the sinking of the arandora star

Two years ago the freshly elected David Cameron spoke of how Britain owes so much to the USA for its military support during the Battle of Britain.

the fact is that we are a very effective partner of the US, but we are the junior partner. We were the junior partner in 1940 when we were fighting the Nazis.

Robert Fisk writes of how, as the Iraq War began in 2003,

both Bush and Blair reminded journalists that the US had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Britain in her hour of need in 1940.

In fact the Americans only joined the war in December 1941. In 1940, Britain stood alone against the Nazis. Facing vastly superior weaponry the Americans expected that, like much of Europe, we would readily fall to Nazi occupation.

Knowing that the immediate future would be one of either occupation or the protracted privation of war, the British swiftly interned all German and Italian men, even those who were here as refugees from fascism, then set about deporting them.

And so it was that around 1,400 of them were crammed into a ship called the Arandora Star. On 1st July 1940 she sailed out of Liverpool and, in the early morning light 72 years ago today, appeared to the commander of a German submarine like a slow moving prize of a troop ship. After the torpedo hit there was barely half an hour before she sank, taking around 800 men to their deaths.

Towards the end of July, as bodies washed up along the Scottish and Irish coasts, only the few whose personal papers had survived weeks in the sea could be identified. Many were buried in services paid for by the communities who found them.

If you want to know more, I wrote a piece about it for the radical history calendar site On This Deity. There's also a really well-written home made documentary on Youtube in four parts starting here.

Last month I visited Islay, one of the westernmost isles off the coast of Scotland, facing out into the Atlantic.

On Islay, as all across Britain, cemeteries usually have a few military graves tended by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. I was surprised and moved to find that Arandora Star passengers - civilian non-combatants and enemy nationals - are also buried in these areas. As such, their graves and headstones are tended in perpetuity out of public funds.

Both of Islay's Arandora Star passengers are Italian. The Italians had been on the lowest decks, under the most barbed wire, and a disproportionate number of them died.

Here is the grave of Andrea Gazzi, a 41 year old from Bardi in northern Italy, buried in Bowmore churchyard. He was found after more than two months in the sea on 6 September 1940. Some 48 men from his small village died on the Arandora Star, and there is now a commemorative chapel in Bardi's cemetery.

Down at Port Ellen cemetery there is an unknown Italian civilian. The inscription says 'Deceduto il 19 Agosto 1940' - died 19 August 1940, which is erroneous. They will have died on the 2nd July when the ship sank and, like Andrea Gazzi, the inscription should say 'rinvenuto', 'found'.

They are both buried with the phrase 'morto per la patria' - 'died for their country'. This appears to be a standard motto on all Italian graves in the care of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

In the case of prisoners of war it is perhaps accurate, but here it has a sharp, almost cynical sting. They did not die fighting for anything. The Arandora Star internees - many of the Italians resident in Britain for 30 or 40 years - died for their nationality, rather than their country.

bob lambert: once a bomber, still a spy?

Mark Kennedy may be the only household name in the undercover police spy scandal but as more information emerges it seems that Bob Lambert was the most malevolent of them.

Lambert went undercover in the early 1980s, meaning it is likely he was trained and overseen by the people who founded the Special Demonstration Squad in 1968. From this, we can presume that he acted in accordance with their desired methods and purpose. He fathered a child with one of his targets yet was not withdrawn from operations, indicating that they had no problem with that.

He then had a second serious intimate relationship with someone who wasn't even an activist, just to make him appear a well rounded character. He had her house raided by his Special Branch colleagues to beef up his image and give him the excuse to disappear without raising suspicion about his real role.

Anyone who has been burgled knows of the trauma, the sense of violation that it brings. A police raid is far beyond that. Like burglars they are after some of your possessions, but they are also after you personally, your thoughts, beliefs, ideas, family and friendships. It is a massive piece of 'collateral intrusion' to visit upon anyone, let alone a non-activist.

By 1987 Lambert had infiltrated a cell of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) who were on a campaign of firebombing shops that sold fur. Their plan was to attack three branches of Debenham's in Luton, Romford and Harrow simultaneously. Last week Caroline Lucas MP told a debate in Parliament that Lambert planted the Harrow firebomb which detonated causing £340,000 of damage. 

The interesting thing is Lambert is having none of it and flatly says

I did not commit serious crime such as 'planting an incendiary device at the [Debenhams] Harrow store'

Really Bob?

The plan was hatched by a small secretive cell of which Lambert was one. He ensured two of the bombers were caught and must know who the third was. Either he planted that third bomb, or he knows who did but chose to let them go. Which do you think is more likely?

One of the others has spoken out and is in no doubt, saying that Lambert was the only other person who knew of the plan and that, perhaps in an attempt to reduce his damage, he had failed to place his second device.

Lambert's outright denial is just the latest in a string of implausible arse-covering he's issued since being unmasked. His credibility can be judged from his earlier claim that

the vast majority of Met special branch undercover officers never made the mistakes I made

Of the exposed officers, we know most did exactly what he did. Most of them acted as agents provocateurs, most had long term intimate relationships with targets - a quarter of them fathering children - most targeted campaigns that posed no risk to public safety, and at least two of them did so under the orders of Lambert himself after he became the superior officer running undercover operations.

One of them was Peter Black who says that, far from being aberrant (and yet somehow allowed to continue for years), Lambert's methods were hugely admired

He did what is hands down regarded as the best tour of duty ever

So why the denials? Unlike the other outed undercover officers, Lambert still has a respected career to protect. After more than 20 years involved in infiltration he suddenly set up the police's Muslim Contact Unit along with another ex-undercover, Jim Boyling. Why would the police's friendly bridge-building exercise need to be designed and run by two of the most experienced infiltrators, unless it too is a cover for spying and running a network of informants?

Several years later, Lambert left the police - collecting an MBE for his services - and forged a career as an academic along the same lines as his work with the Muslim Contact Unit. And 'forged' is the right word if it's cover for spy work.

Because Mark Kennedy was the first undercover cop outed and was then tacky enough to hire Max Clifford to pimp him to the media, he is the most prominent of them. Yet there is nothing we know that Kennedy did that wasn't also done by other officers, with the exception of his returning to his targets as a private spy after he left the police.

Bob Lambert, on the other hand, committed every outrage undercover police are known to have perpetrated and one or two, such as getting a non-activist's house raided, that were just for him. If, as appears plausible, his current academic career is a continuation of spying begun in the Muslim Contact Unit then he too has continued his infiltration after leaving the police, making him the worst of the worst. No wonder he wants to pretend none of it is true.

the puppet apologist for abusers

Let's just remind ourselves of the official position of the police regarding undercover officers having sexual relationships with the people they are spying on.

Jon Murphy of the Association of Chief Police Officers - the body in charge of the deployment of Mark Kennedy and others who infiltrated the environmental and anti-capitalist movements - is clear and unequivocal.

It is absolutely not authorised. It is never acceptable for an undercover officer to behave in that way...

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.

Peculiar, then, that last week Home Office policing minister Nick Herbert contradicted this, saying that it can be authorised under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

It's notable that Herbert, unlike Murphy, extensively hedged his position saying that it was only the case

in very limited circumstances... and consideration should always be given to seeking legal advice.

He then supplemented his speech with an odd notion.

Of course, there is another point that banning such actions would provide the group targeted the opportunity to find out whether there was an undercover officer specifically within their group.

The assumptions here are baffling. Do they imagine that all activists, no matter what their personal feelings, would allow themselves to be forced into sexual activity with people just to prove that they are not police?

The fact is that more than one of the undercover officers lived and worked among activists without having any sexual relationships, and without being suspected. At at least two of them would refer to a partner who lived far away and actually brought their supposed partner to meet the activists.

This successful tactic of supplying pretend partners means that not only did officers not need to enter into the relationships with activists, it points to something more. It strongly implies that superior officers chose on some occasions not to give pretend partners, that the officers who had relationships were, in effect, sanctioned and even encouraged from on high.

This would certainly tally with the testimony of another undercover officer, Liam Thomas, who says

The official Met line was 'don't do it', but unofficially it was condoned.

The real outrage of the undercover operations is not the sexual activity, it is the prolonged intimacy, profound emotional bonds and personal trust they fraudulently cultivated. One of the women currently suing the police had a nine year relationship, another lasted for six years. More than one had children with their police partners, men sent into their lives to ruin the womens' most important moral values, who became as close as anyone could get and then, with little or no warning and on someone else's orders, upped and left.

Whatever Nick Herbert and his novel interpretations of UK law say, that's a clear breach of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees that no-one shall be subject to inhumane and degrading treatment and that we all have the right to private and family life, including the right to form relationships without unjustified interference by the state.

It sounds like hyperbole to call what was done to these women the most complete invasion of someone's life that is possible but really, I defy anyone to say how it could have been more so.

Given that such relationships are known to have occurred since at least the early 1980s, and involving officers like Bob Lambert who had two significant intimate relationships and fathered a child with activists and then went on to run operations, it is ludicrous to suggest that senior officers were unaware of the possibility, and that the daily-contact cover officers were blind to how their charges lived.

As the womens' lawsuit progresses, the police must be terrified of the facts of this most invasive and indefensible of strategies coming out. They must be desperate to try to fob them off or invent a trapdoor to jump through and escape. And indeed, it's not just Nick Herbert who's been suddenly saying that sexual relations are, after all, professional and acceptable.

the Met had told the women's lawyers that "forming of personal and other relationships" is permitted under Ripa, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.

Britain's only Green MP, Caroline Lucas, highlighted the contradiction and points out that whatever the truth there are officers guilty of very serious acts.

either rogue undercover officers have been breaking the rules set by senior officers, or senior officers have misled the public by saying that such relationships are forbidden.

Perhaps it's not so simple as that. Perhaps it was, indeed, officially forbidden clearly last year (and therefore at the time that all those officers were deployed), yet was still used by this unsupervised runaway train spy department as a deliberate tactic.

Under the new threat of accountability the police will have been furiously thumbing their rulebooks and legislation to make something, anything, slant enough to sound like it might make their actions somehow permissable. To back up their case, the words would need to come not just from them but the more objective and authoritative mouth of, say, a sock-puppetted government minister.

Step forward, Nick Herbert, apologist for the sustained psychological, physical and sexual abuse of the citizens he represents.

if i were the gm crop industry

Around fifteen years ago several large multinationals tried to introduce genetically modified crops to Europe. They were met with suspicion, and they responded - notably with Monsanto's 'Food Health Hope' advertising campaign that included URLs for anti-GM groups - with a concerted effort to allay fears.

They lost. They said that what they were doing was no different to the selective breeding that humans have been doing for centuries. But thus far nobody has been able to make a scorpion mate with a tomato; the results of such a novel genetic mix are far more unpredictable than crossing two tomatoes. They claimed their new crops would need less argichemicals, but part of the point of things like Monsanto's Roundup-Ready crops was to allow farmers to drench fields in the chemicals without killing the crops.

This leads us on to the really sinister part. GM was planned as a device to get farmers to use patented crops which tied you in to using their chemicals. You know the way Canon, Epson and co sell you an amazing scanner-printer for £40 then charge you £30 a time to get toner cartridges, leaving you skinter than planned or else with a printer that's perpetually out of use? Like that, but with the global food supply.

To ensure that farmers didn't wriggle out of it there were patents filed for 'terminator genes'; plants whose seeds would be infertile, meaning farmers couldn't save some of their seed to plant next year but instead would have to buy new seed every year from Monsanto.

Even as they conspired to take control of food away from those who can't pay, they claimed that anti-GM sentiment was ill informed fear of technology, a luxury only available to well fed rich people. This convenently ignored the fact that governments across Africa banded together to shun GM, and Indian farmers burned crops and protested in their hundreds of thousands, a scale far greater than in the rich nations. 

The UK press, used to food scares like botulism, salmonella, BSE, E coli and all the rest, largely portayed it as a public health risk, which ignored the much more definite threat of corporate control of global food production and impacts on wildlife.


The release of genetically modified organisms isn't like an oil spill or chemical leak. This stuff replicates and multiplies. It cross-pollinates with non-GM crops, leading to new mutations. The UK government allowed field trials, all but one of which showed detrimental effects on local biodiversity.

A 2005 study by the GM companies and DEFRA found that even fifteen years after GM oilseed rape was planted there will still be a GM plant in every square metre of the field.

The field trials were hampered by protesters going into the fields and ripping up the crops before they'd had chance to pollinate. With overwhelming public support, these few hundred underfunded people stopped a multibillion dollar industry dead in its tracks.

A few years later, BASF resurrected the idea. Once again they trotted out the unsubstantiated overblown claims of their new crops being essential to provide food for the starving. The anti-GM campaigners pointed out that BASF's potato grown for industrial starch isn't really a belly filler. That, coupled with outcry from local beekeepers whose premium borage honey production would have been affected, forced another complete climbdown.

So, what to do? GM is already planted across swathes of the Americas. There's an industry that's been geared up for Europe and is jealously coveting this untapped market. If I were them, on the back of two serious defeats, I'd realise this can't be done in one jump. Stepping stones are needed.

For example, the government know they can't simply privatise healthcare in one go, so they transfer fund-holding to GPs (who, though public in service, are essentially private in structure). When, in five or ten years, the GPs find they haven't the time or knowledge to run their own funding, the large corporations will step in and clean up. We'll then get crap doctoring for free and a range of top-up plans for anything that provides real health care.

By the same token, the UK is not going to take corporate-controlled chemically intensive GM crops. So ask, what do the protesters complain about, then tackle that stuff head on. Persons here assembled, I give you the Rothamstead GM wheat trial (and its opponents Take The Flour Back).  

What if we make a GM crop that really is a food crop, really does use less chemicals, and has no patents? The protesters will have to agree or look insane; all of a sudden the geneticists will appear like the reasonable ones. Then, that problem finally dealt with, we will have the way clear to bring in the GM crops that make money.

I'm not saying that's necessarily what's happening with the new GM crop of wheat being tested in the UK. Who knows, maybe the biotech industry has suddenly become altrusitic and has no interest in developing products in order to make profit.

going for the nuclear option

Really, I'd forgotten what it was like living under Tories. Once or twice a week they roll out something utterly outrageous, so obviously cruel, duplicitous and/or corrupt that it stuns you with its gall and makes you feel powerless to stop it even though it's a once-in-a-generation horror. Then a few days later it's superceded by the next one.

Earlier this month I flagged up their new law to monitor every phone call, text and email. Imagine if Royal Mail were obliged to open all letters and keep photocopies for police and security services to look through. This goes beyond that. Through long term logging of your texts, emails and websearching I could get a more complete and accurate picture of you than you could ever describe to anyone.

And this is from the government whose foundational policy document said

We will implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties and roll back state intrusion.

So, another day, another bit of jaw-danglingly bold hypocrisy from the government. That same Programme for Government promised us:

Liberal Democrats have long opposed any new nuclear construction. Conservatives, by contrast, are committed to allowing the replacement of existing nuclear power stations provided that they are subject to the normal planning process for major projects (under a new National Planning Statement), and also provided that they receive no public subsidy.

The government are to bump up electricity bills to subsidise new building of energy sources it deems to be low carbon. This isn't just developing new technologies that need investment to get up to scale. The phrasing - we can only assume deliberately - makes no mention of the word 'renewable'. It includes nuclear power.

once a scab, always a scab

The government have a secret underground bunker that they can escape to in case of attack. From 1952-92 it was at Kelvedon Hatch in Essex. In the 40 years of its service the lawns were trimmed to bowling green standards and the fixtures and fittings were kept polished and gleaming. There was nothing else for the bored staff to do as the facility was always on green alert.

Except once when it went to amber. It wasn't the Cuban missile crisis. It wasn't during Les Evenements of 1968. It was the miners' strike of 1984. The government really feared they'd misjudged the nation and that if people in unions banded together against the freshly militarised police force it could go to civil war. Sometimes you're a lot closer to victory than you dare to think.

But the government had spent a couple of years stockpiling coal so the electricity supply would stay on, they had the media sewn up (the BBC re-ordered footage of police attacking miners and the miners retaliating, putting the miners' response first making it appear an unprovoked assault on police), and they bludgeoned and bribed the impoverished strikers.

Some scabs, centred around Nottinghamshire, returned to work and formed their own breakaway union, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM). Their chief Neil Greatrex and his deputy Mick Stevens led the organisation for many years. They later set the Nottinghamshire Miners Home Charity which ran a home for ex-miners in Chapel St Leonards near Skegness. Greatrex gave himself salaries of over £100,000 plus having his mortgage paid by the UDM.

In the late 1990s the Labour government set up the Coal Health Scheme to dish out £8bn of compensation to 750,000 miners who have been affected by serious medical conditions from their work. Typical New Labour, they had it administered through private solicitors who creamed off millions.

Neil Greatrex and Mick Stevens set up a company called Venside which made over £20m in fees from the solicitors involved in the scheme for referring claims to them. One of those companies was Doncaster firm Beresford's which took up to 30% of the miners' compensation. Partners James Beresford and Douglas Smith's joint earnings went from about £182,000 in 2000 to £23,273,256 in 2006. Taking such 'success fees' is unlawful and they were banned from being solicitors. However it is not criminal and they did not get prosecuted, walking away having trousered millions.

This money should have been caring for diseased old miners. There will be thousands having unnecessarily hard lives because the money went to buy luxury refits at the homes of people like Beresford, Smith, Greatrex and Stevens.

Seeing the UDM's firm so eagerly referring miners to such a dodgy company who were ripping miners off, the scandal put the Serious Fraud Office on the sniff around Greatrex. They discovered that, not content with his riches, over a period of years he had £150,000 worth of work done on his and Stevens' houses, paid for by the charity they'd set up. Police found that he'd got false invoices for the work, saying it was for lifts and a kitchen at the care home. Greatrex and Stevens were charged with 14 counts of theft.

Their trial took place this week. Greatrex lied to court saying the work was in lieu of salary, never mind that it said the work had been done on a care home that the builders never even saw. Even though Mick Stevens can be presumed to have noticed his home improvements, and even though he countersigned the dodgy cheques, he was acquitted of all charges.

Neil Greatrex was unanimously convicted by the jury of theft. The judge said he'll be getting a prison sentence. But, like James Beresford before him, he gets to keep the money.

anything above a whisper will be heard

May 2010: The new Tory-LibDem administration publish The Coalition: Our Programme For Government. On page 11 they tell us:

The Government believes that the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused and eroded fundamental human freedoms and historic civil liberties. We need to restore the rights of individuals in the face of encroaching state power...

We will implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties and roll back state intrusion...

April 2012:

The government will be able to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of everyone in the UK under new legislation set to be announced soon. Internet firms will be required to give intelligence agency GCHQ access to communications on demand, in real time.

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


If you enjoyed this hypocrisy in the Coalition's foundation document, you may also like:

- We will stop the top-down reorganisations of the NHS that have got in the way of patient care

- We will continue public sector investment in carbon capture and storage

- We will restore rights to non-violent protest.

mark kennedy spying to the last

The Mark Kennedy media bandwagon lurched to America earlier this month in the form of a feature article in Rolling Stone (paywalled link).

Rather like his documentary last autumn, it buys into the idea of a divided soul who loved his comrades and after he was sacked from the cops came back to the activists out of camaraderie. In fact, he set up his own private spy firm and came back to keep betraying those activists. He would still be doing it today had the activists not caught him.

Neither the Rolling Stone journo nor the documentary makers mentioned this, meaning either they were told not to by Kennedy's notorious publicity agent Max Clifford, or else they were too lazy to do some elementary googling.

The Rolling Stone piece goes one further: the documentary claimed he came back to activists for the sense of community, but Rolling Stone posit that he entirely gave up activism when he did so. This is demonstrably and unarguably wrong.

So let's set out what is known about this bit of his career in order to make it harder for lazy/puppetted journalists to get away with perpetuating a lie.

After he left the police Mark Kennedy took a break of several months then returned in early 2010, still as the activist Mark Stone. He was active all over Europe, mainly with a sudden interest in animal rights, an odd thing for someone who (despite his recent claims in the press) wasn't even vegetarian.

After Kennedy was uncovered, activists compiled a strictly factual database of all activism he could be verified as having taken part in. It has numerous entries from 2010 after his police career, including his trip to Italy for an animal rights gathering which has also been reported in other interviews with him, as well as animal rights work in Germany, anti-capitalist meetings in France and several animal rights and environmental things in the UK.

The sense of him being torn is hype. Rolling Stone says Kennedy's faith in policing was 'shattered' when he got a beating from the police at a protest in the summer of 2006 (none of the beatings, raids and fit-ups of the activists he loved made him feel that way, though, even when he'd helped to organise them). Yet despite this supposed lack of faith in his role he did not truncate or quit his mission, he continued as ordered for over three years until his superiors decided to withdraw him.

The article claims that he offered to help the activists being prosecuted in the Ratcliffe trial. Well yes, he said 'I'd like to help' to someone who was making him squirm in what he thought was a private conversation (you can hear it in this news report). He made no specific offer, no public offer, and most importantly he did not - then or at any time before or since - ever do anything to help the activists. Thus he upholds his police work.

Kennedy came to the environmental direct action movement in 2003. The police ended his mission in autumn 2009. A serious drop in income is a frightening prospect for anyone, let alone someone on the kind of salary he was used to. When he left the police he had no saleable skills bar his spying. So he continued to stab backs for money, just as he did previously in the police, just as he does these days in the press.

The world of corporate spies is not new. During the McLibel trial it was revealed that there had been meetings of London Greenpeace where genuine activists were in the minority. Most people there were police, private spies watching activists, or a second lot of spies hired to watch the first lot.

One such spy company is Global Open. It was set up in 2001 by ex-Special Branch officer Rod Leeming. It is known to have worked for Eon at the time of the Kingsnorth Climate Camp, a protest Kennedy was spying at for the police.

Kennedy told the Daily Mail that he was approached by Global Open's director Rod Leeming to work for him in January 2010 as he was leaving the police, and that he accepted and worked for them.

Of course, this is a claim of Kennedy's so must be subjected to extra scrutiny. He isn't just a liar in the normal sense but appears to be someone beyond that point who cannot actually determine truth from falsehood. His string of self-contradictions are evidence of this. But the lies tend to be things that mitigate him, things that make him out to be the victim, to be a good guy who has sympathy with all sides. Any statements that don't feed into this myth - and in fact make him look like more of a bastard, like being a private corporate spy - are more likely to be credible.

All companies in the UK have to be registered, and the names and addresses of directors are made public. The Guardian revealed that in February 2010, as he was leaving the police, Kennedy set up Tokra Ltd. He registered himself as the sole director and called himself 'logistics officer'. The address he used was the Bedfordshire work address of Heather Millgate, who was then a director of Global Open.

The fact that Kennedy did not stop spying after he left the police is perhaps the most damning aspect of his story. This is the one area where he appears to be far worse than any of the other officers so far exposed. He chose of his own free will to continue betraying the activists he lived among, scuppering their work and undermining the things they held most dear.

If, as he claims, he did genuinely feel any sympathy for the activists' cause then that makes him even worse; he not only wronged these people, he knew it to be wrong but did it anyway for money. Either he ideologically wanted to ruin them or he loved them but loved his own bank balance even more. Whichever it is, Mark Kennedy's post-police career was not one of someone who cared for the activists he lived among.

bob lambert mbe vs sir fred goodwin

Bob Lambert was a part of the Metropolitan Police's Special Demonstration Squad for over twenty years. In that time he infiltrated assorted environmental and animal rights groups and then oversaw other officers doing the same. He formed at least two serious intimate relationships under his false identity, fathering a child with one of the activists he spied on, then seeing a non-activist as a way of appearing normal. His invasion into her life included having Special Branch officers raid her home.

It's these long term committed relationships that have been perhaps the most shocking aspect of the undercover policing scandal. Officers used their training to get not just the political trust but the deepest emotional attachment of people on an entirely fraudulent basis, weaving themselves deeply into lives and families. The person targetted will open themselves up as much as they ever have, share their innermost selves, foresee an indefinite future together, perhaps have children (a quarter of the exposed officers fathered children with women they spied on).

Put simply and without fear of exaggeration, it is the most complete invasion of privacy possible, the most complete intrusion into a citizen's life that the state could enact.

Then, without any warning, the superiors decide the mission is over and the officers disappear, leaving these women robbed of years of their lives and unable to trust others or even their own judgement any more.

Not only is this all morally abhorrent, but according to Jon Murphy of the Association of Chief Police Officers it is completely against the rules to even have sex with the people targetted.

It is absolutely not authorised. It is never acceptable for an undercover officer to behave in that way...

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.

The HMIC report into the Mark Kennedy case, even though it's the police investigating themselves, unequivocally concedes that Kennedy was guilty of 'disproportionate intrusion' into people's lives. With the exception of the longevity of his relationships, there appears to be nothing Kennedy did that wasn't also done by Lambert.

In some respects Lambert went further than Kennedy, siring a child and having major relationships outside activist circles, undermining the justice system by being prosecuted under his false identity. Lambert was later in charge of putting undercover officers into those same protest groups, as well as undermining justice campaigns like that of Stephen Lawrence's family.

Just after he left the police force, in June 2008, Bob Lambert was given an MBE 'for services to the Police'.

Fred Goodwin was knighted for his services to banking but crashed RBS and, as that meant he had flushed away huge sums of public money and in fact done gross disservice to banking, he was stripped of his knighthood.

What does it take to get Bob Lambert - who spent his police service not only acting grossly unprofessionally but did so repeatedly; ran the operations of others who did the same; who is guilty of the most profound intrusion into citizens' lives; whose actions obstructed justice by several avenues; and all of it at huge public expense - to be stripped of his MBE for services to the police?

bob lambert: still spying?

Of all the undercover police officers exposed so far, Bob Lambert is one of the worst. The longevity of his involvement, the range of campaigns he helped to weaken, and his personal life behaviour - there seems to be nothing appalling that any of the other officers did that he didn't do too, and he seems to have done much that others didn't.

He was an undercover police officer in the 1980s, infiltrating London Greenpeace. He had a long term sexual relationship with one of the activists he spied on, fathering a child. He later formed a relationship with a non-activist just to help his social plausibility, and had her flat raided by his colleagues at Special Branch to bolster his image as a hardcore activist.

He then went on to oversee the deployment of other officers in the 1990s, including Jim Boyling's spying on Reclaim the Streets and Pete Black's undermining of anti-racist groups including justice campaigns like that of Stephen Lawrence's family.

The relationship with Boyling was perhaps especially close, as BristleKRS noted

Both Boyling and Lambert are accused of lying to courts to preserve their cover; both Boyling and Lambert duplicitously entered into sexual relationships with activists on whom they were spying; both Boyling and Lambert sired children by these women. Is this coincidence, or an indication of the nature of the training Lambert offered his protégés?

Their work together continued beyond infiltrating activists. After devoting the major part of their careers to undercover work they abruptly shifted focus, setting up the Muslim Contact Unit in January 2002. This police outfit is aimed at building bridges with muslims and muslim communities. And maybe that's all it is.

But if I were the police, wanting to have undercover officers in muslim groups in the wake of 9/11, I'd have to think of a new tactic. Having a legion of trained white folks wouldn't help me be surreptitious. So, what if they openly approached muslims as police but had this nice supportive role? They would then be well placed to identify people who could become a ring of informants. They would also be highly trained and very experienced at the tricks and tactics of gaining people's trust and making them confess things they want to keep secret.

I have absolutely no evidence that's what the Muslim Contact Unit is. I just find it very peculiar that, of all the available officers, they chose two of the country's most experienced undercover infiltrators to set up and run it.

The Islamic Human Rights Commission is proud to present this award to Inspector Robert Lambert (Head of Muslim Contact Unit), upon his retirement from the Metropolitan Police Service. In appreciation for his integrity and commitment to promoting a fair, just and secure society for all, which, is a rarity and will be greatly missed.