Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance press release on the publication of the Tranche 1 Interim Report by the Undercover Policing Inquiry, 29 June 2023

The Metropolitan Police’s political ‘spycops’ unit should have been disbanded 50 years ago, its activity was a waste of time and its intrusiveness would have caused outrage if revealed, a public inquiry has found.

Victims of the police spying operations today welcomed the findings of the Undercover Policing Inquiry Interim Report that the notorious undercover policing unit, the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), should have been disbanded in the 1970s.

The report covered the first part of the Inquiry’s work, from the formation of the Squad in 1968 to 1982.

The Metropolitan Police’s secret spying operations targeted around 1,000 campaigning and left wing groups, was sanctioned at the highest level of the police and successive governments, and continued operating until at least 2010.

The Inquiry Chair, Sir John Mitting, found that, in his view, only three groups were ever ‘a legitimate target’ for undercover policing of any kind.

In his report, Sir John wrote that these issues ‘should have been addressed at the highest level within the MPS and within the Home Office.’

He concluded:

“The question is whether or not the end justified the means […]. I have come to the firm conclusion that, for a unit of a police force, it did not; and that had the use of these means been publicly known at the time, the SDS would have been brought to a rapid end.”

The report does not assign blame, but finds that there were four crucial issues which should have alerted the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office to serious problems:

• long-term intrusive relationships by undercover officers
• the legality of entering private homes without a warrant or just cause
• the theft of dead children’s identities by officers
• undercovers taking on positions of responsibility in the groups they were targeting and using that to report on personal details of people engaged in legitimate activities

Public inquiry core participant Zoe Young, who was spied on for her environmental activism, said:

“The police have tried to justify their actions by saying they were targeting subversives and protecting public order. Their own evidence showed this was not the case.

They ignored violent groups such as the National Front in favour of reporting on cake sales and campaigns for free nurseries. While we were on the street calling for an end to racist murders, we now know police were spying on us. They treated as criminal anyone who wanted to change the world for the better.

If there is a subversive organisation in all this, it is the institutionally anti-democratic Metropolitan Police through their systematic attacks on basic human rights.”

Among the most shocking evidence released by the Inquiry are reports showing the Met explicitly targeted police accountability groups in the 1980s.

Over three sets of hearings the Inquiry heard from many former undercover officers, their managers and victims of the spying. Evidence showed a lack of training and direction to the operations, with officers mostly “self tasking”.

Managers admitted they did not try to change things but simply followed what their predecessors did. What emerged was a picture of a political policing organisation that had no meaningful oversight or clear requirements.

A number of reports demonstrated that teenagers were regularly reported on, alongside details of the children of activists. Numerous reports used derogatory and bigoted terms.

‘Lindsey’, a core participant who has been given anonymity, added:

“No doubt many undercovers and managers will be relieved they did not receive stronger criticism, the evidence of their reports speaks for itself. We see racist, sexist and offensive language regularly being signed off. Their reports show the contempt with which they held people trying to make the world a better place.

They had no guard rails, whether reporting on children or making salacious comments on people’s sexual activities. All this was filed away by Special Branch and MI5.”

While Donal O’Driscoll, another victim of spycops, echoed criticisms from many core participants:

“The Inquiry isn’t over and when it looks at later spying it will find these same patterns of abuse went on for decades and got worse, with the founding of a second unit in 1999.

We are outraged by the intrusive tactics used against us and the lack of oversight, but it only demonstrates what we already knew, that the Metropolitan Police is out of control, both then and now.

They remain a deeply sexist, racist and homophobic institution, despite being put in special measures last year. The Inquiry shows these problems have been deeply rooted for decades. We now know that some of the undercovers who abused people, such as Vincent Harvey, went on to hold high-ranking positions in the police.”

This report is just the beginning. As the Inquiry progresses, victims expect more shocking revelations, and call for the issues not dealt with in the Interim Report – such as the central role of MI5, government involvement, targeting of family justice campaigns, blacklisting of trades unionists, and reporting on children – to be properly addressed.

To this end, they continue to press long standing demands. These include the release of all personal files, the names of all the spycops, and a full list of the over 1,000 groups they targeted. They argue that only when this has happened can there be a full and proper debate about the nature of political policing in the UK.

–ends–

Notes:

• The Interim Report can be found on the Undercover Policing Inquiry website. A summary of the report which has been prepared by Police Spies Out Of Lives can be found at https://policespiesoutoflives.org.uk/summary-of-ucpi-interim-report-june-2023/

• The Inquiry has cost £64m to date. It has completed one of four tranches of investigations and hearings since it was established in 2015, and is expected to conclude in 2026. Further statistics can be found at https://www.ucpi.org.uk/about-the-inquiry/#costs

• There are over 200 non-state core participants including many women who were deceived into sexual relationships by officers, families of murder victims such as Stephen Lawrence, Rolan Adams and Ricky Reel, as well as the families whose dead children’s identities were stolen by the undercovers.

• The Metropolitan Police conceded earlier this year that, “By modern standards, the SDS’s deployments in this period are unjustifiable, because of the way they were structured – not least because there was a failure to consider intrusion, necessity, and proportionality.”

Police on horseback charge demonstrators against the Vietnam War, Grosvenor Square, 17 March 1968

1968 was a time of tumult around the world. Political dissent was brewing to a boil in Paris, Mexico City, Berlin and beyond. The civil rights movement, and latterly opposition to the Vietnam War, had brought a new wave of confrontation to the streets of America and the screens of the world.

In Britain, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) had been set up in 1966 and attracted a broad mix of people from the left of British politics. It was supported publicly and financially by venerable peace activist, the then-94 year old Bertrand Russell, who had left the Labour Party in protest at its stance on the Vietnam War. (Woodsmoke blog describes the background of its formation and events that followed.)

There had already been a demonstration outside the American Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square in October 1967 that passed off without much incident. But the militant political mood, galvanised by outrage at the escalating horrors of the Vietnam War, meant the next one on 17 March 1968 would be much larger.

The war, already prolonged and brutal, was intensifying. Though the world wouldn’t know it until late the following year, two days before the march American troops had killed at least 347 people in the My Lai massacre.

SQUARING UP

It has been said that the Metropolitan police weren’t expecting trouble on the day, but that isn’t entirely true. Coaches travelling to the demonstration were stopped and thoroughly searched, and people were charged with possession of offensive weapons using a broad and creative definition of the term – in one case, it was a sachet of pepper.

As always, estimates of the size of the demo vary, but it’s thought around 80,000 people rallied in Trafalgar Square to be addressed by activists including actor Vanessa Redgrave. Afterwards, a crowd of around 15,000 marched to the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. The plan agreed with police was that demonstrators would be kept on the roads around the square, and a small delegation led by Redgrave and Tariq Ali would go to the embassy itself to present a letter.

The access route was changed at the last minute. The crowds in Trafalgar Square weren’t told, and so there was confusion when entry to the square was bottlenecked by police. Feeling as if police were trying to block the way, then squeezing a gap in police lines only about eight metres wide, the marchers felt the tension markedly increase.

Though police were used to forming solid barriers to protect buildings, (eg buses would be parked across the entrance to Downing Street as demonstrations passed), for some reason they chose to defend the American embassy with police officers on foot, supported by others on horseback. This inevitably drew heckles and the volatile atmosphere headed towards ignition.

As the crowd funnelled out into the centre of the square, as they had at the previous demonstration, police saw them as deviating from the original plan to be in the three streets around the edge. Officers on horseback galloped in to disperse them, batons flailing, with no regard for the safety of those they were charging into.

EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS

Counterculture legend Mick Farren described it:

‘They came at us like the charge of the Light Brigade, these mounted police sweeping across the square. They had these long clubs, kind of like sabres. We said “get under a tree so they can’t get a clean shot at you”.’

Many among the crowd responded by throwing whatever they could in return – stones, fence posts, clods of earth. Protestors broke the police lines, rocks and fireworks were hurled towards the American embassy. Somewhere in the chaotic scene was Mick Jagger, who shortly afterwards wrote Street Fighting Man, an uncompromising call for revolution.

A magistrate, Mr E Appleby, later described the scene to the Guardian:

‘One case will illustrate. An inoffensive student of exemplary character and integrity, standing some distance from the police, taking photographs, was set upon by four policemen shouting “Let’s get this one!” He was dragged into a van and told not to use his camera or he would not see it again.

‘Next day he was charged by his assailants with assault and summonly convicted. No opportunity had been given him to use a ‘phone or to contact his parents. And no time before or after his arrest had he done anything which could be remotely construed as an assault!’

One of the 25 legal observers from the National Council for Civil Liberties was watching another neutral figure, a journalist, but both were pulled into more involved roles:

‘When the superintendent reached the cameraman—with the clear aim of destroying camera and film (and film-maker too if necessary)—about a dozen other people, half police, half civilians, converged on the pair, the former concerned to aid the superintendent and the latter to rescue the camera and cameraman.

‘For my own part, I took only two steps forward when I was surrounded by five policemen, received a knee in the groin, was thrown to the ground and kicked by five or six boots. After a time I was hauled up and according to accounts of witnesses afterwards two attempts were made to arrest me but I was not in a state to respond and in the end was dropped.’

Mick Brown recalled:

‘The whole thing was disorganised. The police weren’t lined up and charging the way they would be now. There was just a general melee.

‘It was probably not intentional but this young girl of about 18 got trapped underneath a [police] horse and was in a state of panic. I’m not sure the rider was that aware of what was going on. All I did was pull her out. To do that I had to bend down more or less underneath the horse and so the policeman hit me over the head.

‘I left the square – I was a bit stunned. When I was outside the square I saw a friend of mine quite close to me. He leant over to a policeman who had his back to him and he tipped the policeman’s helmet off. He turned and ran. The policeman saw him so I stepped in front of him. I didn’t hit him, but I must have obstructed him. And he said, “Right, if I can’t get him I’ll get you.”

I didn’t realise the seriousness of it and he arrested me. He charged me with assault.’

The officer told the court Brown had grabbed him round the neck and punched him in the face several times. Brown was sentenced to two moths in Brixton prison and never went on another demonstration.

EXTRAJUDICIAL PUNISHMENT

It doesn’t matter whether an action or campaign has violent intent. It doesn’t matter whether it plans anything illegal. Some campaigns are deemed politically unacceptable and they are met with an array of police behaviours that amount to extrajudicial punishment. They are faced with police violence, arrest, protracted spells of detention, trumped-up charges and home raids. These are disproportionate but very difficult to challenge legally. Even if a victim is one of the sliver of a percent who bring a successful claim for wrongful arrest, they have still had to endure the treatment.

Political movements are broken by separating the deeply committed from the rest who can be discouraged from participation or bought off with minor compromises. Police punishments make everyone who hears about them choose between risking being subjected to them or staying away. It’s an effective way to curtail an increasingly popular movement and teach people not to challenge authority.

It’s the instinctive reaction of a state that fears the power of people who are calling for a world different from the one the government delivers.

START OF THE SPYCOPS

By the end of the day on 17 March 1968, 246 people had been arrested. It was political violence on British streets of a kind unknown since battles against fascists in the 1930s. It shocked the public and shot fear into the hearts of the political elite.

The government and police were terrified of the revolutionary fervour sweeping the world. A few weeks after the March demonstration, the French government was almost overthrown by ‘les évènements’ of May 1968. Could the UK be heading the same way?
Chief Inspector Conrad Dixon of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch said he could deal with the problem.

On 10 September 1968, Dixon prepared a report for his bosses.

‘The climate of opinion among extreme left-wing elements in this country in relation to public political protest has undergone a radical change over the last few years. The emphasis has shifted, first from orderly, peaceful, co-operative and processions to passive resistance and “sit-downs” and now to active confrontation with the authorities to attempt to force social changes and alterations of government policy.

‘Indeed, the more vociferous spokesmen of the left are calling for the complete overthrow of parliamentary democracy and the substitution of various brands of “socialism” and “workers control”. They claim this can only be achieved by “action on the streets”, and although few of them will admit publicly, or in the press, that they desire a state of anarchy, it is nevertheless tacitly accepted that such a condition is a necessary preamble to engineering a breakdown of our present system of government and achieving a revolutionary change in the society in which we live”.

(For more on this, see the Special Branch Files Project’s section on released documents about police reaction to anti-Vietnam War protests.)

Conrad Dixon’s Special Branch memo, 10 September 1968

Asked what he would need, Chief Inspector Dixon is said to have replied ‘twenty men, half a million pounds and a free hand’. That’s what he got. He set up the Special Operations Squad (SOS) which, in 1972, would change its name to the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS).

Around ten officers would be deployed at a time. They handed in all their police identity documents, changed their appearance and went to live among their targets, becoming one of the activists they were spying on.

Though we are told they were warned not to become agents provocateur, take office in organisations or have sexual contact with people they spied on, it’s clear that all these things were mainstream tactics in the unit from very early on.

THE NEXT MARCH

Vietnam Ad Hoc Committee leaflet, October 1968

On 27 October 1968 there was another march against the Vietnam War. This time, the police were ready and so were the press. The Observer declared that ‘to allege that the British police are violent is as dazzling a piece of hypocrisy as the big lies that Hitler once remarked deceive people more than small ones’.

Organisers, too, had taken steps to avoid a repeat of the violence in March. The Ad Hoc Committee – an umbrella co-ordinated by the VSC – issued leaflets calling for no militancy and no excuses for arrests.

The VSC said 100,000 attended the protest, while contemporary media accounts (presumably taking figures from the police’s notoriously implausible underestimates) said it was around 30,000.

Whichever, the bulk of the march stuck to the planned route, passing Downing Street where Tariq Ali handed in a petition of 75,000 signatures calling for an end to British support for the American side in the war, before heading on to Hyde Park.

A separate, more confrontational, group on the demo openly planned to go to Grosvenor Square, but VSC activists succeeded in ensuring that the bulk of the march did not join in.

Nevertheless, several thousand broke away for the now-familiar Grosvenor Square set piece. Though there was a four-hour stand off with some fireworks and argybargy, there was nothing on the scale of the March riot.

Despite the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign’s rejection of political violence at that moment, it was the major target of the first spycops. Of the five SOS/SDS officers known to have been deployed in that first year, four were in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign.

The unit rapidly expanded its remit. Within a year it had infiltrated the Independent Labour Party, and spread out through peace, workers’ rights and anti-capitalist groups to anti-racist campaigns, Irish nationalist campaigns (which had been the sole remit of the Met’s Special Branch when it was formed in 1883), far right groups and later into environmental and animal rights campaigns.

ORDERS FROM ABOVE

This was not just paranoid police inventing a job for themselves. The SOS was to be secretly and directly funded by the Home Office. Who gave the instructions? How much oversight did the politicians have? What did the Home Office think they were paying for?

A short while after the spycops scandal broke in 2011, Stephen Taylor, a former Director at the Audit Commission, was commissioned to investigate the Home Office’s links with the SOS/SDS. He searched every archive and found nothing. Millions of pounds spent by the Home Office yet not one single page of evidence has been kept.

Taylor’s slender 2015 report unequivocally said:

‘it is inconceivable that there would have been no discussions within the Department or with Special Branch’.

Time and again he had found reference to a file, catalogue number QPE 66 1/8/5, understood to have covered Home Office dealings with the SDS. It has disappeared. It would have contained material classified Secret or Top Secret, which would have strict protocols around its removal or destruction, yet there is no clue as to what happened to it. They physically searched all storage facilities in the Home Office. It’s gone.

Taylor couldn’t make allegations but rather pointedly said ‘it is not possible to conclude whether this is human error or deliberate concealment’.

Taylor did not dig deep. He does not appear to have spoken to any of the twelve living ex-Home Secretaries when investigating. The Undercover Policing Inquiry has dragged on so long that two former Home Secretaries and a former Met Chief Commissioner have died since it was announced.

Fifty years on, we still have no answers as to why it all happened, what it was all for and who was really responsible.

The announcement of the terms of reference for HM Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland’s review into undercover policing manages to go beyond being meaningless, insulting those demanding answers for historical abuses by spycops, explains Dónal O’Driscoll

Last week Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland (HMICS) announced the terms of reference for its Review of undercover policing. Though campaigners were not holding their breath, the terms were more offensive than we expected.

From the beginning we’ve denounced this Review as police investigating police. We experienced the efforts of the Inspectorate of Constabulary in England & Wales and the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Herne. Each report they produced was irrelevant, and in one case pulped the day before publication for misrepresenting the extent of the scandal.

The reality is that HMICS is staffed with ex-police, some of whom will return to policing the force they are examining. Its limited credibility was already strained to its limits when it was revealed that those conducting the review would not just be ex-police but include those closely linked to undercover policing in Scotland.

In no other situation would it be considered acceptable for abusers to investigate themselves. Yet, according to HMICS they will:

‘provide an independent view of the operation, procedures and safeguards in place by Police Scotland in relation to undercover policing, with the objective of providing assurance to Scottish Ministers, the Scottish Parliament and the public’.

We wonder what opinion Scottish Justice Minister Michael Matheson, who commissioned this review, must hold of the public to believe it would blindly accept such assurances. And this in the week we learn that even the rudimentary oversight provided by the Office of Surveillance Commissioners is being ignored by Police Scotland.

Basic political common-sense would say to provide something tangible to reassure campaigners. There was nothing – no promise of answers, no talk of transparency or even listening to the concerns of those most affected.

The announcement stated:

‘HMICS will be mindful of all time of the wider interest of public safety and and will not reveal information capable of impacting negatively on this interest including covert tactics, operational methods, and material potentially leading to the identification of covert human intelligence sources, including undercover officers’.

It is language we have heard many times before from the police. It leaves no doubt that HMICS will adopt the same policy as the rest of the UK – say nothing and stick to Neither Confirm Nor Deny – because it’s more important to them to shield police from consequences of how they abused people than to actually deliver justice. Given the current Chief Constable of Police Scotland oversaw the Special Demonstration Squad, we are not really surprised, however.

The words ‘justice’ or ‘accountability’ are conspicuously absent from the 16 page announcement. There is no mention at all of those most affected by the spycop scandal, a shameful if unsurprising omission.

The investigation is limited to anything after the year 2000, though abuses were taking place long before then. These are grave injustices; there is no statute of limitation, so no reason to stop investigating. Rather, it is the classic police line of ‘nothing to see, move along’. It merely underlines why we demanded an independent inquiry from the beginning.

When we heard the terms of reference for the HMICS review were being released, it felt irrelevant. There was little doubt it would be meaningless political speak. We did not imagine we would be quite so offended. Yet, according to their statement, the review will:

‘comment on the contribution made by undercover policing operations towards public safety in Scotland’.

In plain language, the review is there to give undercover officers a congratulatory slap on the back. Not a word of the abuse conducted by them, but a big well done to the men who deceived, betrayed and destroyed the lives of people fighting for a better world.

Just read the account of Andrea, targeted by a spycop for a relationship, to see why this leaves a bitter taste in our mouths. They will tell us how undercover policing protects the public yet take no interest in protecting the public from these undercover police.

They are not investigating suspicions or allegations. The police themselves accept that it was morally wrong and ‘an abuse of police power’. The people targeted by spycops have uncovered a small fraction of what went on. The question is how far did it go? Instead of addressing that, the Scottish police and their satellite bodies, like their colleagues south of the border, are intent on glossing over what cannot be denied and keeping the rest firmly hidden.

Derek Penman, head of HMICS, wants to maintain public confidence in undercover policing – if anything, he achieved the opposite, demonstrating that the culture of cover-up where reputation comes before justice is the most important motivating factor. It motivated the police at the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry and it is being repeated here.

Mr Matheson, the goal is so wide at this point, that the only possible conclusion is that you are deliberately choosing to miss. This goes beyond ineptitude to intentional collusion with known abusers in covering-up this scandal. It is frankly corrupt. Collaborating in this cover-up stains the entire Scottish Ministry of Justice.

Though these are my views, a group of those of us spied upon in Scotland, shall be writing to the Justice Minister this week, asking for a meeting.

The author was spied upon in Scotland by Mark Kennedy and other undercovers, and is a core participant in the Undercover Policing Inquiry.

Read Andrea‘s description of her relationship with a spycop, with numerous links to related stories, on the Police Spies Out of Lives site.

Barbara Shaw, holding the death certificate of her son Rod Richardson

Three years ago today, the first halfway credible official report into Britain’s political secret police was published. The Home Affairs Select Committee had taken evidence from three of the women deceived into relationships by officers – Helen Steel (aka Clare), Alison and Lisa Jones.

Their powerful testimony was overshadowed by that week’s revelation of the fact that Mark Kennedy’s predecessor, the officer known as Rod Richardson, had stolen a dead child’s identity. The real Rod Richardson died when only a few days old.

Pat Gallan, head of the Met’s self-investigation Operation Herne, said they had found a solitary instance of theft of a dead child’s identity five months earlier. Since then, despite the combined efforts of Herne’s 31 staff, they had failed to find any more until activists came forward with the evidence about Richardson. Gallan refused to apologise for the practice.

Perhaps not coincidentally, she was removed from Operation Herne four days later.

The Select Committee took it very seriously.

The practice of ‘resurrecting’ dead children as cover identities for undercover police officers was not only ghoulish and disrespectful, it could potentially have placed bereaved families in real danger of retaliation.

This point is an important one. John Barker died aged 8 of leukaemia. His identity was later stolen by police officer John Dines. After his deployment ended and he disappeared, Dines’ worried and bereft activist partner Helen Steel traced John Barker and went to the house listed on the birth certificate. John Barker’s brother Anthony said

Now, imagine that policeman had infiltrated a violent gang or made friends with a volatile person, then disappeared, just like this man did. Someone wanting revenge would have tracked us down to our front door – but they wouldn’t have wanted a cup of tea and a chat, like this woman says she did.

The Select Committee gave clear instructions to the police.

Families need to hear the truth and they must receive an apology. Once families have been identified they should be notified immediately. We would expect the investigation to be concluded by the end of 2013 at the latest.

In July 2013 Operation Herne published a report into the theft of dead children’s identities, contradicting Gallan’s claim of it being unusual and confirming it was in fact mandatory in the Special Demonstration Squad for decades. Around fifty identities were stolen for use by police.

WHEN IS A RISK NOT A RISK? WHEN IT’S A COVER-UP

The Operation Herne report talked of the police’s ‘essential’ and ‘long-standing policy’ of Neither Confirm Nor Deny (NCND).

As Police Spies Out of Lives, the group representing eight women deceived into relationships by these officers, pointed out

NCND doesn’t have any legal standing. It doesn’t even seem to be a ‘policy’ – no evidence has been presented of a written policy, and in some instances police lawyers have referred to it as a ‘practice’.

They wryly observed

The women launched their legal action in December 2011, but it was not until June 2012 that the police first mentioned NCND in relation to the claim. You might think if there had been such a long standing policy this would have been highlighted in the first police response.

They then listed a number of times when this supposed policy didn’t apply, ranging from media appearances to the Met Commissioner speaking on the record to the Metropolitan Police Authority.

The report’s author, Chief Constable Mick Creedon, agreed that the relatives deserve an apology but said revealing the names used

would and could put undercover officers at risk.

If officers were spying on the likes of Helen Steel, then it is insultingly absurd to say they would be put at risk by being identified. Numerous officers have been exposed for many years – including their real names and photos being widely reproduced in the mass media. The worst retribution any of them has suffered is a few people politely leafleting outside a building that they weren’t actually in.

If the officers really were spying on genuinely dangerous people, then they are leaving the bereaved families at risk. Under witness protection programmes, the police put endangered civilians through court and then organise a new safe life with changed identity . It’s a lot of effort, but it’s only a few cases and society deems it worthwhile in order to ensure justice is done. Plainly, the same could be done if there actually were any former officers who were in a position of risk.

So either way, this refusal to name names is transparent nonsense. It is a decoy, a device for shielding the police from accountability and further condemnation for their actions. No other institution would protect its rampantly immoral staff so vigorously and effectively.

The police admit that they have done wrong to the citizens they are supposed to serve. They agree that they should issue an apology, but have not done so. This demonstrates absolute arrogance.

WHEN IS A REPORT NOT A REPORT? WHEN IT’S A SECRET

The police said they had completed a report into the theft and use of Rod Richardson’s identity, and concluded there were no criminal charges to be brought,  nor even misconduct proceedings. What were their reasons? We have no idea because the police would not let anyone see the report, not even Richardson’s mother Barbara Shaw.

Her lawyer, Jules Carey, condemned the secrecy and its part of a wider mosaic of abuse by undercover police.

What we heard this morning was not an apology but a PR exercise. The families of the dead children whose identities have been stolen by the undercover officers deserve better than this. They deserve an explanation, a personal apology and, if appropriate, a warning of the potential risk they face in the exceptional circumstances that their dead child’s identity was used to infiltrate serious criminal organisations.

The harvesting of dead children’s identities was only one manifestation of the rot at the heart of these undercover units which had officers lie on oath, conduct smear campaigns and use sexual relationships as an evidence-gathering tool.

In Ms Shaw’s case, the Metropolitan Police have stated that the investigation into her complaint is complete but they have declined to provide her with a report on the outcome. They have refused to confirm or deny that the identity of her son was used by an undercover officer despite there being only one Rod Richardson born in 1973. And they have concluded that there is no evidence of misconduct or even performance issues to be addressed.

Ms Shaw has told me that she feels her complaint has been ‘swept under the carpet’.

MASTERS AND SERVANTS

The conclusion of the Home Affairs Select Committee’s interim report (the full report never materialised) was unequivocal.

The families who have been affected by this deserve an explanation and a full and unambiguous apology from the forces concerned.

The police simply refused, and that was the end of it.

The Select Committee also said

We will be asking to be updated on the progress of Operation Herne every three months. This must include the number and nature of files still to review, costs, staffing, disciplinary proceedings, arrests made, and each time a family is identified and informed. We will publish this information on our website.

It appears that didn’t happen either. What reason could there be? Either the Select Committee didn’t ask, or the police refused and the Select Committee didn’t make a fuss.

Even as they wallow in a foul cesspool of their own long standing practices, the police feel able to blithely ignore insistent demands of parliament to come clean. And parliament has let them get away with it.

If you haven’t heard of the College of Policing‘s National Undercover Scrutiny Panel, don’t worry. It appears that you weren’t really meant to.

After some mentions on social media, they responded on 12 March with a press release entitled National Undercover Scrutiny Panel Set Up. This is somewhat misleading, as it had been set up and agreed its terms of reference far earlier, in July last year. It had further meetings in October 2014 and February 2015, still without any public mention.

But who were they? The interest aroused on 12 March forced them to disclose the Panel’s line up the following day.

But how did they get there? A Freedom of Information request was made on 15 March asking for copies of any advertisements that were published seeking Panel members, any documents that outline the desired qualities and/or qualifications for participants, and minutes of any meetings where the selection of participants was discussed.

On 28 May the College of Policing admitted they were in breach of the Freedom of Information Act by not giving an answer within the mandatory time limits. And still, it goes unanswered.

Two weeks after the initial revelations they gave further detail about the Panel’s purpose and belatedly put minutes of meetings online.

MADE IN THEIR OWN IMAGE

As far as we can tell, none of the individuals or groups targeted by the disgraced undercover policing units and methods, nor their legal repesentatives, were informed of the Panel’s formation, let alone asked to participate.

Undercover policing is in the spotlight because of the public outrage following the exposure of the political secret police units. What kind of credible scrutiny can there be when the Panel is laden down with officers involved in the old ways and doesn’t have a voice for those who were abused?

One of those on the Panel is Mick Creedon, who was put in charge of the police’s self-investigation Operation Herne after its previous head Pat Gallan was removed from the post following her ludicrously implausible cover-up testimony at the Home Affairs Select Committee.

Herne is now starkly seen as a damage limitation exercise. There is no clearer example than its response to the revelations about police spying on the Stephen Lawrence campaign.

Two teams, one from Operation Herne, the other led by Mark Ellison QC, looked at the issue. Drawing on the same documents, they issued reports on the very same day. Ellison basically said that the campaign had been spied on and it pointed to much more beyond Lawrence. Herne essentially said the opposite, and even refused to concede that the whistleblower Special Demonstration Squad officer Peter Francis was ever actually in the police.

It is one of the countless examples proving once more what we all already know, that no organisation, especially one with power, can impartially investigate itself. And no matter how well intentioned, such actions can never have credibility.

The establishment of the forthcoming public inquiry is a de facto admission that Herne has failed, that it’s the police marking their own homework, and something wider, more robust and independent is needed to improve the public’s understanding of what has been done to them over the last fifty years.

The political policing scandal is not a partnership issue, this is a perpetrator and victim situation. For the police, their enablers (and the public) to understand what they did wrong, they need to hear it described by those they did it to.

The Scrutiny Panel being established in secret among police officers is an act of bad faith. It appears to be nothing more than an extension of the damage limitation we’ve already seen from some of the officers on the Panel.

ADDING THE CREDIBILITY OF DISSENT

They did have two critics of the police on the Panel. Ben Bowling is professor of criminology and criminal justice at King’s College, London. He was one of the founders of the Monitoring Group who have been powerful advocates for people who have been racially victimised by individuals and the state over the last thirty years. He gave an excellent talk, ‘From Robert Peel to Spycops; Where Did It All Go Wrong?’ at the Monitoring Group’s extraordinary Police Corruption, Spying, Racism and Accountability conference on Saturday 7 February, just two days after attending a Panel meeting.

Sophie Khan is solicitor-director at Sophie Khan & Co, who specialise in actions against the police, and also an occasional media commentator where she is an advocate of civil liberties and often critical of policing.

Ahead of the Panel meeting at the end of April she posted on her Telegraph blog [update Dec 2020: her blog appoears to have been deleted]:

Vested interests are being protected by the police-led Panel but what about the rights of those who will be subjected to undercover policing? Do they not have a right to be heard and for their interest to be considered?

She wanted the process to

include more non-police voices, campaigners and activists who challenge undercover policing. This has been advanced in previous meetings, but there has been no change in the police-led, police-focused and police-chaired panel.

A fortnight later, just three weeks ago, she was exhorting people to join the Panel process and ‘be part of the solution’. This week she stood down from the Panel and, to her credit, boldly made it public on her blog:

I am disappointed that the College of Policing has asked me and others to volunteer for a Panel that was never designed to progress the work on undercover policing.

The lack of transparency and the imposition of public official duties on private individuals has also contributed to my decision.

It’s surprising that it took eleven months to realise that an opaque police body was intended to shore up existing methods. Like so many of the previous official reports and inquiries on this issue, it was designed to be seen to be doing something rather than actually doing anything, to bolster rather than challenge police power and credibility.

That last bit of Khan’s about imposing public duties is intriguing and somewhat cryptic. We can only hope that she will explain it in the more detailed piece she’s said will follow shortly.

As far as we know, Professor Ben Bowling remains on the Panel.

We are grateful to the Undercover Research Group for their piece this week on the Panel, and particularly for their characteristically thorough profiling of all the Panel’s members.

Stephen Lawrence

Greater Manchester Police has admitted that it spied on people attending the Inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, making it the fourth constabulary known to be involved.

When the MacPherson Inquiry took place in 1998, it held a number of hearings outside London. A GMP memo was issued on 8 October asking for ‘information or intelligence on groups or individuals who are likely to be attending’ to be given to a Detective Chief Inspector in Special Branch.

The spying appears to have been motivated by wholly political concerns. There was no anticipation of any threat to public order, there is no suggestion of anything criminal, and the memo makes no mention of anything untoward.

GMP’s Operation Kerry report into spying on Lawrence campaigners is due to be published shortly. However, not only is it another self-investigation, but it only covers the Manchester element. The spying on Lawrence activists was much larger and more systematic than that. Yet again, official inquiries are parcelling off a small question and giving it to police to mark their own homework. As such, it is an obstruction to the truth rather than its vehicle.

Last year it was revealed that spying also took place when the Inquiry went to Bradford in the same month as it visited Manchester. West Yorkshire’s Assistant Chief Constable, Norman Bettison, ordered his Special Branch to produce a full report on one of the witnesses at the Bradford hearing, Mohammed Amran. Bettison was referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission for this, and they began investigating last July. It was reported earlier this year that he has been interviewed under caution as part of the inquiry.

Sir Norman Bettison

Bettison is already a thoroughly disgraced figure. Widely believed to be one of the chief architects of the Hillsborough cover up and the smear campaign against Liverpool fans, he was forced to resign as Chief Constable of West Yorkshire over his response to the Hillsborough Independent Panel, in which he tried to manipulate the West Yorkshire Police Authority and contradicted the established fact that the fans were not to blame. An IPCC report concluded that, had he not resigned, he would have been dismissed for gross misconduct.

He is one of several senior police officers, including Bernard Hogan-Howe, who are tainted by their involvement in both the Hillsborough and spycops scandals.

But for all his extensive personal failings and corrupt dealings, Bettison’s spying on the MacPherson Inquiry in West Yorkshire was not a rogue act. South Yorkshire police also admitted spying on ‘extreme leftwing groups’ attending events indirectly linked to the Inquiry.

When the Inquiry’s main hearings took place in London, Peter Francis – the undercover officer who has described how he was earlier tasked to ‘find dirt’ to discredit the Lawrence family – said that there was intensive surveillance from plain clothes officers.

I am 100% aware that the Metropolitan Police Special Branch had a Special Branch officer regularly, if not daily, in both parts of the Macpherson inquiry.

This means that at least four constabularies’ Special Branches spied on people attending the Inquiry as it toured the country (so we may safely surmise that people at the Birmingham and Bristol hearings were similarly spied on).

There can be no excuse for this. The usual fob-offs about shady volatile people trying to hijack a campaign, flimsy at the best of times, cannot apply at all. This wasn’t an angry crowd in the streets on the day of a killing, this was a formal judge-led inquiry five years later. The Met still had ‘a spy in the Lawrence family’s camp’ at that time.

Peter Francis says he advocated telling MacPherson about the earlier spying, but that he was overruled by his superiors.

The Met’s claim that they came clean at MacPherson is a cruel joke, another decoy to keep us from realising both the depths that spycops will sink to and the depths that they will involve themselves in the lives of citizens.

If this level of spying is revealed by police self-examination, how much more would be revealed by a proper Hillsborough style independent inquiry?

John Catt, permanently spied on even though he has no criminal record

Last autumn’s report into undercover policing by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) was as unimpressive as it was long. The 208 pages devoted much of their attention to non-political policing, even though the report was commissioned as part of the response to the revelation that the Special Demonstration Squad spied on Stephen Lawrence’s family.

The report said it was reassured that everyone knew officers shouldn’t have sexual relationships. Yet it appears there’s always been official banning of it. Despite this, numerous ex-officers have said it was unofficially condoned.

Bob Lambert had four sexual relationships whilst undercover. If it were such a bad idea, you would have thought that when he went on to run the Special Demonstration Squad he would make sure other officers didn’t do it. Instead, his proteges also had relationships – including long-term life partner relationships – and even (as Lambert had done) had children with activists they targeted.

Of the 14 officers so far exposed, 13 had sexual relations with activists they spied on. It’s hard to see this as anything other than accepted strategy. So the HMIC’s sense of ‘reassurance’ is based on a faith that has no basis in fact. That, or a desire to cover-up and protect police who’ve done wrong.

WE’RE COMING FOR YOUR FAMILY

Whilst life-partner sexual relationships are the most complete invasion of a person’s privacy that it is possible for the state to enact, there are others. They integrate into people’s lives and families, affecting non-activists. The official term is ‘collateral intrusion’, as if the deceit and damage done to the activists who are the primary focus is justified, as if those who want a fairer world are legitimate targets for psychological manipulation and abuse.

A 2012 HMIC report – when they thought they could pin everything on disgraced National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) agent Mark Kennedy being a sole ‘rogue officer’ – said the evidence

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

However, when he was part of a group of climate activists who planned to stop a coal train, his authorisation papers say the opposite.

It is very rare for collateral intrusion to occur because [Kennedy’s
name redacted] spends the majority of their time with likeminded people
engaged in activism.

He went straight from the coal train action to a friend’s wedding. People’s children and other relatives were there. And there he is in the pictures, whilst being paid overtime, PC Kennedy.

If the friends and children who formed relationships with him are not deemed not to ‘collateral intrusion’ then they are, therefore, in the target group. Just knowing someone who is an activist, being their friends or parent or child, makes you a legitimate target for these spying operations.

Kennedy spent a lot of time with the family of one of his partners, a woman known as Lily [update: she has now dropped her anonymity and is known by her real name, Kate Wilson] who explained to BBC Radio’s File on Four (download podcast here) that ‘he was on duty every minute that he spent with me’.

Lily’s mother mother took out a family photo and said,

That was my mother’s 90th birthday, as you can see from the balloon in the background. He looks comfortable in the photograph. I keep using that word, ‘comfortable’. I felt very comfortable with Mark and he seemed absolutely devoted to my daughter. He used to stay here, slob around watching TV with us, all that stuff that you do in a relaxed way with people in the family.

Kennedy was sanctioned and approved from on high, and it was no mere rubberstamp job. His authorisation papers include a full side of supportive A4 hand written by the person who oversaw all the secret police units, the National Co-ordinator for Domestic Extremism, Anton Setchell.

So when senior cops at HMIC say they’re reassured that there are no bad relationships, that there’s no collateral intrusion, it’s meaningless and worthless. Just like the Operation Herne inquiry into undercover policing, it’s the police marking their own homework and awarding themselves A grades. There can be no credibility in self-investigation, nor those done by police satellite bodies like HMIC and the Independent Police Complaints Commission. We have given them too much trust for too long and they’ve shown themselves not to deserve it.

GUILT BY ASSOCIATION

Last month’s Supreme Court decision on the John Catt case underlined this. Catt is a 90 year old peace campaigner with no criminal record. After he had attended three demonstrations at the EDO arms factory in his native Brighton, anti-terrorism police stopped his car in London and threatened him and his daughter with arrest under the Terrorism Act if he didn’t tell them where he was going. He later discovered that a marker was placed against his car registration on the Police National Computer and that the network of number plate recognition cameras was used to flag him up to police for stopping.

It’s worth noting that the political police units – Special Demonstration Squad, National Public Order Intelligence Unit and others – have been merged with the Metropolitan Police’s Anti-Terrorist Branch under the name Counter Terrorism Command. Today’s Mark Kennedies are deployed by the same unit as the ones dealing with people who want to set bombs off on public transport. The structure is designed to conflate all dissent.

The Catts mounted a legal challenge but senior officers found their officer’s actions had been ‘proportionate and appropriate’, a finding upheld on appeal to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which concluded that while the case highlighted the concerns over ‘the civil liberties
or protesters’, police had been acting in accordance with ‘national policy’.

Catt then went to court to challenge the retention of his data on the ‘domestic extremist’ database. He won, at first, but the Metropolitan Police launched an appeal and last month they won. The ‘national policy’ prevails and it is considered legitimate to gather data and harass anyone who has been ‘associated with protest’. It is guilt by association, and what you’re associated with needn’t be criminal either; protest is, in and of itself, seen as something to crack down on.

In other words, the Supreme Court just ruled that anyone who speaks out against the government and the established political order – even though there is no suggestion of any involvement with any crime – can be singled out for special treatment by the police. We have a name for that kind of state.

GUILT BY PROXIMITY

As the wedding guests at the wedding Mark Kennedy attended can attest, you needn’t even be as involved as John Catt. The construction industry blacklist run by the Consulting Association was more than an illegal practice used by most of the industry’s big names to deny work to anyone involved in unions or other political activity. There was a two way exchange of information between the blacklisters and police. Even the Independent Police Complaints Commission admit that it was likely to have been part of all Special Branches’ work to illegally supply the illegal blacklist with information.

But it wasn’t just construction workers. There were files on around 200 environmental activists whose information appears to have come from details given to police when arrested. The file on construction worker Frank Smith describes him as a ‘leading light’ in a group known as the Away Team who sought to protect anti-fascist groups from attack. That’s not the kind of thing a building site manager could observe.

Smith’s girlfriend, Lisa Teuscher, was also spied on and had a blacklist file despite having no connection with the industry.

I was shocked when I first read my file. It made me feel physically sick. It’s absurd. I don’t see any reason why my name should be linked with the building industry. I had no professional involvement whatsoever. The only reason I am on the list is because of Frank.

Remember this when they say that counter-terrorism police are needed to target ‘just the paedos and terrorists’ – their definition of legitimate targets is wide. If this is their definition of political threats, who might be included in their net of potential terrorist threats? To trust Counter Terrorism Command to be making reasonable, proportionate decisions puts a lot of faith in people who have repeatedly proven themselves unworthy of it.

The political police’s choice of who it is reasonable to spy on includes anyone who is politically active, anyone who is related to them, anyone who attends an event at which they’re present. The construction blacklist proves that this is not mere background gathering of information in case it becomes useful. The political policing units have actively broken the law to help ensure their targets are denied work, deliberately inflicting the impacts that has on a person and their family. They are there to disrupt the activities and lives of those they spy on, and that can be anyone.

When Mark Ellison QC produced last year’s report into undercover police officers spying on Stephen Lawrence’s family, he also found that officers appeared to have engineered miscarriages of justice.

Several undercover officers, including Bob Lambert and Jim Boyling, went through court cases under false identities, swearing to tell the truth and then do nothing but lie.

Boyling was on trial as part of a group, meaning that this police officer was party to defence meetings with their lawyers. One of his comrades was convicted. This was eventually overturned last year, though it does leave the question hanging of how many other wrongful convictions have been left to stand.

After his report into the Lawrence spying, Mark Ellison was tasked to produce a new report on the miscarriages of justice. He was due to report in March, but on 13 January a written parliamentary answer revealed that there will merely be a ‘progress report’. The final item has no projected completion date.

This will set some people’s alarm bells ringing. Two years after the Home Affairs Select Committee’s ‘interim report‘ into undercover policing we are still waiting for the full thing. With the Chilcott report fossilising in the vaults it would be easy to see Ellison’s delay as too convenient for those with something to hide. However it seems more likely that the scale of the job is significantly larger than anticipated.

When police pre-emptively arrested 114 climate activists at a 2009 meeting to plan the shutdown of a coal fired power station, one of them was Mark Stone, aka police officer Mark Kennedy. Charges were brought against 26. A first trial of 20 activists saw all of them convicted.

The remaining six pointed out before their trial that, in the meantime, they’d uncovered Kennedy’s true identity. They asked to see his undisclosed evidence but, rather than hand that over, prosecutors dropped the charges. It turned out Kennedy had recorded the meeting, securing evidence that exonerated the six but which the prosecutors and police had withheld from the defence. The initial 20 had their convictions quashed afterwards.

Sir Christopher Rose’s now-discredited report said that the case was anomalous and there was no systemic problem. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Kier Starmer, dodged Jeremy Paxman’s repeated question about whether there might be other cases.

Then an earlier,  similar case in which Kennedy had participated in stopping a coal train on its way to Drax power station was highlighted. Another 29 convictions were overturned. It was clearly systemic.

We have information on less than 10% of the officers who have worked for Britain’s political secret police since the formation of the Special Demonstration Squad in 1968. If, like Kennedy, they each secured around 50 wrongful convictions then there are about 8,000 miscarriages of justice being left to stand. Even if we conservatively assume there was only one wrongful conviction per officer per year of service, it’s around 600.

It is no exaggeration to say that we could be looking at the biggest nobbling of the judicial system ever exposed. Let’s hope that, in contrast to the undercover officers, Mark Ellison will reveal the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

A massive new report on undercover policing from police satellite body Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary was published yesterday.

As with the huge stack of similar reports on the issue, it gives us quite a few dry facts and criticises some administration but fails to tackle the key, shocking issues.

It reveals that 1,229 officers are trained for undercover work. However the police’s National Undercover Index only lists 568 of them. This ‘renders the database unsuitable to the task for which it was created,’ says the report.

Seven types of deployment are listed, but there is no mention of the political spycops. For a report commissioned as a response to the revelation that the Stephen Lawrence campaign had been spied on, after several years’ groundswell following the exposure of Mark Kennedy in 2010, this is no mere oversight. It’s a dodge.

Campaigning for social justice or for the proper investigation of the death of a loved one due to incompetent or malevolent police is left entirely unmentioned in all 206 pages, unless they somehow count among ‘those who seek to commit serious crimes, eg acts of terrorism’.

The report is only critical of administration, training and support for officers, rather than the impacts on citizens and the sinister intent of certain undercover operations. It essentially saying that a little bit more oversight and authorisation will make everything alright.

The authors find it ‘reassuring’ there is apparently ‘a universal understanding by the undercover officers and those managing them’ that intimate relationships aren’t allowed and ‘there are good safeguards in place’ to prevent it.

But out of the 14 spycops so far exposed, 13 had sexual relations with citizens they spied on. Three had kids. One – Bob Lambert –  became a manager overseeing a new crop of officers who did it. Citizens have not been ‘protected’ from the most complete invasion of privacy that it is possible for the state to enact. They have been subjected to it in such a comprehensive way that it can only be seen as accepted standard practice and strategy.

It shows a staggering amount of gall to even suggest that there is ‘universal acceptance’ of it being wrong and there is therefore no problem.

There are 49 recommendations at the end of the report. None are about the known outrages of these relationships, let alone others such as undermining family justice cases and political campaigns, and the police collusion with illegal corporate activity.

We need a simple law that bans sexual relationships whilst undercover outright. It is already illegal in Germany for spies to have sexual relations in their undercover persona and German society is not suffering because of that restriction. It is needless, inexcusable institutionalised sexism.

But the report tells us that

if society wants the police to identify & apprehend some of its most dangerous criminals, it has to allow individual police officers to “get their hands dirty”.

The report does concede that the ‘neither confirm nor deny’ (NCND) policy “is not grounded in legislation” & mustn’t be used if it risks a miscarriage of justice. This is to be welcomed. But as words in isolation, it is meaningless. Police lawyers are obstructing a legal bid for justice by a group of women, saying that NCND is essential.  Those same lawyers also argued that the supposedly safeguarded-from sexual relationships are actually legally authorised. The women’s group has already condemned the new report.

This report is yet another bucket of bitter whitewash written by police and their associates. It insults those who’ve been abused by the undercover officers from the counter-democratic political police units. Beyond that, it insults anyone who believes in the right to make a stand for environmental and social justice.

It is another decoy, papering over deep cracks in a rotten architecture. It must not distract from the need for a full, open, public inquiry that examines each aspect of undercover political policing in detail and takes testimony from all those impacted by it. COPS will continue to campaign for such an inquiry.

We will continue to host events and support those organised by the various groups and individuals who have been targeted. You can support our campaign by coming to those events and getting your trade union, campaigning organisation or other group to affiliate to us.

Cherry Groce in hospital after being shot by police

Once again Operation Herne – the police’s self-investigation into the political secret police units – proves its irrelevance.

After the admission earlier this year that police spied on the Stephen Lawrence family campaign, the new report, the third from the Herne team, concedes that for at least 20 years police gathered intelligence on 18 more families who had justice campaigns for their loved ones, including Jean Charles de Menezes and Cherry Groce.

The report (PDF here) plainly says this had no operational purpose in preventing crime. Clearly, then, it is about undermining people who might embarrass the police by exposing what they have done.

The report’s author, Chief Constable Mick Creedon, claims that the intelligence was not searched for, it was incidentally gathered by officers infiltrating other campaigns and then kept for no particular reason. This accident happened to one campaign after another over a span of decades. He acknowledges that even he knows this is an unlikely explanation, admitting it ‘must seem inexplicable’.

Equally implausibly, he says that it appears the Special Demonstration Squad were just amassing information and there is no solid documented evidence of sending infiltrators into the families.

Firstly, much of the secret police’s information was never written down. Secondly, a great deal of the material that did make it onto paper has been shredded. Indeed Creedon concedes that, had proper procedures been followed, the evidence of spying on the families would have been shredded.

It leaves a simple question – why would the infiltrator unit be gathering information on people who weren’t targets for infiltration?

The whistleblower Special Demonstration Squad officer Peter Francis has described his infiltration of justice campaigns. After his revelations, police threatened him with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. Most of the information is not on paper, only in the minds of the people who did it. The truth can only come out if former officers are compelled to give evidence under oath without fear of self-incrimination.

We know that these 18 families are not the only ones. It also raises the question of how many other bereaved families seeking justice have been spied on. Police have already released details of their surveillance of on Janet Alder whose brother was unlawfully killed by police officers. Several Hillsborough families are certain they were spied on. When it’s happening on this scale over such a prolonged period it’s hard to see it as anything other than an active policy.

For Operation Herne to once again rely solely on what surviving papers it can find proves that it is little more than a police damage control exercise, admitting a few of the smaller outrages in order to shore up the denial of the larger ones. The forthcoming public inquiry is clearly a more serious and rigorous proposition. The public inquiry supercedes Herne, leaving it without any purpose apart from perpetuating the extra injustice of focusing on reputation protection instead of facing the facts.