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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He concluded:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–ends–

Notes:

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

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

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

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

Despite grave reservations from civil liberties groups and those who have been targeted by Britain’s political secret police, the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill passed its third reading in the House of Commons yesterday and will now go to the Lords.

It will allow police and a range of other state agencies to self-authorise their agents to commit any crime at all.

This is not about foiling deadly terrorist plots, as laws and agencies already exist to do that. Instead, it will give carte blanche to the spycops to abuse citizens campaigning for social change. It specifically includes protecting ‘economic wellbeing’, which would make strikes, boycotts, blockades and pickets legitimate targets for the most serious crimes.

Human Rights Defeated in Parliament

Labour introduced a number of amendments to limit the powers of the Bill, including outlawing the infiltration of trade unions, deceiving people into sexual relationships, and the use of children in spying. All amendments were defeated. Nonetheless, Labour whipped MPs to abstain.

All Plaid Cymru, SDLP and Green MPs voted against it, as did most SNP and Liberal Democrat MPs and one Conservative, Adam Afriyie.

Additionally, a total of 34 Labour MPs defied their leadership to vote against the Bill. Seven of them had to resign positions to do so; shadow schools minister Margaret Greenwood, shadow Treasury minister Dan Carden, and Parliamentary private secretaries Navendu Mishra, Kim Johnson, Mary Foy, Rachel Hopkins, and Sarah Owen.

Many of us have been shocked by the failure of Labour to oppose this attack on democratic freedoms, personal security, and the labour movement in particular.

Labour MPs Spied On

In March 2015, whistleblower spycop Peter Francis revealed that he had personally seen ten Labour MPs spied on during his time at the Special Demonstration Squad in the 1990s.

The targeted MPs were from the full width of Labour’s political spectrum. Several of them made outraged statements to parliament at the time, demanding to see their files.

Here are a few excerpts from that afternoon (with transcripts and closed captions for accessibility).

Peter Hain

Peter Hain was an active anti-racist campaigner in the 1970s and 1980s before he became a Labour MP in 1991. He was a minister for more than a decade following Labour’s 1997 election victory. He is a core participant at the Undercover Policing Inquiry.

In March 2015, he listed his fellow Labour MPs known to not only have been spied on as earlier campaigners, but having it continue while they were MPs who were supposedly protected by the ‘Wilson Doctrine’, a convention that prohibits the security services from targeting parliamentarians.

Peter Hain:

‘Would he pass on to the Home Secretary my request that she ensures that the remit of the public inquiry she’s announced into the operations of the Special Demonstration Squad includes surveillance of MPs publicly named by Peter Francis when he was an undercover officer between 1990 and 2001?

Is she aware – and is he aware – that aside from myself he saw a Special Branch file on my Right Honourable friend the member for Blackburn [Jack Straw] who was actually Home Secretary for four of these years, and files on my Right Honourable friends the members for Camberwell and Peckham [Harriet Harman] and Lewisham Deptford [Joan Ruddock] and my Honourable friends the members for Hackney North and Stoke Newington [Diane Abbott], Islington North [Jeremy Corbyn], and Bolsover [Dennis Skinner], as well as former colleagues Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone and Bernie Grant?

Did this monitoring affect our ability as MPs to speak confidentially with constituents? What, if any, impact did that have on our ability to represent them properly? We know for example that the campaign to get justice for Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager murdered by racists, was infiltrated by the SDS [Special Demonstration Squad], and that the police blocked a proper prosecution.

Did police infiltrators in the Lawrence campaign exploit private information shared by constituents or lawyers with any of us as MPs? Will the Home Office in order the police to disclose all relevant information and to each of the MPs affected our complete individual personal registry files?

It is hardly revelatory that the Special Branch had a file on people like me dating back forty years ago to anti-apartheid or Anti-Nazi League activist days because we were seen through a cold war prism as subversive. Even though we vigorously opposed Stalinism that didn’t stop us being lumped together with Moscow sympathisers. But surely the fact that these files were still active for at least ten years whilst we were MPs raises fundamental questions about parliamentary sovereignty and privilege, principles which are vital to our democracy.

It is one thing to have a police file on an MP suspected of crime, child abuse, or even co-operating with terrorism, but quite another to maintain one deriving from campaigns promoting values of social justice, human rights and equal opportunities which are shared by millions of British people. Surely, Mr Speaker, that means travelling down the road that endangers the liberty of us all.’

Jack Straw

The spycops didn’t just target members of the government who were supposedly their superiors, but they specifically spied on Jack Straw when he was Home Secretary and therefore ultimately in charge of the police.

Straw noted the sinister implication that it may well have been motivated by a desire to prevent police being held to account over the institutional racism that enfeebled their investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

Jack Straw:

‘Does the Minister accept that if these allegations are correct then we have an extraordinary situation where I as Home Secretary – and for three years from ’97 to 2000, was the police authority for the Metropolitan Police – not only knew nothing whatever about what appears to have been going on within the Metropolitan Police but may also have been subject to unlawful surveillance myself as Home Secretary? That ought to be looked at.

But the trigger, what appears to be the trigger, which is much more serious ought to be looked at, which was my decision, taken against a lot of reluctance by the Metropolitan Police, to establish a full judicial inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. And what is completely unacceptable was that it appears that elements of the Metropolitan Police were themselves spying on the bereaved family of Stephen Lawrence.’

Joan Ruddock

Like Peter Hain, Joan Ruddock was spied on earlier campaigning work, in her case the peace movement. She was weeks away from stepping down as an MP and lamented the lack of leverage she had to force answers from the police.

Joan Ruddock:

‘Thank you, Mr Speaker. In 1981 I was elected the chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and two years later an MI5 agent, Cathy Massiter, blew the whistle on the surveillance the phone taps and the collection of Special Branch reports had been undertaken on me. She cited political interference in the service. She said what had happened was illegal and she resigned.

Now, in ’87 I became a member of this House. I took the loyal oath. In 1997 I became a minister. I subsequently signed the Official Secrets Act. How is it that surveillance was carried out on me all of that time? I want to know, and get the Minister to understand, who authorised that surveillance? On what grounds was the surveillance authorised?

And he needs to answer those questions because this is a political issue, it is his responsibility, the Home Office’s and Home Secretary’s responsibility.

Mr Speaker, I am leaving this house. I can do no more than make these points, put in an FoI [Freedom of Information request] to the commissioner, write to the Home Secretary. But frankly, it is something that affects all MPs, and even though I leave he needs to do something and the future government of this House needs to ensure that there is a proper investigation. This should never ever have happened to members of this House.’

David Davis

From the other side of the chamber, Conservative MP David Davis emphasised the fact that spycops is not only a historic scandal, and insisted that the Undercover Policing Inquiry must examine activity right up to the present.

David Davis:

‘Thank you, Mr Speaker. In the last year there have been a number of revelations about the police improperly hacking into journalists’ telephone calls, improperly breaching legal privilege, and using the information they obtained from breaching legal privilege of suspects, and the government has been very coy about responding to my requests about the current state of the Wilson Doctrine.

If these allegations that have come out now are true, it indicates the Wilson Doctrine was broken in spirit if not in the letter.

Can he make sure that the inquiry actually comes right up to date in terms of what it looks into, and that it is drawn broadly enough to ensure that none of these risks exist today?’

Harriet Harman

Two MPs demanded to see the release of their files; Harriet Harman, then-Duputy Leader of the Labour Party, and a relatively unknown but long-serving backbencher by the name of Jeremy Corbyn.

Harman had been an MP for more than thirty years at the time she spoke in 2015. Not for the first time, she defended the right to political dissent without interference from spycops and demanded to see her full file.

Harriet Harman:

‘I’d like to ask the Minister – it’s more important than just feeding in our views to an inquiry, the question is what he decides – and I would like him to assure me that he, the government, will let me see a full copy of my file.

In the 70s and the 1980s when I was at Brent Law Centre and then at Liberty, I was campaigning for the rights of women, for the rights of workers, and the right to demonstrate. None of that was against the law. None of that was undermining our democracy. On the contrary, it was actually essential for our democracy.

The security services do an important job, and the government of course should support them, but if they overstep the mark the government must hold them to account. So can I repeat a request I made to the previous government that was turned down and make it again to this government in the light of these new revelations.

Will he give me an assurance that this government will release to me a full copy of my file?’

Harriet Harman is still an MP. She voted for several of the amendments to the CHIS Bill but, after they failed, she abstained on the final vote.

Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn is the other spied-on Labour MP who is still in the Commons. He defied the leadership to vote against the CHIS Bill last night.

Back in 2015, Corbyn’s outrage at the injustice was palpable as he spoke to the House.

Jeremy Corbyn:

‘Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m pleased that this story has finally come out and as members of parliament we’re in a position to raise questions with the Home Office and demand the truth come out. Unfortunately many, many others unknown to us who were under surveillance do not have that opportunity.

The question is one of accountability of the Metropolitan Police. Who authorised this tapping? Who knew about it? Did the Home Secretary or successive Home Secretaries know about it? If they did, why didn’t they accept the Wilson Doctrine in respect of MPs? Why did they allow this covert operation to go on within the Metropolitan Police?

And I’m very surprised that, in his answer a few moments ago, he said the files might be released to us but they may have to be redacted for security reasons. If I’m under surveillance, or the late Bernie Grant or any of my friends are under surveillance, and whatever meetings we were at they were presumably there, whatever phone calls we made they were presumably recording, I think we have a right to know about that.

We represent constituents. We’re in a position of trust with our constituents. That trust is betrayed by this invasion of our privacy by the Metropolitan Police and I ask the Minister again can we each of us have a full unredacted version of everything that was written about us, every piece of surveillance that was undertaken of us, our families and our friends?’

Still No Answers, What Next?

All their requests to see their files were, like everyone else’s, ignored by the police. Five years later and those MPs, like the rest of us, are still waiting for answers.

The public inquiry into undercover political policing finally starts on 2 November, seven years after it was promised by the Home Secretary. It has granted anonymity to most spycops officers, so even if it does reveal some truth, there is little chance of proper accountability.

A major part of the Inquiry’s remit is to make recommendations for the future. But if the CHIS Bill becomes law, it turns the Inquiry into an academic historic exercise, with the spycops of the future able to commit the most heinous abuses with impunity.

Andy Coles then and now

A Metropolitan Police investigation has upheld a complaint by a woman deceived into a relationship by former undercover officer Andy Coles.

The Met have found Jessica’s claims credible and ruled that Coles would face charges of gross misconduct if he were still a serving officer.

It’s a huge blow to Coles, who has consistently denied Jessica’s account of his abuse as he tries to shore up his crumbling credibility as a city councillor and public figure.

ANDY COLES: LYING THEN

Andy Coles was a member of the Metropolitan Police’s disgraced Special Demonstration Squad. In the 1990s he spent four years undercover as peace and animal rights activist ‘Andy Davey’. Like many other officers in Britain’s political secret police, Coles abused his role to deceive women into sexual relationships. The most significant of these was a woman known as ‘Jessica’.

Jessica was, as Coles knew, a vulnerable teenager at the time. He told her he was a 24 year old who shared her worldview and became her first proper boyfriend. In reality, he was 32 and married, paid to be sent into her life to betray the values she held dear.

The relationship lasted a year. Two other women, Emily and Joy, have also spoken about being the target of his unwanted sexual attentions during his deployment.

Coles went on to have a career in Special Branch, managing and training other officers for the same role as he’d held.

He retired from the police in 2012, about a year after the spycops scandal broke. In Peterborough he became a Conservative member of the City Council for Fletton and Woodston ward, and was appointed to the post of Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for Cambridgeshire.

When he was exposed in 2017, Coles resigned as Deputy PCC within hours without explanation. However, seemingly believing lower standards apply to councillors than Deputy PCCs, he did not step down as a councillor. Every council meeting since then has seen protests calling for his resignation. His seat will be up for re-election in May this year.

ANDY COLES: LYING NOW

A year later, in 2018, the Undercover Policing Inquiry confirmed that he had indeed been a Special Demonstration Squad officer. Coles released two prepared statements to the press, which only confirmed what the Inquiry had said, and flatly denied what he called the ‘lurid allegations’ made by Jessica:

‘The allegation the ALF activist known as “Jessica” makes that I had a sexual relationship with her for over a year while undercover are [sic] completely untrue’.

The Undercover Policing Inquiry, which has access to secret police files, had already granted Jessica ‘core participant’ status in August 2017. They have only given that designation to around 200 of the most seriously affected victims of spycops. Clearly, they find her account credible too.

Through his lawyer, he told the media yesterday that he still denies having ‘an inappropriate relationship’ with Jessica.

Now that the relationship is officially regarded as credible, he is perhaps trying to insert some room for manoeuvre and suggests that even if he did have a relationship it was somehow ‘appropriate’. That quite plainly cannot be true, as has been repeatedly and unequivocally established by a range of senior officers and official investigations.

NEVER APPROPRIATE

Chief Constable Mick Creedon produced a series of reports on the political secret police under the aegis of Operation Herne, and in 2014 he was clear:

‘There are and never have been any circumstances where it would be appropriate for such covertly deployed officers to engage in intimate sexual relationships with those they are employed to infiltrate and target. Such an activity can only be seen as an abject failure of the deployment, a gross abuse of their role and their position as a police officer and an individual and organisational failing.’

Operation Herne – Report 2: Allegations of Peter Francis (Operation Trinity)

When the Metropolitan Police gave their landmark apology to women deceived into relationships in 2015, two years before Jessica found out the truth about Coles, they said:

‘some officers, acting undercover whilst seeking to infiltrate protest groups, entered into long-term intimate sexual relationships with women which were abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong… these relationships were a violation of the women’s human rights, an abuse of police power and caused significant trauma. The forming of a sexual relationship by an undercover officer would never be authorised in advance nor indeed used as a tactic of a deployment’.

Jon Murphy from the Association of Chief Police Officers explained it when the scandal broke in 2011, at a time when Coles was employed by the Association:

‘It is grossly unprofessional. It is a diversion from what they are there to do. It is morally wrong because people have been put there to do a particular task and people have got trust in them. It is never acceptable under any circumstances… for them to engage in sex with any subject they come into contact with.’

When his deployment ended in 1995, Andy Coles updated the Special Demonstration Squad’s Tradecraft Manual to incorporate his experience and methods, including tips on conducting the kinds of relationship he now denies having.

After this, he trained the first undercover officers in the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), a new sister unit to the Special Demonstration Squad, teaching them to steal the identities of dead children. He went on to become Head of Training for the NPOIU’s oversight body ACPO-TAM as they deployed a number of the most notorious spycops who committed the same kind of abuses, such as Mark Kennedy.

WHAT’S HE GOT TO HIDE?

During the Met’s investigation into Jessica’s complaint, Coles was interviewed twice under caution and both times he supplied a prepared statement. He refused to answer questions.

Why did he resign as Deputy PCC? Why did he refuse to answer questions put to him by his old colleagues at the Metropolitan Police? Why does he continually refuse to comment, except to confirm what’s officially concretely established and deny the rest?

These are not the actions of someone who believes they have done nothing wrong. They are more like the response of someone who is desperately trying to hide from the truth.

The fact that his old colleagues at the Met, not known for their bias against themselves, have found Jessica’s report of a relationship credible makes Coles’s desperate denials appear transparently false.

He has doubled down, telling today’s Peterborough Telegraph:

‘The Metropolitan Police has taken no further action against me’

That’s an extraordinary response to the Met upholding a complaint against him and announcing that they would bring the most serious disciplinary charges against him if only it were still in their power to do so.

Despite the Met’s investigators having spoken to many people who knew Coles and Jessica at the time, and seen documentary proof such as contemporaneous letters, Coles desperately repeats his lie:

‘I deny the accusations made completely. I denied them when they were first made, I deny them now’

While his current friends and colleagues on the council may forgive his abuse of a woman thirty years ago, if he admits it happened it means he has been lying to them since 2017. They would not look so benevolently on that. So he goes on, as the evidence piles up all around him, lying to his peers and compounding the damage he has done to Jessica.

STALLING AS HIS LIES ARE FALLING

Coles is still refusing to answer, merely saying through his lawyer that ‘it would not be appropriate to respond outside of the Inquiry’.

He talks as if the Inquiry is a court and he might prejudice a fair trial. It’s yet another deceit he is playing on the public. He knows full well that the inquiry process does not restrict him at all and that he is at liberty to say what he wants. Any number of former spycops have given interviews to television and press, made public appearances, one even hired a publicity agent.

Coles knows this is merely a way to kick the can down the road. Though the Inquiry is not a court of any kind, it is as slow as any process in the judicial system. Initiated six years ago and originally scheduled to conclude in summer 2018, it has yet to begin. There are no dates set for officers from Coles’ era to give evidence, and the whole thing is not expected to finish until 2025 at the earliest.

It leaves Coles continuing in his respected public role while Jessica – and the wider public – still wait for the truth about full extent of Britain’s counter-democratic secret police units.

Jessica said:

‘I’m pleased the complaint was upheld however I am disappointed at the lack of accountability. Andy Coles was allowed to retire in 2013 at a time when the revelations about undercover officers having sexual relationships and even children with unsuspecting women had started to come out. I would like to know what his superior officers knew or ought to have known about our relationship. Was he properly supervised?

‘Kate Wilson is in court later this week fighting to find answers to what happened to her. Her relationship with an undercover police officer happened a decade after mine. This is not historic abuse. It’s systematic and institutionalised sexism in the police.’

Men who abuse their public roles to violate women should not be in positions of civic trust. This isn’t just about what he did 30 years ago, appalling as that was. This is also about his unrelenting deviousness and lack of integrity today.

The Sack Andy Coles campaign has protested at every Peterborough Council meeting since the truth was revealed. Join us at the next one on Wednesday 4 March 2020, 5pm at Peterborough Town Hall.

And whether you can be at the protest or not, please sign and share the petition launched by one of Coles’ fellow councillors calling on him to resign.

Originally published by Sack Andy Coles

The public inquiry into Britain’s political secret police is publishing more names of undercover officers. Despite this, their list of known spycops is incomplete.

Is this is a catalogue of innocent incompetence despite spending £17m? Or deliberate obfuscation to protect the wrongdoers whose deeds the Inquiry exists to expose?

Whichever, it adds to the list of obstructions that have been the hallmark of this Inquiry.

TOO LITTLE TOO LATE

Last week the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) named the officer previously known as HN78. ‘Anthony “Bobby” Lewis’ is the only known black officer in the history of Britain’s political secret police. He spied on Stephen Lawrence’s family campaign as part of his infiltration of the Socialist Workers Party and Anti-Nazi League between 1991 and 1995.

There are known to have been at least 139 undercover officers in the 50 year history of the spycops units the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) & National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). Lewis is the 26th to have infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party, which means – even ignoring all as-yet unnamed officers – nearly 20% of all spycops targeted that one organisation. It is, by far, the most targeted group, attracting far more attention than the entirety of the far right.

The Inquiry was announced by the Home Secretary more than five years ago and was originally expected to have finished in summer 2018. Last week the Inquiry said it is hoping to start properly in summer 2020. We expect the final report to be published around 2025.

The release of Lewis’ fake name comes more than a year after the Inquiry decided to do it. With their new natty graphics on Twitter, the casual observer might think the Inquiry was starting to become more communicative with the public whose funds it so ravenously consumes.

However, they still haven’t even published a complete list of the officer names that they’ve agreed to publish. Their incomplete list that does exist doesn’t link to any further information on the officers (not even the stuff the Inquiry has published elsewhere on the same site). It is given in order of the officers’ fake surnames, and is not interactive, so you can’t order it by year of deployment, group infiltrated, or even just first name.

THE TRUTH, NOT THE WHOLE TRUTH

Additionally, the list of groups for each officer is incomplete. For example, for ‘Andy Davey’ – the undercover identity of officer Andy Coles – it only lists animal rights groups, but his brief as given in an internal SDS document was ‘Anarcho/ Animal rights/ Environmentalist & Pacifist’.

Coles spent a lot of time infiltrating various environmental and peace groups and going on their demos. However, if people from those organisations word-search the Inquiry site for their group’s name, they’ll draw a blank and the Inquiry will never hear their testimony.

Most of the spycops on the Inquiry website have only a limited amount of groups behind their name, or some none at all (just ‘anarchist groups’ for instance).

Also, because of the organic and intertwined way many of the groups were/are organised, targeting one group meant lots of information was gathered on closely linked groups and people as well.

Organisations like the Socialist Workers Party (and their forerunner International Socialists) were specifically targeted over the years because of their involvement in a wide variety of then-current campaigns.

For a spycop, a position next to a key organiser who knew a lot of people was a goldmine, they would get insights into how things were set up and who were the key players. Chumming up with such organisers also meant that the undercover officer could ask their buddy about people of interest, instead of having to approach that person directly with questions that could raise suspicion.

FILLING THE GAPS

The Undercover Research Group and the Guardian made a list of the groups targeted by spycops but, lacking the Inquiry’s access to police files, it cannot be a comprehensive list.

We keep our post How Many Spycops Have There Been? updated as new names are revealed. It currently stands at 75 named officers out of the total of 139.

Beyond our simple list, the Undercover Research Group have collated the Inquiry’s documents that use code numbers with ‘N’ prefixes for officers. They’ve collated the information along with that of independent researchers produced a more complete rundown of the N-numbered officers.

They have also made an interactive spycops timeline that shows which officers were deployed when and into what political movements. Just imagine what a thorough job the URG could do with a decent fraction of the millions that the Inquiry has wasted. If you’d like to help them, you can donate.

The Inquiry list contains the names used by 68 officers. Fifty of the others have already been granted total anonymity, so the Inquiry will not even publish their fake name. The Inquiry is going to withhold almost all officers’ real names. This means that, even if their deeds become known, they will not be held to account.

Victims of spycops, and the wider public, deserve the truth about what was done to them. The Inquiry is more concerned with protecting abusive officers from suffering any consequences of their abuses. We should all be given the fullest information.

Here’s what we know is missing from the Inquiry’s list of Special Demonstration Squad spycops.

SPYCOPS NOT MENTIONED AT ALL BY THE INQUIRY

These four officers may be among those identified by the Inquiry’s anonymising N-numbers, but there aren’t enough details given for researchers to be able to identify them. If this is deliberate then, given that their names have long been in the public domain, it is ludicrous.

“RC”

‘RC’ was involved in animal rights campaigns around Oxford 2002-06. Like so many spycops, he was an active organiser who used his vehicle to help out, and would occasionally denounce others as spies. He was exposed in February 2016. Although researchers find it overwhelmingly likely he was a spycop, the sliver of doubt means they have withheld his full name and picture.

Full profile of ‘RC’.

“Gary R” & “Abigail L”

‘Gary R’ appears to have been the successor to ‘RC’ in Oxford. He was joined for some of the time by a partner, ‘Abigail L’. They were exposed in July 2016. As with ‘RC’, researchers are withholding full names in case of the unlikely event that they’ve misidentified them.

Full profile of ‘Gary R’ & ‘Abigail L’.

These three officers are likely to have been from the National Public Order Intelligence Unit. Though they worked in parallel with the SDS performing the same function, and indeed some personnel moved between the two, the Inquiry has been much more secretive about this unit. There is no significant information on the NPOIU from the Inquiry that wasn’t already uncovered by activists and researchers.

“Mike Ferguson”

This SDS officer infiltrated the Anti Apartheid Movement in 1969-70, and was actively involved in the Stop The Seventy Tour campaign against South African sporting teams touring Britain.

The campaign was chaired by Peter Hain, later to become a Labour MP and afterwards a member of the House of Lords. ‘Ferguson’ rose to become Hain’s deputy.

After a plan to throw smoke bombs and metal tacks onto a pitch got rumbled by police, Hain realised there was a spy and ejected a member – it wasn’t ‘Ferguson’, who stayed on to continue his espionage.

‘Ferguson’ was exposed in True Spies, a 2002 BBC documentary series on the SDS [transcript, video]. Hain is one of 200 significantly affected people who have been made core participants at the Inquiry. They acknowledged ‘Ferguson’ when granting Hain this status, yet have not mentioned him anywhere else before or since.

In 2015, ‘Ferguson’s daughter wrote an article for the Guardian about growing up with a spycop for a father – including identifying details about him – and described the impact of discovering the truth years later whilst watching True Spies. But for the Inquiry, the fact that he was outed on national TV nearly 20 years ago by his own police handler doesn’t seem to count for anything.

CONFIRMED BY INQUIRY BUT MISSING FROM THEIR LIST

The Inquiry’s list only covers undercover officers of the SDS. In their most recent Update Note, the Inquiry said it will publish a table of NPOIU officers ‘in due course’. The following four officers from the NPOIU have already been officially confirmed by the Inquiry, but they are not included in the cover names list.

Mark Kennedy aka “Mark Stone”

The NPOIU officer whose unmasking in 2010 caused the whole spycops scandal to erupt. Deployed from 2003-09 into environmental, anti-capitalist and anti-fascist groups, Kennedy deceived several women he spied on into long-term intimate relationships (four of whom – Lisa, Kate, Naomi & Sarah – have taken legal action against the Metropolitan Police and received apologies).

Kennedy worked in at least 11 countries beyond the Inquiry’s remit of England and Wales. He was arrested several times during his time undercover, and caused at least 49 people to be wrongfully convicted.

After he left the police, he continued spying on the same activist community for corporate paymasters until he was caught by suspicious comrades.

“Rod Richardson” HN 596

(Inquiry also refer to him as EN 36)

‘Rod Richardson’ infiltrated environmental, anarchist and animal rights groups from 2000-2003, as Mark Kennedy’s predecessor. He is one of – if not the very – first officers in the NPOIU. He was trained by Andy Coles, the SDS officer who’d updated that unit’s Tradecraft Manual after his own deployment ended in 1995.

Coles instructed him to use a technique that was, by then, anachronistic; stealing the identity of a dead child as the basis of a fake persona. In the online age, this became hugely risky, and it was a websearch of death certificates that led to the spycop ‘Richardson’ being unmasked in 2013.

The Met refused to confirm or deny it, much to the distress of the mother of the real Rod Richardson who had died as a baby.

In December 2016, the Inquiry confirmed that ‘Rod Richardson’ was an undercover officer of the NPOIU. His name, photo and details have been published in the mainstream media for six years, and the Inquiry has made quite a few references to him, yet because he is an NPOIU officer he does not appear in the Inquiry’s current list of names.

Full profile of ‘Rod Richardson’.

“Lynn Watson” EN34

Based in Leeds from 2002-06, ‘Lynn Watson’ infiltrated environmental, anti-capitalist and peace groups, and was treasurer of The Common Place, a political social centre in the city.

She was especially active in the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, and there is video of her in a clown outfit arsing around in the car park of Hilary Benn MP’s office.

As well as being arrested on a couple of climate change protests, she also committed an offence under the Companies Act 2006 by filing the Common Place’s accounts under a false identity.

Her name and picture were published in the mainstream media in 2011. There was a ten-page section devoted to her deployment in the 2013 book Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police by Guardian journalists Rob Evans & Paul Lewis.

Despite all this public knowledge, it wasn’t until 30 October 2018 the Inquiry confirmed her identity by name as it granted her core participant status. The Inquiry will not be publishing her real name.

Full profile of Lynn Watson.

“Marco Jacobs” HN 519

‘Marco’ began his deployment in Brighton in 2004, but after failing to fit in he was redeployed to Cardiff. There, he involved himself in a range of anti-war, anarchist and other causes.

In a dramatic court hearing in 2015 – presided over by Sir John Mitting who would later become Chair of the public inquiry – police conceded they wouldn’t contest the assertion that ‘Jacobs’ was a spycop. Just like his NPOIU contemporary Mark Kennedy, ‘Jacobs’ not only had multiple relationships with women he spied on but actually accompanied one of them to the funeral of her father.

As with ‘Lynn Watson’, ‘Jacobs’ had his cover name, photo and story published in the mainstream media in January 2011 and had a detailed section in the Undercover book. The Inquiry eventually confirmed his identity when making him a core participant in November 2016.

Full profile of Marco Jacobs.

COVER NAME LISTED BUT REAL NAME IS ALSO KNOWN

“Peter Johnson”, “Peter Daley”, “Peter Black” HN 43
Real name: Peter Francis. On Twitter @realspycop

“Jim Sutton” HN 14
Real name: Jim Boyling

“Mark Cassidy” HN 15
Real name: Mark Jenner

“Bob Robinson” HN 10
Real name: Bob Lambert

“John Barker” HN 5
Real name: John Dines

“Mike Blake” HN 11
Real name: Mike Chitty

“Roger Thorley” HN 85
Real name: Roger Pearce

“Andy Davey” HN 2
Real name: Andy Coles

ON THE INQUIRY LIST BUT WITHOUT A NAME

HN 89

This SDS officer infiltrated the far-right in the 1990s. He is now dead. No application has been made by the family to withhold the real name or the cover name. The Inquiry said in November 2017 that it was intending to publish both.

The last two officers to be named by the Inquiry were Paul Gray and Bobby Lewis – both over a year after the Inquiry had announced its decision to do so. How much longer we’ll have to wait for HN 89 is anyone’s guess. We know that waiting for the full truth will take a lot longer, and it will not be something delivered by the Inquiry.

Former Special Demonstration Squad officer Peter Francis

Peter Francis, undercover police officer turned whistleblower, has declared he won’t have anything more to do with the Undercover Policing Inquiry’s anonymity applications from his former colleagues.

The former spycop, who infiltrated anti-racist groups in the 1990s and spied on the loved ones of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, says the public inquiry is protecting the guilty and concealing the truth.

Francis said:

‘I know at least half of all SDS officers. Armed with such knowledge, I had hoped to assist the Inquiry to critically assess the applications being made by former undercover police officers to keep their cover names secret. But the level of redactions accepted by the Inquiry Team is so high, even I am often unable to decipher from whom the applications are made…

‘Even when a risk assessment concludes that risks faced by an individual are “low”, the Inquiry has refused to publish his or her cover name. In such circumstances, I cannot justify continuing to incur tax payers’ money drafting written submissions or attending hearings which are clearly not going to change the approach adopted by the Chairman.’

THE SPY WHO STEPPED OUT OF THE SHADOWS

Francis was deployed by the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), a political secret police within the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch, from 1993 to 1998. He infiltrated Youth Against Racism in Europe, Movement for Justice and Militant (now the Socialist Party).

Francis was tasked to ‘find dirt’ with which to discredit the Lawrence family and Duwayne Brooks, Stephen’s friend and the main witness to the teenager’s murder.

In April the Inquiry named an officer known to have spied on the Lawrence family. Formerly known as N81, the officer – mentored by Francis – used the name David Hagan.

Francis told a 2015 conference of police corruption and racism campaigners, via his lawyer Rosa Curling:

‘I have let every single one of you down, especially the Lawrence family, by my cowardice in not appearing before the original Macpherson public inquiry when I knew in my heart at the time that I should have done so. No matter what my senior police managers were saying to me at the time, I should have been there, I should have spoken out.

‘Just imagine how many things might have changed for political protesters, especially all the black justice campaigns, had I had the bottle to do it then.’

Francis initially came forward to tell his story, only identified as ‘Officer A’, to the Observer in March 2010. It was the first time many people had heard of the SDS.

At the end of that year activists unmasked spycop Mark Kennedy, and Francis became a prime source of information for the Guardian’s detailed investigations into the unit, its remit and methods. This culminated in the Guardian journalists Rob Evans & Paul Lewis’ definitive book Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police in 2013. At that time, Francis dropped his pseudonym and shared details of his personal deployment.

He was keen to talk to Operation Herne, the Met’s self-investigation into spycops, if the Met would withdraw their threat to prosecute him under the Official Secret Act for sharing secret information. This was superseded when the full-scale public inquiry was commissioned.

THE SECRET PUBLIC INQUIRY

Since the original Inquiry Chair, Lord Pitchford, resigned for health reasons in 2017, there has been growing concern about his replacement Sir John Mitting. His credulous approval of police demands for anonymity coupled with a penchant for secrecy have seen a groundswell of protest, all of which has been ignored. He oversees a slow, shambolic and secretive excuse for a public inquiry.

Matters exploded in the February hearing of the inquiry when it discussed officers known as HN23 and HN40. Victims’ lawyer Phillippa Kaufmann QC asked why we couldn’t even be told the reason these officers were being granted total anonymity, to which Mitting famously responded:

‘They are examples of deployments where you are going to meet a brick wall of silence.’

Francis’ lawyer Maya Sikand told the court that Francis knew who the officers were and that they:

‘would have valuable evidence to give you about the violence that was permitted by Special Demonstration Squad managers to be used by Special Demonstration Squad officers.’

Francis broke protocol, rising to his feet to interject in person:

‘I have great, huge, concerns that these professional liars are spinning you, the Inquiry and definitely these poor solicitors they are working with here.’

Mitting insisted Francis sit, which he voluntarily, observing that the court’s ‘Krispy Kreme security’ would not have been capable of forcing him.

Matters came to a head at the following hearing in March, where Kaufmann led her legal team and the victims they represent out of court, telling Mitting:

‘We are not prepared actively to participate in a process where the presence of our clients is pure window dressing, lacking all substance, lacking all meaning and which would achieve absolutely nothing other than lending this process the legitimacy that it doesn’t have and doesn’t deserve.’

Francis stayed and made some forthright contributions, only to see that Mitting ignored it all and granted anonymity to many officers as planned.

The Undercover Research Group analysed Mitting’s decisions so far, and they calculate that he is on course to grant full anonymity to around 25% of SDS officers.

Mitting’s “minded-to” note on the NPOIU officers

Last week, Mitting turned his attention to the SDS’ successor unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, which ran from 1999-2011. His ‘minded-to’ note shows intentions to grant anonymity to a much greater proportion of these officers.

It is inexcusable, unacceptable, and proof of what the victims have been saying for months; Mitting is wholly unfit to investigate and expose police wrongdoing.

It is into this atmosphere that we now hear Peter Francis’ withdrawal from the process of anonymity applications:

‘Three years ago, Stafford Scott (another Core Participant) said that walking into the Inquiry was like walking into a boxing ring, facing the Metropolitan Police with one hand tied behind your back and a blindfold covering your eyes. Sadly, his assessment has proved correct.

‘The approach adopted by the Inquiry to restriction orders has undermined its ability to uncover the truth about undercover policing in the UK. I had hoped my involvement in this process would in part remedy the unfair advantages identified by Mr Scott but this has not proved possible.’

There is another preliminary hearing of the Inquiry this Wednesday, 9 May. It is another session on the anonymity of officers. We have no faith that Mitting has altered from his method of listening to the police, making up his mind, then having a pantomime hearing before approving his predetermined ruling. We will not waste our time on it.

Neither the victims nor Peter Francis are abandoning the inquiry, just the process of appraising applications for anonymity. We want to engage with the Inquiry, as long as it is intent on revealing the truth about Britain’s political secret police. Sir John Mitting is an obstacle to that and he cannot be left in charge.

Join us for a protest before the hearing – 9am, Wednesday 9 May at the Royal Courts of Justice, Strand WC2A 2LL.

Follow Peter Francis on Twitter.

Undercover police officer Andy Coles, 1991

Former undercover police officer Andy Coles has finally broken his silence with a startling lie. Despite three women testifying about his sexual predation, he has flatly denied it.

Having refused to comment since he was exposed as a member of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) in May last year, his hand was forced by when the Undercover Policing Inquiry confirmed his identity last month.

Coles was in the SDS from 1991-95. During that time he was sexually aggressive to a number of women he spied on, and groomed a vulnerable teenager – known as ‘Jessica‘ – into a year-long sexual relationship.

As the Met’s Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt made plain in 2015:

‘Some officers, acting undercover whilst seeking to infiltrate protest groups, entered into long-term intimate sexual relationships with women which were abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong. I acknowledge that these relationships were a violation of the women’s human rights, an abuse of police power and caused significant trauma.’

Jessica has been granted core participant status at the public inquiry into undercover policing. She is also bringing legal action against the Met for Coles’ abuse.

As soon as Coles was exposed in 2017, he resigned as Cambridgeshire’s Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner. However, he has clung on to other positions of public trust, including his Peterborough City Council seat and his governorship at two schools in the city.

He has locked all his social media accounts and refused to comment on the issue at all. Coles only broke his silence last month when the public inquiry confirmed he had been an SDS spycop.

NO ADMISSION

In a statement to the Peterborough Telegraph, Coles conceded only what the inquiry has said, that he was an SDS officer.

‘I am pleased at last to be able to confirm that in my past I was deployed as an undercover police officer to infiltrate some of the most committed and violent animal liberation extremists operating in the UK in the early 1990s.’

He knows there is no excuse for spycops deceiving women into sexual relationships, so he has taken the only option to shore up his social prestige, a path well-trodden by other infamous sexual abusers with a public profile to protect. He claims it didn’t happen.

In a second statement he says that there simply was no relationship with Jessica.

‘The allegation the ALF activist known as “Jessica” makes that I had a sexual relationship with her for over a year while undercover are completely untrue.’

He refuses to admit anything further, hiding behind the Undercover Policing Inquiry.

‘The right place to make further comment in this case is in the Public Inquiry where I welcome the opportunity to give my evidence in due course.’

Coles speaks as if he had been prevented from commenting, and as if the public inquiry is a court that will examine all the evidence of his deployment and come to a judgement. He knows none of that is true.

The public inquiry is not a criminal court, it is perfectly proper to discuss what it will examine. Indeed, several spycops have given extensive interviews to the media, including his former manager Bob Lambert.

SCARE QUOTES

Andy Coles’ SDS Tradecraft Manual author credit

He exaggerates the threat from the animal rights activists he infiltrated (who mostly leafleted and occasionally freed some animals from breeders), and fails to mention the peace campaigns he spied on.

The most well-known photo of him whilst undercover was taken after a day of protest at the US air force base at Fairford, where Coles and comrades had tied peace symbols to the fence.

Just after his deployment ended in 1995, he wrote the SDS’ Tradecraft Manual. He devoted a section of it to infiltrating pacifist organisations.

It was something he was well acquainted with – the author credit on the manual said he infiltrated ‘environmentalist & pacifist’ groups as well as animal rights.

In his rush to justify himself by making the people he spied on appear scary, Coles excludes any mention of this aspect of his deceit.

If the activists he spied on really were as terrifying as he now claims, why didn’t he get them arrested? To this day, Jessica does not have a criminal record.

After his statement last month, Coles was commended on Twitter by the Countryside Alliance’s hunting campaign.

Coles replied:

‘Thank you. I now know from personal experience how it feels to be targeted by the anti-democratic radical fringe I infiltrated. I look forward to giving my evidence at the undercover policing inquiry.’

It’s notable that his statement speaks about the violence of animal rights activists and welcomes the support of hunters, as it’s the opposite of what he told his colleagues at the time.

Extract on hunters from SDS Tradecraft Manual written by Andy Coles, 1995

His Tradecraft Manual doesn’t give details of violence by activists, but he does talk in damning terms about violence done to them by uniformed police and hunters.

‘I know that in the future I will have nothing but contempt for fox hunters and in particular their terriermen.’

In his tweet, Coles said he infiltrated ‘the anti-democratic radical fringe’. It is a peculiar term for him to use. Pressure groups that Coles infiltrated, such as the London Boots Action Group who leafleted outside Boots shops in protest at animal testing, are a key part of democratic culture. Democracy is much more than political parties.

SPOILING THE PARTY

That said, the SDS spied on political parties too. They targeted at least ten Labour MPs including Jeremy Corbyn, Jack Straw, Bernie Grant and Diane Abbott. They began spying on Jenny Jones, Green Party member of the Greater London Assembly, after she was elected and continued for over ten years. These are all democratically elected public figures.

They spied on numerous trade unions, including the Fire Brigades Union and Communication Workers Union. They illegally gave information on citizens to a blacklist of construction workers that unlawfully prevented thousands of people from getting work. Again, there is no clandestine activity nor threat to public safety. It is the deliberate undermining of people exercising their democratic rights. The Special Demonstration Squad was a counter-democratic organisation.

IMPLAUSIBLE DENIAL

After they have been unmasked as members of the disgraced secret police units, many spycops hide from the public. The few who do speak tend to follow the same pattern of admitting a few of the more innocuous details, denying their more serious abuses no matter how many witnesses saw it, and demonising the people they spied on.

Bob Lambert issued an apology to one of the women he deceived into a relationship, Belinda Harvey, but he omitted any mention of his two-year relationship with Jacqui, with whom he had a child and shared a home.

Mark Kennedy sold his story to the Mail on Sunday under the headline ‘I Fear For My Life’. He testified to parliament but insisted he had only had two sexual relationships with women he spied on whilst an undercover officer. The Met have already apologised to and compensated four who had significant relationships with him, and those who knew him can name many more.

Andy Coles has chosen this route, admitting some details but denying the most damaging details even though, as with Kennedy, everyone around him at the time saw him do it.

The Met’s self-investigation into spycops, Operation Herne, was very clear in 2014:

‘there are and never have been any circumstances where it would be appropriate for such covertly deployed officers to engage in intimate sexual relationships with those they are employed to infiltrate and target. Such an activity can only be seen as an abject failure of the deployment, a gross abuse of their role and their position as a police officer and an individual and organisational failing.’

Coles, however, thinks differently. His Tradecraft Manual for undercover police officers gives tips on how to handle a sexual relationship with people being spied on.

‘you should try to have fleeting, disastrous relationships with individuals who are not important to your sources of information.’

This is an explicit instruction to cause anguish and distress. It is premeditated, calculated abuse. Coles is drawing from his own experience here. Whilst a year is scarcely ‘fleeting’, the relationship with Jessica was certainly disastrous.

Specifying ‘individuals who are not important to your sources of information’ is particularly callous. Nobody deserves to be treated this way. Indeed, the Met have conceded it breaches the right to freedom from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment – an absolute right that it cannot ever be justified to breach.

Even if the officer has the warped disdain to believe the targeted activists deserve it, Coles specifically instructs officers to go for more peripheral figures around the group being spied on, as Lambert did with Belinda Harvey.

What Jessica and the others are saying is very damaging to Coles’ social standing – Andy Coles is violator of human rights and sexual abuser of women. English libel laws are notoriously biased towards the subject; they do not have to prove an allegation false, instead their accuser has to prove the claim is true. Why doesn’t Andy Coles take legal action? Instead, it is Jessica suing the Met for Coles’ abuse.

His total denial of his relationship with her comes from an inhuman, degrading and calculating place. Well aware that it cannot be justified, he tries to shield himself from accountability by pretending the public inquiry is some sort of court case, and that it would prejudice a trial to speak about ongoing criminal proceedings. He knows this is nonsense.

He must surely be aware that, in doing this, he is compounding the damage he has done to Jessica and other women. This is not something that can be dismissed as something from long ago, this is the measure of the man’s character today.

Here is Jessica talking about Andy Coles’ abuse. Decide for yourself who you think is the liar.

See the Sack Andy Coles campaign site (and follow them on Facebook and Twitter) for more.

Victims walk out of the Undercover Policing Inquiry, 21 March 2018

It’s been such a hectic week in the spycops scandal that nobody can have properly kept up!

In no particular order, here’s a list of twelve key events and revelations in the last six days:

1) Roger Pearce – who was spycops officer ‘Roger Thorley’ – was revealed as having written what the Inquiry called ‘virulently anti-police’ articles for Freedom Newspaper, who have now been granted core participant status at the public inquiry.

2) The announcement of the Secret Spycops Ball, a comedy benefit on 8 July for Police Spies Out of Lives, featuring Stewart Lee, Evelyn Mok, Mark Steel & Rob Newman. Be quick, most tickets have already been sold!

3) A new spycop has been named – Special Demonstration Squad officer ‘Michael Scott’ infiltrated the Young Liberals, Anti-Apartheid Movement, and Workers Revolutionary Party, 1971-76.

This means political parties targeted by Britain’s political secret police include:

• Liberal Party
• Labour Party
• Green Party
• Socialist Party
• Independent Labour Party
• Socialist Workers Party
• Workers Revolutionary Party
• British National Party

4) Kate Wilson, who was deceived into a relationship by undercover police officer Mark Kennedy, secured an admission from the Met that Kennedy’s managers acquiesced to the relationship. This is surely the death knell for the claim by senior police that such abuse was ‘rogue officers’ acting on their own initiative.

5) In Paris, after ten years the Tarnac defendants have finally come to court. Originally arrested for terrorism after security services linked them to damage to a train line, and an anonymous anarchist book, the accused have garnered huge support in France.

Under public pressure, the terrorism charges have been dropped, but the case still partially rests on unreliable intelligence from British undercover police officer Mark Kennedy. The Canary published secret police files, including excerpts from Kennedy’s notebook.

6) The Undercover Policing Inquiry finally confirmed Andy Coles was a spycop, a year since he was exposed as another one who deceived a woman into a long-term relationship, and was forced to resign as Cambridgeshire’s Deputy Police & Crime Commissioner.

7) Having been officially outed, Andy Coles ended his silence and not only defended his deployment but went full Rolf Harris and simply denied his year-long relationship with Jessica ever happened!

Having resigned from his post as Deputy PCC, he is desperately clinging to his Peterborough City Council seat and school governorship. He must step down from these too – men who abuse their power to sexually exploit the citizens they’re supposed to serve should not be in positions of public trust. Follow the Sack Andy Coles campaign for more info.

8) Victims of spycops and their entire legal team walked out of a hearing of the public inquiry, having told the Chair, Sir John Mitting, that he should resign or get a panel of people who understand the issues. We published the full blistering speech to Mitting by the victims’ counsel, Philippa Kaufmann QC.

9) As organisations who were spied on, both the Fire Brigades Union and Unite the Union issued statements supporting the walkout from the Inquiry.

Doreen Lawrence also gave a strong warning to the Inquiry about Mitting:

‘Theresa May, then-Home Secretary and now Prime Minister promised me a truly thorough, transparent and accountable inquiry. This has turned into anything but that and before any more public money is spent on an Inquiry which does not achieve this, the chair should resign or continue with a panel which is not naive or old fashioned and which understands my concerns about policing and what I went through. Anything less than this will lead me to consider carefully whether I should continue to participate in this inquiry.’

10) The Met finally admitted that Special Branch officers illegally supplied info on political activists for construction industry blacklisting. Thousands of people were denied work for asserting their legal rights, such as union membership or wanting proper safety equipment.

Most major construction firms supplied and used the list, and police added to the blacklist’s files with information on citizens’ political and union activity. It’s has been known for some time that Special Demonstration Squad officer Mark Jenner was an active member of construction union UCATT, and here is Carlo Neri on a construction industry in 2004.

11) A less redacted version of the Special Demonstration Squad’s tradecraft manual was released, a book dripping with disdain for not only those spied upon but every other person that spycops into contact with. Officer Andy Coles was named as the author.

12) Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb, aka the Green Party’s Jenny Jones, challenged the government in the House of Lords about the failure of the public inquiry.

‘the cases we know about are only the ones we have heard about: those are the only police names in the public realm. Until we know all the names of the undercover police we will not know how many victims there were.’

At the end of the busiest week ever in the spycops scandal, with demands for justice coming from ever larger numbers of people, the push for truth has never been stronger.

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

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

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

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

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

SQUARING UP

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

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

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

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

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

EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS

Counterculture legend Mick Farren described it:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mick Brown recalled:

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

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

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

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

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

EXTRAJUDICIAL PUNISHMENT

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

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

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

START OF THE SPYCOPS

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conrad Dixon’s Special Branch memo, 10 September 1968

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

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

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

THE NEXT MARCH

Vietnam Ad Hoc Committee leaflet, October 1968

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ORDERS FROM ABOVE

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

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

Taylor’s slender 2015 report unequivocally said:

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

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

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

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

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

The recent hearing of the Undercover Policing Inquiry was a world away from the stereotype of legal proceedings. Whilst other courtrooms seize up with the stale formality and impenetrable legalese, this session was awash with dramatic force that engulfed everyone present. And not in a good way.

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, was sitting in for his second public hearing after taking over from Christopher Pitchford. Concerns victims had about the Inquiry under Mitting’s predecessor have only multiplied as the bias towards police secrecy becomes markedly worse.

NEITHER TRUTH NOR JUSTICE

Mitting said that he would not tolerate the Metropolitan Police’s former tactic of ‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny‘ (NCND) being used to withhold from the public any information about large numbers of officers.

In his first public hearing in November 2017, Mitting unequivocally stated:

‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny has no part at all to play in Special Demonstration Squad deployments’

Yet he has essentially continued the Met’s policy of NCND, rebranding it by saying that revealing any details about a spycop is ‘a potential breach of an officer’s Article 8 rights’, the human right to a private life. This has been the basis of Mitting issuing blanket anonymity to batches of undercover officers in recent months.

Effectively, Mitting is saying the rights of violators are more important than the rights of the violated. Because he regards the officers’ human rights as paramount, the public won’t be told the names of these spycops who invaded citizens’ lives and breached Article 8 rights – as well as Article 3 (freedom from torture), Article 6 (the right to a fair trial), Article 10 (freedom of expression), Article 11 (freedom of assembly and association) and Article 14 (freedom from discrimination).

The overprotection of police privacy is now Mitting’s standard procedure. He looks at what the police officer says, and then at a risk assessment performed by another police officer, then he publishes redacted versions of these statements and issues a ‘minded-to note’ of his intentions.

Dutifully, we then go to hearings where Mitting basically goes along with what the police have recommended. He appears oblivious to the possibility that an officer might want to be anonymous because they have something to hide.

The one exception was the U-turn on Rick Gibson, whose real name is to be released, but only because the Undercover Research Group presented shocking new information about him deceiving women into relationships. Without his erstwhile comrades coming forward with the name the officer had used, the groups he infiltrated and when, this investigation would have been impossible.

NO NAMES = NO EVIDENCE = NO TRUTH

This is the fundamental issue of the Inquiry – we need to know the cover names used by officers in advance, so that those spied upon can give testimony on what the officers did. Without that, the Inquiry is reduced to the police selectively self-reporting.

The hearing earlier this month was concerned with seven officers, all of whom Mitting was intending to grant full anonymity.

Counsel for the victims, Phillippa Kaufmann QC, began bluntly:

KAUFMANN: ‘We are in no better position now than we were before the last hearing. On the contrary, we feel the situation has got worse…

‘these oral hearings, or the invitation of written submissions from us in advance, look increasingly like window dressing and look increasingly pointless in terms of actually having any realistic prospect of having any influence upon your decision-making. That is a matter of great public concern’

RUNNING INTO A BRICK WALL

Two of the officers were known by the code numbers HN23 and HN40. We are offered the bare minimum of information about them, basically just telling us that they existed. Mitting claims publishing their cover names could lead to the real names being discovered which, in turn, could lead to the risk of serious violence against the officers.

HN23 was deployed against one group and reported on other groups in the 1990s. They fear their friends and family will feel betrayed that they kept their spycop past a secret.

HN40 was deployed against two groups in the last decade of the existence of the SDS (ie 1998-2008). They were prosecuted under their false name. Despite this evidence of perjury and perverting the course of justice, the Inquiry seeks to fully protect the officer.

Kaufmann said the refusal to say anything at all amounted to Neither Confirm Nor Deny. Mitting responded:

MITTING: ‘With respect it is not a Neither Confirm Nor Deny approach. It is stronger than that. It is a flat refusal to say anything about the deployment in the open.’

Kaufmann then asked, if we can’t know about the officer can we at least be told why that decision has been taken?

MITTING: ‘I am afraid that HN23 as HN40, they are examples of deployments where you are going to meet a brick wall of silence.’

KAUFMANN: ‘It strikes us as extraordinary that we cannot even be told, for example, was this officer engaged in a deployment in relation to left wing groups or right wing groups. How on earth can the disclosure of that fact alone put that officer at risk?

Mitting was aloof and unrelenting, waiting for her to finish speaking and simply repeating himself.

MITTING: ‘I am afraid you are meeting a brick wall in these two cases and others.’

Maya Sikand, representing whistleblower SDS officer Peter Francis, spoke next about HN23.

SIKAND: ‘We come here, we hope to assist but we are not assisting because you will say, “Well, actually, no, this is a brick wall”. So it does beg the question as to why it is we are invited here’

Sikand then raised the stakes, saying that Peter Francis knows who HN23 is and the groups that were infiltrated.

She said of HN23:

SIKAND: ‘This is an officer who would have valuable evidence to give you about the nature of his deployment and what he was asked to do would be something that he needs to give evidence to you about, because it is likely that there was a level of violence authorised by Special Demonstration Squad managers in his deployments.

‘The difficulty with not disclosing his cover name is that you cannot have his evidence properly tested other than by those with whom he possibly perpetrated that violence or who were witnesses to it, in that group that he infiltrated. So that’s why we say it is of particular importance that you do disclose this cover name.’

Moving on to HN40, Sikand added:

SIKAND: ‘It is Peter Francis’s view that once more this officer would have valuable evidence to give you about the violence that was permitted by Special Demonstration Squad managers to be used by Special Demonstration Squad officers.’

At this point Peter Francis interjected in person.

PROFESSIONAL LIARS

Francis started by reminding Mitting that he and his fellow SDS officers lied professionally, that they had been trained to make whatever they say sound plausible.

Rising to his feet, Francis contrasted the dangers faced by SDS officers with those of former drugs squad officer Neil Woods who was sitting in the public gallery. 

Pointing Woods out to the court, Francis expounded:

FRANCIS: ‘This man here is a former undercover officer himself, Neil Woods, the author of “Good Cop, Bad War“. He personally has led to more imprisonment of individuals totalling approximately 1,000 years for his deployment from 1993 all the way to 2007…

‘That one man has led to more imprisonment than the entire Special Demonstration Squad from 1968 to 2008. He is sitting here in his own name. I am sure he doesn’t mind saying he’s actually brought his wife along today. He walks in society freely and yet there is hundreds upon hundreds of people who would like to pay that man back…

‘I have great, huge, concerns that these professional liars are spinning you, the Inquiry and definitely these poor solicitors they are working with here.’

LAWRENCE SPYMASTER IS PRESUMED FLAWLESS

The court moved on to what Mitting conceded is ‘the problematic case of HN58’.

HN58 was the senior manager at the SDS during a crucial period in the late 1990s. It was five years after Stephen Lawrence was killed, and the Macpherson inquiry was investigating corruption and racism in the Metropolitan Police’s murder investigation. That inquiry was supposed to get to the truth and be the last word on the issue. But unbeknownst to them, the SDS was spying on the Lawrence campaign for justice, effectively trying to undermine the inquiry.

Mitting gave a clear statement in November 2017, saying that he wants this Inquiry to succeed where Macpherson and other previous processes have failed.

Peter Francis, who as an SDS officer was tasked to ‘find dirt’ with which to discredit the Lawrences and their campaign, said it is essential that HN58’s real name is released so his role can be discussed. Francis explained to the court:

FRANCIS: ‘I personally have promised Mr Lawrence, as in Stephen Lawrence’s father… that I would do absolutely everything for him because I and the Special Demonstration Squad let him down in the last Macpherson Inquiry.’

But withholding the real name is not the only issue with HN58. Like most SDS managers, he had previously been an undercover officer. We want the cover names published. With HN58, where there is evidence of wrongdoing as a manager, it suggests possible wrongdoing when he was an officer. His cover name must be published to allow the people he spied upon to come forward with their experiences.

REAL MEN DON’T LIE

But Mitting intends to withhold HN58’s real and cover names for three reasons:

1. ‘There is no known allegation of misconduct against him’.

This is absurd. How can we make any allegations against an officer if we don’t know who they are? Tell us the name and let those they spied on come forward to say if there was misconduct, otherwise Mitting is conducting his own mini-trials based solely on police evidence. Kaufmann bluntly told Mitting, ‘it is not a reason that actually makes any sense’.

2. ‘The nature of his deployment’.
This is impossible to comment on without knowing any details, but it’s clear that officers exaggerate the danger of their deployments.

3. ‘What is known of his personal and family life make it unlikely it would be necessary to investigate possible misconduct even if details of his deployment were made public’.

This is even weirder than point 1, and nobody seemed to understand what Mitting was alluding to. When challenged, he replied ‘I know more about this man than you do’.

Exactly what he meant had to be teased out of him. Eventually he said it.

MITTING: ‘We have had examples of undercover male officers who have gone through more than one long-term permanent relationship, sometimes simultaneously.

‘There are also officers who have reached a ripe old age who are still married to the same woman that they were married to as a very young man. The experience of life tells one that the latter person is less likely to have engaged in extra-marital affairs than the former.’

There were gasps of incredulity around the court. Does Mitting really believe that if a man has stayed married to one woman for a long time he will not have deceived women he spied on into sexual relationships? And that we can be so confident of this that we don’t need to check if it applies in every case?

The idea that men do not hide affairs from their wives, or have arrangements where affairs are tolerated, is utterly bizarre. It is patently untrue, as we already know from other spycops. Several are known to have stayed married to the same person (at least until the truth was exposed by those they spied on), including the infamous Mark Kennedy who had relationships with four women who have now reached legal settlements with the Met.

A man possessed of opinions such as Mitting’s has no place running an Inquiry with sexual abuse of women and institutional sexism at its core.

CRIMES IGNORED

This moment also made clear that Mitting had been using ‘misconduct’ exclusively as a euphemism for ‘deceiving women into sexual relationships’. He had already made the women a special case at the November hearing, saying they deserved full answers, but not mentioning any other groups of victims.

It’s important to remember that sexual abuse was only one element of the spycops’ criminal misconduct. Assault, identity theft, incitement, burglary, perjury and perverting the course of justice were all commonplace. Mark Ellison QC found that not only did spycops lie to courts and spy on lawyer-client meetings, they also withheld evidence that could have exonerated accused people.

Officers have admitted to the Inquiry that they were arrested and prosecuted whilst undercover, yet Mitting has apparently decided this is not misconduct worthy of consideration, let alone telling the victims about.

As Alison, who was deceived into a five year relationship by SDS officer Mark Jenner, wrote in the Guardian last week:

‘Rather than one senior judge, this inquiry requires an independent panel of experts, along the lines of the one that advised Sir William Macpherson in the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, or the Hillsborough Independent Panel.’

WHAT’S THE POINT?

Helen Steel was deceived into a two year relationship by undercover police officer John Dines. He was only exposed through her diligent research.

Having represented herself in the same courts for the McLibel trial, the longest trial in English history, Steel is now representing herself at the Undercover Policing Inquiry, but in effect she spoke for many:

STEEL: ‘Frankly the way that the Inquiry is currently conducting this process gives the core participants absolutely no faith that it is interested in learning the truth because it is basically believing everything the police says and saying, “I don’t need to hear you because you haven’t got anything you can tell us”…

‘it is just a pointless waste of money if we are not being told enough information to effectively participate this Inquiry. It is not going to get to the truth and the whole purpose of this Inquiry is to stop the human rights abuses that were being committed by these units. You can’t do that without our participation and it is a joke that we are being excluded from this process. It is an insulting joke.’

The victims should be heard. They – the people who brought the issue into the light – are the most keen to have the truth publicly established, but they are repeatedly running into Mitting’s brick wall. His excessive faith in police integrity, and refusal to be substantially swayed from that trust, is steering the Inquiry far from its goal.

Last week the Inquiry announced that, despite all that was said at the hearing, it will withhold the real and cover names as intended (with the exception of probably releasing the real name of the now-deceased Rick Gibson). In other words, if an officer is still married to the person they were with at the time of deployment then they are assumed to be blameless and will be protected from scrutiny.

The Inquiry cannot fulfil its purpose like this. Something fundamental must change if there is to be any point in it at all.

There are two new names on the list of known officers from Britain’s political secret police; Christine Green and Bob Stubbs.

The Undercover Research Group published a profile of Christine Green on Sunday. She infiltrated South London animal rights groups from 1994-2000, seemingly as a replacement for Andy Coles.

She became a regular hunt saboteur and protester, as well as editing London Animal Rights News and helping out at an animal sanctuary.

After her deployment ended, she started living with a man she had spied on called Tom, who had served a prison sentence for violence against a hunter (which he emphasises was an act of self-defence). More than a decade later, they are still together.

She is the first woman officer known to have had a long-term relationship with someone she spied on, although it is unclear if the relationship began whilst she was still undercover.

WEASEL WORDS

This story, already odd even by the standards of the spycops scandal when it was published on Sunday, took a swift turn for the bizarre.

On Tuesday the Metropolitan Police issued a public apology to Hampshire police. It turns out Christine Green had been authorised by the her Met Special Demonstration Squad managers to take part in a raid on a Hampshire mink farm in 1998.

Around 6,000 mink were released into the wild. Hampshire police launched an investigation at the time, though no charges were ever brought. With their new information they’ve looked into it again but decided there is still no chance of a successful prosecution.

The Morning Star gave it the glorious headline Spycop Sprung Mink From The Clink, which could only be bettered by BristleKRS’ comment:

‘STOATS AMAZE BALLS-UP: How the Met kept a (muste)lid on its spycop’s involvement in a huge mink release from a site on a neighbouring police force’s patch’

BOBBING UP

With a little less drama, the Undercover Policing Inquiry added another name to the list on Tuesday: ‘Bob Stubbs’ infiltrated International Socialists/ Socialist Workers’ Party 1971-76. The Inquiry decided in November not to publish Stubbs’ real name.

It can be very difficult to do anything with sparse information such as this. Asking people if they remember a bloke called Bob from 40 years ago is often met with an understandably hazy reply. If the Inquiry really wanted the people who knew an officer to come forward, it would locate and publish a photo of the officer along with the cover name.

It would not significantly increase any risk to the officer. With the passage of time, whatever they looked like then will be substantially different to their present appearance. There is no chance of someone seeing a picture from the mid 1970s on the Inquiry website then recognising that person in the street.

WHO ELSE WAS SPIED ON?

The Inquiry has finally instated a list of officers on its website. It gives their cover names, the groups that may have ‘encountered’ the officer, and the dates it happened. So far 16 are named, with an average of two groups each.

However, the Inquiry has admitted that the Special Demonstration Squad spied on more than 1,000 groups. These groups were targeted (according to the National Police Chiefs Council) by 118 undercover officers of the SDS.

This means there should be an average of more than eight groups per officer, rather than just two.

Who else did the named officers spy on? Why isn’t the Inquiry telling us? Is it because they are withholding names, or are the police not supplying the full facts to the Inquiry? If it’s the latter then we have to wonder what else the police are not revealing.

Whistleblower SDS officer Peter Francis is listed as spying on two groups, Youth Against Racism in Europe and Militant (now called The Socialist Party).

As soon as he appeared on the list, Francis tweeted

Activists may have also “encountered” me as spycops from 1993 to 97 as a part time student at Kingsway College Anti Fascist Group (KAFG) Which whilst I was spying er sorry ‘encountering’ on it, became the Movement for Justice (MFJ)

Every one of the thousand-plus groups has a right to know. If the inquiry would publish the full list of groups, those spied upon could be contacted and asked about infiltration. Until that happens we cannot get to the truth of what was done.