Lois Austin giving evidence to the Undercover Policing Inquiry, 14 November 2025
Content warning: this report contains descriptions of severe interpersonal violence, killing, and misogynist abuse.
INTRODUCTION
On the morning of Thursday 14 November 2025, the Undercover Policing Inquiry heard evidence from Lois Austin.
Austin is a lifelong socialist and social justice campaigner. She’s a member of the Socialist Party (formerly Militant Labour) and works with us, Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance.
Sarah Hemingway, Second Junior Counsel to the Inquiry
She is one of a number of activists being called to give evidence to the Undercover Policing Inquiry ahead of Francis’s appearance in the first week of December.
Austin gave powerful, sincere and candid testimony challenging specific falsehoods. She unambiguously explained the politics, process and culture of the campaigns she was involved with.
The Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) is an independent, judge-led inquiry into undercover policing in England and Wales. Its main focus is the activity of two units who deployed long-term undercover officers into a variety of political groups: the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS, 1968-2008) and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU, 1999-2011). Spycops from these units lived as activists for years at a time, spying on more than 1,000 groups.
Austin has given the Inquiry a written witness statement [UCPI0000037774].
Austin grew up in Welling, South London, as part of a socialist family. She was politically active from the age of 14 or 15 with the local branch of the Labour Party Young Socialists, alongside her younger sister.
The 1984-5 miners’ strike galvanised her political spirit. She was outraged at the police violence and biased media reporting. She was active in many of the prominent campaigns of the day including anti-apartheid, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. She wasn’t shy about taking on active organising roles and doing media work.
The Thatcher government set up the Youth Training Scheme (YTS), in which young people had to work full-time hours for unemployment benefits. In 1985, Austin organised a school strike in opposition to plans for the YTS to be made compulsory. She made numerous national media appearances talking about it.
She was on the Labour Party Young Socialists’ London regional committee and the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee youth sub-committee.
THE BNP IN WELLING
Austin was asked about the far-right British National Party (BNP), the main racist organisation on the rise in Britain at the time. The BNP moved into a residential street in Welling in 1987, calling their operational base a ‘bookshop’.
They chose Welling due to its history of far-right support. Austin remembers a 1981 National Front march several hundred strong coming down the High Street.
The BNP went into youth clubs, recruiting new members. The area immediately experienced a huge rise in racist attacks, including murders of young Black men. One Asian family in particular was singled out. The police weren’t interested, so the campaigners organised a rota of visitors:
‘We wanted the British National Party to see that this was a family that had support, the whole of the community, black, white and Asian, and we made sure there was people in and out.
Sometimes people had to stay there overnight because we wanted to send a signal that this is a family that is being protected, it is being defended by the community and you need to stay away.’
In response to the BNP’s presence in her neighbourhood, Austin helped to co-ordinate opposition among trade unionists, socialists and other anti-racist community groups to form the Bexley and Greenwich Labour Movement Campaign Against Racism and Fascism.
The group petitioned the council to use planning laws and the Race Relations Act to have the BNP ejected from their ‘book shop’ headquarters. From 1987 to 1993 they lobbied every full meeting of Bexley council, and had sympathetic councillors present motions to the meetings.
Austin recalls how upsetting it was to hear Bexley council, the police, and the press saying the left were just as bad as the BNP. The BNP were trying to create hatred and division whereas they were doing the opposite.
The campaign also did street stalls for outreach, something that was dangerous given the presence of the violent far-right group Combat 18. Austin was singled out. Neo-Nazi Combat 18 activists were asking around in local pubs about ‘that commie slag Lois Austin’, wanting to know where she lived. She ended up on a Combat 18 hit list.
Asked if she accepted the BNP as a legitimate political party with a right to campaign, she was clear and blunt.
‘No. I would not accept that. Because the British National Party were openly fascist. They said that… They said “We are a Nazi party and Hitler was right”.’
Even Combat 18’s name is a Nazi reference – the 1st and 8th letters of the alphabet are Hitler’s initials.
On 8 May 1993, in the aftermath of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, an anti-racist demonstration was held in Welling. As always, the Inquiry was keen to find out about anything that might be construed as violence from the people who were spied on. Austin says some placards were thrown at the BNP office but not much else.
The main disorder was caused by police who waded in with horses and riot gear, attacking people. This was not a one-off, and Austin is emphatic that the Inquiry needs to examine the actions of the police in attacking demonstrations.
ENTER SPYCOPS – THE OCTOBER 1993 DEMO
HN43 Peter Francis was deployed on 27 September 1993, shortly before a large anti-racist protest in Welling on 16 October 1993. He was tasked to infiltrate Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE), which had been formed in 1992 in response to rising racist attacks across the continent. Austin became one of the UK leaders.
Notice from the Class War newspaper – ‘the Beano of the left’ – saying ‘burn down the BNP’.
Austin rejects the claim in spycop reports that YRE was merely a front for Militant Labour. She says there’s a long history of socialists setting up broad organisations (Eleanor Marx was involved in setting up the GMB!). The biggest contingent on the October 1993 march was unaffiliated local people.
She explains how her specific role on 16 October 1993 was to lead the demonstration with the banner. They found the planned route blocked by riot police with mounted officers behind. They were not being permitted to go past the BNP office, but nor were they given an alternative. They were penned in with no exit, an early example of police ‘kettling’ that increased at protests over the following years.
We are shown a clip from ‘Violence With Violence’, an episode of the ITV political documentary series World in Action which alleges the existence of a secret violent group with YRE. The footage shows police blocking the 16 October march.
Austin says they were affronted at being blocked from marching past the BNP, because it breached their democratic right to protest.
A spycop intelligence report [UCPI0000025694] claims that the night before the demonstration activists were confident of destroying the BNP headquarters during the protest. Austin says this is a wildly fictionalised account of a meeting that just had stewards planning logistics to keep it safe and orderly.
Francis says there was a Class War plan to burn down the BNP bookshop. This seems to amount to little more than a notice in that group’s provocative anarchist publication.
‘I think Class War were probably not even seriously putting that forward. Because I think “Lewis” described yesterday, their magazine being the sort of Beano of the left… “Eat the Rich” and stuff like that. So nobody really took them seriously.’
Austin says she never heard of such a plan at the time and would have been stridently opposed if someone had actually suggested it.
She dismisses the idea as ridiculous on several levels. Not only was it wholly beyond the ways and methods of YRE, but the BNP HQ was a heavily fortified building next door to a residential house and a fire would have put people at risk.
‘And that, quite frankly, is ridiculous. Because the method of Youth Against Racism in Europe, and the Anti-Nazi League as well, actually… was to build a mass political campaign. That is how you defeat fascism.’
Austin describes how she was charged by police and knocked on the floor then saved by YRE stewards:
‘If it weren’t for the Youth Against Racism in Europe stewards, people like Dan Gillman and others who jumped on my back when the police were trying to batter me and they took the blows on their backs, if it hadn’t have been for that, I honestly believe I would have ended up like Julie Waterson who was whacked across the head by a police truncheon.
And I can see her on my left. I am negotiating with the police. Police keep charging us and I can see Julie Waterson in her white jacket covered in blood. I was saying to our stewards, “They have got Julie, they have got Julie, you have to go over there, you have to assist.” That was what was going on. That was the reality of Welling.’
She asks again, why did the police block the exit at Lodge Hill that would have taken everyone away from the BNP and up to the park? Every exit route was blocked. The inescapable conclusion is that it was a police trap so they could attack the crowd.
Austin points out that riot police chased protesters across fields as they were trying to leave the area, beating people up as they were leaving.
THE OCTOBER DEMO IN WELLING – ANALYSIS
The spycop report of the march, apparently by Francis [UCPI0000025694] claims the march was a group of hoodlums bent on violence, prevented by seeing the might of their adversaries:
‘The physical presence and appearance of large numbers of fully equipped riot-police was the single most persuasive deterrent to the ill-intentioned mob on that day. The second major factor was the choice of battleground by the police.’
Austin not only rejects the allegation but also the wider mindset of it being akin to a military conflict. The police are mounting gladiatorial opposition to people exercising their democratic rights, and people shouldn’t be portrayed as violent just because they protest.
Map of the anti-BNP protest in Welling, 16 October 1993
She says the police intimidation and violence were part of a strategy of scaring people away from protesting, and this is totally unacceptable in a democracy.
Austin also dismissed the World in Action documentary’s characterisation which, while talking about a secret plan for anti-racist violence, only actually shows police attacking protesters and the crowd reacting.
Given how closely the World in Action perspective matches the fictions of the spycops, this suggests that the SDS may have been the source of the programme’s information.
Similarly, the spycops report said ‘stewards were instructed not to carry weapons’, which is a way of admitting they were unarmed but still crowbarring in an implication that they were wanting violence.
‘We didn’t have to say to our stewards “don’t carry weapons” because we didn’t carry weapons… the idea that we were violent, that we were carrying weapons, that we were up for a fight and all of that, it’s just not true.’
The spycops report claims ‘coloured youths of murdered families and a holocaust survivor were being used as stooges’ by YRE activists. Austin is disgusted at this. Again, it characterises activists as inauthentic, having a nefarious desire for violence rather than genuinely holding the moral position that they’re always talking about.
It shows the police find it hard to believe anyone could actually be actively anti-racist, and believe there can be no legitimate opposition to racism.
But more, Austin points out, it shows a racist basis to their thinking:
‘The fact that the police report it in that way shows their racism actually, and their prejudice, that Black families, Black members of the community, have to be led or can be in some way manipulated by activists, socialists, trade unionists. It is absolute rubbish.’
The spycop report talks about how ‘actual fighting was started by 60-100 ‘crusties’’ (members of a scruffy anarcho-political youth subculture of the time) who the stewards were powerless to control. It says they were hunt sabs and anarchists, two favourite bogeymen of the spycops and conservative state. It doesn’t say how they were able to ascertain this.
Austin is asked if it is true, and she flatly rejects it. When people were penned in and shoved by police there were people pushing back, but the overt violence was started by the police.
Though the day was fraught, the sustained campaigning won in the end, which Austin says shows that both the cause and the method were vindicated. They had been lawfully campaigning for the law to be applied and a danger to public order to be removed; things the police should support, yet the police had treated them as the problem.
‘What ultimately happened was that our campaign was successful. The political campaign that we had in the area, the mass pressure from everything that we did, along with other groups, meant that the authorities eventually did set up a planning inquiry…
I wrote the evidence for Youth Against Racism in Europe where I linked issues around planning and detriment to the community to the Race Relations Act and incitement to racial hatred, and I said that the Race Relations Act is relevant to planning law and that is a reason to close it.
And the judge included our submission and that point in his reasoning as to why the British National Party headquarters should be closed down. So our mass political campaign won.’
TARGETED FOR WANTING CHANGE
The intelligence report of the 1994 Militant Labour AGM [MPS-0745874], filled with the characteristic disdain of the spycops, says:
‘A debate of some interest took place on the Sunday afternoon, when the question was raised as to whether Militant Labour should conceal the fact that it is really a revolutionary group, bent on the overthrow of the capitalist state.
Given its relationship with the Labour Party had been severed so unceremoniously, it was perhaps no surprise when it was decided that the message should be shouted from the rooftops in true Trotskyist tradition.
This apart, the weekend offered little to interest a normal person.”
Austin responds with a fundamental truth, that everyone says there is something wrong with society. She is a socialist who wants to transform society, at the time focused on – as the reports show – anti-racism, jobs and housing.
In November 1995 the Security Service (aka MI5) are recorded [UCPI0000027223] as asking the SDS for information on specific members of Militant Labour. Austin says this proves the political policing extended well beyond the SDS, and that MI5 should be being investigated as part of the Inquiry.
‘There is nothing in our paper, in our magazines that doesn’t say what we are, who we are and what we stand for and why we want people to join us. Again, it’s political policing and it’s the state, the Security Services, operating in a biased way…
Why are the Security Services getting involved with Special Branch to infiltrate and subvert organisations which are supposed to be tolerated in a democratic society?’
MILITANT ISN’T VIOLENT
For the Inquiry, Sarah Hemingway once again suggests Youth Against Racism in Europe was part of Militant Labour. Austin explains that while there were Militant Labour members, YRE was a broad organisation 20,000 strong.
From there, Hemingway asks what the term ‘militant’ means, suggesting there is something intrinsically violent about it. Austin gives a comprehensive and eloquent answer:
‘When we use the word militant or militancy in a labour movement context, that is language of the labour movement, and if somebody is raising it to suggest that it means violence or something they don’t really understand the labour movement.
I would describe myself as a working class militant. I work for a campaigning trade union and when an employer says we are going to make job cuts, or we are going to rip up your terms and conditions, or we are going to outsource you to a rotten private company, then we take militant action. We build the union. We organise for ballots for industrial action, we set up strikes and picket lines.
So that’s what it means in the context of the labour movement, and it’s a term that’s always been there.’
Hemingway isn’t really listening and interrupts to ask:
‘Does it mean confrontation? Does it mean violence?’
Austin patiently replies that no, it doesn’t.
Hemingway is certainly having a peculiar day of it. She comes across as disorganised and flustered. She is clearly keen to not overrun and so interrupts Austin’s longer responses, seemingly unaware that she’s just heard the answers to questions she’s about to ask.
NOT VIOLENT ANYWHERE ELSE, EITHER
Hemingway asks Austin if she has ever been violent on a demonstration.
‘I have never been arrested and brought before a court and I do not have a criminal record and I have never been violent. So why do the Metropolitan Police and the secret services have a huge file on me?
It is completely and utterly wrong. It is disgraceful and it is something that should never, ever happen in a so-called or supposedly democratic society.
And I think what goes to the heart of all of this, and again it needs to be said at this Inquiry, is that this is political policing. This is the police, the secret services and British State saying “anybody that criticises the state and what it is doing is a legitimate target”, and that is completely and utterly wrong.’
This underlines Austin’s fundamental theme of the day: the spycops were not about preventing disorder, they were political police units aimed at those whose political beliefs were deemed unacceptable.
Lois Austin on a YRE lobby of the Home Office, 1993. Pic: Tim Bolwell
Hemingway interrupts again to ask Austin if the Youth Against Racism in Europe logo of a fist smashing a swastika was violent, noting that more recently it’s just a swastika going in a bin. There is laughter from the public gallery, and Austin seems a tad surprised that she has to explain that the fist is symbolic.
A spycop report of 9 November 1993 [UCPI0000033071] talks about an event called ‘Smash the Nazis’ organised by Austin. Hemingway asks if this was a sign that she was violent. Austin once again points out that there is no evidence of them ever attacking anyone. She explains, again, that YRE was a political campaign using petitions, lobbying and marches.
Austin says they would use slogans like ‘smash the BNP’ but this didn’t mean bodily smashing individual BNP members. It certainly wasn’t taken that literally by anyone she ever worked with, and on a practical level such violence would have been counter-productive, discouraging people from joining the campaign.
Hemingway quotes spycop Peter Francis’ witness statement [UCPI0000036012] which says that the YRE used the slogan ‘no platform for fascists’ and that they wanted to ‘hit the BNP’ whenever they could. Might this, then, be proof at last that YRE was violent?
Austin points out that Francis, despite all his embellishments, gives no evidence of any violence ever occurring with YRE.
She has to explain the concept of ‘no platform’ meaning kicking the fascists out of their headquarters, and banning them from using public premises like libraries for meetings. This is not the same as the tooled-up street fights Hemingway seems so keen to imagine.
‘No platform means that we need to use a political campaign, we need to use the community, the mass, as many people as we can, to ensure that they are not platformed. That’s what we mean by that.’
THE AWAY TEAM
Hemingway asks about the ‘away team’, named in the World in Action documentary as YRE’s secret violent core.
March on the BNP headqquaters, Welling, 1992
Austin explains that it was just a loose term for YRE members who stewarded at meetings and marches to try to ensure safety and prevent people from being attacked by fascists or police. It wasn’t a formal organisation, let alone the clandestine street-fighting squad that the spycops and World in Action describe.
Austin explains that they were asking lots of people to come to demonstrations against the BNP, so they had to take stewarding seriously. Protesters had been hospitalised by fascists and police, so they organised well-disciplined stewarding to defend themselves and keep it as safe as possible.
Stewards would ensure people kept to the agreed route, they would spot fascists up ahead and ensure the two sides didn’t meet. They would also put themselves between police batons and marchers, and prevented some terrible injuries from happening.
Asked again if the away team was a secret self-organised group within Militant Labour, Austin has to explain how they organised as a hierarchical party and that sort of thing would not happen. She reiterates it was an open political campaign.
Austin is challenged on saying the away team was never formalised. We are again shown a spycop report about the 1994 Militant Labour conference (the same one that said they were going to declare themselves bent on overthrowing the state) [MPS-0745874] that says there was a motion passed confirming the official formation for the away team.
Austin says there is no evidence any such motion took place. It appears to be yet another spycop fairytale invented to shore up the story of derring-do in the face of danger, created to impress their managers.
Peter Francis says in his witness statement:
‘Part of my deep cover involved convincing my targets that I was interested in the confrontational side against the BNP. We as a group certainly instigated violence with the BNP. I, as part of that group, attacked people. That was the role. The role was agreed with management.’
Austin gives it no credence whatsoever:
‘I don’t think there is any truth in this at all. I am not aware of that at all. We were not involved in pre-emptive attacks. We were involved in lobbies, protests, mass demonstrations, counter protests. If the British National Party were having a protest we would have a counter protest. But we were not involved in pre-emptive attacks.’
Francis also claims that there were ‘dawn raids’ on BNP members by people he spied on, with swastikas painted on houses and dog excrement pushed through letter boxes. However, Francis himself admits he never saw them actually happen. Austin rejects the entire accusation outright too, saying it simply never happened.
BRICK LANE
Austin is asked about an incident where the BNP were on the streets in the notably multicultural Brick Lane on 19 September 1993, three days after the BNP had a councillor elected. She can’t remember if Peter Francis was there.
We are shown another clip from World In Action, shot on the day. There are Anti-Nazi League banners and Austin is visible as part of the static protest behind railings, in a police-approved pen on the opposite side of the road from the fascists.
Lois Austin leading the chants on a Close Down the BNP protest
The World in Action voiceover refers to it as the sinister ‘away team under the ANL banner’. A group of anti-fascists were mistaken for fascists by police and guided across to the BNP side of the road, where they chased the fascists away.
Austin accepts that the group who rushed the BNP paper sellers included YRE stewards. She says she had no knowledge of any premeditated plan to rush the BNP. She puts it in proportion, pointing out that worse goes off at West Ham matches on a Saturday, never mind the horrendous racist attacks of the time.
Hemingway brings her back to the point, that this was surely a confrontational attack. Austin doesn’t disagree, but sets it in terms of self-defence. Again, the footage is at odds with the commentary. There is no evidence of a secret violent group in YRE, and chasing fascists down the street is hardly riotous disorder.
Peter Francis claims that the YRE had ‘an appetite for violence’. Austin rejects that entirely. It was a mass organisation made up of trade unionists and teenagers. There was no public disorder at the vast majority of events they were involved in. The spycops can’t see it as anything other than a small, violent group when it was actually neither.
Austin says YRE always had pre-event negotiations with the police. For every single event, including small matters like lobbying of the council, they always got permission.
THE EARL’S COURT ATTACK
The Inquiry then turned to a genuinely horrific incident at Earl’s Court tube station on 15 January 1994.
Neo-Nazi band Blood and Honour were due to play a gig in a pub in Becontree, East London. There was an anti-fascist protest to try to stop the gig. Austin thinks they contacted police about it in advance.
As she was approaching the location, a van of riot police drove alongside at walking pace with its side door open. An officer called out to Austin by name, saying ‘we know all about you’.
‘I was targeted by the police on that day. And my question again for the Inquiry, which needs investigating, is what role did undercover police officers play in trying to create an image that I was a violent person that needed to be contained, which was just not true?
What role did they play in setting all of that up? And what did undercover police officers say to the uniformed police and the riot police on that day that meant that I was targeted?’
Asked how they intended to prevent the gig, Austin explains that they would have liked the antifascists to have has sufficient numbers to prevent the gig, although in the event it was cancelled anyway.
The police surrounded the protesters and told them were not allowed to leave. The spycop report [UCPI0000029708] says the police told the group that the police had laid on a special train to take them to Bow Road where there was a fight going on with fascists, and that Austin ‘rather naively’ accepted the offer.
Austin angrily dismisses this ludicrous fiction:
‘They said, “you can only get out of this area by getting on this train. There is no other way we are going to let you go. You can only get out of this area by getting on this train, and you are going to Victoria and you can disperse from Victoria.” That’s what was said.’
The train went non-stop through 22 stations, and people were very nervous. It was very packed. On arrival at Victoria, the doors weren’t opened. They could see ordinary passengers outside, and several people were banging on the window trying to let people know that they were trapped inside the train.
After a while, the train went on to Earl’s Court. On arrival, the doors opened and there was relief because people believed they were going home. They were very wrong indeed.
There were riot police on all platforms and escalators. It was a trap. Austin remembers an officer seeming to recognise her and grinning.
At the top of the escalators, they found the gates out of the station had been closed and the general public had been cleared out. A great mass of police were hitting people on their heads with batons. A gang of them rushed towards Austin and beat her to the floor. While they were kicking her, they were shouting insults:
‘They were battering me, booting me and kicking me and whacking me with truncheons, and while they were doing it they were calling me a fucking cunt, a fucking slag, calling me the worst misogynistic, sexist abusive names you could possibly imagine.’
The gates were opened, and Austin was among the protesters who managed to run out onto road. They turned round to see the gates being shut and police batoning those still inside.
Shortly after, the gates were opened again and the police charged out. Austin was battered on the top of her head. She was left with a large wound and blood streaming down her face.
She feels she was personally targeted. The signs all points towards it. The earlier intimidation of ‘we know who you are’, the grin on the escalator, the number of officers who made a beeline for her as she got to the top, and the fact that Dan Gillman (who gave evidence to the Inquiry on the same day as Austin) was assigned to her that day as a steward to protect her but was arrested just before she was attacked.
Austin wasn’t doing anything to draw attention to herself at all. She was targeted as organiser of these antifascist protests.
‘Again, that’s political policing. That is outrageous in a democratic society. Why are we not allowed to protest without being in fear of our lives in terms of police brutality?’
Hemingway inevitably asks if the protesters were being violent towards the police. Austin says not at all, and recounts the sickening violence by the police against them. She is impassioned, and visibly upset recalling her trauma from the experience.
There is no doubt that the attack at Earl’s Court was planned well in advance. To have had so many officers ready and kitted out in riot gear, to have a dedicated tube train ready and waiting, to clear the station and close it to the public, all must have taken a great deal of preparation, under instructions from high up.
RISKING KILLING – AGAIN
Austin was one of about 30 people who needed hospital treatment. The nurse who attended to her said ‘why are they hitting you on the head, do they not know they’ll kill somebody doing that?’
Kevin Gately in Red Lion Square, London, 15 June 1974
It was no exaggeration, but a very real and present risk. Metropolitan Police blows to the head have killed many people in the past, including anti-fascist protesters.
Kevin Gately was a 20 year old student protesting against the National Front in Red Lion Square on 15 June 1974. At 6’ 9” tall, his head was well above the level of the crowd when mounted police charged through, batoning anyone they could reach. He died of a brain haemorrhage.
33 year old teacher Blair Peach was killed when police hit him over the head with an unauthorised weapon at an anti-fascist protest in Southall on 24 April 1979.
Barely a year after police attacked Austin and the YRE protesters at Earl’s Court, on 3 May 1995 police stopped Brian Douglas in Clapham. Although walking backwards away from the officers with empty hands, they hit him on the head with one of the Met’s then-new long acrylic batons. He died of a massive brain haemorrhage.
The officer who killed him lied to the inquest, saying he’d merely hit Douglas’s shoulder. Douglas’s loved ones campaigned for justice, for which they were spied on by Peter Francis.
No police officer was ever charged for any of these killings.
In the aftermath of the Earl’s Court attack, the spycop report of 18 January 1994 [UCPI0000029708] mildly describes the violence as nobody’s fault, and praises the police for setting up the situation:
‘There was some confrontation with police at Earl’s Court station, and at least seven members of the group, including Lois AUSTIN, sustained injuries.
The special train ploy to remove this violent group was brilliantly conceived and executed.’
Austin has never been able to trust the police again.
It’s incredible that the Inquiry regards chasing fascists down the street one time as violence while ignoring the premeditated attacks by police.
Imagine if YRE had tooled up with batons and armoured clothing, locked a load of police in an enclosed space and battered their heads, leaving dozens hospitalised. The name of the incident would still be general knowledge all these years later.
The attack did not become legal just because it was committed by police officers. Criminal prosecutions should have followed. But because police were perpetrators it’s just accepted, nobody hears about it. Nobody is held to account and we just move on.
Austin brought a civil claim against the police for it, and received a settlement.
PERPETUAL SPYING
As a person of interest, Austin continued to be subjected to intrusive personal reporting by spycops that had no policing value at all. The fact of being spied on in the past meant you were going to be spied on in future.
A spycops report of 1 October 1996 [MPS-0246670] gives details of Austin moving house. It says she is ‘always moving house’. She points out she was a young woman living alone at the time and a group of men were secretly keeping tabs on where she was living:
‘If I had known about this at the time, I would have been frightened.’
A further spycops report of 26 November 1996 [MPS-0246858] describes Austin attending protests around the country, including an anti-deportation protest in Manchester and a memorial event for Ken Saro-Wiwa, a West African campaigner against Shell’s environmental devastation in the Niger delta.
We’re shown a spycops authorisation for HN104 Carlo Soracchi ‘Carlo Neri’, deployed 2000-2006, [MPS-0069948] which says that the Special Branch ‘Red Desk’ is asking for more information about Lois Austin.
The Inquiry then showed a document from Operation Herne, the police’s internal investigation into spycops [MPS-0721975]. Officer HN73 said that comprehensive reports on people would be commissioned on individuals once they had come to be ‘of interest’, often at the behest of MI5. Austin notes that many of these reports are stamped ‘Box 500’, meaning copies had been given to MI5.
EXIT THE SPYCOP
Brian Douglas, killed by police in 1995. Peter Francis spied on the campaign for justice.
Austin is asked about when spycop officer Peter Francis was nearing the end of his infiltration and money was raised for him by the Hackney branch of Militant Labour, where he had risen to the post of secretary.
As was standard for spycops, he feigned a mental breakdown to provide him with a credible excuse to vanish from everyone’s lives.
And, as was also standard, this lie caused a great deal of worry among the friends he’d spent years cultivating friendships with.
Francis claims in a spycop report that he sold all his furniture at a car boot sale and gave the proceeds to Militant Labour. Austin doesn’t think that’s true. Her recollection is that people visiting his flat noticed how sparse it was, felt sorry for him and had a collection among themselves to give him money.
Hemingway asks Austin if Francis failing to overtly have sex with members of Militant Labour led her to suspect he might be a state agent.
‘That is ridiculous. The idea that I or anybody else in the leadership of Youth Against Racism in Europe and Militant knew about the sex lives and who was having sex with who is ridiculous. I mean we are a very, very working class organisation, full of ordinary people in trade unions and things like that.
I have seen reports about the “wearies” being promiscuous, and all of that. The undercovers have said that, and if you weren’t having lots of sex then your cover would be blown. That’s absolute and utter nonsense.
I would not have even known if he was having sex, or who he was or wasn’t having sex with, and it wouldn’t have interested me in the slightest. It does interest me if he was an undercover officer infiltrating our organisation and deceiving women into intimate sexual relationships. That’s abuse.’
Austin says Francis has done real public service by becoming a whistleblower, and for that she is grateful. But she says we cannot allow his claims that YRE were violent and looking for trouble to go unanswered.
That’s the last question for Austin. She will be back to answer questions about events on May Day 2001 where she was spied on by HN104 Carlo Soracchi and brought another civil claim against the Met. This will be dealt with in the Tranche 3 Phase 2 hearings scheduled to be held February-March 2026.
Sir John Mitting opening the Undercover Policing Inquiry’s Tranche 3 Phase 1 hearings, 13 october 2025
INTRODUCTION
The Undercover Policing Inquiry kicked off ‘Tranche 3’, examining the final 15 years of the Special Demonstration Squad 1993-2008, on Monday 13 October 2025.
This is quite a long report, use the links to jumpt to specific speakers:
• David Barr KC – Counsel to the Inquiry (the Inquiry’s main lawyer who’ll question witnesses)
• Peter Skelton KC – Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis (the Metropolitan Police as an institution)
• Neil Sheldon KC – Home Office (government ministry in charge of police and the Inquiry)
• Oliver Sanders KC – Designated Officers (the majority of undercover officers invovled)
The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, opened the hearing, saying that T3 will continue until the end of July next year.
Tranche 3 has been divided into 3 ‘phases’. Phases 1 and 2 will consist of evidence from undercover officers (UCOs) and civilian witnesses.
Phase 3 (currently scheduled to take place in June-July 2026) will examine evidence of the unit’s management – hearing not just from the SDS (Special Demonstration Squad, later called the Special Duties Squad) managers, but from those higher up the senior chain of command, those with oversight of the spycops’ operations. We hope to finally hear from the Home Office, who despite setting up the SDS and directly funding it, have been notably silent in this Inquiry to date.
The dates are:
• Tranche 3 Phase 1 hearings, SDS officers and relevant civilians 1993-2008 part 1: 13 October 2025 – approx 18 December 2025
• Tranche 3 Phase 2 hearings, SDS officers and relevant civilians 1993-2008 part 2: 2 February 2026 – approx 26 March 2026
• Tranche 3 Phase 3 hearings, SDS managers: 15 June 2026 – approx 30 July 2026
We believe there will also be ‘closed’ (secret – not open to the public, or to those spied upon) hearings taking place in 2026. Everyone involved in Tranche 3 will then be invited to make Closing Statements in early 2027.
Mitting is due to produce a report, detailing his findings about the SDS, before he retires later in 2027. A new Chair will then be found to oversee the remainder of the Inquiry.
It is important to note that this week’s Opening Statements refer only to what is being called ‘Tranche 3, Phase 1’ (T3P1). Despite having delayed the start of the tranche by eight months, supposedly in order to ensure everyone would have a chance to review the evidence before it began, the Inquiry has yet again failed to get the Hearing Bundle of documents ready on time.
Around 300 people and organisations heavily involved in the spycops scandal have been designated as Core Participants by the Inquiry (mostly people who were spied on). They have so far only received the witness statements and evidence in relation to the six officers that will be examined in this first set of hearings.
‘outside the jurisdiction. She is legally represented but has declined to provide a witness statement’.
This is understood to mean that the Inquiry does not have the power to compel witnesses to give evidence if they live outside England and Wales.
HN123:
‘is unrepresented and ceased responding to the Inquiry’s correspondence some time ago. Despite significant efforts by the Inquiry to find him since then, we have been unable to do so. He has not provided the Inquiry with a witness statement but he did make a witness statement for the purposes of civil litigation against the Commissioner in 2003’.
We note that HN123 is not the only T3 officer to have gone AWOL in this way and we will be questioning the Inquiry’s apparent intention to continue giving those officers anonymity, despite their obvious bad faith.
Evidence relating to the remaining 19 officers from T3 is yet to be released to Core Participants. ‘Phase 2’ (T3P2) hearings are expected to start in February 2026 and continue until at least the end of March.
In his statement, Barr gave a relatively long rundown of the legal, political and administrative changes that affected the SDS during the T3 period (which runs from 1993 until the SDS was disbanded in early 2008) and of the evidence the Inquiry will be hearing.
In the afternoon we heard from lawyers representing the Home Office, Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and some of the officers (undercovers and their managers). They each gave fairly short statements, effectively blaming each other for the scandal of what they are now calling ‘a dysfunctional unit’.
Before reading the reports of their statements below, we encourage you to remember that throughout the history of the SDS they were all saying how brilliant it was, and commendations were being handed down from on high to SDS officers like confetti.
The Inquiry’s page for the day has video of the hearing, a transcript, and many of the documents referred to.
Live evidence (questioning witnesses in person) starts on Friday 17 October.
There are over 100 pages of Annexes, including a list of all 15 ‘open’ undercover officers (UCOs), and 10 ‘closed’ UCOs (whose real and cover names are being kept anonymous).
Barr began by highlighting some important changes that took place during the T3 era, 1993-2008, and key themes of these T3P1 hearings.
With the end of the Cold War, there was a diminishing interest in ‘subversion’ on the part of the Security Service (aka MI5).
It decided to stop identifying rank and file members of groups considered ‘subversive’ in October 1992.
However, Barr noted an increased threat of terrorism in the UK during the T3 period, citing a number of major terrorist attacks:
‘9 September 2001, or “9/11”, when Al-Qaeda terrorists attacked the United States occasioning very serious loss of life, including 67 British citizens’; and ‘the appalling “7/7” attacks, in 2005, which claimed the lives of 52 innocent people as well as those of the suicide bombers’.
It is hard to comprehend the relevance of these attacks to the work of the SDS.
On Barr’s account, it came when:
‘in a case of mistaken identity, police shot dead Jean Charles De Menezes, at Stockwell underground station, wrongly believing an innocent man to be another suicide bomber’
The SDS proceeded to spy on the family of this innocent victim, and their Justice4Jean campaign.
Barr also mentioned spying on campaigns against the Second Gulf War (including ‘what is generally accepted to have been the largest political demonstration in Britain of all time’ in February 2003). Barr explained that the Inquiry will be examining whether reporting on the Stop the War Coalition, Disarm DSEI and other anti-war, or anti-arms trade campaigners, was justified.
Barr also mentioned the 2006 Lebanon War and ‘long-running problems in the Levant’, as background to spycop HN18 Rob Hastings ‘Rob Harrison’ spying on the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian solidarity group. We note that this is the first time this officer’s real identity has been mentioned in public.
Other movements spied on in this period included the climate movement, especially Camp for Climate Action. This will be examined in detail in Tranche 4, which will examine the second spycop unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, which deployed EN12 Mark Kennedy ‘Mark Stone’.
Camp for Climate Action at Drax coal-fired power station, Yorkshire, 2006. Spycops from both major units were involved.
But we now know that these events were also attended and reported on by SDS officers. We were told that HN66/EN327 ‘Dave Jones’ was targeted against the 2006 Camp for Climate Action held close to the Drax power station in North Yorkshire.
Both HN118 ‘Simon Wellings’ and HN18 Rob Hastings ‘Rob Harrison’ appear to have attended the 2007 Camp for Climate Action at Heathrow Airport.
Barr described extensive reporting on other environmental groups, and non-violent direct action against genetically modified crops, road building and the proliferation of motor vehicles generally, with groups such as Earth First! and Reclaim the Streets being specifically targeted by the SDS.
However, none of these deployments will be looked at in detail until ‘Phase 2’ hearings beginning in February 2026, and the bundle of documents and evidence about these officers has not yet been disclosed to us.
Animal rights activism continued to be targeted by the SDS throughout the T3 era. A footnote to Barr’s statement notes that spycops HN26 ‘Christine Green’, HN14 Jim Boyling ‘Jim Sutton’, HN16 James Thomson ‘James Straven’ / ‘Kevin Crossland’, and HN60 ‘Dave Evans’ were all targeted in the animal rights field, Green and Thomson exclusively so.
Barr explained that ‘a wide range of animal rights activism was infiltrated’ including hunt sabs.
He notes that a:
‘landmark event was the Hunting Act 2004 which, subject to certain exemptions, rendered unlawful hunting wild mammals with dogs. It came into force on February 2005.’
IRELAND
Barr’s list of key events in the period included the 1992
‘transfer of lead responsibility for Irish Republican terrorism on the mainland from the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, or MPSB, to the Security Service’
He also cited the radical changes to ‘both the political and policing landscape’ brought about by the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998.
Nevertheless, he went on to describe SDS activity in the 1990s (notably that of HN15 Mark Jenner – see below) which suggests the unit still considered this part of its remit.
RACIST POLICING
This will be a primary focus of the evidence we are going to hear in these ‘Phase 1’ hearings. Barr noted that there was considerable racist violence within the Metropolitan Police District in the early 1990s, particularly in South East London, which prompted large anti-racist protests, for example the two that took place in Welling in 1993.
He highlighted the fact that:
‘Racism within the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] was also an issue. Numerous racial justice campaigns arose often from deaths in custody, miscarriages of justice or failures to bring the perpetrators of racist attacks to justice.’
After the murder of Black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993 and the racist police investigation, a public inquiry was announced in July 1997 and reported in February 1999. It famously found that:
‘the Metropolitan Police Service was institutionally racist.’
Barr continued:
‘We have been investigating SDS reporting on Black justice campaigns and attitudes to race within the unit from the outset of the Inquiry. There have been many examples in Tranches 1 and 2 of racist content within SDS reporting. We have found much reporting on those campaigning for racial justice.
There were deployments into far-left wing groups campaigning for racial justice, such as that of HN106 “Barry Tompkins” in Tranche 1… HN88 [‘Timothy Spence’], in Tranche 2, [deployed to Stoke Newington and Hackney], where he reported on racial justice campaigners and those seeking to hold the police to account.’
We have already heard a great deal of harrowing evidence about the racism at the core of the police, and how it related to the SDS operation, from a host of witnesses: John Burke-Monerville, Sharon Grant OBE, Diane Abbott MP, Richard Adams, and Stafford Scott. (Scott has provided an additional witness statement for this Tranche, which will be published in due course).
This provides important contextual background about the attitudes and practices found within the SDS and amongst the ‘consumers’ of the intelligence it gathered.
Barr made it clear that the issue of race will be particularly prominent in T3P1:
‘There is a great deal of SDS reporting on a large number of racial justice campaigns during this era’.
Much of it came from the deployments of HN43 Peter Francis, HN81 ‘David Hagan’, and HN15 Mark Jenner.
A large number of civilians affected by SDS reporting on racial justice campaigns or race related issues have provided witness statements, including:
• Baroness Doreen Lawrence OBE
• Dr Neville Lawrence OBE
• Duwayne Brooks OBE
• Bernard Renwick
• Lee Lawrence
• ‘MSS’ (family of Michael Menson)
• ‘MWS’(family of Michael Menson)
• Myrna Simpson
• Patricia Armani Da Silva
• Sukhdev Reel
• Tish Reel
• Winston Silcott
Barr noted:
‘The traumas experienced by each of these people are clearly set out in their deeply moving, at times harrowing, evidence. So too are their complaints about the police, many of which have already been held to be justified.’
Others who advised or closely supported those at the heart of such campaigns and were themselves reported on or directly targeted have also made statements, including:
• Michael Mansfield KC
• Suresh Grover of The Monitoring Group;
• Asad Rehman of Newham Monitoring Project
• Marc Wadsworth of the Anti-Racist Alliance
• Mark Metcalf and ‘Alison’ of the Colin Roach Centre
• Dr Graham Smith of the Hackney Community Defence Association
• Hannah Sell and Lois Austin of Youth Against Racism in Europe
• Alex Owolade, Karen Doyle, Antonia Bright and ‘Lewis’ of the Movement for Justice
The Inquiry intends to look for evidence of conscious and subconscious racism in the SDS deployments, and examine the way that Black justice campaigns were reported on. Was this a case of what is termed ‘collateral intrusion’ when mainly spying on someone else, or were they deliberately targeted by Special Branch? What was this reporting used for?
BLACKLISTING
It is well established by police and their satellite bodies that Special Branch officers routinely, illegally, supplied personal details of people to an illegal employment blacklisting organisation, The Consulting Association. Thousands of people were denied work merely for entirely lawful trade union and workplace activity.
Barr informed us that:
‘The Consulting Association continued to be involved in blacklisting throughout the Tranche 3 era. We will continue, as we have to date, to look for evidence of any links between SDS intelligence and those blacklisted’.
However we note that blacklisted union activist, COPS campaigner and Secretary of the Blacklist Support Group, Dave Smith, has not been called to give oral evidence, despite his expertise and unique understanding of the blacklisting scandal.
Smith has applied for a Judicial Review of the unreasonable and irrational decision by Sir John Mitting not to call him at these hearings, saying:
‘The inquiry’s intention to restrict the evidence of blacklisted workers, means they are relying only on police accounts. It is against natural justice and the public interest and it makes the inquiry look like an establishment cover-up’.
KEY LEGAL DEVELOPMENTS
T3 saw some very significant legal changes, most notably the enactment of the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) on 2 October 2000. From then onwards, unjustified interference with private life through undercover policing, and inhuman or degrading treatment at the hands of undercover officers, both constituted Human Rights breaches enforceable in the UK domestic courts.
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (referred to as ‘RIPA’) introduced a statutory regime with specific regulations for all deployments of undercover police officers, supposedly to ensure that these complied with the requirements of the HRA.
It introduced new systems for the authorisation, review, record keeping and oversight of undercover deployments which Barr noted:
‘should have focused minds on the justification for deploying SDS UCOs, including proportionality, as well as the need to manage and limit collateral intrusion.’
Barr made it clear that this Inquiry is prohibited from ruling on civil or criminal liability, but
that its terms of reference allow it to establish the extent to which managers considered and followed the laws which were designed to prevent problems of precisely the kind which beset the SDS.
In addition to the HRA and RIPA, other relevant legal changes that took place in the T3 period included the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996, the Police (Conduct) Regulations 1997/30, the Data Protection Act 1998, the Greater London Authority Act 1999, the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 and the Police (Conduct) Regulations 2004/645, the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, and the Police (Health and Safety) Regulations 1999.
Barr pointed out that these last two are relevant to:
‘the extent to which the MPS sought to protect its officers, and those affected by their actions, from avoidable psychiatric harm’.
He also observed that the Inquiry will examine:
‘a great deal of evidence in this tranche about the harm done not only to members of the public but also undercover officers as a result of SDS operations’.
ORGANISATION OF THE SPECIAL DEMONSTRATION SQUAD
The Inquiry has now published a timeline and explanatory note for Tranche 3. This sets out the dates different officers served in the unit and some of the organisational changes that took place.
Barr described how in 1992, Special Branch’s ‘C’ and ‘E’ Squads merged into ‘CE Squad’ which commanded the SDS until approximately January 1995. Command was then transferred to ‘S’ Squad.
He also mentioned the 2006 merger of the Met’s Special Branch (‘SO12’) and Anti-Terrorist Branch (‘SO13’) into Counter Terrorism Command (‘SO15’).
Members of Unite the Union protest in London against employment blacklisting. Spycops illegally assisted the blacklist.
In 1997 or 1998, the meaning of the SDS acronym also changed, from ‘Special Demonstration Squad’ to ‘Special Duties Section’.
The SDS itself was headed by a Detective Chief Inspector (DCI), supported by a Detective Inspector (DI) and two or three Sergeants.
A civilian administrator was added in 1995, and a Detective Constable joined the back office team in 2003. Nominally, the SDS was supposed to have 12 undercover officers deployed at any one time, but in practice there were often fewer than that.
Many aspects of the SDS operation appear to have remained largely the same in the T3 era. They continued to recruit officers exclusively from within Special Branch. Training continued to be informal, in the back office and on the job.
The deeply problematic SDS Tradecraft Manual appears to have been in use throughout this period. The unit continued to conduct twice weekly meetings at safe houses, and undercover officers continued to use cover accommodation, cover employment, cover documents and cover vehicles.
Other practices changed. The back office was moved to covert premises in 1997 or 1998 and
undercover officers were given (frankly ludicrous and disturbing) code names.
The SDS computerised its administration in 1995 and the Inquiry has worked from electronic documents in this Tranche. (Full details of their methodology and sources can be found in the Tranche 3 Disclosure Note).
In Tranche 2, examining the SDS 1983-1992, we heard how the selection process was changed after the ‘Scutt affair’. T3 saw further changes, with the introduction of psychometric testing (according to the SDS Annual Report of 1993-94).
The practice of peer mentoring continued, but was not without its problems. There is evidence that when HN86 was in charge of the unit, he sought to improve the support available for UCOs, with psychological support apparently on offer from around 2001 onwards. However, the extent to which his reforms were actually put into practice and maintained is in doubt.
By 2005, the unit’s recruitment process seems to have included:
‘an informal meeting, an interview, psychometric testing, a psychological interview, a structured interview, a home visit and then final selection.’
The selection process, according to Barr:
‘sought, amongst other things, to assess moral and ethical boundaries… Dilemmas on themes of “racial violence”, “racial issues” and “sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll”, amongst others, appear to have been used’…
The titles alone seem to confirm that these were areas which either were, or should have been, of concern for management’.
However, despite all the legal and organisational changes, much of the behaviour of the SDS remained the same. There is considerable evidence that sexual relationships were still known about and talked about within the unit during T3.
Keeping the unit’s existence and methods secret continued to be a ‘paramount consideration’, and this influenced the way that misconduct of all kinds was dealt with, or not, and the unit’s attitude to the civil and criminal justice systems.
Barr outlined key questions for the Inquiry, a list which bears quoting in full:
‘who took targeting decisions, what decisions were made, why, how, whether they were justified, whether they were kept under review and, if they were justified initially, whether they remained so?’
He went on to say:
‘We will be taking a particular interest in how targeting was dealt with once the provisions of RIPA came into force. What difference did formal statutory processes make? To what extent did they achieve the aims which the legislation intended and, where they fell short, why?
It is self-evident that the introduction of RIPA did not act as a panacea for problems of the kind that we have been investigating. But understanding why that was the case may be very important to recommendations for the future of undercover policing. Especially if the answer is cultural, involving ingrained attitudes, behaviours and practices’.
DECEASED CHILDREN’S IDENTITIES
The SDS officially stopped stealing the identities of dead children early in T3, and HN43 Peter Francis was the last of the ‘open’ UCOs to base his cover identity on a dead child.
However, the Inquiry has learnt that HN16 James Thomson made supposedly unauthorised use of the identity ‘Kevin Crossland’. Barr explained:
‘Kevin Crossland lost his life, aged 5, in an aeroplane crash in the early hours of 1 September 1966. His mother and sister also perished in the crash but his father, David, survived albeit with serious injuries.’
The Inquiry will consider evidence of family members and will hear oral evidence from Liisa Crossland, about the impact of Thomson’s conduct and concerns about the management of the SDS.
Thomson will be questioned about how and why he used Kevin’s identity, seemingly for his own ends. Barr noted:
‘By the time the issue came to the attention of SDS managers, DS Thomson had registered Kevin to vote, obtained a mobile phone in his name and obtained a driving licence in this name.’
SDS ANNUAL REPORTS
The SDS produced annual reports until at least 1996-97. These reports were published in T2. Three further documents have now been published, including what appears to have been some discarded text from the 1995-96 report, a signed copy of the 1996-97 report with associated minute sheet, and either an incomplete draft, or part of a report, for 1997-98.
Barr noted that no complete report for 1997-98 nor any subsequent SDS annual reports have been found amongst surviving SDS records.
We can see from the minute sheet accompanying the 1996-97 report that it was definitely seen by a number of senior officers, including the then Commissioner, Sir Paul Condon, and the then Assistant Commissioner (Special Operations), Sir David Veness.
Dated 14 October 1997 is a comment from Condon:
‘Please convey my appreciation to all concerned for another year of outstanding courage and professionalism’.
This fact should be coupled with spycops describing Condon visiting their safe house to personally congratulate them. It shows that when, in the early days of the spycops scandal and the Met were in denial mode, Condon was lying when he said he’d never even heard of the SDS.
The incomplete 1997-98 report evidences a wish, on behalf of SDS management, to trumpet to their superiors about the work of HN81 ‘David Hagan’, his infiltration of the Movement for Justice and reporting on the group’s alleged actions in relation to the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry.
Questions need to be asked about the senior chain of Met command’s knowledge and involvement with the SDS, and the Inquiry will be investigating this at hearings in summer 2026.
THE DEMISE OF THE SDS
The SDS was shut down at the very start of 2008. The Inquiry will examine the events around the unit’s demise in detail at the T3P3 hearings in summer 2026.
According to Barr, in these T3P1 hearings, they will start exploring the apparent ‘clash of cultures’ that occurred towards the end:
‘It manifested itself in considerable tensions between managers with backgrounds outside Special Branch and UCOs recruited from within Special Branch. The former sought to effect significant changes to the way in which the SDS was run. They were met with considerable resistance to their efforts.’
The Inquiry has just published an explosive report for the SDS [MPS-0722622] which was written by Detective Sergeant HN273 in 2009, following the closure of the unit, at the behest of DCI Flood.
Barr describes it as:
‘a significant early critique of the SDS operation. Amongst other things it recognised the considerable legacy of risk which the unit was leaving behind. For example, because of the way in which courts had not been properly informed of SDS activity.
An important question is why more was not done at that time to act upon the recognition that there were likely to have been miscarriages of justice and deceitful sexual relationships’.
HOW EVIDENCE WILL BE ‘ADDUCED’
Barr addressed the Inquiry’s evidence process for this Tranche. He made a point of insisting that the Inquiry’s approach ‘will remain the same as it was in Tranche 2’, claiming that the vast majority of evidence was only ‘adduced’ in writing, rather than being heard orally.
This was something of a dog whistle on Barr’s part, as there is significant controversy over the fact that the Inquiry does not intend to call many non-police non-State witnesses in this Tranche, even where there are significant disagreements.
He specifically defended those decisions, telling the Chair:
‘Not every dispute of fact arising on the face of the written evidence will need to be resolved in order for you, Sir, to discharge the terms of reference. For this reason, it is not necessary to call some witnesses even though their evidence conflicts with that of other witnesses. Nor is it necessary to question every witness who is giving oral evidence about every dispute.’
He also explained that non-police non-State witnesses would continue to give evidence first, before the officers that spied on them.
This means that a large number of these witnesses will be expected to give evidence in ‘Phase 1’, about officers whose witness statements have not been disclosed and whose oral evidence will not be heard until next year.
(A full list of the non-State witnesses can be found at Annex E to the written version of Barr’s Opening Statement and the Inquiry has uploaded a provisional schedule of the T3P1 hearings).
Barr then made a very important point, reminding the Chair that:
‘the boundaries between our tranches and the phases within them are entirely administrative boundaries used by the Inquiry to organise the conduct of our necessarily complex and lengthy investigation. The ground truth was a continuum and there is considerable overlap between tranches and phases in places.
For example, some members of the public were reported on by both SDS and NPOIU UCOs during the period that both units co-existed. Some were affected by both Tranche 3 Phase 1 and Tranche 3 Phase 2 UCOs.’
One such example is that of the civilian witnesses who will be called to appear in these hearings but can also provide important evidence about HN104 Carlo Soracchi ‘Carlo Neri’, who won’t appear until ‘Phase 2’.
This understated comment was a significant moment: the Inquiry has behaved quite ridiculously when it comes to Soracchi, and although his real name has been public knowledge for years, this was the first time anyone from the Inquiry has publicly said it.
Finally, Barr summarised the police witnesses who will be giving evidence in ‘Phase 1’, and about whom others will give evidence, in the coming weeks:
1. HN143 Dennis ‘Ben’ Gunn
Gunn is actually a senior manager from T2 who is giving evidence out of turn, early next week because ‘it is expedient to do so now rather than wait until next summer’s senior management
hearing.’ Gunn served as Commander (Operations) in the Met’s Special Branch (MPSB) between approximately February 1988 and November 1991.
2. HN587 Peter Phelan
Barr noted that the Inquiry plans to call another senior manager ‘at some point during the Phase 1 hearing’. Peter Phelan was supposed to give evidence on Thursday 16 October but he cancelled unexpectedly. He served as Commander (Operations) in MPSB from the late summer of 1983 until December 1987 and thereafter as Deputy Assistant Commissioner (Security) from January 1988 until December 1991.
3. HN16 James Thomson, ‘James Straven’/ ‘Kevin Crossland’
Detective Sergeant James Thomson was deployed from February 1997 until March 2002 under the fictional cover name ‘James Straven’. He infiltrated the animal rights movement, specifically targeting the Brixton Hunt Saboteurs and the Croydon Hunt Saboteurs, and Barr added that:
‘He also appears to have mixed with at least some people who were believed to be committing offences under the banner of the ALF.’
Barr noted that Thomson’s deployment into Brixton Hunt Sabs was short lived. The reason he cites: ‘it was felt they were too unpredictable to be a source of reliable advance intelligence.’
It is worth noting that this seems improbable. It is far more likely that Thomson just failed to win the trust of the group, one which evidence from T2 suggests the SDS were extremely interested in.
Barr notes that Thomson claims to have ‘assessed the Croydon Hunt Saboteurs to be more organised and consistently led’.
Thomson’s reporting for the first three years of his deployment is described as: ‘a mixture of intrusive personal reporting of the kind with which we are now familiar but also reports about activities which, on their face, appear to have some policing value’. Thomson’s managers
were seemingly pleased with his performance.
However, Barr states:
‘In fact, all was not well. There are very many troubling aspects of DS Thomson’s deployment and conduct. Despite investigation by his immediate managers towards the end of his deployment, investigation by [police internal spycops investigation] Operation Herne and our work to date it is still not entirely clear where the truth lies…
One thing is certain: Mr Thomson has, on his own admission, told many lies to date. He has lied not only to those he mixed with whilst deployed but also to his managers and to the Inquiry. His credibility is very much an issue.’
HN16 JAMES THOMSON ABUSING WOMEN
Thomson’s misdeeds include deceiving several women into sexual relationships (something which he no longer denies).
‘Sara’ joined the Croydon Hunt Saboteurs, soon after meeting the man she knew as ‘James Straven’, in the autumn of 1998. She liked him. A relationship developed and became sexual. He told her that he loved her at the Glastonbury festival in 1999.
She felt a strong connection to him and would have married him had he asked. Over Christmas 1999 she could not contact him. She challenged him and he came to see her with a letter in which he claimed to have experienced sexual abuse when at school, asking her not to tell anyone about this. She is now very angry with the way in which she was manipulated.
Barr stated:
‘I shall not attempt, in this brief opening, to do justice to “Sara’s” evidence about the impact of DS Thomson’s deceit. But her counsel, Ms Kilroy KC, will be speaking on her behalf tomorrow.’
Sara will be the first T3P1 witness to give evidence, doing so on Friday 17 October.
‘Ellie’ was not an activist but was and is an animal lover. She volunteered and later worked at a local animal hospital. Her relationship with the man she knew as ‘James Straven’ began in early 2001.
Spycop HN16 James Thomson, ‘James Straven’/ ‘Kevin Crossland’
He had asked her close friend, who we are calling ‘Wendy’, to set them up. Ellie was 21 years old at the time and vulnerable. He said he was 33. He was in fact 37. ‘James Straven’ was Ellie’s first real love and first serious boyfriend.
They went on holiday together to Indonesia and Singapore. Around the start of 2002, Ellie recalls ‘Straven’ telling her that he was going to move to the United States because his ex-wife and children were moving there. About a month later he told her he would be moving sooner than he thought. This was all part of Thomson’s exfiltration plan from his deployment.
For an extraordinary sixteen years after Thomson’s deployment ended, he kept in touch with ‘Ellie’ and met up with her periodically. ‘Ellie’ has provided exhibits to the Inquiry, including some of the loving and emotional communications that passed between them over the years. In one, Thomson asked for photographs of her in lingerie.
In June 2015, thirteen years after his deployment ended, after this Inquiry was announced and just a month before its formal opening, ‘Ellie’ had sex with the man she still knew as ‘James Straven’.
Eventually, in April 2018, after Thomson knew that he was going to lose his anonymity in the Inquiry, he told Ellie he had been an undercover police officer. By this stage, Barr noted:
‘We may need to explore in more detail what was said in this conversation. Amongst other things, “Ellie” states that Mr Thomson told her that a lot of former UCOs were leaving the country until the Inquiry had blown over.’
Such prolonged contact, over so many years, had a significant impact on ‘Ellie’. She was never able to move on and get over him, and the discovery that ‘Straven’ was an undercover police officer has had a profound impact upon her.
Spycop James Thomson ‘James Straven’ in a bar in Amsterdam, 1998
Ellie will be giving evidence on 23 October and 3 November.
‘Wendy’ was deceived into a long-term friendship by ‘Straven’ which lasted for over twenty years. from 1997 until she discovered the truth about who he was in 2018.
She volunteered and then worked at the same animal hospital as ‘Ellie’. She was an animal rights activist, who became a hunt saboteur in 1997, aged 17.
‘Straven’ supported her in 2000 and 2001 when her mother was dying, at a time when her mental health was very poor. She recounts how Thomson encouraged her to continue hunt sabbing at this time and facilitated her doing so.
‘Sara’ and ‘Ellie’ were close friends and Wendy is now troubled by the role she played in encouraging Thomson’s sexual relationships with them both. Thomson’s deception has had a significant impact upon her which she articulates in her witness statement.
One particularly disturbing aspect of his interference in her life is a passage in an internal SDS document about her which reads:
‘Recently moved into an address… which she has bought since the death of her mother, attempts to disrupt this purchase having failed. It is impossible to predict how long she will remain here’.
Why on earth did the spycops want to stymie her buying a house? Barr agreed in his statement that ‘this passage calls for an explanation.’
From 2000-2003, James Straven and Kevin Crossland were on the electoral roll together at Flat 2, 25 Southey Road, London SW9 0PD. Neither of them existed; they were two identities used by spycop James Thomson.
SDS managers first developed serious concerns about Thomson in 2001, when he told them he would travel to France on annual leave (from 26 September to 5 October 2001). They discovered he had in fact deliberately disobeyed instructions and gone to Indonesia with ‘Ellie’.
Barr explained that from then on, more and more problems with Thomson’s conduct emerged.
He had multiple credit cards and bank accounts in his ‘James Straven’ identity, and more than one passport, some with pages removed, apparently to conceal unauthorised travel.
He had multiple driving licences at various addresses, and managers believed he must have broken the law to obtain some of them.
‘Perhaps most troubling of all, DS Thomson was found to be developing another false and unauthorised persona. It was based on a deceased child’s identity: that of Kevin Crossland…
There was, and is, considerable suspicion about the financial propriety of DS Thomson’s conduct during his deployment.’
Barr then recounted an especially serious incident in Thomson’s deployment which will be examined in detail by the Inquiry.
As part of his supposed infiltration of the Animal Liberation Front, Thomson reported on a plot to travel to France to obtain a firearm and black powder from an animal rights activist. This supposed plot was allowed to go ahead in order to be disrupted by the police.
Barr explained:
‘DS Thomson appears to have driven to Marseille in his cover Land Rover Discovery with an activist known as ‘L3’. He seems to have left the vehicle where it could be, and was, recovered by [SDS manager] HN58 who made it appear like a theft.
A semi-automatic large calibre handgun was found in the vehicle, together with ammunition and black powder. DS Thomson hired a car and drove to Bordeaux where “Sara” recalls meeting him.’
However, SDS managers became suspicious that the plot might in fact have been a self-
aggrandising tale designed to prolong Thomson’s deployment. There has been no independent corroboration of the plot, and it appears that another UCO – who has full anonymity in this Inquiry – told his manager HN36 Michael Dell that Thomson was in possession of a firearm, given to him as a gift while on protective duties.
Thomson allegedly sought permission to keep the gun as a gratuity, and when that was refused, did not return it but instead took it to France and stored it in a ‘deposit box’.
Barr bluntly asks:
‘Was there a genuine plot which DS Thomson’s intelligence and actions thwarted, or was it all a deception on his part?’
SDS managers noted that the volume of Thomson’s reporting was much lower than might have been expected, and on analysis it proved to be of little value, so what was he doing? During his deployment, he was spending time with ‘Ellie’ and ‘Wendy’ and found the time to study for numerous qualifications from the Open University.
Barr told us that the SDS managers suspected that Thomson was overly ‘engrossed’ in his unusual cover employment. HN36 Michael Dell even commented in a File Note that Thomson’s activities in the film industry were almost the only topic of conversation at field officers’ meetings.
Barr displayed a screenshot from the British Film Institute’s website for the 1998 television drama, ‘Coming Home’, noting:
‘It is certainly an extraordinary feature of this deployment that the cover name of an SDS UCO features in the credits for a wartime period drama.’
The evidence is that managers knew about Thomson’s relationships. His phone records revealed a suspiciously large number of calls to ‘Sara’, ‘Ellie’ and ‘Wendy’.
In his witness statement, Thomson claims that when he was interviewed by Detective Chief Superintendent Black, he admitted to having a relationship with ‘Sara’.
Barr noted that:
‘it appears that an opportunity might have been missed to prevent, or reduce, the protracted deceptions of both “Ellie” and “Wendy” which continued until 2018. In the result, “Sara”, “Ellie”, “Wendy” and the Crosslands did not find out what DS Thomson had done until this inquiry’s processes brought his conduct to light.’
Barr made it clear that the Inquiry has a lot of questions about how the case of Thomson was handled by SDS management. According to him:
‘Both SDS and more senior MPSB managers faced a by now familiar quandary. Should they discipline Thomson or might that risk leading to a chain of events that would compromise the operational security of the SDS?’
Thomson doesn’t seem to have faced any formal disciplinary process, just some ‘stern words from DCS Colin Black’. His undercover deployment was ended, his security vetting reduced and his firearms authorisation revoked, but these last two were reinstated a few years later, and Thomson continued working as a police officer until his retirement in June 2014, upon completion of 30 years’ service.
It is striking to see that managers being interviewed in 2012 (i.e. after concerns about the SDS had become public) are recorded as saying that they have ‘every faith in JT who has shown unquestionable integrity over the last decade’, thanking him ‘for his dedication, commitment and value over the last 11 years through some extremely stressful operations that have been performed in an exemplary way throughout’ and adding that they do not wish DS Thomson to finish his career ‘thinking he is under a cloud’.
Barr concluded his account with the comment:
‘As to why DS Thomson behaved as he did, we understand him to be conveying in his witness statement that he lost his sense of identity and effectively became James Straven. He suggests that he was suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder.
You may need to decide, Sir, whether Mr Thomson lost his grip on who he really was or whether his conduct, over the course of many years, has in fact been motivated throughout by amoral self-interest.’
HN43 PETER FRANCIS ‘PETER JOHNSON / BLACK / DALEY’
Peter Francis joined the SDS in January 1993 and was deployed between September 1993 and September 1997. He stole the identity of a dead child, Peter David Johnson. Barr noted that there are some questions about how this was done.
He also used other names,‘Pete Black’ and ‘Pete Daley’, but without any false documentation to support them. He secured cover employment at a special needs school in West London, which allowed him to have school holidays with his real family.
Of his early deployment Barr notes that:
‘whilst in the back office, preparing to deploy, he regularly drove the then head of the SDS, HN86, to and from work. Doing so enabled him to get to know HN86 well and led to conversations about the unit.’
Francis’ evidence says HN86 was thoroughly and overtly racist. In particular, Francis says he was instructed by HN86 to seek out intelligence that could be used to undermine, discredit and destroy
Black family justice campaigns, particularly that of Stephen Lawrence.
HN86 denies these allegations, and the Inquiry intends to look at them very closely indeed.
Barr notes:
‘On the one hand there is evidence of overt racism, in the chain of command, relating to HN593 Detective Chief Supt. Robert Potter and HN86.
There is also evidence of racist content in SDS reporting, considerable emphasis on Black justice campaigns, evidence of critical police comments to the media in other cases, following the deaths of Black people as a result of the use of force by police, and broader findings about racism within the MPS, not least the findings of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry itself…
On the other hand, none of Mr Francis’ SDS contemporaries corroborate his account of a tasking to undermine the Lawrences. Nor is there any written SDS record of any such tasking.’
Barr also noted that several other witnesses question Francis’ credibility.
Francis’ account states that when he was working in the SDS back office, HN86 gave him a list of names of people visiting the Lawrence family home in the wake of Stephen’s murder, and asked him to find out if any of them had particular political affiliations and were known to the SDS.
Family Liaison Officers (FLOs) who visited the Lawrences’ home in the aftermath of the murder did make a list of visitors to the house, and the FLOs are being asked to provide further evidence.
Barr insists that:
‘Our exploration of the evidence in Tranche 3 will not be narrowly confined to whether or not events occurred precisely as described by Mr Francis. The Inquiry is seeking to establish the full truth about what happened in relation not only to the Lawrence family and Stephen Lawrence Campaign, but also Duwayne Brooks and other family justice campaigns.
We will be exploring whether relevant SDS deployments were tainted by either conscious or subconscious racism, taking into account all relevant contextual evidence.’
Francis’ first targets included the Kingsway Anti-Fascist Group (KAFG) and ‘Lewis’, a member of that group who is due to give evidence on 12 November. Barr notes that: ‘There are significant disputes of fact between members of KAFG and Mr Francis’ for the Inquiry to investigate.
Very early in his deployment, Francis attended a demonstration at the British National Party’s headquarters in Welling, held on 16 October 1993.Through his infiltration of KAFG, he made contacts within both Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE) and Militant Labour (ML, called the Socialist Party since December 1996).
Francis held a number of official roles within YRE and Militant, some of which he discussed with managers. However, yet again, Barr notes that:
‘There are considerable differences between Mr Francis’ accounts and the accounts of those he mixed with from YRE and ML. There are also conflicts between Mr Francis’ evidence and that of his managers and fellow UCOs’.
Francis was also involved in anti-racist activism, reporting widely on a number of single issue and racial justice campaigns, including the Winston Silcott Defence Campaign, the Brian Douglas Campaign and the Wayne Douglas Campaign.
Francis reported on trade unionists, whom he believed fell into the ‘subversives’ category. Examples include:
• Frank Smith (trade unionist and member of the Militant Away Team)
• Alex Owolade (member of UNISON, as well as the Revolutionary Internationalist League, and then Movement for Justice (MFJ)
• Tony Gard (member of the National Union of Teachers as well as the MFJ)
• Matt Wrack (member of the Fire Brigades Union)
Francis claims that his intelligence was of interest both to Special Branch and to the Security Service, and was likely disseminated to the Branch’s building trade contacts, and potentially used for ‘blacklisting’ purposes.
Peter Francis in a Special Branch surveillance photo of an activist event at Conway Hall, London, in the mid 1990s
Similarly, he reported on Militant members getting involved in unions and associated campaigns, such as the National Union for Teachers’ Campaign Against Vouchers in Education.
By November 1996, the Security Service was no longer required information on such ‘subversive groups’. In any event, it was decided to end Francis’ deployment in 1997. An exfiltration strategy was put in motion in December 1996, and became a long and convoluted process.
Francis finally withdrew from the field in September 1997, using the pretence of a sick mother, who then died. This prompted sympathy cards and offers of support from his targets.
He asserts that his deployment in fact ended due to the actions of his then wife who raised concerns about his mental health with his manager, HN10 Bob Lambert.
Francis says he argued forcefully for the Macpherson Inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder to be informed of his involvement, but his superiors were against this.
He feels he was failed by SDS management. He was medically retired from the Met in 2001 and then brought a civil claim for damages against them, which was settled out of court.
Francis says managers Lambert and HN67 ‘Alan Bond’ advised him always to use condoms when having sex undercover. He describes two occasions when the Squad travelled to Amsterdam where many of the officers, he implies, enjoyed all the city had to offer.
He says he had a number of sexual encounters during his deployment (some of which he referred to in the civil claim he brought in 2003, which management would have seen). Barr elaborates:
‘He portrays a unit in which such conduct was well known and accepted as part of the job. He states that managers HN86 and HN67 told him that the SDS went “where MI5 feared to go”, the inference being that MI5 agents could not engage in sexual activity but SDS officers could’.
Barr also noted:
‘All three of the open former UCOs being called to give oral evidence in Phase 1 sexually deceived women. Three of the five who we will be hearing from in Phase 2 are also known to have done so.’
Despite raising doubts about Francis’ credibility as a witness, Barr acknowledged that he is a whistleblower:
‘He made a very significant contribution to the series of events which led to the establishment of this inquiry.’
HN81 ‘DAVID HAGAN’
HN81 ‘David Hagan’ joined the SDS in January 1996 and was deployed on undercover operations in June of that year. He used the cover name ‘David Steven Hagan’ and was assigned the codename ‘Windmill Tilter’.
He infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Hammersmith and later Fulham. He has provided the Inquiry with a lengthy witness statement but is not attending to give oral evidence due to complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
Barr describes his operation as:
‘a relatively fruitless exercise as far as public order intelligence was concerned. The SWP was not engaging in what is euphemistically described in police documents as “street activity”.’
HN81 sought redirection, which took him South of the Thames to Brixton. There he refocused his attention on Class War, an anarchist political organisation that had been involved in the Poll Tax riots of 1990.
His involvement with this group led him to Movement Against the Monarchy (or ‘MA’M’). He was not specifically tasked to infiltrate Class War or ‘MA’M’. His managers had directed him to go to Brixton, outlining his general targeting strategy as a “roving public order brief” with a broad discretion as to direction.’
Barr questions why he was sent with such a wide brief to ‘a racially diverse part of London’ and notes that ‘he found little by way of serious public order to report on’.
Within a year of his deployment starting, HN81 sought to infiltrate the Movement for Justice (MFJ), a group involved in a number of campaigns focussed on issues of racism and immigration. These included the police’s use of stop and search powers, CS spray, and deaths in custody (all of which disproportionately affected young Black men), often supporting family justice campaigns.
Issues of race became a feature of HN81’s reporting, and he remained a member of MFJ until his deployment ended in the summer of 2021.
Barr explained:
‘The extent to which members of MFJ, including ‘David Hagan’, were, or were not, involved in the Stephen Lawrence Campaign, the Stephen Lawrence Public Support Group (or with the Lawrence family or other supportive groups) is a matter that will need our close attention. A significant number of the documents relating to HN81’s deployment refer to the Stephen Lawrence Campaign and, indeed, the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry.
HN81 was present at Hannibal House, above the Elephant and Castle shopping centre, on a number of occasions when that inquiry was sitting there. Not least on the day that the five murder suspects attended. He accepts being involved in the public disorder surrounding that event.’
The Stephen Lawrence family campaign always advocated for order and calm. Yet on that day, 29 June 1998, Hagan describes shouting and aggressive posturing, and admits to joining in with the pushing and shoving that began when the suspects emerged from the building.
We were shown a long and compelling extract from ‘The Murder that Changed a Nation’, a BBC documentary showing scenes of the community’s protests as well as the police’s behaviour that day.
Barr cited the feelings of Stephen’s father, Dr Neville Lawrence, who finds it:
‘particularly troubling that an officer who sought to justify surveillance on the grounds of public disorder actively contributed to it’.
He also noted the observation of Baroness Doreen Lawrence, Stephen’s mother:
‘HN81’s presence at campaign meetings and events was purposeful and his involvement suggests more than incidental involvement; the effects of his actions amounted to surveillance and intrusion into their family and the campaign for justice.’
Barr revealed that:
‘There is written evidence that the SDS, through HN81 and his manager DI Robert Lambert, fed directly into the MPS Stephen Lawrence Review Team (or SLRT). They provided oral briefings to A/DI Richard Walton around August 1998 at a time when the Commissioner’s legal team were preparing his submission to the Macpherson Inquiry. There was a meeting at which A/DI Walton, DI Lambert and HN86 were present which was held in DI Lambert’s back garden.
It is our understanding that [Chair of the Lawrence inquiry] Sir William Macpherson was not made aware of such channels of intelligence…
Who knew what about HN81’s operation must also be established. There is evidence suggesting that it went to the top of the MPS, eliciting praise from Commissioner Sir Paul Condon at the height of the Macpherson Inquiry…
In a summary of HN81’s withdrawal strategy, HN129 DS Noel Warr notes (I quote), “[Windmill Tilter] is quite candid in admitting that he was largely responsible for their adoption of the Stephen Lawrence case, and the rest, as they say, is history”.’
It is important to note that that this kind of interference in legal processes is by no means an isolated incident, and Barr specifically stated that:
‘The legal and ethical basis for the MPS resorting to undercover intelligence in the context of legal affairs is a wider topic that this inquiry will investigate’.
Through MFJ, Hagan also came into contact with the family of Lakhvinder ‘Ricky’ Reel, who died after a racist attack in Kingston-Upon-Thames. The police insisted it was an accident and the family started a campaign for justice:
‘His mother, Sukhdev Reel, has stated that she was horrified to learn that HN81 had been reporting on their personal lives, and had driven her home following a meeting one evening.’
HN81’s deployment ended in 2001. He believes that his service as an undercover officer has had an enduring effect on his mental health and that of his family.
HN15 MARK JENNER ‘MARK CASSIDY’
Mark Jenner was deployed between February 1995 and April 2000. He first infiltrated the Colin Roach Centre (CRC) and the Hackney Community Defence Association (HCDA). He then targeted Anti-Fascist Action and Red Action.
From late 1995 onwards, Jenner was reporting on Republican Forum and Republican Sinn Féin, and SDS records from 1997 show that he was ordered to focus on London-based Irish Republican activists. His targeting specifically included two named individuals, Mark Metcalf of the CRC and Norman Blair. The former he got very close to, but not the latter.
Barr explained that the Inquiry will investigate whether there was any justification for spying on the CRC and HCDA:
‘There are serious differences between the portrayal of the CRC and HCDA by the SDS and the descriptions provided by these witnesses.’
However it is agreed that the CRC campaigned against racism and the HCDA was involved in police accountability work, including cases with a racial dimension.
Barr further noted:
‘There is also an issue as to how DC Jenner conducted himself, including whether he was violent in his undercover identity and, if so, whether his use of violence was appropriate or authorised?’
Witnesses Mark Metcalf, ‘Alison’, Steve Hedley, Dr Graham Smith, and Jenner’s now ex-wife (known as ‘S’) will all give evidence about his deployment.
Barr noted that Jenner was arrested on suspicion of obstruction of the highway at a counter demonstration against the National Front in Dover on 28 February 1998. He showed news footage of that event, commenting that it:
‘gives a flavour of the kind of public disorder in which DC Jenner found himself during the course of his deployment. He is wearing a black bomber jacket, black woollen hat and gloves and can be seen prominently at the end of the piece, apparently mouthing “come on” to opposing demonstrators.’
Barr also noted that Jenner assumed a number of positions of responsibility during his deployment and that a cause of considerable concern is
‘the extremely prolonged sexual and emotional deception that DC Jenner practised on “Alison”.’
Jenner began a sexual relationship with ‘Alison’ very early in his deployment, and soon moved into her flat. The relationship lasted almost five years and they cohabitated for more than four years.
Jenner became very deeply involved in her life, attending family weddings, birthdays and religious celebrations and holidays in the United Kingdom, Greece, Israel, Vietnam and the Netherlands.
Barr noted:
‘A particularly cruel feature of DC Jenner’s deception of “Alison” is that she wanted to start a family. The man she knew as “Mark Cassidy” told her he wanted to have children with her, but “just not yet”. Her written evidence explains that she persuaded him to go to couples counselling for between 12 to 18 months in an attempt to resolve that impasse.’
Jenner implemented his exfiltration plan after Christmas 1999, by feigning depression and paranoia.
Mark Jenner in Vietnam with Alison. Jenner is understood to have been in couples counselling with Alison & his wife at the same time, with both thinking they were his only partner
On 15 March 2000, he abruptly moved out of the flat, returning for two periods over the following weeks, before finally disappearing for good on 11 April 2000, leaving a note explaining he had left to travel to Germany. ‘Alison’ was utterly devastated by his sudden departure.
She made extensive efforts to locate him, but these yielded nothing.
She learned through an unofficial search that Mark Cassidy’s passport was recorded as stored in ‘CE’. Further enquiries with a private detective led her to believe that Mark had been living under a false identity.
Eventually, a meeting with Helen Steel and a discussion surrounding her own experience with HN5 John Dines ‘John Barker’ convinced Alison that Mark Cassidy had been a Special Branch officer.
She didn’t receive any confirmation of this until 2011 (and the Met continued to ‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny’ his identity for years after that).
Barr said:
‘An extraordinary and valuable element of the evidence that we have is video footage
of DC Jenner during the course of the relationship. It was filmed by “Alison”…. It vividly depicts the deception in ways that words cannot.’
We will also hear from ‘S’, Jenner’s wife at that time, who Barr recognises as a ‘female victim of his deployment’.
Her evidence describes the sacrifices made by her family during and after the deployment, including being forced to move house, and the other impacts of Jenner’s behaviour. She is critical of SDS management, asserting that there was a lack of oversight, information, and support.
Barr lists a number of issues the Inquiry will wish to investigate in relation to Jenner’s deployment, including management knowledge of the sexual relationship and the extent to which the chain of command was aware of the nature of his target groups.
He cites a memo written by HN127 Tiddy dated 10 October 2000, which was circulated at the time to all of the unit’s managers (i.e. DCI HN53, DI HN58, DS HN52 Greaney and DS Warr):
‘Partnerships in the left-wing field are by and large confined to the parties that they are members of. For example, there are a large number of cohabiting partners/relationships within the SWP and SP and anyone who enjoys single status over a certain period may invite unwanted suspicion.
The most difficult of this type of enquiry is generally instigated from an attached female who may be taking soundings on behalf of one of her friends. The female antennae is a difficult creature to subdue and whereas, as a rule, they applaud monogamy they do possess the ability to unearth doubts about perceived relationships.
There have been recent operations e.g. Touchy Subject [Jenner] and Psycho Dream [Boyling] where, due to the lifestyle employed by the operatives their bona fides were considered unimpeachable.
This is patently not the case in every operation and consideration should now be given to providing additional operational support to field officers.’
This strongly suggests managers knew about the long-term intimate relationships these officers were having and knew exactly how they were spending their time. Beyond that, it indicates that managers saw such long-term relationships positively as a way to reinforce a deployment.
HN26 ‘CHRISTINE GREEN’
HN26 ‘Christine Green’ spied on animal rights activists from November 1994 to November 1999. She was based in South and West London, but also operated outside the city. She reported principally on London Animal Action, South London Animal Action, Brixton Hunt Sabs and what Barr describes as ‘persons involved in actions which fell under the ALF [Animal Liberation Front] banner’.
He commented that:
‘Her reporting covers a great variety of activism in the cause of animal rights, some of it lawful and some of it decidedly unlawful’.
However, it wasn’t clear whether he meant the activism or the reporting was unlawful, because he went on to say that:
‘Amongst reporting on individuals of a kind that was usual for the SDS is a report on a planned meeting to discuss making civil claims against the Commissioner. It is yet another example of reporting on civil litigation, or the potential for it’.
Barr made reference to a watershed in her reporting, around the spring of 1998. Following complaints from managers that she wasn’t producing good enough intelligence, there seems to have been a sudden increase in reporting on Animal Liberation Front (ALF) type activity, focussed on a man named Thomas Frampton, who was widely known as ‘Joe Tex’ or ‘Joe Tax’. An SDS File Note described him as ‘the leader of a London based ALF cell’.
In fact, Green became intimately involved with Mr Frampton and eventually resigned from the police to be his permanent partner.
There is some dispute about when that intimate relationship began, but in Tranche 2 hearings, Paul Gravett and ‘Walter’ gave evidence to the effect that it began during her deployment, and this might explain the sudden change in her intelligence product.
Barr commented:
‘Far fewer women than men served as undercover police officers in the SDS. But HN26’s case illustrates clearly that the risk of undercover police officers becoming involved in sexual relationships with those they mix with undercover is not confined to men.’
It is, however, striking that, far from the cruel and degrading ways in which male officers behaved towards the women they deceived, Green seemingly told Frampton the truth about her identity, and ultimately left her husband for him. They were understood to still be together when the facts became public in 2018.
Barr highlighted a key question of particular concern to the Inquiry: Green’s involvement in the high-profile animal liberation action which resulted in up to 6000 mink being released into the wild from Crow Hill Farm in Ringwood, Hampshire on the night of 8 August 1998:
‘She was authorised by her SDS managers to participate. The focus of our investigation, when managers are questioned next summer, will concern the circumstances in which she was so authorised, the level of that authority, and why local police were not informed either before or afterwards when the crime was being investigated.’
HN123
Barr told us HN123 infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Anti-Nazi League in the mid-1990s, adding the cryptic comment ‘He later targeted another group which was involved in violence.’
Barr highlighted three aspects of HN123’s written evidence that are of particular significance:
1. He has stated that he reported on the Stephen Lawrence Campaign whilst he was infiltrating the Anti-Nazi League.
2. His partner wrote a letter of complaint to Assistant Commissioner David Veness in August 2002, in which she referred to officers boasting about undercover activity, including their sexual relationships and the extra-marital affairs. She recalled AC Veness himself referring to the SDS as a ‘cowboy outfit’. Her main concern was the failure of the SDS to protect the welfare of its officers and the stable family relationships they relied on.
This was an attempt to bring the issue of sexual misconduct to the attention of a very senior officer: ACSO Veness was second only to Lord Stevens in the SDS’ chain of command at that time. Mr Veness will have an opportunity to respond next summer when the Inquiry’s attention turns to the unit’s management.
3. HN123 joined in with Peter Francis in bringing a claim for damages for personal injury to his mental health against the Met’s Commissioner. This was settled out of court.
CONCLUSION
Barr ended by saying that the Inquiry ‘continues to be a Herculean task’, and thanked all the people who have worked to prepare for these hearings, often to tight deadlines. He also said how ‘daunting and stressful’ the prospect of giving evidence will be for many, and advertised the fact that the Inquiry now has a Vulnerable Witness Policy, encouraging people to read it and seek the support it offers.
Peter Skelton KC (on behalf of the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis)
Peter Skelton KC
Skelton spoke for only thirty minutes, representing the Metropolitan Police as an institution.
His statement was basically a long list of the mistakes the police had made, peppered with negative superlatives and apologies, suggesting that the MPS no longer have the will to defend the indefensible.
He acknowledged from the outset that there was serious wrongdoing by ‘some UCOs’, and specified that it was ‘not only in hindsight but by the standards at the time.’
He then listed seven specific failings:
1. Managers should not have allowed reporting on family justice and police accountability campaigns
He stressed that these groups presented no risk of crime and no risk of disorder, and families like the Lawrences tended to actively discourage such behaviour.
He referred to senior officers having ‘legitimate concerns’ about a lack of trust in the police and some public disorder resulting from this, but accepted that the use of undercovers was not justified. The police’s time and resources would have been better spent on community engagement and relationship repair, and responding more effectively to racist violence.
He expects managers and more senior officers to be questioned about exactly what they knew about such reporting, and what they authorised, or failed to question, acknowledging that there was a ‘collective failure to exercise ethical judgement’, and also a failure on the part of the most senior officers to get rid of an unhealthy ‘us against them’ culture within the Met.
APOLOGY 1
He delivered an apology at this point to ‘the family of Stephen Lawrence, Duwayne Brookes OBE the family of Ricky Reel and the other individuals, families and family members who were the subject of this improper reporting during the T3 period’.
2. Sexual relationships were wrong
APOLOGY 2
Skelton began by citing the Met’s apology made in 2015, describing these relationships as ‘a gross violation of privacy and human rights. They were abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong’, adding that they were a serious failing ‘by the standards of any time.’
He stressed that who knew what about these sexual relationships will be a matter for Phase 3, but admitted that they were ‘facilitated by poor management’ and that there is considerable evidence that managers within the SDS and Special Branch either knew, or should have known, of at least some of them.
He pointed out that the attitude of managers towards sexual relationships was exemplified by the ‘inadequate, misguided, sexist and offensive’ guidance in the SDS’s Tradecraft manual.
He described its focus as ‘self-serving’, and ’predicated on the false premise’ that rather than the undercovers, it would be their civilian targets and ‘associates’ who would want and initiate these relationships. UCOs were allowed and encouraged ‘to abrogate responsibility for their own predatory actions’.
He went on to say:
‘senior police officers in the MPS and other police services would now be expected to recognise sexual misconduct as an abuse of power and to understand the significant effects that it has on the people who are manipulated and deceived.’
This is not due to some sudden developoemnt of conscience within the Met, but the reaction to the investigative and campaigning efforts of women who were deceived into sexual relationships by officers from both spycops units.
Skelton ended by saying:
‘It is a matter of deep regret that such recognition and understanding was not part of the prevailing culture within the MPS during the 1990s and 2000s. Therefore, no consideration was given at that time – as it would now be today – to contacting the individual women to inform them that they had been deceived’.
We note that if that is the case, it was a very long time coming, as women deceived into relationships in the 1990s and 2000s were still finding out about it as late as 2017 for ‘Jessica’, 2018 for ‘Ellie’, and 2019 for ‘Maya’.
3. Participation in Crime
Managers failed to ensure that any participation of SDS officers in criminal activities was fully compliant with Home Office guidelines (Home Office Circular No. 35/1986 ‘Consolidated Circular to the Police on Crime and Kindred Matters’), specifically citing the Crow Hill mink farm incident and multiple examples of officers misleading the courts.
The Home Office had already issued unequivocal instructions in 1969, a year after the SDS was founded, saying that if the use of any kind of informant might lead to a court being misled, they should be exposed or withdrawn. No spycops should ever have gone to court without the court’s full knowledge.
4. Failure to discipline UCOs for misconduct
He referred to a ‘general failure on the part of the SDS’s management to impose discipline on UCOs’:
‘Officers who behaved unprofessionally or dishonestly were not subject to misconduct proceedings and there was no proper recognition that their lack of professionalism and integrity created security risks which made them unsuitable for further sensitive work within Special Branch or elsewhere in the MPS.
This led to a culture in which misconduct was tolerated wrongly in order to protect the continuation of the secret work of the unit… the handling of Detective Sergeant Thomson’s misconduct exemplifies this failure.’
5. Deceased Children
Skelton described the move from using dead children to fictional identities as ‘prompted by computerisation not ethical concerns’ and repeated the apologies made in T2, extending them to the Crossland family and other families affected in T3:
APOLOGY 3
‘The MPS accepts that the managers of the SDS failed to recognise the hurt, distress, and anger that the use of deceased children’s identities would cause the families of the children, and the public concern that would result if the practice had been revealed.
It apologises unreservedly to the families for this. It also wishes to acknowledge that their distress will have been compounded by the revelation that some SDS officers behaved indefensibly while using their children’s names’.
He went on to say that there was ‘no justification whatsoever’ for DS Thomson’s misuse of Kevin Crossland’s identity.
6. Welfare of UCOs
Skelton described how the T3 period saw an increasing awareness, both within Special Branch and in the wider intelligence community, of the unique stresses and risks to mental health that could be caused by undercover work.
He noted that the ‘operational security of the unit’ was too often prioritised over the welfare of the UCOs, with professional psychological support not being made compulsory until 2001.
The ‘psychological effects of living in a false identity and, for some, the direct experience of physical violence or the chronic fear of being exposed and physically attacked’ went unrecognised. The Met now acknowledges that some SDS officers suffered ‘significant psychological harm as a result of their work’.
One of those officers, Peter Francis, was mentioned by name at this point, in a way that seemed a rather nasty back-handed attack on his credibility and mental health.
7. Spouses, partners and families of UCOs
Finally, the MPS added to the long list of grovelling apologies they have been forced to issue in the course of this Inquiry, this time to the UCOs’ partners and families.
Skelton noted that SDS deployments led to particular stresses on the undercovers. They spent a lot of time living in their false identities, for years on end, most of them only intermittently returning home to their families and their ‘real’ lives. Security risks and fear of exposure meant that some UCOs and their families had to undergo the upheaval of relocating their homes and lives.
The failure of the unit’s managers to ‘provide sufficient support and psychological welfare’, and their failure to prevent sexual misconduct (and therefore sexual infidelity) from taking place contributed to the harm done to UCOs’ families.
Skelton noted that ‘S’, the former wife of Mark Jenner, will be giving evidence and stated:
APOLOGY 4
‘The MPS wishes to apologise unreservedly to them, and to all the partners and former partners of SDS UCOs, for its failure to better protect them from the effects of the SDS’s work and the misconduct of its officers’
Conclusions
After all of that, Skelton added the police’s standard mitigating point:
‘Undercover policing is an extremely valuable means of gathering intelligence for the purposes of protecting national security, preventing serious crime, preserving public order, and other important policing purposes.’
He acknowledged that it is ‘exceptionally invasive’, and there was a risk of officers abusing their power, saying that ‘high standards of conduct, ethics and governance’ were needed for any undercover operations.
He insisted that ‘some of the SDS’s targeting was justifiable’ and some of the intelligence they gathered was ‘valuable’, but offered no examples, and admitted that some of those they spied on should never have been the subject of undercover reporting.
His closing comments were damning:
‘In short, the SDS became a dysfunctional undercover unit. The human toll of the SDS’s dysfunction has been severe and wide-ranging: misuse of deceased people’s identities, wrongful intrusion into individuals’ private and political lives, grievous sexual exploitation, damaged relationships, broken families, and widespread anger, distress and psychological harm – including to some of the officers themselves.
The MPS recognises how important it is to understand the damage that the SDS has caused, to hear directly from the people who have been affected, and for the Inquiry to hold those responsible to account.’
Neil Sheldon KC spoke on behalf of the Secretary of State of the Home Department (the Home Secretary), in her capacity as a Core Participant (rather than as the sponsor and funder of the Inquiry).
These are the first submissions to be made by the current Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood – the ninth person to hold the office since the Inquiry began – so he took the opportunity to say on her behalf that she is appalled by these ‘historical allegations’, and that it is vital that this Inquiry uncovers the truth and lessons are learnt for the future.
However, Sheldon then defended the use of undercover operations as a tool for tackling crime. He did stress that there ‘never can be any excuse or justification for the type of conduct at the heart of the Inquiry’, noting that it irreparably damaged lives, and that it must be subjected to ‘unsparing public scrutiny’. Nevertheless there was an obvious attempt to distance the SDS from any other policing operations.
NOTHING TO DO WITH US, HONEST
The rest of the statement was an exercise in distancing the Home Office from any responsibility for what happened.
Sheldon said ‘direct involvement of the Home Office in this T3P1 is limited’, pointing out that the Inquiry has not yet requested any witness evidence from the Home Office in any Tranche, as though this were somehow evidence of their innocence, rather than a serious oversight on the part of the Inquiry.
Core Participants have pressed for the Home Office to be required to provide a witness statement and respond candidly to questions about their role.
We would also remind the Home Secretary that her Government has just introduced a Bill to Parliament (the ‘Hillsborough Law’) which would make attempts by the Home Office to cover up their role in the spycops scandal a criminal offence.
Sheldon admitted that the Home Office was ‘a recipient of indirect SDS intelligence’, but repeatedly claimed that there was no ‘cogent evidence’ that they had anything to do with the SDS’s tasking.
He said that only one State witness claimed otherwise in either of the earlier Tranches, and cast doubt upon the credibility of that particular former officer (HN78 Trevor Morris ‘Anthony Lewis’ gave evidence to the effect that the Home Secretary deemed the SWP to be a ‘subversive organisation’).
He made a plea that the Inquiry should ‘rigorously’ test any such allegations in this Tranche, and that people should take care not to lump all branches of ‘the Government’ together, or refer to ‘the Home Office’ when they actually mean another branch of the State or the Security Service.
He went on to assert that the Home Office have not seen any evidence to suggest that anyone there had any knowledge of UCO misconduct, specifically their involvement in criminality, theft of dead children’s identities, sexual misconduct, or actions which may have led to miscarriages of justice.
He stressed that:
‘it is important that everyone keeps in mind what the evidence does, and perhaps more importantly, does not demonstrate in this regard.’
This is very reminiscent of the police defence in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal proceedings Wilson v MPS, where the MPS insisted on admitting only to what could be demonstrated by the written evidence, and declined to ask any of their employees who were present at the time what they did or did not know.
The Home Office set up the SDS, and documents at the time show that they were terrified of the embarrassment it would cause the Home Secretary if its existence were ever made public. The Home Office directly funded the SDS for 20 years, renewing funding annually after reviewing its activity over the year.
After the spycops scandal broke, a search of all Home Office archives failed to find a single document about the SDS. The Undercover Plolicing Inquiry is exactly the kind of thing the Home Office must have had in mind when they ensured there was no paper trail leading to them.
REGULATORY REFORMS
Sheldon then moved on to mention the ‘radical reform’ that took place in the T3period, a reference to the fundamental change in the way that undercover policing operations were supposed to be authorised and regulated, with new statutory standards and requirements being introduced.
For example, according to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), deployments could only be authorised if three requirements were met: necessity, proportionality and oversight.
There was also the Police Act 1997, and new Police (Conduct) Regulations which came into force in 1999. These brought in new regulations that the police were supposed to follow, and an improved complaints procedure.
Included was a new Code of Conduct for all police officers to follow at all times
‘It is of paramount importance that the public has faith in the honesty and integrity of police officers. Officers should therefore be open and truthful in their dealings; avoid being improperly beholden to any person or institution; and discharge their duties with integrity…
Whether on or off duty, police officers should not behave in a way which is likely to bring discredit upon the police service’.
The ‘CHIS Code’ (or to give it its full name, the ‘Covert Human Intelligence Sources: Code of Practice 2002’) provided guidance on all aspects of undercover operations. It aimed to ensure that such policing was done in a way that complied with RIPA, other relevant legislation and human rights. It outlined the procedures that should be followed by authorising officers, and those handling intelligence from undercover sources, including a duty to consider the risk of collateral intrusion.
Finally, he quoted at length from the 2004 ‘Home Office Guidelines on the Work of a Special Branch in Great Britain’. In short, Special Branch staff were expected to comply with all of the new legislation that had been introduced, including the Human Rights Act 1998 (which came into force in October 2000). They were reminded that, just like every other branch of the police service, they were also: ‘subject to the provisions contained within the Data Protection Act 1998 and, more recently, the Freedom of Information Act 2000’.
At no point did Sheldon acknowledge that the SDS simply ignored all of this ‘radical reform’ and didn’t bother to comply with the new legislative ‘landscape’.
The other spycops unit, the NPOIU, was established during the T3 period, and it is clear from what we already know about their operations that the same forms of malpractice continued in it. Both units saw themselves as beyond the law.
Sheldon went to some pains to state that none of these reforms were the result of legislators or anyone at the Home Office becoming aware of misconduct or malpractice on the part of any police officers.
IN CONCLUSION
Sheldon finished by saying that the Home Secretary supports the Inquiry’s aims and is committed to her department ‘continuing to cooperate fully with its investigations’. She awaits its findings and recommendations with interest, including the ‘interim report’ which Mitting has promised to deliver in 2027, before he finally retires. Sheldon then took the opportunity to acknowledge, on behalf of Mahmood, Mitting’s ‘many years of hard work’ as Chair of this Inquiry.
Mitting thanked him for his ‘kind words’.
Oliver Sanders KC (Designated Officers)
Oliver Sanders KC
Sanders represents the ‘designated lawyer officers’, 114 mostly ex- (though some current) spycops.
They are predominantly from the Special Demonstration Squad, but some from the later National Public Order Intelligence Unit, and they include both undercover and back room staff. Some of them became managers later. In total, it’s around 60% of all SDS staff (around 70% of those still alive).
None of his clients are due to give evidence in this Phase of hearings (Jenner, Francis and Thomson have all chosen to be represented by other lawyers).
HN81 is a client of Sanders, but he will not give oral evidence. Neither does he represent managers Gunn and Phelan (who are T2 witnesses giving evidence out of turn),
Sanders therefore only wanted to raise a few ‘short matters’ today; his written Opening Statement goes into more detail.
THE SUCCESSES OF THE SDS
He pointed out that there are more ‘closed’ officers (who won’t be known to the public), and therefore more ‘closed’ (secret) hearings in Tranche 3 than any of the previous tranches. He claimed that during this era, the SDS ‘did some of its most challenging and valuable work’, basically suggesting that although we will hear lots of damning evidence, we won’t hear about a lot of the background and how successful the SDS really was.
He alluded to the unit’s managers having a lot ‘on their plate’, which we (the public, who are excluded from the ‘closed’ hearings) can never fully understand, and claimed that they made lots of improvements to the way the unit was run and started to ‘modernise’ it before RIPA was enacted, with a whole list of innovations being introduced at this time.
These included:
‘psychometric testing for new recruits; psychiatric or psychological support for undercover officers and former undercover officers; the introduction of a mentoring scheme; the introduction of performance indicators and customer feedback surveys; the introduction of designated cover officers for specific undercover officers; and changes to the way in which undercover identities were made.’
Like Sheldon, he glossed over the fact that none of these ‘reforms’ prevented officer misconduct or mismanagement or had any discernable impact on the toxic culture of the SDS.
THE PROBLEMS OF HN43 PETER FRANCIS
Sanders dedicated a significant chunk of time to discussing, or rather, seeking to undermine, the evidence of Peter Francis, whilst claiming to make ‘no comment on his sincerity or motivations’.
He advised Mitting to be ‘cautious’ about accepting the claims made by Francis, saying that many of them are uncorroborated, and at one point referring to his evidence as ‘a mixture of fact, fiction and fantasy’.
Peter Francis graduating from police training, May 1986. He is presented with his award by Assistant Commissioner Hugh Annesley
In particular, he highlighted Francis’ claim that there were ‘high-level concerns’ within the SDS and Special Branch, about the ‘risk of “race riots”’, and/or of public disorder connected in some way to Black family justice groups, including the Lawrence family.
Sanders claimed that this could not possibly have been the case, because there’s no written evidence of these concerns in any of the surviving reports and records that the Inquiry has been able to unearth.
As he well knows, the SDS avoided written records on some sensitive subject, as well as destroying a lot of its paper archives when it was closed down, and the wider Met is known to have deliberately shredded many more shortly after this Inquiry was announced.
Similarly, Sanders dismissed three other claims made by Francis.
The first: that the SDS was keen to find out who visited the Lawrences’ home in the immediate aftermath of Stephen’s murder, again pointing to a lack of any proof of this. Yet in his statement earlier in the day, Counsel to the Inquiry David Barr KC pointed out the existence of evidence that police ‘Family Liaison Officers’ did in fact make lists of such visitors.
Secondly: Francis has also claimed that there was an attempt to ‘smear’ the Lawrences and their campaign. Sanders attempted to suggest that this would have been ‘an extraordinary and unprecedented tasking’, completely inconsistent with what the SDS did. He claimed that this would entailed ‘an extraordinary degree of bad faith’.
Duwayne Brooks: persecuted by police
It is doubtful that any of the Non-State core participants had any difficulty in believing that this was indeed something that the SDS were capable of doing, and not ‘extraordinary’ at all. Sanders is underestimating the documented extent of the bad faith with which the institutionally racist and institutionally corrupt Met approached Black families like the Lawrences at the time.
Stephen Lawrence’s friend Duwayne Brooks, the main witness to the murder, was persecuted by the Met for years. He was prosecuted on charges so trumped up that the judge threw it out without Brooks saying a word, designating it an abuise of process.
Then the Met did it again. There is no other person known to have ever had two cases thrown out as abuse of process. So yes, the Met undoubtedly did have an extraordinary degree of bad faith towards those invovled in the Lawrence campaign.
Francis has also stated that he believes that intelligence gathered by the SDS around the time of Stephen’s murder was retained and passed on to other officers (specifically Richard Walton) years later, at the time of the 1998 Macpherson Inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder. Sanders flatly states that this is ‘not true’ but offers no reasons for this opinion, and claims there are inconsistencies in what Francis has said about this over the years.
It is well established that SDS manager HN10 Bob Lambert brokered a meeting between his officer HN81 ‘Dave Hagan’ and Richard Walton, a senior officer crafting the Met’s defensive response to the Macpherson inquiry. Lambert would not have done that unless HN81 ‘Dave Hagan’ was the best officer to report on the Lawrences.
HN81 ‘DAVID HAGAN’
Special Demonstration Squad officer HN81 ‘David Hagan’
He finished his submissions with a rebuttal on behalf of one of his clients, HN81 ‘David Hagan’.
Since the Ellison Review of the Stephen Lawrence case came out in 2014, he has been referred to as ‘a spy in the Lawrence family camp’ and, according to Sanders, this has had ‘a devastating and unfair impact on him’.
Hagan denies ever meeting or speaking to the Lawrences, and says the organisation he infiltrated – the Revolutionary Internationalist League, and what he called its ‘front’ Movement For Justice – was not close to the Lawrence family, who shunned most political parties.
We note that this unrepentant and self-pitying statement completely ignores the fact that Hagan admitted that he did meet, speak to and even drive Sukhdev Reel, the mother of murdered Asian teenager Ricky Reel, to her home, a fact that has caused that family significant distress.
The Inquiry’s decision to delay seeking evidence from Hagan for over 10 years, by which time he was apparently too ‘ill’ to provide it, is one that will not be easily forgiven by many core participants.
HN86 refusing to testify
After Sanders had reached the end of what he wanted to say, the Chair, Sir John Mitting, intervened with an unexpected bit of drama.
He explained that he had made a Restriction Order in July 2018 granting anonymity over both the real and cover names of HN86.
He read at length from the anonymity application received from the ‘Designated Lawyers’ at the time, which stressed that it was in the public interest to grant HN86’s request, as this would enable him to participate as fully as possible in the Inquiry, by mitigating any risks to his health and welfare. The inference was that he was willing to co-operate and give evidence, provided his identity was protected.
Mitting stressed that the Inquiry is willing to take whatever measures are needed for HN86 to give his evidence, for example he could do so remotely. He is keen to find out what HN86 has to say, especially about some of the evidence provided by Peter Francis.
HN86 was deployed undercover as well as serving as an SDS manager. However it seems that he has now declared that he has no intention of giving any oral evidence. There are no medical grounds for this refusal. He just doesn’t want to.
Mitting then dropped the news that he had decided to serve notice under Section 21 of the 2005 Inquiries Act, to compel HN86 to give evidence, and notified him of this via his lawyers. HN86’s lawyers are now seeking to challenge that decision with a Judicial Review.
Mitting pointed out that HN86’s decision to bring legal proceedings will mean three different groups will need to reflect on the situation, and what happens next:
1. The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime will have to consider whether they should allow public money to be used to fund these proceedings, which are not designed to enable the Inquiry to continue its purpose but on the contrary, will make it more difficult.
2. If HN86 cannot be persuaded to provide oral evidence, then Mitting and his team will have to reconsider his anonymity, and maybe revoke the Restriction Order on his name that was granted in 2018.
3. The ‘Designated Lawyers’ themselves may have to reflect on whether it would be proper of them to bring proceedings ‘that aim to frustrate the purpose indicated in their application’ for that Restriction Order.
Sanders responded to the Chair’s unusually public airing of this kind of grievance by pointing out that this is actually the third such judicial review the firm has brought against the Inquiry’s decisions on the public dime, and he sees no reason why the taxpayer shouldn’t pay him to do this one too.
Dave Smith with his blacklist file
The unfairness of this is particularly stark, as Non-State core participant) Dave Smith, the country’s leading expert on employment blacklisting, is also currently seeking to bring a judicial review. In contrast to HN86, Smith is going to court in order to be able to give – rather than withhold – vital evidence to the Inquiry, and is having to pay for this out of his own pocket.
Sanders noted that HN86 is getting older (unlklike the rest of us?) and ‘doesn’t feel able to give evidence’.
According to him, the judicial review questions whether or not this Inquiry actually has any legal power to compel someone like HN86, who lives overseas, to return to the UK and give oral evidence, or even just to give it remotely.
Sanders described this question as ‘a live issue’ and ‘arguable’, adding that he ‘appreciates it is a disappointment for you and the Inquiry and others’, and almost shrugging his shoulders as he says ‘all I can do is advise him and take his instructions and represent him’.
He continues:
‘It is our position that the Inquiry has no power to compel overseas witnesses, and there is no point us trying to litigate it now’.
We can agree that the issue is an important one, as it raises questions about why this power was not used to compel HN5 John Dines to give evidence in T2 and whether it could be used to compel HN26 ‘Christine Green’ to give evidence in T3. The Inquiry had started the day by saying that Green will simply be left alone because she is ‘outside the jurisdiction’.
It was also striking that Mitting chose to air this conversation in public, and although he was very polite about it and couched it all in careful legalese, the overall impression we got was that he really is quite cross.
Peter Skelton KC was invited to comment about this development on behalf of the Commissioner, but he protested that he could not say anything at the stage about the Met’s position as he had not had time to take any instructions from them. Mitting asked that Skelton let the Inquiry know when he has received such instructions.
Despite grave reservations from civil liberties groups and those who have been targeted by Britain’s political secret police, the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill passed its third reading in the House of Commons yesterday and will now go to the Lords.
It will allow police and a range of other state agencies to self-authorise their agents to commit any crime at all.
This is not about foiling deadly terrorist plots, as laws and agencies already exist to do that. Instead, it will give carte blanche to the spycops to abuse citizens campaigning for social change. It specifically includes protecting ‘economic wellbeing’, which would make strikes, boycotts, blockades and pickets legitimate targets for the most serious crimes.
Human Rights Defeated in Parliament
Labour introduced a number of amendments to limit the powers of the Bill, including outlawing the infiltration of trade unions, deceiving people into sexual relationships, and the use of children in spying. All amendments were defeated. Nonetheless, Labour whipped MPs to abstain.
All Plaid Cymru, SDLP and Green MPs voted against it, as did most SNP and Liberal Democrat MPs and one Conservative, Adam Afriyie.
Additionally, a total of 34 Labour MPs defied their leadership to vote against the Bill. Seven of them had to resign positions to do so; shadow schools minister Margaret Greenwood, shadow Treasury minister Dan Carden, and Parliamentary private secretaries Navendu Mishra, Kim Johnson, Mary Foy, Rachel Hopkins, and Sarah Owen.
Many of us have been shocked by the failure of Labour to oppose this attack on democratic freedoms, personal security, and the labour movement in particular.
The targeted MPs were from the full width of Labour’s political spectrum. Several of them made outraged statements to parliament at the time, demanding to see their files.
Here are a few excerpts from that afternoon (with transcripts and closed captions for accessibility).
Peter Hain
Peter Hain was an active anti-racist campaigner in the 1970s and 1980s before he became a Labour MP in 1991. He was a minister for more than a decade following Labour’s 1997 election victory. He is a core participant at the Undercover Policing Inquiry.
In March 2015, he listed his fellow Labour MPs known to not only have been spied on as earlier campaigners, but having it continue while they were MPs who were supposedly protected by the ‘Wilson Doctrine’, a convention that prohibits the security services from targeting parliamentarians.
Peter Hain:
‘Would he pass on to the Home Secretary my request that she ensures that the remit of the public inquiry she’s announced into the operations of the Special Demonstration Squad includes surveillance of MPs publicly named by Peter Francis when he was an undercover officer between 1990 and 2001?
Is she aware – and is he aware – that aside from myself he saw a Special Branch file on my Right Honourable friend the member for Blackburn [Jack Straw] who was actually Home Secretary for four of these years, and files on my Right Honourable friends the members for Camberwell and Peckham [Harriet Harman] and Lewisham Deptford [Joan Ruddock] and my Honourable friends the members for Hackney North and Stoke Newington [Diane Abbott], Islington North [Jeremy Corbyn], and Bolsover [Dennis Skinner], as well as former colleagues Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone and Bernie Grant?
Did this monitoring affect our ability as MPs to speak confidentially with constituents? What, if any, impact did that have on our ability to represent them properly? We know for example that the campaign to get justice for Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager murdered by racists, was infiltrated by the SDS [Special Demonstration Squad], and that the police blocked a proper prosecution.
Did police infiltrators in the Lawrence campaign exploit private information shared by constituents or lawyers with any of us as MPs? Will the Home Office in order the police to disclose all relevant information and to each of the MPs affected our complete individual personal registry files?
It is hardly revelatory that the Special Branch had a file on people like me dating back forty years ago to anti-apartheid or Anti-Nazi League activist days because we were seen through a cold war prism as subversive. Even though we vigorously opposed Stalinism that didn’t stop us being lumped together with Moscow sympathisers. But surely the fact that these files were still active for at least ten years whilst we were MPs raises fundamental questions about parliamentary sovereignty and privilege, principles which are vital to our democracy.
It is one thing to have a police file on an MP suspected of crime, child abuse, or even co-operating with terrorism, but quite another to maintain one deriving from campaigns promoting values of social justice, human rights and equal opportunities which are shared by millions of British people. Surely, Mr Speaker, that means travelling down the road that endangers the liberty of us all.’
Jack Straw
The spycops didn’t just target members of the government who were supposedly their superiors, but they specifically spied on Jack Straw when he was Home Secretary and therefore ultimately in charge of the police.
Straw noted the sinister implication that it may well have been motivated by a desire to prevent police being held to account over the institutional racism that enfeebled their investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
Jack Straw:
‘Does the Minister accept that if these allegations are correct then we have an extraordinary situation where I as Home Secretary – and for three years from ’97 to 2000, was the police authority for the Metropolitan Police – not only knew nothing whatever about what appears to have been going on within the Metropolitan Police but may also have been subject to unlawful surveillance myself as Home Secretary? That ought to be looked at.
But the trigger, what appears to be the trigger, which is much more serious ought to be looked at, which was my decision, taken against a lot of reluctance by the Metropolitan Police, to establish a full judicial inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. And what is completely unacceptable was that it appears that elements of the Metropolitan Police were themselves spying on the bereaved family of Stephen Lawrence.’
Joan Ruddock
Like Peter Hain, Joan Ruddock was spied on earlier campaigning work, in her case the peace movement. She was weeks away from stepping down as an MP and lamented the lack of leverage she had to force answers from the police.
Joan Ruddock:
‘Thank you, Mr Speaker. In 1981 I was elected the chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and two years later an MI5 agent, Cathy Massiter, blew the whistle on the surveillance the phone taps and the collection of Special Branch reports had been undertaken on me. She cited political interference in the service. She said what had happened was illegal and she resigned.
Now, in ’87 I became a member of this House. I took the loyal oath. In 1997 I became a minister. I subsequently signed the Official Secrets Act. How is it that surveillance was carried out on me all of that time? I want to know, and get the Minister to understand, who authorised that surveillance? On what grounds was the surveillance authorised?
And he needs to answer those questions because this is a political issue, it is his responsibility, the Home Office’s and Home Secretary’s responsibility.
Mr Speaker, I am leaving this house. I can do no more than make these points, put in an FoI [Freedom of Information request] to the commissioner, write to the Home Secretary. But frankly, it is something that affects all MPs, and even though I leave he needs to do something and the future government of this House needs to ensure that there is a proper investigation. This should never ever have happened to members of this House.’
David Davis
From the other side of the chamber, Conservative MP David Davis emphasised the fact that spycops is not only a historic scandal, and insisted that the Undercover Policing Inquiry must examine activity right up to the present.
David Davis:
‘Thank you, Mr Speaker. In the last year there have been a number of revelations about the police improperly hacking into journalists’ telephone calls, improperly breaching legal privilege, and using the information they obtained from breaching legal privilege of suspects, and the government has been very coy about responding to my requests about the current state of the Wilson Doctrine.
If these allegations that have come out now are true, it indicates the Wilson Doctrine was broken in spirit if not in the letter.
Can he make sure that the inquiry actually comes right up to date in terms of what it looks into, and that it is drawn broadly enough to ensure that none of these risks exist today?’
Harriet Harman
Two MPs demanded to see the release of their files; Harriet Harman, then-Duputy Leader of the Labour Party, and a relatively unknown but long-serving backbencher by the name of Jeremy Corbyn.
Harman had been an MP for more than thirty years at the time she spoke in 2015. Not for the first time, she defended the right to political dissent without interference from spycops and demanded to see her full file.
Harriet Harman:
‘I’d like to ask the Minister – it’s more important than just feeding in our views to an inquiry, the question is what he decides – and I would like him to assure me that he, the government, will let me see a full copy of my file.
In the 70s and the 1980s when I was at Brent Law Centre and then at Liberty, I was campaigning for the rights of women, for the rights of workers, and the right to demonstrate. None of that was against the law. None of that was undermining our democracy. On the contrary, it was actually essential for our democracy.
The security services do an important job, and the government of course should support them, but if they overstep the mark the government must hold them to account. So can I repeat a request I made to the previous government that was turned down and make it again to this government in the light of these new revelations.
Will he give me an assurance that this government will release to me a full copy of my file?’
Harriet Harman is still an MP. She voted for several of the amendments to the CHIS Bill but, after they failed, she abstained on the final vote.
Jeremy Corbyn
Jeremy Corbyn is the other spied-on Labour MP who is still in the Commons. He defied the leadership to vote against the CHIS Bill last night.
Back in 2015, Corbyn’s outrage at the injustice was palpable as he spoke to the House.
Jeremy Corbyn:
‘Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m pleased that this story has finally come out and as members of parliament we’re in a position to raise questions with the Home Office and demand the truth come out. Unfortunately many, many others unknown to us who were under surveillance do not have that opportunity.
The question is one of accountability of the Metropolitan Police. Who authorised this tapping? Who knew about it? Did the Home Secretary or successive Home Secretaries know about it? If they did, why didn’t they accept the Wilson Doctrine in respect of MPs? Why did they allow this covert operation to go on within the Metropolitan Police?
And I’m very surprised that, in his answer a few moments ago, he said the files might be released to us but they may have to be redacted for security reasons. If I’m under surveillance, or the late Bernie Grant or any of my friends are under surveillance, and whatever meetings we were at they were presumably there, whatever phone calls we made they were presumably recording, I think we have a right to know about that.
We represent constituents. We’re in a position of trust with our constituents. That trust is betrayed by this invasion of our privacy by the Metropolitan Police and I ask the Minister again can we each of us have a full unredacted version of everything that was written about us, every piece of surveillance that was undertaken of us, our families and our friends?’
Still No Answers, What Next?
All their requests to see their files were, like everyone else’s, ignored by the police. Five years later and those MPs, like the rest of us, are still waiting for answers.
The public inquiry into undercover political policing finally starts on 2 November, seven years after it was promised by the Home Secretary. It has granted anonymity to most spycops officers, so even if it does reveal some truth, there is little chance of proper accountability.
A major part of the Inquiry’s remit is to make recommendations for the future. But if the CHIS Bill becomes law, it turns the Inquiry into an academic historic exercise, with the spycops of the future able to commit the most heinous abuses with impunity.
Former Special Demonstration Squad officer Peter Francis
Peter Francis, undercover police officer turned whistleblower, has declared he won’t have anything more to do with the Undercover Policing Inquiry’s anonymity applications from his former colleagues.
The former spycop, who infiltrated anti-racist groups in the 1990s and spied on the loved ones of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, says the public inquiry is protecting the guilty and concealing the truth.
Francis said:
‘I know at least half of all SDS officers. Armed with such knowledge, I had hoped to assist the Inquiry to critically assess the applications being made by former undercover police officers to keep their cover names secret. But the level of redactions accepted by the Inquiry Team is so high, even I am often unable to decipher from whom the applications are made…
‘Even when a risk assessment concludes that risks faced by an individual are “low”, the Inquiry has refused to publish his or her cover name. In such circumstances, I cannot justify continuing to incur tax payers’ money drafting written submissions or attending hearings which are clearly not going to change the approach adopted by the Chairman.’
THE SPY WHO STEPPED OUT OF THE SHADOWS
Francis was deployed by the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), a political secret police within the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch, from 1993 to 1998. He infiltrated Youth Against Racism in Europe, Movement for Justice and Militant (now the Socialist Party).
Francis was tasked to ‘find dirt’ with which to discredit the Lawrence family and Duwayne Brooks, Stephen’s friend and the main witness to the teenager’s murder.
In April the Inquiry named an officer known to have spied on the Lawrence family. Formerly known as N81, the officer – mentored by Francis – used the name David Hagan.
Francis told a 2015 conference of police corruption and racism campaigners, via his lawyer Rosa Curling:
‘I have let every single one of you down, especially the Lawrence family, by my cowardice in not appearing before the original Macpherson public inquiry when I knew in my heart at the time that I should have done so. No matter what my senior police managers were saying to me at the time, I should have been there, I should have spoken out.
‘Just imagine how many things might have changed for political protesters, especially all the black justice campaigns, had I had the bottle to do it then.’
Francis initially came forward to tell his story, only identified as ‘Officer A’, to the Observer in March 2010. It was the first time many people had heard of the SDS.
At the end of that year activists unmasked spycop Mark Kennedy, and Francis became a prime source of information for the Guardian’s detailed investigations into the unit, its remit and methods. This culminated in the Guardian journalists Rob Evans & Paul Lewis’ definitive book Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police in 2013. At that time, Francis dropped his pseudonym and shared details of his personal deployment.
He was keen to talk to Operation Herne, the Met’s self-investigation into spycops, if the Met would withdraw their threat to prosecute him under the Official Secret Act for sharing secret information. This was superseded when the full-scale public inquiry was commissioned.
THE SECRET PUBLIC INQUIRY
Since the original Inquiry Chair, Lord Pitchford, resigned for health reasons in 2017, there has been growing concern about his replacement Sir John Mitting. His credulous approval of police demands for anonymity coupled with a penchant for secrecy have seen a groundswell of protest, all of which has been ignored. He oversees a slow, shambolic and secretive excuse for a public inquiry.
Matters exploded in the February hearing of the inquiry when it discussed officers known as HN23 and HN40. Victims’ lawyer Phillippa Kaufmann QC asked why we couldn’t even be told the reason these officers were being granted total anonymity, to which Mitting famously responded:
‘They are examples of deployments where you are going to meet a brick wall of silence.’
Francis’ lawyer Maya Sikand told the court that Francis knew who the officers were and that they:
‘would have valuable evidence to give you about the violence that was permitted by Special Demonstration Squad managers to be used by Special Demonstration Squad officers.’
Francis broke protocol, rising to his feet to interject in person:
‘I have great, huge, concerns that these professional liars are spinning you, the Inquiry and definitely these poor solicitors they are working with here.’
Mitting insisted Francis sit, which he voluntarily, observing that the court’s ‘Krispy Kreme security’ would not have been capable of forcing him.
Matters came to a head at the following hearing in March, where Kaufmann led her legal team and the victims they represent out of court, telling Mitting:
‘We are not prepared actively to participate in a process where the presence of our clients is pure window dressing, lacking all substance, lacking all meaning and which would achieve absolutely nothing other than lending this process the legitimacy that it doesn’t have and doesn’t deserve.’
Francis stayed and made some forthright contributions, only to see that Mitting ignored it all and granted anonymity to many officers as planned.
Last week, Mitting turned his attention to the SDS’ successor unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, which ran from 1999-2011. His ‘minded-to’ note shows intentions to grant anonymity to a much greater proportion of these officers.
It is inexcusable, unacceptable, and proof of what the victims have been saying for months; Mitting is wholly unfit to investigate and expose police wrongdoing.
It is into this atmosphere that we now hear Peter Francis’ withdrawal from the process of anonymity applications:
‘Three years ago, Stafford Scott (another Core Participant) said that walking into the Inquiry was like walking into a boxing ring, facing the Metropolitan Police with one hand tied behind your back and a blindfold covering your eyes. Sadly, his assessment has proved correct.
‘The approach adopted by the Inquiry to restriction orders has undermined its ability to uncover the truth about undercover policing in the UK. I had hoped my involvement in this process would in part remedy the unfair advantages identified by Mr Scott but this has not proved possible.’
There is another preliminary hearing of the Inquiry this Wednesday, 9 May. It is another session on the anonymity of officers. We have no faith that Mitting has altered from his method of listening to the police, making up his mind, then having a pantomime hearing before approving his predetermined ruling. We will not waste our time on it.
Neither the victims nor Peter Francis are abandoning the inquiry, just the process of appraising applications for anonymity. We want to engage with the Inquiry, as long as it is intent on revealing the truth about Britain’s political secret police. Sir John Mitting is an obstacle to that and he cannot be left in charge.
Join us for a protest before the hearing – 9am, Wednesday 9 May at the Royal Courts of Justice, Strand WC2A 2LL.
The public inquiry into political undercover policing is in crisis, but has it ever been functional? It is as if they want to technically publish information whilst keeping it effectively secret.
Pitchford promised to have ‘a presumption for openness’. There was alarm that the new choice of Chair, Sir John Mitting, would incline the opposite way due to his background in secret courts that almost invariably comply with government surveillance agencies.
‘We are rapidly losing confidence in the Inquiry and in the abilities of John Mitting. He is rowing back on commitments made by the previous Chair, Christopher Pitchford, who stated the inquiry’s priority is to discover the truth and recognised the importance of hearing from both officers and their victims along with the need for this to be done in public as far as possible.’
It was ignored.
Mitting has shown himself to be gullible, taking police assertions at face value despite the fact that the Inquiry is into wrongdoing by trained police liars.
‘We are not prepared actively to participate in a process where the presence of our clients is pure window dressing, lacking all substance, lacking all meaning and which would achieve absolutely nothing other than lending this process the legitimacy that it doesn’t have and doesn’t deserve.’
Victims are desperate for the Inquiry to fulfil its purpose. Keenly aware that the Met would like nothing more than a boycott that let them protect their secrets, the walkout was not a permanent move. Rather, it is an act of desperation as the victims’ good faith has been eroded by a process that goes out of its way to ignore them.
We want to tell our stories of being spied upon, but we cannot do it until we all know which of our friends and comrades was actually a police spy. We come eager to participate but the Inquiry’s acquiescence to police demands for secrecy means we are blindfolded and hogtied.
Mitting grants anonymity to undercover officers even when the ‘independent risk assessor’ (a fellow police officer) says the risk of harm if they are named is low.
A few days ago we learned that officer HN15 – whose risk assessor said the danger of harm is high – is in fact Mark Jenner. He has had his real and cover names in the mainstream media along with his photo for over five years without, as far as we know, coming to any harm.
How can other officers’ risk assessments still be taken seriously? How can we trust in a Chair who believes such twaddle and then acts to shield abusers from accountability?
‘the Chair holds the rights of perpetrators in higher regard than the rights of victims. He clearly sees the officers’ human rights as sacrosanct, withholding the names of the spycops who invaded our homes, our families and our intimate lives…
‘Secrecy pervades this so-called ‘public’ inquiry, where officers who abused our rights are granted private hearings with the Chair to convince him to protect their privacy.’
But the Inquiry’s bunker attitude pre-dates Mitting’s appointment and goes beyond what he makes rulings on.
PUBLIC HEARINGS TURNING THE PUBLIC AWAY
The hearings have been held in the Royal Courts of Justice, with a public gallery that can’t quite squeeze 100 people in. With 200 significantly affected victims designated as core participants, most of them are physically prevented from attending the hearings, even before any of the wider public want to attend.
So far, only one preliminary hearing has had to turn people away – perhaps because the Inquiry won’t cover travel costs for victims who want to attend – but that will surely increase as the Inquiry moves towards hearing evidence.
Last month’s hearing took place on the same day as one for the Grenfell Tower inquiry. The Grenfell one was livestreamed, but the spycops Inquiry chooses not to let the world see what it is doing. The best it does is issue a transcript a day or two later in a bizarrely formatted PDF.
PUBLICATION UNSEEN
Much of the Undercover Policing Inquiry website is pages with links to dozens of PDFs bearing uninformative titles like ‘Detailed consultation document,’ ‘Chairman’s note on risk assessments,’ and ‘Ruling on undertakings’.
When scrolling through the list – one page is already at 66 different PDFs, some with the same name as each other – bear in mind that the Inquiry process hasn’t properly begun and the site is a small fraction of the size that it will end up.
A huge proportion of the PDFs on the site are ‘flat’, ie made of pictures of documents rather than text, which means they can’t be wordsearched and the contents won’t appear in websearches.
The search function on the website doesn’t assist. It claims there is nothing on the site about undercover officer Mark Kennedy.
A search of the site via Google turns up 56 results.
NAMING THE OFFICERS, A BIT
There was some hope of relief when they published a page listing undercover officers. However, that only lists four items of information about each officer:
Cover name
Herne nominal (without explaining what the term means)
Groups they infiltrated
Years of deployment
As ‘Alison‘, who was deceived into a relationship by a man she knew as Mark Cassidy said:
‘There is no restriction order on his real name: Mark Jenner. Yet his real name – and the real names of other confirmed officers – are not listed on this table, making it hard for the public to keep track of who’s who. It feels as if they’re always trying to keep as much hidden as possible.’
There is no link to an officer’s statements, independent assessments or anything else that is buried elsewhere on the site.
For the officers as yet unnamed, there is a link to one document that includes a ruling about them. Once the officer is named, they remove that one link and leave the reader with nothing but the four categories.
Page from undercover officer Mark Jenner’s 1996 diary, showing his attendance at a UCATT meeting
Even within that, the information is incomplete. Looking at the groups they infiltrated, they average less than two per officer. The Inquiry has previously admitted that more than 1,000 groups were spied on which, divided by the number of officers, means it must average as at least seven each. Every infiltrated group has a right to know. Why can’t we see the full list?
With the named officers, we can even name some of the other unmentioned groups they infiltrated, yet the Inquiry won’t admit it.
Whistleblower officer Peter Francis has publicly said his list is incomplete, as it omits Kingsway College Anti Fascist Group, which became Movement for Justice whilst he was infiltrating it.
Mark Jenner’s list doesn’t mention anything to do with trade unions, yet he was known to be a member of construction union UCATT and targeted other unions including the RMT, Unison, CPSA and TGWU. He was also a regular at meetings and on picket lines.
NO RESPONSE
The list of officers is incomplete in other ways. The section on those whose cover names won’t be published (‘Table Three : Where The Cover Name is Restricted’) only has has three officers, code-numbered HN7, HN123 and HN333.
This is not a matter of the page not being updated, as ‘Table Two: Where the cover name is not known’ includes officers who were decided on in the same ruling (HN322 and HN348).
We emailed the Inquiry about this on 18 March. They have ignored it.
Trying to contact them on social media would be equally futile as their Twitter bio specifically says:
‘Tweets will not be responded to.’
END THE CULTURE OF SECRECY
The Undercover Policing Inquiry has already cost over £9m and despite its glacial pace, exclusion and secrecy, it insists it does not need extra staff. If it believes it is competent, that implies it is this way by design.
This is not just an overpaid underskilled worker making a bad website. The Inquiry site, the one-way social media and the refusal to livestream hearings are all online symptoms of a wider fundamental belief that the Inquiry does not have to properly engage with the public. The only substantial information it has given has been about officers already exposed by the people who were spied on.
Mitting has had more secret hearings than public. He not only refuses to answer key questions but rebuffs requests to explain his refusal, saying ‘I know more than you do’.
It is all an extension of his and the Inquiry’s belief in themselves as establishment overseers, which gives the process an inflated trust in the police whose wrongdoing the Inquiry is supposed to expose.
Enough is enough. The clue is in the name – it is a public inquiry. It takes the public’s money, it exists to make public the truth about the abuses of Britain’s political secret police. Nothing less will do.
The recent hearing of the Undercover Policing Inquiry was a world away from the stereotype of legal proceedings. Whilst other courtrooms seize up with the stale formality and impenetrable legalese, this session was awash with dramatic force that engulfed everyone present. And not in a good way.
The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, was sitting in for his second public hearing after taking over from Christopher Pitchford. Concerns victims had about the Inquiry under Mitting’s predecessor have only multiplied as the bias towards police secrecy becomes markedly worse.
NEITHER TRUTH NOR JUSTICE
Mitting said that he would not tolerate the Metropolitan Police’s former tactic of ‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny‘ (NCND) being used to withhold from the public any information about large numbers of officers.
‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny has no part at all to play in Special Demonstration Squad deployments’
Yet he has essentially continued the Met’s policy of NCND, rebranding it by saying that revealing any details about a spycop is ‘a potential breach of an officer’s Article 8 rights’, the human right to a private life. This has been the basis of Mitting issuing blanket anonymity to batches of undercover officers in recent months.
Effectively, Mitting is saying the rights of violators are more important than the rights of the violated. Because he regards the officers’ human rights as paramount, the public won’t be told the names of these spycops who invaded citizens’ lives and breached Article 8 rights – as well as Article 3 (freedom from torture), Article 6 (the right to a fair trial), Article 10 (freedom of expression), Article 11 (freedom of assembly and association) and Article 14 (freedom from discrimination).
The overprotection of police privacy is now Mitting’s standard procedure. He looks at what the police officer says, and then at a risk assessment performed by another police officer, then he publishes redacted versions of these statements and issues a ‘minded-to note’ of his intentions.
Dutifully, we then go to hearings where Mitting basically goes along with what the police have recommended. He appears oblivious to the possibility that an officer might want to be anonymous because they have something to hide.
The one exception was the U-turn on Rick Gibson, whose real name is to be released, but only because the Undercover Research Group presented shocking new information about him deceiving women into relationships. Without his erstwhile comrades coming forward with the name the officer had used, the groups he infiltrated and when, this investigation would have been impossible.
NO NAMES = NO EVIDENCE = NO TRUTH
This is the fundamental issue of the Inquiry – we need to know the cover names used by officers in advance, so that those spied upon can give testimony on what the officers did. Without that, the Inquiry is reduced to the police selectively self-reporting.
The hearing earlier this month was concerned with seven officers, all of whom Mitting was intending to grant full anonymity.
Counsel for the victims, Phillippa Kaufmann QC, began bluntly:
KAUFMANN: ‘We are in no better position now than we were before the last hearing. On the contrary, we feel the situation has got worse…
‘these oral hearings, or the invitation of written submissions from us in advance, look increasingly like window dressing and look increasingly pointless in terms of actually having any realistic prospect of having any influence upon your decision-making. That is a matter of great public concern’
RUNNING INTO A BRICK WALL
Two of the officers were known by the code numbers HN23 and HN40. We are offered the bare minimum of information about them, basically just telling us that they existed. Mitting claims publishing their cover names could lead to the real names being discovered which, in turn, could lead to the risk of serious violence against the officers.
HN23 was deployed against one group and reported on other groups in the 1990s. They fear their friends and family will feel betrayed that they kept their spycop past a secret.
HN40 was deployed against two groups in the last decade of the existence of the SDS (ie 1998-2008). They were prosecuted under their false name. Despite this evidence of perjury and perverting the course of justice, the Inquiry seeks to fully protect the officer.
Kaufmann said the refusal to say anything at all amounted to Neither Confirm Nor Deny. Mitting responded:
MITTING: ‘With respect it is not a Neither Confirm Nor Deny approach. It is stronger than that. It is a flat refusal to say anything about the deployment in the open.’
Kaufmann then asked, if we can’t know about the officer can we at least be told why that decision has been taken?
MITTING: ‘I am afraid that HN23 as HN40, they are examples of deployments where you are going to meet a brick wall of silence.’
KAUFMANN: ‘It strikes us as extraordinary that we cannot even be told, for example, was this officer engaged in a deployment in relation to left wing groups or right wing groups. How on earth can the disclosure of that fact alone put that officer at risk?
Mitting was aloof and unrelenting, waiting for her to finish speaking and simply repeating himself.
MITTING: ‘I am afraid you are meeting a brick wall in these two cases and others.’
Maya Sikand, representing whistleblower SDS officer Peter Francis, spoke next about HN23.
SIKAND: ‘We come here, we hope to assist but we are not assisting because you will say, “Well, actually, no, this is a brick wall”. So it does beg the question as to why it is we are invited here’
Sikand then raised the stakes, saying that Peter Francis knows who HN23 is and the groups that were infiltrated.
She said of HN23:
SIKAND: ‘This is an officer who would have valuable evidence to give you about the nature of his deployment and what he was asked to do would be something that he needs to give evidence to you about, because it is likely that there was a level of violence authorised by Special Demonstration Squad managers in his deployments.
‘The difficulty with not disclosing his cover name is that you cannot have his evidence properly tested other than by those with whom he possibly perpetrated that violence or who were witnesses to it, in that group that he infiltrated. So that’s why we say it is of particular importance that you do disclose this cover name.’
Moving on to HN40, Sikand added:
SIKAND: ‘It is Peter Francis’s view that once more this officer would have valuable evidence to give you about the violence that was permitted by Special Demonstration Squad managers to be used by Special Demonstration Squad officers.’
At this point Peter Francis interjected in person.
PROFESSIONAL LIARS
Francis started by reminding Mitting that he and his fellow SDS officers lied professionally, that they had been trained to make whatever they say sound plausible.
Rising to his feet, Francis contrasted the dangers faced by SDS officers with those of former drugs squad officer Neil Woods who was sitting in the public gallery.
Pointing Woods out to the court, Francis expounded:
FRANCIS: ‘This man here is a former undercover officer himself, Neil Woods, the author of “Good Cop, Bad War“. He personally has led to more imprisonment of individuals totalling approximately 1,000 years for his deployment from 1993 all the way to 2007…
‘That one man has led to more imprisonment than the entire Special Demonstration Squad from 1968 to 2008. He is sitting here in his own name. I am sure he doesn’t mind saying he’s actually brought his wife along today. He walks in society freely and yet there is hundreds upon hundreds of people who would like to pay that man back…
‘I have great, huge, concerns that these professional liars are spinning you, the Inquiry and definitely these poor solicitors they are working with here.’
LAWRENCE SPYMASTER IS PRESUMED FLAWLESS
The court moved on to what Mitting conceded is ‘the problematic case of HN58’.
HN58 was the senior manager at the SDS during a crucial period in the late 1990s. It was five years after Stephen Lawrence was killed, and the Macpherson inquiry was investigating corruption and racism in the Metropolitan Police’s murder investigation. That inquiry was supposed to get to the truth and be the last word on the issue. But unbeknownst to them, the SDS was spying on the Lawrence campaign for justice, effectively trying to undermine the inquiry.
Mitting gave a clear statement in November 2017, saying that he wants this Inquiry to succeed where Macpherson and other previous processes have failed.
Peter Francis, who as an SDS officer was tasked to ‘find dirt’ with which to discredit the Lawrences and their campaign, said it is essential that HN58’s real name is released so his role can be discussed. Francis explained to the court:
FRANCIS: ‘I personally have promised Mr Lawrence, as in Stephen Lawrence’s father… that I would do absolutely everything for him because I and the Special Demonstration Squad let him down in the last Macpherson Inquiry.’
But withholding the real name is not the only issue with HN58. Like most SDS managers, he had previously been an undercover officer. We want the cover names published. With HN58, where there is evidence of wrongdoing as a manager, it suggests possible wrongdoing when he was an officer. His cover name must be published to allow the people he spied upon to come forward with their experiences.
1. ‘There is no known allegation of misconduct against him’.
This is absurd. How can we make any allegations against an officer if we don’t know who they are? Tell us the name and let those they spied on come forward to say if there was misconduct, otherwise Mitting is conducting his own mini-trials based solely on police evidence. Kaufmann bluntly told Mitting, ‘it is not a reason that actually makes any sense’.
2. ‘The nature of his deployment’.
This is impossible to comment on without knowing any details, but it’s clear that officers exaggerate the danger of their deployments.
3. ‘What is known of his personal and family life make it unlikely it would be necessary to investigate possible misconduct even if details of his deployment were made public’.
This is even weirder than point 1, and nobody seemed to understand what Mitting was alluding to. When challenged, he replied ‘I know more about this man than you do’.
Exactly what he meant had to be teased out of him. Eventually he said it.
MITTING: ‘We have had examples of undercover male officers who have gone through more than one long-term permanent relationship, sometimes simultaneously.
‘There are also officers who have reached a ripe old age who are still married to the same woman that they were married to as a very young man. The experience of life tells one that the latter person is less likely to have engaged in extra-marital affairs than the former.’
There were gasps of incredulity around the court. Does Mitting really believe that if a man has stayed married to one woman for a long time he will not have deceived women he spied on into sexual relationships? And that we can be so confident of this that we don’t need to check if it applies in every case?
The idea that men do not hide affairs from their wives, or have arrangements where affairs are tolerated, is utterly bizarre. It is patently untrue, as we already know from other spycops. Several are known to have stayed married to the same person (at least until the truth was exposed by those they spied on), including the infamous Mark Kennedy who had relationshipswithfourwomen who have now reached legal settlements with the Met.
A man possessed of opinions such as Mitting’s has no place running an Inquiry with sexual abuse of women and institutional sexism at its core.
CRIMES IGNORED
This moment also made clear that Mitting had been using ‘misconduct’ exclusively as a euphemism for ‘deceiving women into sexual relationships’. He had already made the women a special case at the November hearing, saying they deserved full answers, but not mentioning any other groups of victims.
It’s important to remember that sexual abuse was only one element of the spycops’ criminal misconduct. Assault, identity theft, incitement, burglary, perjury and perverting the course of justice were all commonplace. Mark Ellison QC found that not only did spycops lie to courts and spy on lawyer-client meetings, they also withheld evidence that could have exonerated accused people.
Officers have admitted to the Inquiry that they were arrested and prosecuted whilst undercover, yet Mitting has apparently decided this is not misconduct worthy of consideration, let alone telling the victims about.
‘Rather than one senior judge, this inquiry requires an independent panel of experts, along the lines of the one that advised Sir William Macpherson in the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, or the Hillsborough Independent Panel.’
WHAT’S THE POINT?
Helen Steel was deceived into a two year relationship by undercover police officer John Dines. He was only exposed through her diligent research.
Having represented herself in the same courts for the McLibel trial, the longest trial in English history, Steel is now representing herself at the Undercover Policing Inquiry, but in effect she spoke for many:
STEEL: ‘Frankly the way that the Inquiry is currently conducting this process gives the core participants absolutely no faith that it is interested in learning the truth because it is basically believing everything the police says and saying, “I don’t need to hear you because you haven’t got anything you can tell us”…
‘it is just a pointless waste of money if we are not being told enough information to effectively participate this Inquiry. It is not going to get to the truth and the whole purpose of this Inquiry is to stop the human rights abuses that were being committed by these units. You can’t do that without our participation and it is a joke that we are being excluded from this process. It is an insulting joke.’
The victims should be heard. They – the people who brought the issue into the light – are the most keen to have the truth publicly established, but they are repeatedly running into Mitting’s brick wall. His excessive faith in police integrity, and refusal to be substantially swayed from that trust, is steering the Inquiry far from its goal.
Last week the Inquiry announced that, despite all that was said at the hearing, it will withhold the real and cover names as intended (with the exception of probably releasing the real name of the now-deceased Rick Gibson). In other words, if an officer is still married to the person they were with at the time of deployment then they are assumed to be blameless and will be protected from scrutiny.
The Inquiry cannot fulfil its purpose like this. Something fundamental must change if there is to be any point in it at all.
In July 2014, police admitted there was proof that undercover officers from the Special Demonstration Squad had spied on 18 grieving groups of families and friends seeking justice for their loved ones. They did not publish a list, but said that ‘the majority’ were black. This is institutional racism.
These people were campaigning for their truth. They only wanted to know what really happened, and for people to see the police for what they actually are and what they had actually done. But people of colour self-organising is perceived as a threat in itself. This was compounded by the threat of embarrassment to the police, the brand damage that would occur if these campaigns became popular.
The combined threat was enough to have them actively befriended by paid betrayers. Officers took active, pivotal roles in campaigns. Undercover officer Mark Jenner was a long-term activist at the Colin Roach Centre, chairing meetings and editing newsletters.
Just as the infiltration of protest groups shows the counter-democratic remit of the spycops, so their infiltration of justice campaigns over a period of 26 years proves a key part of their purpose was to take an active role in obstructing justice.
The resources that should have established the truth and brought the guilty to justice were instead spent on undermining the grieving loved ones.
Which Campaigns Were Spied On?
But which campaigns were known to have been spied on? The Guardian reported that the police’s 2014 list of 18 included:
1. Harry Stanley
2. Wayne Douglas
3. Michael Menson
4. Jean Charles de Menezes
5. Cherry Groce
6. Stephen Lawrence
7. Ricky Reel
Otherreports from the time added:
8. Rolan Adams
9. Joy Gardner
The Undercover Policing Inquiry later confirmed the list included:
10. Trevor Monerville
Beyond the ten we can be sure of, it’s notable that the families of Roger Sylvester and Blair Peach are core participants at the inquiry.
Additionally, whistleblower SDS officer Peter Francis has cited the ‘moral low point’ of his time undercover as his infiltration of the Brian Douglas campaign.
It’s not clear if the Brian Douglas, Roger Sylvester or Blair Peach campaigns are on the list of 18. These are just the named ones they have admitted to spying on. There are eight unnamed and there must surely be many more besides.
We can be confident that police units devoted to secrecy – who institutionally avoided documentation and have shredded incriminating files since the Inquiry was announced – will have spied on many more justice campaigns than there is proof of.
How Many More?
We recently learned of two SDS officers from the early 1970s. Alex Sloan infiltrated the Irish National Liberation Solidarity Front at a time when they were in a demonstration against the police’s killing of Stephen McCarthy.
John Clinton infiltrated the International Socialists (forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party), 1971-74. Was he at the International Socialists-supported demonstration in June 1974 where police killed Kevin Gately outside Conway Hall in London?
There are so many other people killed by police in London whose justice campaigns seem highly likely to have been spied upon. These include Winston Rose, Cynthia Jarrett, Oluwashiji Lapite, David Ewin, Ibrahim Sey, Richard O’Brien, Sean Rigg, Derek Bennett, Azelle Rodney, Paul Coker, Frank Ogburu and Mark Duggan. There are also campaigns by loved ones of people who died in unexplained circumstances with police involvement, such as Nuur Saeed, Colin Roach, Daniel Morgan and Smiley Culture.
Additionally, there are organisations who are racial justice advocates and co-ordinate justice campaigns who were spied on in their own right. Several have already been given core participant status at the public inquiry, including the Broadwater Farm Defence Campaign, Hackney Community Defence Association, Youth Against Racism in Europe, Newham Monitoring Project and the Monitoring Group.
All these are just in the London area, and thus are likely targets for the Met’s spycops. There are many others beyond the capital such as Christopher Alder, Clinton McCrubin, James Ashley, Liddle Towers, Leon Patterson, Giles Freeman and Alton Manning. Then there are the victims of racist killings that were not properly investigated, leaving killers free to do it again.
As with learning the spycops’ names, we have only identified a fraction of the number of spied-upon justice campaigns. We have so much more to learn than the police and public inquiry have admitted to.
Here are brief details of the 13 people’s deaths whose campaigns police have confirmed they spied on.
The 13 Confirmed Campaigns
Wayne Douglas
In December 1995, Wayne was being questioned in Brixton police station. Police said he collapsed during questioning and died of heart failure. The inquest showed that Wayne, who suffered from heart disease, had been held face-down with his hands cuffed behind his back on four different occasions.
Though at the inquest the jury acknowledged police action caused Wayne’s death, by majority verdict they said it was accidental. The family’s appeal for a second inquest was refused with Lord Woolf saying:
‘little more could be achieved by subjecting all concerned to the considerable expense and stress of a further inquest.’
Wayne’s sister Lisa Douglas-Williams said:
‘We are particularly upset by the judge’s remarks about the expense of holding a further inquest. A proper verdict on my brother’s death is far more important than money.’
Michael Menson
Musician Michael Menson was racially abused and had his coat set on fire set on fire by three men in February 1997, who then went to get flammable liquid and returned to burn him more severely. In hospital, he told family and police he had been attacked. He died several days later from his injuries. Police treated it as suicide.
After two botched police investigations, the inquest verdict of unlawful killing forced a third which ended in three people being charged.
A three-year investigation for the police complaints authority by Cambridgeshire police found evidence of negligence and racism including an officer telling a pathologist:
‘I don’t know why they’re worried – this only concerns a fucking black schizophrenic.’
‘I don’t have any doubt that had a white man been set on fire in a street in north London that there would have been an active and vigorous investigation’
Jean Charles de Menezes
On 22 July 2005, Jean Charles, a 27 year old electrician, lived in South London flats that were being watched by police trying to trace people responsible for failed bombings the day before.
As he left for work he was followed by police who, failing to comply with instructions to stop him entering the tube system, followed him into Stockwell station and executed him on the train.
Spurious details appeared in the press to make him appear deserving of his fate – he was in the country illegally, wearing a bulky jacket on a hot day, his clothing had wires coming out, he vaulted the station barrier and ignored police shouts to stop – all of which were found to be untrue.
‘I want the policeman who did that punished. They ended not only my son’s life, but mine as well.’
Though the inquest uncovered a host of serious failures by police, and found the officer who shot Jean Charles did not tell the truth, no officer was charged.
The coroner had instructed the jury not to return a verdict of unlawful killing. The jury rejected the police account and returned an open verdict.
Cherry Groce
Dorothy ‘Cherry’ Groce was shot in the chest by police while they were searching her home in Brixton, south London, looking for her son Michael in September 1985. Anger erupted into rioting that evening.
Cherry survived the shooting but the bullet had passed through her spine, leaving her paralysed from the waist down. She reached a settlement with the police but they accepted no liability. Detective Inspector Douglas Lovelock was prosecuted for the shooting but acquitted.
‘When I was in my teens I used to get picked up by the police for things I hadn’t done. They would tell me I fitted the description of someone who had just committed a crime and that sort of thing. Once when I was 17 I was put into a police cell. A police officer opened a flap in the cell door and said: “Are you Cherry Groce’s son?” When I replied that I was he said: “Pity she didn’t die”.’
Cherry died in 2011, and pathologists concluded the injuries from the shooting were causal. An inquest – for which the family were denied Legal Aid until a campaign got the decision overturned – lambasted police failings in the raid and arrogance in refusing to take responsibility afterward.
Stephen Lawrence
Eighteen year old Stephen Lawrence was murdered by a racist gang in Eltham, south London, in April 1993. The swathe of police failings meant that, although everyone knew who the killers were, none were prosecuted.
Five years later the Macpherson Inquiry examined the case and famously concluded that the Met were institutionally racist.
Rev David Cruise said the case showed that it was race, not behaviour, that defined treatment by the police.
‘The irony is that the Lawrences behaved exactly how every black family is supposed to behave. They were law-abiding, close, stable, relaxed and upwardly mobile.’
Stephen’s friend Duwayne Brooks, the main witness to the murder, was repeatedly prosecuted on trumped up charges that were thrown out of court.
Two of the five killers were finally convicted in 2012. Stephen’s mother Doreen responded
‘Now that we have some sort of justice I want people to think of Stephen other than as a black teenager murdered in a racist attack in south-east London in April 1993. I know that’s the fact, but I now want people to remember him as a bright young man who any parent of whatever background would have been proud of. He was a wonderful son and a shining example of what any parent would want in a child.’
Ricky Reel
Ricky was last seen in Kingston-Upon-Thames. He had been harassed by racists who chased him towards the river. His body was found downstream a week later on 21 October 1997.
When his parents reported him missing, the police officer mockingly suggested Ricky had run away to avoid an arranged marriage or because he was secretly gay. They have consistently refused to consider the death as foul play, let alone a racist murder. When Ricky’s clothes were returned to the family, his mother Sukhdev found a big rip in the shirt. Police accused her of making it.
A report by the Police Complaints Authority concluded there had been ‘weaknesses and flaws’ in the initial investigation and criticised three officers for neglect of duty. Sukhdev became an ardent fighter for justice.
‘I became a lawyer because it was my way of processing everything that had happened to me. I just kept seeing how a normal family like ourselves, not rich, can be turned upside down overnight. You can be completely normal and secure to completely vulnerable in a heartbeat and then you’re reliant on people like the police in authority to help you.’
Fifteen year old Rolan was with his brother Nathan in February 1991 when they were attacked by a large racist gang. Telling Nathan to run, Rolan was chased, cornered and fatally stabbed in the neck.
Though there were 15 attackers only one, Mark Thornburrow, was convicted of the killing. Four others were found guilty of public order offences and given 120 hours’ community service.
Two years later, Stephen Lawrence was murdered nearby. Two of the four convicted over Rolan’s death were named in the Macpherson report into Lawrence’s murder as individuals the police should interview.
Rolan’s father Richard Adams said:
‘There is no doubt that had Rolan’s murder been investigated properly, Stephen Lawrence may still have been alive today.’
Harry Stanley
Harry Stanley was a 46 year old painter and decorator, brought up in Glasgow but living in London all his adult life. In September 1999 he was returning home with a bag containing a table leg that had been repaired by his brother.
Police had received a call about “an Irishman with a gun wrapped in a bag”. Two armed officers challenged Harry from behind. As he turned to face them, they shot him dead at a distance of 15 feet.
The coroner only allowed a verdict of lawful killing or an open verdict, and the jury opted for the latter. Harry’s family managed to get a second inquest which returned a verdict of unlawful killing. The officers involved were suspended, but after more than a hundred of their colleagues handed in their firearms authorisation cards in protest, the suspensions were lifted.
‘If this can happen to my dad, it can happen to anyone. It just proves that nobody is safe on the streets.’
In 2005 the High Court the High Court decided that there was insufficient evidence for the verdict of unlawful killing and reinstated the original verdict, with the judge saying a third inquest should not be allowed. The Stanley family said
‘families cannot have any confidence in the system. They feel they cannot get justice when a death in custody occurs’
Joy Gardner
Mature student Joy Gardner had her north London house raided by immigration officials in June 1993.
When she resisted attempts to put her in a 4-inch wide restraint belt with attached handcuffs she was shackled, gagged, and 13 feet of adhesive tape was wrapped round her head. She rapidly suffered respiratory failure and died four days later without regaining consciousness.
Joy’s mother, Myrna Simpson, said the police were in denial about their racism.
‘[Met chief] Paul Condon said it was not about race. Well, I say, how many white women have they done that to? Look at [serial killer] Rose West and look at what she did. But they still treated her as a human being. They didn’t go into her house, truss her up and kill her. What they did to Joy was terrible, terrible. I just keep asking why? Why? Why?’
Three police officers were charged with manslaughter. Though four pathologists agreed on the cause of death, police – as they would do later with Ian Tomlinson – found one who would give an alternative cause. The suggestion that it was a head injury, rather than complete blockage of airways, that caused the lack of oxygen gave a grain of doubt and all three officers were acquitted.
The use of gags was banned shortly after, but no admission has ever been made that it was part of the cause of Joy’s death.
Special Demonstration Squad boss Bob Lambert oversaw the spying on Joy’s family campaign. At the time of her death, Joy was studying Media Studies at London Metropolitan University, which would later coincidentally employ Lambert as a lecturer.
Trevor Monerville
In January 1987, 19 year old Trevor Monerville was taken to the notorious Stoke Newington police station. Two days later his father John reported him missing and the police still didn’t say he was in custody.
Trevor had been severely beaten, with extensive injuries to his face and brain which left him with permanent brain damage. Police had then taken him to hospital where he had to have emergency brain surgery.
The Police Complaints Authority refused to release the custody record, and Trevor’s doctors were told not to speak to the family’s lawyers.
Afterwards, Trevor was repeatedly arrested and charged for various offences, and was repeatedly acquitted.
Trevor was murdered in an apparent street robbery in 1994. Nobody was ever charged.
Trevor’s 73 year old grandmother was assaulted by police so badly that she eventually received £50,000 compensation.
In 2013, Trevor’s brother Joseph Burke-Monerville was shot in a case of mistaken identity. The three main suspects were so implicated that they were forced to attend the inquest and eventually charged only for the Crown Prosecution Service to offer no evidence on the day of the trial. In 2017 they lodged a 15-page complaint about police failings over the murder.
‘It would be a real joy to the family to have a conviction. Twice around and we have had no result whatsoever. We are in limbo, waiting.’
At Joseph’s inquest, the family wondered why Trevor hadn’t had one. Their lawyer discovered in August 2017 there had in fact been an inquest for Trevor but the family hadn’t been told about it.
Roger Sylvester
In January 1999, police were called as Roger Sylvester was outside his house and shouting. Thirty year old Roger had bipolar disorder and wasn’t himself that day. Eight police restrained him and took him away for detention under the Mental Health Act.
Though officers are trained not to restrain people face down, they did this with Roger. He suffered serious brain damage and cardiac arrest, and fell into a coma.
The Met’s press office issued a statement claiming that someone had called 999 and described Roger as acting in an ‘aggressive and vociferous manner’. They were later forced to admit this wasn’t true and apologise for it. Roger died eight days later without regaining consciousness.
Police coroner Freddy Patel told the media Roger was a crack user, something his family denied. Patel later performed the autopsy on Ian Tomlinson that favoured the police version of events and led to Tomlinson’s killer’s acquittal. In 2012 Patel was struck off by the General Medical Council who found that he was not only incompetent but also dishonest.
Though it took four years to get an inquest for Roger, it took the jury only two hours to reach a unanimous verdict of unlawful killing. The officers responsible for the killing had the verdict overturned on appeal.
‘From day one we were told to expect openness, accountability and transparency. We merely wanted truth and where necessary justice. Instead we have had obstacles, delays, anguish, smoke and mirrors and ‘just-ice’. Where is the justice?’
Blair Peach
Teacher Blair Peach went on an Anti-Nazi League demonstration in Southall, South London on 23 April 1979. It was a few weeks ahead of the general election and the National Front were having an election meeting at the Town Hall.
Having broken away from the main demonstration into a side street, Peach was confronted by a vanful of Special Patrol Group riot officers, one of whom fractured his skull with an unauthorised weapon. Eleven witnesses gave testimony.
The coroner dismissed the possibility of an officer killing Peach, discounted accounts from Sikh witnesses, and tried to prevent a jury being instated. A misadventure verdict was returned.
Crucially, the inquest ignored the report by Commander John Cass which found the SPG officers had a range of unauthorised weaponry and Nazi memorabilia. The officers refused to co-operate with the inquiries and many changed their appearance to impede witnesses ability to identify them. The Cass report was published 30 years later. It identifies ‘Officer E’ as ‘almost certainly’ being Peach’s killer.
Blair’s partner, Celia Stubbs, reflected on Blair and his measure of justice after so long.
‘He was a dedicated teacher, a committed trade unionist and anti-fascist. He was a good, funny and loving person to his family and friends. He was a socialist who believed passionately in fairness and equality.
‘He supported the Bengali community in their protests against the National Front selling their newspapers in Brick Lane, demonstrated outside a pub that would not serve black customers, and had been instrumental in getting the National Front headquarters closed in Shoreditch.
‘It was his socialist beliefs that took him to Southall, and it is amazing that he is remembered by so many people.’
Officer Alan Murray – who lied to investigators and refused to take part in identity parades at the time – has identified himself as the officer in question (though he denies killing Peach). Neither he, nor anyone else, has ever faced any charges.
Brian Douglas
Police stopped Brian Douglas while driving in May 1995. Witnesses say that PC Mark Tuffey used a then-new extendable baton to strike a downwards blow on Brian’s head. Tuffey said it was aimed at the upper arm but slid up over the shoulder.
Three pathologists later said Brian had received hard blows to the back of the head. Brian suffered massive and irreversible brain damage. Despite vomiting in his cell, he was left for 12 hours before finally being transferred to hospital where he died.
‘I fear that the numbers killed in police custody over recent years without redress may have helped to shape the attitude that informed those officers when they brought down that baton on my brother’s skull.’
The campaign was spied on by Special Demonstration Squad officer Peter Francis who has described his subsequent shame.
‘By me passing on all the campaign information – everything that the family was planning and organising through Youth Against Racism in Europe – I felt I was virtually reducing their chances of ever receiving any form of justice to zero. To this day, I personally feel that family has never had the justice they deserved.’
Although it may be hard to feel sympathy for the officers of Britain’s political secret police units, there’s no doubt the enacted split in their lives and values caused them severe psychological stress. In a less understanding era, and amidst the inherently macho police culture, such damage was seen as a personal weakness, but since the mid 1990s a few have successfully forced payments out of the Met for PTSD and other harms.
All spycops had to be married. Having a family was thought to give them an anchor in their ‘real’ life – something to come back out for, to prevent them getting lost in their activist social circles or to prohibit temptation to switch sides. Still, the strain on relationships – the secrecy, absence, the warping of personality caused by having two characters inhabiting one mind – has broken one family after another.
Whilst the shocking accounts of activist women abused by spycops have come to light, we are yet to hear from the damaged families also caught up in these stories, though this may change as the forthcoming public inquiry has granted several members of officers’ families ‘core participant’ status.
Beyond their ruined families, after long-term niche activity, spycops aren’t qualified for much else. So what did they do afterwards? Most of the 150 or so spycops are unknown, though the few we have identities of point us to examples of what their lives look like.
Mark Kennedy, 2011
Mark Kennedy’s deployment ended in late 2009 and even before he left the police he had signed a contract to do the same spying under the same false identity this time for a private firm.
He was hired by Global Open, a company set up by another former Special Branch officer, Rod Leeming, who had taken knowledge and contacts from the police’s Animal Rights National Index and was using it to provide spies for institutions targeted by animal liberation campaigners. Kennedy – without fake ID or his team of police handlers, strategists and psychologists – soon came unstuck and was exposed by activists.
Prone to self-aggrandising claims, in February 2013 he told the Home Affairs Select Committee he worked for the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, adding that he had just taken a security job with a large leisure firm. It’s comforting to imagine this means he is doing nightwatch in a leaky caravan at Center Parcs.
His was ‘hands down regarded as the best tour of duty ever’, leading to promotion as head of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) from 1993-1998, deploying a new generation of officers who took his methods as a template.
It’s not clear what he did from 1999-2001, though it’s notable that this is when the other spycops unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), was established.
In 2002 he set up the Muslim Contact Unit. It’s very odd that the Met’s Special Branch, as intelligence gatherers, would run a community outreach project. It’s even more fishy that they did so using their most effective infiltrators who had no other obvious skillset. Why use spies, unless you’re spying?
Lambert left the police in 2007, collecting an MBE ‘for services to policing’ on his way out. He then gained several academic posts and began writing and speaking on counter-extremism, notably regarding Islam. After his past was revealed by activists in 2011, he swiftly resigned from his planned ten-year project at Exeter University and stopped his public appearances.
He continued to lecture at the University of St Andrews and London Metropolitan University, training a new generation of police managers. Following a series of protests at both institutions, including talks to staff and students, and with the excoriating IPCC report on Lawrence family spying pending, he resigned from both positions in December 2015.
Mike Chitty undercover in the 1980s
Mike Chitty was the first SDS officer tasked with infiltrating the animal rights movement. Rather than inveigling himself into hardcore activism he was ineffectual and only ever managed to be a peripheral member of animal welfare groups. Like many undercover officers, he moved on to police VIP protection work.
Two years later, in 1989, Chitty secretly returned to his old targets. He wasn’t interested in the politics but rekindled friendships and romantic relationships. He would change his clothes, swap cars and become ‘Mike Blake’ again.
After a further two years, his bosses wondered why his claims for travel expenses were so much higher than his colleagues and why he was working in Wiltshire but buying petrol in Surrey. His superiors sent Bob Lambert to investigate.
Lambert spent 18 months feigning friendship and persuading the disgruntled Chitty not to take action against the police or go to the press. In May 1994, Lambert presented his report to his bosses at Special Branch. Suitably impressed, they made him Head of Operations in the SDS by the end of the year.
The following year Chitty finally brought a claim against the Met, but dropped it when he was awarded an ill-health pension. He ended his four-year double life and emigrated to South Africa.
Helen Steel confronts John Dines, 2016
John Dines, who overlapped with Lambert infiltrating London Greenpeace, began a relationship with Helen Steel shortly before McDonald’s served the McLibel writs. They lived together for two years.
Steel tenaciously investigated and exposed Dines in 2013, but this was not the end of it.
Peter Francis spied on racial justice campaigns in the 1990s. He became disenchanted with the purpose of the work, and, after his deployment, brought a claim for PTSD. In 2010, months before any spycops had been outed, he did an anonymous interview with The Observer. He used the article to tout for a book deal but no publisher thought the issue would be interesting to readers.
Following Mark Kennedy’s unmasking, Francis – under the pseudonym Pete Black – guardedly gave more information to Guardian journalists Rob Evans and Paul Lewis. The wealth of material formed the core of their definitive book Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police.
In June 2013, Francis finally came out of the shadows and was interviewed for the explosive Dispatches documentary which revealed he had been ordered to discredit Stephen Lawrence’s family.
Unique so far among the spycops, he has subsequently given statements which have been helpful to justice campaigners rather than himself. It’s surprising that he has only been the subject of one smear piece in the Daily Mail, though they may be saving more to discredit his testimony in the pending public inquiry.
Roger Pearce, 2013
Roger Pearce is something of an outlier in terms of our knowledge. Rather than being exposed by those he spied on, we only have a tapestry of his own admissions (so much for the Special Branch’s ‘sacred’ policy of Neither Confirm Nor Deny’).
Pearce was an undercover SDS officer from 1978-1980 and went on to run the unit in the mid 80s, overseeing Lambert and Chitty. He stayed with the Met’s Special Branch and was its head for the final years of his police career, 1999-2003, which were the first four years of the NPOIU. He then took a counter-terrorism post with the Foreign Office before moving on to be European Security Director for GE Capital.
In recent years, he has published two police spy novels, Agent of the State (which, according to his website is being adapted for TV), and The Extremist.
Jim Boyling was the star protégé of his manager, Bob Lambert. Undercover from 1995-2000 – during which time he had two children with Rosa, a women he spied on – he was still a serving police officer when he was exposed in January 2011. His behaviour, though typical of spycops and well known to his superiors, was indisputably serious and he was suspended pending an investigation into his professional conduct. In what is, even by corrupt police cover-up standards, an astonishing feat of procrastination, six years later the investigation is understood to be still in its preliminary stages.
The Crown Prosecution Service looked into whether Boyling and other officers should face criminal charges. They appear to have taken Boyling’s version of events at face value and not bothered talking to anyone he targeted. In September 2014 they decided not to charge any officers with anything.
More than six years since the scandal broke, no spycops have even faced disciplinary proceedings, let alone criminal prosecution.
Originally published by Real Media, 18 January 2017
Political spying is not new. The Metropolitan Police founded the first Special Branch in 1883. Initially focusing on Irish republicanism in London, it rapidly expanded its remit to gather intelligence on a range of people deemed subversive. Other constabularies followed suit.
But in 1968, the Met did something different. The government, having been surprised at the vehemence of a London demonstration against the Vietnam War, decided it had to know more about political activism. The Met were given direct government funding to form a political policing unit, the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS).
About twelve officers at a time would change their identities, grow their hair and live among those they spied on for years at a time. They would ‘become’ activists, each infiltrating a particular group on the far left, far right or in other areas of dissent such as the peace movement and animal rights. They were authorised to be involved in minor crime.
The police and the secret state have always used informers, and even private investigators, as part of their surveillance work. However, the SDS was unique in being a police unit set up to focus on political groups with extended periods of deployment. The model was rolled out nationally in 1999 with the creation of the SDS off-shoot, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU).
The Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance is primarily concerned with these dedicated political secret police – the long-term, deep-cover officers of the SDS, the NPOIU, and the successor units that subsumed them and their roles.
It’s generally accepted that there have been around 150 of these undercover officers since the SDS was formed in 1968. This figure comes from work by the Undercover Research Group and activists, and extrapolation from details in official reports.
Operation Herne, the Met’s self-investigation into the spycops scandal, said in July 2013
‘To date Operation Herne has verified one hundred and six (106) covert names that were used by members of the SDS.’
This is just the SDS. Last year, Mark Ellison’s report into spycops causing miscarriages of justice asked about the NPOIU, which ran from 1999-2011.
‘Operation Herne has identified fewer than 20 NPOIU officers deployed over that period’
However,
‘Operation Herne’s work to investigate the nature and extent of the undercover work of the NPOIU was only able to begin in November 2014 and has barely been able to ‘scrape the surface’ so far’.
There may well be more spycops from either or both units.
Other, similarly hazy, approaches arrive at a similar number. The SDS ran for 40 years and is understood to have had around 12 officers deployed at any given time, usually for periods of four years. This would make a total of 96 undercover officers. However, it’s known that some officers were active for a fraction of the usual time, so the real figure will be somewhat higher.
Assuming the same scale for the NPOIU gives a total of 36 officers. That is a fuzzy guess though – the NPOIU was a new, national unit and may have deployed more officers.
[UPDATE July 2019: There are now known to have been at least 139 undercover officers – see detail at the end of this article]
The Operation Herne report from 2013 said that, of the 106 identified SDS officers, 42 stole the identity of a dead child, 45 used fictitious identities, and 19 are still unknown. The practice of stealing identities was mandatory in the unit for about 20 years until the mid-1990s. The NPOIU, starting in 1999, is only known to have stolen a dead child’s identity for one officer, Rod Richardson.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
There are certainly some more spycops from the successor units.
The Met merged its Special Branch (including subsidiaries like the SDS) with its Anti-Terrorist Branch in October 2006 to form Counter Terrorism Command. They reviewed and shut down the SDS in 2008.
Although the NPOIU used a number of Met Special Branch officers, from 2006 it was overseen by the Association of Chief Police Officers as part of their National Domestic Extremism Unit (NDEU). In 2012, the NDEU was also absorbed into the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command. At the same time, the NDEU changed its name and stopped having any responsibility for undercover officers.
Last November the Met’s Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt issued an abject apology to eight women deceived into relationships with undercover officers. Two months later Carlo Neri, another officer who had similar relationships, was exposed. Assistant Commissioner Hewitt assured the BBC that the Met
‘no longer carries out ‘long-term infiltration deployments’ in these kinds of groups but would accept responsibility for past failings’
That appears to contradict a 2013 report by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary. It plainly says today’s spycops are deployed by the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command and similar regional units.
‘The NDEU restructured in January 2012, and now operates under the umbrella of the MPS Counter Terrorism Command (which is known as SO15). NDEU has also recently been renamed, and is now called the National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit (NDEDIU)…
‘The NDEU’s remit changed at the same time as its restructure and no longer carries out any undercover operations. All deployments of undercover officers which target the activity of domestic extremists are coordinated either by the SO15 Special Project Team (SPT), or by one of the regional SPTs…
‘The SPTs are in the North West, North East and West Midlands Counter Terrorism Units, and the Counter Terrorism Command in London.’
HOW MANY SPYCOPS ARE KNOWN?
There are 17 [UPDATE September 2019: now 76] spycops who have been named. There are strong suspicions about several more. Fifteen of the seventeen have been exposed by their victims. One has been exposed by journalists, one by the officer himself – Peter Francis, the only whistleblower. None have come from the police.
Journalists – notably Rob Evans and Paul Lewis at the Guardian – have substantially fleshed out the activists’ research. The Met recently claimed to be having trouble even sorting their records into order. If that is true then perhaps the best bet would be to allow these tenacious activists and journalists, who have done such sterling work despite police obstructions, to come and have a go.
Although the 17 spycops’ identities are properly established, with most of them having extensive details and numerous photos in the public domain, the Met are reluctant to give any further information.
Until the cover names are known, the majority of people targeted don’t even know it happened. Waiting for victims to investigate and gather evidence is a denial of justice. This is why most people granted ‘core participant’ status at the forthcoming public inquiry – mostly activists confirmed as significantly affected – have called for the release of all cover names and the names of the groups who were spied upon.
The Met say they must ‘neither confirm nor deny’ that anybody was ever an undercover officer (for a demolition of their ‘policy’ of Neither Confirm Nor Deny, you cannot do better than Helen Steel’s superb speech to the Pitchford Inquiry into undercover policing). On many occasions they have even refused to refer to Mark Kennedy by name, as if it’s still a secret. This came long after he hired Max Clifford to sell his story for a tabloid front page splash, which is about as unsecret as it’s possible to get.
After three years of legal wrangling, in August 2014 courts forced the Met to admit that Jim Boyling and Bob Lambert were spycops (again, long after both officers had personally talked to the media).
In March 2014 the Met’s Operation Herne produced an 84 page report concerning SDS whistleblower Peter Francis’ revelations about spying on the family of Stephen Lawrence. It said it
‘will not confirm or deny if Peter Francis was an undercover police officer’
As if they might devote all that time and effort to the ramblings of a fantasist.
It’s an insult to those who have been abused. It’s also a double injustice familiar to other victims of state wrongdoing – there’s what the state does, then how it pours resources to smear, lie and obstruct justice for its victims.
This doesn’t bode well for the forthcoming public inquiry.
Today, Kennedy, Lambert and Boyling are still the only three spycops the Met will officially admit to. Here is the list of 17.
WHO ARE THE SPYCOPS?
Peter Francis AKA ‘Peter Daley’ or ‘Pete Black’, 1993-97.
SDS. Self-disclosed. Initial exposure March 2010, real name given June 2013
Jim Boyling AKA ‘Jim Sutton’, 1995-2000.
SDS. Exposed by activists, January 2011
UPDATE July 2017: How many spycops have there been?
In February 2017 the National Police Chiefs Council told the Inquiry
The current position is that there are believed to have been 118 undercover officers engaged in the SDS, and a further up to 83 management and ‘backroom’ staff.
The Inquiry has written to 54 former members of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit who are believed to have been either undercover police officers or cover officers (26 undercover officers and 28 cover officers).
This makes a total of at least 144 undercover officers in the two units (it should be noted that the Inquiry may not have written to all NPOIU officers).
UPDATE JULY 2019:
The Undercover Policing Inquiry’s Eighth Update Note said there were 117 undercover officers in the SDS, and a further 22 in the NPOIU, making a total of 139.
The German government have formally asked to be included in the forthcoming Pitchford inquiry into undercover policing. Five officers from Britain’s political secret police units are known to have been in the country.
Special Demonstration Squad whistleblower Peter Francis says he was the first officer to work abroad when he was sent to an anti-racist gathering in Bavaria in 1995. Francis was accompanied by his handler who stayed in a nearby hotel – the infamous former officer turned overseer Bob Lambert. The recently exposed officer known as RC is also reported to have been in Germany around ten years after Francis.
Mark Kennedy was also a frequent visitor to the country, and in 2007 went with fellow officer Marco Jacobs. Kennedy was arrested in 2006 in Berlin for arson after setting fire to a dumpster, and again at an anti-G8 protest in 2007. He gave his false name to authorities which – along with arson, of course – is a crime in Germany.
The forthcoming Pitchford inquiry is planning to only examine actions of spycops in England and Wales. As the majority of exposed officers were active in Scotland (and Scottish chief constable Phil Gormley had oversight of both spycops units at the key time) it is patently absurd to exclude Scotland from the inquiry.
Despite their government formally asking to be included last year, and even Tories demanding Theresa May accede, there has been no real response. It has been six months now, yet we have merely been told time and again that “talks are ongoing”.
With the preliminary sessions of the inquiry mostly over, it is starting to look like the Home Office is simply stalling and that the lack of a response will effectively become a refusal once the inquiry begins.
For their part, two representatives of the inquiry fielded questions at the recent conference hosted by the Monitoring Group and Centre for Crime and Justice Studies. They told those attending that it would be nonsense to exclude part of an officer’s story just because it happened abroad, and the inquiry would want the full picture.
Whilst this is some comfort, it is far from good enough. Firstly, the spoken assurance of underlings is very different to the declared decision of the Chair.
More importantly, it avoids many of the real issues. Spying abroad raises questions far beyond the officers’ own stories. Who organised it? Who decided their remit and purpose? How much did the host country know? Who is responsible for crimes committed by officers whilst abroad?
absolutely zero schooling in any law whatsoever. I was never briefed, say for example, if I was in Germany I couldn’t do, this for example, engage in sexual relationships or something else.
NORTHERN IRELAND ALSO IN THE QUEUE
The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) says police weren’t even told that spycops were being deployed there. Yet German police confirmed to Andrej Hunko that Mark Kennedy was directed and paid by German police. Which operations were done which way, and why?
That mention of ignorance is the first official comment from police about spycops being in Northern Ireland. SDS officer Mark Jenner was there in August 1995 fighting with nationalists in a violent clash with the loyalist Apprentice Boys of Derry march.
This week PSNI’s Assistant Chief Constable Mark Hamilton told the BBC that nobody in the Northern Ireland police was ever aware the SDS were there, nor of any information being passed to them from the SDS.
With myriad other undercover operations going on in Northern Ireland during the conflict, to have sent Met officers in seems dangerously blase at best. Hamilton said
risk assessments have to be carried out. Anybody who’s deployed here without those assessments would be, in my view, an act of madness.
It seems hard to believe the SDS were so cavalier as to send their officers blundering in like that. Perhaps their contacts in the Northern Irish police aren’t admitting anything. Perhaps the SDS was working with some other arm of the British state. Or maybe this really is another area where the SDS simply didn’t think about the possible impacts on the people it worked among.
All this only refers to the SDS in Northern Ireland. Mark Kennedy, of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, was active in Belfast in 2008. He was there with activist Jason Kirkpatrick who has had confirmation that the Northern Irish government has also asked to be included in the Pitchford inquiry.
ALL IRELAND SPYING
Kennedy was a repeat visitor south of the border as well, notably fighting with police in a Mayday demonstration in 2004. It’s been five years since this was made public knowledge and Michael D Higgins TD – now president of Ireland – demanded an explanation.
SDS officer Jim Boyling was there in the mid 1990s so it’s clear the Republic, like the North, has a long history of being targeted by both of Britain’s main spycops units.
HOW MUCH MORE?
Last year we compiled a list of 17 countries visited by spycops over a period of 25 years. It is barely the beginning. All of these instances come from the fifteen exposed officers from the political secret police units. There are over a hundred more about whom we know nothing.
How much more of this – and what else that we haven’t even imagined – did they do? What campaigns did they infiltrate? Whereabouts were they? What crimes did they commit? Which children are still looking for disappeared fathers under false names?
Their actions – which the Met itself describes as “manipulative, abusive and wrong” – were perpetrated against uncounted numbers of people. The apologies and inquiry apply to actions in England and Wales, but it is no less abhorrent if the victim is abroad and/or foreign.
The German request is a major event. The extensive incursion of spycops into politically sensitive Irish territories surely means there will surely be more demands for inclusion and information coming from there as well. Affected activists have also initiated a legal case in Northern Ireland to force inclusion in the inquiry, a tactic that may well spread to other countries. Yet the disdain with which the Scottish government’s long-standing demand has been treated by the Home Office means the fight is far from over.
The arrogant disregard for the personal integrity and wellbeing of individuals was carried over to the laws and statutes of entire countries. Everyone who has been abused by spycops deserves the full truth, be they a solitary citizen or a sovereign nation.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.AcceptRejectRead More
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
Despite grave reservations from civil liberties groups and those who have been targeted by Britain’s political secret police, the 
The recent 
In July 2014, police admitted there was proof that undercover officers from the Special Demonstration Squad had spied on 18 grieving groups of families and friends seeking justice for their loved ones. They did not publish a list, but said that ‘the majority’ were black. This is institutional racism.
Fifteen year old Rolan was with his brother Nathan in February 1991 when they were attacked by a large racist gang. Telling Nathan to run, Rolan was chased, cornered and fatally stabbed in the neck.
Mature student Joy Gardner had her north London house raided by immigration officials in June 1993.
In January 1987, 19 year old Trevor Monerville was taken to the notorious Stoke Newington police station. Two days later his father John reported him missing and the police still didn’t say he was in custody.
In January 1999, police were called as Roger Sylvester was outside his house and shouting. Thirty year old Roger had bipolar disorder and wasn’t himself that day. Eight police restrained him and took him away for detention under the Mental Health Act.
Teacher Blair Peach went on an Anti-Nazi League demonstration in Southall, South London on 23 April 1979. It was a few weeks ahead of the general election and the National Front were having an election meeting at the Town Hall.
Police stopped Brian Douglas while driving in May 1995. Witnesses say that PC Mark Tuffey used a then-new extendable baton to strike a downwards blow on Brian’s head. Tuffey said it was aimed at the upper arm but slid up over the shoulder.
The German government have formally asked to be included in the forthcoming