self-investigation injustice (slight return)

To make undeniable trouble go away, hire someone sympathetic to run an inquiry. Then fend off all specific complaints with, 'it would be inappropriate for me to comment while the inquiry is ongoing'. Then keep it running for as long as possible in the hope that the general public loses interest and forgets, and those personally wronged get worn down, crumble under the stress and give up.

Mick Creedon, the Chief Constable of Derbyshire, is investigating the undercovers scandal.

Creedon offered a "100%" assurance the matter would be properly investigated. He added that prosecutors were already being asked to consider whether criminal offences had been committed by generations of undercover operatives who had been planted in protest groups over the past 45 years.

This includes the possibility of prosecuting officers who committed criminal acts, such as sexual assaults. But then we're told

Keith Vaz MP, the chair of the home affairs select committee, has already called on Scotland Yard to inform parents whose children's identities were used by undercover police.
However, Creedon said it was "highly unlikely" he would contact the parents because it would require confirming the false identities used by former operatives.

It would only confirm their fake name, not their real identity. However, they cannot prosecute an officer without publicising their full name and details. If they won't do it for fake names, they certainly won't do it for real names. Which means that prosecution will only be an option for thiose who have been caught by activists and journalists. So far that is twelve, out of what is believed to be between 100 and 200 officers.

So Creedon is actually giving about an 8% assurance that it will be properly investigated. We're also told it may well run - and they appear to be serious - until 2016. In the Care Quality Commission cover-up scandal the minister in charge was pleased that those responsible were rapidly named. What's different here then?

To be fair, what institution would do a daming report on itself? It's no insult to presume bias. This is why, in most fields, the more serious the charges the more independent the investigation into it. But Creedon specifically rubbishes the idea of an independent inquiry, saying he will do a better job than they could.

In case you've any residual confidence in this self-investigation, he blithely ignores the long history of extensive cover-ups involving thousands of officers that - even when exposed - still don't get anyone convicted. Instead he gets in there first with his supposed affrontery that tells you all you need to know about where his allegiances and biases lie and what the report will say.

"There has always been public concern about police investigating the police, but I'll be brutally honest: there is no one as good at doing it as the police," he said. "We don't seek to hide things. We do actually seek to get the truth and we do it properly and I frankly find it almost insulting that people suggest that in some way, because I'm a police officer, I'm not going to search the truth."

Stephen Lawrence. Orgreave. Christopher Alder. Greenham Common. Blair Peach. Joy Gardner. Hillsborough. Colin Roach. Ian Tomlinson. Liddle Towers. Mark Duggan.

self investigation: the next level of injustice and abuse

Clear a bit of space on your desk. You're going to need it shortly to bang your head on.

As the revelations reverberate about undercover police undermining Stephen Lawrence's family's campaign for justice, politicians call for action.

David Cameron tweeted

I'm deeply concerned by reports that police wanted to smear the family of Stephen Lawrence. The Met must investigate immediately

[headdesk time]

You know how we didn't respond to the phone hacking by saying the News of The World should investigate it themselves? That. Exactly that. As anyone who's ever found themselves at the fridge at midnight can tell you, self-regulation amongst the guilty doesn't work.

Jack Straw - Home Secretary at the time of the MacPherson Inquiry into the Lawrence investigation that was kept in the dark about the spies - said on Radio 4 this morning that the Independent Police Complants Commission should investigate.

[headdesk time]

You know what the result of sending Kelvin MacKenzie in to lead Times journalists to investigate the News of The World would have been? That.

People who spend their professional and personal lives with police officers are, even with the best of intentions, going to be biased. Even if they weren't largely ex-police themselves.

The IPCC exonerated the police over the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes (you know, the rapist in the bulky jacket on a hot day who vaulted the barrier and ignored police shouts to stop, except none of that happened).

The IPCC took the police's word for it that Ian Tomlinson hadn't had contact with them, they believed the dodgy rush-job autopsy, they believed that there weren't any CCTV cameras in the area of Tomlinson's assault, that OK there were cameras but just like with De Menezes they weren't working. Their first response to the incriminating footage appearing on the Guardian's site was to go into the newspaper's offices with police (whose asked who, I wonder) and demand it be removed.

They are not independent and not fit to adjudicate in serious cases.

DOUBLE INJUSTICE

Thanks to the tenacity of journalists and suspicious activists we now have documented proof of over thirty years of undercover political policing. The police, were they really interested in justice and believed their institution was innocent, would want to get to the bottom of it. Instead they ignored it until it blew up in the media. Then they said Mark Kennedy was one rogue officer way off mission.

Here we come to the double injustice visited upon those who fight police corruption. First there is what is done to you. Then there are the smears and obstructions to justice. The infiltration of the Lawrences and other black justice campaigns is evidence of that. Ask yourself what your impression of Mark Duggan is.

In far more terrible circumstances and to a far greater degree, the Hillsborough families suffered like this. They too had the double injustice, with police self-investigations being nothing of the sort, instead smearing and sexually harassing survivors as the concocted a fraudulent case to protect the force.

Eight women who had long-term relationships with undercover police officers are suing. You can see their site and donate to their campaign at policespiesoutoflives.org.uk. The Met reponded by trying to get the case thrown out and then, partially successfully, by trying to have it heard in an Investigatory Powers Tribunal. Still got that dented desk clear? You'll be wanting that.

Did you think you have a right to a fair trial? If your case involves surveillance then it can be heard in an Investigatory Powers Tribunal. The police can make up whatever evidence they like (and omit whatever incriminates them). The complainants do not get to see the evidence police present, do not get to be in the court, do not get given the reasons for the verdict, and have no right of appeal.

In cases of life-threatening espionage there might be an argument for that. But with these activists, when the details have been splashed all over the press with the officers' pictures, when Mark Kennedy has hired fucking Max Clifford to handle his media appearances, all claim to the need for secrecy has long since vaporised. It's a deliberate obstruction, a further attack on these women by the police.

The Met's department of Professional Standards is trying to talk to activists who were spied upon about what happened. Yet, desperate to avoid being sued, they won't officially confirm that any of the officers were actually officers. Let me say that again - an internal body of the police talks to you about your ex-partner who has been exposed in the press as a police officer, but they won't admit he was anything to do with the police. Otherwise you might want compensation or maybe maintenance payments for the child he fathered twenty years ago and left you to bring up alone.

Worse, it would expose what has really gone on and, as the infiltration of the Lawrences shows, they hate nothing more than being made accountable for their indefensible acts. There are miscarriages of justice, listed convictions, being left to stand because the officer involved, although named and pictured in the press, cannot be conclusively proven to have been a police officer.

WHAT THIS ISN'T AND WHAT WE DON'T NEED

This is not about rogue officers or units. The obfuscating response alone makes that clear, as they close ranks to envelop and protect the abusers.

The current chief of the Met is Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe. In 2011, when chief of Merseyside, he wrote the first major report into the Mark Kennedy affair (actually it was the second - they had to pulp the first one before it was published because fresh revelations had shown it to be a cover-up even before it came out). It was a whitewash. Not one bad apple after all? OK, mistakes were made, few individuals, mostly oversights, all over now, nothing to see, move along.

There are a staggering twelve inquiries, all with their limited remits, all police self-investigations or near as dammit. If there's one thing the last three years has taught, it's that we don't need any more on that list. It's time for something real, complete, honest and trustworthy that acknowledges the institutional abuse and ensures that it ends. Actually, it's long past time for that.

It is indisputably established that this is a system that has continued through several generations of officers, many of whom have subsequently risen through the ranks. The long-awaited, much promised amending of the rules for undercover officers turned out to be nothing of the sort. Instead it makes clear that the police want all these horrific abuses to carry on indefinitely.

They, and anyone on their side, cannot be the ones to investigate what went wrong. Self-investigation is a repulsive insult to the people who have been abused and an affront to anyone who desires justice.

WHAT WE NEED NEXT

Phone hacking was an outrage that got a full judge-led inquiry. Undercover policing involves more lives, for a longer time, invaded to far greater degree, with far more serious consequences, by people in a far greater position of trust. It needs a far more serious response.

But this scandal must not have a judge-led inquiry. Hillsborough had two of those - the Taylor Inquiry and Lord Justice Stuart-Smith's scrutiny - and they failed. Hillsborough proved that the state cannot investigate its own cover-ups. But the Hillsborough Independent Panel is a model of getting to the truth so that it can be established, agreed and believed. I'm willing to bet that it's cheaper too.

The swathe of horrors uncovered in this scandal - the women abused, the children abandoned, the campaigns stifled, the bereaved families' dead childrens identites stolen - is barely the start. We know of a dozen officers. There were well over a hundred. None of the officers exposed infiltrated campaigns that threatened life and limb. Almost all had long-term relationships. A quarter of them fathered children. Is that statistically accurate? Why aren't we being told?

There is an even bigger question - who devises this political policing? Do the police make it up for themselves? Is it ordered by government? The long, resounding silence from politicians, apart from Cameron's absurdly trusting tweet this morning, has been very telling.

protectors of racist murderers

A year and a half ago, when two of Stephen Lawrence's five racist killers were finally convicted after 18 years, I wondered how much quicker and more complete justice might have been had the police not actively undermined it. I said then it seemed likely to have been one of the justice campaigns that was infiltrated by an officer known as Pete Black.

Today Peter Francis - Black's real name - has confirmed that he was indeed sent into the Lawrence family and their campaign soon after the teenager's murder in 1993. He was ordered to find 'dirt' to discredit the family. He managed to get Lawrence's friend Duwayne Brooks - who was the main witness in the case - spuriously arrested and charged. Francis says he was one of four officers spying on the campaign.

Stephen's mother Doreen Lawrence remembers that the family liaison officer would note the names of everybody who came and went from the house.

The people in our house were all black. The people who killed my son were white. Why should the police be so interested in who was in the house?

None of this work was made known to the MacPherson Inquiry in 1998 that examined the police's investigation and gave the famously damning verdict of 'institutional racism'. Francis says he argued for it to be but superior officers overruled him.

From earlier reports, we know Francis worked with Bob Lambert, who'd left activism in 1989 and was moving to take charge of running operations. He is the one who had previously infiltrated London Greenpeace, co-written the McLibel leaflet and fathered a child with an activist. In both my posts this week I've said that Lambert's claim that infiltration of non-terrorists was merely a stepping stone to proper terrorists was bollocks. Today's revelations galvanise that point

NOT JUST THE LAWRENCES

Lambert also deployed Mark Cassidy - aka undercover officer Mark Jenner - to live with an activist girlfriend for four years and infiltrate black justice campaigns. Jenner was deeply invovled in several groups at the Colin Roach Centre (named after a man who was shot dead inside Stoke Newington police station). They got many wrongful convictions overturned, though on a day when they held a picket of Stoke Newington police station the Centre was burgled, with equipment vandalised and a computer stolen. Cash was left undisturbed.

Where is the threat to life and limb from these campaigns? What terrorists might there be hanging round the Lawrence family and others like them? The only threat they posed was one of embarrassment. They would discredit the police, not by any libellous means but simply by showing them up for what they had actually done.

It is clear that this is political policing. They make no distinction between threat to life and limb, threat to corporate profits, threat to police credibility or threat to the dominance of capitalist ideology.

By undermining anti-racist activists they act as pro-racist activists. The police have done more than anyone to scupper anti-racist campaigns in the last 20 years as the BNP and EDL have risen.

The long-promised tightening up of rules for undercover work was announced last week and it leaves all these methods and activities, including the long-term relationships, unaffected. It is still going on today and they intend to carry on with it indefinitely.

WHAT DOES IT TAKE?

And so tonight there is a confirmed addition to the already long list of Bob Lambert's crimes. Being prosecuted under his false identity for a political arrest while undercover was likely to have been illegal and so is the most actionable, even though morally it's the least of it. This serial sexual and psychological abuser of women and firebomber is also the protector of racist murderers.

Since leaving the police five years ago he's forged - and I do mean forged - a career as a progressive academic. Here he is speaking at a Unite Against Fascism conference, here's hard left Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn hosting a parliamentary booklaunch for him, here he is writing for Al-Jazeera, then for lefty journal New Statesman, blogging at the Huffington Post and being praised in the Guardian.

"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".

These days Lambert holds a post at the University of St Andrews trading on his career of repressive political policing which he has the gall to call counter terrorism. How much can the truth of his career shred his credibility before the university decides he's unfit to teach there?

Just how much damage of many kinds need he be known to have done - including damage to the reputation of the police, of course - before he is stripped of the MBE he got for services to policing?

When will he be put before a real inquiry and compelled to tell the whole truth about what he did so that justice may begin to be done?

If phone hacking warrants a proper inquiry, this far greater invasion of lives - in the case of the women who had long-term relationships, the greatest possible invasion of lives - deserves at least as much. It cannot be a judge-led inquiry. Hillsborough had two of those that came to nothing. The state cannot investigate itself fairly.

Hillsborough's Independent Panel model showed how it can be done. However, as the infiltration of bereaved families shows, when they are in the wrong the police will go to extraordinary lengths to obstruct justice.

mclibel: police drumming up business

With the Guardian's book on the undercover police scandal out next week, the newspaper is publishing flagship articles with some of the revelations in it.

The McLibel trial was the longest trial in English history, with McDonald's spending millions prosecuting a small group for a leaflet. It was already found to have been unfair, and the two defendants won damages from the UK government at the European Court of Human Rights.

We already knew the police had illegally given details of the activists to McDonald's. We knew that McDonald's sent in two teams of private spies. They claim it was solely to get information to bring for the case, yet they actually sent a final agent in as it was launched to stay for many months, spying on how the group responded and prepared its defence.

Yesterday we got confirmation that the state was even deeper in. The controversial leaflet at the centre of it all was was co-written by Bob Robinson, aka undercover police officer Detective Inspector Bob Lambert.

I do hope McDonald's are now thinking of suing the police. They spent £10m on the case, fighting two anarchists conducting their own defence, and still the court found that the leaflet was right in many of its assertions. It was a public relations disaster for the junk food giant.

Bob Lambert infiltrated the animal rights movement in 1983. Shortly afterwards, Special Branch started giving briefings to McDonald's security department, which was itself entirely comprised of former police officers. Lambert joined the small group London Greenpeace (who have no connection to Greenpeace International) around that time. He had a number of serious relationships with activists, including fathering a child. He had a further relationship with a woman who wasn't even an activist. After he firebombed a Debenhams store in Harrow - part of a campaign targeting fur retailers - he had that woman's home raided by his colleagues at Special Branch supposedly looking for him. It violated her life but gave him a good excuse to leave his deployment without being suspected.

NOT JUST LAMBERT

This was 1988. By that time John Barker had also joined London Greenpeace. Except he hadn't. John Barker was an eight year old who died of leukaemia. The man using his identity was Sergeant John Dines. He targeted future McLibel defendant Helen Steel and they began a long term relationship and moved in together. She says she fell 'madly in love with him'. As her partner, he will have been privy to confidential legal meetings, plans and documents for her cases involving McDonald's and the police.

Like so many of his colleagues, when it came time to leave he feigned mental breakdown. He declared himself alone in the world but for her. He disappeared in March 1992, leaving Steel without trace of him and desperately worried. Again, like so many of his colleagues, he was simply returning to his wife and job. [UPDATE: Today's Guardian has a lengthy piece speaking to partners of Lambert, Dines and Jim Boyling]

Lambert went on to be in charge of undercover deployments, putting Jim Boyling into Reclaim The Streets and 'Pete Black' into assorted anti-racist campaigns. Then he set up the Muslim Contact Unit that, on the surface, is a community outreach exercise. But, as I've mused before, that seems a rather unlikely thing for someone whose expertise is in spying and infiltration. The more plausible explanation is that it is yet another spying operation or a front for a ring of informants. Several years later he left the force, collecting an MBE for services to policing on his way out.

Since his exposure by activists in 2011, desperate to preserve his credibility now he's got his academic career, Lambert has said that he only infiltrated London Greenpeace to establish himself before moving on to real hardcore activists. Yet not only did he stay for many years, but between him and Dines there is seven years of unbroken infiltration of London Greenpeace. And that, of course, presumes they were the only ones and there aren't more yet to be unmasked.

That's rather a lot of attention if the group were just one of a plethora of possible entry points. It's clear that groups like this are spied upon in their own right. It is insulting to our intelligence to pretend otherwise and frankly I even feel a wee bit patronising just saying it so plainly. Undercover policing is aimed at anyone who is a threat, without distinguishing between the threat to life and limb, the threat to profits or the threat to capitalist ideology.

The new Guardian book details over forty years of it, and Eveline Lubbers' essential book Secret Manoeuvres In The Dark shows that it goes far beyond that period and the UK, it is simply how states and corporations work.

NOT JUST VICTIMS

Lambert, Dines and Boyling are all named in the lawsuit being brought by eight women who had long term relationships with undercover officers. The women have just revamped their website and now, alongside the updates on their case, you can donate, declare your support and find more assertive articles including a strident, dignified statement declaring their aims and beliefs.

There are no circumstances in which it would be acceptable for an undercover police officer to engage in intimate relationships with either targets or members of the public under the guise of their undercover identity. The fact that this has taken place repeatedly, despite being morally wrong and unjustifiable, shows that within the police forces in the UK there exists: 

* institutional sexism – women have been used to shore up undercover identities, without regard for those women’s right to a private life (whilst men have been affected, evidence so far shows that it is primarily women’s lives that have been abused in this way). 

* institutional prejudice against members of the public who engage in social justice and environmental campaigning, including a disregard for their human rights. Both these forms of institutional prejudice must be challenged and stopped; each has reinforced the other. 

We call for: 

• a clear and unambiguous statement that the abuse has ceased, and will never, in any circumstances, be permitted. 


• the past to be thoroughly and openly investigated, so that the damage may be acknowledged, those responsible may be held to account, and that as a society we may come to terms with what has happened, heal the wounds that have been inflicted and be confident that the practice has ceased. 


• action and change to prevent these human rights abuses from ever happening again, including stronger support for whistle-blowers and greater protection for rights of association and expression.
  
  Until these things happen, we have no reason to believe that these abhorrent abuses have stopped, or that the police acknowledge their actions are wrong, and that they must change.
  
  We come from different backgrounds and have a range of political beliefs and interests, and we are united in believing that every woman, and every person, has a right to participate in the struggle for social and environmental justice, without fear of persecution, objectification, or interference in their lives. We welcome allies who wish to engage with the above issues in this spirit of democratic empowerment.

undercover oversight

As the undercover policing scandal rolls on - with the tenacious Guardian journalists about to publish their book and have the accompanying documentary screened by Channel 4 on Monday - the government has announced tighter rules for future operations.

All long-term undercover policing operations will be independently authorised

Well that sounds reassuring. But which outside body will be scrutinising the police's desires?

the Office for Surveillance Commissioners (OSC) will be notified at the start of all undercover police deployments – and must approve any lasting beyond 12 months.

NO CHANGE THERE, THEN

We've come across these people before. They already had the ultimate sign-off on undercover deployment. Hiring a bunch of judges and asking them to question the motives of police, well, no need to guess how well that went and why we've had decades of unjustifiable invasion into political groups and outrageous abuse of the individuals therein.

We've even had Surveillance Commissioners look at this specific issue after everyone knew it had gone wrong. In the wake of the exposure of Mark Kennedy and the revelation that witholding his evidence had led to a miscarriage of justice that saw 20 people wrongfully convicted, Sir Christopher Rose produced a report looking into whether the Crown Prosecution Service had colluded with the police.

Rose was a former judge and a Surveillance Commissioner. Just like the way police had initially tried to make out Kennedy was one rogue officer, Rose's report scapegoated one CPS official, Ian Cunningham. He specifically said there was no conspiracy.

Nothing I have seen or heard suggests that, at any stage of this prosecution, there was deliberate, still less dishonest, withholding of information which the holder believed was disclosable

It takes a hell of a lot of front to say that, given that months earlier emails had been leaked showing Cunningham and a more senior CPS official discussing the 'sensitive disclosure issues' around the 'participating informant' Kennedy. If you have two people involved in a cover-up it is, by definition, a conspiracy. If they document it then it is, by dint of plain evidence, not an oversight.

Rose said that although there were transcripts of Kennedy's recordings of the activists' planning meeting, nobody at the CPS thought they might have important information in regarding what happened in the meeting and so didn't look at them or think to give copies to the defence.

These are the people who will be checking the police's motivations and need for future deployment of undercover officers. Just like the "Independent" Police Complaints Commission, they're a rubber-stamp body made up of people who spend their professional and personal lives trusting police officers.

SELF REGULATION IS NO REGULATION

Police enjoy self-regulation and, if anything goes wrong, what amounts to self-investigation, often without the pretence of an independent body.

After it was revealed that undercover police used the identities of dead children - a practice that is not only ghoulish but puts bereaved families in real danger - the investigation into undercover officers was taken away from the force that did it, the Metropolitan Police, and put in the hands of, oh... a different Chief Constable.

After 24 years of campaigning the Hillsborough families have proven there was a cover up (pertinently, it also went beyond police into the judiciary) and the original inquest verdicts have been quashed. Last week we learned that the new inquiry, to prove itself free of any bias towards the police who have been so thoroughly discredited, will be relying on a report from, oh... a former Chief Constable.

What other body can be so indisputably shown to have acted so deplorably and ruined so many lives yet still be given self-investigation as a response? If a Manchester United player commits an extreme offence on camera, it's not investigated by Manchester United officials. Furthermore, responding to pressure by getting Manchester United's reserves team manager to look into it instead does not qualify as an independent investigation.

The proposals once again say undercover officers will be used for "terrorism and for serious organised crime". But this is the line they've always spun as they target non-terrorists who are merely politically undesirable, people with ideas that challenge the status quo and are in danger of catching on. We've seen undercover officers like Bob Lambert MBE say that he had to go through less dangerous groups to establish credibility before moving on to actual terrorists (in his case, people who did not threaten anybody's life but did property damage). Like Kennedy he was an agent provocateur, becoming a successful firebomber.

Even this stepping-stone argument seems to be largely bollocks as many officers, such as Kennedy, spent years with the fluffier groups without ever graduating to any bomb-weilders. These protest groups are often the end target in themselves.

The use of the term 'domestic extremist' to mean anyone who would break a law for a political reason (and that's everyone, by the way) shows that the authorities are trying to conflate civil disobedience with terrorism. The deliberate lies spun about climate activists  - they want to commit serious violence against citizens, they want to hurt your granny - is a stark underlining of that point.

WHAT THEY'RE NOT SAYING

But the most important thing about the new proposals for undercover officers is what is omitted. The scandal broke because Kennedy was caught by his partner of six years. Since then we have learned of a dozen officers, almost all of whom had long-term, committed life-partner relationships with activists they targeted. A quarter of them fathered children. It is the most shocking and controversial aspect of the whole scandal. And yet the new proposals on making undercover operations fair and accountable contain nothing, not a single word, about the most intrusive act that the state performs on a person.

The officer is sent into someone's life to be their partner - their most trusted confidante, their lover, in numerous cases to co-habit and co-parent - all the while having it monitored, analysed and presumably directed by an unseen group back at Scotland Yard. The person targeted doesn't know it is going on so they do not hold back in the way that others, such as people imprisoned, retain some privacy and personal identity from the state agents ranged against them.

Last year Home Office minister Nick Herbert was glove-puppeted to say officers must be allowed to have sex with the people they spy upon.

to ban such actions would provide a ready-made test for the targeted criminal group to find out whether an undercover officer was deployed among them.

So with that, and the absence of anything in the new proposals, we know that they intend to continue as before. Lives will be ruined, women will be violated and left rearing children single handed.

More, there is no justification for it to ever happen. To anybody at all, under any circumstances, ever. The 'ready made test' argument is absolute unmitigated bullshit. Are undercover officers infiltrating paedophile gangs are authorised to rape children? Otherwise the group concerned have a ready-made test.

Even presuming that political activists warrant infiltration to defend society and it's not just the powerful protecting their political interests, what is it that can be got from activists by this means that cannot be got other ways? The fact that two officers - Lynn Watson and Rod Richardson - were deployed without having relationships and weren't rumbled shows that it is not necessary. The police just prefer it.

So this new announcement isn't about genuine oversight or a change from the wanton abuse of citizens. It's the police trying to make a few of the right noises to protect their existing methods and power.

police using dead children : common practice

Phone hacking warranted a major full public inquiry yet the undercover policing scandal, which involves a far larger invasion of lives over a longer period, has triggered a ragbag of piecemeal reports and inquiries. Most of them are the police investigating themselves. Each of them has a limited remit, preventing any overview of it as a system. Some of them are not even going to publish their findings.

Operation Herne was established in October 2011 for the Metropolitan Police to self-investigate the Special Demonstration Squad, an undercover unit set up in 1968 to infiltrate political activists. It should be noted this does not include the Met's similar National Public Order Intelligence Unit, set up in 1999 and who deployed Mark Kennedy among others.

In early February the Home Affairs Select Committee - a cross party group of MPs - held a hearing on the undercover issue (subsequent interim report as a PDF is here). They heard from women activists who had long term relationships with officers; their lawyers; Guardian journalist Paul Lewis who's been covering the issue; and ex-undercover officer Mark Kennedy whose exposure unleashed the scandal. The police were not going to send anyone.

However, two days beforehand came the revelation that officers had stolen the identities of dead children to create their fake activist personae. In the outrage that followed Patricia Gallan, the Met's Deputy Assistant Commissioner, was obliged to turn up to the Select Committee and give evidence.

Between times, the police had spun the line that it was a practice mainly in the 1970s and 80s. But one of the officers uncovered, who used the identity Rod Richardson, was active in the 2000s.

Trying to avoid any liability for what her force has done to people, Gallan stoutly refused to apologise for any of it. On the matter of dead children's identity being used, she said unequivocally that it was

not sanctioned within the Metropolitan Police or any other police force

The Guardian had estimated that around 80 officers had done it. Gallan disparaged this, saying she had learned of only one incidence, eleven months into the investigation, back in September 2012. In the five months following she claimed that neither she nor the 31 staff on Operation Herne had uncovered any more until the Rod Richardson case was published by activists and media.

I do not know if the figure that has been quoted about the number of identities of dead children used is accurate. I have seen the evidence of one case, and we very recently received a complaint of a second case and that is now being investigated.

A week after Gallan's testimony an officer from outside the Met, Mick Creedon, was appointed to take over Operation Herne. This week he admitted to the Select Committee that identity theft of dead children was actually 'common practice'.

Once again the facts have to be arduously dragged out of the authorities. Like many others before them, those affected by the undercover scandal find themselves victims of a double injustice. There is what the authorities did to them, then there is the obstruction and lying to try to prevent the truth coming to light.

In behaving this way the police add a cruel new layer upon the suffering of those they abused. It discourages some of their victims from coming forward if they haven't got the stomach for a gruelling fight. It makes a glaringly indisputable and vicious mockery of any claim to be interested in justice.

undercover relationships were approved: the evidence

A year ago Mark Kennedy said

I lived undercover for eight years and if I hadn’t had sex, I would have blown my cover... It was essential for me to have relationships in order to do my job.

Last November the head of the Metropolitan Police, Bernard Hogan-Howe, said  it was 'almost inevitable' that such relationships happened, though they 'shouldn't be part of the strategy'.

This tallies with the earlier claim by police who, glove-puppeting the policing minister Nick Herbert, said that such relationships were completely legal under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and therefore the case of women involved should be heard in a Bullshit Stalinist Tribunal rather than an actual court.

Herbert went further, adding

Moreover, to ban such actions would provide a ready-made test for the targeted criminal group to find out whether an undercover officer was deployed among them. Specifically forbidding the action would put the issue in the public domain and such groups would know that it could be tested.

So, almost all undercovers had sex with their targets because there's no way to infiltrate activists without having relationships with them. This week's revelations about the officer known as Rod Richardson tells us that is not true.

HOW TO NOT HAVE SEX WITH ACTIVISTS

Rod* lived among activists in Nottingham, sharing a house with them, for nearly three years from 2000-2003. He left a couple of months before Mark Kennedy arrived in the same community, indicating that he was Kennedy's predecessor. The difference in the men's behaviour is illuminating.

Rod did not have any sexual relationships with activists, and he was not suspected of being a spy. He said he had a long-term partner, 'Jo', who lived elsewhere in the country. Most crucially, Jo turned up with him at several social occasions (and his friends wondered why he was seeing someone who had such a different nature and was, well, rather like a cop).

An officer calling herself Lynn Watson infiltrated the same activists, living among them in Leeds from 2004-2008. She too had no sexual relationships - bar a single one-night stand - and she also said she had a long-term partner living elsewhere. As with Rod, Lynn had 'Paul' accompany her on a social occasion. And, again, Lynn's comrades wondered why she couldn't do better for herself and said amongst themselves that this guy seemed almost like a cop.

It seems clear that superior officers had set-up the undercover officers with a pretend partner to strengthen their claim to having a long-term relationship elsewhere. They not only knew of the risk of relationships, they had an effective strategy of ensuring it didn't happen.

WE KNEW BUT WE DIDN'T KNOW

Several officers - both undercovers and seniors - say that though sexual relationships may happen it's never overtly talked about, implying it is done with a nod and a wink.

But this is contradicted by the evidence of Jim Boyling. He infiltrated Reclaim The Streets and anti-capitalist groups in the late 1990s and 2000s. He not only had a relationship with one of the activists he targeted, he married her, had children, confided in her and introduced her to other undercover officers. He also

told her a ruling from seniors that undercover operatives should not have sex with targets was unrealistic, and developing relationships with activists was "a necessary tool in maintaining cover".

Given when Boyling was deployed, starting before Rod but overlapping with him, it seems likely that Rod's abstinence was because of that directive.

And yet Kennedy came after Rod. So they had a proven effective tactic for avoiding relationships without garnering suspicion yet they chose not to use it for Kennedy. The most likely explanation, then, is that they preferred Kennedy to have his relationships.

THE INEVITABLE BECOMES THE IMMORAL, AGAIN

At last week's Home Affairs Select Committee hearing, Patricia Gallan, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police repeatedly said that undercover officers' sexual relationships are not authorised and are morally wrong.

This flies in the face of the statements of them being inevitable, providing a ready-made test, and the very basis of the police's case to go to the Bullshit Stalinist Tribunal. Unless, that is, she's trying to do some very fancy footwork and say that though they're not authorised and are reprehensible, nonetheless they are legally intended and provided for.

It seems those in charge know there is no position they can take that will get them out of this and so they're flailing between stances to see if anything is better than the untenable place they're currently in.

But let's be as generous as we can and say that, despite paying other officers to be pretend partners, seniors really didn't know that undercovers had relationships. Let's say that, all along, the top brass did not authorise them, thought them morally wrong and said so.

Lynn Watson not only moved among the same groups, she was often at the same events as Kennedy. If his quasi-marital relationship with an activist was so far beyond the pale then surely she would have reported on it. Yet it was allowed to continue for a further four years to the end of his deployment and beyond.

THEY KNEW AND APPROVED

Between Lynn Watson's witnessing, the two uses of the pretend partners, and the fact that the tactic pre-dates Kennedy's deployment, it is clear that Kennedy's relationships were known about and approved of by his superior officers.

The startling similarity of the relationships, and the fact that those who'd engaged in them were later in charge of deploying officers who did the same, is are strong enough indicators that this has always been the way. But the evidence we now have means that, for Kennedy's case at least, there is no longer any shred of plausible denial.


=========


*It may seem overly familiar to refer to him as just Rod, but out of respect for the real Richardson family whose dead baby's identity was used by the officer, I'm not comfortable calling him 'Richardson'.

police lying about undercovers. again.

On Tuesday the MPs from the Home Affairs Select Committee held a session about the undercover policing scandal. As well as hearing from lawyers acting for women who had relationships with officers and a Guardian investigative journalist who's been covering the issue, they had Patricia Gallan, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

It was the day after the Guardian revealed that officers from the Special Demonstration Squad had used stolen identities of dead children, and it had happened in around eighty cases. As the Guardian's live blog of the hearing reported, Gallen cast doubt on the figure.

She says she does not know if the figure of 80 children's identities being used is accurate. She knows of two cases....It has been confined to the SDS and the NPOIU (National Public Order Intelligence Unit).

The admission it was the NPOIU is interesting. The police had tried to spin that the cases were in the 1970s and 1980s, yet the NPOIU was only formed in 1999.

But hang on a minute. If she knows of two, and of it happening in two units, then that's one per unit.

Details came out this week of the presumed NPOIU officer, who used the identity of Rod Richardson. There's an Indymedia post with photos and list of his activities by activists who knew him, and a Guardian piece that interviews the dead baby's mother.

So that leaves the Special Demonstration Squad officer. Except we have John Dines, who posed as John Barker from 1987-1992, and also the officer known as Pete Black who stole that name in 1993, as he explains in this video.

So Gallan can't count the three already exposed, yet we're supposed to have faith in her helming yet another secret self-investigation into the dozens of cases.

Asked why she hadn't told the parents or apologised she explained that

It would be inappropriate to rush to make statements in haste

That's a broad definition of haste. She conceded that she found out about the dead children's stolen identities five months ago.

WHY SHE REFUSES TO COUNT TO THREE

Asked by the Committee's chair Keith Vaz whether the parents of the dead children should be informed, she dodged, saying

it's important to find out all the circumstances and whether they are accurate... ethical and legal issues also need to be considered.

Indeed there are. I'm sure they want to consider legal issues and prevaricate, hoping the clamour for families to be told will dissipate. The Richardson family are already suing. The brother of John Barker, an eight year old who died of leukaemia whose idenetity was used by John Dines, points out the seriousness of such claims and the danger police put citizens in.

In our case, we now discover, there was a girlfriend who was left behind when the policeman pretending to be my brother disappeared from the scene. Apparently she was so worried about him that she tracked him down to the house we had moved out of a few years earlier.

Imagine that policeman had infiltrated a violent gang or made friends with a volatile person, then disappeared, just like this man did. Someone wanting revenge would have tracked us down to our front door – but they wouldn't have wanted a cup of tea and a chat, like this woman says she did.

Eighty-odd cases - and with the NPOIU added in that could be over a hundred - would be hugely humiliating and expensive for the police. So, as is their habit, they are playing down their wrongdoing and trying to avoid us knowing the truth; the opposite of what a body concerned with justice would do.

THE TRUTH? YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH

A few years ago a Freedom of Information request was lodged asking for Special Branch records on people with alleged affiliations to London Greenpeace, a group we know was heavily infiltrated.

The police information manager responded in October 2006, readily admitting that records existed and it "would contribute to the quality and accuracy of public debate" to release them. However they refused to do it as it was not in the public interest.

They explained – and get ready to have to read this twice to believe it - "The Public Interest is not what interests the public, but what will be of greater good if released to the community as a whole." Disclosure is therefore not in the public interest because it could "undermine their goodwill and confidence in the Metropolitan Police and could result in a lack of engagement with the MPS" and may "endanger the health and safety of our officers".

In other words, if you really knew what we did to you, you'd lynch us.

equal marriage

I've never understood marriage, unless it's for tax or citizenship reasons. Maybe I'm just not romantic, but I've never been moved to say, "I love you so much that I want to make a contract with the state to ensure that leaving me is an expensive process involving lawyers".

Though I don't want it for me, that's my choice. Ringfencing it, or anything, exclusively for heterosexuality is an injustice to be fought. I think less people should eat at McDonald's but if they had a whites-only policy I'd join the fight against it.

At a time when 'gay' is still a common term to mean pathetic or inept, it is clear we have not reached a point of equality. So the overwhelming parliamentary vote in favour of gay marriage seems almost bizarre to me. I find it hard to take in such colossal progressive support from so reactionary an institution as the House of Commons. But it's also about the pace of change. It's dizzying, confusing and gratifying to realise I'm just not up to speed.

The country I was born into had men in jail simply for being gay. In the early 1970s people would be stopped in the street by police and forced to remove their 'glad to be gay' badges. Those who came out would be called 'self-confessed gays', like murderers or rapists. Around this time the UK had its first Pride marches. They were not the corporate-branded extravaganzas of today, but a few hundred people being jeered by the excessive number of police sent to escort them.

In the 1980s the official response to AIDS was to ignore it and let gay people die, until it appeared to be a threat to the rest of the population. Then the homophobia went into overdrive. Tabloids routinely referred to it as 'the gay plague'. The government passed laws to prevent teachers from depicting gay relationships as equal to straight. Libraries withdrew gay books. Gay newspapers had their offices firebombed and it was defended in parliament with a Tory MP saying, 'it is quite right that there should be an intolerance of evil'. As late as 1989 the Sun said that it was impossible to get AIDS through heterosexual sex and anything else was 'homosexual propaganda'.

A world in which a major rugby player would be out and able to get married to another man was ludicrously unthinkable. So far, so fast.

SING IF YOU'RE GLAD TO BE GAY

In the mid 1970s a then-unknown gay activist called Tom Robinson wrote a song called Glad To Be Gay. Two years later, and by then the first out and proud rock star, he released it as a single. Despite radio stations refusing to play it, it got in the top 20. Over the years Robinson rewrote the lyrics to keep them current. It was the protest that mattered to him, not the art.

I thought that was an interesting creative challenge. But these days the various versions of the song have a historic job to do as well. They are a snapshot from every couple of years through a period of extraordinary social change on the issue.

As a generation come of age who struggle with the idea that homosexuality was ever illegal, who have never heard of Clause 28 or the Spanner trial, it is important to remember what was done. It is not just about gay rights, it is also a stark lesson that society at every level can discriminate against whole groups but it doesn't make it right. So I did a website of all the versions of Glad To Be Gay, explaining the references.

The very first version of the song talked of Peter Wells, a man who, in 1974, was 26 but his boyfriend was 18. The age of sexual consent was 16 for straights but 21 for gay men. Had Wells fallen for a woman it would have been socially lauded and they would have been able to marry. But it was another man, so he got two and a half years in jail. There he was beaten and abused by inmates and guards alike, even before his conviction. He spent the last year of incarceration in solitary confinement.

But whilst inside he launched a case at the European Court of Human Rights, saying that the different age of consent was discrimination. He did not win but, as with so many political campaigns that fail, it laid the foundations for those who came after to succeed. In the late 1990s a young man called Euan Sutherland brought another case, citing Wells' work. He won and the UK was forced to equalise the age of consent.

Peter Wells did not live to see it. He died in violent circumstances in 1979, aged 31. Brought up in borstal institutions, imprisoned for being gay, he was the victim of a swathe of brutality and alienation that we have succeeded in rolling back. I've researched and written a biography of him that will be published soon.

Today, Peter would be five weeks into his retirement. Those of us who celebrate last night's progressive landmark owe him, and so many others like him, thanks. As Owen Jones reminds us, we must remember that this hasn't come about through government benevolence but through the persistent campaigning of brave people.

dead children in uniforms

Undercover police officers infiltrating protest groups stole the identities of dead children to create their fake identity. They would comb registries looking for someone with the same first name. They would visit the dead child's house and locality to get the details for the backstory. On the dead child's birthday, as the family would have been in sombre reflection on their tragedy, they would take activist comrades out to celebrate.

It's thought around 80 bereaved families are affected. The police say they're looking into it - another self-investigation, another bucket of whitewash - but they are distancing themselves by saying it was mainly in the 70s and 80s.

Firstly, that does not alter the morality one iota. Secondly, it is untrue. Whilst the children themselves were born in those years, the identity theft came later. One officer, known as Pete Black, did it in the 90s. He infiltrated anti-racist groups before moving on to campaigns for justice for black people who died in custody or whose death had been under-investigated. Another case was an officer from the 2000s.

WHY DO IT AT ALL?

We're told

The idea was that if activists ever researched a police spy's background to check out whether they were who they claimed to be, they would come across the birth record of a real child.

But the obvious problem is that there is also a death certificate waiting to be found. Did they really think people suspicious enough to look for birth certificates would not go further? The case of John Dines proves that, as you'd expect, they would and they did.

Later spies who simply made up a name - Mark Kennedy appears to be one, using his real date of birth to be 'Mark Stone' - had no such flaw. They didn't have a birth certificate, but there are numerous plausible reasons for that, such as being adopted or born abroad. These would also fit with undercover officers' prediliction for stories of a disturbed childhood.

Peter Blexley, a former undercover officer for a different unit investigating serious crime, told the [Radio 4 Today] programme: "I cannot for the life of me comprehend why anyone would want to adopt an identity, rather than create one."

The only plausible reason I can think of is the same one that anybody wants a birth certificate for - to prove an identity to authorities. In an era when the state was dealing with the Cold War and Northern Ireland, perhaps the government thought infiltration of lefty parties, peace activists and trade unionists was unworthy of equipping with the full gamut of false identity documents. Could it be that the undercover officers weren't issued with stuff like fake passports and bank accounts, and resorted to fraudulently applying for them?

Another officer who used a dead child's identity says it was done for 'the greater good' but neglects to tell us what that good is and why it couldn't be achieved by other means.

THE BIG QUESTION

The identity theft of dead children is ghoulish and is further evidence of the institutionalised callousness and arrogance with which the police treat the public they supposedly serve, as if that wasn't already amply illustrated by the way they intrude upon the living.

Presumably they thought that, like the women with whom they had long-term relationships and fathered children, the people they were abusing would never find the full details and catch up with them.

As Pete Black says himself, to search your house they have to get a warrant. To bug your house or tap your phone they have to have approval from the Home Secretary. But to live in your house, hear all your calls, integrate into your family, be your quasi-marital partner, have a child that they know they'll leave you to bring up alone from pre-school age onwards, that just requires the police to decide they want to do it. But that is not the issue.

The big question in the political policing scandal is: who ordered it? Do the police make up these missions for themselves or are they given ideas, directions and commands from political sources? If so, is that the government of the day? An international mix of governments and security services?

The phone hacking scandal caused a storm with politicians clamouring for a public inquiry. There is no way in which the spycops scandal is not a greater invasion of lives and yet politicians (outside the Green Party) are staying deafeningly silent. If you want to know who was complicit and culpable, you should usually look for who is turning away, whistling, hoping not to be noticed.

THE JUSTICE TO COME

The people whose lives have been affected - the women abused for years at a time, the political campaigns undermined and now the grieving families of dead children - have suffered a double injustice.

Firstly there was what was done to them and then there's the wilful obstruction of justice by the police. Amongst the self-investigations is one by the Department of Professional Standards. They are contacting people who were spied on and asking for their assistance whilst simultaneously saying they 'neither confirm nor deny' that the spy was a police officer.

Why would an internal police body be asking about someone who wasn't a police officer? It is an insult to the intelligence of their victims and a crude legal trick to avoid accountability. We all know what went on but if you can't prove that they were a cop, how can you sue police chiefs for doing it? We still don't even have real names for half of the exposed officers.

The increasing likelihood of a public enquiry is good, though that would not be the end. There were two of those for Hillsborough and they failed.

PERSIST AND PREVAIL

This is a justice campaign. People who suffered far worse double injustices - such as the Hillsborough families or the Lawrence family - also got tired at times, and people outside stopped being interested.

But they held on to their outrage, and each new avenue, each attempted assault on the castle would bring a new smidgen of information. And whilst nothing can undo what was done, there can be justice. Truth can be told, those responsible can be brought to account, and future deeds of the same ilk can be prevented.

The peculiar thing about justice campaigns is that if they persist they tend to win. Maybe the authorities give up when there's no careers on the line any more because all those responsible are retired or dead. Or maybe the irritation builds up into a serious discrediting and the continuation of that is worse than letting the truth be told.

Either way, the lesson seems clear. This will not be over soon, and just because the facts become familiar does not make them less of an outrage.