LONDON — Survivors of undercover police spying have published their own consultation report after boycotting the Home Office’s online questionnaire, which they say was ‘rigged’.
Non-state core participants in the Undercover Policing Inquiry say the Home Office consultation on the future of the inquiry was designed to produce a predetermined outcome, with the apparent aim of legitimising Ministers taking the unprecedented step of shutting a statutory public inquiry down.
The Inquiry into the spycops scandal is proving to be highly embarrassing for the Metropolitan Police. Campaigners cite police obstruction of the Inquiry, a biased questionnaire, a history of interference by previous Home Secretaries, and a direct conflict of interest, saying it looks like an attempt at a state cover-up.
Today, in advance of the Home Office’s own consultation report, the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance have published an analysis of 2,690 letters sent to the Home Office by stakeholders and members of the public, after survivors of spycops abuses urged allies to boycott the official survey and write directly to the Home Office instead.
The report finds unanimous opposition to curtailing the Inquiry, calling for it to be completed to ensure the shocking police malpractice exposed never happens again.
Ben Leamy of the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance explained:
‘I believe the consultation is a sham, a pretext. The decisions Ministers will make off the back of it will have significant implications for state transparency and accountability.
We are publishing this report because we do not trust the Home Office to accurately represent the views expressed.
Our report shows the strength of the responses from thousands of people who boycotted the rigged Home Office questionnaire and sent letters instead.’
The letters point to the fact the questionnaire offered respondents no option to support the Inquiry continuing under its original Terms of Reference, instead forcing respondents to answer multiple-choice questions geared to choosing which bits of the Inquiry could be discarded, and rating alternative proposals for after the original inquiry is shut down.
Dave Morris, a core participant in the Inquiry said:
‘The police spent five years trying to sabotage this Inquiry with endless secrecy applications, closed hearings, and redactions.
Now Ministers want to cite those self-inflicted delays and costs as an excuse to shut it down before it examines modern political policing.
It is vital that this policing scandal is fully exposed and never allowed to happen again. Allowing police to escape accountability simply by making an inquiry too slow and expensive sets a dangerous precedent.”
Core Participants have written to the Ministers responsible to ask for meetings as well as writing to Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, calling on his government to support state candour for victims and uphold the spirit of the Hillsborough Law. They point to a conflict of interest at the heart of the review.
The current consultation was launched by the Labour Government in the summer, but Campaigners say the Home Office has been seeking to curtail the Inquiry for longer than that.
A freedom of information request revealed that in October 2023, then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman secretly proposed changes to the terms of reference, with the idea of holding a public consultation and ending the inquiry at the end of 2026. Taken together, campaigners say, this amounts to the appearance of a state cover-up.
‘Lisa’ from Police Spies Out of Lives, who was deceived into a six-year intimate relationship by undercover officer Mark Kennedy explained:
‘There is a conflict of interest at the heart of this review, because the Home Office is itself a subject of investigation for the role it played in authorising and funding abusive undercover units.
The Home Office Minister, Lord Hanson of Flint, who is overseeing the consultation, was Policing and Security Minister in 2009. He had oversight of the covert unit that was deceiving me into an intimate relationship.
That is due to be investigated in the part of the Inquiry the Home Office is now proposing to cancel.
Letting a minister decide whether operations on his own watch will be investigated can’t be right.’
Core demands of the non-state Core Participants:
– scrap all proposals to curtail or narrow the Inquiry.
– guarantee all remaining elements of the Inquiry proceed in full.
– appoint a new Chair and expert panel.
– enforce disclosure timetables backed by sanctions against further police obstruction.
The Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) was established in 2015 following a series of scandals involving undercover policing . Evidence heard by the Inquiry has included: theft of deceased children’s identities; deceptive sexual relationships; targeting of anti-racist and family justice campaigns; unlawful blacklisting of trade unionists; infiltration of environmental, anti-war and community organisations; reporting on legitimate political activity. www.ucpi.org.uk/about-the-inquiry
Outstanding work
The Inquiry’s chair, Sir John Mitting, retires in 2027 and rather than appoint a replacement, the Home Office took the opportunity to launch the consultation. As a result there is currently no Chair in place for Tranche 4, Tranche 5, and Module 3. These tranches should examine the legal framework that still governs undercover policing today, and Module 3 that should be making recommendations to ensure the identified failings do not reoccur.
The consultation
Launched on 16 July 2026 during tranche 3 hearings with a deadline of 20 August 2026 until complaints forced the Home Office to extend until 20 September.
Section 14 (1b), Inquiries Act 2005 permits ministers to end an inquiry early. Explanatory Notes state that the power is intended for where it is “no longer necessary or possible for the inquiry to continue”.
Conflict of Interest
Ending the inquiry early would effectively reward obstruction and set a precedent that inquiries can be terminated by making them too slow and expensive to complete.
The Home Office is itself a subject of investigation in the Inquiry, making its role in deciding the inquiry’s fate a conflict of interest.
Additionally, Lord Hanson of Flint was Minister for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing from June 2009 to May 2010, squarely within Tranche 4.
He now oversees the consultation set to decide whether the Inquiry examines that period at all.
Gunning principles
These are requirements for lawful consultations, confirmed by R (Moseley) v Haringey LBC [2014] UKSC 56, stipulating that: proposals be consulted on at a formative stage (not pre-determined); sufficient information be given to permit intelligent consideration and response; adequate time be allowed; and responses must be conscientiously considered.
The consultation was launched after ministers sought to curtail the Inquiry; the consultation paper withheld financial and impact assessment data; the initial five-week window ran over summer recess; and the questionnaire’s multi-choice structure excluded the option of supporting the Inquiry’s completion.
These breaches may make a decision to end the Inquiry early vulnerable to legal challenge.
Protest outside the Undercover Policing Inquiry (pic: Martin Godwin)
PRESS RELEASE
29 October 2026
Survivors of Spycops abuses have written to Prime Minister Andy Burnham requesting urgent meetings with Cabinet Ministers over abusive use of the Hillsborough Law to threaten the future of the Undercover Policing Inquiry.
LONDON — Non-State Core Participants in the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) have today written to ministers, including Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, Lord High Chancellor Alex Norris, Policing Minister Sarah Jones, and Home Office Minister Lord Hanson of Flint, requesting face-to-face meetings to address concerns about the Home Office’s ‘public consultation’ and fears for the future of the Undercover Policing Inquiry.
A letter was also sent to Prime Minister Andy Burnham, setting out the alarm and outrage felt by survivors of undercover police abuses at the perverse use the Home Office consultation makes of the Public Office (Accountability) Bill.
Rather than upholding a duty of candour designed to open up inquiries and prevent public bodies from delaying, deflecting, and concealing institutional misconduct, the government has used the Bill as a pretext to try to justify potentially stripping back the Inquiry’s statutory powers and scope.
Chris Brian of the Undercover Research Group explained that the entire premise of the consultation undermines the spirit of the Hillsborough Law.
‘All the delays and cost escalations we have seen in this Inquiry have been caused by state agents and the police actively avoiding candour through relentless applications for secrecy and anonymity.
Using that state-sponsored obstruction as a reason to reduce or shut down the Inquiry sends a deeply offensive message to subjects of state investigations – if police bodies deliberately cause delays and inflate costs, they can evade scrutiny and accountability.
This is entirely at odds with the principles of candour that should be at the heart of the Hillsborough Law and which our Prime Minister has supported so enthusiastically in the past.’
Ken Derbyshire, Chair of the Hillsborough Justice Campaign, writes:
‘It is of great concern to us that the Inquiry might be curtailed before all evidence has been heard and we are equally concerned that The Public Office (Accountability) Bill (more commonly known as Hillsborough Law) is being cited as a potential justification for curtailing the Inquiry…
As a campaign of many years standing, we at the Hillsborough Justice Campaign, know only too well the enduring damage that is done to survivors and bereaved families by lies and coverups…
In the name of truth and justice we would urge you to cease any plans to curtail the Inquiry.’
Earlier this month, Core Participants met with the Home Office sponsor department to discuss their concerns. However serious questions remain regarding the consultation process and the future of the Inquiry, and victims are requesting urgent meetings with ministers before any decision is made.
‘The uncertainty about the Inquiry’s future created by this consultation is particularly traumatic and damaging for people whose lives have already been disrupted by police deception and who have waited more than a decade for the Home Office and the Inquiry to fulfil their promises.
That is why we are seeking explicit assurances that Prime Minister Andy Burnham and his Government remain fully committed to the state candour and justice that victims deserve and expect.’
The UCPI’s remaining work includes the more recent undercover operations authorised under the same regulatory framework that is supposed to protect the public today. The current Inquiry Chair, Sir John Mitting, has announced he will be retiring next year and he will not be delivering recommendations in his 2027 Second Interim Report.
Dave Morris of the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance explained:
‘This inquiry has uncovered levels of misconduct, corruption and abuse in undercover policing that far exceed what anyone expected at the outset, and it still has important work to do.
The scandals surrounding undercover policing are not just ‘historical ‘, and ending the Inquiry without recommendations for future policing practice based on a full examination of the evidence would represent a massive waste of the time, public money, and resources already invested over the past eleven years.
More importantly it would be a blatant State cover up which we’re determined not to allow.’
The Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance (COPS) is currently compiling an interim report on the Home Office Consultation, which will be published on Monday morning.
Core Participants’ key demands:
● Ministers must meet face-to-face meetings with survivors and Core Participants before any decision on the Inquiry’s future is taken
● The Home Office must ensure that the Inquiry is fully resourced to complete the Terms of Reference as a statutory public inquiry.
● An expert panel and a new Chair must be appointed to ensure a smooth handover and avoid further delays.
● The government must uphold the principles of candour enshrined in the Hillsborough Law to ensure prompt disclosure of evidence to those who were spied on, and full candour and openness from the police and other state parties under investigation.Guarantees that the UCPI will be permitted to complete its full Terms of Reference as a judge-led statutory public inquiry.
NOTES FOR EDITORS:
1. The Inquiry was established as a statutory inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005 by then-Home Secretary Theresa May in 2015 to investigate systemic abuses by undercover police units since 1968.
It took five years before it even started to hear evidence, delayed by hundreds of police applications for anonymity and redactions. Three of the six core elements have been completed but now the chairman Sir John Mitting is retiring and the Home Office has not appointed a successor and is using this as an opportunity to intervene.
So far the Inquiry has looked only at the ‘legacy’ operations of the Special Demonstration Squad that operated between 1968 and 2008. Remaining elements of the Inquiry include the NPOIU (Mark Kennedy’s unit), other covert operations, and governance and oversight, along with recommendations for the future.
2. The Undercover Policing Inquiry was established following a series of scandals involving undercover political policing. The Inquiry is investigating undercover policing operations conducted between 1968 and 2014. Evidence heard so far includes:
● The theft of deceased children’s identities by undercover officers.
● Deceitful and abusive sexual relationships.
● The blacklisting of trade unionists.
● Officers committing criminal offences and acting as agents provocateurs.
● Surveillance of family justice campaigns.
● Widespread infiltration of legitimate political activity.
4. The Home Office is both the sponsor department of the Inquiry itself, but also under investigation by the Inquiry for its knowledge and its role in approving and funding the units, something campaigners say creates a clear conflict of interest.
Freedom of Information requests have revealed previous ministerial attempts to interfere with the timeframe and scope of the Inquiry dating back to Lord Sharpe and Chris Philp in May 2023, Suella Braverman in Oct 2023, and James Cleverly in Jan 2024. During those private communications, ministers were actively attempting to revise the Terms of Reference, impose a budget cap and set a 2026 deadline. (FOI 2024_04432)
5. Non-state Core Participants requested a meeting with the Home Office in December 2024 to discuss the functioning of the Inquiry, the Home Office refused in an email dated 23 December 2024, stating: “It would not be appropriate… The Inquiry is operationally independent, and it is really important that we maintain those lines of independence.”
They launched this public consultation without talking to victims first.
Protest against Home Office curtailing spycops public inquiry, 20 Sep 2026
PRESS RELEASE
20 September 2026 – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Controversial Spycops consultation closes at midnight tonight
LONDON — The Home Office consultation on the future of the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) has faced fierce opposition from survivors of the abuses the inquiry is investigating. It closes at midnight tonight, Sunday, 20 September 2026.
The consultation is deeply unpopular among survivors in the Inquiry who say they weren’t consulted and they consider it to be a cover up. They criticise the multiple-choice format that neglects to include any option to support the Inquiry continuing in its current, statutory form. They have urged supporters to boycott the official survey and instead write directly to the Home Office, calling for the Inquiry to be properly resourced to complete its work.
‘The survey is rigged. It’s not a genuine attempt to seek views. They’re asking the public to rank inseparable priorities—like ‘fact-finding’ against ‘value for money’.
You can’t have a meaningful inquiry that skips the facts to save a few pounds. They want to be able to present these abuses as ‘historic’.
It feels like they are tricking people into supporting a decision the Home Office has already made, to truncate the Inquiry or reduce its powers before it looks at more recent events.
Survivors assaulted as Home Office refuses to accept consultation responses
On Friday a group of core participants in the inquiry tried to deliver their responses to the consultation calling on Ministers not to cover up spycops abuse, but the Home Office refused to accept the delivery and locked the building down.
Video: https://x.com/fruitbatmania/status/2101367454073041136
One of those present explained:
‘They lied to us, saying they’d come down and take the delivery, but secretly telling security they didn’t want to accept it. After an hour and a half waiting, we decided we’d drop the letters at reception, get a receipt and leave.
Instead, inquiry core participants were assaulted, and the police were called and told the Home Office was “under attack”. The building was locked down for almost an hour before they finally accepted the letters.
They launched this consultation and asked us, as victims of state violence and police spying, to respond. They say they want to listen, yet this is how they treat us.
We’ve been waiting 11 years for the truth and we were spied on precisely because we fought for what we believed in. We’re not people who are going to just give up and go away.’
– Emily Apple (Core Participant)
The police eventually asked the Home Office to agree to accept the delivery, which contained more than 2600 consultation responses from core participants and other victims of the misconduct and police corruption being uncovered, as well as thousands of members of the public who recognise the importance of this Inquiry and wrote to pledge their support.
Hillsborough Justice Campaign accuses government of abusing the Hillsborough Law
Among the letters delivered on Friday was an appeal from the Hillsborough Justice Campaign, criticising the government’s perverse use of the Public Office (Accountability) Bill to justify their attempt to shut the spycops inquiry down:
‘Survivors haven’t fought for all these years so a law (not yet enacted) can be used to deny other victims truth and accountability. Moreover, Hillsborough Law (if eventually enacted) has its limitations.
Laws may come into place but cultural shifts take much longer. In the name of truth and justice we would urge you to cease any plans to curtail the Inquiry.’
– Ken Derbyshire (Chair of the Hillsborough Justice Campaign)
The consultation, which was launched the day after the Hillsborough Law cleared the House of Commons, proposes replacing the UCPI with ‘an independent non‑statutory inquiry’ which ‘will not have formal powers to compel evidence from unwilling witnesses’ but notes ‘it may have these powers in the future, depending on changes made by the Public Office (Accountability) Bill.’
Survivors are dismayed that the law is already being misused in this way:
‘We were so excited about the Hillsborough Law. We hoped Andy Burnham’s longstanding commitment to ‘rewiring the state’ and ‘rebalancing the scales of justice’ would be good news for us.
All the delays this inquiry has faced are because of the police and the state avoiding their duty of candour and seeking to keep evidence out of the public gaze.
If the Hillsborough Law had been in place at the start of this Inquiry we would not be where we are today, so we were absolutely stunned when the first thing the government did off the back of the Bill was to try and shut our inquiry down.
It hasn’t even passed yet and it’s already being abused!’
The Home Office ‘consultation’ is set to publish a report before Christmas 2026, and Ministers will be making a decision about the future of the Inquiry early next year.
1. The Inquiry was established as a statutory inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005 by then-Home Secretary Theresa May in 2015 to investigate systemic abuses by undercover police units since 1968. It took five years before it even started to hear evidence, delayed by hundreds of police applications for anonymity and redactions.
Three of the six core elements have been completed but now the Chair, Sir John Mitting, is retiring and the Home Office has not appointed a successor and is using this as an opportunity to intervene. So far the Inquiry has looked only at the ‘legacy’ operations of the Special Demonstration Squad that operated between 1968 and 2008.
Remaining elements of the Inquiry include the NPOIU (Mark Kennedy’s unit), other covert operations, and governance and oversight, along with recommendations for the future.
2. The Undercover Policing Inquiry was established following a series of scandals involving undercover political policing. The Inquiry is investigating undercover policing operations conducted between 1968 and 2014.
Evidence heard so far includes:
● The use of deceased children’s identities by undercover officers.
● Deceitful and abusive sexual relationships.
● The blacklisting of trade unionists.
● Officers committing criminal offences and acting as agents provocateurs
● Surveillance of family justice campaigns.
● Widespread infiltration of legitimate political activity.
4. The Home Office is both the sponsor department of the Inquiry itself, but also under investigation by the Inquiry for its knowledge and its role in approving and funding the units, something campaigners say creates a clear conflict of interest.
Freedom of Information requests have revealed previous ministerial attempts to interfere with the timeframe and scope of the Inquiry dating back to Lord Sharpe and Chris Philp in May 2023, Suella Braverman in Oct 2023, and James Cleverly in Jan 2024.
During those private communications, ministers were actively attempting to revise the Terms of Reference, impose a budget cap and set a 2026 deadline. (FOI 2024_04432)
5. Non-state Core Participants requested a meeting with the Home Office in December 2024 to discuss the functioning of the Inquiry, the Home Office refused in an email dated 23 December 2024, stating: ‘It would not be appropriate… The Inquiry is operationally independent, and it is really important that we maintain those lines of independence’. They launched this public consultation without talking to victims first.
The Home Office building, Marsham Street, London (pic: Terry Farrell and Partners)
PRESS RELEASE
Home Office consultation on the future of the ‘spycops’ inquiry sparks public protest and accusations of state cover-up.
11am, Friday 18th Sept 2026 outside the Home Office, Marsham St, SW1 4DF
[LONDON]
Members of the public with a direct interest in the ‘spycops’ scandal will gather outside the Home Office at 11am on Friday 18th Sept, to hand-deliver responses to their public consultation on the future of the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI).
With banners demanding “end the state cover up”, boxes of thousands of letters to the Home Office will be presented. (Photographs will be available after the event.)
More than 2500 people have emailed the Home Office since the consultation was announced on 16 July. The consultation is widely condemned as illegitimate and ‘rigged’, with campaigners saying that it is the consultation and not the Inquiry that should be abandoned.
Dr Dónal O’Driscoll from the Undercover Research Group said:
‘The consultation questionnaire appears to assume the Inquiry will not continue and that has caused significant alarm. It is framed around alternative approaches which would mean that the most recent wrongdoing would never be examined.
Whatever the intention, the practical effect of curtailing the Inquiry or its powers would be a state cover up, and the deployments still to be investigated are the ones authorised under the legal framework that still exists today. It is essential to understand what went wrong and whether current deployments are lawful and free of the same abuses,’
Survivors of spycops’ abuses have made their demands clear to the Home Office:
Withdraw the consultation and meet with Core Participants to discuss ways forward.
Ensure that the Inquiry is fully resourced to complete the Terms of Reference.
Appoint an expert panel and a new Chair to ensure a smooth handover.
Ensure prompt disclosure of evidence to those who were spied on, and full candour and openness from the police and other state parties under investigation.
‘I was deceived into a six-year intimate relationship by Mark Kennedy. He was present in every part of my life, including my family and the most difficult moments I was living through.
I have been waiting for more than a decade for the Inquiry to finally give me the opportunity to understand how this could happen, and what exactly went on.
We need the Inquiry to follow the evidence, hear from those responsible and uncover who knew what, and why all safeguards failed. Whatever the Ministers ultimately decide to do, the fact that they are creating uncertainty for people like me is cruel when we have waited for so long to get answers.
The prospect of the Inquiry being curtailed just as it reaches the evidence relating to my own experience is devastating.’
Alex Hodson from the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance adds:
‘The consultation was launched the same week the ‘Hillsborough Law’ cleared the Commons, and we were shocked to find that it cites the Bill as justification not for ensuring candour but for stripping back the Inquiry’s powers.
The Hillsborough families fought for decades to win that duty of candour precisely so that public bodies could never again delay, deflect, and withhold their way out of scrutiny — it was designed to open inquiries up, not to provide cover for shutting them down.
This consultation isn’t about “timely justice for the victims”, they clearly have no interest in us at all. It stinks of a cover-up to protect vested interests and sweep systemic abuses, corruption and miscarriages of justice under the carpet.’
Another of the core participants, Roger Geffen MBE, asserts:
‘Cutting short the Inquiry would inevitably mean it fails to achieve its statutory purpose.
Many shocking abuses committed by spycops since 1998 would remain unknown, their many victims’ quest for truth would be frustrated, and the recommendations of the Inquiry itself would be unable to reflect what has happened under the current legal framework.
After all, it is the police and other state actors whose constant delaying tactics have made the Inquiry over-run by several years, at huge public expense. Their efforts to avoid accountability mustn’t be allowed to succeed.’
Members of the public are being encouraged to ask their MPs to raise concerns in Parliament and to support the Early Day Motion (#811) tabled on 14 September 2026.
For further comment or interviews contact: 07564 585094 info@policespiesoutoflives.org.uk
NOTES FOR EDITORS
1. The Undercover Policing Inquiry was established as a statutory inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005 by then-Home Secretary Theresa May in 2015 to investigate systemic abuses by undercover police units since 1968. It took five years before it even started to hear evidence, delayed by hundreds of police applications for anonymity and redactions.
Three of the six core elements have been completed but now the Chair, Sir John Mitting. is retiring and the Home Office has not appointed a successor and is using this as an opportunity to intervene.
So far the Inquiry has looked only at the ‘legacy’ operations of the Special Demonstration Squad that operated between 1968 and 2008. Remaining elements of the Inquiry include the NPOIU (Mark Kennedy’s unit), other covert operations, and governance and oversight, along with recommendations for the future.
2. The Home Office is both the sponsor department of the Inquiry itself, but also under investigation by the Inquiry for its knowledge about the wrongdoings and its role in approving and funding the units, something campaigners say creates a clear conflict of interest.
Freedom of Information requests have revealed previous ministerial attempts to interfere with the timeframe and scope of the Inquiry dating back to Lord Sharpe and Chris Philp in May 2023, Suella Braverman in Oct 2023, and James Cleverly in Jan 2024.
During those private communications, ministers were actively attempting to revise the Terms of Reference, impose a budget cap and set a 2026 deadline.
3. When non-state Core Participants requested a meeting with the Home Office in December 2024 to discuss the functioning of the Inquiry, the Home Office flatly refused with an email dated 23 December 2024, stating: “It would not be appropriate… The Inquiry is operationally independent, and it is really important that we maintain those lines of independence.”
Notably the statutory need to hold a consultation had already been raised in the correspondence between the Home Office and the Inquiry in 2023/2024.
4. The consultation was launched on 16 July 2026, originally with just a five week deadline falling in the summer recess. The multiple choice questionnaire proposes various ‘alternative approaches’ to the remaining work of the Inquiry but significantly does not include the option to support continuing the statutory Inquiry as originally conceived.
The Home Office consultation is expected to produce its report before Christmas.
For further comment or interviews contact: 07564 585094 info@policespiesoutoflives.org.uk
They express shock and deep concern at the Government’s proposals to curtail the Inquiry, and the perverse use of the Public Office (Accountability) Bill (the ‘Hillsborough Law’) to justify weakening a statutory public inquiry before the legislation has even been enacted.
‘We were so excited about the progress of the Hillsborough Law, and the promises it makes for survivors of state abuse. But the very next day the Home Office did this.
It may be no coincidence this consultation was launched in the last days of Starmer’s government: he’s implicated in covering up undercover operations during his time as Director of Public Prosecutions and may have questions to answer himself.
But we have a new government now, under Andy Burnham. He built his political career on the fight for justice after Hillsborough. Is denying us truth and accountability really going to be one of the first things his government does?’
The letter is accompanied by submissions from Peter Weatherby KC, who acts for a number of the victims and helped draft the Hillsborough Law. He argues the Inquiry’s statutory powers are essential to uncovering the truth, and describes the consultation as ‘misconceived’, joining calls for it to be withdrawn.
Since public hearings began in 2020, the UCPI has exposed serious police abuses – sexual misconduct, criminal behaviour, agents provocateur activity, interference in democratic processes, misleading the courts, unlawful intrusion into the lives of thousands of people, and catastrophic failings that go all the way up the chain of command.
However, some of the most significant evidence is yet to be examined, such as the work of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), who deployed Mark Kennedy; abuse by undercover officers in criminal investigations (such as the case of ‘Mary’); and failures in the policing of racist criminal gangs.
These, more recent, operations took place under the Human Rights Act and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act—the very legal framework that is supposed to protect the public today. Core Participants say it is essential the Inquiry completes its work in order to make recommendations and prevent future abuse.
Dave Morris of the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance said:
‘It’s no surprise that the state wants to shut down this Inquiry – it is a disaster for the Metropolitan Police. Just yesterday, ex-Commissioner Baron Condon said in evidence that these were not isolated incidents but a result of systemic failures and a “culture of paranoia” in Special Branch.
The public deserves the full truth, and the Home Office must not bow to vested interests seeking to prevent that.’
The letter calls on the Home Office to withdraw the consultation, appoint new leadership to the Inquiry, ensure adequate resources to complete its work, and urgently meet with Core Participants to discuss ways forward.
Core Participants have been seeking to make recommendations about the Inquiry process since 2019, and have been asking to meet the Home Office since 2024, but have been rebuffed.
Jodie Gibson, Head of the Home Office Sponsorship Unit, told them in an email dated 23 December 2024:
‘It would not be appropriate for officials in the Home Office Sponsorship Unit to meet with you to discuss the functioning of the Inquiry. The Inquiry is operationally independent, and it is really important that we maintain those lines of independence.’
The Core Particpants group is aghast that the Home Office have refused all contact but now, without requesting our input, have published a misconceived, multiple choice ‘consultation’.
The group is asking people not to fill in the consultation, and will publicly oppose any attempt to curtail the Inquiry and will continue campaigning to ensure that the full truth about undercover policing is uncovered.
We are shocked and surprised by the announcement and deeply concerned that this is an attempt to shut this Inquiry down. We have been requesting a meeting with the Sponsor Department of the Home Office for more than a year and have been stonewalled.
Now, we are presented with this multiple choice survey which clearly demonstrates that they have already considered the options without listening to us. We wish to stress that the delays and costs incurred by the Inquiry to date are entirely the result of applications for secrecy and lack of candour by the state agents taking part.
The timing of this consultation (in the middle of Inquiry hearings, and at the start of the summer break) will exclude many of those affected from being able to properly engage. The options on offer have real implications for how — and whether — the truth gets established, and we are considering the survey carefully.
We are calling on supporters not to fill it in until we have had a chance to respond.
The UCPI has been running since 2015, investigating abuses by undercover officers spanning five decades. One of the most expensive and longest running public inquiries in British history, it has been hampered by the death of its first Chair and the imminent retirement of its second, with no replacement in sight.
So far it has only considered a single police unit, the Special Demonstration Squad,and is yet to consider some of the most important evidence, relating to abuses that took place under the existing regulatory framework that is supposed to protect us today.
Police actions to disrupt and stall proceedings (using tactics such as ‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny’, making numerous anonymity applications, and demanding extensive redactions of documents) prevented the Inquiry from even starting to hear evidence for the first six years, and continue to cause delays. We believe that had there been a Hillsborough Law in place when the UCPI started it would have saved much time and expense.
Since its hearings started in 2020, the UCPI has uncovered evidence of sustained misconduct and corruption. Some of the most important revelations of our time about secret state (and Home Office) interference in our political freedoms.
The constant stream of revelations has caused considerable embarrassment and led to multiple public apologies from the Metropolitan Police. We have no doubt that there are powerful interests who would want it shut down.
However, the Inquiry has yet to consider units such as the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), who employed one of the most notorious officers, Mark Kennedy. Many victims are still waiting for answers, and the Inquiry must properly consider all the evidence before key recommendations can be made.
We call on the Home Office not to hamper the search for truth and justice, and to allow the spycops inquiry to do the job it was called on to do. We will continue to hold the police and public officials to account.
Content warning: this report contains a graphic description of child sexual abuse.
On Tuesday 24 February 2026, Donna McLean gave evidence to the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI). From 2003 to 2005 she was deceived into a two-year cohabiting relationship by undercover police officer HN104 Carlo Soracchi ‘Carlo Neri’. He was deployed from 2000 to 2005, infiltrating socialist and antifascist groups in London.
The 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.
McLean’s evidence was given as part of the UCPI’s ‘Tranche 3 Phase 2’ hearings, examining the final 15 years of the Special Demonstration Squad (1993-2008). McLean was not a member of any group targeted by spycops, she was a trade unionist who was friends with some of the people Soracchi spied on.
In 2022 she published a memoir about the relationship, Small Town Girl: Love, Lies and the Undercover Police. The book was used as evidence in the hearing, with McLean clarifying that its account is true but not exhaustive. She has also provided a short written statement to the Inquiry [UCPI0000039712].
McLean begins by confirming that she wasn’t a political activist in the 1990s. She grew up in a Scottish, working class socialist family. She became an outreach worker in mental health, homelessness and substance abuse treatment.
The vocation committed her to social justice, and to justice for the under-served. There was a general left-wing slant to those involved, and a great sense of camaraderie among her coworkers. She became particularly good friends with one of them, Dan Gillman, a socialist and antifascist who was spied on by Soracchi (and who gave evidence to the UCPI in November 2025).
She was briefly a trade union representative, as was Joe Batty, who she met on a training course as they worked in similar jobs. Batty was also spied on by Soracchi (and gave evidence to the UCPI earlier in February 2026).
MEETING CARLO
The very first time McLean met Soracchi was brief and uneventful. In early 2002, Gillman had borrowed some boxes from McLean as he was moving house. Soracchi, as was standard for spycops, had been equipped with a large vehicle to make himself useful and ingratiate himself into his target group. He gave Gillman a lift to McLean’s to return the boxes.
Special Demonstration Squad officer Carlo Soracchi
McLean first met Soracchi properly on 28 September 2002, when she went to a huge protest in London against the Iraq War.
She had intended to find friends from her union but the crowd was too large. Gillman and Batty were often stewards for socialist and union groups on demonstrations, and this occasion was no exception. McLean spotted Gillman in his hi-vis and stayed with him and the other stewards, who included Soracchi in his undercover guise as ‘Carlo Neri’ the socialist, antifascist and locksmith.
After the demo ended they all went to the pub together, then out for dinner. A few of them went on to a bar afterwards, and gradually the group dissipated down to just McLean and Soracchi.
They went back to hers together. The sexual relationship began that night. Soracchi stayed over, briefly popped back to his own flat the next day to get clean clothes, then came back and stayed a second night.
FULL SPEED AHEAD
It was the start of a whirlwind romance that got very serious very quickly, as McLean explained:
‘We got on really, really well. I had just come out of a 12-year relationship, I had no expectation that I would meet someone that I really liked…
But I think when I met Carlo, I was just surprised…
We agreed on so much. We liked talking about the same things, he was very family orientated, we liked music, we liked films, and it just felt that he was right. It felt like we were right together.
In a way that was surprising, but I also didn’t question it, I trusted it.’
This is a common story among women deceived into intimate relationships by spycops. The officers had been trained to ‘mirror’ people, responding with the same tastes and preferences so that an instant bond of recognition and trust is created.
Whistleblower spycop HN43 Peter Francis has described how officers would sometimes be briefed in advance of meeting a target so that they’d immediately have subtle but powerful points of personal connection.
Even by the standards of the spycops, Soracchi’s targeting of McLean is extraordinary. His first interaction with McLean was on 28 September 2002, and by New Year they were living together and engaged to be married. In actuality, he was already married.
In contrast to all this, Soracchi’s witness statement to the UCPI [UCPI0000035550] denies a lot of the facts in an attempt to downplay what he did.
He says he expected it to be a one night stand but McLean kept contacting him after. He says he can’t even remember if they actually had sex that first night.
McLean is affronted at this. She points out that they weren’t drunk from some kind of pub crawl, they’d been for a meal. They’d had a conversation about old relationships and contraception. His witness statement claims he used condoms; she says he never did.
McLean goes on to say that they were instantly effectively cohabiting as a couple at her flat:
‘He “went to work” in the day, I went to work in the day, and every evening and weekend we spent together.
So my expectation was that this was a very quick but very, very solid and very grounded relationship. Because he seemed like a very grounded person. He seemed like a very loving and caring and generous person.’
She says he told her he loved her every day. It felt like it would last forever.
Soracchi’s witness statement openly admits that McLean was not part of any groups he was spying on, and says he was just using her for comfort:
‘The motivation for starting a relationship with Donna McLean was that it was shortly after the death of my mother and I was at a low ebb and not thinking very clearly at the time.
I sort of fell into it with Donna. She was a nice person. She was not a political activist as far as I knew and she provided me with a bit of solace at a time when I needed it.’
He goes on to say he thinks it is merely ‘unlikely’ that she would have had the relationship if she’d known the truth about who he was.
Again, McLean is aghast at his gall. She says it was obvious that she’d have never let him near her if she’d known he was an undercover police officer.
She adds that Soracchi wasn’t just deceiving her for his comfort, either. It was also that she was an established, trusted friend of people he was spying on. Being her partner gave him a kind of credibility and made him more readily accepted.
PART OF THE FAMILY
Their relationship wasn’t just between them domestically and seeing friends socially. Soracchi rapidly and eagerly integrated himself into McLean’s extended family.
Carlo Soracchi with Donna McLean’s sister, stepfather and mother, Robin Hood’s Bay, Yorkshire, March 2003.
McLean told him that she’d had a violent abusive father, he’d said his father had been like that too. She says this created empathy and a bond. It made them feel closer to one another.
Soracchi was keen to meet her extended family. He would instigate phone calls with them and spend a long time talking to them.
They first went to Scotland together to visit McLean’s family around the time they started living together, in November 2002. Her relatives were still in shock from the recent death of her grandmother. Soracchi immediately blended in with them, taking a three year old relative off to read stories while the family discussed a choice of headstone.
The child asked him about his favourite children’s books. His description of The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business was met with enormous enthusiasm. A few weeks later, on his next visit to Scotland with McLean, he brought the child a copy.
McLean is horrified:
‘I think it’s incredible that he could do it. That this was actually part of his work. This level of intrusion and this complete disregard for any safeguarding of anybody or anything.’
This is another one of the many things Soracchi denies in his witness statement: he says he was never left with a child in the absence of a parent. McLean says he’s lying, as numerous family members involved can readily confirm.
Her family had been surprised that McLean was in such a serious relationship so soon after the end of her previous one, but Soracchi’s warmth, generosity and openness made them completely accept him and be genuinely happy for her.
However, Soracchi did embarrass himself at McLean’s sister’s graduation ceremony. When God Save The Queen was played, Soracchi reflexively stood up.
Carlo Soracchi at Whitby harbour with Donna McLean’s sister, March 2003.
Nonetheless, he was welcomed into the family. He collected snowglobes from around the world. McLean’s mother started getting ones for him from places she went.
Later in the year, Soracchi drove McLean and others to see a Stiff Little Fingers gig in Scotland. They could have gone to the London date, but Soracchi said it would be good to see her family again as they were still dealing with the bereavement. As with the previous time, they stayed at McLean’s mother’s house.
When on this second trip to Scotland, staying with her family, he started crying during a cab ride. He told McLean that he had an estranged son, and said wanted to tell her because his relationship with her was becoming serious.
He said he wanted to be able to be able to put pictures of his kid up in McLean’s flat. During that night’s deep conversation, McLean says she suggested moving in as he was there all the time anyway. He moved in a few days later. It was late November or early December. They had been seeing each other about two months.
In contrast, Soracchi’s witness statement claims he only stayed at McLean’s ‘on occasion’ prior to fully moving in with her in January 2003. This, she says, is another lie. He was there full-time and gave up his own flat before Christmas 2002. She is certain of this, remembering him being insistent that they had a real Christmas tree.
COVER STORY
The Christmas tree Carlo Soracchi insisted he and Donna had, 2002. He now denies even living with her at the time.
The backstory Soracchi told McLean wasn’t just vaguely drawn from his real life. He actively included the true specific details of a lot of it. Having told her he had a son, he put a photo of the child on the bookcase in her flat. It was his real son, and he used the boy’s real forename.
He put more photos up, too: his real father feeding his real son spaghetti in Italy, his mother, his sister. In the end, there were pictures of all his actual close family, apart from his wife.
He said that his son had been born from a brief fling. The mother had become pregnant and wanted to keep the baby but be wholly independent of Soracchi, not having a relationship or receiving financial support from him.
Soracchi, playing the role of the caring, emotionally mature man, said he was trying to resolve the difficulties with the mother so he could build relationship with his son. He went away one weekend a month, supposedly see the child in Cornwall.
In reality, he was making the short journey across London to his wife and son. He made his wife pregnant with their second child while he was in the relationship with McLean.
McLean is astonished at his brazenness, that he took her to places where his real family could have seen them, as well as the depths of his dishonesty:
‘It’s hard to find a word that’s strong enough, because “fraudulent” just doesn’t quite match it.’
Soracchi talked to McLean a lot about his sister. As with his son, he had a picture of her on display in the flat and used her real forename. He said she lived in Peterborough, and was isolated and depressed. He would go away saying he was visiting her, but always giving an excuse why McLean couldn’t accompany him. Presumably these were in fact more visits to his wife and son.
After she found out the truth of who Soracchi was, McLean readily found his sister on Facebook. His sister has a successful career and seemingly happy family, the complete opposite of the impression Soracchi had given.
Soracchi, his father, his sister and her husband are all directors of the family’s Italian food import business and an associated deli. The public details were easily found, and the forenames matched those that Soracchi had told McLean.
Beyond the personal deception, McLean says it is proof that the spycops’ existence was based on a lie. They claimed to be monitoring these quasi-terrorist subversives who’d maim their enemies given half a chance. Yet spycops like EN12 Mark Kennedy, HN15 Mark Jenner and particularly Carlo Soracchi needlessly left huge clues to their real identities with the women they deceived into relationships.
McLean scoffs at them:
‘I had all that information because he gave it to me. The idea that we are somehow dangerous people, us trade unionists and people on the left are dangerous – he gave me all that stuff.
He made it part of our lives for his own benefit and he was using them as well.’
THE RENT SCAM
There was an unexpected moment of real courtroom drama when Counsel tried to clarify the date that Soracchi moved in with McLean. Counsel said that Soracchi was added to the rental agreement in January 2003.
McLean said there was no rental agreement for him to be added to. She was subletting from a person who was abroad for three years, it was approved by the housing association that owned the flat, but there was no formal documentation.
Counsel said:
‘Maybe we are talking at cross-purposes. The rent book, his name was put on the -’
McLean interrupted to say there was no rent book either. Nothing official was written.
Counsel looked perplexed and brought up a rent book that the Inquiry has been given among Special Demonstration Squad papers [MPS-0527068].
McLean has never seen it before. Counsel says it was found in an SDS filing cabinet. It should have been included in the documents shown to McLean before the hearing, but the Inquiry is increasingly failing to function properly, especially in showing civilian witnesses the documents that pertain to them.
Page from Carlo Soracchi’s rent book, 2003. It shows £685 per month, and huge differences in the way Donna McLean’s initials are written.
The rent book is labelled ‘Tenant: Carlo Neri’ and dated 30 January 2003. Under ‘rent collector’, it names both the landlord and McLean. The landlord’s name is spelt incorrectly.
There are payments of a month’s deposit of £685, and monthly rent payments thereafter up to October 2003. They are initialled as received by McLean and the landlord.
But McLean’s landlord was in the USA for the entire duration of her tenancy. She never met him, neither did ‘Carlo Neri’. The rent on the flat was actually only £320 per month. It was paid by standing order from McLean’s bank account. There was no deposit.
The only explanation is that Soracchi created this rent book and used it to fraudulently claim the rent on his expenses.
McLean laughs at the poor quality of Soracchi’s forgery of her signature. Each iteration of the D is different.
Soracchi never formally paid rent to her. Instead he gave a variable amount, around £150, to McLean in cash every month or so.
He was already being paid overtime to live with someone who wasn’t an activist and who provided no intelligence. He then forged a rent book and fiddled his expenses to increase his wages still further.
The complete lack of integrity, the remorseless corruption of spycops is truly astonishing. They betray their targets, their families and the police themselves.
Soracchi’s relationship with McLean was characterised by his seeming generosity, bringing home many items of quality and taste. He often bought her jewellery, as well as high-value items for the kitchen, laying flooring and installing blinds.
McLean is shocked and still laughing at the shoddiness of the rent book forgery. Then she wryly observes:
‘I know where my presents came from now.’
HOLIDAYS AND KIDS
Spycop Carlo Soracchi on holiday in Bologna, February 2003.
The couple went on holiday to Bologna in February 2003 for Valentine’s Day. As Soracchi had said it was his birthday on 12 February, McLean paid for the trip.
In reality, his birthday was in January and, as was standard tradecraft for spycops, his fake age was younger than his real age.
They stayed in a high-class hotel in the city centre. The itinerary was all down to Soracchi as he knew the city well and spoke Italian.
McLean recounts sightseeing, including a visit to the railway station where a plaque commemorates the victims of the 1980 bombing of the station by fascists. The trip involved lots of gourmet food at Soracchi’s favourite restaurants and bars.
McLean says Soracchi was in his element:
‘He acted as he always did, very caring, very warm, very loving. He seemed very happy to be there.’
Soracchi had said his father lived an hour or so away. Despite him being a frequent and capable driver, they didn’t visit him. Soracchi said the family had some significant problems and he didn’t want it to spoil the romantic holiday. McLean was annoyed about the excuses.
The following month, March 2003, they went to Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast for McLean’s birthday. Her family came down from Scotland and they all stayed in one house together.
Soracchi was once again the genial host, in charge of music and drinks, generous and compliant with whatever the rest of the party wanted to do.
During this visit he told McLean’s mother that he wanted to have a child with Donna. Her mother thought this was great, though Donna herself said she wanted to wait until they had a more stable life and accommodation. This prompted them to discuss getting a more permanent home together.
Once again, this is something Soracchi denies in his witness statement:
‘Donna McLean claims that I encouraged her to have a child. I did not. I was with Donna for a period of approximately 14 months. I made it clear at that time that I was not interested in having any more children.’
LYING THEN, LYING NOW
It is extraordinary that Soracchi is trying to downplay a few details as if that will somehow make it alright. And expressing a wish to have children with McLean is no small detail.
It’s something we’ve seen from many of the spycops giving evidence. They don’t seem to realise that even if all their minimisations were somehow taken as wholly true and accepted, it’s tinkering at the edges. What they admit they did was still totally unjustifiable, appalling, unlawful and cruel.
As it is, it’s obvious that they’re lying, so by making these claims they change their status from ‘inexcusable scumbag’ to ‘inexcusable scumbag liar’. More, they’re not just exposed as having been deceitful, self-serving and arrogant decades ago as undercover officers, they’re showing themselves to be of the same disposition today.
In Soracchi’s particular case, McLean is incredulous at his denials as they are about things he said in front of numerous witnesses. He actually told her family that he wanted to have three children. She says it was a subject that they spoke about frequently.
He even contradicts himself. His claim to only have been with McLean for 14 months is undermined in the same witness statement that concurs with the timeline McLean has recounted. They both say it started in September 2002 and ended in November 2004.
McLean emphasises the totality of his integration into her family:
‘People – and I am talking about my family members and I am also talking about close friends – they were sharing really intimate details of their lives.
They were talking about how they felt after bereavements, friends talking about how they felt after a relationship break up.
They would cry in front of him. He would comfort them. He would be there to comfort people when they needed help…
It’s not just a social thing, it goes much deeper, it’s a real emotional intimacy…
Trying to explain how bizarre that is in this context is really difficult, because it’s so enmeshed. And there is no understanding of why he needed to do that to all these people.’
For his part, Soracchi’s witness statement resorts to a term beloved of spycops, ‘collateral intrusion’. It’s used when they’ve invaded lives and events that not even they can claim had any policing value:
‘I accept that coming into contact with Donna’s family was to some extent collateral intrusion. At the time I felt that there was very little if anything I could do about that to avoid risking compromising my cover.’
McLean rejects both the assertion and its minimising terminology. Far from merely ‘coming into contact’, he had chosen to move in with someone he wasn’t actually spying on, and then actively embedded himself into her extended family.
McLean points out that Soracchi’s excuse doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. Lots of people’s partners don’t want to go to every occasion with their in-laws, so there was no need for Soracchi to do so to make himself seem plausible.
She picks out the term itself with particular revulsion, saying it is trying to cloak what is actually an admission of guilt:
‘This “collateral intrusion”, it is a term that I really detest. I find it very, very offensive and very upsetting, because there is a recognition there that you have done things to people very, very much unnecessarily.’
THE REAL TARGET – DAN GILLMAN
The couple visited Cornwall twice in the first half of 2003, with Soracchi wilfully intruding into another family’s life. Dan Gillman and his partner wanted to visit Gillman’s dying mother, so Soracchi drove them and McLean all the way there.
McLean believes Soracchi targeted her because of her closeness with Gillman. Having heard Gillman’s testimony to the Inquiry recently, and that of others who knew him, she is more sure of this than ever.
Soracchi seemed very close with Gillman, and also with Joe Batty and Frank Smith. McLean admired Soracchi for his male friendships, it indicated that he was capable of emotional openness and closeness which made him seem very grounded and sound.
After their first two months together, Soracchi told McLean he was going to Italy for Christmas without her. In reality, he will presumably have been with his wife and son.
NEW YEAR’S PROPOSALS OF MARRIAGE AND ARSON
He returned for New Year’s celebrations. At his suggestion, the couple had a New Year’s Eve party at their flat, which was attended by about 20 friends. Soracchi proposed marriage to her at it.
Carlo Soracchi with Donna McLean’s mother, March 2003.
He went down on one knee and asked ‘will you marry me?’. She said yes, he stood up and picked her up. People gathered around them. Soracchi then said they should phone McLean’s mother to tell her the good news.
In the aftermath, Soracchi said he and a friend of McLean’s would choose an engagement ring for her, as this was the traditional Italian way of the bride-to-be getting her ring.
The couple received cards from numerous friends and co-workers, and witnesses have told the Inquiry under oath that they witnessed the proposal.
Soracchi now denies it all in his witness statement, and says he never proposed to McLean at any time. He claims he was not even at the party on New Year’s Eve.
He has other reasons for denying even his presence there. As Batty and Gillman have told the Inquiry in some detail, at the party Soracchi got a few of them together and went out to a nearby charity shop which he said was owned by Italian fascist leader Roberto Fiore, who was using the shop as a fascist front. Soracchi suggested petrol bombing it.
The friends said that wasn’t their style at all, and they were more interested in going back to the party.
It seems Soracchi was acting as an agent provocateur, trying to set up Gillman and others with an arson charge. It’s something that his boss, HN10 Bob Lambert, had done to people he spied on when he was undercover in the 1980s.
McLean remembers Soracchi taking people into the bedroom without her and that he looked at her strangely as he went. She suspects the proposal may have been to distract her from asking about it.
The Inquiry took a break, during which Tom Fowler made this video with Zoe Young of Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance:
In early 2003, Soracchi and McLean talked a lot about their wedding and plans for living together afterwards. They contemplated moving up to Scotland, but they also had to accommodate Soracchi supposedly building a relationship with his son.
He said he wanted to introduce the boy to McLean, and have him come to stay regularly. McLean was keen for this to happen, so they knew they’d need a two-bedroom place to live.
The couple had planned a fortnight’s holiday for July 2003, following the Tour de France:
‘This was something he liked, it was not something I was particularly interested in but I loved France so it sounded like a really, really nice plan.
And also it was going to be a two-week trip, which was quite a significant chunk of time so that had been booked off work.’
Soracchi told her he’d booked everything. But the day before they’d been due to go, he said that his father had had a stroke and he was going to Italy instead. Soracchi rang McLean every day and promised to make it up to her.
In retrospect, it seems likely that this was time he planned to spend with his real family and no holiday with McLean was ever booked.
As the relationship went on, Soracchi said he’d changed jobs. He had originally told everyone he was a locksmith. He would say to activists that their locks were substandard and then he’d change them as a favour. Thus, he was able to give keys to Special Branch and whatever other government agencies might want to unlawfully enter the homes undetected.
After a while, again drawing on his real family, he said he was working in his family’s Italian food import and export business. He would bring a lot of gourmet foods back to his home with McLean. Knowing the truth as we now do, and in light of his rent fraud, we have to wonder whether he was claiming that on expenses, diverting police funds into his and his family’s pockets. Or perhaps he was stealing from his family as well.
By the end of 2003, their wedding was still on the cards, but finding new place to live had become the main priority. McLean was getting restless, wanting to meet his son and integrate that side of his life. She says it was altering the nature of the relationship:
‘I think there was a small shift, but it wasn’t enough to make me alarmed. It just was not progressing quite the way I wanted it to, or expected it to.’
ABUSE ABOUT ABUSE
For the festive season Soracchi said he was going to Italy to see his supposedly ailing father for Christmas and then return to be with McLean for New Year again. Over Christmas he rang to say he would be staying in Italy longer as his father was more unwell than he’d realised. In the early hours of New Year’s Day, Soracchi phoned McLean at a party at Gillman’s house to say that his father had died.
It was all a lie. McLean later found documents showing that Soracchi’s father was still alive and well, living in London in 2011.
But back then in the first few hours of 2004, she was devastated. She offered to go over but Soracchi said to stay in England and he’d come back after the funeral. She forced herself to accept it:
‘It was a huge thing, but it was also a continuation of the not being involved in his family life, when he was so embedded in my family life, and that just felt a bit lopsided.’
Soracchi had sounded genuinely on edge and upset in the phone calls, as was to be expected from someone who was supposedly bereaved.
When he returned to McLean a fortnight later, in mid-January, he didn’t just sound different:
‘He didn’t even look like himself, and this was the thing that really struck me. He looked a bit haggard. He’d let his beard grow out, and he always had his hair quite closely cropped, he’d let it grow out as well. So he looked a bit dishevelled.
He looked like he had lost weight and he also just looked – it’s weird – his eyes looked different, there was kind of a glaze to them, like he wasn’t quite there, he wasn’t quite present.’
He was much less affectionate and tactile with McLean. Then he revealed why. He told her that after the funeral, his sister revealed that their father had sexually abused her as an adolescent. He was very specific about his sister’s abuse, saying his father had raped her anally and orally in order to avoid pregnancy.
He specifically told McLean not to tell anyone else. She says it is difficult to contain such traumatic knowledge, but she honoured his request and kept it to herself. She later found out he’d told the story to Joe Batty as well.
He’d said all along his that father had been violent to his mother, but this was something entirely new. He added that it explained his sister’s self-isolation and depression.
He also described feeling bad about himself, that he felt guilty for not having prevented the abuse and protected his sister. He used the words ‘dirty’, ‘broken’ and ‘guilty’ a lot.
He told her he was no longer the person she’d fallen in love with, that he needed space, but also that it was only temporary and she should wait for his recovery, saying:
‘I still love you, we’ll get through this because I love you so much.’
MALICIOUS CRUELTY IS TRADECRAFT
McLean was hugely concerned about his mental state. She needn’t have been. Astonishing as it sounds, this was standard spycop tradecraft.
Donna McLean and Carlo Soracchi at Whitby Abbey
The spycops invent details about abuse in their family for several reasons. It gives the person being told a sense of intimacy and trust, which encourages them to trust the spycop in return. It also gives the spycop an excuse for not introducing people to relatives.
Additionally, it feeds into the tactic Soracchi was using here, feigning severe mental distress as an excuse to end a relationship and leave at the end of his deployment.
We have heard extensive evidence about this tactic. How they keep up the charade continuously for months on end, convincing all those around them that something is very, very wrong.
Having little understanding of empathy, it doesn’t seem to occur to them that their behaviour will provoke intense worry in the partners and friends they have curated under their false identities.
When other spycops have used this tactic prior to their deployment ending, it’s resulted in worriedex-partners ended up travelling the world to search for them afterwards, hoping to help, not realising they’re looking for a person that never actually existed, a fictional character with a false name played by someone living with a family a few miles away in London.
McLean is utterly disgusted with Soracchi for this outrage:
‘I think it’s one of the cruellest things that he did, actually. I think it’s a real cruel thing, I think it’s really malicious. And I think when Carlo uses terms like “collateral intrusion” – that’s not collateral intrusion, that’s deliberate psychological harm being inflicted.’
Soracchi denies that it was all his doing, and that he ever mentioned sexual violence, let alone in such horrendous detail. His witness statement asserts:
‘The breakdown of our relationship was a two-way thing…
I told Donna that my sister had suffered violence at the hands of my father, but I did not say to Donna this was sexual violence… I did say that I was going through a lot of mental anguish. This was partially true, but also partially a part of my exfiltration strategy.’
She’s emphatic that the relationship breakdown was all his doing, and that she didn’t want it to end at all. She, again, points out that this was something witnessed by others, so his recent denial is provably a lie.
When he said he wanted to move out in May 2004 he repeatedly reiterated that he still loved her, they’d work it out, and it definitely wasn’t the end of the relationship.
A few days later, McLean came home from work and he had gone. He had taken everything he’d bought, apart from flooring, blinds and a dressing table. Not just his clothes, books and CDs but a vast amount of kitchen equipment, even the cabinet that the TV stood on.
This, too, is met by a pointless downplay in Soracchi’s witness statement, claiming he only took ‘a few books, some clothes and some cooking utensils’.
HE’S GONE, BUT HE HASN’T
McLean had no contact from him for two weeks after he left. Then he rang and said he really missed her and wanted to meet up. After that, they saw each other two or three times a week. He was very affectionate again, saying he wanted to sort it out and asked for her patience. They restarted the sexual relationship. She thought he might move back in.
Carlo Soracchi giving evidence at the Undercover Policing Inquiry, 3 March 2026
McLean had to move out as her tenancy was up, and Soracchi helped her move in to stay with a friend. After three months there she moved to another friend’s. He helped her move again.
She believed the massive trauma he’d described would take a long time to resolve. She knew that she would have to put the time in and be patient. But his behaviour consistently gave her solid grounds for hope. He was still affectionate, he talked about their future together, he was buying her presents again. There was no indication he wanted to end it.
They talked at length about his discovery of sister’s supposed abuse. McLean still believed she was the only one that this poor man was opening up to, so she did her best to support him, but it made her mental state increasingly fragile.
McLean last saw Soracchi in November 2004. They’d been to see a film together, an Italian one he’d chosen. She’d anticipated that, as usual, they’d decide to go back to one or other of their homes afterwards. Instead, he called her a cab:
‘He put me in the taxi and then he threw some money at me for the taxi. And it was like, “what is this? What is this behaviour?”
It was so kind of off and so dismissive. It was horrible and I felt horrible.’
Shortly afterwards, he sent a short email to her work address. He said the relationship was over, he couldn’t make it work so he was moving on, adding ‘I loved you more than you will ever know.’
McLean was shattered. Despite his unbalanced behaviour and the taxi incident, she’d believed the problems were all external to their relationship, so it was not in peril.
Two weeks later she received an envelope and recognised his handwriting immediately. Inside was a note saying he would always love her and a voucher for an expensive spa day.
Five months after that she emailed him as she was going to Italy, asking for travel advice. He just replied saying he had none. That was their final contact.
The friend passed the book to McLean who found it not just compelling but chillingly familiar. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up as she read about the detective work of women who’d been deceived into relationships by spycops and she realised it sounded like her Carlo. He had everything from the love bombing, the childhood trauma, and being useful with a large vehicle to the breakdown prior to leaving – but why on earth would he have targeted McLean, who wasn’t an activist?
The following year, in 2015, McLean met up with Gillman and some of the others who’d known Soracchi. They had amassed convincing evidence and were certain he had been a spycop.
Asked about the impact, McLean says that the disjointedness of a spycop’s life becomes contagious:
‘It’s mind blowing, because you have kind of got two lives. You have got the life that you have lived believing that that was the relationship and that was how it ended. And then you have the retrospective life of going back and saying, actually, this was the life.
So it’s like someone with a dual identity has created a dual life for you, and you have to try to piece that together. And it’s so hard.’
She says her family and friends are still having realisations that certain things they did or places they went weren’t of their own making but were manipulated by Soracchi. They’re all still trying to figure out how much of their lives were real and their own.
She had never suspected anything about Soracchi and, as a mental health professional, felt foolish at being duped by his feigned breakdown. Though it has to be said, out of all the suspicions that spied-on people have reported having about spycops, nobody saw through that part. They were phenomenally, and frankly disturbingly, convincing at behaving in a profoundly unbalanced way, as if they were finally letting some genuine warped feelings manifest.
McLean dug deep into the spycops scandal, obsessively searching for the details. She wanted to know his real name.
It took its toll on her health:
‘Having an autoimmune disease, there are several factors that impact on it, and stress is one of the biggest ones.
And that stress was so huge and so sudden and so bizarre, that that just kind of sent my immune system – because my immune system attacks itself.
So my body attacks me basically, so I had a huge flare and I was very physically unwell, but also mentally very fragile at the same time, which is not a good combination.’
Over the years that followed, she suffered nightmares and intrusive thoughts, became distant from her children, and struggled working with people with mental health problems. Counsel adds McLean’s concern at being followed to the list of paranoid reactions, but she’s clear that was no illusion. She really was followed.
She also noticed logins on her Facebook account in Bury St Edmunds, a place she’s never been to. She remembered seeing on the news that the Anonymous activist hacker Lauri Love’s computers were taken to the police IT headquarters at Bury St Edmunds. If they’ll get into your life, your home, your bed and your body, then your social media accounts are not beyond their bounds.
‘My body was used against my will. I did not consent to being a sexual experiment. I did not consent to being a mistress, I did not consent to being fucked all over the world by a man who did not exist.’
Asked if she feels the same way today, she says more than ever as she see that it happened to so many others as part of an overarching strategy.
‘I think angry wouldn’t be a strong enough word. It’s malicious and cruel and unnecessary, and a deceit that’s just beyond anything that we understand to be human or humane.
My personal belief is that the level of the intrusion of this entire scandal is very underestimated by people outside rooms like this, because they don’t see how deep it is, and they don’t see how the impact just goes on and on and on. Because it doesn’t make any sense, to anyone.’
That concluded the questions in the morning’s public hearing.
McLean was asked if she had anything to add that hadn’t been properly covered. She replied with characteristic insight:
‘Our bodily autonomy was stolen from us. And not just in the fact that we did not give consent, but also the time that we chose to have children, whether we have children, how difficult that became, the relationships that we ended up in, the issues of trust that came for that, and that spans your whole life. It doesn’t stop.
There is the period of the relationship itself. There is the period when you find out. There is the aftermath. There is, you know, doing all this stuff [the public inquiry], which is quite difficult.
But the entire autonomy of your own body has been stolen in a way that was strategic, and I think that’s something I just want to highlight as an overarching thing.’
The Inquiry then took a break, during which Tom Fowler made this video with Dan Gillman:
Much of the afternoon hearing was held in secret as it dealt with private matters.
During this, Tom Fowler made another video, this time with Chris Brian from the Undercover Research Group:
When it was made public again there was some discussion of the detail of Soracchi’s fraudulent rent book.
After this, the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, concluded the hearing and thanked McLean effusively:
‘I can only express my admiration for the good humour with which you’ve fulfilled this difficult task.’
After the hearing finished Tom Fowler made this video with Lois Austin who was a political comrade of Dan Gillman’s and other friends of McLean’s:
Reclaim the Streets party protest at the M41, London 13 July 1996. An attendee holds a sign reading ‘street festival temporary road closure’.
On Tuesday 3 February 2026, the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) questioned ‘Monica’. In the 1990s she was an activist with Reclaim the Streets. Monica was deceived into a long-term sexual relationship by an undercover police officer who infiltrated the group, HN14 Jim Boyling ‘Jim Sutton’.
The 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.
Monica’s evidence was given as part of the UCPI’s ‘Tranche 3 Phase 2’ hearings, examining the final 15 years of the Special Demonstration Squad (1993-2008). She has provided a written witness statement to the Inquiry [UCPI0000038662].
Monica has been given a high level of anonymity at the Inquiry. Monica is not her real name, and her testimony was broadcast audio-only, without her face being shown.
Monica was questioned by Sarah Hemingway as First Junior Counsel to the Inquiry. The first 15 minutes of her evidence were not published and cannot be reported due to a restriction order. That is, they are kept secret in order to protect the privacy of those people mentioned.
BACKGROUND
Reclaim the Streets, Camden High Street, 14 May 1995
Monica was in her mid-20s when she moved to London in the autumn of 1995. Her boyfriend at the time was already involved in the anti-roads movement and its urban arm, Reclaim the Streets (RTS).
These campaigns sought to challenge the dominance of car culture and shift the balance of urban planning and living back to being more people-centred.
Monica had met her boyfriend at a protest against a new road near where she lived. She moved to London with him, and he took her to an RTS meeting. They were a couple until July 1996, and remained close friends afterwards.
Special Demonstration Squad officer Jim Boyling was deployed undercover from June 1995 to September 2000, infiltrating animal rights and environmental groups, predominantly Essex hunt saboteurs, Earth First!, and RTS.
He started coming to RTS meetings around the same time as Monica, his first police report being filed about the group on 21 November 1995.
Boyling was known to some as ‘Grumpy Jim’. Monica says this wasn’t a proper nickname, but it was nonetheless accurate as he seemed less empathetic than the rest of the group:
‘There is a characteristic that is hard to define that stood out among us, that we kind of recognised in that in him.’
Monica thinks that she and her boyfriend would have seemed kind and welcoming to Boyling, a soft touch for an entry point into the group.
Jim Boyling whilst undercover in the 1990s
Counsel asks several times about monogamy – whether Monica was monogamous with her boyfriend, whether monogamy was commonplace among RTS activists.
It’s not clear what this is about, unless it’s at the behest of spycops who want to imply that not being monogamous means someone was fair game for the relationships that the Met themselves have already condemned as ‘abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong’.
Monica says that she and her boyfriend were monogamous, and she wasn’t aware of the relationship status or philosophies of others in the group. It wasn’t something that came up as they were just having one meeting a week about political campaigning, attended by a cross-section of society.
Spycops have said that they had to deceive women into relationships in order to fit in with the group, that men who didn’t have a relationship would have been somehow suspicious. Monica dismisses this completely.
Counsel has Monica spell it out; becoming single in July 1996 did not suddenly make her in any way suspicious, and the same was true of her now ex-boyfriend. The spycops’ excuse is a lie.
She does say that coming to the meetings with a partner who was already known to the group helped her integrate more easily. However, this is not what Boyling did. He was already part of the group when he set out to deceive her.
RTS and allied campaigns brought together a diverse range of people who worked with each other in good faith:
‘I think humans want to trust each other. And groups like Reclaim the Streets at the most central part relied on trust, relied on commitment, being on the same page, wanting to have the same discussions, wanting to raise the same issues.’
RECLAIM THE STREETS
Monica talked about the formation and purpose of RTS. There had been protests at rural sites of new road building schemes since the early 1990s.
Twyford Down roadbuilding machinery occupied by protesters, 9 December 1992
Twyford Down in Hampshire had seen the first significant camp occupying the land and taking direct action to obstruct the building work of the new M3 motorway route.
RTS began a couple of years later, around the same time as the protest against the building of the M11 Link Road through East London. It had a lot of the same concerns as the protests about rural landscapes, but also about localised air pollution and the way roads divide communities and bring dangers.
RTS organised ‘street parties’ with an urban street blocked off for an afternoon, cars excluded and replaced by music, celebrations and a carnival-like atmosphere. It was, Monica explained, intended to give a glimpse of how urban space could easily become something much more humane than the car culture allows:
‘You take over a space that’s often divided. People are divided by the car, and you create a different place where different things are possible.
There are banners, there is a sandpit, there are decorations, people are connecting to each other, people are talking. That’s an expression of something that’s different, some way of living that’s different.’
All these movements stemmed from a belief that consumerism was unsustainable and capitalism was an engine of destruction and misery.
The SDS Annual Report of 1996/97 [MPS-0728967] describes this in the exaggerated and sneering terms common to spycop documents:
‘Reclaim the Streets is a group of extremists with the potential and the ambition to cause serious disorder and disruption in London and elsewhere in pursuit of their primary belief that the motor car is evil and their subsidiary belief that big business, the establishment et cetera is also evil.’
Monica felt a strong sense of connection and purpose in her activism and moved into a squat in Hackney with like-minded people.
She said RTS was focused on direct action, which she defines as putting yourself in the way of something harmful or creating something good, rather than having an easily ignored protest march asking others to make changes. She says that some of this was illegal, such as subvertising amendments to billboards.
As for causing ‘disorder’, Monica says it’s a matter of perspective:
‘That desire for the street party was to create a different narrative and to create a different experience of what a road could be, and how roads enclosed people and separated people. How hard it is for someone to cross a six-lane road, that kind of thing.
So you could call that public disorder, but you could also call it an expression of something else. In a way it’s a little bit of both.’
Boyling’s witness statement to the Inquiry is in classic spycop format, describing events and adding exaggeration and lies. As well as blockading roads he claims ‘damaging vehicles and smashing windows was common’. It was nothing of the sort.
TARGETING MONICA
Boyling deceived Monica into a relationship in 1997. Between January and October 1996 he spent more and more time with her, going to pubs together after meetings. She believes he was deliberately targeting her, using the ‘mirroring’ technique that other deceived women have described which makes it feel like extraordinary mutual attraction.
‘I think he was probably behaving in ways that he had been trained, and wanting people to feel comfortable and safe with him, so I did. Because it was rare for me to feel comfortable with people.’
Monica’s mother was gravely ill at the time, and died in April 1996.
Like a large proportion of spycops, Boyling had a vehicle to make him useful to the group. He would generously give people lifts home, thus learning everyone’s addresses and eavesdropping on unguarded conversations.
He also came with a typical spycop backstory of a disturbed childhood. It is a tactic that garners sympathy and trust, and in turn makes people open up to the officer more. He told Monica he was adopted but didn’t want to know who his biological parents were.
At the same time, Monica was going to the Newbury tree protests, where more than 30 camps occupied trees along the nine mile route of a new bypass road around the Berkshire town. From January to April 1996, bailiffs worked to remove the protesters. Monica was at a camp when it was evicted, and was charged with obstruction of bailiffs executing a sheriff’s order.
PARTY ON THE MOTORWAY
On 13 July 1996, Reclaim the Streets held a huge street party on the M41, a mile-long stretch of urban motorway in West London.
Huge crinoline dress at the Reclaim the Streets protest party, M41, 13 July 1996
Thousands of people came and danced to the sound systems in the sunshine. Several people in huge crinoline dresses provided cover for one of them to shelter a person underneath, drilling up the tarmac and symbolically planting a tree.
Both Boyling and Monica had roles in preparation for the event, though as the planning was secret neither knew what the other was doing.
Monica made banners and décor, Boyling had used his van for the recce to check the site, and also driven supplies to the motorway on the day.
Uniformed police had clearly decided to let the event go ahead rather than create confrontation and chaos with so large a moving crowd. Boyling reported on the event [MPS-0246485] and describes the mood in the crowd as ‘jubilant’.
Monica describes a particular moment:
‘There was a woman in a lovely dress and she was playing a cello and singing Amazing Grace and there was this policeman smiling and joining in with her.
It was a really precious moment because it showed how things could shift and showed how commonality could arise, even if it was just a policy of the day. It was something that has always stayed with me. It was very beautiful and meaningful.’
Boyling’s witness statement to the Inquiry describes himself as one of the main organisers of every RTS action from the M41 street party of July 1996 to the Carnival Against Capitalism event in the City of London on 18 June 1999. A Special Branch note of 12 March 1997 says Boyling is ‘a leading figure’ in RTS with contacts throughout Europe.
However, another RTS activist known as ‘Ruth’ has given a witness statement to the Inquiry rubbishing this. Ruth says there was no explicit formal structure within RTS and Boyling was regarded as a bit of an outsider, and he only maintained proximity to the most active organisers through her. Monica essentially confirms Ruth’s description.
This exaggeration of their position and influence, sometimes augmented with exaggeration of the risk they faced, has been a continual feature of spycops at the Inquiry.
PRIVATE SPIES
The road protesters had been subjected to surveillance by private detective agencies. It was intrusive, intimidating and arguably unlawful. In August 1996, Monica took part in an action against one of the agencies, Pinkerton’s in Richmond. This was to be an ‘office occupation’ where activists enter an office and thus disrupt the working day.
The meeting point the night before had been announced at an RTS meeting. Monica was a bit surprised to see Boyling there. He asked what the plan was, but nobody could give him a detailed answer because there wasn’t one as such. They were just going to walk into the office. Boyling got very irritated at the lack of a formal plan and stormed out. The extremity of his reaction left Monica anxious and agitated:
‘It really affected me… I took it as a personal rejection, as something wrong, I have not done something that I should be doing, and I am responsible and I have to make this work.’
As she tried to enter the Pinkerton’s building, Monica was grabbed by a female employee who pushed her. Monica pushed back. The police were on the scene immediately and she was arrested for causing Actual Bodily Harm.
At the police station, Monica admitted that the workers hadn’t wanted her in the building, and that she’d touched the woman. She agreed to plead guilty to a charge of using violence to enter premises. It’s something that has affected her employment applications ever since.
Asked about the use of political violence, she gives a considered response:
‘I don’t think you can create positive change with violence. I think the only way we can really change ourselves is if we learn to live in peace, but I think that takes a hell of a lot of effort and commitment as a species to find a way to do that.
But violence exists everywhere in our society. It’s how it operates, in many ways.’
Boyling reported on her arrest [MPS-0246565] and said that her home address was ‘even more squalid than the usual squat’, something Monica vehemently denies. It is another example of the general spycop disdain for activists and their denigrating stereotyping of them. Curiously, Boyling does not report on his attending the meeting that he stormed out of the night before the arrest.
Shortly afterwards, a Special Branch report [MPS-0246569] says Monica is to be co-ordinator of a Newbury protest support action on 20 August, but she refutes this. After her arrest she was too shaken to be organising.
STOP THE PARTY
There was an RTS street party in Brighton on 24 August 1996. This one was met with police violence. Boyling’s report [MPS-0246589] says about 800 people were there (though Monica thinks it was less) and that uniformed police confiscated most of the equipment before the event could begin.
This resulted in activists not having a focal point during the day and there were a number of flashpoints around the city, with 80 people arrested. Monica’s ex-boyfriend was one of them, dragged down the street and sustaining injuries to his back.
Boyling added notes to his reports bluntly explaining that allowing street parties to go ahead created a contained space and minimised disruption to the rest of the city, whereas the Brighton response caused chaos. Monica confirms the truth of this.
It’s a perspective further illustrated by Boyling’s report on the Oxford street party on 31 October 1996 [MPS-0246780], at which police simply directed traffic around it. Boyling describes this in cynical terms:
‘It is literally just a street party, devoid of the necessary element of political significance.
Nevertheless, as with all such previous events, it was hailed a success by most of the London Reclaim the Streets contingent.’
Monica takes issue with this sneering, pointing out that creating an alternative space for people to connect in a joyous way, showing how being car-free was better, was the actual point.
On 28 September 1996 there was a protest in Liverpool titled Reclaim the Future. Lots of activists from the RTS and road-protest milieu were showing support for striking Liverpool dockers.
The dockers’ dispute was initially about the overtime pay of five workers who then picketed the docks. Dockers refused to cross a picket line and were sacked. This sparked a wider strike. It was widely understood to be about something more, the de-unionisation of the docks workforce.
Asked about the groups organising Reclaim the Future, Monica has no answers, as by that time she was living at the Fairmile road protest camp in Devon and wasn’t attending London meetings. She stayed at Fairmile until early 1997.
NEVER MIND THE BALLOTS
On her return, she found there were preparations for a major event called Never Mind the Ballots on 12 April 1997, just over two weeks before the general election. Monica remembers it in Trafalgar Square as a street party atmosphere but now, seeing Boyling’s spycop documents she realises the full extent of plans for the day.
Cover of spoof newspaper Evading Standards, produced by Reclaim the Streets, April 1997
A report from Boyling is shown [MPS-0000279], detailing the intention to occupy an abandoned Department of the Environment building for several days and hold workshops and meetings.
Monica hasn’t seen this document before and did not know the plan. She asks for time to read it and becomes emotional, stopping Counsel to explain that it appears to have been a well thought out plan to get people together and consider what the election is compared to what it could be. There was to be a space for people to really get to grips with who controls politics, and how things could be different. It was much more than something for leisure, it was outreach, it was communication to stimulate thought and change.
RTS had produced ‘Evading Standards’, a free newspaper that spoofed the format of the Evening Standard, to be handed out on the day. Police seized all 20,000 copies to prevent those ideas being shared and arrested three activists. These were wrongful arrests and the police later had to pay compensation, but the harm was done and the police can afford it.
Monica says that though the election was about to bring a change in the party of government as Tony Blair’s Labour Party swept to victory, it was just a continuation of neo-liberal capitalism, nothing significant was actually changing and crucial issues continued to be ignored.
She knew that Boyling had been one of the three RTS organisers of the day:
‘It makes me want to cry because, as I say in my statement, Boyling was one of the three main organisers of this and I was really proud of him. I had thought he really stepped up.
But obviously he and the police who employed him made this not happen, and I am angry and upset about that in this moment.
It is heartbreaking, and it is so effective, isn’t it, at limiting the debate and controlling the options, because no one is allowed to actually express anything that is different.’
She remembers Boyling mocking one of the other three organisers for being nervous on the morning of the events. She is now disgusted by this. Unlike the others, Boyling wasn’t an activist who believed in what he was doing, taking risks to try to create a better world. Of course he wouldn’t be nervous, because none of it mattered to him.
Monica had a role herself, creating the flags that would have helped direct some of the marchers to the Department of the Environment building.
One of the red, black and green flags at the Never Mind the Ballots party protest by Reclaim the Streets and Liverpool dockers, Trafalgar Square, London, 12 April 1997.
A central gathering in Trafalgar Square with a sound system was one of the parts of the wider plan that had been permitted to go ahead. Monica was there and describes a typical positive street party mood for much of the day. Later on though, tensions started to rise. They had been penned in by uniformed police. She saw one person throw something at the line of officers.
Then over by the sound system, for the first time in a long while, she saw Boyling. He told her he was worried that the sound system would not be allowed to leave and would be impounded. She reassured him and held his hand.
The system was allowed egress and the crowd began to disperse. Monica was quite buoyant about the afternoon, but met a friend who’d known more about the failed plans who was disappointed. They went to a pub and she saw Boyling there, who seemed pleased to see her.
THE SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP
Numerous spycops have claimed that it was essential to deceive women into relationships in order to gain credibility and not seem like an oddball. It is nonsense and, as Counsel notes, Boyling had been successfully infiltrating RTS for 18 months at this time without sexually violating anyone.
Yet in his witness statement, Boyling says:
‘It is difficult to sustain the image of a single bloke living alone within activists’ groups, where relationships are made and unmade very easily and almost all activists were in a relationship with another known activist.’
This is simply not true. A significant number of activists don’t have relationships with other activists. Many spycops before and after Boyling successfully completed their deployments without deceiving women into relationships.
Monica looks at it from an additional angle, suggesting that if you can’t do spying without violating women’s bodily autonomy and human rights, then you shouldn’t be spying at all.
Spycop Jim Boyling with his van. Vans were commonly used by spycops as a way to make themselves useful to a group to the point of indispensability.
She says clearly that it is obviously possible to spy on people without having sex with them, and sex should never be used to bolster an undercover identity.
The evening after Trafalgar Square, she left the pub with Boyling. They sat on a wall and she kissed him. She asked to go home with him and he readily agreed. He went to collect his van then drove them to his one-bedroom flat in East Dulwich. They smoked cannabis mixed with tobacco.
This was a very significant moment for Monica. She had been a heavy smoker from the age of 14, and had recently seen her mother die from a smoking-related illness. She had developed severe bronchitis and had managed to give up at the start of the year, but this smoking with Boyling renewed her addiction.
She says in her witness statement [UCPI0000038662] that she deeply resents him for this, and also for laughing at her for the resulting breathlessness when she ran.
Smoking the cannabis was entirely unnecessary. It was fairly common in those social circles but a large proportion did not indulge. This was just Boyling gratuitously enjoying the criminal perks of the job.
MAKING IT CONTINUE
They had sex, and the next morning cemented it into an ongoing relationship. Counsel again asks if his action was somehow socially necessary, and again Monica says it wasn’t. If he had said he didn’t want a relationship or had a girlfriend or given some other reason not to continue, she would have thought badly of him for not telling her the night before, but it wouldn’t have been a big deal.
Boyling claims he was compelled to start the relationship because she’d kissed him in front of other activists and he would have looked suspicious had he not responded positively. Monica says neither part of that is true:
‘I don’t think I would have kissed him in front of other activists if they had been stood around the pub. I think we were alone. He could have just said, “Look, sorry, love” and for me that wouldn’t have been a big problem.’
She adds that the attitudes in the network were actively supportive of people’s right to be themselves and make their own choices outside of social coercion.
The two of them lived in very different parts of London, so she kept a toothbrush and clothes at his flat:
‘We had an intimate relationship for six months between April and October 1997 and during that period I considered him my boyfriend, as it would have been, and that I saw him regularly.
I went back to his flat after Reclaim the Streets meetings. If I wasn’t going anywhere else or leaving London for any other reason, then I spent time with him.’
Counsel interjects to say that Boyling’s various accounts have been inconsistent, but at its shortest he says the relationship lasted for a few weeks in the summer. In his witness statement [UCPI0000036294] he claims Monica only stayed at his flat on a few occasions, and they probably only had sex about a dozen times. He claims Monica was seeing other people at the time, something she flatly denies.
It really is pathetic of him to try to weasel out of it by downplaying it and truncating the dates. It’s the fact that he deceived her and abused her that’s the problem. Even if his version were wholly true, it doesn’t absolve him of anything.
BOYLING’S WANTON CRUELTY
Many women deceived into relationships by spycops have said that the officer acted as if they were their perfect partner. But Boyling, once his mirroring had ensnared Monica’s affections, did not maintain such a pretence. She describes a nasty side to his treatment of her.
As already mentioned, despite the fact that she had bronchial issues, he laughed at her for her level of physical fitness. She worried about people talking behind her back, and he mocked her for it. She speculated about alien lifeforms coming to help human civilisation and he not only ridiculed but shouted at her for it.
They drove up in his van to the 1997 Earth First! summer gathering in Strathclyde. En route they stopped for the night in the Lake District. Monica woke up cold and told him, but Boyling – toasty warm in his expensive Snugpak sleeping bag – just turned over and left her to it.
Once at the gathering, Monica went to a women’s-only meeting where there was a man in the space which created some debate. Afterward, she discussed it with her supposed boyfriend, Boyling, who, it now appears, deliberately antagonised her:
‘I went back to the van and was talking to him about this, because it had been quite intense. And he just was mocking me about the need to have women’s only spaces, because this man being there had disrupted the space…
I kept trying to explain, earnestly explain, what that meant. Like, from my lived experience in that moment. And he kept just mocking it and going, “should have men’s only spaces”…
You know when you are really trying to explain something to somebody that means a lot to you and they don’t listen and they don’t hear, and actually they keep taking their position in a degrading way?…
I think he was playing with me, in truth, now. I look back at that, I think he was playing with me.’
She says that after finding out the truth about who he was, she had trepidation at the prospect of seeing his police reports about her. He had manipulated her affections but his cruelties at the time had shown he also felt disdain, and the stark reality was something she dreaded:
‘I had been afraid of knowing what he really thought of me, a lot, because I think he had contempt for me. There might have been other things there, but there was contempt.
And there was a sense of me being lesser than him and a bit of an idiot and inferior, because he is this high-profile ever-so-good Metropolitan Police officer.’
ACTIVISM TOGETHER
In her witness statement, Monica says that she and Boyling discussed RTS activities with each other as a couple. She describes him as focused on what was the right direction to take in the movement; he was motivated to organise, take part in actions, and willing to take risks.
About a month after they got together, Boyling filed a report on a court appearance of Monica’s [MPS-0000365]. She had been part of a group who’d visited the home of the Transport Secretary and dug up some grass. She says it was just ‘a publicity stunt’. A similar action had been done before without convictions, so she was surprised that digging up turf and putting it back counted as the offence of criminal damage.
Spycop Jim Boyling while undercover, 1997
Another month afterward, on 21 June 1997, there was an RTS street party in Bristol. Boyling reported on that [MPS-0000417] and names Monica as one of those attending.
The report includes her Special Branch Registry File number, meaning that she had a ‘live’ file; she had already been reported on a number of times and was considered worthy of ongoing monitoring.
The following week, the couple attended Glastonbury Festival together. Boyling’s witness statement says that Monica slept separately in her own tent, but she says they stayed together in his van.
Again, it appears that Boyling thinks if he can slightly tone down minor details it will somehow make him look like less of a manipulative abuser.
He did lend her a tent later that summer, when she was planning to go to Buddhafield festival in the hope of finding the spiritual strength to overcome her tobacco addiction.
A fortnight after Glastonbury, the couple travelled up to the previously mentioned Earth First! Summer gathering in Strathclyde, held 9-15 July 1997.
In his witness statement, Boyling says he doesn’t remember attending the gathering and says his reporting on it was from second or third hand information. In most of his reports on events he lists ‘Jim Sutton’ as attending, but has not done so for this one.
Monica is certain they were there together. She remembers the sleeping bag incident en route and the women’s workshop argument with great clarity. She suggests that Boyling is seeking to understate his activity and, as he isn’t mentioned in the list of those attending, is trying to get out of it.
Her perspective is reinforced by the fact that the Inquiry has a copy of his managers’ authorisation to travel to the event [MPS-0527813].
Monica was involved in organising ‘Strike Oil’, part of 100 days of action against the oil industry in the run-up to the crucial Kyoto climate change summit where world leaders would try to agree a plan for cutting carbon emissions. Boyling filed a report about it on 3 September 1997 [MPS-000519] and again on 9 September.
The report describes Monica and Jay Jordan as the organisers, which she accepts. Jordan knew of her relationship with Boyling and was surprised by it, telling the Inquiry:
‘”Monica” was a brilliant, politically intellectual, sharp person and Boyling gave the impression of not being interested in politics.’
She thinks perhaps Jordan was more perceptive than she:
‘One of the things that I took at face value of Jim was his being a vegan. I’m quite easily duped and quite naive. I take people at face value. So that had quite a big impact, he’s vegan, he’s “hunt sab Jim”, so he must be in the same place.’
She doesn’t disagree with Jordan’s description of her, but does say that her political abilities didn’t extend to great practical skills, which was something she learned in the Strike Oil process. In the end, the action didn’t go ahead as planned.
The Inquiry took a break, during which Tom Fowler made this summary and analysis video with Jay Jordan:
ENDING THE RELATIONSHIP
In October 1997, six months into her relationship with Boyling, Monica ended it.
‘I think his snidey behaviour, sometimes his way of treating me, was probably having an effect as well, which I think was probably intentional of him.’
A while afterwards, they had a phone call where Boyling was crying and saying that, despite having previously wanted to split up, he was now missing her.
After the split, they met up and she told him about an activist she liked and had sex with. Boyling chose to react by emotionally blackmailing Monica for sex.
‘Anyone who knows him, how he presented, he used to look up with his eyes, his little doe eye things, and he kind of said that would it be all right for him if we had sex. And I didn’t really want to, but because he did, I did.
Because that’s the kind of unconscious aspect of my personality, I tend to do what I think other people want me to do.’
Asked how she felt afterwards, she is very definite:
‘I didn’t feel good. It didn’t feel good. It didn’t feel right.’
She had always sensed a kind of vulnerability in Boyling. It might be him mirroring her feelings back at her, but she suggests that it may be something else instead:
‘I pick things up without knowing. So I think maybe I did pick up on the vulnerability of living a complete lie and betraying everyone that you knew…
It must be incredibly hard to be playing such a game. To not only play the game of being a really well-thought Metropolitan Police officer, who everyone thinks is amazing, but you are also lying to all the people around [you] in order to deceive them.
It’s not a game I could play. It is quite a full-on game, it must feel quite lonely on some level, never to be able to be your real authentic self, whatever that is, with anyone around you. So maybe I picked up on that.’
DISENGAGING FROM RTS
Leaflet for the Reclaim the Streets protest party in London, 13 July 1996
On 24 October 1997, Boyling reported on RTS [MPS-0000601] saying that the Strike Oil plan had been dropped, there was low morale, and a split between the ‘core group’ and the wider attendees of weekly meetings.
Monica doesn’t see it in those terms, saying that any creative group contains clusters of people who bond over shared intent and experience, but this doesn’t necessarily make factions who oppose one another.
Monica says that the huge street party on the M41 in July 1996 had garnered a new influx of attendees at the weekly RTS meetings. There was a common desire to turn this groundswell of enthusiasm into action, but a number of different ideas about how to do it.
It is common among spycops to report in terms of hierarchies, command structures and ranks, describing people competitively jockeying for status and control, even when nothing of the sort is happening. It’s like they take the police’s institutional model and project it on to all groups, unaware that things can actually be done differently.
A week later, on 31 October 1997, Boyling reported [MPS-0000638] that some RTS activists were going up to the site of the planned Birmingham Northern Relief Road (now called the M6 Toll). This would have been somewhat premature as the contract for building hadn’t yet been awarded to any company, and the route wasn’t going to be cleared until 1999.
Monica says it wasn’t a formulated plan, just an idea discussed. She had grown up in the area, she and her father used to walk their dog there:
‘It was a rare space of nature and that road was going through it. So I used to, in my mind and my passion, used to fantasise about protecting that space.’
Her mother had recently died. Monica was struggling with life in London, and contemplating moving back to the area and spending time with her father.
Boyling wrote of the activists discussing the visit:
‘It’s widely presumed that they just want to spend the winter up a tree.’
Monica is disgusted by the arrogance and inhumanity:
‘When I look at it, I think it’s part of my passion being expressed to someone I thought was a close person to me, then being recycled into the sneery intelligence report…
They are in a position where they know things and they also totally believe themselves to be superior to us, hence the term “wearies“, and hence the way they look at us in degrading inferior ways, like the ‘squalid squats’ and all this kind of stuff.’
Also on 31 October 1997, Monica was part of a protest at an open-cast coal mine in Derbyshire. The Inquiry refers to it as Stonebroom, but this is an error in Boyling’s reporting; the site was Doe Hill Quarry, near Tibshelf. Several of those attending wrote reports for Earth First! journal Do Or Die.
Security around the action had been tight: people met at a pre-arranged point, were taken by coach, and the location of the target was only disclosed at the last minute, in person. Boyling’s report sounds impressed, albeit prefixed with an inevitable backhanded swipe:
‘In stark contrast to recent shambolic environmental protests, this was a well-planned and meticulously prepared event.’
Around 200 people occupied the mine, did considerable damage to the mining equipment, and left, all without uniformed police even turning up.
On the coach back to London, Monica sat next to Boyling and fell asleep on him. She asked to stay at his and he agreed. It wasn’t sexual at all, but rather that she felt safe with him and wanted company.
LEAVING, YET SPIED ON ALL THE MORE
Boyling reported on an RTS meeting on 8 December 1997 [MPS-0000730], listing Monica as one of three people who ‘attended but have now been excluded from the group’.
Spycop Jim Boyling giving evidence to the Undercover Policing Inquiry, 10 February 2026
She explains that this is another exaggeration and projection of factionalism. Nobody was excluded, it’s just that there was a section who were up for taking on organisational roles who decided to have separate meetings.
Monica was struggling personally at the time so did not opt to be a part of that. She adds that it was not long after the formation of that group that Boyling deceived ‘Ruth’ into a relationship.
Monica was arrested in early May 1998 as part of a group attempting to squat a former Department of Social Security building in Dalston. As a government location, its alarms were linked to the police, who turned up in large numbers and in a bad mood.
Monica was among those arrested. Two of her comrades were convicted of assaulting police officers, but these convictions were later quashed on appeal when an expert on the Sitex metal screening covering the windows proved that the police’s story, which rested on the squatters impossibly moving the screens, was a lie.
Immediately afterwards, a Special Branch briefing note [MPS-0730815] says RTS activists were seeking locations for future street parties. It lists Monica as one of the North London planning group, gives a lot of personal details including a physical description, and requests further personal intrusive surveillance:
‘As part of Operation Larder, a general lifestyle surveillance of “Monica” would be beneficial. Together with any information concerning her involvement in the planning of the above event, such as the reconnoitring of potential sites and meetings with other environmentalists.’
It appears that, despite becoming less involved in activism, she had become a person of such significant interest that she was assigned her own code name for Special Branch reporting, ‘Perpetual Motion’.
In the summer of 1998, Monica left London and RTS-style activism behind. She had attended a June 1998 street party and felt alienated. Seeking other ways to balance her relationship with herself and do practical good, she turned her focus to meditation and permaculture. Her social circle continued to include a lot of people who had an activist background and had been on many of the same campaigns and protests as her.
Reclaim the Streets banner ‘the earth is not the casino of the rich’, London, 18 June 1999
Monica is mentioned in two further reports. One, from 1 March 1999 [MPS-0001845], reports that on 23 February activists including Monica had occupied the London offices of Kvaerner, the company that had been awarded the contract for the Birmingham Northern Relief Road.
As that project was especially close to her heart, she had returned to London for the action. The action itself was fairly brief and unremarkable. The report lists her as an organiser, which she doesn’t recall doing at all.
She’s also named as the organiser of a protest for the Justice for Simon Jones campaign, which she wasn’t, she only made a banner.
Again, this is a pattern we’ve seen in reports by other spycops: once an activist is considered to be a key organiser, they have significant roles falsely attributed to them. It’s unclear why this is, unless it’s just a way to for spycops to impress their managers by supplying intelligence on the people that are supposedly the commanders of a movement.
OPENING THE FILE
The Inquiry then brings up Monica’s Special Branch Registry File [MPS-0720800]. An entry dated 2 August 2000 talks about comprehensive enquiries made regarding her, and she’s described as a dedicated and prominent environmental activist.
The file has extensive personal details: her date and place of birth, her parents, and her childhood address. There is a photograph, a physical description, and her current whereabouts. Special Branch have added information from state agencies such as the DVLA, electoral roll, and Police National Computer. The latter lists her sentences for five offences; a caution, two fines, and two conditional discharges.
Monica objects to the phrasing, especially for the first two which were the result of the Newbury Bypass tree protest:
‘I was contextually protecting woodland from being destroyed. So I don’t call that an offence in a way…
I also think that protecting nature or ecology, the living systems of this planet that support all of life, from being destroyed by the voracious need of capitalism to consume all the resources for this unending progress of consumerism, I don’t think that is an offence.’
She also corrects the file’s repetition of her and another person being co-organisers of the Justice for Simon Jones protest. Monica was asked to make a banner and she agreed to do it, that was it.
In her witness statement [UCPI0000038662], Monica expressed her outrage at the fact that the spying extended to her parents:
‘Seeing my dad’s name and job discussed in a Special Branch file has been one of the most impacting things of this whole Inquiry process, and I am very angry about this.
Dad died in 2022, and fortunately I did not have to make a decision about whether to tell him about this invasion of his privacy, owing to this unwarranted characterisation of me as a threat to the British State…
He would never have imagined that my efforts to make the world a better place had led to such intrusion into his life. I am glad in a way that I have been spared having to tell him that he had been abused and violated in this way.’
Seeing her file, Monica is incredulous at the narrow-minded short-sightedness of its authors:
‘It seems that the way we are supposed to think, to not be considered subversive, is quite limited by the MI5, the Home Office, the Metropolitan Police.
It almost feels like we will be spied on if we stand up for justice, or stand up for how we perceive justice to be, whether that is protecting people from having fascists beating them up or protecting the ecological system from destruction.
For wanting to live in different ways that aren’t just as consumers of a capitalist system that serves very few people and serves the people who spy on us and infiltrate us.
So it is a little bit like “this person could still be dangerous or could still be considered to be subversive, because she cares about a living system of the earth which gives her life”.’
She says that the Extinction Rebellion protests were focused on the right issues, but it was depressing to hear the media refuse to listen to the real purpose. She adds that she couldn’t think of participating in anything like that, knowing the truth about Boyling and spycops.
‘It is heartbreaking to see the level of delusion that the human race is acting, the level of sociopathy, psychopathy and narcissism that runs our world and how our voices are still being silenced…
So I live as simply as I can and as kindly as I can and I do my best, because there is nothing else that I can do. But I still have hope.’
IMPACT OF THE TRUTH
Monica says the discovery of Boyling’s real identity was life changing for her personally.
‘It is a patriarchal entitlement fundamentally, if you really look at it. It is like “men have needs” – which is something I know that he said once – and I, my body, doesn’t have an individual right. My human rights don’t exist because I am a woman.
It is such a violation and it is such a cold, calculated way of using people….
It’s such a negation of self, it is a negation of agency, they knew we would not consent, but it doesn’t matter because it serves their cause.’
She expands on this to say that it was also a collective violation of the activists by the police.
When asked about how it impacted her to have an intimate relationship with Boyling, she takes issue with the term:
‘I didn’t have an intimate relationship with him, really. He had sex with me for whatever reasons he did. I thought I had an intimate relationship with him, but I didn’t. I had something else altogether, but I wasn’t aware of it…
Of course he gave no thought for me. I was irrelevant to his startling career, wasn’t I? I was irrelevant to his commendation. I was irrelevant to how well he was doing in infiltrating this group of wearies.’
As the hearing approached its conclusion, Monica was asked if there was anything else she wanted to add.
She says that she was just the first woman Boyling deceived into a relationship. He then moved on to ‘Ruth’, and then to ‘Rosa’ with whom he had two children. That meant abuse on scale far beyond what he did to Monica. And we’re getting answers now not because the police wanted to come clean but because those they victimised did the detective work:
‘I walked away from this car crash. “Rosa” didn’t. And unless the women who were so traumatised by these men suddenly leaving their lives hadn’t tried to look for them, we wouldn’t be here now.
And, actually, if it wasn’t for the fact that it came to light that the Special Demonstration Squad had spied on the Lawrence family, and the Lawrence family had already been through several abuses by the state that it became such a question, we wouldn’t be here now… before that happened, we didn’t count.’
Monica expresses gratitude for the work of the Inquiry, and for the activists reporting on it. Even though she’s been so profoundly violated by a spycop, she’s still shocked at what she’s seen and heard in the hearings, and at the emotional poverty of the officers who appear unable to feel any remorse or even see those they spied on as fully human:
‘They don’t care about anyone else. They don’t have empathy. That’s how it seems. And these are the people who are controlling us. These are the people who are running society.’
NO EMPATHY, FEW CONSEQUENCES
Boyling is the only officer involved in the spycops scandal to lose their job. A tribunal ruled in 2018 that his behaviour in relation to Rosa amounted to gross misconduct and deserved dismissal.
In July 2023, a second police disciplinary tribunal found that Boyling’s abuse of Monica was also gross misconduct, but not to a sackable degree. The key difference seems to be that he identified fellow spycops to Rosa. His abuse of the women was of secondary importance to the tribunal.
Monica’s legal case to challenge the Crown Prosecution Service’s refusal to prosecute Boyling failed, with judges ruling the CPS had acted properly.
It’s clear that the lack of empathy extends far beyond the spycops.
Monica sets the small-heartedness of the spycops and their defenders within the biggest picture:
‘We live in a vast universe beyond measure and we are conscious, and this society is what we do with it? We could be so much more. We could tend the earth, we could garden. We could live in peace.’
The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, praised Monica for having the courage to come and face public questioning and thanked her for doing so.
After the hearing ended, Tom Fowler made a summary and reaction video with two former RTS activists, Zoe and Dave:
Austin has since seen further disclosure of evidence about another undercover police officer, HN104 Carlo Soracchi ‘Carlo Neri’, who was deployed from 2000 to 2005, infiltrating socialist and antifascist groups in London. She has therefore produced a second witness statement, and is being called back to give evidence about that.
Spycop Carlo Soracchi
The UCPI is an independent, judge-led inquiry into undercover policing in England and Wales.
Spycops from these units lived as activists for years at a time, spying on more than 1,000 groups.
Austin’s evidence was given as part of the UCPI’s ‘Tranche 3 Phase 2’ hearings, examining the final 15 years of the Special Demonstration Squad (1993-2008).
She has produced a written witness statement for the Inquiry [UCPI0000037774] however at time of writing (four months after she gave her evidence) it has not yet been published online.
Austin began by describing the protest in London on 1 May 2001. The protest was just one of many annual Mayday demonstrations that happen throughout the world every year. Austin explained:
‘The trade unions in London have a regional May Day demonstration every year… I am a trade unionist, I am a socialist, I attend, along with comrades, friends, family.’
On 30 April 2001, the night before the Mayday protest, Soracchi filed a report [MPS-0005795] about antifascist group of No Platform alleging that:
‘Should the opportunity present itself for an attack on property or the police then they will take part.’
Austin explains that this is a wild exaggeration of the kind we see over and over again in SDS reports:
‘It is absolute rubbish and nonsense. What we were doing on that day was about politics. It was a political intervention…
So it’s not reliable. No, it’s not reliable pre-event intelligence’
Around 20-30 Socialist Party members joined the protest, to give out flyers and sell newspapers. They stayed together as the protest went down Regent Street and reached the Nike shop at Oxford Circus.
Austin takes up the story:
‘So we arrived at Oxford Circus probably just before 2.00 pm…
There were lots of police around. Lots of protesters. Very peaceful, carnival atmosphere, people with musical instruments. I was outside Nike Town, I think, giving out leaflets about child labour and the fact that Nike use child labour in the Third World.’
At around 2pm, 6,000 police officers moved in and surrounded the crowd. About 3,000 people, including Austin, were held there, penned in by police, for seven and a half hours.
People were tightly packed, there was no water, food or toilets provided, and there was a level of distress in the crowd. No one was allowed to leave until 9:30pm.
This was the first time the Met used this now-common tactic, known as ‘kettling’. It caused outrage not only among those invovled but among civil rights groups too.
‘Q. You didn’t see any incidents of violence, did you, while you were in that cordon?
A. No, I didn’t. What I saw was people tired, frustrated. People with medical conditions like diabetes, you know, we had a couple of young women with us who were on their period. There were no toilet facilities.’
Spycop Carlo Soracchi, who infiltrate the Socialist Party and associated groups, was also in the crowd that day with Austin and around two dozen other Socialist Party members. He was held inside the kettle along with everyone else.
Austin describes how the police cordon closed in on the crowd, which she felt was both dangerous and reckless.
‘At a certain point they tightened the cordon, and the normal uniformed police officers stepped back and then rows and rows of riot police move in and they tighten and tighten the cordon.
I can remember saying to the police near me at the time, “Why are you tightening the cordon? Why are you doing that? That is dangerous, are you attempting to create a crush? Because people are getting frightened. You are creating a crush”.
As it is, we are already quite tightly packed into Oxford Circus’
Austin had a baby in creche that day, less than one year old. She was breast feeding and needed to get back to collect her child. She explained this to police but they refused to let her leave.
‘I was scared and frightened. I was frightened when they tightened the cordon.
I was upset when they wouldn’t let me leave to collect my daughter and I got really scared when it got dark and we were getting hardly or no announcements from the police about what was going on’
THE OXFORD CIRCUS KETTLING CASE
In 2005 Austin brought a civil claim against the Metropolitan Police over their use of the ‘kettle’ that day.
Police kettling Mayday protesters at Oxford Circus, 1 May 2001 (pic: Brian David Stevens)
She was represented by barrister Kier Starmer, among others, and hers was the first of a potential 150 claims for false imprisonment brought by people unlawfully detained by police at Oxford Circus on 1 May 2001.
We now know that Soracchi was tasked with briefing the legal team representing the Met in that case, giving insider information about the police’s legal opponents..
Documents have emerged in this Inquiry which reveal that Soracchi met with John Beggs, the lead barrister representing the Met, the night before Austin was cross examined.
Soracchi was still deployed in 2005. We were shown an authorisation [MPS-0526804] which stated that his deployment was for the prevention and detection of the crime or public disorder.
Yet this was a civil claim, not to do with crime. Furthermore, it had nothing to do with dosorder, Austin and the others had acted entirely lawfully, it was the Met who didn’t.
Soracchi’s authorisation says that he was tasked with infiltrating antifascist groups No Platform and Antifa. Counsel asks if there was crossover between them and the Socialist Party.
Austin points out that she has given evidence on this before, and that she doesn’t know what else he was doing:
‘I just thought he was an ordinary member of the Socialist Party.’
There is no sign of any SDS reports by Carlo Soracchi about the legal briefing he gave to Beggs, however there are bullet points in an internal SDS document about it, and a later authorisation document for Soracchi (using his code name ‘Craggy Island’) mentions that he was able to provide briefings in a civil case to legal counsel, noting:
‘Undercover officer Craggy Island’s intelligence and assessment for MPS counsel in relation to the recent May Day action was of significant value.’
Evidence of what was said in that briefing can be found in the notes made by officers who interviewed Soracchi in 2013 for Operation Herne, the Met’s investigation in to spycops [MPS-0726931, MPS-0738088].
Two different officers took notes of Soracchi’s description of the meeting with Beggs and record it as follows:
‘Brief description given of Lois and what would wind her up because of the type of person she was.’
And that Soracchi was:
‘asked to brief… in relation to her character. I know she was a South London girl who could easily get wound up.’
At the trial itself, Austin gave evidence for two days, and she says the cross examination was very hostile. She describes how it was evident from Beggs’ tone that he was trying to discredit her as a witness:
‘The questions I was asked at the start of when I gave evidence about Irish people, I was asked: “There were a lot of Irish people in the Socialist Party contingent, wasn’t there? Your partner is Irish, he was active in politics in, I think, Belfast in the 1990s.”
And I remember asking the question to Mr Beggs: “Are you allowed to ask questions about that? Is that not racist? What are you trying to say about Irish people?”
So that makes me think that maybe that’s the information that Carlo had given Mr Beggs, to say, well, Lois is married to an Irishman, she’s got Irish friends. That may be something that’s going to wind her up.’
Beggs has submitted a witness statement about this incident to the Inquiry [UCPI0000039326] in which he claims that he brought up the presence of Irish people at the Mayday 2001 protest for ‘forensic reasons’, however he does not explain what they were.
Soracchi has also given a statement to the inquiry about the briefing he gave to Beggs [UCPI0000035550] but a large section is redacted.
INSIDE INFORMATION
Irrespective of what the briefings and meeting involved, there was a police spy in a group that was involved in legal action against the police. This is exactly the situation that scandalised the nation when it was revealed that police had done this to the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, an outrage that forced the Home Secretary to set up the Undercover Policing Inquiry.
Beggs has told the Inquiry that he remembers being briefed by Soracchi. He describes being provided with written briefings about Lois by the SDS, and says he didn’t want to rely on them for his cross examination because they were untested.
‘[the briefings] seemed to portray Lois Austin as some kind of wild radical, possibly involved in very serious matters.
I was asked whether I wanted to meet with the undercover officer. I said yes because (as stated) I was sceptical about the written briefings.’
We are told by Counsel that these briefings may have been produced by Soracchi’s managers at the time, HN58 or HN36 Michael Dell. Beggs goes on to conclude that the briefings were unfair and inaccurate, saying:
‘I remember contrasting the hyperbole of the written briefings with the mundanity of his [Soracchi’s] direct oral briefing to me.’
However Austin disputes this:
‘I think this is Mr Beggs trying to cover his tracks… is it lawful or is it misconduct?
If it is not unlawful, is it misconduct for a barrister to meet an undercover informant, or undercover police officer, the night before a trial and -’
Hemingway cuts Austin off:
‘I don’t think that is something we can comment on this morning.’
It is important to remember that Soracchi’s account of the meeting is that he was specifically asked by Beggs to give information about what would ‘wind her up’.
Austin describes her experience in court on the second day:
‘A lot of the cross-examination was about violence, whether I was violent and about violence generally…
Carlo knew that I wasn’t a violent person and Carlo admits it here, says it here, that Lois was not a violent person.
So the Metropolitan Police… have been told by one of their sources that I am not a violent person, why was I cross-examined… so vigorously by Mr Beggs about violence and whether or not I was a violent person?…
Not only did Carlo know that I wasn’t a violent person… he knew that I had a baby…
I can’t imagine that he was in that kettle for seven and a half hours and at no point had spoken to his handlers.’
Again, Counsel interrupts Austin to shut her down, saying that uniformed police wouldn’t have been able to know whether she was lying about having a baby and insisting:
‘We are not going to back and re-litigate and we are not going to look at the reasoning of the judge here.’
This seems unnecessarily hostile, particularly given the questions Counsel went on to ask.
Counsel takes us to Beggs’ second witness statement [UCPI0000039591] in which he says that he believed Austin and other witnesses were going to perjure themselves by denying membership of the Socialist Party.
Counsel then seems to re-ask many of Beggs’ cross examination questions, seeking to establish whether or not witnesses to the Mayday 2001 civil case were secretly members of the Socialist Party, and very much giving the impression that she does actually want to re-litigate the case.
At the trial in 2005, Beggs was working for the police alongside George Thomas KC. He has given a statement to the Undercover Policing Inquiry [UCPI0000039464], saying:
‘Mr Beggs sets out in stark terms the seriousness of the allegation that witnesses disclaiming any personal involvement with the Socialist Party were in fact members of it…
This was not a case of the defendant seeking to take inappropriate advantage of information learned from a secret source about the other side’s legitimate litigation tactics: the information, if true, indicated serious wrongdoing, and possible illegality.
If it was not true, or could not be proved, it would lead nowhere.’
Counsel recognises that it did, in fact, lead nowhere, and Austin points out that was because it was untrue.
Austin laughs at the idea that she would ever hide her membership of the Socialist Party – she was in the party leadership and stood in elections:
‘I mean the world and his dog knows that I was a member of the Socialist Party!’
ACCUSED OF LYING
She confirms that Beggs did ask her repeatedly about the other witnesses and called her a liar for saying she didn’t know them.
‘I was cross-examined on it and I was asked specifically about names of individuals, and whether or not they were Socialist Party members and whether I knew them. At the time I can remember thinking: why is he asking me about these people that I had never heard of?’
Austin is shown the list of 150 claimants-in-waiting for the Mayday 2001 kettling case. She is asked how many were Socialist Party members and she replies that, including her, there were three.
Asked about the list of the ten witnesses that were called by claimants in the civil case, she says none of them were Socialist Party members except her partner, although one was a friend in the Socialist Alliance.
Lois Austin on a Youth Against Racism in europe lobby of the Home Office, 1993. Pic: Tim Bolwell
However, Austin also points out that if the number of Socialist Party members among the witnesses had been twenty rather than two, it would not have made any difference to the legal strategy.
The fact is that the police were using their secret political spies to gain litigation advantage in a civil claim.
Another lawyer who represented the police, whose name is restricted, has made a witness statement saying it was ‘standard practice’ to try and get background information about the other side’s witnesses. They refer to an email from Beggs after the meeting which states that he has acquired some ‘useful general information about the nature of the beast’.
Soracchi claims he did not pass on any information that would be subject to legal professional privilege, i.e. he says he didn’t disclose Austin’s legal strategy. That seems unlikely, and even if it were true, the fact that an undercover officer was briefing the police legal team was never mentioned in disclosure at the time.
Soracchi was not only in a position to know about Austin and what might wind her up. As a member of the Socialist Party at the time who had been there on the day, Soracchi was also contacted as a witness to the 2001 kettling, and invited to be part of Austin’s case.
As Austin says, he had been present in the crowd on the day, and he ought to have had important evidence to give to the court that supported her description of events:
‘Carlo would have been a very good claimant. Because he would have said, “I saw no violence and people were bored and fed up and frustrated and people wanted to go home”.’
Austin makes clear that the Inquiry needs to put it to Soracchi that he knew full well that the things that were said about her during cross-examination were untrue.
While there was a short break in the questioning, Tom Fowler made this video with Donal O’Driscoll of the Undercover Research Group:
DISORDER ORGANISED BY SPYCOPS
During the trial in her civil claim, Austin was cross-examined for hours about violence, including being shown videos of disorder at ‘J18’ protests in June 1999, and Mayday 2000.
She reminds the Inquiry that she wasn’t at either of those events. It is very clear from the evidence heard in this Inquiry, that the SDS officers HN14 Jim Boyling ‘Jim Sutton’ and HN3 ‘Jason Bishop’ played a significant role in organising those events. If there was any crime involved, the spycops had far more to do with it than she did.
That would obviously also have been relevant disclosure to be made in her case, if Beggs wanted to use those events as evidence against her.
‘I feel very upset that I was a young mum, two small children, cross-examined for two days in the most hostile fashion about events that we now know were set up and orchestrated by undercover police officers.
And used as an excuse to contain me for seven, seven and a half, eight hours, in Oxford Circus, no access to the toilet.
I was lactating at the time so I was actually in physical pain and needed to feed my daughter…
[I was told] that I was not credible when I said that there was no violence or I saw no violence, when actually a member of the Metropolitan Police, Carlo Soracchi, who was with me in the containment, also said that he saw no violence. But that was never disclosed to the court.’
Austin further says that she does not accept the claim that police witnesses were not briefed by Soracchi. She points out there were confirmed telephone briefings of witnesses by Beggs after he met with Soracchi, and we are shown another authorisation document which states:
‘The undercover officer Craggy Island has been in a position to provide background briefing to both Metropolitan Police legal advisers and SO12 [Special Branch] senior management in the current May Day 2001 civil case.’
Austin points out that senior management within Special Branch at the time included Detective Chief Inspector Alan Mitchell, who was a police witness during the trial.
It is frankly appalling that a spycops officer was briefing barristers for the Met to help them defend a civil case at all.
Hemingway drew Austin’s attention to the fact that undercover officers were mentioned in Alan Mitchell’s evidence in her case, but Austin explains how that was understood:
‘I would have thought, you know, police that were maybe turning up to the odd meeting in the run-up to the protest…
What I certainly did not consider or think was at all possible in what is supposed to be a democratic society, that undercover officers were deep infiltrators.
That someone like Carlo had actually joined the Socialist Party, was deceiving women either who were members or on the sort of fringes, or friends of members of the Socialist Party into intimate sexual relationships, and that they kept the sort of information on us that they did…
They took leadership positions in the organisations that they infiltrated.’
LOSING THE CASE
The judge ultimately found against Austin in the civil claim. He added that even if he had found in her favour, he would have only awarded nominal compensation of five pounds.
Austin points out that if the judge had been made aware of the role of the SDS in the case, and the intelligence and briefings provided by Soracchi, he may well have taken a different view.
‘I know that you have said we are not talking about the bigger issue about as to whether the containment was lawful or not, but surely knowing what we now know about undercover police officers setting up J18 and the events of May Day 2000, surely we do have to ask the question: was the containment lawful?
Because if Jim Boyling and ‘Jason Bishop’ hadn’t done what they had done, then that was given at the trial as the justification for the seven to eight-hour kettle in Oxford Circus on May Day 2001.’
Austin points out how terrible the ruling was in the civil case.
‘We appealed because the judgment was so bad and so awful… we couldn’t allow the idea that it was completely okay to kettle protesters for hours with no food, no water, no toilet facilities…
Whether or not we thought that we could win an appeal, I think we knew that it was problematic because there had been a big attempt… to criminalise protesters to say that all protesters are violent… but I think we felt that we had no choice.’
We are shown an intelligence report by Soracchi about the civil case [MPS-0043049]which claims that Austin did not give a good ‘performance’ in court and notes that the police were able to discredit her, as well as reporting the intention to appeal.
‘Q. Specifically, how do you feel about that being reported back to the police, given that they were part of the litigation?
A. Well… I mean… I am not a lawyer. But is that allowed?… is it lawful for a police officer?
Q. I can’t answer that question’
Austin is asked how it makes her feel that an undercover officer was used to brief the opposing legal team and that information was not disclosed to her in the civil case:
‘Very upset. Very angry… undercover officers should not be allowed to infiltrate and attempt to subvert democratic organisations like the Socialist Party or trade unions.
The fact that they were all talking about me, gathering evidence on me, I find very, very upsetting…
I have never been arrested. I have never even been cautioned… So the fact that the Metropolitan Police have a huge big file on me, that they are having all sorts of conversations about me that I don’t know about… I think is alarming and it should not happen in a democratic society.
If I have done something wrong, then please, arrest me and bring me before a court and say “We have this big file on Lois Austin, because we think she’s a criminal and we think she’s done all these things that are a breach of the peace or she’s been involved in violent disorder.”
But there is no such evidence and, as I said, I have never been arrested. What’s happened instead is I think I have been the subject of a terrible injustices. I have been beaten, I have been kettled. I have been spied on.
The organisations that I am a member of, which are public organisations, have been infiltrated. And I am very angry and upset about it.’
This was a short hearing, dealing with this one event, and it was over before lunchtime.
The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, thanked Austin for coming back to give evidence for a second time.
After Austin’s questioning ended, Tom Fowler made this video with Austin’s partner Niall Mulholland, and Donal O’Driscoll of the Undercover Research Group:
Joe Batty giving evidence to the Undercover Policing Inquiry, 2 February 2026
The Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) resumed for a new set of hearings on Monday 2 February 2026. Designated as ‘Tranche 3 Phase 2’, these hearings examine the final 15 years of the Special Demonstration Squad (1993-2008).
This opening day was devoted to questioning Joe Batty, a trade unionist, socialist and anti-fascist activist who was spied on by undercover police officer HN104 Carlo Soracchi, cover name ‘Carlo Neri’, who was deployed 2000-2006.
Batty has provided a written witness statement to the Inquiry [UCPI0000037742].
The 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.
Tim Salisbury, Deputy First Junior Counsel to the Inquiry.
Batty grew up in Greater Manchester in the 1970s and was first politicised by the National Front leafleting his school. He and some friends made counter-leaflets to distribute to pupils. He went to some Anti-Nazi League meetings but did not become a member or activist with any group at the time.
As a young adult, he got a supermarket job and joined the GMB, as membership of the union was mandatory at his workplace. This involvement drew him to socialist politics and he became a GMB branch president, representing workers in disputes and negotiating with employers and government officials.
He went to Oxford University’s Ruskin College, and on to the University of Kent for a degree in British labour history and modern politics. While there, he became friends with Dan Gillman, who gave evidence to the Inquiry in November 2025.
The pair held office in the university’s Labour Club and significantly built up its membership. They also organised coach travel to the large demonstration against the British National Party (BNP) in Welling, South London, on 16 October 1993. Batty and Gillman took responsibility for stewarding the people they’d brought to the protest.
In response to the rise in far-right activity, including attacks on local people, they created Kent Anti-Fascist Action Committee:
‘When I was at Ruskin College and at the University of Kent, I studied fascism. It wasn’t something new to me. I understood what it meant.
I also understood the history of fascism in the UK and what it had done over the historical period. So it was natural that I would want to make sure that it didn’t go off the political agenda.’
In 1993, Batty began working in homelessness, first in Cheltenham and then in London. He remained an active trade unionist, and also helped Youth Against Racism in Europe with stewarding of meetings and protests.
Over the next couple of years, fascist activity died down, yet Batty did not reduce his antifascist activity:
‘Myself and Dan and others recognised that history tells us when the far right is no longer successful electorally, it retrenches to violence.
You know what, I hate to say I am right, but that’s literally what they did, with the bombings that Copeland and his cohort – because I don’t believe he acted alone – were involved in.’
NO PLATFORM
At the end of the 1990s, Batty helped to found No Platform. As we’ve heard so many activists do at the Inquiry (with debatable levels of success), Batty explained that it was wrong to think of his group as a formal organisation:
‘There were about a dozen people or so who may have been the mainstays of it, but it really wasn’t a static organisation with cards and the constitution.
So we drew from people who were interested in being involved in one thing and one thing only, and that was stopping the far right having control of communities in the streets.’
These people had a variety of social backgrounds and political perspectives, united by that sole criterion.
We’re shown a police report by Carlo Soracchi [MPS-0003710], dated 1 August 2000:
‘Frank Smith, a member of the Socialist Party away team has helped to form a new anti-fascist organisation entitled No Platform. The group comprises disaffected members of London Anti-Fascist Action and members from the away team…
The aim of the group is to provide a powerful stewarding arm for left wing public order protests and to undertake the targeting of right wing individuals.’
For so few words, this elicits quite a lot of unpacking by Batty. Firstly, it shows that the spycops, even more than the Inquiry, can only think of groups as regimented and hierarchically structured institutions with official membership. This is not how most activist groups work.
Batty flatly rejects the allegation of targeting right-wing individuals. He also questions the use of ‘away team’ as denoting a formal group, saying it’s only become familiar to him recently from seeing the paperwork at the Inquiry. It was a loose term used occasionally to describe event stewards, yet spycops talk like it was some defined loyal gang of hardened hooligans.
Batty adds that there were indeed some people in No Platform who’d done Anti-Fascist Action work, but ‘disaffected members’ is another inaccurate description.
The group was named No Platform after an existing strategic understanding, aiming to deny the far right legitimacy by preventing them from speaking on public platforms or becoming part of the regular discourse.
STOPPING THE FASCISTS GATHERING
Batty gives examples of the work: shutting down gigs of fascist bands, and occupying the ‘redirection points’ where fascists met prior to going to meetings at secret locations.
BNP leader Nick Griffin in Barking
He says there would be ‘handbags at paces’ – posturing and taunting – but he doesn’t remember any physical violence.
Often the police would see potential conflict and clear the area entirely, which No Platform were happy about as it meant the fascists couldn’t meet up.
He stresses that they wanted to avoid violence as it would be counterproductive in a community they were trying to defend, and to make it clear that the fascists were the troublemakers.
Simply by turning up at the secret meeting point, No Platform made it apparent to the fascists that they had informers in their midst. This sowed distrust and helped the groups to disintegrate.
Batty is emphatic that these tactics prevented the spread of far-right activity. He points out that when anti-fascists stopped being active in Barking and Dagenham there was a groundswell of far-right support and soon afterwards a BNP presence on the local council, leading to a concerted effort by the party to get their leader Nick Griffin elected there.
He adds that the majority of No Platform work was just stewarding events and involved no confrontation at all.
Batty worked with No Platform on about thirty events over the space of five years until he left London around 2005. The work would generally involve being aware of meetings or protests that might be attacked by fascists and making sure that they had proper stewarding to ensure things happened safely.
Soracchi joined the stewarding groups and befriended Batty. Soracchi’s witness statement to the Inquiry [UCPI0000035550] describes Batty as the ‘main organiser’ for both No Platform and the Socialist Party away team. Batty says the latter is absolutely untrue.
As for Batty’s position within No Platform, a Soracchi report [MPS-0010730] says that Gillman has stepped down and Batty is now its ‘leading activist’. Batty again highlights the fundamental misunderstanding in the phrase, and explains that there was no leadership at all, just people who were consistently available, organising together.
The Inquiry showed a spycop report, presumably Soracchi’s [MPS-0005753], about an anti-fascist counter-demonstration in central London on 14 April 2001:
‘Current No Platform tactics are to locate the meeting point for fascists and then to attack them before they get anywhere near the location of the march.’
Batty hasn’t seen the document before. With the Inquiry now rushing, it is no longer providing witnesses with all the relevant documents, and it has started hearing evidence even though the hearing bundles are incomplete, undermining the potential for getting considered answers.
Special Demonstration Squad officer Carlo Soracchi
Batty takes issue with the report’s incendiary terms, saying that they would go to disrupt the meet-up by being at the meeting point, but this is a long way from ‘attacking’, something he declares impossible anyway as No Platform would have only had a dozen people at most.
Some of No Platform’s information about fascist activity came from Searchlight, a group that specialised in gathering intelligence about the far-right.
This exchange was done on an informal basis, though Soracchi’s reports [MPS-0009903] characteristically misrepresent it as being much more formal, as if Batty and Smith had organised delegations to some kind of Searchlight briefing meetings, and furthermore [MPS-0010590] were ‘relishing’ the prospect of going to occupy fascist meeting points.
Batty is clear that the work was not something done with glee or as a fun leisure activity:
‘That would make you sound like you were waiting and willing for some sort of action and that we were addicted to fighting with the fascists. I have to tell you, I have never been particularly a great fan of fighting with anybody.’
EXAGGERATION OF VIOLENCE AND DANGER
After Soracchi’s deployment ended, he compiled a timeline of his activity [MPS-0071194]. In it, he described how No Platform would put stickers and posters up in an area where fascists were present, and would then target fascist election canvassers.
Once again, Batty recognises some of the descriptions but rejects Soracchi’s claims of deliberately seeking aggression and violence. This isn’t just a No Platform principle or about trying to avoid arrest and its impacts on employment and personal lives; he points out that it would be counter-productive too:
‘If we were to engage in assaulting candidates, that would then turn into a huge political issue that would, I am sure, garner sympathy for the very people we were campaigning against. So as a tactic, it’s just not right.’
Pressing the point, Counsel shows another Soracchi report that the Inquiry had failed to disclose to Batty in advance, dated 18 June 2001 [MPS-0006121]. It specifies a plan to target the BNP in Bethnal Green. Batty is aghast and dismayed:
‘I don’t know where to begin with this statement. I don’t know where he comes up with this sometimes. I mean, I spent literally hours with Carlo… talking through the political processes as to why violence of this ilk is just counter-productive…
The legitimate process, which I have said time and time again now, is occupying spaces for a defensive purpose to enable the community to feel safe and to enable us to feel safe about going about our business.’
He explains that attacking fascist candidates’ homes would provoke retaliation on their own homes. It would create more fear and violence in the community, the exact thing that they were seeking to dispel.
He points out that part of Soracchi’s backstory was that he’d been involved in the Italian Red Brigades, a group notorious for kidnappings, kneecappings and other serious crime. Batty and others had repeatedly explained to Soracchi that such things have no commonality with the British socialist movement.
Counsel asked about No Platform’s disruption of the BNP’s ‘Red White and Blue festival’ in 2001, a neo-Nazi event held on BNP leader Nick Griffin’s land in Wales [MPS-0006469].
No Platform did not intend to attack the event in any way (apart from anything else, they were outnumbered and they feared the violent neo-Nazi group Combat 18 would be providing security). The plan was simply to picket the entrances, to show that there was opposition to fascism that would be present wherever fascists gathered.
They didn’t manage it because they were turned back by police. Batty is scathing about this acceptance of fascist action with the police stymieing opposition. There were racist attacks and bombings in London, and the BNP spawned National Action, a group that was eventually proscribed under the Terrorism Act, yet the police targeted the antifascists.
The Inquiry took a break, during which Tom Fowler made this video of summary and analysis with Dan Gillman:
Early in his undercover deployment, Soracchi shared a flat in Homerton with another SDS officer, HN77 ‘Jackie Anderson’. Soracchi says that his comrades believed he and ‘Anderson’ were in a relationship, but Batty has no memory of her at all. Anderson was deployed 2000-2005, infiltrating anarchist groups such as the W.O.M.B.L.E.S. and Earth First! (EF!), and worked alongside NPOIU officer Mark Kennedy.
Both EF! and the W.O.M.B.L.E.S. have applied to be included as core participants in this Inquiry, but so far that has been refused. It seems that neither the police nor the Inquiry have been able to contact Anderson at all since the Inquiry began.
FIRST CONTACT
Soracchi’s deployment timeline [MPS-0071194] records that he first made contact with Batty and others on an asylum seekers’ rights march in central London in June 2000.
Special Demonstration Squad officer Peter Francis revelaed how spycops were briefed on key activist targets before they were deployed
Batty’s first memory of Soracchi is a social visit to the second flat Soracchi had while undercover, on Narrow Way in Hackney.
Whistleblower spycop HN43 Peter Francis has described how, before being deployed, an officer would be briefed on particular people they wanted to get close to. These people would often be respected activists, targeted because their acceptance of the spycop would make others in the group more likely to be immediately welcoming and trusting.
The briefing would include details of the targeted person’s personal taste outside politics. By pretending to share their interests, likes, and dislikes, the spycop manipulated an instant bond of affinity into existence, encouraging friendship beyond being just another comrade.
Over the course of the Inquiry and in the bookswritten by women deceived into relationships, we’ve seen a lot of evidence that this was standard spycop tradecraft.
Batty says he initially bonded with Soracchi over a shared passion for cycling, and Soracchi had a bike on a trainer treadmill in his flat.
Soracchi was a welcome addition to the social group and their stewarding of events:
‘Having a steward on a demonstration who is, you know, heavy and heavily set, is an asset because you don’t want the group to be attacked. So it’s another barrier between us and trouble.’
We moved on to a report by Soracchi from nearly 18 months later, 26 November 2001 [MPS-0007391], in which he describes a No Platform meeting and names ten people and their formal roles in the organisation.
He is not only, yet again, making it sound much more formal and rigid than it really was, he also lists himself as having been appointed as ‘volunteer to assist with communications’.
Batty is baffled by it, saying that the meeting happened but that the details are wholly false.
THE INDISPENSABLE DRIVER
Spycop Jim Boyling with his van. Vans were commonly used by spycops as a way to make themselves useful to a group to the point of indispensability
Batty adds that Soracchi did have a specific responsibility for transport, as he was the only person there with a large, reliable vehicle.
This too is standard spycop tradecraft. Sometimes (as with Soracchi) it was an estate car, but more commonly it was a van. This was SDS practice as early as HN354 Vince Miller ‘Vince Harvey’ who was deployed in 1976, and it continued all the way through to EN12 Mark Kennedy ‘Mark Stone’ (2003-2009). HN2 Andy Coles was so useful with his that he was known among those he spied on as ‘Andy Van’.
Activists were generally not well off, so a dependable functioning vehicle was very useful. The driver would be the one of the first to be told about any plans for which travel was needed. They would pick people up and drop them off, thus learning all the home addresses.
More than one SDS officer deliberately dropped a target off last in order to spend time alone with them and get more information. HN10 Bob Lambert ‘Bob Robinson’ did that with ‘Jacqui’, and other officers are also known to have done this as a way of initiating intimate and sexual relationships.
Spycop Mark Kennedy driving
Beyond all this, having a vehicle and being involved in logistics gave spycops a subject to talk about in detail that didn’t require any political understanding.
Batty says Soracchi was diligent about attending meetings, which were then reported on, but less motivated to attend events. As the group was so small, around a dozen pepople at most, Soracchi inevitably helped to influence and steer its direction.
Soracchi’s written witness statement to the Inquiry [UCPI0000035550] claims that the groups he spied on were criminal, including committing Actual Bodily Harm and Grievous Bodily Harm. Batty rejects this outright.
Counsel seemingly enjoys collecting rebuttals on the exact same topic and returns to a report of Soracchi’s [MPS-0010730] which claims Batty wants to make No Platform into a secret terrorist organisation:
‘Batty is aware that London No Platform needs a successful public action to attract numbers to the group, but is very much taken by the notion of a small committed cadre carrying out raids ‘in the living rooms’ of the far right.
He is aware that the state might well regard such acts as terrorism and react accordingly, but the recent rise in popularity and street presence of the extreme right wing might, he believes, leave anti-fascists with no other option.’
Batty patiently reiterates to Counsel that not only is it untrue but – as he’d also explained to Soracchi at the time – on a tactical level it would undermine the purpose of the group because such activity invites reaction in kind, including attacks on his and his comrades’ families, something he wanted to avoid at all costs.
‘It is just a nonsense. It looks like he’s justifying his placement within No Platform and within the left wing in general.
I really don’t recognise that statement and I take offence at it being written about me.’
THE COCK TAVERN INCIDENT
Counsel moved on to discuss a series of Soracchi’s reports. The first of these was about disorder at The Cock Tavern on 16 December 2000. It was a venue used by the left wing and the Irish community, and the National Front held a demonstration at it.
Batty describes a callout among left wing and antifascist groups who had a sizeable turnout outside the pub. Temporary steel barriers separated them from the fascists over the road, with police ensuring the two were kept apart.
Spycop Carlo Soracchi on holiday in Bologna at taxpayers’ expense while undercover
Batty is clear that this wasn’t some kind of difference of legitimate opinion, but rather one group that was seeking to destroy community cohesion, challenged by another that felt a civic duty to defend the community from hatred and division.
Batty and around ten others went round the back of the fascists, intending to create a noise and make the police feel it was too difficult to keep the fascists isolated and so make them disperse.
He’s clear that they weren’t going to attack in any way as there would be hardened fascist thugs present as well as police. The plan worked.
Soracchi has said he was there, but Batty is pretty sure that’s not true. A spycop report from Soracchi’s information [MPS-0004904] says Batty was ‘satisfied’ with the event because of the ‘attack’ on the fascists. He corrects the version again – ‘attack’ has a number of meanings and implies physical interaction, which wasn’t the plan and did not happen.
The police did arrest a number of antifascists, but none were convicted and one received compensation from the Met for wrongful arrest.
However, the personal details of those arrested were published in far-right journal The Flag. The only way this could have happened was that someone with fascist sympathies at the police station took the information and passed it on.
This is not the first time we have heard evidence of the police passing anti-fascist activists’ details to the far right. Activist Mark Metcalf told the Inquiry how he provided a bail address that was a school, which later appeared in a far-right newspaper even though the only people who could possibly have that address for him were the police.
MORE LIES
Counsel shows another Soracchi report that they failed to disclose to Batty in advance [MPS-0005529]. It’s about No Platform’s response to the BNP standing for election in Beckton, East London, in March 2001. Soracchi reports that No Platform were going to attend the vote count:
‘Activists are intending to single out the British National Party security team for attack.’
Batty is now weary of repeating the same point:
‘I have explained already pretty much ad nauseam that we are not against the electoral system, we are against the far right, and we wouldn’t attack anybody standing in an election.
There was instances of the far-right attacking canvassers in Barking and Dagenham and it was really not a good look.
It doesn’t help the legitimate candidates who are standing to have people who often are supporting them beating people up in front of the count. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s not what we would do.’
Batty does recall a separate occasion where antifascist leafleters bumped into BNP canvassers. They had a verbal exchange but nothing physical. And certainly, it was not a premeditated ‘attack’ of the kind that Soracchi repeatedly claimed they were planning.
Moving on to two documents that refer to No Platform in the Bradford Riots of July 2001 [MPS-0006264 and MPS-0029169], Batty explains that while there were people in Bradford using the name of No Platform, they weren’t a branch of a national organisation. There was no ownership of the name, it was used by anyone of roughly the same standpoint.
In March 2001, Batty and several friends went for a couple of sessions at a gym, Batty reviving an earlier interest in boxing. They only went a couple of times and it did not become a habit. Despite this, Soracchi reported on it through his ever-present lens of imagined political violence [MPS-0005536]:
‘The group has been in training for the past four weeks and believes it will be useful in any confrontation with the fascists.’
Soracchi reported [MPS-0527773] that Batty and Dan Gillman had invited him to accompany them to a Socialist Party event in Leuven, Belgium in July 2001, and then go on to Genoa in Italy to join large protests against the G8 summit. Soracchi, unusually, specifically says the group did not intend to get involved in any confrontation in Genoa.
But Batty says that he wouldn’t have been able to go for any reason. It was hard enough to get time off work for the Leuven trip, an extra week would not have been possible for him even if he’d wanted it.
DEFENCE IS NO OFFENCE
The Inquiry showed Soracchi’s quarterly review for the end of 2001 [MPS-0007737] which describes the target group:
‘No Platform was formed in late 2000 and is in effect a coming together of militant anti-fascist street fighters whose common link is the willingness to carry out violent assault on individuals or groups belonging to the extreme right wing.
Although activists are drawn from differing strands of the far left and anarchist tradition, they are united in the belief that violent confrontation is a key strategic element in beating fascism.
To that end, No Platform has on a number of occasions in the past year put that belief into violent action against members of the National Front and also police officers acting to prevent disorder.’
Batty totally rejects this description, both of No Platform and of himself personally:
‘I have already said it previous times. This is always a defensive action. The way it is being worded “street fighters”, “militant”, “attacking”, “far left”. I never considered myself far left. I never considered myself a street fighter. I never considered I was particularly militant…
I don’t understand where this sort of characterisation comes from. Unless you are trying to legitimise an ongoing situation of undercover policing when you can’t actually report on anything of substance.’
He adds that none of them were ever arrested for anything like this, which would be very odd if they really were a group who were running about maiming police officers.
It’s notable that Soracchi, like many spycops before him who made stuff up, says his group has been involved in serious crime yet is unable to provide specific examples.
Jumping ahead to 27 October 2003, Soracchi reported on No Platform’s supposed plans for the protests against the visit of US President George W. Bush [MPS-0029555]:
‘They see the visit as the first opportunity in a very long time for a situation where mass public disorder can develop.
Most of the group are not strangers to protests of this kind and have experience of being able to agitate and aggravate a developing situation.
Joe Batty and Frank Smith are particularly good in these situations.’
No Platform weren’t relevant to Bush’s visit. On the day, Batty and others stewarded the Socialist Party section of the protest. In stark contrast to Soracchi’s fanciful imaginings, it all went off peacefully.
Batty adds that the only times he’s seen real violence on a protest were the Poll Tax protest of March 1990, and the anti-BNP march in Welling in October 1993. He adds that both of these demonstrations were turned into riots by police action.
Finally on this topic, we were shown a document authorising the continuation of Soracchi’s deployment [MPS-0526932]. As one might expect from something that decides whether he could continue in the role he enjoyed, Soracchi employed some extra-special made up exaggeration, referring to ‘leading Antifa activist Joe Batty’.
DECEIVING WOMEN INTO RELATIONSHIPS
Counsel then moved on to what Batty knew of Soracchi deceiving women into relationships.
Spycop Carlo Soracchi and Donna McLean
In 2001, Soracchi initiated a relationship with ‘Lindsey’. Batty knew Lindsey beforehand, and thought of her as personable and intelligent. She was a Socialist Party member but was not involved in No Platform.
He remembers the relationship going on for some time, and that it was certainly known to the wider social group.
He became concerned at Soracchi’s poor treatment of Lindsey towards the end of the relationship. He spoke to Soracchi about it repeatedly and at length at the time – of course, being wholly unaware of the truth. Lindsey is due to give evidence to the Inquiry on 25 February 2026.
In September 2002, Soracchi was stewarding an anti-war march where he met Donna McLean. As with Lindsey, Batty knew McLean, though not especially well. She was a good friend of his comrade Dan Gillman, and they all had jobs in related work. Soracchi instigated a whirlwind romance and, just three months later, at a New Year’s Eve party at McLean’s, they got engaged. In reality, Soracchi was already married.
At the same New Year’s party, Soracchi told Batty and several others that a nearby charity shop was actually a front for Roberto Fiore, a notorious Italian fascist widely believed to be involved in the 1980 bombing of Bologna railway station that killed 85 people.
Soracchi suggested firebombing the shop. Several of them – though not Soracchi himself, as far as Batty remembers – took a drunken walk to the location. Batty banged on the window and they lost interest and went back to the party.
A few days later Soracchi gave Batty a lift and drove past the shop, pointing it out.
‘I can remember telling him that there is a philosophical reason why we are not involved in terrorism. It is really simple. It alienates everybody and wins no arguments.
So I am not sure if that part of his legend was he wanted to try and persuade us in a different direction, but it really disappointed me that he never actually picked up on that.’
Nothing further happened with the shop.
The Inquiry took a lunch break, during which Tom Fowler made a summary and analysis video with antifascist and blacklisted trade unionist Dave Smith:
In November 2002, Soracchi and Batty were among a group of five who planned a trip to Florence for the European Social Forum, a conference of anti-capitalist groups. Soracchi reported on it a few weeks beforehand [MPS-0010591], and the timeline created at the end of Soracchi’s deployment [MPS-0071194] describes it in more detail.
Batty remembers a huge march in Florence and Soracchi pointing out that they were passing the home of Dario Fo, Nobel Prize winning playwright, author of Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! and Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Fo was waving to the crowd, and even though he was exactly the kind of person the SDS would view as dangerously subversive and warranting spying on, Soracchi’s write-up for internal police use described the venerable writer as a genius.
Soracchi’s reporting says he stayed in a squat with an anarchist he knew, and reported on ‘an emerging connection between UK and Italian extremists’. Batty doesn’t remember anything that fits this description.
THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPENED
Soracchi filed a report [MPS-0062785] claiming that Socialist Party activists were closely involved in the campaign for justice for Jean Charles de Menezes. Batty does not remember this being the case at all.
Jean Charles de Menezes, shot dead by police on 22 July 2005
Jean Charles de Menezes was a Brazilian electrician who was shot dead by police at Stockwell tube station in July 2005 after being mistaken for a possible Islamist suicide bomber.
Rather than try to establish and admit the truth, police sought to take the minimum of blame for the killing, and gave off-the-record briefings to journalists.
The public were told that de Menezes was wearing a bulky jacket on a hot day, that his jacket had wires sticking out, that he vaulted the barrier at the tube station, that he ran down the escalator, and ignored police shouts to stop; that he was in the country illegally and that he was a sex offender. Not one of these things was true.
De Menezes was living with his cousin at the time, Patricia da Silva Armani, and she has campaigned for truth and justice ever since. She is due to give evidence to the Inquiry on 12 March 2026.
This became another justice campaign that the police regarded as hostile and sent spycops to spy on. In claiming that his target group was actively included in the campaign, Soracchi knew he was delivering what his managers wanted to hear.
In his witness statement [UCPI0000035550], Soracchi also claims to have been arrested (but not charged) after violence between No Platform and the BNP at Gants Hill. Batty has no memory of the event or arrest, nor can he remember Soracchi ever being involved in any political violence or other criminal activity.
There was one incident of violence but it wasn’t political. Batty and a friend had been out drinking with Soracchi. It was late in the evening and, as Batty phrased it, ‘we were towards the end of our sobriety’ when they were attacked in the street for no apparent reason. There was an altercation but no arrests were made and nothing came of it after.
Batty agrees with Soracchi’s description [MPS-0010097], apart from taking issue with the officer’s drastic underestimate of the level of drinking.
CLOSE FRIENDSHIP
Batty describes how he was close friends with Soracchi for more than four years from late 2000, spending a lot of recreational time together:
‘Steam baths, dinners, meals, going out for drinks. Drinking absinthe. You get the scene. We were going out socialising properly.’
Soracchi arranged for Batty and his partner to visit Bologna where they were met by someone they believed to be a relative of Soracchi’s, though they now realise it was probably a police officer.
Batty describes Soracchi as the instigator of many of the social activities, and the glue that held the friendship group together. Soracchi also helped Batty move to Manchester, and while doing so he stayed at Batty’s parents’ house:
‘My mum, being my mum, really made him welcome. She loved the fact he was Italian, was always going on about food and all this sort of stuff, so she enjoyed his company.’
While Batty was away in Manchester for about four months, he arranged for Soracchi to be able to stay in his London flat. We’re shown the documents making the arrangements with the City of London Corporation, including the receipt of a deposit paid by ‘Carlo Neri’ [MPS-0527068].
On 26 August 2004, while paying the rent on Batty’s London flat, Soracchi filed an entire report on Batty’s marriage titled ‘Joe Batty experiencing marital problems’ [MPS-0036399]. In it, Soracchi says that Batty’s partner, ‘Fawzia’, has not enjoyed living in Manchester and wants to leave:
‘Batty is very pessimistic about the current situation. He feels that his partner has not given the move a chance and is very upset about her behaviour.
“Fawzia” has always been the more dominant part of the relationship, but if Batty is pushed too far he will become extremely intractable, the future does not look rosy for the relationship, even if both were to return to London.’
Batty confirms that there was some discussion about staying in Manchester permanently, but it was nothing like the loggerheads described (and indeed he and Fawzia are still together). He wasn’t in touch with Soracchi at the time, so has no idea where the information would have come from.
He is affronted at Soracchi’s level of invasiveness:
‘He really had no right. And the Met had no right to try and weave a narrative of what is going on in people’s homes with what they are doing in their political life.
I am offended by this, and I am also offended by the fact that I had never seen that. I have not had my police record, I never had anything. So I didn’t know until this was made available very recently that this had been said.
And I think it’s a violation. That’s what it is. I feel violated, and I feel quite viscerally about that.’
INVENTING ABUSE FOR SYMPATHY
Like many spycops, Soracchi had invented a backstory featuring distressing details of abuse in his family.
Spycop Carlo Soracchi
Doing this serves several purposes. It creates a sense of trust for the person the spycop was telling, and that would likely be reciprocated.
Trusting the officer on confidential matters of activism, but also with intimate personal matters, made the target activist easier to influence and manipulate.
These stories of abuse or childhood hardship also gave the spycop good reason for not introducing people to their family, and for sometimes acting in inexplicable ways or ‘needing time away alone’ (when they are visiting their real family).
This pretence of a troubled mind also leads to people being ready to accept the standard story at the end of a spycop’s deployment, where they feign a mental breakdown and say they’re permanently moving somewhere far away.
Soracchi told Batty and others that after his mother had died, his sister had told him that their father had been sexually abusing her. Soracchi showed Batty a photo of his supposed perpetrator father.
The friendship group were all concerned for Soracchi, and they collected money to help him with incidental costs of the aftermath of his mother’s supposed death:
‘Our friendship was such that towards the end of his time with No Platform I felt I could counsel him when he confided in me about personal issues.
I believed at the time that his sister had been a victim of sexual abuse and that this had surfaced around the period when his mother was either dying or had just passed away.
I remember spending a lot of time talking to him about these issues, offering empathy and support…
A lot of the work that I did with rough sleepers was about trauma, and so I wanted to be there for somebody who has obviously gone through trauma – his mum passing away, which as you know is no easy thing for anybody – and then to find out this revelation at that pretty painful time was something that I thought he wanted to talk about.
So we talked about it. We spent a lot of time talking about it.’
We’re shown a document from 2 January 2006, late in Soracchi’s deployment, where he methodically lists the activists he spies on, the kind of contact he has with them, and how frequent it is [MPS-0704577].
Batty is second on the list, and seems primarily perplexed by the reason for the spying to be happening at all when his activism was open and public.
PERSONAL INTRUSION
On at least ten occasions, Soracchi reported personal details about Batty, including personal and work contact details and domestic living arrangements. He also reported in April 2004 [MPS-0034066] that Batty had lost his job and wages owed when his employer went into liquidation. Batty describes confiding in the man he thought was a trusted friend:
‘What I was expecting had all gone. I had a domestic situation with my mum being unwell. There was a lot of things that happened at the same time. Of course it was deeply personal.
The liquidation by the way was a fraud, and I would rather the police had investigated the fraud than me, but there you go.’
When the Independent Police Complaints Commission was established, Batty and a friend applied for jobs there. Soracchi reported on this in alarmed terms on 29 March 2004 [MPS-0032327]:
‘It is viewed as an opportunity as to really cause damage to the Met Police.’
It’s the same police conflation of accountability with hostility that led them to infiltrate and undermine various justice campaigns.
Batty never even received a reply to his application and laments a missed opportunity.
‘I wanted to use my experience – and I know another person wanted to use their experience – in working with vulnerable adults to ensure that they were also getting justice or were heard. So by inferring that we were doing it for nefarious reasons, it undermines us doing it.’
BETRAYAL AND ONGOING MISTRUST
In concluding, Batty reflects on how his working life with homeless people necessitated a lot of positive working with police. But since learning about the spycops and how he was personally spied on, his feeling towards working with the police have soured:
‘I brought that forward, what had happened, and the experience of what had happened, to my last job, which I worked for eight years with the community of North Kensington that was affected by the Grenfell fire.
And throughout the period that I was involved in that, I really, really, really, struggled to not say to people in their campaign groups, “you really ought to be careful, because the police will be sitting in your meetings, recording the things you do and invading your personal life”.
And that for me was really horrible, and I told them, just as I will say now, that I hope you get justice from your inquiry system, just like I hope that this will provide justice for people.
Because if not, why do people at the bottom end of the scale believe there is ever going to be any justice? And that, for me, it really hurt me. It hurts me now.’
At the end of the hearing, the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, spoke to Batty. His manner was markedly different from the way in which he’s treated other left-wing witnesses. He seemed to regard Batty as something akin to an equal. Perhaps Batty’s mention of being a Freeman of the City of London had some effect.
Mitting asked Batty about his personal history. Batty detailed a long and impressive career working with vulnerable people, particularly rough sleepers. It involved working with numerous agencies, and giving direct help and advice as well as designing management strategies to improve the lives of those affected.
He says this leads him to the conclusion that his employment chances at the Independent Police Complaints Commission were deliberately stymied:
‘I just outlined my CV, as it were, and that makes me a really good candidate for a number of those areas because I understand the milieu of working with people who are vulnerable when they interface with the police or drugs services or the other.
So the fact that I never got a response to being able to be an interface between the community and people who have complaints about the police does show me that somebody definitely sat on it.’
Mitting expresses thanks to Batty, saying that the testimony was especially welcome as the Inquiry has had a huge amount of testimony about the personal impacts on women who were deceived into relationships by spycops, but far less about the people who were close platonic friends. With that, the hearing finished.
Immediately afterwards, Tom Fowler made this summary and reaction video with Zoe Young from Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance:
Carlo soracchi is due to giveevidence to the Inqruity on 2-5 March 2026.
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