An explosive new report on spycops in Scotland proves the need for a proper inquiry into their activity. The Scottish government is refusing to address the issue, so victims are launching a legal case to force them to act.

Officers from Britain’s political secret police worked all over the UK and beyond. They undermined campaigns, invaded families and violated the fundamental human rights that police are sworn to uphold. Everyone affected deserves answers, but people in Scotland are being shut out.

HALF AN INQUIRY

In March 2014 the Home Secretary announced there would be a full-scale public inquiry into political undercover policing. It came as a shock when, a year later, the Inquiry’s terms of reference said it would be limited to events in England and Wales.

There were voices of outrage. The German government officially asked to be included. Irish parliamentarians challenged ministers to do the same. A judicial review of Northern Ireland’s exclusion is underway, backed by Amnesty International. But nowhere has the objection to exclusion been stronger than in Scotland.

Many of the known spycops were active in Scotland, over a period of decades. Every known active officer was at the 2005 protests against the G8 meeting in Gleneagles.

A number of officers initiated and furthered intimate relationships with women they were spying on whilst in Scotland. Some of them took the women on special trips to Scotland purely to cement and deepen the relationships.

By the Metropolitan Police’s own admission,

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

All these visits to Scotland should have been sanctioned by the local police forces. Either Scottish police were complicit, or else they weren’t told, which would be a serious breach of protocol. Either way, it warrants investigation.

The matter has been twice debated in the Scottish Parliament. The Scottish Justice Minister met with victims of spycops in Scotland. The Scottish government, supported by every party in the parliament, made repeated official requests to be included in the public inquiry. The Home Office refused.

POLICE ASKED TO EXONERATE THEMSELVES

The Scottish government’s response to the rebuff was as baffling as it was insulting to victims. They hired HM Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland (HMICS) – a body of career police officers – to conduct a review.

HMICS decided to put the task in the hands of Stephen Whitelock, who had worked in and alongside the posts that deployed undercover officers, including authorising Strathclyde’s deployments of the very Met officers his review examines. It was a corrupt self-investigation. Victims protested to no avail, and so it went ahead without actually speaking to anyone who was subjected to the abuses.

It got worse. When the Strategic Review of Undercover Policing in Scotland was published in February 2018, it went beyond the anticipated whitewash. Much of its content was given over to other kinds of undercover policing, information that was utterly irrelevant to the political infiltrations. It didn’t even mention officers having relationships with women they spied on, let alone what happened and who was responsible.

The Scottish government accepted this vacuous decoy of a review and said there was no need for a further inquiry.

THE TRUTH ABOUT SPYCOPS IN SCOTLAND

Earlier this year, the Scottish Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance published Political Undercover Policing in Scotland: The facts about spycops in Scotland & the questions that remain unanswered [PDF].

Written by academic Dr Eveline Lubbers, it focuses on the two main spycops units, the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU).

There are extensive details on the activity of nine officers in Scotland, their relationships, and the groups they targeted. It also covers Scottish issues affected by political policing (as opposed to officers visiting the country as part of UK or international issues) including anti-nuclear, anti-war, climate and trade union campaigns.

Additionally, the SCOPS report profiles a number of senior Scottish officers seconded to one of the Met’s spycops units. One of them, Phil Gormley, went on to become Chief Constable of Scotland.

Dr Lubbers told Bella Caledonia:

‘Our research found that Scottish officers had crucial leading management roles in both the NPOIU and the overseeing body ACPO TAM, and were as such involved in setting the agenda for the secret undercover units. Our findings confirm that the NPOIU acted on a national level, and that Scotland was within its remit.’

The SCOPS report vaporises any credibility that the HMICS report may have had. SCOPS has delivered a copy of the report to every MSP, including Justice Minister Humza Yousaf. Mr Yousaf has yet to respond.

You can download the report for free, or order a paper copy to be delivered, at the bottome of the SCOPS page.

JUSTICE FOR ALL

The spycops committed crimes, some of them serious. They were agents provocateur, lied in court and set people up for wrongful convictions. They are known to have orchestrated dozens of miscarriages of justice, and the true figure may be in the thousands. They systematically sexually and psychologically abused women they spied on. They stole the identities of dead children from bereaved families.

Every instance of these abuses should be exposed wherever it happened. Every officer should be held accountable. Everyone targeted by these officers and tactics deserves the truth, and the state should give victims all the support and opportunity for redress that they need. They, and the public, must have answers.

‘Andrea‘, who had a long-term relationship with officer Carlo Soracchi, told The Scotsman:

‘As a victim of political policing in Scotland, I seek the truth as to why I was spied upon and why my life and the lives of my family were so cruelly disrupted. I want to know who was responsible for (Soracchi’s) activities in Scotland and which of his handlers secretly travelled with us.’

It cannot be right that people violated by unlawful and unethical political policing in England and Wales have a judge-led inquiry, whilst those in Scotland get nothing at all.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

Tilly Gifford, an activist targeted by political secret police in Scotland, is bringing a legal case to compel the Scottish government into having a credible inquiry into spycops in Scotland.

She has launched a crowdfund appeal for the costs. Please share the link and, if you can afford it, contribute.

Tilly Gifford

The Scottish establishment is inexplicably stalling investigations into political secret police in the country, but you can help.

Most of the known spycops were active in Scotland, including many who had deceived women they spied on into sexual relationships, something the police concede is an abuse of police power and a violation of human rights.

Despite such serious events being well known, the public inquiry into undercover policing is limited to events in England and Wales.

In December 2015 the Scottish government – supported by every party in the Scottish parliament – made a formal request for Scotland to be included in the Inquiry. The Home Office refused.

One would have thought the SNP government in Scotland would have seized on this – English officers committing gross violations of citizens in Scotland, and whilst English and Welsh victims get a full scale Inquiry their Scottish counterparts get nothing.

However, Scottish justice minister Michael Matheson merely commissioned HM Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland (HMICS) to conduct a review of the matter. As HMICS is effectively a satellite body of the police, we have no faith in its ability to deal with the issue in a credible way.

We met Michael Matheson in May 2017, and he told us he expected the report in September. He assured that that if the review showed serious issues, he would order a proper inquiry.

HMICS did indeed finish their report in September. After preparations, it was delivered to Matheson on 2nd November 2017. Nobody has heard anything about it since.

JUDICIAL REVIEW – WHEN IS A CASE NOT A CASE?

Meanwhile activist Tilly Gifford, who was targeted by spycops in Scotland, has sought to have a judicial review of the Home Office’s refusal to include Scotland in the public inquiry. The Scottish Legal Aid Board (SLAB) turned her down for funding, saying the case ‘did not have merits’.

This is at odds with a parallel case in Northern Ireland, where a judicial review is going ahead with public funding. Gifford crowdfunded her case and in September 2017 the Court of Session in Edinburgh accepted the merits of the case and granted permission to proceed to a full judicial review.

Gifford reapplied for legal aid but SLAB have moved the goalposts and now say they won’t fund the case unless it has ‘a good probability’ of winning.

This flat-out refusal with changing excuses is, on its own, enough to make one suspect political interference. Taken alongside the Scottish government’s reluctance to have a proper inquiry into spycops’ abuses, it is increasingly hard to come to any other conclusion (even before we consider other allegations of political interference in Scottish policing).

This is where you come in. We would like people to write to Scottish justice minister Michael Matheson to conduct an investigation into the decision to deny legal aid in this case, and to table a motion asking for the decision to be overturned.

As Gifford told Bella Caledonia this week:

‘I still don’t know how long I had been followed. I still don’t know who commissioned me as a target. I still don’t know what files are held on me. What I do know is that I was followed on the streets, that they had access to my home, that they could call me on my personal phone from untraceable numbers when they wanted…

‘communities in Wales and England who have suffered extreme abuses have the potential to have light shed on these sexual, emotional and physical violations carried out by the state. Yet, as it stands now, people in Scotland have no such recourse to truth or accountability. There are women who know they were targeted for sexual relationships by undercover operatives in Scotland.’

The Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers have provided an online form and suggested text for you.

Please take a few minutes to add your name to the call and help secure access to justice for Tilly Gifford, that she may then let the country know what counter-democratic abuses have been committed in their name.

People spied upon by Britiain’s political secret police in Scotland are boycotting the forthcoming Scottish review of the issue, saying ‘it cannot be trusted’ and branding it ‘pointless’.

The review by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland (HMICS) was commissioned by the Scottish government. Although most known officers from the disgraced units were active in Scotland, the Home Office has limited the full-scale public inquiry to events in England and Wales. The Scottish government – supported by every party in Holyrood – formally asked for inclusion but were rebuffed in July last year.

The Scottish government responded by asking HMICS to do a review, but only of events in Scotland since 2000.

Now eighteen people have written to HMICS, decrying both the remit and the choice of the body itself.

Most of them were so heavily spied upon that they are among the 200 people designated core participants at the London-based public inquiry. They include several women who were deceived into relationships by undercover officers and have received an abject apology from the Metropolitan Police.

Others were only targeted in Scotland and so cannot be part of that inquiry. Among them are former MSP Frances Curran and climate activist Tilly Gifford who is bringing a case to force a judicial review of Scotland’s exclusion.

Many were also on the illegal construction industry blacklist, despite never having worked in that trade. Several hundred activists were on the list as every constabulary’s Special Branch illegally supplied it with the details of people who were politically active.

‘The HMICS review has none of the muscle it takes to bring the truth to light, even if it were within the remit and was so disposed.

‘There is little point in another report that simply says things were wrong but it has all changed now. We and the Scottish public need proper answers. We want to know the truth of who spied on us, how we were targeted and why police thought they could get away with it. Without that truth there is no path to justice.’

The group add that they ‘do not want to be complicit with measures that treat a violation as less serious if it occurs on Scottish soil’.

Citing earlier reviews in England as inadequate, they call for an entirely different approach that puts the abused first, rather than leaving everything to the abusers and their colleagues;

‘the HMICS review should be scrapped and replaced by something that is credible to all sides and to the public at large’.

The full text of the letter:

HM Inspectorate of Constabulary for Scotland
1st Floor West
St Andrew’s House
Regent Road
Edinburgh
EH1 3DG

27 April 2017

Dear HMICS,

Re: Review of Undercover Policing in Scotland

We were spied upon by undercover political secret police officers in Scotland. Some of us were spied on to such a significant extent that we are core participants at the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI), yet the same officers committing the same acts against us in Scotland will not be considered by the UCPI. Some of us were only spied upon in Scotland and so are ignored by the UCPI. We all deserve the truth, as do the Scottish public whose democratic rights have been interfered with.

In 2011, when the truth of what had been done to us came to public attention, we were met with denials from senior police, and sham inquiries that were narrow investigations by police officers. We have no faith in police investigating themselves. We said these reviews were not sufficiently transparent, robust or independent to satisfy public concern and would not come close to addressing all of the issues raised. We were proven right.

As the scale of what went on became clearer and the content of many of these reports – including one from your sister body HM Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) – were discredited, more serious action was taken. Mark Ellison’s reviews were followed by the announcement of the UCPI. Its exclusion of events in Scotland is a serious limitation. Most of the exposed officers were active in the country and the truth of what happened in Scotland is just as important as it is in England.

For the Scottish Government to commission a review by HMICS is a retrograde step. It is much like the response we had in 2011; police self-investigating a tiny part of what happened, a fob-off to give the appearance of doing something.

We are far beyond that now. We are not dealing with allegations, but proven abuses. This includes officers initiating and furthering intimate relationships with women in Scotland, which the Metropolitan Police has conceded was a violation of human rights and an abuse of police power. It warrants comprehensive and impartial investigation, which we have no faith HMICS is capable of delivering.

Firstly, there is a mater of trust. HMICS is a body of career police officers investigating their colleagues. On that basis alone, it cannot be trusted.

The proposal to look at two disgraced units that were, at the time in question, overseen by the current chief constable of Scotland (whose wife works for your sister organisation, HMIC). This makes it even harder to feign independence. Additionally, the review is being led by Stephen Whitelock who has been working in and alongside the posts that deployed undercover officers, including authorising Strathclyde’s deployments of the abusive Met officers this review examines. The decision to choose him and HMICS gives the appearance of corruption. We cannot think of anyone less appropriate to be doing this.

Secondly, there is a matter of scope. The HMICS remit is limited to events since 2000, a fraction of the lifetime of the units. Among the many outrages committed was the targeting of women through intimate relationships, the use of stolen identities of dead children and the illegal blacklisting of construction workers, environmental and community campaigners. All of these took place in Scotland before 2000 but the investigation will treat them as if they did not happen. To ignore such a significant part of the pattern of abuses makes the investigation unable to see anything like the whole picture and renders it pointless.

Thirdly, there is the element of HMICS’ power to investigate. We have battled for years to get as far as we have, faced by a police culture that will do anything it can to avoid accountability. We have some hope that the UCPI, with its power to compel witnesses who give testimony under oath, might elicit some truth. The HMICS review has none of the muscle it takes to bring the truth to light, even if it were within the remit and was so disposed.

There is little point in another report that simply says things were wrong but it has all changed now. We and the Scottish public need proper answers. We want to know the truth of who spied on us, how we were targeted and why police thought they could get away with it. Without that truth there is no path to justice. There is also no means for the Scottish public to learn how these undemocratic abuses came about and so put steps in place to ensure they do not happen again.

No police report to date has offered anything like that and there is no reason to believe HMICS could, let alone would, do so.

We believe the Justice Secretary should have spoken to those of us abused by these officers in Scotland before deciding on an appropriate course of action. Instead, he spoke only to police and their satellite bodies and then hired them.

We do not want to be complicit with measures that treat a violation as less serious if it occurs on Scottish soil. The HMICS review should be scrapped and replaced by something that is credible to all sides and to the public at large.

The Scottish public and those abused in Scotland deserve a proper Inquiry into the abuses committed by political undercover policing units, just as those in England and Wales deserved one.

‘Andrea’
‘Alison’
Claire Fauset
Donal O’Driscoll
Dr Nick McKerrell
Frances Curran
Harry Halpin
Helen Steel
Jason Kirkpatrick
John Jordan
Kate Wilson
Kim Bryan
Lindsay Keenan
‘Lisa’
Martin Shaw
Merrick Cork
Olaf Bayer
Tilly Gifford

SDS officer John Dines on Barra in the Outer Hebrides. His activity is excluded from the Scottish inquiry

The Scottish government has asked a group of senior police officers to investigate spycops activity in their country.

It comes in response to the forthcoming Pitchford Inquiry into undercover policing being limited to events in England and Wales. The Home Office refused a request, supported by every party in the Scottish Parliament, to extend the Pitchford remit to Scotland.

As we’ve said previously, Scotland was not merely incidental to the political spying of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) and National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). The majority of known officers worked there. Officials admit Mark Kennedy made 14 authorised visits to the country. During these, he had numerous sexual relationships that the Met themselves have described as ‘abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong’ and a breach of human rights. He was far from the only one – Mark Jenner, Carlo Neri and John Dines all did the same.

Having failed to secure Scotland’s inclusion in the main Pitchford inquiry, every party in Holyrood except the SNP backed the call for a separate Scottish inquiry. On Wednesday the Scottish government announced its decision. It has asked Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland (HMICS) to look into it. HMICS is a body of senior police officers.

HMIC’s FIRST BUCKET OF WHITEWASH

Its sister organisation for England and Wales, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), has already got a history of whitewash on the spycops scandal.

The whole issue first hit the headlines in 2011 when Mark Kennedy’s exposure caused the collapse of a trial. Since then, 49 convictions have been overturned due to Kennedy’s involvement. HMIC were asked to look into Kennedy and the two spycops units.

The report was drafted by Bernard Hogan-Howe, on a two year stint at HMIC between his roles as Chief Constable of Merseyside Police and Commissioner of the Met. By the time the report came out he was spending huge sums of Met money deploying lawyers to obstruct justice for spycops’ victims.

The HMIC report was completed by Denis O’Connor, who had been Assistant Commissioner of the Met at the time of the MacPherson Inquiry into the killing of Stephen Lawrence.

The report is believed to have portrayed Mark Kennedy as a rogue officer who had strayed from the purpose of his deployment. It was dramatically withdrawn and pulped just five hours before publication because The Guardian published revelations that another officer, Jim Boyling, had caused miscarriages of justice just as Kennedy did.

It underwent four months of rewriting and, when finally published in 2012, it still came out saying senior officers knew nothing, and basically hung Kennedy out to dry.

‘operational supervision, review and oversight were insufficient to identify that his behaviour had led to disproportionate intrusion.’

Kennedy had been in daily contact with his cover officer, who will have known where he was and what he was doing. Documents released since the HMIC report show that Kennedy was sanctioned from on high and people far up the ladder took a keen and detailed personal interest in his work.

Above the spycops units were their authorising officers.

‘it was not evident that the authorising officers were cognisant of the extent and nature of the intrusion that occurred; nor is it clear that the type and level of intrusion was completely explained to them’

What is an authorising officer doing if not asking about the necessity and impacts of the things they authorise?

But the HMIC report, in the classic style of self-investigations, says it was incompetence and ignorance rather than anything more sinister, only the lowlings did any really bad stuff, lessons have been learned and we can all move on.

It is a challenge for anyone to seriously expect anything different from the forthcoming Scottish report.

CHRONOLOGICAL BLINKERS

As if choosing police to self-investigate isn’t bad enough, the Scottish Government’s remit to HMICS is

‘to report on the extent and scale of undercover policing in Scotland conducted by Scottish policing since the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (Scotland) Act came into force: and the extent and scale of undercover police operations carried out in Scotland by the National Public Order Intelligence Unit and the Special Demonstration Squad in the same period.’

This means the earlier abuses of officers like Mark Jenner and John Dines – who were committing what their bosses admit were breaches of human rights on Scottish soil – will be ignored.

This isn’t just the police getting to mark their own homework. It is police who have been caught after decades of wrongdoing, with a history of cover-ups on this very topic, being given a narrow section of their misdeeds on which to report. Even if they could see clearly, they are looking at the picture through a toilet roll tube.

The Pitchford Inquiry has designated 200 people who were seriously involved in spycops activity – mostly those who were spied on – as ‘core participants’. A group of 24 of them were also personally targeted in Scotland and demand to know the truth of what was done to them there.

As with the police’s spycops self-investigation Operation Herne, it’s unlikely that victims will lend credibility to HMICS’ inevitably flawed and partisan effort by participating. Not that HMIC asked any victims for the 2012 report anyway.

SCOTLAND’S TOP COP DID IT, HIS WIFE’S AN INVESTIGATOR

Any idea that this will produce mere hopeless bias rather than corruption is largely dispelled by the tangle of personal involvement between Scottish police, the two spycops units and HMIC.

Scotland’s Chief Constable, Phil Gormley, was head of the Met’s Special Branch – and therefore oversaw its sub-unit the Special Demonstration Squad – from 2005-2007. He was also secretary of ACPO-TAM, the committee that oversaw Mark Kennedy’s unit the NPOIU, from 2005-2008.

Gormley supervised both units at the exact time that is under investigation. Beyond the usual bias of police investigating police, will fear of besmirching Scotland’s top cop further influence the report? What about the fact that Phil Gormley is married to Detective Superintendent Claire Stevens who has been at HMIC since 2011 (according to her recently deleted LinkedIn profile)?

If this were happening in some tinpot failed state we would express incredulous outrage. The police chief oversaw disgraced secret units that abused dozens of women, engineered hundreds of miscarriages of justice, illegally gave information on political activists to industrial blacklists, disrupted legitimate campaigns and undermined the struggle for justice by families whose loved ones died at the hands of his constabulary. An inquiry run by his senior officers with links to his wife is touted as credible.

That this is the response of the Scottish government, as it seeks to show itself as a fairer than Westminster, beggars belief.

AN INSULT AND A BETRAYAL

These aren’t suggestions or allegations. They are the established facts of large-scale, systematic sustained abuse of power and violation of the citizens that the police are supposed to serve.

To appoint HMICS to investigate these events places huge trust in those who have emphatically proven themselves unworthy. It is an insult to all those who were abused by spycops in Scotland – the people who have done all the work of exposing these outrages – whilst the police, including HMIC, smeared victims in an attempt to mitigate, justify and deny. It is a betrayal of those who expect truth and justice.

To let HMICS go ahead in light of the facts is frankly corrupt. More than that, it is an acceptance by the Scottish government that abuses serious enough to warrant a public inquiry in England count for less, or even nothing, when done in Scotland.

COPS Scotland is being launched with two public meetings featuring:

• Helen Steel (Police Spies Out Of Lives)
• Donal O’Driscoll (Undercover Research Group)
• Harvey Duke (trade unionist)
• Tilly Gifford (Plane Stupid; Glasgow only)

Glasgow, Wednesday 5 October 7.30pm
Jury’s Inn, 80 Jamaica Street G1 4QG

Dundee, Thursday 6 October, 7.00pm
Dundee Voluntary Action, 10 Constitution Road DD1 1LL