrations could be effectively policed.

Claim: Police never intend to harm anyone, including the women deceived into relationships

Peter Skelton QC, for the Metropolitan Police, told the Inquiry that the Met is ‘aware of continuing anger and distress of victims of spycops’. He said the Met stands by its 2015 apology to women deceived into relationships by spycops (despite the fact that it still won’t let women see their files, and is delaying civil claims by some of them).

Richard Whittam QC, representing a smaller group of undercovers and managers, also mentioned the apology naming such activity as ‘abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong’. But, he said, spycops committing crime is essential for national security and the prevention and detection of other people committing crime. The apology should be seen ‘in context’, by which he seemed to mean it should be disregarded.

This echoed other police lawyers, who have implied that it was acceptable to abuse people because times were different then, and it was all done for the greater good.

Claim: Spycops are better than the alternative

Repeatedly, police noted that people have been killed on protests – citing two cases from the 1970s, Blair Peach and Kevin Gately – and there would be more death and injuries if it wasn’t for the undercovers ensuring demos were policed properly.

Contemptuously, they failed to mention that Blair Peach and Kevin Gately actually both been killed by the police; Gately in 1974 on an anti-fascist protest organised by heavily spied-on groups, and Peach in 1979 as a member of the most spied-on group of all, The Socialist Workers Party, on an anti-racist protest.

Discussing spycops stealing of dead children’s identities, Sanders said that though it was regrettable, it was necessary to prevent risk of exposure. The alternative to spycops with stolen identities was paramilitary police on demonstrations, he said. This is a patently ridiculous excuse.

Claim: Intelligence must be gathered indiscriminately

Spied-upon groups which were newly named this week include Justice for Rhodesia, Croydon Libertarians, and the St Pancras & Camden United Tenants Association. This contrasts strongly with police insistence that spycops saved the public from violent riots, murder and mayhem by infiltrating these groups; that it was necessary to spy on people who were committing no crimes in order to get to the ‘real criminals’.

The SDS essentially turned belonging to groups such as Hackney United Tenants Ad-Hoc Committee into a valid reason for the state to target you for surveillance. A report from 1973 gives the names of three people who had merely asked about the International Marxist Group.

They did, however, say they found it difficult to infiltrate black power movements; a rather telling sign that they were lacking in Black police officers.

Claim: Even though they’re bad, we can’t judge them because it was a long time ago

Essentially, police lawyers found various ways to say ‘what the spycops did may have been bad but it was a long time ago, lessons have been learned, it’s different now, nobody need lose their job or pension, move on, there’s nothing to see here’.

This directly contradicts documents that make clear the government was aware from the very beginning that what they were doing was deeply unethical, and would cause public outrage if discovered. Even by the standards of 1968, the spycops’ behaviour was blatantly immoral.

This refrain was accompanied by police barristers stating that other types of undercover work keep the public safe from paedophiles and terrorists. This is of little relevance to the activities of political secret police.

It ignores that the spycops of 2010 – long after the supposed new regulatory framework of the Human Rights Act, and Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act – were, if anything, committing even worse abuses than their 1968 counterparts.

The Inquiry also heard from representatives of the groups and individuals who were spied on

Families of the dead children whose identities were stolen

The Inquiry recently informed 19 families that their dead children’s identities were stolen by spycops. The Home Office Select Committee demanded in 2013 that affected families be told, yet the Met refused. Skelton conceded that the Met hadn’t cared about the families of these children.

Sanders said this procedure was invented in an earlier time when people felt differently about death and risk (once again using the ‘it was a long time ago’ excuse), yet the practice continued until the 1990s.

Additionally, one family whose living child’s identity was stolen has been informed.

Justice campaigns of grieving families, represented by Richard Parry and Jane Deighton

These were families in mourning who just wanted answers about what had happened to their loved ones so that they could have at least some closure; in many cases the parents and relatives of people who were barely more than children, and died violent deaths under traumatic circumstances.

Instead, their efforts were blocked and police were openly hostile to them and spycops infiltrated their campaigns for the truth. Police resources that should have been spent catching killers were instead spent on obstructing justice.

As a teenager in 1993, Duwayne Brooks survived a racist attack in which his best friend Stephen Lawrence was murdered. Brooks was spied upon in an attempt to discredit his evidence. He said this week that he won’t testify unless he can see his whole police file first.

Skelton said the Met is ‘grateful’ for Duwayne Brooks’ and Stephen’s mother Doreen Lawrence’s work.

Workers with trade unions and/or politically active workers who were blacklisted

Reports show that trade unions were targeted and spied on from as far back as 1973. Yet, Sanders unequivocally stated that the SDS did not have any involvement in industrial blacklisting.

It did not target justice campaigns, members of parliament or trade unions directly, it was merely inevitable collateral collection while spying on other things, he claimed. These are lies, with ‘collateral damage’ as an excuse. Whether accidental or deliberate, it’s still spying.

Dave Smith, a trade unionist and co-author of Blacklisted: The Secret War Between Big Business & Union Activists, was due to give evidence on Friday 9 November but was gagged by the Inquiry after a legal challenge to the content of his prepared statement.

Three wives (now ex-wives) of spycops, represented by Angus McCullough QC

For all but one of the wives of the undercover officers, it is the first time their words have been heard. In most cases they are now ex-wives, such was the stress their relationships were subjected to due to the activities of their husbands.

There can be no doubt that they were deceived and abused as badly as any other victim of the spycops. They were told that their husbands were gone for long periods in the interests of national security, not that they were on holiday in Thailand or Crete with women they’d manipulated into believing were the loves of their lives.

McCullough described how although they were vetted as support for their husbands, the wives and their children were offered no support during the periods of deployment. Nor were they years later, when the Met knew that the stories were about to hit the press and yet did not deign to warn them.

The officers themselves were flatly told that there would be very little support during deployment. They were given no prior warning of the psychological impact that going deep and long-term undercover would have on them. They received even less support than they’d been promised.

Skelton admitted the Met ‘hasn’t always understood’ how to support the spycops officers. Their wives, all of whom are mothers with children to care for, were used by the SDS and the Met as free, unqualified, in-house emotional support and therapy for their officers.

Peter Francis, represented by David Lock QC

Peter Francis, the only spycop whistle-blower to have come forward, was an SDS officer from 1993-98.

This week he requested a cast-iron guarantee from the Metropolitan Commissioner of immunity to prosecution for information about spycops he revealed prior to the Inquiry starting. Under the Inquiry’s terms, witnesses including Peter Francis cannot be prosecuted for anything that he says during the proceedings.

However, he could be charged under the Official Secrets Act for his previous public statements. His pension hangs in the balance, and he will not testify without absolute confirmation he will not be charged.

It should be obvious that without his evidence, this cannot be a properly informed inquiry. Under the current timetable, the Inquiry doesn’t intend to take evidence from Francis until 2023.

People from a vast range of groups targeted for their political beliefs and activism, overwhelmingly from the left

By the Inquiry’s own admission, over 1000 groups were spied upon (although Sanders and the police themselves now deny this).

This week, they revealed the previously unknown names of just 44 of them. This comes too late for members of those groups to ascertain which of their friends or intimate partners never really existed, let alone participate in their only current chance for some kind of justice.

New photos of SDS officers published

The Inquiry also published previously unseen photos of various officers. Only one was a spycop; the rest were mostly back office staff, apparently all at the same festive event in 1968.

People are excluded from the Inquiry, including core participants

Lawyers for the non-police side noted that without names and photos of spycops it is impossible to reach all the people who were their victims. It is grossly unjust that they will not be represented through the deliberate choice of the Inquiry to exclude them.

There are a great many people who, even though they know they were spied on and have come forward, will also be excluded. Another deliberate choice by the Inquiry is to refuse to livestream the proceedings.

After this week, the hearings will be conducted in secret. Despite that fact that secure livestreams have been set up due to Covid-19, only the text will be made available after the proceedings have finished.

As already stated, over five years into the Inquiry many victims still have no documents. Many more have no names or photographs that would answer otherwise impossible, unanswerable questions.

People giving evidence who were spied on during this time were only provided with relevant documents – a total of 5,263 pages – five weeks ago. Attempting to read all of them before the start is roughly equivalent to reading all of Lord of the Rings twice a week for five weeks straight.

No diversity, no understanding

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, is not just preventing the victims’ access to full understanding, he’s determined to prevent his own. From the very beginning, calls have been made for a diverse panel of people with relevant life experience to advise and guide the Inquiry. This is standard practice for other inquiries, yet Mitting refuses to follow precedent.

The goal of this Inquiry should be to unflinchingly and honestly deal with institutional sexism, racism, and attacks on workers’ rights and the conditions of the disadvantaged. As an old white cis male Knight of the Realm who is a member of the men-only Garrick Club and finds the Macpherson definition of institutional racism ‘controversial’, comprehending these realities is beyond him.

As Ruth Brander, representing the Non Police/ State Core Participants, told him this week, ‘With respect, the concern is you, sir’.

A wise and impartial man would ask for help. Instead, Mitting refuses the offer of information that would increase the chances of a fair conclusion to the proceedings.

What next?

After two more days of opening statements from victims of spycops, the Inquiry’s first evidence hearings (Phase 1 of Tranche 1) will start on Wednesday 11 November. They will cover the formation of the Special Demonstration Squad in 1968, in response to protests against the war in Vietnam, and why it continued beyond that. They will continue until Friday 20 November.

The next set of hearings after that, taking evidence of events from 1973 to 1982, are expected in spring 2021. The Undercover Policing Inquiry has no set end-date, but is expected to perhaps conclude around 2026.

COPS will be live tweeting every hearing, producing a summary every evening, and a weekly report like this one at the weekend.

For more information including an FAQ, see the links on our UCPI Public Inquiry page.

>>Next UCPI Weekly Report (9-13 Nov 2020)>>

Tranche 1, Phase 1, Day 5

6 November 2020

 

Evidence from:

James Scobie QC (Core Participants represented by Paul Heron)

Ruth Brander (Non-Police, Non-State Core Participant Group)

Lord Hendy QC (Fire Brigades Union and Unite)

Gareth Peirce (National Union of Mineworkers)

It was a day based around trade unions who were spied on by the political secret police.

James Scobie QC
(Core Participants represented by Paul Heron)

It began with James Scobie QC, speaking on behalf of those represented by Paul Heron from the Public Interest Law centre.

RICHARD CHESSUM & MARY

Scobie explained that he represented two people who were spied on the period covered by ‘Tranche 1’ (1968-72) – Richard Chessum and ‘Mary’ – as well as others who were spied on many years later.

He said the controversial tactics used by these units were introduced right at the start, and allowed or actively encouraged in the years that followed. These weren’t due to a handful of ‘rogue officers’, or something that only developed slowly over time.

The State knew from the start that the spycops were being sent in to impede and slow the work of democratic organisations fighting for positive social change. They were systematic and systemic. The Governments of the day knew must have known how these units were operating, and we want to know the extent to which these abuses were endorsed and instigated at the highest level.

Either the spycops were endorsed by the Government, or successive administrations were powerless to prevent these secret police operating with impunity: which is most frightening?

Scobie also spoke of the impact on victims of this Inquiry, its many lengthy delays and the continuing lack of disclosure, even to Core Participants. He questioned whether it was the police or the state obstructing the work of the Inquiry. If the state was unable to force its own police to cooperate with the Inquiry, or whether the failings were the fault of the Inquiry itself.

Scobie pointed out that none of his clients were serious criminals, or violent, and the spycops knew this, but targeted them anyway. The State subjected victims to wholesale manipulation and exploitation and, in the case of ‘Mary’, sexual violation.

The Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) was set up in 1968, ostensibly to deal with public order situations. But within a short period of time it was being used to curtail the activities of many peaceful, democratic organisations whose aims were supported by significant sections of society.

TARGETED YET PROVEN RIGHT

History has proven that many of the activists were right and their causes just. Both ‘Mary’ and Richard Chessum campaigned against the use of internment without trial in Northern Ireland; they campaigned about the events of Bloody Sunday; they campaigned against apartheid. History has proven them right time after time. They worked to highlight the institutional racism of the police: something that was only officially accepted many years later. However, the spycops set out to undermine their campaigns, and therefore to prolong the violence.

The organisations they were in that were infiltrated (the Troops Out Movement and others) were open to the public and posed no threat to anyone. But they did oppose state policies, and for this, they were targeted by deceitful spycops. This was political policing, not criminal policing.

It was overwhelmingly left-wing groups who were spied on. ‘Mary’ recalled watching the National Front smash up a meeting while the police looked on. Rather than concentrating on groups that fracture community cohesion, the spycops went after those who were campaigning for better conditions for everyone. According to the list made available by the Inquiry, up to the end of the 1970s we only know of three right-wing groups who were reported on.

Conrad Dixon, the SDS founder, instructed his officers to be ‘followers not leaders’ in the groups they infiltrated: to avoid taking office, chairing meetings, initiating actions, making leaflets or speaking in public.

Despite his specific prohibitions, it is now clear that by 1974, these guidelines were being ignored. From 1974 to 1976, ‘Rick Gibson’ (real name Richard Clark, now deceased) was a London organiser in Big Flame, and chaired meetings. He then became joint National Secretary of the Troops Out Movement, undermining the group.

Clark’s reports were sent to Special Branch and MI5 by senior officers, so it is clear that his activities were sanctioned by the state, and it is not credible to suggest that the government wouldn’t have known about this intelligence gathering. Let’s be clear, inhibiting groups of this kind equates to inhibiting democracy itself.

We heard more details of one of the victims, Richard Chessum, who was described as a decent, caring person, a committed Christian who campaigned for peace, was involved in CND as well as the Labour Party, and now works to help homeless asylum seekers.

SPYCOP INSTIGATOR

Chessum was targeted by Clark, who socialised with him, encouraged him to set up a local Troops Out branch, but reported on him, his sister and his partner. Why was Chessum’s trust betrayed in this way? And why was this done to numerous others like him in the decades that followed?

Chessum had no criminal record. Despite this, the information gathered by Clark was passed to the security services, and Chessum found himself refused employment multiple times. From academic and research posts to a Royal Mail sorting office where he scored 86% on the entry test, time and again, he was refused. When he asked why Royal Mail rejected him, he was told that they were “not at liberty to say”. That is utterly Orwellian.

Thousands of people found themselves blacklisted for their political views. In 2013, it was confirmed that intelligence gathered by the spycops had been used to create the blacklist.

‘Mary’ knew Chessum in the 1970s. She was a student at Goldsmith’s and a member of the Socialist Society (campaigning for student welfare, creche provision, supporting trade unionists) as well as a supporter of the Troops Out Movement. This is why she was targeted by Richard Clark, who deceived her into a sexual relationship. She is adamant that she would never have had a relationship with him if she’d known he was a police officer.

We know that Clark had at least four sexual relationships (including one long-term one) while undercover. Clark’s exit strategy was similar to that used by later officers. He wrote a letter to his long-term partner after his deployment ended, with more lies.

The spycops had total disregard for the women sexually exploited in this way. This was a deliberate tactic used extensively by multiple spycops from the 1970s onwards. It was “part of the DNA of political policing” in the UK, and nothing less than state rape.

Scobie went on to mention the theft of dead children’s identities by officers creating their cover names. The police lawyers prefer to refer to them “using” the names, rather than “stealing” them. But it was done dishonestly, with no consideration of the likely impact on these dead children’s families.

At the beginning of the SDS, Commander Dixon referred to officers needing “to obtain necessary papers”, implying that they had to do this for themselves, with no written guidance. However by the 1990s, this had become long-established practice, as we can see in the SDS’s Tradecraft Manual.

Unfortunately for ‘Rick Gibson’, suspicious activists found ‘his’ death certificate, and challenged him. Clark was rumbled.

Instead of changing their tactics after this failure, the spycops continued committing identity theft.

While both ‘Mary’ and Richard Chessum say that Clark did not incite criminality, we know that other spycops certainly did in later years.

LOIS AUSTIN & HANNAH SELL

Lois Austin and Hannah Sell had their lives infiltrated in the 1990s. They’d joined the Labour party together, and were leading figures in Militant Labour (which became the Socialist Party in later years). They were instrumental in setting up Youth against Racism in Europe (YRE), a mass organisation advocating peaceful change: jobs and homes, not racism.

There was a spike in violent racist attacks in South East London after the British National Party set up its infamous bookshop/ headquarters there. This included at least one racist murder every year. As a result, local anti-racists like Lois and Hannah campaigned to shut the bookshop down. This is when spycop Peter Francis was sent to spy on YRE.

PETER FRANCIS & CARLO SORACCHI

Peter Francis’s deployment lasted for five years. It started within YRE but followed Hannah Sell and Lois Austin over the years into Militant Labour. Francis was followed into Militant Labour, which was by then known as the Socialist Party, by another officer, ‘Carlo Neri’ (real name Carlo Soracchi).

Francis and Soracchi followed the SDS playbook to the letter. They used the whole array of dirty tactics that had been in play for at least 20 years. Francis became secretary of the Socialist Party’s Hackney branch. He and Soracchi realised that holding office in the organisation meant he was able to attend regional and national conferences.

Both officers infiltrated social groups. Both had at least two sexual relationships with women they were spying on. Their victims remember both of them encouraging and engaging in criminal behaviour.

For example, Francis repeatedly tried to incite YRE members to physically attack fascists, Sell and Austin used to respond to him by arguing that defeating fascism required patient campaigning. Sell has no doubt that this was a deliberate attempt on his part to encourage them to commit offences for which they could be arrested.

Soracchi repeatedly attempted to persuade his ‘comrades’ to take part in even more serious criminal activity: arson. He actually took activists to a shop in London, which he told them was owned by an Italian fascist (Fiore, implicated in the 1980 Bologna bombing), and suggested they burn it down. They refused to do so. It was in a residential street. This was not the only time when a spycop seriously advocated the tactic of arson to those they were spying on, something that would have resulted in long jail sentences.

Questions must be asked. Why did they do this? Was it to discredit the campaigners? To maintain their cover? To justify the spycops units’ very existence by making them seem like they were infiltrating dangerous groups?

The CHIS Bill (currently going through parliament) would legitimise tactics of this kind; is its introduction an attempt to pre-empt any findings from this Inquiry?

Peter Francis and Carlo Soracchi didn’t just infiltrate pressure groups, they both infiltrated a political party, and this is interference in democracy. It is known that other spycops infiltrated the Labour Party, the official party of opposition at the time.

DAVE NELLIST

Dave Nellist served as the Labour MP for Coventry South East from 1983-1992. During this time, he had one of the highest voting records in parliament. He set himself a salary equivalent to the average wage of a skilled worker in his constituency, and gave the rest of his parliamentary allowance away to good causes. He made himself unpopular with his colleagues when he campaigned against pay-rises for MPs!

Despite being named ‘Backbencher of the Year’ in 1992, in that year he was expelled from the Labour party for his opposition to the unpopular poll tax. He went on to launch the Socialist Party after this.

Dave Nellist was being spied on while a serving Member of Parliament. He was targeted because of his views, his beliefs, his steadfast and long-lasting opposition to the Government of the day.

According to whistle-blower spycop Peter Francis, there was an MI5 officer spying on Militant/ the Socialist Party. Cabinet papers from 1984 show an awareness in government of of Militant members in various trade unions – including the civil service union, CPSA, now known as the CPS, which Lois Austin is a member of – which was viewed with alarm by MI5. Thatcher said the state should be “very ready” to sack such subversive employees.

We now know that MI5 asked West Midlands police to spy on Nellist. The Chief Constable must have been asked.

How would they have been in a position to put a spy into his constituency office?

Who would the spycop have been accountable to?

Who would have authorised this arrangement? The police, or the Home Office, or both?

Which Home Secretary authorised the spycops to target an MP?

Was this done with or without the knowledge of the Prime Minister?

We know that the SDS was funded directly by the Home Office until 1989. We know that when the unit was first set up, the Home Secretary was put under pressure “from above” to do so. We know that the Home Secretary feared the public exposure of spycops. There are many questions for this Inquiry to answer.

So far the only disclosure we’ve had from the Inquiry has consisted of police files. There are no Government records. It is clear that this Inquiry cannot reach the truth or genuine accountability if they rely on the police to provide full records.

Supposedly there are zero documents about the SDS in the entire Home Officer archives (even though the Home Office provided all the funding for over 20 years). What exactly has the UCPI done to discover how high this scandal goes?

There appears to have been a high level of collusion and collaboration – the Metropolitan Police, MI5, the Home Office, other police forces around the country were all involved – but will the spycops be left to ‘carry the can’ alone?

TELL US WHO & WE’LL TELL YOU WHAT

It is possible to uncover some information about government interference in trade unions. The Shrewsbury 24 campaign has – on a far lower budget than this Inquiry – managed to unearth documents that prove this.

Though more than five years that have passed since this Inquiry was first announced, the majority of Core Participants have yet to receive a single document relating to the spying they suffered. Even those involved in this first tranche have not been given access to witness statements, which we know are relevant to them.

Giving us the names of the people who spied on us decades ago, without any other details or a contemporaneous photographs, is not enough to jog memories. Why has this Inquiry chosen not to share the material we need if we are to engage effectively?

The only disclosure so far has consisted of heavily-redacted intelligence reports, but nothing relating to policy. If the Inquiry has these documents, why have they not been shared with us? If the Inquiry still doesn’t have these documents, what does that tell us about the government and the police, and the likely outcome of this (expensive) process?

We are left wondering how many people have been spied upon, and had their lives changed irrevocably by the spycops, because the state didn’t like their politics.

We still haven’t been given the exact number, and the names, of the groups known to have been reported on. How can this be described as an ‘open’ or public inquiry? How can the public understand the industrial scale of these abuses without information?

We don’t just want to see a few individual (and, to the state, expendable) spycops’ necks on the block in order to save the reputations of the guilty people higher up. This Inquiry must properly investigate, and find out who was responsible. It must ensure that the victims of these abuses are fully included, otherwise the Inquiry will just mirror the disdain shown by the spycops themselves.

We don’t just want a condemnation of certain methods used by these units; we want an end to all political policing.

The accompanying written opening statement from James Scobie QC on behalf of the Core Participants represented by Paul Heron

Ruth Brander
(Non-Police, Non-State Core Participant Group)

The next speaker was Ruth Brander, who represents all the Non Police/ State Core Participants (NPSCPs) at the Inquiry, apart from families of police officers, and whistle-blower officer Peter Francis.

She started by saying the core participants want to know what was done to them personally, and how spycops were allowed to undermine civil society in the UK and beyond for over 50 years. They think that the Chair is not exactly helping them to get there.

LIVE-STREAM THE EVIDENCE HEARINGS

Almost every decision taken by the Chair has reduced his prospect of getting to the truth.

Brand then made a strong plea for live-streaming of the witness hearings, which start on Wednesday next week:

As soon as the evidence phase begins, she said, public access to the hearings will be restricted to just 60 people, many of whom will be lawyers. It is stretching credulity to suggest that there would be any significant risk to any of the officers if their evidence were be live-streamed, as these particular hearings address events of 50 years ago. Besides, other Inquiries – such as the Child Sexual Abuse Inquiry – have proper security in place to prevent information being wrongly released by live-stream. It can be done, so the refusal is a choice rather than a necessity.

Spycops get anonymity at the Inquiry to protect their comfortable life in old age and their social reputation, not their security. Some have spoken publicly before and nothing untoward has happened to them. Moreover, anonymity was granted to spycops several years ago, when we expected a public hearing. But the pandemic has changed the situation completely, it means we don’t get to be present, and if we don’t get live-streaming, this would make the public inquiry a private inquiry. Reading a transcript is not the same thing.

Brander then explained the victims of undercover officers have four big concerns:

1. Significant resource for the Inquiry

When the Inquiry was announced we hoped the victims would be at the heart of the process and would at least see their files. But more than five years later, almost nobody has received anything at all. Requests have been dismissed by the Chair as “unhelpful distractions”. Not only does this run contrary to the Inquiry’s obligations under the Data Protection Act 2018, it is counter-productive. It will affect Inquiry’s ability to get to the truth.

Given disclosure, victims of spycops would be able to help the Inquiry to fulfil its purpose. But the Inquiry hasn’t searched thefiles the Met holds on those named as core participants. Incases the Inquiry was told people were indeed mentioned in Special Branch files, the Inquiry failed to ask for the full file. Victims are appalled by this.

2. Give us the names

Brander then challenged the false distinctions being drawn between various individuals and groups by the Inquiry. The Chair refuses to make disclosure to those NPSCPs whom he deems not to have a “direct interest” in a particular period. This means that those CPs and their lawyers do not get access to the hearing bundles of documents until after the hearing at which the evidence is given. The Inquiry is effectively shutting out the active participation of victims, and thus undermining public confidence in the eventual conclusions.

Also, the Inquiry has done little to inform people who’ve been spied on (apart from some of those deceived into sexual relationships). For instance, the Inquiry intends to give only six of the names used by the 21 officers of the NPOIU (the unit of Mark Kennedy).

People spied on can’t come forward if they don’t know which of their old friends was in fact an undercover officer. We have repeatedly asked the Inquiry to publish a list of all of the groups that were spied on so that members of the public will know if there is a possibility that they were targeted.

How can the Chair evaluate if spying was justified when he only talks to the spies? Those who were spied on will not get an opportunity to give their account, if the officers’ cover names are restricted, or if there isn’t full disclosure of group and personal files

How is the Chair equipped to decide which campaigns were justified targets, especially the more recent ones where issues remain contentious?

Publishing the list of groups that were spied on would also increase public understanding of the issue because it would demonstrate the reach of undercover political policing. It is still a common public misperception that undercover policing has been limited to groups and individuals involved in serious criminality. Publication would dispel that impression.

By not being more proactive in its search for non-state evidence, the Inquiry is likely to miss significant information, in particular, in respect of its task of assessing the scope of undercover policing and its effect on the public.

The Inquiry is still a very, very long way from a position that would enable it to benefit properly from full participation by non-state core participants.

3. Don’t trust the police to self-disclose

The Inquiry relies on police to be the principal source of evidence, while they are the very body under investigation. In cases where cover names are restricted, they will be the ONLY source of evidence. This happens in the context of units whose entire ethos was to keep everything secret, who have a woeful history of non-disclosure, and who have have committed significant wrongdoing, including, numerous admitted human rights violations.

In an inquiry into their wrongdoing, they cannot be trusted to tell the whole truth.

Undercover officers deployed in the political policing units knew, from the outset, that it was very unlikely that they were ever going to have to account for their actions. This led, inevitably, to a culture of impunity.

This culture of secrecy is so ingrained in these units that it is incomprehensible that the police records and evidence should now be approached by this Inquiry as a reliable – and in many cases, exclusive – source of information about their activities.

Discovery that ‘James Straven’ lied to the Inquiry, twice, in signed witness statements in support of his application for restriction orders, does not appear to have altered the Chair’s approach to other spycops denying they engaged in intimate relationships whilst deployed.

Documents relevant to the Undercover Policing Inquiry were shredded by Metropolitan Police personnel in May 2014, after this Inquiry had been announced and after a command circulation had been issued specifically stating that such material should not be destroyed.

HM Inspectorate of Constabulary made this point themselves in their 2012 report.

The culture of impunity was reinforced by the units collecting intelligence rather than evidence, and consequently their methods were never scrutinised in a criminal trial. Where they did have interaction with courts, undercovers lied and misled.

The SDS undermined the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, and the the Met also withheld evidence of police corruption from -, as detailed in Mark Ellison’s report from 2014.

We can’t trust the police to be their own honest archivists. Moreover, the victims have no confidence that the police will give the Inquiry proper disclosure beyond tactical damage limitation.

4. Install a panel

The Inquiry’s terms of reference require it to reach decisions about the motivation and justification for undercover policing operations. In respect of the vast majority of the groups spied on by the Special Demonstration Squad and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, those are inherently political questions. The Chair has already made comments which are indicative of a dismissive view of groups whose political ideologies differ from his own. This is a matter of real concern.

In case she wasn’t already clear enough, Brander said to Sir John Mitting “with respect, the concern is you sir”.

The NSPCPs have real concerns about the Chair sitting alone to determine the issues of fundamental importance in the Inquiry.

The Inquiry will have to confront the extent of political policing, institutional (and individual) racism, sexism, class and political bias in the targeting and conduct of spycops operations.

The Undercover Policing Inquiry’s Chair has no experience of sexism or racism. He needs a diverse panel to advise him, but refuses to appoint one.

If the Chair continues to sit without a panel’s assistance, he has the heavy burden of challenging his own biases. It’s made harder by the secrecy around the evidence he will examine.

We urge the Inquiry to:

• facilitate proper public access to proceedings;

• enable non-state core participants to participate meaningfully and effectively by giving them disclosure;

• publish the full list of groups spied on;

• publish photographs and cover names of all undercover officers.

Without these it’s hard to see how the Inquiry can fulfil its purpose of getting to the truth.

With that, Brander concluded. Inquiry Chair Sir John Mitting responded: ‘all I can say is that I hope to prove you wrong’, dismissing everything Brander had given reasoned, evidenced points for. He may hope to prove her wrong, but with that offhand dismissal he proved her right.

Mitting’s immediate, offhand dismissal of all the reasoned and evidenced proposals is utterly repellant, exactly the sort of thing she was saying needs to change, and in keeping with what we’ve been used to from Mitting and the police. It’s why we have so little faith in the process.

The accompanying written opening statement from Ruth Brander on behalf of the Non-Police, Non-State Core Participant Group

Lord Hendy QC
(Fire Brigades Union and Unite)

Lord Hendy QC spoke for the Fire Brigades Union and Unite the Union

The first thing Hendy pointed out that his two clients were far from the only trade unions believed to have been targeted by spycops. The Communication Workers Union, National Education Union, National Union of Journalists, Rail Maritime & Transport Union, Public & Commercial Services Union and the GMB all have good reason to be here too.

TRADE UNIONS: FROM ILLEGAL TO INDISPENSABLE

Hendy began with a detailed history of trade union rights. Trade unions have been around for about 300 years, just trying to improve conditions for working people, but they had to fight to become lawful.

Trade unions were illegal under the Combination Acts until 1824, but even after that they had stringent limits. A trade union’s leverage comes from the possibility of industrial action, but collective bargaining remained illegal as a ‘restraint of trade’. Over the 19th century, they became lawful and accepted, though the threat of a strikes and pickets was held to be unlawful conspiracy until 1885.

It was not until the Trade Disputes Act 1906 that unions were truly free to threaten or take industrial action. By the end of the first world war collective bargaining became the policy of government, and remained so with all governments up until 1980.

Trade unions are involved in political campaigning beyond their direct interests because, through the experience of working under poor conditions, they have seen that poverty anywhere constitutes a danger to prosperity everywhere.

There can be no legitimate infiltrating of trade unions acting in their usual functions. Regulation of trade unions is a civil issue, not a criminal one, so it should have nothing to do with police. If some trade unionists act criminally, that’s a specific individual issue, it doesn’t in any way justify infiltration of unions by spycops.

The right to strike & picket is protected by a raft of international treaties to which the UK is a signatory. It is part of civic life. Union activity cannot be treated as a threat.

Trade unions act as a balance to the power of multinational corporations. Today’s unions ensuring protection of workers during the pandemic shows they are as needed, and benevolent, as ever.

SPECIAL BRANCH INDUSTRIAL UNIT

It’s only now, five years in, that the Undercover Policing Inquiry is starting to take evidence. Worse than the delay is the paucity of documents.

Hendy said his clients have seen a grand total of two documents from the Inquiry. Yet we know there has been long term spycops focus on unions.

Beyond the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) and National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), the two undercover units with which the Inquiry is primarily concerned, it’s worth noting that the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch had an Industrial Intelligence Unit from 1970. It plainly existed to spy on unions.

The Inquiry says there’s no evidence of spying on unions in the early years of the SDS, 1968-72, which it will examine in these first hearings. We note that the police lawyers’ denials of SDS spying on unions didn’t mention the Special Branch Intelligence Unit’s spying. Its very existence shows spying happened. We want to know more about the Special Branch Industrial Unit, especially its relation to that other Special Branch unit, the SDS.

In 2015, whistle-blower spycop Peter Francis admitted that he had personally reported on members of five unions when he was an undercover officer in the 1990s. His colleague Mark Jenner was a member of construction union UCATT.

Additionally, Helen Steel, Donna McLean, and ‘Alison’ were all trade union representatives when undercover officers deceived them into long-term intimate relationships.

1973: SPYCOPS TARGETING UNIONS

A Special Branch report dated 28 November 1973 details a conference held by the International

Socialist party earlier that month in Manchester.

In the report, spycop John Clinton records the names & addresses of attendants at a conference, naming their union membership or allegiance.

The report has given each of the unions have their own code numbers. Specifically, the prefix 400 seems to refer to trade unions in the spycops’ filing system. It must have already been an established part of the intelligence gathering.

The 1973 report also refers to the Shrewsbury 24, members of UCATT and other unions, who were charged with Conspiracy to Intimidate by police during the 1972 Building Workers Strike. Several of them were jailed.

Nearly 50 years on, earlier this year the Criminal Cases Review Commission decided to look at the convictions, and it seems they may well be quashed.

The SDS’ early annual reports we’ve seen from 1968-74 show that its main targets were left-wing groups. There is no reference in these reports to trade unions, despite trade disputes being the backdrop of the groups being spied upon.

The 1974 SDS annual report says the Shrewsbury 2 Defence Committee had been penetrated. It will have been trade unionists, successor to the Shrewsbury 24 Defence Committee.

What justification was there for spying on this campaign at all? Where was the risk of crime? The infiltration was surely to monitor whether the Shrewsbury campaign was having any success in proving police had fitted up those who were convicted.

POLICE & BLACKLISTING

Jack Winder was a senior official with blacklisting firm the Economic League. In 2013, Winder told the Scottish Parliamentary Affairs Committee that he’d had regular meetings with police officers, and even with the Employment Minister. These had continued right up to when the League was forced to close in the early 1990s.

After the collapse of the Economic League, one of its employees, Ian Kerr, set up a construction industry blacklist called the Consulting Association. Like most blacklists, the Consulting Association wanted to prevent active trade unionists gaining employment.

Ian Kerr ran this illegal operation with the help of 44 construction companies including many household names such as Balfour Beatty, Costain, Skanska, Laing O’Rourke & McAlpine. When it was raided by the Information Commissioners Office in 2009, it was found to have files on 3,213 people.

The information hadn’t only come from construction firms. An ICO senior investigator said ‘the information was so specific and it contained in effect operational information that would not have formed anything other than a police record.’

In 2013, the Independent Police Complaints Commission said it appeared that every constabulary’s Special Branch unlawfully passed personal information about citizens to the Consulting Association. No police officer or construction firm has ever faced any charges of sanction for their involvement with the Consulting Association.

It’s been established that senior NPOIU spycop Gordon Mills met the Consulting Association in 2008, just before the construction of the London Olympic Park at which blacklisting was rife.

Under the aegis of Operation Herne, a forerunner of the Undercover Policing Inquiry, Chief Constable Mick Creedon mounted Operation Reuben, an investigation into police and blacklisting. Completed in 2016, his report found that ‘police, including Special Branches and the Security Services, supplied information to the Blacklist funded by the country’s major construction firms, The Consulting Association and/or other agencies’.

IT’S NOT WHAT THEY KNOW, IT’S WHO YOU KNOW 

Creedon cited a specific example. An individual sought work with a television company making educational videos. The company also did work for the construction industry and so contacted the Economic League to vet the application.

The Economic League said the applicant was a left wing sympathiser and therefore decided to contact the Met Special Branch’s Industrial Unit, due to the perceived risk of having a lefty involved in education.

Special Branch replied saying there was a possible link to terrorism which, despite the lack of any evidence or detail, the Economic League took at face value. Unsurprisingly, the person was denied employment. The prospective employer told them it was due to ‘being blacked by the security people’.

This episode only came to light because the person concerned was related to a retired Chief Superintendent who took the matter up with their former employer and had it all straightened out.

That a private blacklister could so readily get police to check their files and share secret, defamatory (and false) information is astonishing. How many people did it happen to, who don’t happen to have a police relative to put it right?

Just having a Consulting Association or Economic League file prevented employment, irrespective of the content of the information or its veracity, and lives were ruined.

Blacklisters and police are so intertwined that such firms should be part of the investigations of this Inquiry.

THE CHIS BILL 

The Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill, or ‘CHIS Bill’, currently before parliament will allow police to authorise their spycops to commit literally any crime. This Inquiry is being pre-empted, the government is not waiting for its recommendations on the future of undercover policing.

It means any officer refusing to commit a crime will be disobeying a lawful order and so face disciplinary charges.

The CHIS Bill specifically allows spycops to commit crime to protect ‘the economic well-being of the UK’, which can easily be made to apply to legitimate trade union activity.

Some 14 trade unions general secretaries, 20 Labour MPs and a number of campaigning organisations including the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance, have signed a joint statement against the CHIS Bill.

RELEASE THE NAMES, OPEN THE FILES

Finally, we must be given all the names used by spycops if the people who were spied on are to be able recognise them and so come forward and testify. Without the cover names of spycops being published, the Inquiry cannot fulfil its remit.

The accompanying written opening statement from Lord Hendy QC on behalf of the Fire Brigades Union and Unite

Gareth Peirce
(National Union of Mineworkers)

Finally, we heard from Gareth Peirce, representing the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).

Peirce said that the NUM shared many of the views expressed by other trade unions in this Inquiry.

NUM members and their families experienced sustained assaults on their civil and political rights as the state set about destroying their industry and their communities, particularly during the decade from the early 1980s to the early 1990s. Many of these unlawful actions were perpetrated by the institutions of the state, not just the police.

Peirce explained the history of the NUM. Miners had been organising politically since the 18^th century, and fighting collectively for better conditions. The NUM was established in 1945, just before the coal industry was nationalised in 1947.

In the early 1970s, the NUM took industrial action in order to secure more reasonable pay and safer conditions. They were committed to improving working conditions, which remained grim. They were able to contribute to a wider trade union movement.

This strength made them a target for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who came to power in 1979. The security services and police conspired with the newly elected government, and selected media, to secretly attack the NUM. Some of these operations have come to light recently, many must remain as yet undiscovered.

MANUFACTURED DESTRUCTION

The Tories’ long-term aim was the de-nationalisation of the coal industry and the closure of UK pits. As the NUM sought to defend its members, the British state unleashed its full power against miners.

During the miners’ strike of 1984-85, the NUM faced an unprecedented show of state power, and a militarised police force, deployed nationwide. They openly used all manner of hostile tactics, introducing the practice of ‘kettling’ a crowd, extreme violence, and mass arrests to crush the strike.

Behind the scenes though, the establishment was also running its own covert campaign. There is already evidence – some obtained under the thirty year rule from government departments, some gathered from a long series of court cases, including a preliminary Independent Police Complaints Inquiry, some the work of investigative journalists over the years.

There is also clear evidence of the use of informers, infiltrators, provocateurs, bugging and surveillance, on a huge scale. Police violence was premeditated, union members were wrongfully arrested, evidence was fabricated by the police, and manipulated in an attempt to implicate senior NUM officials in criminal acts.

Nobody has been sanctioned for their part in this unlawful intrusion, and these unprecedented assaults. ‘National security’ was invoked to maintain secrecy and prevent accountability.

These false accusations were given a lot of publicity. The militaristic language of the government was parroted by senior police – talk of “battles”, “the enemy within”, “enemies of the state” – and mining communities viewed as a threat to society.

The government declared itself “at war with the NUM”. Although secondary picketing and large assemblies were not offences, the police routinely stopped vehicles and tried to disperse groups of pickets. They went so far as to seal off entire villages, impose curfews, sometimes even occupy them with police horses, which affected (and terrorised) the whole community, not just the striking miners. The police used harsh bail conditions to control those they’d arrested.

Police forces shared officers with each other, creating a de-facto standing armies. There were over 11,000 arrests over the course of that year, 7,000 pickets injured, hundredsof people imprisoned.

THE BATTLE OF ORGREAVE

At Orgreave, on 18^th June 1984, 95 miners were arrested. Their trial (almost a year later) had to be abandoned when it became obvious that there had been mass fabrication of evidence by over 100 police witnesses.

The most senior police witness at the trial, Assistant Chief Constable Clements, admitted that the police had assumed ‘exceptional powers’ – never debated nor authorised by parliament – and had sent in cavalry charges alongside baton-wielding foot-soldiers whose orders were to ‘incapacitate’ the miners and their supporters. The victims of this brutality likened it to a ‘war movie’.

The police also admitted that Orgreave had been pre-selected as a battleground, just like Southall in 1979, which left hundreds of anti-racist protestors injured and Blair Peach dead.

The recently released Cabinet papers proved something that had been long-suspected – that the events of 1984-85 had been deliberately provoked by the state in order to privatise what was left of the coal industry, and also to demonstrate its ability to crush a union as strong and seemingly invulnerable as the NUM. It was thought that this would help them eradicate the rest of the trade union movement.

The government and National Coal Board lied to the miners all along. They sought to create divisions amongst the miners, to undermine the NUM, and ultimately to ‘fragment the public sector’. They drew up their plans well in advance. They planned to starve the striking miners and their families, withdraw social security benefits, and force the NUM to its knees financially.

The government knew that pit closures on the scale they were dreaming of (75 pits to close by 1985) would cause the loss of 70,000 mining jobs, and have a huge economic impact in many areas of the country. They knew this was a sensitive subject, so stipulated that these plans should not be put in writing, and their discussions not recorded or minuted. The government and National Coal Board continued to lie about their intentions, and accuse the NUM of scaremongering.

FIND THE MISSING PIECES

The Government wanted the strike to take place. They demanded that the police make more arrests, that the courts impose more severe sentences, and that more publicity was given to those harsh sentences. They suggested that cases were moved from Yorkshire to more ‘friendly’ courts elsewhere. According to the disclosed Cabinet papers, Ministers sought to use the courts as a political weapon of the state; the courts and due legal process were inappropriately intertwined with political imperatives.

The NUM strongly suspect there was collusion with the spycops. They know that their members were surveilled and spied on by the state. They don’t know whether this was done by the SDS or other agents. However, there was talk of a secret intelligence unit, that could go “beyond Special Branch”.

MI5 expanded during the miners’ strike, and the line between them and the police sometimes blurred. The NUM only possess fragments of the truth, and hopes that the Inquiry can help to assess the motivation, scale and impact of covert policing during the strike.

When we look back at the year of the miners’ strike, we remember the hardship faced, but also the extraordinary solidarity shown. The state was explicit: the miners were the enemy. This meant that all of those who chose to stand in solidarity with the miners were volunteering for the ‘enemy’ side. ‘Public order’ was used as an excuse for these abuses of power.

What was done to the NUM was outrageous, it was unlawful, and it went beyond any possible justification.

The accompanying written opening statement from Gareth Peirce on behalf of the National Union of Mineworkers

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Tranche 1, Phase 1, Day 4

5 November 2020

 

Evidence from:

Rajiv Menon QC (Core Participants represented by Richard Parry and Jane Deighton)

Matthew Ryder QC (Core Participants represented by Mike Schwarz, Simon Creighton, Tamsin Allen & Jules Carey)

Donal O’Driscoll (Category L [Social and environmental activists] Core Participant, appearing in person)

Rajiv Menon QC
(Core Participants represented by Richard Parry and Jane Deighton)

Rajiv Menon QC speaking for some of the spied-on people, finished the statement he started yesterday.

He spoke of two people who were spied on during the very early years of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) 1968-72, the period that will be the focus of this phase of the hearings.

TARIQ ALI & ERNIE TATE

Tariq Ali, activist for over 50 years, will be the first to give witness evidence next week. Ernie Tate was due to give evidence but is now too ill. He is yet another victim of the delays to the Inquiry.

Tariq Ali was born in Punjab in colonial times and is now 76. He’s been in many political and campaigning organisations including the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC), International Marxist Group, and Stop the War. He has written more than a dozen books on history and politics. He was President of the Oxford Union in 1965 when Special Branch opened their file on him.

Ernie Tate was born in Northern Ireland. Tate was a founder of the original target of the SDS, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, and was on its national council until 1969 when he emigrated to Canada.

The fact that the VSC was an open, non-violent organisation did not stop it from being targeted. Tate was also a founder of the International Marxist Group where he became a friend of Tariq Ali. He’s said he’s always been open about his politics, so there was no need for subterfuge to reveal his views or activities.

In the VSC, Tate and Ali organised the 1968 demos against the Vietnam war that led to the foundation of the SDS.

Menon said that the Inquiry had viewed TV news reports of the March 1968 protest that ended in trouble, but the pro-police commentary is at odds with the visuals. Instead of steering the demonstration along its agreed route, police corralled the head of the march near the US Embassy. Police then failed to contain the crowd – who fanned out across the green – and the police ended up sending in the horses.

The injuries that were caused were the result of the police’s actions. The demonstrators were prevented from handing in a letter to the US embassy even though that had been agreed with the police in advance. This was all explained at a VSC press conference the following day.

It has become already become a oft-repeated fable at the Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings that trouble at the March 1968 demo was due to a failure of intelligence. This lie was the original sin that led to the founding of the SDS.

The lack of trouble at the subsequent VSC demonstration in October 1968 was claimed as a success by the new unit, but it was really due to better stewarding, and the intentions of the protesters. This is not mere speculation on our part, the press at the time reported this.

But credit was given where credit was not due. Commissioner Waldron gave a bottle of champagne to SDS officers.

A PERMANENT ARRANGEMENT

The SDS expected to be disbanded after the anti-war protest in October 1968, but MI5 saw the value of spycops having a permanent and much wider remit. The Home Office gave the scheme their blessing and successive governments provided funding year after year.

There should be no mistake. Whilst this squad was kept secret from the public, it was completely integrated into the established security apparatus of the British state, with a chain of command through the senior ranks of the police to the highest levels of government. Documents show the Prime Minister and Home Secretary expected advance reports on the Vietnam demos. The spycops were secret from the public but well known to government.

The SDS spread its attention to other ‘subversive’ groups. Police bragged that new entrants to groups were being identified and reported on within weeks. They were told to cast a wide net.

Their objective was to prevent positive social change, keep people in their places, and allow the established order to thrive.

If people are persuaded that socialism is a better alternative to rampant capitalism, should they not be allowed to exercise their democratic right to pursue such politics without being spied on? The State would say an unequivocal ‘no’.

The International Marxist Group grew to around a thousand members. Its office was burgled by the SDS after spycop ‘Dick Epps‘ was trusted with the keys and made copies.

Only one SDS officer, ‘Alan Nixon‘, admits to brief interactions with Tariq Ali. Ali wants to hear condemnation of the unwarranted spying, but expects instead to hear justification.

Ali is proud to be a revolutionary. He is a proud socialist for peace but is unashamed to say that violence is justifiable if, say, you are a Vietnamese person fighting invaders or a British soldier fighting the Nazis. This does not make him a valid target for spycops.

PIERS CORBYN

Piers Corbyn is in his 70s and still protesting. He has always been open about his politics and has nothing to hide. He attended VSC rallies in the late 1960s and joined the IMG in 1971. He also joined antifascist, Irish and trade union causes, but it seems squatting is what got him spied on.

Police claim they don’t know what cover name the relevant officer (code number HN338) used! Why was Corbyn asked about spycop Alan Nixon, yet officers aren’t asked about him? Corbyn can’t say how he was spied on because neither police nor the Inquiry will say who the spies were.

ADVISORY SERVICE FOR SQUATTERS

The Advisory Service for Squatters (ASS) has been advising people on housing rights since 1975 and has sold more than 150,000 copies of the Squatters Handbook since 1976. Squatting in residential buildings was criminalised in England and Wales in 2012, but ASS was spied on long before that.

Tenants and housing groups seem to have been spied on since at least 1971. SDS called squatting ‘the nursery of extremists’. The ASS say the state spying on them was indefensible. They have only been given two documents by the Inquiry and have no details of why or how they were spied on.

FRIENDS OF FREEDOM PRESS

Freedom Press is the largest anarchist publisher in the UK, and the oldest in the world. It was set up, with the blessing of William Morris, in the 19th century. It was constantly raided by police during world wars for producing Freedom anarchist newspaper.

Spycop Roger Pearce infiltrated Freedom Press from 1979 to 1984. He was actively involved, writing articles for them. Pearce later went on to manage the SDS (and write cheesy police-based novels). Another spycop, ‘Doug Edwards‘, also attended Freedom Press meetings.

Freedom Press’s headquarters was firebombed by fascists in 1993. Did spycops know about it? Did they know it was coming and decide not to stop it?

Freedom Press have had 11 intelligence reports from 1974-77. They have not been asked for a witness statement, nor been officially told which officers spied on them, so cannot possibly comment properly.

One stalwart Freedom Press member died last year, another person failed by Inquiry delays.

JUSTICE CAMPAIGNS

ROLAN ADAMS’S FAMILY

South London couple Richard and Audrey Adams’s oldest son Rolan was studious, about to take GCSEs, and a talented footballer scouted by West Ham, and also passionate about writing music.

In February 1991, racist attacks were on the rise in the area since the British National Party moved their headquarters to the area in 1989. One evening a gang of 12-15 racists chased and stabbed Rolan. His brother Nathan escaped and returned later to find Rolan dying. The gang called themselves Nazi Turnouts. Police knew who they were, and allowed them to walk free.

Neither the police nor the CPS admitted the crime was racist, an ongoing problem of British institutions dealing with such violence. They had a racist stereotype of there being no innocent black boys. Instead of being treated as a victim of crime, Nathan was instead harassed and criminalised by police, repeatedly arrested and searched.

The CPS frequently uses ‘joint enterprise’ against groups of people involved in a crime, yet didn’t prosecute any other attackers with murder. One attacker was sent to jail, and the judge asserted that the crime was indeed racially motivated.

Rolan’s parents started a campaign for justice. They made links with others in similar circumstances. Police were hostile to the campaign, intercepting people coming to the Adams’ house, clearly with advance knowledge of the visits. The family were being harassed but got no protection. They had to leave their home for their own safety three months after Rolan was killed. If police had focussed on the attackers rather than the family perhaps this could have been avoided.

The Adamses family are still angry and grieving. They are angry at the lack of charges, and at the culture of denial of the racist culture that led to Rolan’s murder. If police had taken decisive action, and used intelligence against racists rather than justice campaigns, perhaps they could have prevented later racist murders in the area. Instead, as racist murders rose, more young black men were arrested.

Richard Adams says the Inquiry appears to be a damage limitation exercise for spycops. There is no good reason for the ongoing refusal to live stream the future hearings. The family are cncerned that  the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Moitting, is not assisted by a diverse panel. Whose side is the criminal justice system on?

DUWAYNE BROOKS

Duwayne Brooks was 18 in 1993, living in South East London, training to be an electrical engineer. Stephen Lawrence was his close friend. In April 1993 they were attacked by racists and Stephen was murdered.

His courage exposed the racist nature of the attack, yet police were hostile to him. Whistle-blower SDS officer Peter Francis has described combing through hours of footage of demonstrations and vigils to see if he could find something with which to charge Brooks.

It mirrored the Adamses’ experience; a racist attack with victims treated like criminals and subjected to spycops surveillance. Brooks did everything asked of him. He assisted three investigations. He gave evidence in court when medically unfit. Brooks has since helped numerous police bodies with their work on racism.

Despite – or because – of this, Brooks has been targeted by the police. He was prosecuted on trumped-up charges, a meeting with his lawyer was bugged by the Met, and he has had to face the truth trickling out over many long years. He has received more information than most about his spying, but has received nothing at all from this Inquiry.

Brooks won’t get to see the hearings via live-streaming. The Chair sits without a diverse panel to advise him.

When Brooks is given FULL disclosure he will address the Inquiry, but not before. He refuses to be treated like a suspect all over again, answering the Inquiry’s questions in advance, as if the burden is on him to establish that there was no good reason for the police spying on him.

KEN LIVINGSTONE

Ken Livingstone led the Greater London Council (GLC) from 1981 until its abolition by Margaret Thatcher, but was active long before. He joined the Labour Party in 1969, and soon held office locally, focusing on housing issues.

Livingstone has received limited disclosure from the Inquiry, but has not been told why he was spied on. As soon as he was elected Leader of the GLC he faced relentless vilification from his opponents and in the press.

Special Branch had intelligence of threats to his safety. Having said there’d be no peace in Northern Ireland without a negotiated settlement, he was told that an Ulster Defence Association assassin had been sent to kill him but was called off at the last minute. Livingstone says this is an example of a legitimate use of undercover policing, dealing with a proscribed organisation involved in serious and violent crime.

After the GLC was abolished, Livingstone entered parliament in 1987, something he described as ‘like working in the Natural History Museum except not all the exhibits are stuffed’. Whistle-blower spycop Peter Francis named Livingstone as one of the people he knows was spied upon when they were an MP. Like the other spied-on MPs, he wants to see his file.

Livingstone has been involved in mainstream political life for 50 years, always in public. He can’t see any justification for targeting by spycops, either before or after he was elected.

WHY WERE THE SPYCOPS THERE?

The SDS was a weapon in the arsenal of the state from 1968-2008, with other units doing the same things after, to keep people in their place and allow the established order to thrive. Its unofficial motto was ‘by any means necessary’ but, to address a point made by the police lawyers, the ends DO NOT justify the means.

The victims of spycops aren’t just those who were spied on. In the broader sense, all who want to see an open, democratic, and fair society have suffered for what the spycops did.

We’re here to try to shine a light, let the world see into the dark den of police spies. We hope our participation will allow people to see at least a little of the truth.

In 1962, Martin Luther King said the guardians of the status quo are always on hand with oxygen tents to keep the old order alive. We hope the Undercover Policing Inquiry will not prove to be such a guardian.

The accompanying written opening statement from Rajiv Menon QC on behalf of the Core Participants represented by Richard Parry and Jane Deighton

Matthew Ryder QC

(Core Participants represented by Mike Schwarz, Simon Creighton, Tamsin Allen and Jules Carey)

Matthew Ryder QC speaks for lawyers representing the majority of non-state core participants, more than a hundred individuals and groups whose targeting by spycops was inappropriate, improperly regulated, and abused their rights. They were spied on over a period of more than 40 years, and range from community activists to a Peer who was once a Secretary of State. They all deserve answers. Officers must be called to account, as must the system that permitted it.

Spycops weren’t just out of control. They had political bias that affected the whole process. It included racial bias, and we expect an assiduous exploration of that in the Inquiry.

Spycops targeted many groups who did not seek to overthrow the ‘established democratic order’ unless we take it to mean basically any political or social change. It’s the antithesis of what political culture should be about.

SDS founder Conrad Dixon said a ‘firm line must be drawn between follower and leader’: that spycops mustn’t speak in public, take office, draw leaflets or anything else active in a campaign. These instructions were swiftly ignored. Spycops got deeply involved in stimulating the very groups they were meant to be surveilling, influencing the direction they took and the means of protest they employed.

We’ll never know the true cost of diverting and hindering the targeted campaigns. Voices that should have been amplified because their cause was right were selected for silencing. So many anti-racists, environmentalists and others who were spied on have been vindicated over the years by history and science.

Many were wrongfully convicted, encouraged into acts by spycops whose involvement hidden from the courts.

Most people who were spied on have not seen any documents from the Inquiry, which is a disgrace. Victims are keen to know the life-changing details that have been kept hidden for so long. They want fullest disclosure. They’ve had basically none so far.

Four of the people Ryder speaks for are in Tranche 1 of the Inquiry, which looks at 1968-82. Three of them were anti-apartheid campaigners. The fourth is Celia Stubbs, partner of Blair Peach, an anti-racist campaigner killed by police in 1979, who was spied on for her justice campaign.

ANTI-APARTHEID CAMPAIGNERS

Anti-apartheid campaigners opposed one of the most repulsive racist regimes of the 20th century. Yet the SDS targeted those who opposed apartheid, not its often-violent supporters.

The anti-apartheid movement was mentioned in the first annual report of the SDS. Black power groups were also of particular interest to the new unit. Sporting boycotts were a key part of protesting against apartheid, and were therefore targeted by spycops.

Three core participants – Ernest Rodker, Jonathan Rosenhead, and Peter Hain – were active in the Stop The Seventy Tour (STST) campaign opposing the all-white South African rugby and cricket teams. They made a real contribution to wider anti-racist movement.

Anti-apartheid campaigns helped to bring democracy to South Africa. In December 2015, STST’s role was recognised at the highest level by the South African government when they awarded Peter Hain the Tambo National Award in Silver for his excellent contribution to the freedom struggle.

Yet the police lawyer’s opening statement to the Inquiry this week talked of target groups having ‘totalitarian objectives’.

The three anti-apartheid campaigners were seemingly targeted by spycop Mike Ferguson, but we don’t know for sure because the Inquiry is protecting his identity even though he’s dead. As a Cabinet Minister in the 2000s, Peter Hain has been entrusted with the most serious secret information of state, yet is still not being told which spycops targeted him in his own home 50 years ago.

We do know that Mike Ferguson wasn’t a rogue officer. His colleagues knew about him and have testified about what he did. This wasn’t police using informants, this was police trying to take control of a political movement, a serving officer placed in the group to help direct activity.

We may yet hear explanations from police at the Inquiry. But it appears spycops retro-fit excuses for their surveillance. If there aren’t records to support a given justification the Inquiry should remain sceptical.

Ryder then spoke about some other core participants.

LONDON GREENPEACE

London Greenpeace (LGP) was founded in 1971 to encourage people to take action to preserve the ecosystem.

LGP initially promoted home composting, turning off lights not in use, putting bricks in cisterns to save water, and planting trees. It remained a small, leaderless group and encouraged others to create similar networks. A 1981 LGP leaflet describes itself as nonviolent and libertarian.

In the 1980s Bob Lambert infiltrated LGP. Lambert’s behaviour is truly shocking. He had multiple relationships with women he spied on including fathering a child. He encouraged activists to join actions, and even drove them there. He was still undercover in 1987 when fellow spycop John Dines joined the group.

Dines became LGP treasurer, gave lifts to members (in order to find out their addresses), and deceived one member, Helen Steel, into a long-term cohabiting relationship. Lambert deceived more than one woman into a relationship while he was in LGP. It was unjustifiable by any measure.

People who were part of LGP are concerned about spycops steering the direction of the group, including towards the anti-McDonald’s campaign, which Lambert vigorously encouraged.

The way intelligence was collected was a serious infringement of the subject’s life, and they have no idea what was gathered and how it was used. But we do know it was shared with private companies such as McDonald’s.

Some LGP members are on the construction industry blacklist despite never having worked in the industry. Were their details supplied by the spycops?

It can’t be claimed it was necessary for Lambert to infiltrate LGP to prevent serious crime, when Lambert himself admits they weren’t involved in any such activity. It was a violation of democratic rights.

Former SDS officer Peter Francis says that Lambert’s undercover career was ‘regarded as hands down the best tour of duty’ in the history of the unit. After his deployment he was promoted to running the SDS.

We don’t know which other officers infiltrated LGP, but a Cabinet report suggests it was being spied on in the late 1970s, long before Lambert arrived. So LGP calls for all files to be opened and all officers’ cover names published so those who were spied on can realise what happened and give evidence to the Inquiry.

RECLAIM THE STREETS

Reclaim The Streets was founded in the late 1990s to challenge the noise, pollution, and dominance of cars in our public spaces, and many of the group’s ideas have now been taken up across society. It shows the role of protest groups in inspiring progressive change in society.

Reclaim The Streets was infiltrated by spycops Jim Boyling, Jason Bishop and Jackie Anderson. There may well be others. During the infiltration, spycops were arrested and prosecuted under their false identities.

Boyling was arrested for a protest in 1996 in support of striking tube workers, occupying the office of London Transport office. He and Bishop were both arrested on the Mayday 2000 anti-capitalist protest.

It appears Bob Lambert was Jim Boyling’s direct supervisor. Many of Lambert’s tactics in LGP were used by his charges: active involvement in steering campaigns, sharing intelligence with private firms, and abusing women.

Boyling had at least 3 relationships while undercover, with huge impact, and went on to have two children with Rosa. There can be no justification for this tactic. The fact that it echoes Lambert’s treatment of women shows it was institutional.

From 1999-2005, Bishop was very actively involved in campaigning against the DSEI arms fair. Again, this was a case of an undercover officer encouraging and steering a group.

ALDERMASTON WOMEN’S PEACE CAMP

For the last 35 years, Aldermaston Women’s Peace Camp (AWPC) has been based at the UK’s main nuclear weapons factory. It is a purely political campaign against militarism. It’s one of the few women-only protest spaces in the UK. Spycop Lynn Watson infiltrated AWPC in the years 2003-2004.

Lynn Watson was at Aldermaston at the same time as other groups, and we have to presume that she would have reported on them, espeically as she attempted to infiltrate some of then. However they have been refused core participant status at the public inquiry.

CLIMATE CAMP

In 2006, the first Climate Camp took place at Drax coal-fired power station in North Yorkshire.

There were further camps until 2010, all sited near high-carbon locations, such as power stations and airports, bringing hundreds of campaigners together to educate each other and protest.

Spycops officer Mark Kennedy was deeply involved in planning Climate Camp, attending five of them and being arrested twice. He was in the secret planning group that made the earliest and largest decisions about the Camps, as well as organising all logistics.

Spycop Lynn Watson also attended and helped organise the first Climate Camp, where she engaged in sexual activity with an activist. Like Kennedy, she was part of a secret group which organised the occupation of the site, and gave briefings to the group in her living room in Leeds.

DR HARRY HALPIN

Dr Harry Halpin is a global academic expert in infomatics who worked at MIT. He travels the world, giving talks to the likes the UN, the OECD and the European Parliament.

Halpin is also an environmentalist, who was spied on at the Kingsnorth and London Climate Camps in the late 2000s, since when he’s had repeated problems when travelling, including being detained under terrorism legislation.

It’s plain to see that Harry Halpin has been blacklisted for his environmentalism at events infiltrated and organised by British spycops.

CARDIFF ANARCHIST NETWORK

Cardiff Anarchist Network was a group of about 20 people active from 2005 to 2010. The network consisted of autonomous collectives in opposition to all forms of exploitation and capitalism. Their campaign tactics included direct action.

It was infiltrated by spycop ‘Marco Jacobs’, who got involved in the group’s administrative tasks. He caused discord and fractiousness among the group, and deceived two women into relationships.

Jacobs formed close friendships, attending funerals of family members of the people he spied on. It was a gross invasion of their personal lives.

DEFEND THE RIGHT TO PROTEST

Defend The Right to Protest aimed to respond to the criminalisation of young protesters after the anti-cuts and student protests around 2010. It was an identified target of the National Domestic Extremism Unit. Spycop Simon Wellings was deployed 2001-07.

Wellings spent four years as part of the controlling group of Globalise Resistance. He outed himself by accidentally dialling one of the group while in a police meeting identifying the people he spied on, where he could be heard sharing personal information about activists in photographs he was showing to another officer.

MARK KENNEDY INCITING AND TRAVELLING

In 2009, spycop Mark Kennedy approached anti-militarist campaigner Kirk Jackson to organise UK activists going to Germany.

Jason Kirkpatrick was spied on by Kennedy on numerous occasions between 2005 and 2009, at his home in Berlin and in several other countries as he toured to give talks about protests against the G8 Summits. Politicians in some of these places – Germany, Ireland, Northern Ireland – have called for answers, but the Inquiry seems likely to disregard these as its remit only covers the spycops’ activities in England and Wales.

POLITICAL POLICING WITHOUT LIMITS

This was political policing. There was no constraint to comply with the law, not even the basic rights of those targeted. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 did not restrain spycops – we’ve seen how they carried on well into the 2000s.

The collection, retention and use of data is a major concern. This went on with no legal framework in mind. There was no meaningful system of oversight. Courts and prosecutors were deceived even as they carried out legal processes.

Senior officers either failed to control, or gave approval to, inexcusable acts. This continued for decades under various managers. It was institutional.

The Inquiry limiting access to data – and even the names used by the infiltrators  – means victims are prevented from engaging meaningfully with the Inquiry meaningfully.

RACIAL JUSTICE CAMPAIGNS

Spycops targeted family justice campaigns and community organisations. The preponderance of black campaigns shows how their race was part of the threat they were seen to pose.

Celia Stubbs’s partner Blair Peach was killed by police in 1979. Lee Lawrence’s mother Cherry Groce was shot by police in 1985. Myrna Simpson’s daughter, Joy Gardner, died after restraint by police in 1993. Bernard Renwick’s brother died in 1999, again after being restrained.

Beyond those killed by police, Sukhdev and Tish Reel lost Ricky Reel after he was attacked by racists. Michael Menson died after being set alight by white youths.

Other core participants here are Winston Silcott, who was wrongly convicted of the murder of PC Blakelock, and Stafford Scott, who supported those arrested in the aftermath of the Broadwater Farm disturbances in 1985.

Sharon Grant’s late husband, MP Bernie Grant, supported many such campaigns, and was spied on. All these people were merely seeking justice over police malpractice.

CELIA STUBBS

Blair Peach was a teacher and trade unionist who attended a protest against the racist National Front in 1979.

Eleven witnesses saw six police get out of a van and one of them give Peach a fatal blow to the head. The determined cover-up that followed lasted decades. Police officers refused to answer questions. Commander Cass’ investigation said officers were ‘clearly obstructing’ the investigation.

Cass was clear that a police officer had killed Peach, but officers wanted to maintain the cover-up. All officers present claimed not to remember details. Cass’ report was kept from the inquest and went unpublished for 31 years, until 2010.

The coroner wrote to politicians before the inquest had even finished, saying the idea Peach was killed by police was a political lie. He therefore indicated to the Home Office that the investigation was biased. Blair’s partner, Celia Stubbs, knew none of this.

Stubbs says it can’t be expressed how exhausting it is to suffer bereavement then face such official intransigence. The guilty officer has been identified. Nobody has ever been charged.

Stubbs helped to establish Inquest for people in similar positions. Stubbs knew her phone was tapped but never suspected she was being spied on in person by undercover police. There would have been no justification for it. There were no secret meetings.

She finds it especially distressing that there was undercover reporting at Blair’s funeral.

Stubbs says spycops lost all sense of the fact that Blair was killed by police. His loved ones’ distress was criminalised. Stubbs has had no explanation for why she was spied on, nor why it was kept secret – no officer blew the whistle.

Spying on the Blair Peach campaign was a gross abuse of the trust given to police. They wanted to stay one step ahead of the campaign to assist the police in frustrating the attempts to secure accountability.

Stubbs got an apology from the police in 2015. It is not enough, it must just be a starting point.

The opening statement by police lawyer Oliver Sanders on Tuesday cited the deaths of Kevin Gately and Blair Peach. This was an offensive comment. Peach was not killed by protest or protesters. His killing does not stand as justification for spycops. Blair was killed BY police, and the truth covered up for decades.

What would have saved him was restraint of police brutality against a campaigner against racism. It’s an outrageous way to start the Inquiry.

LEE LAWRENCE

In 1985, Lee Lawrence saw his mother Cherry Groce shot by police at their home by Officer Lovelock. She used a wheelchair for the rest of their life.

In 2014, an inquest found that the shooting had contributed to her death.

Mr Lawrence has sat on advisory boards helping police improve tactics. His positive attitude has built bridges, yet he was spied on.

MYRNA SIMPSON

In 1993, Joy Gardner was at home with her three year old son when there was a raid by police and immigration. Her hands were bound to her sides, her legs strapped together, and 13 feet of tape was wrapped round her head. She was asphyxiated.

Three officers were acquitted of manslaughter.

Joy Garner’s mother Myrna Simpson was spied on by the SDS. We do not know why.

RICKY REEL

Ricky Reel’s family have been campaigning for an investigation into his racist murder in 1997, which police treated as an accident. The police investigation disregarded the racial harassment of Ricky Reel immediately prior to his death. They decided it was accidental death before the investigation was complete.

The police investigation was subject to two inquiries, but the reports are confidential. The family were told in 2013 that they had been spied on by the SDS.

For the Reel family to find out they were spied on on top of Ricky’s death and the failed police investigation has had a horrific impact. Resources weren’t available to investigate the death, but were available for spying on those who were left behind.

MICHAEL MENSON

On 21 January 1997, Michael Menson, a 30-year old black man, was discharged from hospital where he had received treatment for mental health matters. A week later he was found in the street, having been set alight. He was taken to hospital where he said he’d been attacked. He died of his injuries on 13 February 1997.

Police treated it as self-immolation; the family said it should be murder. The inquest ruled it an ‘unlawful killing’.

In 1999, three men were convicted of the murder in two separate trials. A Cambridgeshire police investigation found negligence and racism, with one police officer saying ‘I don’t know why they’re so worried, this only concerns a fucking black schizophrenic’.

Michael Menson’s family was told in 2014 that the SDS had spied on their campaign. They saw heavily redacted files. The family grieved for Michael, and were let down by the police investigation. To this day, they don’t know the full truth.

ROGER SYLVESTER

On 11 January 1999, Roger Sylvester was acutely unwell with a mental health episode. He was taken away by police and was restrained in a way that killed him.

The inquest jury ruled it an unlawful killing, but this was overturned by the High Court.

Roger Sylvester’s family have seen redacted reports on the funeral. Why was that even reported on, and what was redacted?

WINSTON SILCOTT & BROADWATER FARM

In October 1985, a few weeks after police shot Cherry Groce, police entered the North London home of Cynthia Jarrett, and she died from a heart attack. People on the Broadwater Farm estate felt unsafe in their own homes. A protest the next day developed into a disturbance, and PC Keith Blakelock was stabbed to death.

Winston Silcott was convicted of the murder, despite not even being at the scene. Officers had fabricated incriminating notes.

Spycop John Dines lived in a house overlooking the Silcott family home as Winston’s appeal was pending. Alcott’s conviction was quashed in 1991. He was spied on for up to ten years afterwards.

After the Broadwater Farm disturbance, Stafford Scott worked to support people arrested. Scott was arrested during the investigation into the death of Blakelock, and the police later had to compensate him for their mistreatment. He has devoted his life to supporting victims of police malpractice.

The Broadwater Farm Defence Campaign suffered a series of ‘burglaries’ and it is thought spycops are responsible. Spycop John Dines attended at least one protest in support of the Campaign.

HACKNEY COMMUNITY DEFENCE ASSOCIATION

Dr Graham Smith was part of the Hackney Community Defence Association in the 1980s and 90s, along with Mark Metcalf They supported victims of police brutality and abuses of power.

In 1993, Smith and Metcalf established the Colin Roach Centre, which hosted anti-racist, police accountability, civil rights and trade union activists. It too was burgled, and its computers destroyed.

In 1995, spycops officer Mark Jenner infiltrated the Colin Roach Centre. He became very active in it, including writing for its bulletin.

Jenner was privy to confidential information about cases against the police. He then turned his attention to trade union activity, even becoming chair of one group. He also deceived a woman known as Alison into a long-term relationship.

SHARON & BERNIE GRANT

Sharon Grant is the widow of Bernie Grant, MP for Tottenham 1987-2000. In 1987, Bernie was one of three black MPs elected, the first time such a thing had happened in the UK. He supported some of the cases mentioned including the Broadwater Farm Defence Campaign. He challenged police stop and search practice, he opposed apartheid, and frequently travelled abroad for his anti-racist work.

As well as being Bernie’s wife, Sharon was his office manager and an activist in her own right. Was she also targeted by spycops? What justification was even given at the time for spying on an MP? Who else saw the intelligence – the press who vilified him?

DIANE ABBOTT

Diane Abbott was elected at the same time as Bernie Grant, the first black woman in the Commons. She’s been a leading anti racism campaigner for decades, supporting many campaigns including those of Blair Peach and Stephen Lawrence. Whistle-blower spycop Peter Francis says Abbott was spied on while an MP.

Joan Ruddock has supported many progressive causes and was an MP and minister. She too was spied on whilst an MP.

Unjustified, unregulated political policing like this distorts the ability of the public to engage with the political process.

None of these campaigns should have been spied on, nor the MPs. It wasn’t merely insensitive to grieving families. It was police shielding other officers from legitimate criticism and exposure of police wrongdoing.

The targeting of black campaigns and MPs mirrors the very complaints community campaigns were making. For simply seeking accountability by lawful means, they were subjected to the kind of intrusive spying people would think was reserved for serious and violent criminal activity.

Victims were treated as perpetrators. We want to know not just who did it, but who sanctioned it? What level approved or failed to prevent it?

This has a particularly disturbing aspect: unaccountable police undermining campaigns for police accountability. All the people I speak for, irrespective of their own ethnicity, want the Inquiry to be unflinching in exposing the racism of this policing.

MISCARRIAGES OF JUSTICE

Spycops took part in direct action protests and caused miscarriages of justice. They influenced and planned actions, including encouraging unlawful activity for which participants were convicted and even jailed. This was entrapment.

Managers who should have been providing oversight were tolerating, even encouraging this unlawful behaviour. Courts weren’t told. Proper disclosure and integrity of evidence were disregarded. It’s not only contempt for the spied-upon but for the legal process and rule of law .

Home Office guidance was clear – undercover officers mustn’t be agents provocateur, nor ever mislead a court [as cited in our post about spycops and miscarriages of justice]

The SDS Tradecraft Manual actively discouraged spycops from admitting their real identity to arresting police. Spycops arrested on protests were party to defence meetings with their lawyers, breaching legal privilege.

Spycop ‘Mike Scott‘ infiltrated a 1972 anti-apartheid demo, and was arrested and convicted under his fake identity. It is described here by one of those wrongly convicted, Professor Jonathan Rosenhead:

‘Mike Scott’ withheld evidence that exonerated the activists convicted – he knew they weren’t on a public highway as his uniformed colleagues had alleged. The spycops Tradecraft Manual itself warns of the risk of being ‘fitted up’ by uniformed officers.

ANDREW CLARKE & GEOFF SHEPPARD

Andrew Clarke and Geoff Sheppard were animal rights activists in the 1980s and 90s. Sheppard was convicted three times, and each a spycops officer was involved.

Clarke and Sheppard were convicted of planting incendiary devices intended to set off sprinklers in Debenham’s.

At their trial, Clarke and Sheppard had been convicted of joint enterprise, even though they may not have planted all the devices. There was no evidence of Clarke planting any. The Crown said a third person planted one.

In 2011, they found out the third person in their group, ‘Bob Robinson’, was actually spycop Bob Lambert, and appealed their convictions.

Clarke and Sheppard served long sentences. Lambert’s role was kept secret. He went on to run the SDS and get an MBE for services to policing.

Spycop John Dines was involved in Sheppard’s second conviction, when flour was thrown at a hunters’ ball. After that, spycop Matt Rayner encouraged Sheppard to acquire a shotgun, for which he was then convicted.

It seems that neither prosecutors nor the courts were aware of any spycops’ involvement. These officers had access to the defendants’ legal activity. This is secret police overriding the rule of law with nobody approving it but themselves.

Allegations of Bob Lambert’s involvement in the 1987 burning of Debenham’s in Harrow were first made in 2012. Four years later the Met said they were undertaking a criminal investigation. Four more years later, in October 2020, and the Met said they still haven’t finished their investigation.

STOP HUNTINGDON ANIMAL CRUELTY

Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) was a group campaigning to close Huntingdon Life Sciences vivisection labs. Several activists were convicted of blackmail in 2013. Numerous spycops, including Rod Richardson and Mark Kennedy, were involved, plus a corporate spy called Adrian Radford.

Spycops gave witness statements to court for Debbie Vincent’s trial, and we believe it happened in Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty trials as well.

JOHN JORDAN

John Jordan was convicted in 1997 for a Reclaim the Streets action – all other defendants including spycops officer Jim Boyling were acquitted.

Jordan’s conviction was quashed in 2014 but without disclosure of any evidence. The judge said it would come out at the current Inquiry.

RATCLIFFE CLIMATE TRIAL

In April 2009, 114 climate activists were arrested planning a protest to shut down Ratcliffe on Soar power station. Eventually, 26 were charged with conspiracy. In a first trial, 20 admitted the plan but said it was justified, and they were convicted in 2010.

In a second trial, six people denied being part of the conspiracy. Just before their trial began, they discovered that their fellow-arrestee ‘Mark Stone’ was actually spycop Mark Kennedy. They asked the prosecution to comply with their obligation to hand over all evidence, including Kennedy’s reports. On the day the trial was due to start in January 2011, the Crown Prosecution Service dropped all charges.

The Ratcliffe 20 then had their convictions quashed. The judge said future inquiries such as the current one would make everything clear.

DRAX CLIMATE TRIAL

A year before the Ratcliffe arrests, in 2008, 29 climate activists were arrested for stopping a coal train on its way to Drax coal-fired power station in North Yorkshire. The activists acted totally peacefully and with impeccable health and safety considerations. They were convicted.

After Mark Kennedy was unmasked, the Drax 29’s convictions were quashed. The judge suggested Kennedy was an agent provocateur.

GOOD EASTER HUNT SABOTEURS

In 1996, hunt saboteurs went to Good Easter in Essex. They were stopped and searched on the way, and several were arrested. In a similar instance nearby, another person was arrested after being stopped by police.

The police were extremely aggressive. This treatment of animal rights activists chimes with spycop Andy Coles’ contribution to the SDS Tradecraft Manual. In it, he told of the low opinion he’d developed of uniformed officers dealing with animal rights activists, saying it was ‘often out of proportion to your behaviour’.

Those arrested later received compensation. But one of the other ‘activists’ present was in fact a spycop, Jim Boyling. Boyling gave a witness statement about the police’s unlawful behaviour, but as this was believed to be coming from just another hunt sab, it carried no weight.

FAIRFORD COACHES

Protesters travelling on coaches to RAF Fairford to protest against the start of the Iraq War were turned back by police, who then shut off all exits from the motorway to London. They said it was because a protester group known as WOMBLES were on the coaches, allegedly intent on disorder.

One of the passengers, Jane Laporte, brought a judicial review which found in her favour and against the police. This went to the High Court and House of Lords. Police had said they had ‘no basis for distinguishing between passengers’.

But spycop Rod Richardson was on one of the coaches. He knew who was on there, and their intentions. He would also have known who was and wasn’t in the WOMBLES. Spycop Jason Bishop had helped organise the coaches, and would also have known about the passengers.

Police misled the highest appeal court in the land, claiming not to have intelligence they clearly had.

LONDON ANIMAL ACTION

London Animal Action was a collective of animal rights groups founded in 1994. Numerous spycops joined; Andy Coles, Matt Rayner, Christine Green, Dave Evans, and possibly more. Bob Lambert was manager of some of these. All but Evans are known to have had intimate relationships with people they spied on.

We know corporate spies infiltrated London Animal Action. Did they get intelligence passed to them from spycops?

THE COMMON PLACE

In 2005, The Common Place social centre was founded in Leeds. Its first treasurer was spycop Lynn Watson. She complied with the legal obligation to file accounts – but did so under her false name. After she left and this was realised, the centre had to close.

HOW MANY MORE?

Mark Ellison and Alison Morgan’s 2015 report found spycops routinely withheld evidence from courts when they were involved in cases.

All spycops miscarriages of justice cases that have been reviewed have been the result of those convicted raising concerns, not from the police coming clean

Ellison & Morgan’s report also said that the lack of surviving records means we can’t tell what evidence once existed that would have changed court cases.

Ellison & Morgan identified 26 SDS officers arrested on 52 occasions. But it couldn’t identify all potential miscarriages of justice. This is extremely disturbing – the secrecy of the spycops means the facts of what they did were deliberately withheld from courts and some miscarriages of justice can never be rectified.

The refusal of police and the Inquiry to release documents, and pictures of spycops, are obstacles to discovering more.

Those spied upon, who have done better than police or CPS on this issue, must be given a central role at the Inquiry.

WHY WE NEED THE TRUTH

Core participants targeted by spycops are not confident the Inquiry will reach the truth. After years of asking, they’ve been told almost nothing. It makes it hard for them to properly contribute.

Speaking for the police at the Inquiry, Oliver Sands QC said criticism of spycops misses the point because if there were a right to be heard without the police knowing in advance, it would have to apply to everyone regardless of their politics, and that result in ‘pandemonium’.

We think the right to be heard without police knowing in advance is a human right of freedom of expression, it should not apply to those whose politics are deemed officially acceptable.

The behaviour of the spycops was consistent with what they were told was acceptable and encouraged to do; it was systemic, not rogue officers.

Exposing the truth about spycops has come at huge human cost. The spied-on did the work themselves to find out the truth, which is traumatic in itself. But it’s made harder because of the obstructions by police.

Had it been left to the police alone, we would never have heard of it. Discovering for themselves they have been spied on has had profound, long lasting and damaging impacts on the activists themselves.

One of the core participants who exposed Mark Kennedy said:

‘It was worse than a bereavement. When a loved one merely dies they go away forever but, unlike a spycop, they don’t undo all the shared experiences that made you love them when they were here. He should never have been in our lives and families. But more than that, we should not have had to find the truth for ourselves, and by chance…

‘But speaking to others who can’t be sure which of their friends were spycops, I realise I have been spared something even more damaging. The thing worse than knowing is not knowing.’

Undercover policing of this kind must never happen again. Even at this early stage of the inquiry, we should be looking for what changes the Inquiry will recommend for the future. We want to know what the purpose of the spying? Was it tainted by racism or other prejudices? Is the purpose a retrospective excuse that can’t be verified?

What framework did the spycops work to, and is there any evidence of it being adhered to? If it existed at all, why did it fail to protect victims?

The Inquiry itself is a test of whether an inquiry process can deliver justice and explanations to the wronged. It must deliver the truth we all deserve and have waited so long to hear.

The accompanying written opening statement from Matthew Ryder QC on behalf of the Core Participants represented by Mike Schwarz, Simon Creighton, Tamsin Allen and Jules Carey

Donal O’Driscoll
(Category L [Social and environmental activists] Core Participant

Donal is representing himself at the Inquiry. He was involved in numerous campaigns targeted by spycops, and is a researcher for the Undercover Research Group. This is a summarised version of his statement, you can read the full thing on their site.

It appears the Inquiry believes it can do its work without the non-state non-police core participants if needed, that it can interpret the moments and movements we were part of by hearing the words of those whose core training was to lie, people who were willing to pervert the course of justice.

Disclosure of material the police had years to pore over, we are given at the eleventh hour, with insufficient time to process properly.

Trauma, pain and injustice are at the heart of the matter. The undercover policing scandal has its impact because this is what it caused, in myriad different ways. People were abused. Democracy was attacked by ideologically motivated units, yet we are told they are the ones who need protecting with anonymity. The police committed serious crimes, and are clearly approaching the Inquiry as an adversarial process. The constant prioritising of police’s desires exacerbates the pain we all feel.

I’ve seen some of the information spycops police kept on us. I know how extensive, personal and vile it is, and the lies and inaccuracies within. The Inquiry will not get through the layers of deception where the police have covered their tracks, leaving documents that deliberately obscure the truth if they left any record at all.

I grew up in Northern Ireland aware of state sponsored murder gangs and shoot to kill policies. We knew what the British state is capable of and what it is willing to cover up or justify to itself.

So, I come to this with no illusions. However, I will not stand by when the Inquiry tells me it can get to the truth without letting me know the names of the undercovers who spied on me. When the Inquiry insists on withholding those basic facts from myself and others, it is not getting to the truth, it is helping cover it up.

In 1998, I was hospitalised, pushed under a moving car by a police officer during a demonstration, a deeply traumatising moment that still affects me. In the subsequent months I was targeted by police which furthered that trauma. I now believe spycop Christine Green would have been around for that. I want to know what reporting she and other undercovers made in relation to that period, and how that impacted on the civil claim I was then preparing against the police.

PERSONAL HISTORY

In the late 1990s I was placed on construction industry blacklisters The Consulting Association’s so-called ‘greenlist’ of environmental activists and experienced the impact of that, having job offers withdrawn last minute.

In the 2000s, I was involved in defending animal rights groups against civil injunctions that sought to undermining their right to protest. I now know that not only were the domestic extremism units overtly active around this, they were covertly active as well, including one corporate spy now known to have passed material to police. I want to know to what extent undercovers active at the time, at least one close to me, were disrupting our legal defences and who sanctioned that.

During one of the injunction cases, it emerged that Superintendent Stephen Pearl head of the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (NETCU), a sister unit to the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), handed over to lawyers representing a number of private companies the names, details and convictions of 52 individuals including myself.

It was clear that this type of assistance was done as a matter of course and the practice only emerged when they sought to formalise it for proceedings. I managed to successfully intervene on that occasion, but the question remains as to how much other material, including that gathered by undercovers, was being passed over to private companies.

Superintendent Pearl went on to become a director of a vetting and security firm, Agenda. It raises the question of just how seriously should we take claims of risk facing NPIOU officers when, as of yesterday, he was listing his NETCU role and business interests on LinkedIn, along with a photograph of himself.

Around 2010, I was with Debbie Vincent talking to the pharmaceutical giant Novartis, negotiating in good faith regarding their injunction. However, we were not talking to Novartis as we’d been led to believe, but to undercover officer James Adams. I was arrested for conspiracy to blackmail, something I believe was done to undermine my work on the injunctions more generally. The charges were later dropped.

A PROUD ACTIVIST

I would like to make it clear that, as an animal rights activist, environmentalist, anarchist and anti-fascist, I remain proud of all I have been involved in and continue to be committed to those causes. I regret very little. I am sure the state will happily label me a criminal, but that does not bother me.

I have always fought for and been motivated by a sense of justice. It is at the core of who I am, that one does not stand idly by in the face of cruelty or oppression. Positive change comes only through people standing up to the powerful. I will not accept such criticism from a state that gives its agents, unchecked powers to abuse, rape, even murder, and will spend millions to cover for them. Whatever I have done that some might find disagreeable, it is nothing compared to the police.

In October 2010 I was among the first to get the phone call, a friend telling me they had just confirmed my friend Mark Stone was in fact the undercover Mark Kennedy. Over the next few months I watched the pain and tears. I watched good friends and colleagues being broken. I knew a number of those he had relationships with, and could only try to console them as they processed that horror.

In the last decade I have spoken to over 150 people who had been targeted, from all forms of campaigns and groups. Probably better than most, I know how far and deep the emotional scars of this scandal go.

Campaigning is hard enough, causes enough burnout and trauma in itself, without knowing there are those working alongside you to directly undermine all you are seeking to achieve.

It is apparent the undercovers had access to medical records and were willing to use health issues to facilitate access to people. They were close to people suffering serious medical trauma and inserting themselves in their lives and care.

SPYCOPS TRAUMATISING CHILDREN

In a number of cases, spycops were involved in the lives of children of activists. I have listened parents tell of the guilt at leaving their loved ones in the care of people who didn’t really exist, the doubt about their own judgement, and the anger toward the police that sanctioned this.

I’m also very aware of how much it impacted those children, some having to live with parents processing the trauma, others damaged by the knowledge that someone they thought was a friend was lying to them about everything.

Spycops pointed the fingers at other people, alleging them to be police or informers. How many people were wrongly accused in this way, effectively driven out and denied their ability to partake? This is a profoundly cynical, destructive and anti-democratic thing to do, and the interference with their rights should not be glossed over. None of any of these were one-off cases.

INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSIBILITY

The spycops units were not rogue. They were known of at the highest levels and their activities condoned. Many went on to senior management which tells us that knowledge permeated the police. Any investigation must find how far that knowledge went, but also how much there was wilful blindness to the abuses.

The police want to focus on the alleged criminality of protestors to justify the undercover deployments. But these units were ideologically motivated, individually and systemically racist and sexist, with little interest in the rights of those they targeted.

They didn’t send the officers in to tackle the alleged criminality of one or two people, they targeted groups wholesale for exercising their rights to protest and seeking positive social change. In doing so, they effectively criminalised these communities, and once that was accepted practice, it became reason enough to justify everything else.
The notion of “collateral intrusion” has no place in this Inquiry. These units saw nobody as collateral, but reported on everyone regardless.

Even if it management claim they did not know of individual abuses, they do not escape responsibility for creating a culture where anything went and they were content to fund it, and signed off on the choice of targets.

We know that undercovers and their managers went on to work for private firms, taking their knowledge and experience with them. In doing so they perpetuated the same intrusion and abuses they carried out as undercovers. It is not simply a matter of whether they worked undercover subsequently, but whether they also took information with them or used contacts back into Special Branch to obtain that information.

Ironically, many of the spycops make out it is they who are at risk. What they are most worried about is being held responsible. Hiding behind anonymity orders is a cowardly refusal to acknowledge they had no right to carry out their political, sexist, racist and anti-democratic policing.

There is no doubt it is still going on. We know domestic extremism units continue to exist and monitor protests to this day. The fact that they remain embedded in Counter Terrorism Command shows nothing has fundamentally changed in how they view campaigners.

Changing unit names has not altered the ideological foundation that gave rise to the abuses in the first place. These counter terrorism units are merely a rebranding of Special Branch while their Special Project Teams continue to deploy undercovers. The spycop scandal is not an issue of the past; it remains relevant right up the current moment.

People cannot and will not be fobbed off. Growing up aware of the injustice of the Widgery Tribunal’s whitewashing of the Bloody Sunday massacre in itself is, in part, is why I am here today. As with Shrewsbury, Orgreave, blacklisting, and so many family justice campaigns, the issue of spycops will not go away until answers are had, in public.

The accompanying written opening statement from Donal O’Driscoll, a Category L Core Participant

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Tranche 1, Phase 1, Day 3

4 November 2020

 

Evidence from:

Oliver Sanders QC (Designated Lawyer Officers i.e. speaking for 114 spycops)

Richard Whittam QC (Slater & Gordon Clients representing 12 individual undercover officers / managers)

David Lock QC (whistle-blower officer Peter Francis)

Angus McCullough QC (Category M Core Participants – three ex wives of undercover officers)

Rajiv Menon QC (spied-upon core participants represented by Jane Deighton & Richard Parry)

Oliver Sanders QC
(Designated Lawyer Officers)

Oliver Sanders QC, representing the majority of former spycops, concluded the opening statement he’d begun at yesterday’s hearing.

Sanders said the main function of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) was to assess public order threats, of which many came from political protests in the period currently being examined by the Inquiry (1968-82). However, he said it’s hard to quantify because few records have been kept and even at the time intelligence was ‘sanitised’ to obscure its source.

He turned to the SDS’ secondary function, providing intelligence on ‘subversion’ to MI5. He conceded that subversion is an amorphous concept and ‘difficult to grasp as a threat to national security’ but insisted it was a real threat then and now. He cited hostile states sponsoring cyber attacks as subversion, as if that has anything to do with those of us targeted by spycops. It was an extension of the previous day’s repeated iterations of ‘undercovers protect us from terrorism and paedophiles’, a tactic which only serves to smear victims of spycops.

MI5’s FOOT SOLDIERS

Sanders was keen to emphasise that the SDS was no aberration in its choice of targets, merely reinforcing the established work of MI5. He cited The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 by Christopher Andrew (2009), which estimated that in the 1970s a quarter of MI5 resources went on counter-subversion.

In 1980s the groups that fell under this category included the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (which had around 250,000 members and was mainstream enough to have its aims included in the Labour Party manifesto), trade unions such as the National Union of Mineworkers, and an array of left wing organisations including the Socialist Workers Party, International Marxist Group, and the Militant Tendency.

He said that MI5 and spycops were so allied that MI5 considered funding the SDS, and they liaised to ensure they didn’t duplicate spying – it would not only have wasted resources but they may have ended up spying on each other’s officers.

Most SDS intelligence reports were not only copied to MI5 but were sent with the file reference numbers of the people/group already added. The partnership was active, with MI5 recommended tips to SDS spycops, and they asked for specific info – though he didn’t mention any instances of the flow of information and directives going the other way. Instead, it seems the SDS was used as the foot-soldiers of MI5. Sanders noted that the SDS weren’t in a position to question MI5’s focus, thinking and efforts.

Sanders was at pains to assert that there was nothing sinister, surprising, or objectionable in this collusion, it’s just what both organisations were tasked to do.

The subtext of Sanders’ explanation was that, because MI5 targeted the same people in the same ways as the SDS, it means the SDS was acceptable rather than both of them being unacceptable.

PART OF THE UNION

Sanders then made a few tenuous claims about the limits of SDS activity. He unequivocally stated that the SDS did not have any involvement in industrial blacklisting. It did not target justice campaigns, members of parliament or trade unions directly, it was merely inevitable collateral collection while spying on other things.

Mr Sanders appears to have short-term memory issues. On Monday this week, David Barr QC, Counsel to the Inquiry, confirmed that in its earliest years, the SDS spied on the Shrewsbury 2 Defence Committee, a group in support of trade union activists who’d been fitted up with charges after their invovlement in the 1972 building workers’ strike.

Peter Francis was in the SDS from 1993-1998, and believes intelligence he gathered was used in construction industry blacklisting.

SDS officer Mark Jenner was a member of construction union UCATT.

Officer Carlo Soracchi was often on picket lines, and was photographed on an RMT picket in 2004 calling for the reinstatement of Steve Hedley.

Hedley went on to become general secretary of the union and is also a core participant at the Inquiry because it’s credibly established that he was spied on for his trade union activity.

Sanders said talk of the SDS spying on thousands of groups is wholly wrong. Once again, he’s arguing with the Inquiry itself, as that is the source of the fact that more than 1,000 groups were targeted. Sanders did not suggest what sort of figure he would like us to believe.

SPYCOPS STEALING DEAD CHILDREN’S IDENTITIES

Sanders then peeled a figurative onion and tried to sound a bit sad as he came to the issue of spycops stealing the identities of dead children to use as the basis of their undercover persona. He said it was invented in an earlier time when people felt differently about death and risk, and doing this to protect people who were still alive would probably have been OK with the families involved.

He said it was done because having a real birth certificate was the only way to prove a person was real. It was lawful, he reckoned, as ‘it didn’t involve quote-unquote theft’ he said. To the rest of the world, taking someone’s identity without the knowledge of them or their family and then using it to pretend to be them is a solid definition of identity theft.

Sanders said that though it was regrettable, if spycops hadn’t stolen dead children’s identities they would have been at greater risk of exposure, or else there would have to be no spycops and the alternative to that was paramilitary police on demonstrations. So, it was an unpalatable choice but obviously the best of a bad bunch.

This lawyer representing UK police officers, a force that supposedly prides itself on policing by consent, is saying anyone wanting to be politically active must put up with being targeted either by spycops violating fundamental rights in our homes or paramilitary police threatening us on the streets.

Spycops, Sanders informed us, understand why stealing dead child’s identity is upsetting, some were even uncomfortable doing it at the time, but they felt there was no choice. There was no pleasure taken in doing it, and the police hope that is of some comfort. He said it happened until the 1990s.

Sanders doesn’t explain why, once spycops were stealing dead kids identities and the Home Office Select Committee demanded families were told in 2013, the Met refused. In the end the Inquiry had to tell them recently.

SPYCOPS DECEIVING WOMEN INTO RELATIONSHIPS

Sanders said a couple of his clients admit to deceiving women into relationships while undercover, and just two of them say it was long-term. But, unable to deny established facts, he conceded that it appears a significant minority of SDS officers entered into such relationships. These shouldn’t have happened and were wrong, he said.

His excuse was that many of the officers who deceived women into relationships were unsuitable for undercover work, and officers who did so were personal failures who’d lost sight of what they were supposed to be doing. This is palpable nonsense; the very opposite is true. Such relationships were standard practice, known to the managers and seen as integral to the job.

Far from being seen as inadequate misfits, several of the officers who perpetrated them were appointed as role models. SDS officer Bob Lambert deceived at least four women he spied on into relationships and had a planned child with one of them. He was promoted to running the SDS, where he deployed numerous officers who did the same. He received an MBE for services to policing.

SDS officer Andy Coles groomed a vulnerable teenager known as Jessica into a year-long relationship when he was undercover in the early 1990s. He went on to be an SDS cover officer, before being appointed to train the first officers of the SDS’ sister unit the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). After that, he moved on to being Head of Training for the Association of Chief Police Officers’ Terrorism & Allied Matters committee, which oversaw the NPOIU.

SECRECY AND FEAR

Sanders then criticised the Inquiry itself. Its remit is too broad in covering 50 years. It’s also too narrow in only examining activity in England & Wales when spycops often went to other jurisdictions (like a stopped clock momentarily telling the right time, that last point is the bit of Sanders’ speech that does indeed have great merit).

Sanders accurately said that we can’t say what would have happened if there hadn’t been spycops. He then said the lack of this knowledge means the Inquiry will be inadequate, and that as we can’t say things would have been better, we can’t really say they were a bad thing overall.

He suggested that demonstrations may have been more violent and, as he did the previous day, invoked the death on protests of Kevin Gately and Blair Peach – both of whom were killed by police at events with heavily spied-on groups.

If Sanders’ reasoning were sound, we would expect any deaths to have been in unknown groups, and those who were infiltrated would have been safely policed. Instead, the very opposite happened. The spycops targeted the groups seen as dangerous threats, as did the most violent uniformed police in public order situations, all leading to the very worst consequences.

Sanders said a further limit on the Inquiry is the anonymity granted to many officers, including 34 out of the 74 he speaks for. This is, of course, the anonymity that officers have actively imposed on the Inquiry. But, Sanders said, if their identities were revealed some would be targeted and possibly killed.

Numerous spycops have been outed for years, including real names and photos. Some of them have outed themselves, appearing at advertised public events and doing media appearances. Many would be very easy to find. None have come to any harm, and it’s frankly insulting to victims to portray them as such a threat.

Neil Woods, a former undercover drugs squad officer scoffed at Sanders on Twitter:

‘I’ve gone public with my real name. And I actually did take down some dangerous people. Ridiculous to suggest that UC’s are at risk having infiltrated London Greenpeace or CND etc. But besides that, I ALWAYS understood that my anonymity was a privilege not a right.’

Sanders said that there was some genuinely dangerous work done by SDS officers, so secret that the Inquiry can’t talk about it, meaning that people will only hear about the pointless and outrageous activity and not have things in balance.

This crooked logic pretends that it’s a balancing act, that if you catch enough bad guys it’s OK to abuse some passers-by. The Met have admitted that spycops deceiving women into relationships is a violation of human rights including the right to freedom from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment. This is an absolute right that no circumstances can ever justify breaching. There is no pair of moral scales in which to put anything that can outweigh the abuses committed by spycops.

Despite all the admissions of abuse we’ve forced out of the Met in recent years, Sanders submitted that the SDS was lawful, effective and working in the public interest when gathering intelligence and helping MI5. ‘The SDS was a politically neutral cog as part of a much larger apparatus,’ he said.

There’s a right of free speech but no right to be heard or force views on others, he said. If we had a right to disrupt things without the police knowing it would have to be a right enjoyed by everyone and there would be mayhem. A lot of the groups targeted by the SDS wanted to promote their own views and suppress the views of opponents. It’s not fair to blame the SDS just because these groups had beliefs that were in conflict with the Met’s neutral job.

The accompanying written opening statement from Oliver Sanders QC on behalf of Designated Lawyer Officers

Richard Whittam QC
(Slater & Gordon Clients)

Richard Whittam spoke for Slater & Gordon clients, 12 individual undercover officers / managers.

He said that an uninitiated observer may think the Inquiry was just about spycops deceiving women into relationships, but it’s much more than that. However, it isn’t about blaming individual officers. The Inquiry will examine inappropriate deployment and tactics; management and supervisory structure, targeting and authorisation, reporting on justice campaigns, management’s attitude to relationships and commission of crime, the welfare of officers and their families. There are many more issues, Whittam said, but these are of particular importance to the people for whom he speaks.

Whittam said that officers can’t properly justify themselves because those who employed them adhere to the principle of ‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny‘ if anyone is an undercover officer (this tactic has been often been used by police to try to obstruct people getting the truth about spycops). The fact that the Met and Inquiry have confirmed the spycops, using ciphers to protect identity if they feel it necessary, means this assertion is simply not true in this case.

Officers committing crimes while undercover isn’t a problem, Whittam said, because there is some legal basis for allowing it. He expanded, saying the CHIS Bill proves the government see that commission of crime is an essential feature of undercover work in getting to the heart of groups that would cause the public harm. He didn’t pause to define public harm, nor to question whether the current government can be trusted as impartial and infallible moral arbiters.

Whittam turned to the personal well-being of the officers he was speaking for. He told us that their undercover careers and this Inquiry have had a significant impact on their mental health. He lamented that it was supposed to conclude in 2018 yet is only just beginning (neatly sidestepping that the bulk of the delays have come from the police).

Some of the officers he represents are further worried by campaigns to expose their identity. Some deceived women they spied on into relationships but, he said, it’s important not to judge the fact in isolation – one of these relationships continues to this day.

One of Whittam’s spycops, Jim Boyling, deceived several women into relationships. One of them, with a woman known as Rosa, was what Whittam termed “a consensual relationship, albeit with an undercover officer using his cover name, which was not regretted until more than a decade later when his true identity was known”.

Rosa has previously told the BBC:

‘If you put all these things together, you have a team of officers conspiring to rape’.

Boyling faced investigation for sexual offences for what he did. In addition to legal action for rape, he was subject to misconduct proceedings, and was sacked in 2018. Whittam said it’s all a heavy burden for Boyling to bear.

Is it credible that no manager knew about these relationships? Did any of them give approval? Perhaps, he speculated, there are too many for it to be possible to blame individual officers.

We shouldn’t blame them separately for the existence of what was clearly an institutionally accepted and encouraged tactic; for that, we must indeed go to the managers. But we can also certainly blame the undercover officers for perpetrating it.

Whittam mentioned the 2015 apology by the Met to some women deceived into relationships by spycops, in which it was said that such activity was ‘abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong’.

But, he said, spycops committing crime is essential for national security and the prevention and detection of other people committing crime. So we need to see the Met’s 2015 apology to the women ‘in context’, by which he seemed to mean it should be disregarded.

Perhaps it was justified to have a relationship to build and maintain an undercover persona, Whittam said with the air of someone who hadn’t just cited the occasion on which the Assistant Commissioner of the Met officially and bluntly declared:

‘sexual relationships between undercover police officers and members of the public should not happen. The forming of a sexual relationship by an undercover officer would never be authorised in advance nor indeed used as a tactic of a deployment… I can say as a very senior officer of the Metropolitan Police Service that I and the Metropolitan Police are committed to ensuring that this policy is followed by every officer who is deployed in an undercover role’

The accompanying written opening statement from Richard Whittam QC on behalf of Slater and Gordon Clients

David Lock QC
(Peter Francis)

Peter Francis was an SDS officer from 1993-98. Like many of his colleagues, he suffered serious mental distress and PTSD after his deployment ended. He sued the Met for lack of psychological care. In 2010, he blew the whistle on spycops with an interview for the Observer. He has been a major source of evidence for researchers and journalists.

David Lock began by saying that we simply wouldn’t have the Inquiry if it weren’t for Francis. But he’s not a policy maker or politician, he’s only of use here as an ex-spycop.

Those giving evidence at the Inquiry have immunity from prosecution based on what they say at the Inquiry, but this doesn’t extend to revelations made elsewhere.

Francis has had no assurance that he won’t be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act for what he has already revealed. Such a prosecution would leave him open to forfeiture of his pension. He is, declared Lock, hereby asking the Met Commissioner for a cast-iron assurance that he won’t be prosecuted nor have his pension removed because of past disclosures. He wants to receive this before giving evidence to the Inquiry.

On 14 March 2010 Francis began his journey of disclosure because he believes the public have a right to know what is done in their name and with their money. By 2011, the Guardian had published more articles with him using his cover name Peter Black, and in 2013 he unmasked himself. He said he came forward despite threats of prosecution, but he had some confidence that a case would not be brought against a whistle-blower acting in the public interest.

Whistle–blowing is usually of interest not just for the facts, said Lock, but for the failure of the institution to admit the truth early on. Whistle-blowers have inadequate protection, there is no support for those who do it after leaving a job, or release the info to the public domain. Francis faces the additional threat of the Official Secrets Act. Police are effectively banned from whistle-blowing, even if the facts are about public harm. The Met don’t recognise Francis as a whistle-blower, so he has no security.

Although he went public over ten years ago, and the Inquiry was set up more than five years ago, Francis hasn’t been asked to make a statement to the Inquiry, and memories are fading with time. The Inquiry is undermining itself by creating such delays. Under the current timetable, the Inquiry doesn’t intend to take evidence from Francis until 2023.

Lock continued to relay Francis’ thoughts, saying that it’s clear when Francis was undercover in the 1990s that there wasn’t proper governance or oversight to balance the needs of the police with the rights of targets. The Inquiry must decide whether this has changed much, but claims of procedural improvement must be taken with circumspection as they come from professional liars in defence of their position.

The duty of care owed to officers is routinely breached, according to Francis, because the Met doesn’t see the stress of lying and deceiving as part of one’s day job. Those who live untruths for extended periods will find themselves living in the psychological shadows.

Lock said that focus is quite rightly on victims of this barely and badly regulated activity, but dedicated spycops like Francis were badly failed by the state too. He had to resort to litigation, which was settled in 2006. He left the Met with fragile mental health having lost the real Peter Francis from living a lie for so long. There should be long term aftercare for spycops as PTSD is a long term condition.

LOOKING FOR TARGETS

Francis observed that those targeted by the SDS were supposed to be subversives seeking the undermining of the state, but this concept was conflated with the policies and convenience of the government of the day, and of economic interests.

The Vietnam War was the policy of a foreign government, yet opposition to it was seen as so subversive of the British state that the SDS was formed to counter it. None of the original target groups were proscribed. Francis believes it is never justified to spy on non-violent groups.

Such a draconian incursion into the lives of ordinary people expressing peaceable opposition to the government of the day is wholly unjustified, according to Francis. It beggars belief to allege that the Women’s Liberation Movement or Croydon Libertarians posed a threat to society.

Lock said that Francis is clear that undercover policing can destroy lives, both those of the spied upon and those of the officers themselves. It cannot be done lightly. Undercover policing is legitimate in the right circumstances, he says, but policing must be transparent and with the consent of the public.

Obviously, spycops wouldn’t be able to work if they were exposed at the time, but Francis suggests that some time after the deployment people could be told. He’s keen to be clear that he doesn’t have the expertise to speculate about timetables, but there must be a time when the state says who has been lied to and why it was justified, and be entitled to compensation if the targeting was unwarranted. Keeping the lid permanently on the box shouldn’t be an option.

It is an excellent point. The Thirty Year Rule lets us see secret Cabinet papers from 1990, yet we can’t see SDS files from 1970.

The accompanying written opening statement from David Lock QC on behalf of Peter Francis

Angus McCullough QC
(Category M Core Participants: Families of Police Officers)

If there was any doubt as to how deep the institutional sexism of the spycops goes, look at how they treated their own wives. Angus McCullough represents three women who were wives of SDS officers.

McCullough said the women provide unique insight into the officers and the management. The Inquiry will hear many heart rending stories of betrayal and deceit, he said. The sacrifices of the wives went beyond anything they thought they were taking on. It has shattered their lives.

Each of the women has their own story, he said, but they all felt that being police wives was woven into their identity, as part of the wider police service. They felt pride in their husbands joining Special Branch, thinking they would be keeping people safe. They believed they were supporting their husbands in the fight for the good of the country.

McCullough described how they took on the burden of secrecy and fear of reprisals. They did it without any proper support from the Met. Years later they found out their marriages were based on lies. Their husbands’ jobs, of which they had been so proud, were vehicles for the worst kind of infidelity.

They saw the stress and anger that came with the spycop’s job. One had her husband tell her that they had to relocate the family at short notice, and was visited at home by manager Bob Lambert. She now doubts the necessity of this and other significant family decisions.

None had any idea that their husbands had relationships with women they spied on. All were shocked when they saw the media coverage.

Their children were born into relationships imbued with deceit. They saw them struggle with their fathers’ roles at the time, and had to help them negotiate this, then re–chart the relationships again after the publication of the awful truth. Neither the children nor the women got support.

They were an integral part of the process but also exploited by it. This is a unique position for the Inquiry. They saw close–up the impact on the officers and the lack of support. They occasionally met senior officers and have direct evidence about that and the veracity of what the managers said.

They can testify about the recruitment process into the SDS, including indications they specifically sought married men in order to ‘keep them grounded’ (i.e. outsource the stress relief and psychological care) without consideration of the damage it was likely to cause.

McCullough described how they were vetted as support for their husbands, but no support was offered to them.

They were told that their husbands were infiltrating groups of serious violent criminals. When they found out the truth about the groups that were infiltrated they were horrified about how they’d been lied to.

They suffered further with the impact of their husbands’ unsocial hours, absences and missions abroad (which they now know included holidays with the women their husbands had deceived into relationships).

McCullough said the managers promised them support, yet this never materialised. With one exception, there has been no support at all since the scandal broke. They received no warnings before stories appeared in the media, even though the Met obviously knew it was going to happen. They had no support before during or after any of it.

McCullough said the women can also testify as to frequency of contact between spycops and managers, which was basically daily and gives the lie to claims managers didn’t know what undercover officers were up to.

The women who were deceived into relationships have received an apology, but not the wives of the same officers. Why has the Met not acknowledged the sacrifice they had to make and damage to them and their families?

McCullough described the women’s anguish as they’ve been left with so many questions unanswered. How much did their support make the officers a safe bet for spycop duty? Why were they encouraged to have kids even as the stresses piled up? What support were officers offered? Was there anything else the women weren’t told about? Why were the requests for support for wives ignored? Who in the SDS knew about spycops deceiving women into relationships? Were they authorised to have those relationships? Why weren’t wives told before they were made public?

Spycops should not deceive people they spy on into relationships. Nobody should be subjected to it, nor families have to deal with it. The wives are have been dismayed by the statements from police lawyers attempting to minimise and justify the abhorrent practice.

The accompanying written opening statement from Angus McCullough QC on behalf of the Category M Core Participants

Rajiv Menon QC
(Core Participants represented by Richard Parry & Jane Deighton)

Jane Deighton represents Audrey, Nathan & Richard Adams, the family of teenager Rolan Adams who was murdered by racists in February 1991 & whose campaign was one of those targeted by spycops. Jane also represents Duwayne Brooks, friend of Stephen Lawrence & prime witness to Stephen’s murder.

Richard Parry represents five targeted activists, two of whom – Tariq Ali & Ernest Tate – will supply evidence to the early phase of the hearings covering 1968-72.

Menon opened with a bold and blunt question: Why has it taken 2,065 days for the Undercover Policing Inquiry to start?

The original Chair, Lord Pitchford, hoped to finish it in 2018. Some delay is understandable as Pitchford fell ill and Sir John Mitting took over and had to get up to speed, and of course Covid hasn’t helped, but this only explains a fraction of the delay.

The main reason for the long wait, said Menon, is the police’s attempt to obfuscate, obstruct, undermine and delay. They made 148 applications for anonymity for real and cover names of spycops, they insisted every document be vetted before others involved see it. Meanwhile, some of the witnesses have died.

The applications for anonymity were not justified, said Menon. There is no evidence that officers would be at risk if they were identified – no harm has befallen any former officers, either those outed by activists, or those who have outed themselves. It is ironic that officers who invaded other people’s privacy so intensely now invoke their right to privacy at an Inquiry into their own misdeeds.

Police compounded this with mass shredding of documents. The Inquiry’s indulgence of police whims led victims to walk out of the Inquiry then processes in 2018. Little has improved since. Yet victims are still here, hoping for answers.

The Inquiry’s forerunner, ‘Operation Herne’, admitted some facts but sought to defend them and portray the problems as historic, as we might expect from a police self-investigation.

The choice is stark. Is this Inquiry also going to blame the victims and give the state a ‘get out of jail free’ card? Will it blame a few rogue officers? Or will it admit that, since 1968, the spycops have been rotten from top to bottom?

There are 219 victims who are core participants. There are surely thousands more who fit the criteria. Special thanks are due to the Undercover Research Group who have tried to list who was spied on, as neither the police nor Inquiry will publish the lists they have.

What do the victim core participants have in common? They were spied on due to direct, indirect, or perceived connection to social justice, be it against war, racism, inequality, police wrongdoing, animal cruelty, environmental destruction, the abuse of corporate power, or the exploitation of workers. Some were victimised simply for challenging a police narrative. Then we have families of children whose ID was stolen by spycops, wives of officers and a lawyer targeted.

Menon went on to list ten general points on the subject of the Inquiry.

1 – Incompatibility. Spycops’ activity is incompatible with a truly democratic society, being targeted just for having anti-establishment beliefs.

2 – Focus. The Inquiry wasn’t created by police wanting to confess, but by the work of people the police were abusing. Particularly, the women deceived into relationships, and Duwayne Brooks, Doreen Lawrence and Neville Lawrence. Also Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, whose book Undercover is a must-read on the subject. Political policing must remain the focus of the Inquiry. This wasn’t ‘serious and organised crime’.

3 – Scope. The Inquiry is about human interaction; only in England and Wales; only police not MI5. Any conclusions Inquiry reaches will this be partial and incomplete. MI5’s escape of scrutiny is alarming given that most spycops intelligence was shared with MI5 but the reverse isn’t true. Their role is essential to understand the issue.

4 – Disclosure. We must see the documents for ourselves, and in good time, if we are to properly engage. Giving Tariq Ali & Ernest Tate and their lawyers over 5,263 pages of evidence five weeks before the hearings is not good enough.

The Inquiry says it has over a million documents. How can we participate if we only belatedly see a tiny fraction of what documents are available? The Inquiry should supply all relevant documents, as in a criminal case.

With redactions, we should be told who made them – police or the Inquiry? On security or privacy grounds? Why were they needed? Some of the names of spied-on groups from 1968 were redacted. Why?

5 – Shredding. We feared spycops would do it, and they did. The Inquiry must investigate this. How can there be trust in police who have definitely shredded relevant files?

6 – Racism. The British police have always been permeated with racism at all ranks. The Macpherson Inquiry ruling of ‘institutional racism’ wasn’t news to black people, but it was the first admission from the state itself.

We’re concerned that the Chair presides alone without a diverse panel. The Chair told lawyers that Macpherson’s definition of racism is ‘controversial’. The Inquiry mustn’t reverse the progress made due to the courage of black people who’ve fought racism.

7 – Burden. The burden is on the police to explain spycops, not on the victims to justify their own actions. To dissect the politics of victims, turning the spotlight away from the police, is the politics of victim-blaming.

8 – Responsibility. The Inquiry failed to ask the state participants to supply their position in advance, so we’re only just finding out what the agencies think. Some of these opening statements have defended abuse of women by spycops by talking about undercover work against serious and organised crime. This is a red herring, spycops were never about this.

9 – Participation. After next week, the only Inquiry live-streaming is to the Chair’s home and one limited venue in London for which booking has closed. The Grenfell and Child Sexual Abuse inquiries are live-streamed – even closed hearings get streamed to the core participants, lawyers and accredited journalists via secure lines. The Inquiry’s proposed live transcription is not adequate.

Reading is not equivalent to, or even close to being equivalent to, the experience of seeing and hearing a witness give evidence, either in person or on screen. It is also impractical to expect people to read five to six hours of transcript each sitting.

This is an Inquiry with hearings shrouded in secrecy, with most of the police hidden from the public. A time delay in the streaming would avoid any wrong things being broadcast, as other Inquiries are doing.

Which non-state participants are excluded from coming to the venue to see the live-stream? Those who can’t travel; black, disabled and older people are especially at risk. This is a breach of Equalities Act obligations.

Even now, the Inquiry can set up a secure link. If the Chair can have this, why can’t others involved.

10 – Objectives. Participants want answers, chapter and verse, not just scraps. Full disclosure, seeing their full files, complete access as Stasi victims had. They want to know when they were spied on, who authorised, who else saw it?

If the Inquiry does have people’s files, why can’t the subjects even see a redacted version? If the Inquiry doesn’t have them, how can they do their job?

WHAT DO WE WANT? WHEN DO WE WANT IT?

Menon concluded his contribution for the day by saying what the people he speaks for want to see as outcomes, and why the defences we’ve heard from police representatives in the last three days should be brushed aside.

We want it publicly declared that spying on us was wrong. We want the full disbanding of the political policing units, and nothing like them to exist ever again.

Since the 1880s, Special Branch has spied on suffragettes, socialists, pacifists, anti-colonialists and more. Ideas are policed; that’s what Special Branch is there for. But in 1968 things changed, and spycops began living undercover as activists for years on end. The SDS were different from other undercovers by gathering intelligence, rather than evidence for use in trials, so their activities went without scrutiny for decades. The SDS was never about detecting crime, but spying on political opponents of the status quo.

The SDS had a clear political orientation to the right of the spectrum. Officers were politically vetted. Targets were initially all on the left. This was secret, anti-democratic political policing. Only in the late 1970s did a couple of far-right groups attract attention.

There appear to have been no safeguards to check if this spying was justified, necessary or proportional, or its methods ethical or lawful. It was given free rein, regardless of norms and values.

Today, the 70th anniversary of the signing of the European Convention on Human Rights, police lawyers are telling the Inquiry ‘don’t judge 1968 by our standards’, as if people in the 60s didn’t care about human rights and liberty.

We have a host of regulations and supposed oversight bodies. So are spycops’ excesses a thing of the past? It would be extremely naive to assume the police have learned and moved on. Note the reluctance of Counsel for the Met to answer Inquiry’s questions about current policing yesterday: The CHIS Bill demolishes our belief in the effectiveness of oversight, placing no limits on state agents from committing crime, and bars victims from seeking legal redress.

Rajiv Menon will conclude his statement on the morning of 5 November.

The accompanying written opening statement from Rajiv Menon QC on behalf of the Core Participants represented by Richard Parry and Jane Deighton

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Tranche 1, Phase 1, Day 2

3 November 2020

 

Evidence from:
Peter Skelton QC (Metropolitan Police Service)
Gerry Boyle QC (National Police Chiefs’ Council)
Richard O’Brien (National Crime Agency)
Nicholas Griffin QC (Home Office)
Oliver Sanders QC (Designated Lawyer Officers, i.e. speaking for 114 spycops)

 

When the powerful are caught doing the unjustifiable, they follow the same sequence of responses:
– Ignore it
– Deny it
– Delay the reckoning
– Declare too much time has past, it’s a different era, we can’t do anything now

Today was a day of police lawyers’ opening statements at the Undercover Policing Inquiry. ‘What the spycops did may have been bad but it was a long time ago, lessons have been learned, it’s different now, nobody need lose their job or pension, move on,’ paraphrased over and over again.

The morning had representatives of four agencies basically saying what their agency does. It was like listening to someone reading Wikipedia. Nobody has ever relished hearing the word ‘ninthly’.

There was very little of relevance to the scandal of the political secret police, but lots of stuff about how other undercover work keeps us safe from paedophiles and terrorists, implying that spycops aren’t that bad in the greater scheme of things.

Peter Skelton QC (Metropolitan Police Service)

Skelton says the Metropolitan Police have ‘absolute commitment’ to the Inquiry, which is news to those of us who’ve seen their myriad delays and obstructions over the years.

He said the Met doesn’t seek to justify but to admit and improve; but undercover policing is important, though must be within legal and ethical boundaries.

He told us that substantial changes have already been made in law and in police structure. We were told this in the past about the Human Rights Act 1998 and Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, but the spycops units just ignored the rules.

Skelton assured us that sexual relationships while undercover are prohibited under new rules. However, the police have been very clear that this was always the case. Similarly, his saying that participation in criminal activity must be ‘necessary and proportionate’ is no comfort, as this too is a long-established and long-ignored standard. The problem is in who defines necessary and proportionate.

Skelton told the Inquiry that the Met is ‘aware of continuing anger and distress of victims of spycops’, though he stopped short of saying they were sorry. He mentioned spycops deceiving women into relationships and quoted at length from the 2015 Met apology to some of these women. He said the Met stands by the 2015 apology, despite the fact that it still won’t actually give any answers or let women see their files, and is still delaying settling civil claims by some of the women.

There was a concession from Skelton that the Met hadn’t cared about the families whose dead children’s identities had been stolen by spycops. This is ambiguous, as he may just mean when the practice was common up to the 1990s, or he could be including the Met’s more recent flat refusal to comply with government demands to tell affected families, waiting until the Inquiry decided to do it.

Spycops’ involvement in crime was downplayed as merely ‘joining in’, seemingly trying to deflect from the fact that they were agents provocateur and took instigating roles.

There ‘may’ be some deployments which were not justifiable, he told us, and cited the spying on Stephen Lawrence’s family. The Met ‘appreciates’ the length of time Stephen Lawrence’s loved ones have waited for answers – the Met has stonewalled them for decades – and Skelton said the Met is grateful for Duwayne Brooks and Doreen Lawrence’s work.

It wasn’t to be the last time this hearing that we were astonished at the gall of the police in talking about a justice campaign they spied on.

LONG AGO & FAR AWAY

Having admitted what is already well established, Skelton lauded the dedication, professionalism and bravery of undercover officers. With his gift for understatement, he described how the Met ‘hasn’t always understood’ how to support the spycops officers – while it basically pushed them into a PTSD generator. They knew full well it damaged officers, and they chewed them up and spat them out knowing there’d be more to replace them.

The SDS Tradecraft Manual from 1995 has a mocking section on dealing with post deployment anguish. Whistleblower officer Peter Francis asked for help, received none, and then sued the Met and received a settlement for his PTSD, 25 years ago. The SDS did not start to work on a welfare policy until the late 1990s.

Skelton moved into the ‘long time ago’ trope, saying policing now is unrecognisable from 1968. This ignores the fact that the spycops continued operating long after 1968, and their activities got more reprehensible as time went on.

There was emphasis on how undercover policing helps combat child abuse, human trafficking, modern slavery and more, so we should recognise the bravery of undercover officers, specifically including those who were in the spycops units that are the focus of the Inquiry.

Skelton treated us to a long ramble about the historic context of the period the Inquiry is about to examine, citing the advent of the pill, legalisation of abortion (as if that didn’t happen after a lot of campaigning and protest), and the assassination of Robert F Kennedy as if they had some relation to policing left-wing groups and peace campaigns in the UK.

He told us it was important not to judge the spycops of the past by modern standards. In doing so, he contradicted a point made yesterday by the Counsel to the Inquiry: he pointed out that in the early days of the SDS, the Home Secretary desperately feared embarrassment if the truth of the unit’s methods came out. This shows they knew it was very much against the morality of the time.

We were told that although some intelligence gathered by spycops may have been ‘retained unnecessarily’ by modern standards, it would have been hard for them to know what would turn out to be useful information until some time later, so gathering anything and everything was fair enough. While individuals named may not be bad, they may know people who are, so we can’t criticise spycops for targeting people and groups who were harmless. Apparently the Met ‘recognises’ the strength of anger felt by such targeted people.

US AGAINST THEM

After painting a picture of benign public servants vs dangerous activists, Peter Skelton QC claimed “a simplistic narrative of ‘us against them’ – whether malign spy vs innocent civilian, or benign public servant vs dangerous activist – does not do justice to anyone”. In doing so, he sidestepped the key factor of institutional power being on one side of those relationships. We’re not talking about a malign spy, but about a malign institution that trained people to act harmfully over a period of decades.

After Peter Skelton finished, the Chair, Sir John Mitting, asked if he was correct in inferring that the Met, and police generally, no longer regard it as part of their task to assist MI5 with investigation of subversion; that it is no longer viewed as part of the police’s role to infiltrate those ‘who would be regarded by the majority as politically extreme’; and that it is no longer part of the police’s task to infiltrate single issue campaigns which cause disruption, but not serious disorder of the kind caused in 1968. And, if this were true, when was that view formed, by whom, and for what reason? (is this an exact quote? Or can it be?)

Skelton had ten minutes to think about it and came back with a ‘neither confirm nor deny’ answer that wouldn’t comment on present arrangements..

Gerry Boyle QC (National Police Chiefs’ Council)

Gerry Boyle explained what the National Police Chiefs’ Council is. The NPCC coordinates 43 police forces of England and Wales, doing what the Association of Chief Police Officers did until 2015. It doesn’t act for individual officers. It is involved in the Inquiry because it helps formulate policy and practice for undercover policing.

The NPCC is involved in the redaction of documents for the Inquiry, and has done risk assessments for spycops to see if they need anonymity at the Inquiry. It’s been liaison between the Inquiry and all English and Welsh forces except the Met.

The NPCC has these functions: coordination of national operations; command of counter terrorist policing; coordination of police response to national emergencies; implementing standards and policy as set by College of Policing and government.

It was the successor body to the Association of Chief Police Officers, which oversaw the later spycops unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), from about 2006 until it was subsumed into Counter Terrorism Command in 2011.

In keeping with the pattern of the day, implying that spycops somehow deal with significant threats to life and limb, Boyle didn’t even leave it two minutes before mentioning terrorism.

Boyle said many NPOIU officers had experience of major investigations and usually returned to their original constabulary after their undercover deployments. Because they are more likely to have dealt with terrorism and organised crime than the SDS, more of them need anonymity at the Inquiry.

He went on to praise the role of undercover police in dealing with paedophilia and terrorist atrocities, giving detailed examples of these and other things that have nothing to do with spycops, a speech that only serves to insult spycops’ victims by association.

Undercover work has ‘not been without controversy’ but it’s all so much better now, he assured us.

Boyle laboriously listed all the regulations that govern and constrain undercover work, without reference to why they had been institutionally ignored by the spycops units. He said that inspections under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 ensured compliance with the rules, ignoring all the spycops’ outrages since 2000 that prove otherwise.

Richard O’Brien (National Crime Agency)

The National Crime Agency’s Richard O’Brien, like Gerry Boyle, spent time explaining what the agency he represents does. Once again, the state’s representative talked about undercover work against paedophiles and terrorism and used it as an implied excuse for what the spycops did.

O’Brien managed to say ‘serious and organised crime’ in three consecutive sentences. Shortly afterward he said it twice in a row, as the end of one sentence and the start of the next.

The NCA took over the role previously held by the National Crime Squad, and before that various regional crime squads. The NCA has a wider remit than its predecessors, combating organised crime, cyber crime, human trafficking and more. Undercover operations are key to all that the NCA does.

The NCA’s interest in the Inquiry isn’t due to having any relevant spycops itself – it didn’t even exist at the time the Inquiry is examining – and it doesn’t infiltrate political groups. It is in the Inquiry to learn, and is especially looking at the final Module where recommendations will be made for the future. It won’t really be involved in the first two modules as they look at historic issues.

O’Brien said he wasn’t not allowed to say much about what NCA does with undercover officers but it involves weapons and explosives dealers, human trafficking and paedophiles. He did not say why it was relevant to the spycops. There’s an implication that spycops were also involved in such things, therefore their targets were deserving victims, or if not then it was still a fair price to pay for protection against the serious and organised crime he described.

Nicholas Griffin QC (Home Office)

Griffin began by quoting then-Home Secretary Theresa May telling parliament in 2014 why the Inquiry is needed, which you can see at the start of this video on our YouTube channel.

He then explained that the Home Office is especially interested in role of undercover policing in protection from crime, and the legal and regulatory framework for it.

Although the Home Office directly funded the Special Demonstration Squad for its first 21 years, when Steven Taylor was commissioned to report on the link between the two institutions in 2014, he searched Home Office archives but failed to find a single document about it.

The Taylor report unsurprisingly found little evidence of any Home Secretary knowing about spycops, and no evidence of them having knowledge of the various outrages committed by officers.

Griffin said the Inquiry will bring further scrutiny of Home Office role, and they will cooperate.

Oliver Sanders QC (Designated Lawyer Officers)

The final statement for the day came from Oliver Sanders QC, representing 114 mostly ex- (though some current) spycops. They are predominantly from the SDS, but some from the later NPOIU, and they include both undercover and back room staff. Some of them became managers later. In total, it’s around 60% of all SDS staff (around 70% of those still alive).

In contrast to Nicholas Griffin’s brevity, Sanders settled in for a long, repetitive speech. He spoke like someone who is paid by the hour at a very high rate, which is probably the truth of the matter. It was reminiscent of ‘Just A Minute‘, with no comic factor at all. Imagine ‘Just An Hour‘, and no other players.

Sanders basically had three demonstrably untrue points:
– police never intend to harm anyone
– spycops are better than the alternative
– even though they’re bad we can’t judge them because it was a long time ago

He just kept making them over and over with avalanches of pointless details.

Sanders said the SDS was just one cog in much larger machine of security and intelligence, established and overseen by central government, with the Home Office at the top. The Home Secretary sets functions for MI5 as well as overseeing police (the Met in particular). The Commissioner of Met is appointed on Home Secretary’s recommendation. The Home Office mandated Met Special Branch, of which the SDS was a sub-unit. As Nicholas Griffin had already said, the Home Office funded SDS from 1968 to 1989.

Like a droplet of oil hitting water, Sanders suddenly went wide on the philosophy, history and function of policing. The first duty of police and any police officer is keeping the Queen’s peace, he said. Public order is paramount, key to the functioning of a civilised society. Lord Scarman said maintaining normal society is the very function of police.

This became a motif, making a point then reiterating it, citing what he appeared to feel were impartial sources, who were all senior figures of State such as judges and senior ministers.

The right to protest is in conflict with a right to continuous calm, Sanders explained. Balance must be struck that allows protesters to do their thing without impacting on the majority. Cities don’t exist as blank canvases for protests to be imposed upon. As the police have to deal with many communities and keep the peace, they must have information about what’s going on. Hence intelligence units like the SDS who, unlike other police, don’t make arrests.

Sanders said the Met Special Branch existed mainly to provide public order intelligence to uniform branch, and intelligence on ‘subversives, terrorists and extremists’ to MI5.

So, he asserted with perhaps the most daring understatement of the day, the SDS was just doing normal Special Branch work but in a specialised way. This intelligence then helped police to ‘manage’ major public order events.

THE SOUND OF THE CROWD

Returning to the overarching theory of the role, Sanders told us that police are simply ordinary members of society undertaking public service. No matter the strength of one’s feeling, it doesn’t include the right to attack other citizens just because they’re in uniform.

But crowds can behave in ways that single members wouldn’t; in groups, people are more prone to volatility. Peaceable individuals you wouldn’t have thought worth spying on might decide to get rowdy. Protesters can enjoy the effect as disorder can demonstrate strength of feeling, create public alarm and political attention, and give the opportunity to provoke police in the hope the public will regard it as police brutality.

Public order situations were worsening in 1968 because there was a generation of young adults that hadn’t had a world war or national service, Sanders said with a straight face. In 1968, when the SDS was formed, such eruptions were coming from far left and anarchist organisations, rather than the far right, he claimed.

Sanders explained that most intelligence is necessarily acquired indiscriminately, and its value can only be appraised later on. He did not address the fact that he’d just made the argument for a complete surveillance state, without saying there should be any constraints.

This casual, chilling perspective was reinforced by saying that ‘the question is whether the ends justify the means, rather than judging the means on their own terms’, an excuse any torturer would be able to give.

THEN AND NOW

Like the Met’s representative Peter Skelton QC earlier in the day, Sanders cited the assassinations of Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King, then went on a long detour about life in 1968, telling us a pint of beer was 1 shilling and 2 pence, and there were only three TV channels.

So, of course, policing was different in 1968 too, they had whistles but no training on dealing in public disorder. Laws were different too so, again like Skelton, Sanders said we shouldn’t not judge the spycops by modern standards.

As he well knows, laws against identity theft and sexual assault were long established in 1968.

He said it was a tumultuous time compared to 2020, a conclusion nobody who’s lived through this year could draw with the slightest degree of honesty.

Comparisons with 1968 are a diversion – surely deliberate – to distract from the facts of the spycops’ abuses. The spycops are not an event in that year, that was merely the start of an institutional process that went on for decades and, crucially, got worse as time went on. The spycops in 2010 – long after the supposed new regulatory framework of the Human Rights Act, etc – were, if anything, committing even worse abuses than their 1968 counterparts.

Sanders then went on to explain that spycops weren’t really that bad, as worse policing was possible. He conjured scenarios of water cannons and baton rounds being used because spycops hadn’t collected advance intelligence and warned the uniformed police that a protest might end in trouble.

He justified spying on all manner of groups, because you never knew who’d become worth spying on, or which insignificant group would splinter into one they wanted to monitor, or which group would attract members of target groups. He mentioned members of the Communist Party of Great Britain and Socialist Workers Party joining CND with the aim of ‘taking it over’. He said that Rock Against Racism and others were worthy targets because they were just fronts for the SWP.

These groups had a right to pursue their beliefs, he insisted, but police just wanted to understand what was going on in order to create threat assessments. Sinn Fein made Marxist statements, drawing support from far left groups of interest. Advocating the end of internment without trial was lawful, he acknowledged (ignoring the fact that the internment was itself a violation of human rights).

After 1968 demonstrations increased in number, scale and intensity, he said.

MAKING A KILLING

He then made perhaps the most shocking assertion of the day. Oliver Sanders had the gall to list injuries at protests in the 1970s and singled out the deaths of Kevin Gately and Blair Peach, two men who were killed by police.

Gately was on an anti-fascist demonstration, the organisers of which included the Communist Party of Great Britain, the International Marxist Group, and the International Socialists, three groups Sanders himself cited as main targets for spycops.

Peach was in the Socialist Workers Party, the spycops’ most targeted organisation; there can be no claim that he might have lived if only the spycops had been more involved. The officer who killed Peach has been identified, but was never charged. Peach’s partner, Celia Stubbs, ran a justice campaign after his death which was targeted by spycops. She is a core participant at the Inquiry.

Sanders had been rattling on about the need to use police resources efficiently, yet spycops expended huge resources to undermine dozens of justice campaigns like Blair Peach’s. Resources that should have been spent catching killers were used to obstruct justice.

For Sanders to use the death of Blair Peach this way shows foul and venomous contempt for Blair, Celia, and everyone else involved in groups targeted by spycops.

HOW THE SDS FUNCTIONED

Sanders then spoke a little about the SDS’ internal organisation. The SDS had a back office for organisation, and two safe flats in changing locations where back office and undercovers could meet. Around 10-12 officers deployed at a time in far left, anarchist, Irish and far right groups.

Officers in this period (1968-82) would spend some months in the back office preparing their legend and learning about their targets, arranging cover accommodation and vehicle. Once undercover, they would have twice-weekly meetings in safe flat and daily phone calls. The average deployment in the earlier days was 3-4 years.

The SDS’ roles were intelligence gathering, and counter subversion work for MI5. While it monitored a large number of groups, a much smaller number were actively infiltrated.

Sanders insisted they had to report on ‘softer outer circles’, and at times when little was happening, in order to be in place for more serious events. Some campaigns come up without warning in response to events, so they wanted spycops to be in place already. By its nature this meant infiltrating groups that didn’t seem to be worth it.

Intelligence was recorded in reports then catalogued. As hard copy reporting was slow in the days before electronic communications, much of what the SDS did was face to face or on the phone, rather than written. And much of what was written wasn’t retained. The extant files are a fraction of what was made.

A lot of SDS reports have been retrieved for the Inquiry from copies sent to MI5. However, officers remember certain reports that haven’t been found. It may just be they weren’t sent to MI5, or not retained. MI5 had a big subversion clear-out in the 1980s. Sanders explained that this is nothing untoward, no blame to anyone, it’s just the nature of what happens with documents from so long ago.

Sanders emphatically asserted that there is no basis for the suggestions of deliberate shredding of older SDS files to destroy incriminating evidence. Surely spycops would never do such a thing.

Sanders’ opening statement is on the Inquiry site.

Sanders will complete his opening statement on Wednesday morning, covering the functioning of the SDS itself and its operational contribution to public order and counter subversion.

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COPS will be live-tweeting all the Inquiry hearings, and producing daily reports like this one for the blog. They will be indexed on our UCPI Public Inquiry page.

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Tranche 1, Phase 1, Day 1

2 November 2020

Evidence from:

David Barr QC, Counsel to the Inquiry

The opening day of the Undercover Policing Inquiry was wholly taken up with David Barr QC, Counsel to the Inquiry, spelling out what the Inquiry is, and explaining the foundation and early years of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) undercover political policing unit.

There were some surprises – many new targeted groups were named and several officers’ photos were published. Whilst these are welcomed, leaving it so late it means the people in those groups, or who would recognise the officers, are only just getting a chance to learn they were spied on. As a method of disclosure, it seems designed to exclude affected people from being able to contribute to the Inquiry.

WHAT THE UCPI IS ABOUT & HOW IT WILL WORK

Barr made it clear that while there was a significant focus on left-wing groups, the SDS’s remit went beyond them very early on in its history, encompassing those opposing race and gender discrimination, campaigns for disarmament, and justice campaigns such as the family of Stephen Lawrence. Spycops, Barr confirmed, had been involved in the blacklisting of politically active workers.

Barr said ‘several’ had deceived women into long-term relationships (it’s more than 30, David). Spycops stole the identities of dead children.

Spycops stand accused of being agents provocateur, including Bob Lambert, accused of placing a timed incendiary device in a Debenham’s store in 1987 while undercover. (The Metropolitan Police’s investigation into this, begun in April 2016, four years after the allegation was made, has still not concluded!)

The Inquiry, he assured us, will make facts public wherever possible, drawing on historic documents as well as testimony made directly to the Inquiry.

He then ran through a chronology of the scandal: basically one myopic whitewash report after another, interspersed with increasingly outrageous revelations from activists and journalists until the public inquiry was called. Unfortunately, there was a lack of recognition from him of the activists, notably the women deceived into relationships, who did most of the major work exposing the officers. Without them, none of this would be happening.

Barr ran through the Inquiry’s terms of reference, as laid out when it was commissioned in 2015. One of the limitations mentioned is this is an Inquiry into the actions of police officers in England and Wales, even though the spycops are known to have travelled to around 20 other countries, undermining campaigns and violating human rights.

The immunity of witnesses was mentioned – no document produced at the Inquiry will be used against people in future criminal proceedings (unless it’s about giving false evidence to the Inquiry itself), though documents produced by others for the Inquiry aren’t covered by this.

The Inquiry has told 19 families that their dead children’s identities were stolen by spycops. Additionally, one family whose living child’s identity was stolen has been informed.

THE NEW SCHEDULE

When Sir John Mitting took over as Chair in 2017, he cited his predecessor’s desire to discover the truth – that’s not necessarily the same as revealing the truth to the public though.

The Inquiry is divided into Modules, subdivided into Tranches and Phases, which you can see explained in our UCPI FAQ. Sir John Mitting will preside alone over the evidence, then a panel will be appointed by the Home Secretary for the final module that will look at making recommendations for the future (which the CHIS Bill seemingly makes irrelevant).

Although originally scheduled to report in 2018, the Inquiry is now looking like it’ll finish in about 2026. The pandemic is slowing the delayed process even further, as they say that classified documents can’t be worked on at home.

There was dismay at the new protracted timetable for the Inquiry. Tranche 1 Phase 2 (SDS 1973-82) is now expected to be in March or April 2021. They expect the Tranche 2 (SDS 1983-92) hearings will happen in the first half of 2022, Tranche 3 (SDS 1993-2007) in the first half of 2023. As for Tranches 4 (NPOIU), 5 and 6, who knows?

THE FIRST EVIDENCE HEARINGS

The first evidence hearings (Phase 1 of Tranche 1) will start next week. They will cover the formation of the Special Demonstration Squad in 1968, in response to protests against the war in Vietnam, and why it continued beyond that.

There is no evidence in any documents that the earliest SDS officers (1968-72) had sexual relationships with women, nor that it was standard to steal dead children’s identities. However, these things do emerge in Phase 2 (1973-82), the hearings due to take place in early 2021.

Witness statements have been taken from 18 SDS officers for Phase 1 (1968-72), eight of whom will give evidence. For the targeted people, Tariq Ali from the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign will give evidence, and Dr Norman Temple from Irish National Liberation Solidarity Front will have his statement read for him.

The Inquiry will examine documents including Home Office Circular 97/1969, which specifically said spies must never incite crime, and if there’s ever a possibility of misleading a court the spy must be withdrawn (which is cited in our post about spycops and miscarriages of justice).

In covering who was responsible in the early period, Barr listed Home Secretaries and Metropolitan Police Commissioners. It’s worth noting that the huge delays in starting the Inquiry mean that three Met Commissioners (collectively in charge 1977-1993) and two Home Secretaries have died since the Inquiry was announced.

STOPPING THE ‘STOP THE WAR’: HOW THE SDS BEGAN

A March 1968 demonstration in London against the Vietnam War ended with windows being broken at the American embassy. Eager to avoid a repeat at the October 1968 demo, police came up with the idea of deep-cover intelligence officers, and the Special Demonstration Squad was born.

The Inquiry was then shown a contemporary ITV report of the March protest, featuring lots of pushing at police lines and officers kicking people on the ground, two officers carried away on stretchers, several fireworks and some incidental damage to shrubbery. It was overdubbed with continual crowd noise that doesn’t change when the scene cuts, and a voice-over about the wild violence of protesters in “a riot such has Britain has never before witnessed”.

Internal police reports allege foreign demonstrators were catalysts and agitators, though Barr said that Tariq Ali from the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign contests the accuracy and validity of this focus.

Chief Inspector Conrad Dixon of Special Branch resolved to prevent a repeat. Dixon’s report of April 1968 said no intelligence had shown anyone planning violence at the demo, and yet it happened. Implied in this is a common police belief that things have a rigid command structure similar to their own, and if that can’t be seen it must be because it’s being well hidden.

The Inquiry went through a number of contemporaneous documents. They showed a few that said Special Branch had gone to a degree of effort to find out the scale and nature of the March 1968 demo. One Special Branch document describes Special Branch attending a Vietnam Solidarity Campaign meeting but being recognised and asked to leave. Another attempted to attend a private meeting was aborted due to cops not knowing anyone and dressing like cops. Special Branch clearly felt a problem in not being able to get into meetings of anti-Vietnam War activists.

There’s very little contemporaneous documentation of the formation of the Special Demonstration Squad, but it appears to have been founded on 30 or 31 July 1968. Early SDS documents stated its intention as being solely to gather intelligence ahead of the 27 October 1968 Vietnam demo, using publications, informants, technical devices, and undercover police officers.

It rapidly moved from this multi-method narrow-remit approach to the very opposite – just using deep-cover police for a wide, ill-defined range of ‘subversives’.

As the anti-Vietnam War movement factionalised, the SDS infiltrated the various groups. Officers ‘Don de Freitas’ and ‘Margaret White’ posed as a couple to infiltrate a group. One black power leaflet they came across led to prosecution and imprisonment of its distributor, and the officer gave evidence in her real identity.

The spycops had been deployed into a variety of groups, even taking active roles in the organising.

THE OCTOBER 1968 DEMONSTRATION

By the time the October 1968 Vietnam demo came round, Chief Inspector Dixon saw all the factions and anticipated less trouble than had been seen in March. He was correct, but David Barr said that’s not the point. The Inquiry must ask was this necessary? Was it proportionate? Could intelligence have been gained without the use of spycops?

On 29 October 1968, the US ambassador congratulated Special Branch for a less volatile demo than in March. One has to wonder if there would have been such a strong reaction to March demo if it had been at a target that didn’t embarrass the UK in front of the USA.

We were then shown another contemporaneous news report. As with the earlier one, there’s a striking difference between the pictures and the commentary – the ‘Maoists’ / ‘anarchists’ (the words are used interchangably) are violent for linking arms and walking into police, police ‘keep their cool’ throwing punches and kicking.

Again, Barr recounted the police’s narrative seemingly from a position of accepting it as fact, describing how they regarded the comparatively peaceful nature of the Oct 1968 Vietnam demo as a big success for the policing tactics.

It’s unclear if the Inquiry is taking all this at face value. The October 1968 demo was always intended by the organisers to be more peaceful, and the International Marxist Group stopped a large attempted breakaway to the US embassy.

Certainly, it was used as the pretext for making the SDS a permanent arrangement with a much wider scope. Barr talked about the dual role of SDS, covering demonstrations/public order and subversion, but pretty much every organisation seeking any social change could be seen to fit into either category (or both).

The conflation of the former with the latter gave an excuse for state surveillance of almost all protest groups. Within a fortnight of the October demo, spycops boss Chief Inspector Dixon had proposed long term infiltration of the relevant organisations. Funding was requested from the Home Office. Home Office wasn’t overly keen on permanence but paid up anyway.

DEEPER POCKETS, WIDER NET

The documents make clear that the Home Office reticence wasn’t due to any ethical principles. Rather, Home Secretary Reginald Maudling was very afraid of personal impact of exposure.

The fact that the government was terrified of spycops being public knowledge indicates a belief that the public would be outraged, as indeed they were once the truth came out in 2010. They always knew it was profoundly unethical, that it was abuse of citizens and unwarranted curtailing of political dissent.

Funding was granted for the calendar year in 1970 and 1971, but in 1972 it moved to the financial year, indicating that the old temporary spying on Vietnam War protesters had become permanent and broader. A vague mention of spycops in the press yielded no serious opposition from public or civil liberties groups, leading to increased confidence in making the unit permanent, continuing and expanding their roles.

The SDS was directly funded by the Home Office until the late 1980s, which would have been discussed and presumably they wanted to know what they were getting for their money, yet somehow there are no documents of any kind about the SDS in any of the Home Office archives.

Early 1970s documents show the unit’s stated aims being forecasting the scale and mood of demonstrations, identifying organisers, and ‘gathering information for long-term intelligence purposes’ with people profiled ‘within weeks’ of first expressing interest in ‘extremist ideas’.

WHO WAS TARGETED

David Barr then read out lists of groups targeted according to the SDS’ first few annual reports. Some we knew from the Undercover Research Group/ Guardian list, but almost 50 were new.

Certainly, the breadth of interest was extraordinary. It included groups from Hackney United Tenants Ad-Hoc Committee to Croydon Libertarians, Justice for Rhodesia to the Independent Labour Party. The Undercover Research Group posted the full list.

The reports lamented the ‘obvious problem’ of finding it hard to infiltrate black power movements. “Coloured and foreign organisations, because of their exclusivity, continue to be resistant to penetration”.

The SDS said that the Communist Party and extreme right wing groups weren’t covered by its remit, but was up for doing it if they were told to. This is essentially asking for sanction for mission creep.

Big Flame were among the groups described as “penetrated to a lesser degree”, but this somewhat arbitrary distinction doesn’t mean the involvement is minor. They were targeted by Richard Clark, aka ‘Rick Gibson’, but the group became suspicious of him and discovered that he was using the stolen identity of a dead child. They confronted him and he left. The story was unpublished at the time

Clark deceived at least four women he spied on into relationships. One of them, Mary, gave a powerful statement to the Inquiry in 2018:

“I came from South Africa, thinking I had escaped that kind of interference by the state in the life of its citizens. To find that the police and the state in the UK operate in a similar fashion is very disturbing”.

Chief Inspector Dixon laid down some rules. He wanted recruitment by personal approach, and daily supervision of officers, with a maximum of 12 months (the average ended up being 4-5 years). He was firm that officers should not get actively involved in groups, drafting leaflets, etc. This, as has already been mentioned, wasn’t adhered to even then, and it went right out of the window shortly after.

None of the officers the Inquiry has spoken to recalls formal training. There is little evidence of specific guidance on criminal activity, sexual relationships, breaching legal privilege. Unsurprisingly, most say they didn’t commit any offence when undercover.

The Inquiry then published photos of various officers, all seemingly taken at the same event (one has to suspect the 1968 SDS Christmas party). Most of the officers whose faces are shown were backroom staff, rather than actual undercover officers. The Undercover Research Group posted all the pictures of the 1968 spycops.

EXAMPLE DOCUMENTS

The Inquiry concluded the day by showing a range of documents to illustrate key themes.

A report on large public meeting of Vietnam Solidarity Campaign from 1968:

Routine form for early SDS work reporting on events. It lists all the officers present at the meeting (which included Dixon, the head of the SDS, and Saunders, second in command), all of whom were able to vote at the meeting. The document is noted as having been copied to MI5. It’s a clear illustration of spycops having influence on the organisations they spied on, and that this was known at the very highest levels.

A report from officer ‘John Clinton‘ on the April 1972 International Socialists conference:

Almost 400 people attended, and the report is lengthy. This was followed by another from same officer, on the results of International Socialists national committee election, noting specific person’s politics. These two were the basis for the next document, a cover note saying managers were very pleased about the reports on International Socialists, that it proves the value of the SDS, and reports have been copied to MI5. This is proof that such reporting wasn’t a rogue officer but within the remit of the SDS.

A 1969 report from officer ‘Bill Lewis‘ on the International Marxist Group’s summer camp in Scotland, attended by 42 people. This shows spycops acting across borders and jurisdictions very early on, and makes a mockery of the Home Office limiting the Inquiry to England and Wales.

A 1971 report by ‘David Robertson‘, reporting on a Maoist couple, including personal details about financial affairs, home life and child. This kind of intrusive, unpolitical detail was commonplace in such reports.

A 1968 document from ‘Don de Frietas‘ and ‘Margaret White‘, officers who pretended to be a couple to infiltrate the Havering branch of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. The report covers a meeting in a pub with details of all nine attendants.

A 1971 report from ‘John Clinton’ on a member of the International Socialists, who wants to get fellow members to work within a trade union. This was followed by another Clinton one from 1973 reporting on membership changes in International Socialists, noting their locality and trade union. These illustrate the attention to trade unions even in the early days of the SDS.

A 1973 report of officer HN338, noting names of three people who’ve asked for information on the International Marxist Group. This shows that one didn’t have to be an activist or even a member of a target group in order to have a spycops file.

A 1971 report also from HN338 on a Black Defence Committee talk entitled ‘Rhodesia and the racist problem in Britain’. Opposing those things was a threat to the political establishment.

A 1971 report by ‘David Robertson’ on Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) meeting addressed by a delegation that had visited China, but includes details of industrial action and remarks about the ethnicity of certain attendees.

A 1971 ‘Robertson’ report, submitting a Women’s Liberation Front leaflet that advocated an end to exploitation and repression of all kinds, equal pay without regard to gender, access to contraception and abortion. The report has been stamped as copied to MI5.

A 1971 report from officer HN338 reporting on a meeting of editorial groups of an activist publication called Indo-China, showing active involvement in steering groups. Numerous spycops wrote articles whilst undercover, encouraging the political activity they were ostensibly there to undermine.

A 1973 report from officer HN338, reporting on meeting about police oppression by International Marxist Group, Socialist Labour League and International Socialists. Example of police regarding well-earned threats to their reputation as seriously as any other threat.

Finally for the example documents, a report from 1974 by ‘John Clinton’ reporting on a Socialist Worker rally for the Shrewsbury 24 and their families. This clearly shows spycops working to defending the reputation of the police against those who’d expose miscarriages of justice.

All documents mentioned have been uploaded to the Inquiry Archive for 2 November 2020.

 

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COPS will be live-tweeting all the Inquiry hearings, and producing daily reports like this one for the blog. They will be indexed on our UCPI Public Inquiry page.

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