What I Meant To Say Was

I went on last night's Newsnight, on the day the Home Secretary announced a public inquiry into Britain's secret police. It was deeply moving - to the point of painful - to be sat by Neville Lawrence as a report showed pictures of the murderers and talked of how Stephen would be 40 today, then followed with footage of his now ex-wife welling up in parliament as she talked about their son.

After that we had the story of one of the women who had a long term life-partner relationship with a man who turned out to be an undercover police officer, Mark Jenner. As we watched it, waiting for the panel discussion to begin, presenter Kirsty Wark exclaimed when "Alison" said Jenner was married. I told her they all were - it was a matter of policy, as married parent officers had more to come back out for and were less likely to go native.

The other two on the panel were chair of the Metropolitan Police Black Association, Janet Hills, and ex-copper rentagob Peter Kirkham.

Earlier in the day Kirkham had tweeted that

most protests can't control themselves and rapidly descend into violence (or get taken over by violent thugs)

In my experience most protests are small and rapidly descend into boredom or get taken over by an urge to have a trip to the pub. But Kirkham underlines the point I made in the sliver of time I spoke - that protests of all kinds are treated as a dangerous threat to be contained by force. Dissent is, in and of itself, a problem.

The targets of secret police reflect the establishment's values, not any moral objectivity. When Stephen Lawrence was murdered it was still radical to be overtly anti-racist. Even five years ago at Climate Camp we were infiltrated by police as well as set upon by riot officers because we called for an end to the building of coal fired power stations, something that is now settled government policy.

A rich irony is the two kinds of police met at the first Climate Camp and undercover Mark Kennedy was given a proper kicking by uniformed officers that were - unknowingly - only there because of his tip-offs. Kennedy needed surgery afterwards. Still, only targeting the extremists, eh?

The stately, weary gravitas of Neville Lawrence was as crushingly sad as it was humbling. So imagine being weasel enough to tell him that his family were a legitimate target for police spying. Kirkham said it wasn't the Lawences themselves of course, but the shady people at the fringes who might have used their campaign.

Yet the main witness to the murder, Stephen's friend Duwayne Brooks, was prosecuted on trumped up charges that officers had spent hours trawling footage of him to try to get to court. He was so hounded and the charges so ridiculous that he won record compensation and - a much rarer event - an apology from the police. Police bugged a meeting with Brooks and his lawyer long after the MacPherson Inquiry.

ANY THREAT IS EVERY THREAT

I said that it isn't a rogue officer or rogue unit, in fact as the fracking protesters at Barton Moss can testify, the casual beating up, fitting up and harrassing of people who dare to voice dissent is the clear task of uniformed officers. It's not just the secret police, it's a policing culture that cannot distinguish between a threat to national security, a threat to corporate profit, a threat to government policy and a threat to police credibility. In their eyes Neville Lawrence is practically the same as Al Qaeda.

Victims of police wrongdoing are a threat so must be legally obstructed and pre-emptively smeared. Remember how Jean Charles de Menezes was suddenly a rape suspect? Remember the drunken ticketless Liverpool fans who forced the gates open at Hillsborough before robbing bodies and pissing on valiant cops? You know, the kind of valiant cops who suffered a hail of bottles as they tried to rescue heart attack victim Ian Tomlinson. A poll in January showed the majority of people in Britain think the police have a culture of cover-ups. This week's revelations aren't changing peoples' opinion of the police, they're confirming it.

The Newsnight report's factual errors were annoying too - saying that officers like Kennedy were in the Special Demonstration Squad when they were in a different unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, set up in 1999 by New Labour. They also said the Drax 29 case collapsed when a police officer lied in court, but in fact no officer was in court and all 29 were given convictions that were only quashed five years later.

More to the point was the implication this was a historical piece, whereas the secret police units have morphed and amalgamated and are still very much with us as the National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit, and today's political secret policing is now run by Counter Terrorism Units who we've no reason to think aren't using the same methods to target the same kinds of groups.

I thought it'd be short so tried to slim what I wanted to say down. As Woodrow Wilson said,

If I am to speak for ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.

But all I got was a ten second point and an interjection on the copper.  So here's a blogpost brainpurge of all the stuff I was thinking. It repeats a little of what I've said in the last couple of days, but hey.

...AND JUSTICE FOR ALL

The Lawrence family were not the only black justice campaign targeted by the secret police. The partner of 'Alison', Mark Jenner, infiltrated several. They need the truth.

Justice is needed for the women like 'Alison' who suffered the most complete invasion of privacy that it is possible for the state to enact. Several of the officers had children with women they targeted. Had Bob Lambert not been exposed by activists his son would still be on a fruitless search for his dad Bob Robinson.

In Germany it's illegal for spies to have sexual relations with targets. What threats to national security do we have that they don't? What does our policy - something described by a policing minister as 'important' that officers be allowed to do in a statement still not withdrawn by the government - protect us from that Germans suffer? 

We need justice for the bereaved families who whose dead children's identity was stolen. The Home Affairs Select Committee has demanded that the families be told. The police are flatly refusing.

We need justice too for the thousands of blacklisted construction workers denied a living because they raised health and safety concerns or wanted to join a union.

ALL THE COPS

You didn't even need to be a construction worker to be on it - one person was a teacher who was included because they had been involved with an anti-BNP demo. Around 200 environmentalists including me were on it. The Independent Police Complaints Commission has said it was a routine Special Branch task to illegally supply the blacklist with information. Officers from yet another secret police unit, the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit, met with the blacklisters.

Add to this the court cases like Drax and Ratcliffe where police and prosecutors withheld evidence that exonerated defendants and it's clear that this was not police officers upholding the law. It was police officers breaking the law to uphold something else - a policing vision that cannot differentiate between a threat to national security, a threat to government policy, a threat to corporate profit and a threat to police credibility.

So we need the inquiry to cover all secret police units, not just the SDS. The only reason we've got this far is because of events following from the exposure of Mark Kennedy. He worked for a different unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, doing identical work by identical methods. It's absurd to say the SDs warrant an inquiry but the other units don't. The people violated don't give a damn what acronym it was done under.

NOT JUST ALL THE COPS - CORRUPTED COURTS

Beyond the police, we need to look at satellite bodies like the Independent Police Complaints Commission - largely staffed by ex-coppers and who see police as their main customers to please - and the Crown Prosecution Service. We've already had one judge's inquiry, Sir Christopher Rose's report into the collapsed trial that catapulted the Kennedy case into public view. Rose said the police and CPS prosecutors withheld evidence accidentally, not realising that the eyewitness testimony and recordings made by the only police officer present might be useful. Failings were 'individual, not systemic'. But tally it with the findings of the IPCC report into the same issue and there's a clear picture of police and CPS collusion.

Furthermore, in January another 29 convictions were quashed in a very similar case. The only things they had in common were the officer - Kennedy - and the overseer from the CPS, Nick Paul (who the Rose inquiry didn't even talk to). That means it wasn't a one-off. That means it was systemic.

That's 55 wrongful prosecutions and convictions from Kennedy alone, and that in turn is just the ones we know he was responsible for. If the other secret police officers did the same number, it's around 8,000 miscarriages of justice since the secret police began in 1968. Even if we are very conservative and say one per officer per year, it's about 600. In terms of sheer numbers, this would be the biggest nobbling of the judicial system in British history.

This is before we come to the officers who were prosecuted under their false identities, attending defendants' meetings with lawyers and lying in court. Again, this is not officers upholding the law, it's officers breaking the law to uphold something else.

WHAT GOES ON IN PRIVATE

We need to investigate the private spying companies, largely set up and staffed by ex police officers. At the time of the McLibel trial, every member of McDonald's security department was ex-police. The head said that his staff got information from friends still on the force. It was also revealed that there was a two-way illegal exchange between them, including police giving the personal details to McDonald's of people who ended up being named on the McLibel writs. Just as construction won't be the only industry iwth a blacklist, just the only one caught, we know for certain that Mcdonald's aren't the only company to act like this.

Mark Kennedy was caught because he came back to the same activists after he left the police and they found documents in his real name. He worked for a company called Global Open, set up by ex Special Branch officer Rod Leeming, who hired Kennedy even before his police contract ended. How close must contacts have been for that to happen? How many other officers have done that?

We also need to not limit it to historical units. What reason have we got to think any of it has stopped?

THE BIG QUESTIONS

All of this is what, when the big questions are who and why. Who invented our counter democratic secret police? Why were they given free rein to conduct illegal activity? Why was such a long operation above the law? Its higher purpose should be named.

What Kind of Public Inquiry?

Well that was quick. The Home Secretary has ordered a public inquiry into undercover policing.

Responding to today's publication of the Ellison report that found that the Special Demonstration Squad secret police unit spied on Stephen Lawrence's family, she is as shocked as Captain Renault and has ordered a judge-led inquiry. It is to cover the work of the Special Demonstration Squad, though it's not clear how full a review it is, nor if it covers allied units.

Ellison said

Whilst a Public Inquiry would have the power to order the production of documents, require the attendance of witnesses and examine witnesses in a public forum, the potential for it to discover more than we have may well be limited. Fundamentally this is because of the chaotic state of the historical records held by the MPS. There are incomplete records of the moment; files have been destroyed; and the MPS uses a multitude of file-logging systems. In addition, a natural depletion of records will have occurred over time

But it's more than that. Intelligence work, by its nature, is averse to paper trails. It does not have the meticulous ordering of evidence-gathering, and much of it will never have been written down. This is why any inquiry that aims to uncover the truth must have the power to compel those involved to testify under oath, and be able to offer immunity from prosecution.

WHY THIS BURST THE BUBBLE


The Stephen Lawrence case is perhaps the Metropolitan Police's most vulnerable point. There is simply no defending what happened, no blaming individuals or errors. At the 1998 MacPherson Inquiry they had to concede that they were institutionally racist and show that they had come clean and moved on.

Secret police whistleblower Peter Francis, who was tasked to find dirt to smear the Lawrence family in an operation overseen by undercover godfather Bob Lambert, says he argued that the Special Demonstration Squad should have told the MacPherson Inquiry what they did. He was overruled as the secret police were desperate to hide their methods - their very existence - from the public eye.

So on this most clear cut and sensitive of cases, to find that the police had behaved in an even worse manner than the one that led to all the outrage is truly damning.

When the Undercover book exposed the workings of Britain's secret police last summer Bob Lambert, the officer most implicated, did some desperate firefighting. He went on Channel 4 News and admitted to lying in court and some of his sexual relationships (in the 1980s Lambert lived with an activist for several years and had a planned child with her - he kept this family and his existing wife and children ignorant of one another until he was exposed by activists in 2011).

Lambert carefully chose his words to deny the smear campaign in a specific timeframe, and said he had no knowledge of evidence being gathered on the Lawrences.  To leave it there was, at best, misleading of him. It was later established that the secret police did keep files on the Lawrences, and today's report proves even more.

On page 23 of the Ellison report we're told that the SDS officer who had been spying on the Lawrence family had a meeting with one of the team who were drafting the Met Commissioner's response to the devastating MacPherson Inquiry. Ellison condemns this attempt to get one over on the Lawrences as 'wrong-headed and inappropriate'. And who did Ellison find set the meeting up? Bob Lambert.

For all the clever tricks of the secret police, Lambert seems unaware of the obvious fact that the lies are unravelling, and as truths contradict his excuses he becomes ever more discredited, pulling more attention on to his role rather than less. If he's shown to have lied about some things, what else is there?

He was part of a cell of three animal rights activists who simultaneously planted incendiary devices in three branches of Debenhams in protest at selling fur. Lambert says he didn't do it. Either he did, or else there was a fourth bomber that neither he, nor the others, nor the courts have mentioned, who Lambert failed to have arrested.

WHAT COMES NEXT

Any public inquiry needs to have the entire anti-democratic remit of the secret police put squarely in the limelight. In 1999 the Labour government set up the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). They deployed Mark Kennedy, Rod Richardson and Lynn Watson. Thier work was identitcal to the SDS.

In mid 2011 the NPOIU, along with two other secret police units (the National Domestic Extremism Team  and the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit) were amalgamated. They are now called the National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit. The undercover activities were taken over by four Special Project Teams. This work, and its methods, are still going on, just under different acronyms. 

Any parcelling off of the inquiry into just the SDS is a denial of justice. It needs to be the whole of our political secret police, past and present.

Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance

The scandal of Britain's political secret police keeps widening, and those affected are banding together to maximise pressure for truth and justice. Last Thursday there was the launch meeting of the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance in London. It was oversubscribed (I'd guess about 150 people were in the room). For those who couldn't be there, I''ll summarise what was said by the main speakers.

A panel of six people spoke about their experiences, and hearing them in succession, talking about different groups and issues affected over such a long period of time, really hammered home the scale of what has been happening.

Liz Davies, chair of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers chaired the meeting. What was clear was that even full answers about what happened to one person or group is not enough. There needs to be a single, overarching, independent inquiry with the power to compel witnesses.

IMRAN KHAN - LAWYER FOR STEPHEN LAWRENCE'S FAMILY

Imran Khan, long-term lawyer for murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence's family who were spied on, spoke first. He read a statement of support from Stephen's mother Doreen and said that the current raft of police self-investigations aren't convincing anyone. Even if we maximise our benefit of the doubt and say they'll be objective and fair, they will still not be credible because they're not independent.

He spoke of the obvious first questions of accountability - Who was in charge of the secret police units? What was the chain of command? Did it go to the very top? Whistleblowing officer Peter Francis has recounted a personal visit and thanks from the Commissioner - complete with a gift of a bottle of whisky - for their work. How long were they deployed for? Who saw the information that was gathered? Who decided not to tell the supposedly air-clearing MacPherson Inquiry into policing around the Lawrence case?

We know that at least three officers including Peter Francis were deployed around the Lawrences and other black justice campaigns. Unfortunately, the brief of the secret police is not to gather evidence but intelligence. This means things were not meticulously logged for verification. Quite the opposite, information was sanitised to remove clues of its provenance before being passed on. So a look at the files will never be enough, we need the testimony of those involved.

Yet Chief Constable Mick Creedon, the man running the biggest investigation into the secret police, has threatened the one whistleblower with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. This is, of course, done to discourage others from coming forward.

Everyone deserves answers. Not just the Lawrences and the bereaved families put at risk when officers stole their dead child's identity, but all those involved including the people who were less likely to get unalloyed public sympathy such as the political activists and the lawyers.

DAVE SMITH - BLACKLISTED CONSTRUCTION WORKER

Dave Smith of the Blacklist Support Group got up to speak next, pointing out that as an old school trade unionist he stands to speak at meetings.

In the five years since the Information Commissioner's Office raided the Consulting Association - the company that ran the illegal construction industry blacklist - we've seen no prosecutions and no justice. 3,200 files were found. Smith's own was ten pages and included details of his family, his car registration, and ten years of his employment history.

The blacklist was used by many of the biggest names in construction - Balfour Beatty, Carillion, Costain, Kier, Laing O’Rourke, McAlpine, Skanska - and only employees at director level were invited to attend blacklisting meetings. Workers appear on it for trying to unionise, but also for raising health and safety concerns. Some people weren't even construction workers - one was a teacher who was listed because they had been involved in an anti-BNP campaign. Several hundred environmental campaigners (me included) were on it. It cost the companies about £2 per search, and invoices were found for £28,000 for one firm in one year.

There was information that can only have come from secret police. Indeed, late last year the Independent Police Complaints Commission confirmed that illegally supplying the information for this illegal work was a routine part of Special Branch work across the country. Another police unit that spied on protesters, the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit, had meetings with the Consulting Association even though the CA's activities were wholly illegal.

It's not just the same units, it's the same officers. Peter Francis believes his intelligence was used for it. Yet again, the secret police show that corporate profit is more important than the law and that their remit was actively counter-democratic.

Mark Jenner - who was undercover as Mark Cassidy - told the partner he lived with for five years that he was a construction worker. He even turned up on pickets alongside Smith and chaired meetings. (In reality he spent his 'working' days with his wife and family or with police). He also infiltrated black justice campaigns and so, like Francis, is another crossover officer.

The blacklisting campaign started out as an industrial relations dispute, straightforward labour versus capital. But what has been revealed is far more than that. This is a conspiracy between big business, government and the secret services to trample fundamental human rights. Like the undermining of social justice activists, it is not over. Blacklisting was used on projects for the 2012 London Olympics.

Furthermore, if celebrities get a public inquiry for having their phones hacked then what possible excuse is there for not having such an inquiry for this far greater and graver invasion of lives?

I would also add a question - does anyone think construction is the only industry with a blacklist, or just the only one exposed?

HELEN STEEL - SOCIAL JUSTICE CAMPAIGNER

Helen Steel made the next contribution. A lifelong campaigner for environmental and social justice, she is perhaps best known as one of the McLibel Two who defended themselves in the longest trial in English history. Their group, London Greenpeace (nothing to do with the massive Greenpeace) distributed a leaflet called What's Wrong With McDonald's - co-written by a member who was in fact undercover police officer Bob Lambert.

She had a long-term relationship with an undercover officer called John Dines, who had stolen the identity of a dead child called John Barker, and is part of a group of women suing the police.

He had confided in her about the death of his mother, his isolation as an only child, and how he dreamed to have children one day. All of this was untrue - it was policy to only send in officers who were married with children - but he successfully manipulated her feelings over several years. She fell in love with him.

Shortly before the McLibel writ was served they began a relationship that lasted several years. During the last six months he appeared to have a breakdown, which was very stressful and draining for Steel to handle. He left and she received two letters from South Africa, saying once he sorted his head out they may get back together.

After years of searching, one day on the way home from court at McLibel she impulsively went into St Catherine's House and searched the death records, finding the real John Barker's, proving her partner had been someone else. All those years and shared experiences and plans, and she didn't even know his name. So began her uncovering of the truth. She travelled to New Zealand, but the police were aware of her search and had got there first, paying Dines to get out of the country to frustrate her enquiries.

Police have given conflicting responses, saying it is never acceptable to have these relationships yet also saying it is inevitable and even essential. They acknowledge deceit but say that other people lie to partners too. Firstly, police abuse cannot be justified with the line 'but other people do it'. Secondly, this isn't a lie. This is a false identity, false marital status, false job, false politics. If this happened to anyone - police officers included - they would feel violated and traumatised.

Police also suggested that Mark Kennedy's relationships were the actions of a rogue officer. John Dines proves otherwise. Steel's legal action involves eight women who had relationships with five officers over 25 years. And there are others taking legal action, and still more that can't face the gruelling fight.

This was deliberate, repeated strategy. This is institutional sexism, derailing women's lives in order to shore up secret police operations with no oversight.

To search your home there needs to be a warrant, gained from a judge who has seen evidence of the need. Yet a secret police officer can live in your home for years with no scrutiny, nor any need for evidence against you. A suspect in custody is cautioned and may have a lawyer present, yet these officers question you without you even knowing. It's this depth of intimacy, of emotional entanglement, that causes the trauma rather than the sexual element that is the media's preoccupation.

The recent response - to 'neither confirm nor deny' anyone was an officer, the new 'tougher guidelines' that make no mention of sexual relationships - prove that they want to keep this as an option, that it is still going on.

HARRIET WISTRICH - LAWYER

Harriet Wistrich represents the eight women in Steel's case. Having all had their sense of trust shattered by their experiences, it's not been easy for them to work as a group and yet they have made great efforts to support one another. It's clear that what was done was textbook, the pattern of the relationships - the troubled early life, the devoted correspondence, through to the prolonged 'breakdown' when they're about to leave - is strikingly similar in all the cases.

Wistrich expected that, faced with such starkly immoral and operationally indefensible deeds, the police would have held their hands up and said it was wrong but have claimed to have learned lessons and moved on since then. It's been a surprise to see them defend it and obstruct justice. Their main tactic is 'neither confirm nor deny' (NCND), which they pretend is a long-held inviolate principle.

They are also trying to get cases struck out because 'this has no basis in law'. What happened to these women is very rare, and its exposure rarer still, so of course there is no list of similar historic cases.

The Metropolitan Police officers doing the self-investigations met with Mark Jenner/Cassidy's partner, asking for details, letters, photos, diaries. They were from the Professional Standards department, an internal body. Yet still they held the line that they would not confirm that Jenner was a police officer.

I'd also point out that the Met is defending legal action by Jenner's ex-partner, so there's a conflict of interest in them investigating on the one hand whilst trying to stifle investigations on the other.

The three women who had relationships with Mark Kennedy did so after the Human Rights Act came into force, so had a claim there. It has been thrown out of real court and sent to an Investigatory Powers Tribunal, a secret court where the women and their lawyers are barred from being there or seeing what evidence the police provide (or omit), then the judge makes a decision without giving any reasons and there is no right of appeal. Historically, all cases at IPTs find in favour of the state.

All the women have claims under common law for deceit, assault and misfeasance in public office. The police are trying to have these struck out, saying that as their refusal to give evidence about their officers means they won't get a fair trial.

I find thehe idea that someone caught committing a crime can say their own choice not to speak up in court is the denial of a fair trial an amazing, bold obstruction to justice. Try doing that if you're nicked for burglary, see how far you get.

ROBBIE GILLETT - CLIMATE CAMPAIGNER

Robbie Gillett was one of the Drax 29 who stopped a coal train going into Drax power station in 2008 and whose convictions were recently quashed because the prosecution had withheld evidence from the activists' driver, undercover officer Mark Kennedy.

He corrected the common phrase that the Director of Public Prosecutions "invited them to appeal" against their wrongful convictions. This was not benevolence from diligent investigators at the Crown Prosecution Service, it was giving in to pressure about an embarrassment that was ballooning. The 'invitation' came in July 2012, 18 months after the collapse of the Ratcliffe power station trial, also due to Kennedy's involvement. It is the exposure of the secret police and the work to keep it in the public eye that is yielding results.

Sir Christopher Rose's report said that the failings of police and prosecutors at Ratcliffe were 'individual, not systemic,' yet the Drax case had already happened with different police forces and prosecutors. Add to this John Jordan's prosecution a decade earlier alongside an officer who never broke cover, and undercover officer Bob Lambert's admission that he was prosecuted as activist Bob Robinson a decade before that, and systemic is the only word for these miscarriages of justice.

With such wide-ranging, long term infiltration using the maximum possible invasion of citizens' lives, it's easy to get acclimatised and stop being shocked at new revelations. We get normalised to police misconduct. But just because something is normal doesn't mean it is acceptable and we must maintain our outrage and our thirst for justice.

LOIS AUSTIN - SOCIALIST PARTY

Lois Austin is a trade unionist who works for the public services union PCS and is a member of the Socialist Party. She was a member of the Socialist Party's forerunner, Militant Labour, and was chair of its anti-racist campaign Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE) at the time they were infiltrated by Peter Francis.

When they used a bug detector to sweep the YRE office at the time it lit up like a beacon. People forget how controversial the now lauded anti-racist and anti-apartheid campaigns were in the 1980s and 1990s.

I'd note that the anti-apartheid campaign was focused on economic sanctions, and threats to corporate profit are one of the main targets of the secret police.

Many campaigners who'd never been arrested for anything were spied on and had extensive Special Branch files. Peter Francis says there were already files on around a hundred Militant and YRE members when he was deployed, and he opened 25 more. This is political policing to prevent protest, colluding with big business and state bodies, seemingly without any boundaries on the methods used. Illegal action, such as supplying the blacklist, perjury or being an agent provocatuer, were accepted practices for these officers of the law.

This is not a rogue officer or rogue unit overstepping their brief. These methods were so widespread, sustained and interlaced with other agencies that it can only be seen as the accepted, organised strategy. When we've heard Helen Steel's story, it makes you wonder what else there could be.

So this campaign needs to be broad. The initial central demand is an independent inquiry with testimony from all known victims and the power to compel witnesses. We especially welcome Doreen Lawrence's statement that she doesn't just regard her family's case as the boundary but as part of something much bigger. We've seen the recent Hillsborough Independent Panel and Bloody Sunday inquiries reveal much truth but stop short of fully attributing blame.

It is inconceivable that the Commissioner of the Met and the politicians above him didn't know about this. The police are on the back foot with this issue, hence the threatening and smearing of Peter Francis. Pretty much everyone has sympathy with some people who were targeted, so we need to build and popularise this campaign. There is a statement to get union branches and organisations to sign up to. Let's take this beyond the groups affected and out into wider society.

JUST THE BEGINNING

So, that was the six speakers. Even though I already knew much of what was said, hearing it from those affected one after another was intensely moving and made a very coherent picture come into focus. And, although there were people from so many disparate groups, this was by no means the full story. There was nobody there from the Hillsborough families who were spied on. There was no mention of the Muslim groups that were the focus of the final few years of pivotal undercover officer Bob Lambert's final few years in the police.

Beyond the list of known targets, we should remember that all this comes from the unmasking of about a dozen undercover officers. More than 90% of them remain totally unknown to us. How many more court cases were nobbled? How many more children were born to briefly bolster an officer's cover then abandoned? How many outrages were committed the like of which we haven't even thought of yet?

The chief thrust of COPS is to push for a judge-led inquiry. Whilst, as Lois Austin pointed out, it has led to a fuller public understanding of things like Hillsborough and Bloody Sunday - though no convictions - we do also need to be cautious about seeing that as a final goal. Bloody Sunday had an initial judge-led inquiry that was a whitewash, and the Taylor report into Hillsborough, though sympathetic to victims and critical of police, was also unable to marshal all the facts or address the cover-up. It was only after decades of sustained campaigning that the more recent, more accurate judge-led inquiries were held into those events.

With Hillsborough we saw a new model of inquiry, a panel outside of arms of the state, trusted by all sides. It succeeded where judges failed. Enforcers of state power are not the best placed people to objectively investigate large scale abuses of state power.

But, as the Lawrence and Hillsborough campaigns have shown, no single inquiry will provide the complete answer. We must go for what will bring forth the next nugget of truth, and once we've got that out into the light, go for the one beyond it. The case for a proper independent inquiry is so strong, and will be supported by such a broad spectrum of society, that it is the obvious next step.

COPS has been founded to make that happen. They're also on Facebook if you want to give them a Like and stay up to date that way.

A Taxing Question of Proportion

Today's front page of The S*n: Main story with emotional response instructions in red block capitals: Person claims £120 in benefits.

Single column side story: Millionaire state employee fraudulently evades £1,000,000 tax.

Small third story: Millionaire trousers a further £70,000,000 - his annual dodging of £600,000 tax unmentioned.

Brought to you by a billionaire proprietor who has dodged billions of pounds in tax over decades.

Fracking - We Are Winning

Barton Moss near Manchester has been the front line of the anti-fracking campaign in the UK. Police have shown a predictable level of impartiality.

They arrived one rainy day saying that a flare had been fired at a police helicopter two days earlier, cordoned off the tents and undertook searches that involved pulling out everyone's clothes and bedding and leaving it in the rain. Had there actually been any such flare fired the police would not have left it two days to come and investigate.

Older protesters are taken away from the site by the police using a favourite pretext for action with no legal basis, 'for your own safety'.

They have arrested people on a range of trumped up charges. Perhaps the most extraordinary is the incident of a non-protesting Lawful Observer, Dr Steven Peers, who was shooed away from filming an arrest and then arrested for drink-driving even though he was a sober pedestrian. Top tip; don't fit up a person whose role is to film things until you've checked their camera is switched off.



Prosecutors dropped the case as soon as it got to court and he is now suing the police for wrongful arrest and false imprisonment.

Most of the arrests have been whilst walking in front of the delivery trucks. Enclosed in a moving kettle of officers who tread on their heels and kick their ankles, people walk slowly down the access road ahead of the convoy as it arrives in the morning and leaves in the evening. Around fifty people, myself included, have been arrested. Like many of those nicked, I wasn't doing anything that the others weren't, but they tend to pick off the new arrivals or the veterans of other protest camps.

The access road isn't a normal road. It's a private road and a public footpath. The police dug up and nicked the public footpath sign in December, but this does nothing to the legal status of the place.

They were told repeatedly, every day, including just before arresting me, that it was a public footpath and Obstruction of The Highway doesn't apply and such arrests were unlawful.

Yesterday a judge at Manchester Magistrates Court confirmed this. So today people sat in front of the trucks and stopped them for eight hours until the convoy turned around and went away.

The police will now have to fall back on their slurs of protesters turning up for a ruck with the police and what a great job the police are doing of resisting such rabid provocation. That imaginative press release is  believed to be tipped for the Man Booker shortlist, though it will face stiff competition from my strikingly creative arresting officer's statement.

I have never seen a UK environmental campaign that looks so likely to win as the one against fracking. It has the vulnerable fledgling industry element that made the GM campaign successful. Then there is the robust mix of locals, direct activists and NGOs all doing what they do best and working in concert that made the roads campaigns so successful. It has the climate imperative underneath and the sense that drastic looking measures are the only ones that square up to the problem, elements that made the climate camps capture the imagination and move the grounds of debate.

Cuadrilla, the company that had the fracking operation in Balcombe last year, announced a fortnight ago that they were pulling out of all their Lancashire sites. A couple of days later climate denying fuckweasel Environment Secretary Owen Paterson admitted that the protesters are winning the argument, though he didn't say it was due to having better values, science and facts. He attributed it to us having 'exciting clothes'. Last week BP ruled out any fracking in the UK, plainly saying it was because of the protests it would attract. Each new poll shows public opposition to fracking increasing.

We are winning.

Hillsborough: The Treble Injustice

When the Hillsborough Independent Panel report came out the Prime Minister admitted the families had suffered 'a double injustice'; the disaster itself, and the smears and cover up from police.

Today in parliament Steve Rotheram MP says there was a triple injustice - families were also spied upon by undercover police. Families report phone taps and break-ins without robbery. He plainly asked the Home Secretary Theresa May to confirm the spying didn't happen. She dodged it.

Theresa May also said it was 'extremely unfortunate' that police forces didn't give all Hillsborough material to the Independent Panel as they had promised to do. The "Independent" Police Complaints Commission has already recovered 2,500 South Yorkshire police pocket notebooks not available to previous investigations. Thirteen officers have refused to be interviewed by the IPCC and two have not replied.

We know that the secret police sought to protect society from threats. They did not distinguish between a  threat to life and limb, a threat to public order, a threat to corporate profit or a threat police credibility. They put officers into numerous black justice campaigns to deny justice, not just that of Stephen Lawrence's family.

Those campaigns sought to do was expose the police for what they actually were; institutionally corrupt and concerned with protecting their reputation more than admitting wrongdoing, providing answers to those who deserved them and allowing justice. Spying on the Hillsborough families fits squarely into that remit. Today, nearly 25 years on, that injustice continues. 
 
This is yet another strand that need to be included in the one all-encompassing, trusted and truly independent inquiry into the undercover policing scandal.

Testing the Waters

Remember folks, the lack of adequate flood defence and relief is because all the money goes on foreign aid, not because flood funding was slashed to fund tax cuts for the super rich.

We are the fourth biggest economy on earth because of our own hard work and natural superiority, and not because we spend several centuries looting the wealth of countries that we now throw the odd crumb of aid to on condition they let our corporate interests cherry pick their economy.

Whilst we are the fourth biggest economy, we are far from being the fourth-richest nation measured by average incomes. One that is rather better off on a per capita basis is Norway, which in the 1980s decided to keep 51% state ownership of its valuable (and finite) North Sea Oil resources, instead of chucking all that to the private sector. It has since been able to afford to protect its infrastructure from the very high levels of rainfall it endures. And also a load of that social democratic stuff too. you can go to university for free in Norway, even if you're from Eritrea.

Meanwhile, in the UK, we're told the coffers are empty, but since the 2008 banking crisis, banks have paid more than twice as much in bonuses as they have in corporation tax.

As the Met Office links the floods with climate change, long term flood prevention should have a focus on climate change abatement measures. Instead, the government has slashed such funding even when it saved far more money than it cost.

And so we end up wringing our hands and upholstery, demanding that the government answer the real question -  “how many BMWs have to get wet before the government stops trying to impress stupid African babies?”

Where's The Justice?

Another 29 convictions quashed because undercover cop Mark Kennedy's evidence was withheld from the court by police and prosecutors. It happened in an earlier case too.

In April 2009, 114 people were pre-emptively arrested whilst planning to shut down Ratcliffe on soar coal fired power station. Between their planned protest at Ratcliffe on soar power station and the subsequent trial they found out that one of them, Mark Stone, was in fact police officer Mark Kennedy.

Twenty of the Ratcliffe protesters had already been convicted, but the defendants in the separate trial of six more said he must have made some sort of report. As the prosecution have a duty to disclose any evidence that may help the defence, they asked to see it. Rather than do this, the state withdrew the charges (specifically saying it was new evidence and nothing to do with the cop, honest guv) and the trial dramatically collapsed. Two resulting official reports, when sifted in tandem, show that the police and prosecutors had colluded to hide Kennedy's involvement from both trials.

The twenty earlier convictions were quashed. This led the Drax 29 - who'd been driven by Kennedy on their mission to stop a train of coal en route to Drax power station in 2008 - to appeal as well. Earlier today the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, overturned the convictions saying there was "a complete and total failure" to disclose evidence that would have been fundamental to the activists' defence. He said reasons for the failure remained unclear. Seems pretty clear from where I'm sitting. As with the Ratcliffe trail, they withheld evidence that would exonerate the defendants in order to secure convictions.

In October a conviction was ready to be overturned because, again, one of those arrested but not prosecuted was a police officer, this time Jim Boyling. But, bizarrely, the state has refused to say why it will let the appeal win. Next week several media outlets are going to court trying to force disclosure in the public interest.

...AND JUSTICE FOR THOUSANDS

We can be confident Kennedy and Boyling are not the only ones. But most undercover officers haven't been revealed. There will be dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of miscarriages of justice but the people wrongly convicted won't appeal because they don't know one of their comrades was a cop.

With the Ratcliffe 20, plus the additional Ratcliffe 6, that's 55 wrongful prosecutions and convictions from Kennedy alone. Taken as an average for these officers, that's around 8000 since the secret police started targeting activists this way in 1968. Even if it's just one per officer per year, there are around 600 miscarriages of justice being left to stand.

The Director of Public Prosecutions said they will investigate any cases brought to them, but they won't go searching. Thing is, we can't bring cases if we don't know who the cops were. It's a bit like me getting burgled, but the cops ask me to find a fingerprint and put a name to it before they investigate. It's *they* who hold the only records that can identify culprits and, given we all know these crimes happened, their refusal to investigate amounts to a cover-up.

NO TRUST, NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE

If the smaller, less intrusive, less serious phone hacking scandal warrants a public inquiry, what possible excuse is there to deny one for the secret police scandal? This is one of the biggest nobblings of the judicial system ever. Where's the justice?

At the Leveson inquiry into phone hacking, the police were happy to let a few lowlings go down in flames but when it started to implicate a very senior officer the Met held on to their evidence until it was too late to use, and even then handed it in with a gagging order so it couldn't even be referred to in Leveson's conclusions.

If they'll do that to a public inquiry, what chance is there with Operation Herne, the investigation into the secret police scandal headed by a chief constable where most of the personnel are Met staff including serving police officers with an eye on their future career?

They are already obstructing justice in this as much as they can. When women ex-partners of undercover cops had a hearing a couple of months ago trying to get their human rights claim heard in open court, the police were refusing to even admit Mark Kennedy was a police officer. (The court decided that the human rights claim will be heard in a secret tribunal where only the police and judge are present and the women's lawyers don't get to see what evidence the police present or omit.)

DONE, AND SEEN TO BE DONE 

This isn't just about fitting up hundreds of political activists and ruining lives with wrongful criminal records. It's also about spying on Stephen Lawrence's family and other black justice campaigns to undermine them. It's about the dozens of women who were psychologically and sexually abused by undercover officers, some left with children to raise alone. It's about the bereaved families whose dead childrens' identities were stolen by officers, putting the family at risk of retribution from criminals who thought they had twigged who the mole in their operation was. It's about the blacklisting of thousands of trade unionists on an illegal database with information supplied by police officers.

Beyond all that, it's about whatever was done by the other 90% of these officers who we don't yet know about.

Self-investigations will say 'mistakes were made, nothing systemic or malicious, lessons learned, move along, nothing to see'. There needs to be an open public inquiry conducted in a manner that is trusted by all sides. It needs to deliver justice commensurate with the wrongdoing that it investigates. The Hillsborough Independent Panel showed that such a thing is possible. Anything less is either a failure to understand the enormity of what was done, or else a deliberate obstruction to conceal the truth and stifle justice, yet again.

We Are More Possible Than You Can Powerfully Imagine

The problem with working for social change is that you never know if you're wasting your time. Only hindsight, and almost always a considerable quantity of it, can give you clues.

Every successful campaign - indeed, most historical events - gets tainted by our perspective that includes the time between then and now. It makes it look as if what happened was fated and inevitable. Conversely, things that failed appear as if they were always doomed and those involved were daft to have even tried.

When you read what the contemporaneous mainstream voices invested in the status quo said about, say, the Suffragettes or the civil rights movement, you get a very different view. Likewise,when we get to peer into the minds and deeds of the winners we find that they didn't see themselves with certainty either.

Cabinet papers from the 1984 Miners' Strike released today show the government was readying itself to declare a State of Emergency and, against stated government policy, use troops to move coal. Even with that on the table they weren't entirely confident.

Minutes of the secret cabinet committee, Misc 101, reveal Thatcher and her closest ministers were unsure of what to do: "It was not clear how far a declaration of a state of emergency would be interpreted as a sign of determination by the government or a sign of weakness, nor to what extent to which it would increase docker support for the miners' strike."

In 1952 the government built itself a bolthole in case of nuclear attack. These days it's a weird tourist attraction, which has given rise to hilarious roadsigns.

A guide book to bizarre days out, Bollocks To Alton Towers, explains.

The Secret Nuclear Bunker at Kelvedon Hatch easily qualifies as The World's Most Terrifying Bungalow. It's a place made all the more extraordinary for its very ordinary setting, on a country lane between Chipping Ongar, once the furthest outpost of the Central Line, and Brentwood, infamously crowned The Most Boring Town In Britain.

At first sight an unremarkable 1950s farm cottage, this bungalow is in fact the tip of a government iceberg - a huge three-storey bunker with 10ft thick concrete walls reaching 100ft underground. The local villagers knew nothing of its purpose, being the sort of people who could, back in 1952, remain unfazed by 40,000 tons of cement trundling up the road to Parrish Farm. Even the contractors weren't told what they were building.

When it was sold in 1992 the new owners

found the floors polished to within an inch of their lives and grass clipped to nail-scissor perfection. The four bored guards who had been stationed there had made the place nice and tidy and nicer and tidier...

In four decades of active service, at a cost of £3m a year, Kelvedon Bunker was never at red alert status. It was, only once, cranked up to amber. Not, as you might think, during the Cuban Missile Crisis (which apparently happened too quickly), or the occupation of the Palestinian territories, or the invasion of Afghanistan. Kelvedon was readied for action during the 1984-85 miners' strike, when the government was concerned that the country might be on the brink of civil war.

They really though they might have misjudged it, that the unionised workforce might band together to stem the tide of neoliberal regression that now laps around our necks in 2013. It was in no way a done deal.

So this is why we keep fighting for the change we know is needed. Not because we think we are fated to win, but because there are things worth fighting for. Because even if we fail, we may have laid the foundations of inspiration and experience that others will build upon and succeed. But, most of all, because we cannot foretell the future nor know all that is going on today. As a banner at the Newbury bypass campaign said, we are more possible than you can powerfully imagine.

The Shocking Shock Doctrine

The difference between Labour and Tory governments is that you can keep up with the pace of neoliberal evil Labour inflict. The Tories blast such a blizzard that you miss a lot of it. The kind of stuff that cropped up every few weeks and made you eclaim that you can't believe Labour would try it now just zips past you in a sort of white noise of regression, a cacophony of coins clinking on their way into the overstuffed pockets of the already obscenely wealthy.

This morning alone I've found out:


- Having made a pre-election promise of no cuts to Sure Start centres then axed 500, government websites are having the list of closed ones removed.

- Having promised that the bedroom tax wouldn't affect families with carers, it's been shown to hit 60,000 of them. As predicted.

- Senior Tory Liam Fox says the ringfencing of the NHS budget should be stopped. He uses the phrase "can't be fixed by throwing money at it"; try that on any spending, it sounds convincing even when it's untrue. "You can't sort out a debt problem by throwing money at it". Dr Fox trained as a doctor at public expense before giving up medicine to be a Tory MP.

- They plan to let landowners remove public rights of way centuries old. Bonus points to the Telegraph for characterising walkers as "trampling through gardens" and rights of way that go "straight through houses". Not vast estates of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of acres of open land, then.

And I keep finding I'm the only person in the room who's spotted their 2015 manifesto pledge to repeal the Human Rights Act, with Cameron giving serious consideration being given to complete withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, something that was reiterated by the Justice Secretary only last week.

We've just entered the last full year of this government. At this rate, that's more than enough time to push us back to the 1830s.