police in 'lying again' shocker

Further to the last post, there's another point to be considered in Chief Constable Jon Murphy's desperate arse-covering exercise.

Mr Murphy said officers were not permitted "under any circumstances" to sleep with activists. "It is grossly unprofessional. It is a diversion from what they are there to do," he said.

Yet the first undercover cop to talk, Mark Kenedy, said

I had a cover officer whom I spoke to numerous times a day He was the first person I spoke to in the morning and the last person I spoke to at night. I didn’t sneeze without a superior officer knowing about it. My BlackBerry had a tracking device. My cover officer joked that he knew when I went to the loo.

And yet they were unaware of his relationships including one that went on for many years. They didn't look at any of the communications on that Blackberry between him and his partners. The tracking device presumably switched off when he went to his girlfriends' houses or away on holiday with them.

Two of the other three officers uncovered this week are known to have formed lasting sexual relationships. Presumably their superiors didn't know either.

This stuff isn't just about one or two people, nor is it confined to the eco-anarchist movement targetted by the officers we've heard so much about in recent days. In the early 90s far-left and anti-racist groups were infiltrated. One of the officers involved talked about it last year.

officers would get together for regular meetings and you always knew if something was going on. If someone started talking about getting good information from a female target, we all knew there was only one way that could have happened. They had been sleeping with them.

An officer who worked on totally different deployments in the early 2000s said last week

At training school, it was drummed into your head that you are only limited by your imagination. The whole UC model in the police is taken from the spooks, where an agent sleeping with the enemy is condoned.

The official Met line was 'don't do it', but unofficially it was condoned. I remember one senior detective saying to me, 'Have you embedded yourself in the community yet?' It was tongue in cheek, but I left with the impression that had I shagged around for intelligence, it would have been OK.

The chance that Chief Constable Murphy doesn't understand the National Grid and hasn't seen the defence evidence of the case he commented on is exceedingly small, nonetheless it towers over the odds that he really thinks no officers have sexual relationships with targets.

Bracing themselves for a possible spate of legal action from the citizens who were deceived and sexually abused by police, Murphy's statement is the cops brazenly denying their wrongdoing, denying justice and denying truth. The first duty of the police is to protect the police, no matter what they've done.

lock up your grannies

At the recent trial of people who tried to shut down Ratcliffe on Soar coal fired power station, defendants showed that they knew the National Grid network meant that there was no chance of anyone's electricity supply being disrupted. Rather, it meant cleaner-burning gas stations would come onstream. This, in fact, was the basis of their claim to be actually preventing a quantifiable amount of carbon from being released.

Sentencing them, the judge said

It is right to emphasise that this the planned action would have had no practical effect on the electricity supply.

Yet the head of the Association of Chief Police Officers, Sir Hugh Orde, was on Newsnight last week claiming the opposite. He rebutted the interviewer pointing out that the protesters were not terrorists, saying

They were looking at taking out one of the biggest power stations supplying over two million people - hospitals, vulnerable people - for a considerable period of time.

One of the Ratcliffe defendants, Bradley Day, wryly declared

I find it deeply disturbing that a senior police officer with a responsibility for the country's national security doesn't seem to comprehend how his own National Grid works.

But ACPO clearly think this untruth is their best shot. And indeed, given what an awful time they've having as their secret police remit unravels, they may be right. As they continue to be splattered with criticism from all sides - even the Daily Mail laying into them for fuck's sake - they need to ramp up the fear and lies to take our eye off the ball.

Today, ACPO's Jon Murphy went one better than Orde.

Unfortunately, in the midst of some of these groups – recent history would evidence this to be true – there are a small number of people who are intent on causing harm, committing crime and on occasions disabling parts of the national critical infrastructure. That has the potential to deny utilities to hospitals, schools, businesses and your granny.

just checking

As Edward Woollard starts his two years and eight months sentence for dropping a fire extinguisher off Tory Party HQ,

Commander Bob Broadhurst, the Metropolitan police's head of public order, said: "We all recognise and respect the fundamental right to peaceful protest.

Is this the same Commander Bob Broadhurst whose boss who, in the wake of the Mark Kennedy unmasking, is getting a stern letter from Keith Vaz MP, chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee?

"During our inquiry into the G20 protests, [MPs] explicitly asked Sir Paul Stephenson and commander Bob Broadhurst about the deployment of undercover officers," said Vaz. "I am disappointed they appear not to have given us the full facts."

Is this the same Bob Broadhurst who spent the weeks leading up to 2009's G20 protests talking up the threat of unrest so any police action would seem justified?

Is it the same Bob Broadhurst who was in charge of the Met's G20 operation on the day, where officers were sent in to baton people exercising their 'fundamental right to peaceful protest', and continued even as they held their hands in the air and chanted 'this is not a riot'?



Is it the same Bob Broadhurst who, after all the kettling, bloodshed and death inflicted by police, said 'My officers did what I asked them to'?

release the kennedy files

The dramatic collapse of the trial of the remaining six Ratcliffe power station defendants has been seriously misrepresented.

114 people were pre-emptively arrested in the midst of a plan to shut down Ratcliffe on Soar power station in April 2009. Despite not being charged, most were given restrictive bail restrictions. Proceedings were dropped against all but 26. One of those not prosecuted was a protester called Mark Stone, who was in fact an undercover police officer called Mark Kennedy.

The problem for the police is that Kennedy had helped to plan the action, had paid for the vehicles to transport the equipment on the day. When police vehicles were spotted at the power station and activists debated calling the whole thing off, Kennedy drove out for a recce and reported that the police had gone, putting the action back on. He encouraged others to join in.

Whatever the Met's guidelines are for involvement of undercover officers, you have to wonder whether instigating, planning and inciting crime are outside the remit.

Last October Kennedy's true identity was discovered by activists. He professed remorse, though notably didn't tell activists much that they didn't already know.

The Ratcliffe trial went ahead for 20 who admitted planning the action but claimed to be justified as they were preventing a greater crime. Last month, they were found guilty, with the judge leniently sentencing them amidst glowing praise for those convicted.

The trial of the remaining six - who said they had not decided to go on the action at the point of arrest - collapsed today.

Trial collapses after undercover officer changes sides says the BBC, with the same words appearing in the Daily Mail, Telegraph and across the news media.

'The undercover cop who turned' is a great movie premise (actually, it's a mediocre and somewhat corny movie premise), but it's not what happened. He had swiftly retracted his tentative and unspecific desire to help the defendants. It was only when the defence lawyers insisted that there must be witheld documents about Kennedy's part in the action and asked for disclosure from the police that the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case.

So, it was not Kennedy's work for the activists that saved the day but his work for the cops. The opposite of what the headlines say.

It is reasonable to assume that Kennedy reported to his superiors about the action. Indeed, there has been reference to a report planned by NETCU for ministers about it that presumably includes material from their man on the ground. Yet none of it was disclosed by the prosecution.

Rather than expose what they knew the Crown chose to drop it. After hundreds of thousands of pounds had been spent and six, if not 26, people had spent nearly two years preparing for prosecution for a crime which the state knew they didn't commit.

Imagine if a police officer sees a street fight. Ten minutes after it's over a vanload of cops turn up. Yet at the subsequent trial, the prosecution don't even mention the one officer who had actually seen the event. There'd be the pervasive odour of rat.

The CPS said they'd found

Previously unavailable information that significantly undermined the prosecution’s case

and specifically said it was

not the existence of an undercover officer

It was just coincidence that they only found this mysterious evidence, 21 months after the incident, within 48 hours of the prosecution's request for the Kennedy documents. When your job is to secure convictions, it must be tempting to withold evidence that exonerates.

Had the prosecution not been aware of Kennedy's outing, those six people would tonight be preparing for their second day of a three week trial at the end of which, like the 20 last month, they would probably have been found guilty.

Yet the way the story's being told totally misses this stuff. Almost as a mirror of the Ian Tomlinson killing being One Bad Cop, this is One Good Cop gets the activists freed. As with the Tomlinson case, it avoids the real issue - this is institutional. Kennedy didn't do anything to help the defendants; the police and CPS chose to conceal evidence as a matter of policy.

newbury remembered

I've been a fan of Dorian Cope's On This Deity blog since it began. Bright and bold writing commemorating aniiversaries of the history of rebellion and dissent - with an incredibly prolific daily posting policy to boot - it belongs in the blogroll of anyone with a political conscience.

So it was quite an honour to be asked to write for it. Today is the fifteenth anniversary of the tree-felling work starting at the Newbury Bypass. I wrote a book about my time on the Newbury bypass campaign a few months after it ended. Today I've written a primer/reflection piece for On This Deity, The Third Battle of Newbury Begins.

creating an army of slaves

The Conservatives roll out plans to force benefit claimants to work for what was previously their right, but it is actually a scheme set in train by Labour. More, such coercion has existed in prisons for fifteen years.

To make people work for the minimum needed to survive with no hope of improvement or ability to leave is simply slavery. As has always been the case, it's a state of affairs that suits the slave owners very well.

It's the subject of my new Feature article for U-Know, Creating an Army of Slaves.

lib dems: champions of civil rights. in opposition, anyway.

As we reel from footage of police batoning school children who had the temerity to hold placards, let's skip back 18 months to the G20 protests. A week after the protests the LibDems attacked the

"sickening and unprovoked attack" by police.

Their Shadow Justice Secretary David Howarth expanded on this point

“The ugly scenes of police aggression and intimidation witnessed at the G20 protests and the Kingsnorth demonstrations were a national disgrace.

“Tactics like baton charges, the seizure of personal property and the kettling of protestors for hours on end are fundamentally wrong. They are a threat to democratic rights, they cause distress and injury

Other LibDems decried the use of kettling as

the practice of highly aggressive advances in police lines against the demonstration, often by fully armed riot police or horses, which compresses the protest into a smaller space. It causes fear and tension and appears to have no justification from the point of view of preventing disorder. It is not surprising that being subjected to both these tactics can turn an otherwise overwhelmingly relaxed and peaceful crowd more violent, as people become agitated, frustrated then angry.

Their party conference last year - just last year, mind - passed a motion saying

The use of aggressive or intimidatory tactics against peaceful protesters is provocative, inappropriate, and counter-productive, since it increases the tension and likelihood of violence; the police must use aggressive tactics such as ‘kettling’, baton charges, and attacks with dogs only when they are absolutely necessary and proportionate; the seizure of personal property from demonstrators is not acceptable.

The same conference declared

The state must not be allowed to trample over an individual’s right to privacy, liberty, free expression and association.

and demanded

The immediate restoration of the right to protest in Parliament Square.

All fine words. Then they got elected.

This week we heard the sound of tumbleweed rolling through the Liberal Democrat press office.

hydrogen planes won't fly

The BBC reports that the aviation industry is giving up on its promise of hydrogen powered aircraft.

Millions of taxpayers' money has been funnelled into projects that did not seemingly take on board the the fact that hydrogen power would remain costly and polluting for some time to come.

They knew it wouldn't work. It was never intended to work. The whole point of alternative fuels for cars or planes is to pretend that the answer is just around the corner, so it's OK to keep burning oil today.

Anyone who thinks that there's a readily available sustainable alternative to fossil fuels doesn't understand what fossil fuels are. They are millions of years of solar energy captured and stored. You're not going to get that off a year's worth of plants or whatever.

"Kerosene is a very good fuel and very difficult to compete with," explains Rainer von Wrede who works in Airbus's research and technology department.

But we all want to be able to fly round the world, we all want to be able to take a tonne of metal as a security blanket with us every time we pop down the shops, so we want to think there's an alternative fuel to make it happen.

As one false solution becomes exposed, another rises to take its place. Oftentimes, the public ditching of one will be saved until the next one's ready to dazzle us with.

"The big deal at the moment is alternative jet fuels. Principally biofuels that come from sustainable sources, and do not compete with food and water, ecetera," Christopher Surgenor, editor and publisher of GreenAir Online tells the BBC.

Hate to tell you this Christopher, but all biofuel crops compete with food and water.

Just because we switch from using edible crops like sugar or corn to inedible ones like jatropha does not mean there's no competition. It's not the crop that's the issue, it's the land use. There is already something growing there, either crops or forest. The water supply is already in use. There simply isn't a load of 'spare' land and 'spare' fresh water lying around.

We can safely ignore all the guff about using 'marginal' land. Firstly, there isn't waste land - the harder it is to support life the more fragile and vulnerable the ecosystems we find there. Additionally, much of the land they speak of as 'marginal' certainly isn't regarded that way by the people who live graze their livestock there. But the real clincher is the fact that the gargantuan industrial processes involved want intensive farming and maximum production. That means using high quality land.


When Virgin started using a little coconut oil in its planes it was calculated that it would take a coconut plantation twice the size of France to supply the world's aircraft. And that's what we're facing. Next year Lufthansa begin using 50% biofuel on a (woohoo) short haul service. Wherever you grow biofuels, it puts the squeeze on food production and raises prices.

But the first thing we need to address is the supposed reason they're moving to biofuels - carbon savings. The simple fact is that biofuels usually cause greater carbon emissions than oil. That should be enough to get them discounted before we even look at the food and water issue.

Clearing land causes a huge amount of carbon to be released (and taking over farmland for biofuels causes new land to go under the plough, so either way biofuels are responsible for deforestation), and it takes years for this to be balanced by savings from not using oil - in some cases longer than the global oil supply will last.

In Indonesia the researchers found that converting land for palm oil production ran up the worst carbon debts, requiring 423 years to pay off. Producing soybeans in the Amazon would take 319 years of soy biodiesel to offset the carbon debt.

What's more, everybody knows it

Britain's promise to more than double its use of biofuels by 2020 is "significantly" adding to worldwide carbon emissions, the Government admitted yesterday.

They can power cars with electricity from renewable sources (though those are hardly oversupplied right now) and give us equally fast alternatives on road and rail. But for planes, there's no electric alternative, nothing so swift, nothing but planes and oil and biofuels.

Faced with the decline of oil production, they're moving to biofuels in the full knowledge that it is a climate disaster, yet are dressing it up as carbon savings cos, y'know, it's made from nice green natural plants and stuff.

So the roll-out begins, the carbon emissions increase and millions more of the poorest people on earth are on course for starvation.

ratcliffe on trial

Last April police in Nottingham arrested 114 people meeting in a building on 'suspicion of conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass and criminal damage'.

It seems there was a plan being hatched to shut down Ratcliffe on Soar coal-fired power station. You know, like the people who shut down Kingsnorth and were found to have acted lawfully.

No charges were brought against the majority of the 114 (not surprising, given that nobody was on their way to do anything and 'suspicion of conspiracy' puts you two steps away from any visible deed). They did eventually charge 26 of them. There will be two trials; six defendants say they were not on their way to the action and will be tried in the new year.

The other twenty say they were planning to shut down the power station but were justified as they were acting to prevent a greater crime. Their trial starts today, and is being blogged at RatcliffeOnTrial.org



Supporters outside court this morning

beating police repression after the student occupation

The trashing of Conservative Party HQ during a student demo last week took a lot of people by surprise, not just the police and public but many of the participants.

Many of them had never done anything like it before. As such, they are largely identifable on the footage, and police have been arresting many.

FITwatch - a site that campaigns about police repression of protest, especially throught the use of Forward Intelligence Teams who film and photogrpah everything - published some advice to protesters.

The police responded by making the webhost take the FITwatch site down for a year. FITwatch nonetheless remain committed to their work.

In defiance of this censorship, and also to assist with the prevention of people who'd only trashed property from getting arrested, the offending post has been republished all over the internet. The more places do it, the more likeoly it is that the Met will give up and leave it be.

So here it is. If you think it should be in the public domain, please republish it on blogs and message boards.

=============================

The remarkable and brilliant student action at [Conservative Party headquarters] Millbank has produced some predictable frothing at the mouth from the establishment and right wing press. Cameron has called for the ‘full weight of the law’ to fall on those who had caused tens of thousands of pounds of damage to the expensive decor at Tory party HQ. Responsibility is being placed on ‘a violent faction’, after the march was ‘infiltrated’ by anarchists.

There are an encouraging number of intiatives to show solidarity with the arrested students – something that is vital if they are to avoid the sort of punitive ‘deterrent’ sentences handed out to the Gaza demonstrators. A legal support group has been established and the National Campaign against Cuts and Fees has started a support campaign. Goldsmiths lecturers union has publicly commended the students for a ‘magnificent demonstration’ .

This is all much needed, as the establishment is clearly on the march with this one. The Torygraph has published an irresponsible and frenzied ‘shop-a-student’ piece and the Met are clearly under pressure to produce ‘results’ after what they have admitted was a policing ‘embarrassment’.

51 people have been arrested so far, and the police have claimed they took the details of a further 250 people in the kettle using powers under the Police Reform Act. There may be more arrests to come.

Students who are worried should consider taking the following actions:

If you have been arrested, or had your details taken – contact the legal support campaign. As a group you can support each other, and mount a coherent campaign.

If you fear you may be arrested as a result of identification by CCTV, FIT or press photography;

DONT panic. Press photos are not necessarily conclusive evidence, and just because the police have a photo of you doesn’t mean they know who you are.

DONT hand yourself in. The police often use the psychological pressure of knowing they have your picture to persuade you to ‘come forward’. Unless you have a very pressing reason to do otherwise, let them come and find you, if they know who you are.

DO get rid of your clothes. There is no chance of suggesting the bloke in the video is not you if the clothes he is wearing have been found in your wardrobe. Get rid of ALL clothes you were wearing at the demo, including YOUR SHOES, your bag, and any distinctive jewellery you were wearing at the time. Yes, this is difficult, especially if it is your only warm coat or decent pair of boots. But it will be harder still if finding these clothes in your flat gets you convicted of violent disorder.

DONT assume that because you can identify yourself in a video, a judge will be able to as well. ‘That isn’t me’ has got many a person off before now.

DO keep away from other demos for a while. The police will be on the look-out at other demos, especially student ones, for people they have put on their ‘wanted’ list. Keep a low profile.

DO think about changing your appearance. Perhaps now is a good time for a make-over. Get a haircut and colour, grow a beard, wear glasses. It isn’t a guarantee, but may help throw them off the scent.

DO keep your house clean. Get rid of spray cans, demo related stuff, and dodgy texts / photos on your phone. Don’t make life easy for them by having drugs, weapons or anything illegal in the house.

DO get the name and number of a good lawyer you can call if things go badly. The support group has the names of recommended lawyers on their site. Take a bit of time to read up on your rights in custody, especially the benefits of not commenting in interview.

DO be careful who you speak about this to. Admit your involvement in criminal damage / disorder ONLY to people you really trust.

DO try and control the nerves and panic. Waiting for a knock on the door is stressful in the extreme, but you need to find a way to get on with business as normal.

Otherwise you’ll be serving the sentence before you are even arrested.