five year old eco warrior

 This week I got a Facebook message from an old friend about their five year old.

Today J heard the term 'Eco Warrior'. Discussions ensued and you came up.
Here are our questions:

Are you an Eco Warrior?
Why were you living in the trees near Newbury?
Have you got any pictures of it?
Were you scared?
What happened in the end?
How can a 5 year old be an 'Eco Warrior'?

I replied off the top of my head, but people have said nice things about it so I thought I'd post it here too.

= = = = = = = = =

Hi J,

First up, be glad you've got such interesting parents. Most people's are a lot more boring.

Are you an Eco Warrior?

Yes, I think most people would say I was. But I don't like the phrase 'eco warrior' myself, it makes it sound as if people have some magic power or are special in some way, when really it's just ordinary people who care a lot about saving the trees and who have the time to do something about it.

It's sort of like if your dad was very famous for his music, people would call him a rock star but it would seem like he was showing off if he said it about himself. And, worse for him, it would make him seem a bit special and so remote from other people.

I do like the term 'warrior' for the way that it describes a war that is going on, but I don't feel I'm a warrior in that war; the war is between the endlessly greedy people and the one ecosystem that we all need to stay alive.

But in the end, I accept that "eco warrior" is a quick way for people to describe those of us who do that sort of stuff.

Why were you living in the trees near Newbury?

They were going to cut thousands of trees down to build a big new road. We realised that if we went and built treehouses and stayed up in them, they couldn't cut the trees down. At least, not until they'd climbed up and taken us out one by one, which we knew would take them a lot of time.

By making it more of an effort, it meant people planning to do the same thing elsewhere decided not to bother. It also made people ask us what we were doing and we got them to understand our view.

We got them to see that making more roads means cutting down trees and it encourages people to use their cars more, which is very pollluting. Cars are very useful, but we knew there were other, less damaging ways to move people and things around, such as buses and trains.

Have you got any pictures of it?

Yes I have. Have a look in my Facebook pictures at an album called 'Get A Job You Bunch Of Hippy Scum'.

Were you scared?

Sometimes, but not often. I'm a bit of a wuss at being high up, so learning to climb trees didn't come readily. But I knew it would be worth it and I had my friends to encourage me. I expect you've had something similar when climbing up high or going fast, or doing something new and difficult. But you know it'll be worth it afterwards, and that it will be easier next time. It was like that.

Some people might tell you they never get scared; they're lying. Pretending that you have no fear will get you in all sorts of bother, it's much better to realise you're scared and then decide if it's going to be worth doing something anyway. If you know you're not really in danger then you can make yourself get over it.

Having to charge through lines of police and guards to get to trees was scary sometimes, but I knew they wouldn't really hurt me, and much more than that we knew we were right and they were wrong, so that made us all do it anyway, and I'm glad it did.

What happened in the end?

The road got built and thousands of trees were lost, it was too late to stop that. But we convinced lots of people we were right, and most of the other big roads that were planned never got built. There are beautiful places, such as the water meadows near Salisbury, that you can see today only because our work at Newbury made them decide not to build there.

The few trees I was living in weren't in the exact line of the new road, they were next to it. The builders told us that if we saved them the trouble of coming up to get us then they'd let the trees live.

So those four trees, which are a lot older than me and will hopefully outlive us all, are still there because me and my friends lived in them for a few weeks a long time ago.

And on a personal level, doing good things means you meet good people. At Newbury and other camps like it I made some of the best friends I'll ever have.

How can a 5 year old be an 'Eco Warrior'?

There are many places where this stuff is still going on. At the moment a new industry called fracking, where they get polluting gases out of the ground and poison water, is trying to get started, and people are protesting and blocking it just like at Newbury. Some of the old road schemes have been brought back, and people have been in camps at them too.

It's not really possible for you to go and live in the trees but whenever there's a camp they love people coming and visiting for the day, so maybe your mum and dad would take you to one. Knowing that they have the support of so many people who would like to be there but can't - because of jobs or school or whatever - is what makes people in the camps feel like it's really worth it.

But there is a lot you can do that does a lot of the same job - not using too much stuff, respecting nature - in your day to day life. I think spending time in the garden, growing some of your own food (but making sure there's always a little wild corner for the plants and birds and insects to have to themselves) can give you the right spirit that makes you an eco-warrior at heart whether you're living in the trees or not.

It makes us see that there are things we can do to interact with the natural world in a good way, that make us feel like we're making it better but still let us know that we're not in charge, we are part of things much bigger than us that provide us with what we need.

controlling dissent with mass arrests

On Saturday thousands of people took to the London streets in a counter-demonstration to a march by 500 racist knuckle-draggers of the English Defence League (not to be confused with the real EDL). Sections of the mass rally went outside of the police's designated area. They were kettled (ie surrounded by police and not allowed to leave) for seven hours, then arrested. The police had already hired numerous buses to cart them away.

The police said there had been about 150 arrests. Filling five buses to capacity and driving them away is clearly more than that. Like their habitual underestimation of the size of demonstrations, it's a childish way to discredit the dissent, and yet the media happily parrot it.

On Sunday they finally revised the figure upwards to 286, a figure that tallied with estimates given all along by eyewitnesses. They had been bussed out to Surrey, held for hours, and then all of them released without charge but with police bail conditions

WE'VE SEEN THIS COMING

Mass arrest is a tactic that has been developed to stifle protest that is deemed politically undesirable.

In April 2009 Nottinghamshire police arrested all 114 climate activists at a meeting planning to shut down Ratcliffe on Soar coal fired power station. They weren't intending to prosecute a large proportion of them. Only 26 came to court.

Fortunately for the defendants, between their arrest and trial they discovered that one of their number was in fact undercover police officer Mark Kennedy. They asked to see what reports he'd made, as the defence have a right to see evidence that may be helpful to them. Rather than do this, the state dropped the trial of six people, and the earlier convictions of the other 20 were quashed.

In Saturday's context, I can't help wondering if we would even have fascists marching on our streets if the BNP and EDL's rise hadn't been so ably assisted by sending Mark Kennedy and other undercover police officers in to disrupt effective anti-fascist work over the last decade.

But whatever, the Ratcliffe arrests heralded the modern use of mass arrests of dissenting activists. Two years later the Metropolitan Police made a their record mass arrest of an even larger number. Then a year later they broke their record. And now a year after that, on Saturday, they've broken it again.

FORTNUM AND MASON 2011

In March 2011 anti-cuts protesters occupied tax-dodgers Fortnum and Mason. As the video shows, Chief Inspector Clare Clarke was there and told them they were 'sensible and non-violent' and that they would be free to go. Her officers then released them into a pre-arranged kettle outside where an officer said, 'yes, you're free to leave – to the police station. You're going to be arrested.'

All 145 were then arrested and taken away. Many were held for 18 hours and had their phones, clothes and shoes confiscated.

They were the vast majority of those arrested on the entire day's protests, and the Home Secretary told parliament it was a 'message to those who carry out violence'. Between them, the Fortnum's 145 had been responsible for minor damage to an Easter egg.

The police are not distinguishing between protesters on grounds of their propensity for violence, but on their propensity for autonomy and disobedience. If you're active outside of the controlled system of grey politics, and especially if - as with the likes of UK Uncut or Climate Camp - you're really catching on, then you will be clamped down on and mass arrested. Meanwhile, of Saturday's easily corralled fascists, only 14 were arrested.

The 145 Fortnum protesters were given charges, but these were later dropped against the vast majority and only a handful were convicted.

CRITICAL MASS 2012

On the evening of last year's Olympics opening ceremony 182 Critical Mass cyclists were pushed off their bikes and kettled by the Met. As this comprehensive eyewitness account with video shows, it was done in a needlessly aggressive manner.

Held for hours in handcuffs - some on buses, some in a windowless bare concrete police garage - until being put in police stations during the night, all but four were released without charge, yet they had their bikes confiscated and, of course, all had bail conditions. Only nine were charged and five convicted. Again, this is not about court cases, it's about stifling protest.

On Saturday 286 people were kettled for hours, arrested for longer, then given restrictive bail conditions, yet none of them have been charged with anything at all.

AND DON'T COME BACK

The Met are taking their 'total policing' slogan very seriously indeed. This is total political policing, pure and simple. It makes anyone who was there reluctant to come back for future protests if they're not up for a night in the cells and finding their way home from another county. It makes their mates hear the story and think it all sounds a bit much to get involved in.

Irrespective of whether you come back, it means the police have already collected names, addresses, fingerprints, DNA, and anything else they can wheedle out of you. Again, this sounds daunting to those you tell it to, and it also allows the police to build their databases and target their surveillance.

Saturday's counter-demo was addressed by Max Levitas, veteran of the Battle of Cable Street 77 years ago. Then as now, fascists were marching on the East end of London. Levitas and his comrades took to the streets to stop them. It was a defining moment in stopping the rise of the far right in the 1930s. They succeeded precisely because they did not not comply with the wishes of the government and police. It's to their proven vision and methods we should turn for inspiration and guidance.

britain's secret police

Open Democracy have just published an article I've written about Britain's secret police, an overview of the various elements, the issues and questions it raises, all in one easy to swallow 2000 word chunk.

It's here.

And while you're there, check out this powerful piece about the Independent Police Complaints Commission, a watchpoodle body of ex-cops, who rubber-stamp police versions of even the most extreme police behaviour. Placed alongside this piece by Ian Tomlinson's family's lawyer Jules Carey that recunts the shocking details of the cover-up there, the case for self-investigations to be stopped is utterly overpowering.

Yet the only significant investigation into the 45 years of the secret police is being undertaken by the same Metropolitan Police who ran the operations.

ratcliffe trial: prosecutors and police conspired

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

So it was in late 2010 that 20 people were convicted of a protest without the court seeing the evidence supplied by activist Mark Stone, aka undercover cop Mark Kennedy. A further six protesters were later prosecuted and asked to see whatever reports Kennedy had made. Rather than release this, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) dropped the case.

At the time the CPS said they'd found

Previously unavailable information that significantly undermined the prosecution’s case

but they specifically said it was

not the existence of an undercover officer

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

The 20 previous convictions were quashed and it appears to be a formality that the Drax 29, who also had Kennedy take part, will get their convictions overturned too.

In just two protests the one officer secured 49 wrongful convictions. With 150 officers serving in the counter-democratic squads since their formation in 1968, taking Kennedy as an average there will have been over 7,000 miscarriages of justice. Even one per officer per year would give us 600.

So even being conservative, it's clear that poking its head above the water is one of the largest abuses of the judicial system ever revealed. How deep does it go?  Let's ask the only people who know, the police and the Crown Prosecution Service. Except they won't tell us.

After Ratcliffe, Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer said the CPS were actively reviewing files to find more. That was more than 18 months ago and they have so far found zero. It took them a year after the Ratcliffe ruling to say anything about the Drax convictions, even though Kennedy was involved in both.

ROSE RISES TO PROTECT THE GUILTY

In that intervening year we got the Rose report. Sir Christopher Rose was commissioned to investigate why police and prosecutors hadn't noticed that Kennedy and his evidence existed. Rose had been a Surveillance Commissioner since 2006. They have the ultimate sign-off on deployment of undercover police. Like all the inquiries that aren't actual police, it was a police satellite body with a conflict of interest and it amounted to yet another self-investigation.

The result was predictably intelligence-insulting blah - mistakes were made, nothing underhand, lessons learned now, nobody in charge did anything wrong, one scapegoated underling hung out to dry, move along, nothing to see.

Ratcliffe defence lawyer Mike Schwarz appeared Channel 4 News, talking of the report's drive to

hide behind the most benevolent interpretation of a completely myopic examination of one tiny issue. It's a failure of the authorities to address the wider picture, an almost pathological refusal to accept that there are systemic failures here.

Jon Snow then asked the Director of Public Prosecutions, Kier Starmer,

you see no requirement to mount a wider inquiry to check that there haven't been other miscarriages of justice?

To which Starmer replied

Whenever people raise concerns with me I will always look at those cases.... I think it would be a better use of our time and resources to look when an issue is raised rather than look back at everything when Sir Christopher Rose has said there's no systemic problem.

If I get burgled and find a fingerprint I don't expect the authorities to refuse to investigate until I give them a name to go with the fingerprint. It's they who have the files that match the two. In the same way, it's they who know who the undercover officers were, it's they who know which campaigns have been infiltrated. How can I ask for my conviction to be reviewed when I don't know that one of my friends was a cop who filed evidence that exonerates me?

On Newsnight, Jeremy Paxman started by asking Starmer

Are you absolutely certain there are no other cases in which people have been convicted on the basis of the evidence of undisclosed undercover police officers?

Paxman has to repeat the question three times in the folling minute and a half of shifty flanneling and he still doesn't get an answer. (It's interesting to note Starmer saying there are about half a dozen of these big cases involving undercovers annually.)

Starmer told Channel 4 the Ratcliffe debacle

has to be seen as a watershed in the way cases involving undercover officers are dealt with.

Well he certainly tried to make it seem that way, by making it hard for him or Rose's whitewash report to be challenged. Once a report is written, it takes a while to sort out the layout and printing. Yet the media were only told about the release of the Rose report the night before. They turned up at 9am and were given half an hour to read the 44 pages of unnecessarily tangled legalese and unexplained acronyms before Kier Starmer appeared for a few minutes to take questions and sod off.

Far be it from me to suggest that the CPS worked with the police to create another stitch-up to maintain their authority against the interests of justice, but if I wanted to discourage the press from being able to digest a report and ask probing questions, I would organise a report's release like that. If Starmer wasn't a willing part of such an ambush then he is, to put it most generously, too dim or powerless to do anything about the fact that it was set up like one.

The Rose report was a whitewash in both how it was compiled and in the conclusions it drew from its own limited evidence.

Starmer told Channel 4 that the police should have shared what the undercover officer was doing with the CPS and if that had been the case that

the individual failings both by us and by the police I don't think would have happened.

One problem there, Kier. The police did share it with the CPS. In fact, the CPS knew about the activists' plan before many of the participants themselves.

ONE BAD APPLE, UNDER A PILE OF BAD APPLES

The Rose report essentially says nobody in the CPS realised that the police files included Kennedy's stuff or how important it was. It scapegoats one low ranking official, Ian Cunningham. One bad apple, you know, like they told us Mark Kennedy himself was.

The thing is that Cunningham's superior, Nick Paul, was more in the know than anyone. There are emails between the two men talking of the 'sensitive disclosure issues' around the 'participating informant'. Paul overrides the wishes of police to protect Kennedy. Nick Paul was at the time - and until January 2010 - the Domestic Extremism Co-ordinator in the CPS Special Crime Unit.

So the nebulous idea of 'domestic extremism' isn't just used by the secret police - the CPS concur with it enough to use it in a job title. Even though nobody is sure what it means. How long has the CPS had such a role? What else have they dealt with?

If Keir Starmer was interested in justice and wanted a place to start reviewing cases that may well be dodgy, it would be those dealt with by the the Domestic Extremism Co-ordinator. If Sir Christopher Rose wanted to get to the truth of what happened at Ratcliffe, he should have made Nick Paul swear an affa davit. As it is, he didn't even talk to him at all. Odd behaviour for an inquirer, unless he was trying to create a whitewash. Kier Starmer told Newsnight that Mike Schwarz was wrong, that Rose had looked at 'the entirety of the materials, police and prosecutors,' which is simply not true.

Let's look at what the Rose report into police and CPS collusion at Ratcliffe actually tells us when cross-referenced with the Independent Police Complaints Commission's report into the same issue. Bear with me, it'll be a bit long and a tad forensic, but it shows that this was not one lowling's fault. This was a high-level police and CPS cover-up.

RATCLIFFE TIMELINE

6 April 2009: Ian Cunningham says he "was contacted by DCI Severn and told that there was a police operation to counter a threat to close down a power station in the region. He understood that the police were acting on intelligence and was informed that Nick Paul already had an overview of the case. He contacted Mr Paul and they confirmed that Mr Cunningham would be the allocated lawyer for Nottinghamshire Police to contact". (IPCC, para 77, my italics).

Note that Nick Paul already knew. When was he first told?

12 April 2009: 114 climate activists (including deep undercover police officer Mark Kennedy) arrested in the largest pre-emptive political arrest of its kind in English history.

16 April 2009: Police Gold Group meet, and their notes open with their mistrust of Cunningham: 'Ian Cunningham, danger environmentally friendly - local CPS reticent' (Rose, para 19). Rose found no evidence to support this. But here we have, right at the outset, a suspicion from the more judgemental officials. You can see a suggestion as to why, when a scapegoat was needed, Cunningham was sacrificed.

27 April 2009: Cunningham said he attended a Gold Group meeting with several senior police and was shown a single piece of paper about Kennedy's involvement and his authorisation. There was no detailed file. (IPCC, para 79). Nick Paul was present (Rose, para 21). Cunningham emails the Senior Investigating Officer the same day saying "we will always be vulnerable on disclosure, especially matters covert" (Rose, para 21). So the SIO knew about disclosure problems already - this isn't Cunningham keeping it to himself, then.

15 May 2009: Another Gold Group meeting takes place. Cunningham says they discussed the use of Kennedy and agree "to have a further meeting with Mr Paul and others who were sighted on the case to discuss what the implications were regarding the use of" Kennedy (IPCC, para 82, my italics). Following the meeting, the Senior Investigating Officer records in his Sensitive File “I believe that the major impact of the UC [undercover] de-brief is that the main organisers of the event are not amongst the scope of the investigation and a high level CPS/police strategy needs to be agreed to shape the future of the investigation” (Rose, para 21: my italics).

This Sensitive File note is more credible than much of the testimony to Rose as it is one of the few contemporaneous notes used, before everyone knew they had to cover their arses by blaming each other. Cunningham would not fit anyone's definition of 'high level CPS,' so this clearly means it was erroneous to mostly blame him. But who from the CPS or elsewhere - 'others sighted on the case' - did actually form the strategy? Nick Paul? Higher still?

28 May 2009: The CPS' Case Management Review Panel meets. Cunningham and at least two lawyers senior to him are present. Cunningham says if a prosecution goes ahead there are likely to be many disclosure issues. (Rose, para 39). Who were the more senior lawyers? They are responsible for any cover-up as well as Cunningham. Indeed, being senior makes them look more culpable.

16 June 2009: That planned police/CPS strategy meeting 'to shape the future of the investigation' takes place. (IPCC, para 82). Numerous senior police and Nick Paul are present (Rose, para 35).

17 June 2009: Nick Paul emails Cunningham saying, 'the participating informant may become important if the defence switch tack and choose to run a non political defence'. Cunningham replies that there are 'sensitive disclosure issues' and that he has a meeting the next week (23 June) to carry out the initial evidence sift. (IPCC, para 52).


Early July 2009: A Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) at the undercover police unit NPOIU wants Kennedy not to be charged. Nick Paul overrules it. (Rose, para 24). That's quite a stand to make; clearly Paul feels he has power to shape and control this.

23 July 2009: The DCI in Kennedy's unit emails Nick Paul to say once again that he doesn't want Kennedy charged, even though the CPS are pressing ahead with it. He also says that the secret police 'have not given the local CPS any details of the asset [Kennedy] but they are aware there is an asset involved'. (Rose, para 24). This not only shows Nick Paul knew what was going on and is pretty much calling the shots but that lower CPS, possibly including Cunningham, had information kept from them.

17 September 2009: The DCI running Kennedy's unit says that, following a meeting at Nottingham CPS between police, Cunningham and Paul on 15th (IPCC, para 54), Det Supt Pearson made an entry in his Sensitive Policy File. ‘Objective review of the evidence by CPS. In essence Stone UCO [undercover officer] was acting lawfully, within the scope of his authorised activity'. (IPCC, para 55)

30 November 2009: The CPS' Case Management Review Panel meets for the second time. Again, Cunningham and at least two lawyers senior to him are present. Cunningham asks what risks there were on the use of Kennedy's intelligence, pointing out that media had reported the police clearly acted on advance information. They discussed "risks regarding the 'right' questions being asked by the defence regarding covert practices". (Rose, para 39).

Again, who were the two senior lawyers? This looks very much like a conspiracy to keep the evidence from the defence and, again, the more senior CPS lawyers surely bear responsibility with Cunningham.

24 June 2010: The CPS' Case Management Review Panel meets for the third time. Again, Cunningham is there discussing the case with at least two more senior lawyers. Still the non-disclosure plan continues. (Rose, para 49).

13 October 2010: Prosecuting barrister in both Ratcliffe trials Felicity Gerry says she met with Cunningham and police at the CPS Complex Crime Unit offices in Nottingham where she was first informed of the existence of the undercover officer by Det Supt Pearson. (IPCC, para 65). So the person leading the prosecution knew, far ahead of formulating her arguments, and for every second she was in court, that evidence was being withheld from the defence.

21 October 2010: Mark Kennedy is exposed as an undercover police officer by activists. Cunningham informs Felicity Gerry the next day (IPCC, para 68).

22 November 2010: The first 20 of the Ratcliffe activists go on trial. Prosecutor Felicity Gerry - who self-defines as 'an entertaining public speaker and a prolific and popular tweeter' - baffled the jury and wider world by asking 'Was it more fun to plan this action or to vote for Zac Goldsmith? Did the defendants do all this because they didn’t have a Glastonbury ticket?' and suggesting it would have been more effective to get Cheryl Cole to speak out about climate change instead.

It seemed bizarre and clueless at the time, and was deservedly mocked. The Zac Goldsmith thing has a particularly hollow ring now we're three years into the betrayal of the 'greenest government ever'. But the serious part is that, knowing that she was aware of Kennedy, and by implication the withheld evidence and the miscarriage of justice she was enacting, from this distance her arguments take on a cynical and sinister tone.

14 December 2010: The 20 are found guilty.

10 January 2011: The trial of a further 6 collapses as the CPS refuse to disclose Kennedy's evidence that exonerated them. The CPS immediately begin their cover-up, issuing a statement saying it is not to do with Kennedy.

19 July 2011: The convictions of the 20 are quashed.

3 July 2012: A year later but with the scandal still expanding, the CPS invites another group of activists infiltrated by Kennedy, the Drax 29, to appeal their convictions. They are universally expected to be quashed.

WHAT THE REPORTS DIDN'T REPORT

Paragraphs 7-12 of the Rose report list all the materials drawn on. Nick Paul isn't mentioned. The man in the middle of it all, the first person in the CPS to know about Kennedy, who had the power to overrule some very insistent senior police officers, who conspired with Cunningham over 'sensitive disclosure issues', who held the post of Domestic Extremism Co-ordinator, wasn't even interviewed. Why not?

Who were the two senior lawyers on the Case Management Review Panel? Rose concludes they failed 'to sensibly oversee the way in which Mr Cunningham was doing his job as prosecutor' (Rose, para 46). How much did they advise? A mere oversight by two experienced lawyers in the entirety of three meetings over a year? Or were they active in withholding the evidence? Rose does not seem interested in asking. They are one of the main reasons disclosure didn't happen (Rose, para 54) yet they are never named and are seemingly not sanctioned.

In the Rose report's conclusions, despite the damning evidence even from its own limited pool, Rose declared, 'the failures were individual, not systemic'. (Rose, para 53). Yet the report shows the police are desperate to keep the existence of their undercover officers from everyone.

The IPCC concluded that

the dissemination of the sensitive material from the NPOIU [National Public Order Intelligence Unit; the secret police of which Kennedy was a part] through to the police is best described as ad hoc...The transcript should have been fully explained to Nottinghamshire Police with regard to its evidential value... There is no evidence that this conversation took place. (IPCC, para 110)

The secret police are, by definition, mixed up in loads of illegal activity and yet they don't disclose properly to the rest of the police (hence the uniformed grunts nicking Kennedy in the first place) never mind the CPS. If that doesn't fit your definition of 'systemic problem' you need a new dictionary. Even from the scant information in these reports, when you put them together the clear image is one of collusion and cover-up.

THERE'S A STARMER, WAITING IN THE SKY

The IPCC report was narrow but at least it interviewed the relevant cops. The CPS and Rose couldn't be bothered, or else didn't want to hear what might be said. Either way, nobody can pretend that the Rose report is authoritative. It didn't stop Keir Starmer trying, mind.

He rapidly took cover behind Rose's tanker of whitewash, using the pronouncement that there was 'no systemic failing' as a reason not to investigate and rectify the hundreds, quite possibly thousands, of miscarriages of justice that are waiting to be uncovered.

You'd have thought Starmer might have a personal lust for justice against this counter-democratic policing given that he's been fucked over by it more than once before. As a defence lawyer he worked for a group of hunt saboteurs who got a witness statement from one of their comrades called Jim Sutton, aka undercover officer Jim Boyling.

Later, Starmer advised the McLibel defendants after they were prosecuted for distributing a leaflet co-written by undercover officer Bob Lambert. Starmer's sagely wisdom will have been undermined due to being pre-empted - it was seen by John Dines, the live-in boyfriend of defendant Helen Steel, who was also an undercover police officer. But in his supine position before the counter-democratic, judiciary-nobbling secret police, Starmer appears to show that there are few as zealous as those who've converted.

Maybe that's too harsh. Maybe he's too dim to realise how he's been duped and puppeted. Or maybe he's too powerless to speak out, or even speak out about the fact that he can't speak out. Whichever, the Ratcliffe fiasco and his participation in the cover-up have seen his credibility as a figure of justice comprehensively shredded and flushed away.

He's leaving the post of Director of Public Prosecutions at the end of October. Still time to find some of those elusive files before he goes, if he has enough conscience, inclination and ability.

Nick Paul, meanwhile, has left the CPS and is now back working at the place he founded, Doughty Street Chambers. This is, somewhat incongruously, the same chambers that did the Ratcliffe defence, and where Keir Starmer worked before he was Director of Public Prosecutions.

His profile mentions his time at the CPS.

Whilst there he specialised in cases involving police misconduct.

Indeed he did.

ian tomlinson's family gagged with money

The Metropolitan police have reached a settlement with the family of Ian Tomlinson, who died after being attacked by a police officer whilst walking home through the G20 demonstration in April 2009.

Much rarer than a cash payout, the family have also received an apology. The Met apologise not only for the 'excessive and unlawful force' used by PC Simon Harwood, but also

for ill-considered comments made in the media in the immediate aftermath of Mr Tomlinson’s death which served to distract attention away from the investigation into the death.

They additionally apologise for trying to mislead pathologists as to the cause of death.







Even once the police knew what had gone on, they were not interested in justice. Their first response to the footage going online was to demand it be taken down, not with a call or email but actually going round to the Guardian office with someone from the watchpoodle Independent Police Complaints Commission.

They quickly put another IPCC glove-puppet on Channel 4 News to say there was no CCTV in the area of the assault. It was pointed out that at least two police CCTV cameras were directly pointing at it. The IPCC later corrected their position, saying that the cameras weren't working.

You can say this about all the cameras in Stockwell station the day they killed Jean Charles de Menezes (even though the company running the cameras and tube staff contradict it) and get a few people to believe you. But to claim it for cameras at the centre of the largest public order situation in the UK that year, that police had months to prepare for and over a hundred officers monitoring the screens on the day, is ludicrous.

Yet it is not the most far-fetched thing. In an act as desperate as it is insulting, after the footage was published an officer went round to the Tomlinsons' house to suggest that the assailant might have been a protester in a stolen police uniform. The police statement makes no apology for that.

Somewhat disturbingly, the police statement says the Tomlinsons can't talk about the settlement.

it has been agreed that it is in the best interests of the family that no further statement will be made, either by them or the Commissioner, regarding the terms of the settlement.

This apology and payout did not come easily. Were it not for one person's phone footage, Ian Tomlinson would have died of a heart attack as brave bobbies tried to save him under a hail of bricks and bottles. Were it not for the grit of the Tomlinson family aided by the tenacity of their lawyer Jules Carey and Guardian journalist Paul Lewis, it would not have happened.

And yet is is paltry. Four years is a short time for the police to make this payout compared to other cases, but it will have been an aeon for the family to wade through the police obstacles. No matter how much money it is it will not have been easy to earn, let alone anything like compensation for the loss of their loved one.

PAYOUT - THE THIRD INJUSTICE

Once the police make a big cash offer, you have to take it. If you refuse and fight on - with all the trauma of continually focussing on the worst thing that has ever happened to you, because you want to get to court, because you're not interested in the money, because you want to see the people who've wronged you put under oath and questioned, because you want evidence to be shown - then even if you win you can lose. If the court awards you less money than the police offered you, you are liable to pay their costs. This can run into millions. Who could take that chance?

It is a triple injustice. First, there is what the police did. Secondly, there are the smears, lies and legal obstacles they use to try to prevent justice. Then, if you're still standing, they can use their superior power once again to stuff your mouth with money and prevent anyone getting the truth (then sit back and watch as social media comes alive with people calling you gold diggers). This same predicament is likely to face the people suing police for sending undercover officers into their personal lives.

In a statement on behalf of her family, Julia Tomlinson says the settlement - money with a gagging order - 'is as close as we are going to get to justice'. It is still far over the horizon from actual justice.

WHO'S NEXT?

PC Simon Harwood will never spend a day in jail for what he did. Once again the police have killed with impunity. Imagine how different the response would be if PC Harwood had been fatally assaulted by a newspaper vendor instead.

More to the point, Harwood's colleagues and commanders will continue to behave the same way in future. Harwood's violence was excessive and unlawful. It was also typical. As I said at the time

Look at the video of Ian Tomlinson. Look at the casualness of the officer who attacks him. Look how the colleagues are completely unsurprised...

This was not an officer losing his head in the fury of a riot. It’s calm, slow and premeditated.

This was not one bad officer taking the law into his own hands. This sort of assault was endemic that day. I saw it hundreds of times with my own eyes, and I was at the more peaceful climate camp protest, and left before it got kettled then attacked with dogs and batons in the evening.

This sort of assault is what the police do when they’re deployed on this provocative political mission. The difference here is that it was caught on camera and the victim died.

smearing the messenger

Oh here we go. The police have put a piece in the Daily Mail smearing undercover police whistleblower Peter Francis. Full of quotes from three or four loyal cops, it alleges he's doing it for the money he gets from the Guardian book. Which is a book he gets no money from. It's a bit rich from the paper that paid a fortune to Mark Kennedy and credulously printed his extravagantly embellished story in 2011.

Francis is unique in that he spoke out before the Kennedy affair. In March 2010 he did an interview for the Observer.

As former Special Branch officer Chris Hobbs remarks: ‘I find it puzzling that the issue of smearing the Lawrence family was not mentioned (in the Observer) in company with the other revelations.’

At the time, Francis was cagey about a lot of things. It took him months to start being named as Pete Black, even though that too is only an alter-ego. As the scandal has unfolded and the threat to him as sole source has receded, just like the activists who were infiltrated, he has come forward with increased details of what went on.

Similarly the women who had relationships with undercover officers did not speak to the press initially. Then they were pseudonymous. Now several are out speaking publicly under their real names. It's not a because they've spent two years cooking up ever more elaborate lies, it's because it's taken a while to get the confidence. They and Francis knew before they began that they'd be shot down by behemoth institutions who are very protective of their reputation, irrespective of justice.

COVERING THE EXPOSURE

At the time, he wanted to write a book about his undercover life. But the response from publishers was ‘lukewarm’. Apparently, the Observer article was an attempt — ultimately unsuccessful — to attract a book deal... Move forward to 2013, and the new ‘smear’ allegation is the main selling point of both the Dispatches programme and the book by the Guardian journalists. In the much-edited documentary, Francis was steered carefully through his sensational new claim.

So Francis was hoping to get a book deal but failed and has invented with the Lawrence thing to spice up the Guardian journalists' book. Or else the Guardian journalists 'much edited' his interview to make him say something he didn't mean.

Francis has spoken out since the Dispatches programme, standing by its claims, and offered to repeat them under oath.

Which leaves us with the book-hawking thing. The book by the Guardian journalists is just that. By them. It's not by Francis. As they make clear, neither he, nor any other sources, were paid for their contributions. He didn't get paid to be in the Dispatches film either. So as exaggeration for money goes, it's a pretty bad business plan.

Such scepticism should apply to claims by Mark Kennedy who, via his publicity agent Max Clifford, was paid handsomely for his Mail on Sunday exclusive and his Channel 4 documentary, but that's not how it works with Francis.

So why would he do it? Ex-colleague Hobbs says

Time can play tricks with memory

Oh, so even if he isn't in it for the money he's just unhinged. He didn't actually infiltrate the Lawrences, he just thinks he did. He's utterly fabricated the myriad details of a deployment that didn't actually happen. I'm sure that sort of thing happens to us all.

SHOWING THE UNSEEN

How credible are Francis' claims? He says he was tasked to find dirt on the Lawrences and succeeded in doing so for Stephen's friend and prime witness Duwayne Brooks. This is pretty convincing given the Brooks was then prosecuted with preposterous charges and later on the MacPherson Inquiry found he had been the victim of a racist vendetta by police. At the same time other officers were infiltrating similar campaigns. This week police admitted that the undercover police did have files on the Lawrences.

So they do undermine campaigns like this, they did focus on the biggest of them, gathering information and smearing a key person, but yet somehow they opted to leave the people at the centre alone? Hmmmm.

Former Special Branch commander Roger Pearce says

I would be astounded if it is proved that someone said: "Go out and get information to rubbish and smear the Lawrence campaign".

Read that again, stressing the word 'proved'.

An unnamed former colleague - and note the later part of this next quote - says,

I would be absolutely amazed if someone told Peter to get dirt on the Lawrences; even more amazed if there is a written record of it. 

How much paperwork was kept by a top secret unit whose training was mostly given in practice not theory? And how much has been shredded since Francis went public in spring 2010 and Kennedy splashed his arse across the media a year later?

John Carnt, a retired Scotland Yard superintendent, trawled through hundreds of documents relating to Scotland Yard’s investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence ahead of his family’s ill-fated private prosecution in 1996.

He told us: 'I saw the contents of information gathered on the first murder inquiry, and at no time did I see anything which suggested there was a surveillance operation on the Lawrences to discredit them in any way.'

So a Scotland Yard detective found Scotland Yard did nothing wrong. Imagine that.

UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS

But beyond that, the whole point of the SDS was to be secret. Most people in the Met didn't know it even existed. The incident that brought them crashing into the limelight was the Ratcliffe power station prosecution when the police had failed in their duty to give the defence all the evidence.

Mark Kennedy's previously hidden evidence exonerated the defendants, leading to the collapse of the trial, 20 previous convictions quashed and at least another 29 to follow. The police knew they were orchestrating miscarriages of justice.

In these three cases alone there would be 55 wrongful convictions if activists hadn't caught Kennedy. So what chance do you think there was of them fessing up their crooked deeds to officers giving evidence to the Lawrence Inquiry?

Mick Creedon, Chief Constable of Derbyshire, is leading Operation Herne which is investigating the undercover police scandal. He took over to stop it appearing like the Met are self-investigating. In reality, three quarters of its staff are Met employees, including serving officers who have their future careers to think of before revealing anything unhelpful about their superiors. It is police investigating themselves, with no outside scrutiny and not even a promise to publish their findings.

HAVEN'T WE SEEN THIS SOMEWHERE BEFORE?

A year into Herne, they say they found evidence of an officer using a dead child's identity. In the five months that followed the 30-odd staff didn't find any more cases, even though it was standard practice, sanctioned from the top and there were dozens of cases. It's that sort of inquiry.

This week Creedon said

There is nothing in Operation Herne which suggests any attempt whatsoever to do two things. Firstly, to be tasked against the Stephen Lawrence family; and secondly, to besmirch the Lawrence family. 

This is damage limitation. They do it well. Remember when police were criticised after the 2009 G20 protests where they killed Ian Tomlinson? During the protests a Lib Dem MP was called over to a group that had two suspicious people encouraging violence against the police. As they were confronted, the group - including the MP - watched the men walk to police lines, flash their warrant cards and be taken through. The officer in charge, Commander Bob Broadhurst, told parliament

We had no plain-clothes officers deployed within the crowd. It would have been dangerous for them to put plain clothes officers in a crowd like that.

This was flattened by footage of a line of City of London police with batons - check out the one in jeans and baseball cap. Yet it was still more than a year after the footage went public that the police finally admitted they had undercovers on the streets that day. All this without mentioning Mark Kennedy's presence that day, too.

At the G20 the officer in charge of the streets and the one doing media were of the same rank. That's how seriously they take this stuff.

On to the early days of the undercover scandal, when they thought they could portray Kennedy as a rogue officer, Chief Constable Jon Murphy said sex with activists was

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.

Yet all the ones exposed so far have done it to varying degrees, with one officer after another saying it was standard practice. The senior police seem to have given up on denying that now.

With each new revelation we can expect that pattern of denial and of smearing the person at the centre. But if the likes of Francis persist then - as the women who had relationships or those who saw the agents provocateur at the G20 proved - perseverance coupled with the weight of evidence will establish the truth whether police admit it or not.

from one zimmerman to another

More than quarter of a million people were massed in front of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28 1963 when Martin Luther King made his I Have A Dream speech. On the same day, less than a hundred miles away, Billy Zantzinger was in court to be sentenced.

Zantzinger was, at 24, the owner of a large tobacco farm inherited from his parents. In February he had put on his top hat, white tie and tails to attend a charity ball. Excessively drunk by 1.30am - he plausibly claimed he has no memory of it - he chided a member of the serving staff, Hattie Carroll, for not bringing his drink quickly. "I'm hurrying as fast as I can," replied Carroll. Zantzinger declared, "I don't have to take that kind of shit off a n*****," and struck Carroll with his cane on the shoulder and again on the head. She collapsed soon after and died of a brain haemorrhage.

The next morning Zantzinger, already under arrest for other assaults on staff that night, was charged with homicide. This was later reduced to manslaughter, of which he was convicted. Aware that a long sentence would send him to state prison with its large population of long-term black convicts, judges gave him just six months, to be served in the relative security of Washington County Jail.

Imagine if Carroll had killed Zantzinger on a racist whim instead. Fifty years on, give or take a month, and we have the same knowledge of how things would have been different if Trayvon Martin had chased and killed George Zimmerman.

Even in cosmopolitan 2013, it is simple to show that black men get aggressively challenged and have the police called for things that white men are permitted to do, and white women get actively helped with.



Less than two months after Zantzinger's sentence, Bob Dylan - real name Robert Zimmerman - was in the studio recording his third album The Times They Are A Changin. With just his guitar and harmonica, he simply told the story of the two individuals' lives, knowing it was a a microcosm of racial differences across America. He sang of how Carroll spent her working life cleaning up after the white folks and was never their equal, and of Zantzinger's casual violence on the night and fierce sense of entitlement even after arrest.

Each verse ends with Dylan imploring us, saying that despite the injustice he's already reported the worst part is to come.

But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain't the time for your tears

There will always be volatile bigots. The deeper problem is in the attitudes among the mass of people. It is in the way white society creates and reacts to the otherness of people from different backgrounds and even manages to instil those same attitudes in the people it abuses. And reflecting that, the problem extends into the way mainstream officialdom deters and punishes - or fails to - those violent bigots. That really is something that can change and yet we haven't done it.

In the final verse Dylan haltingly tells of that six month sentence.

In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain't pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught 'em
And that ladder of law has no top and no bottom
Stared at the person who killed for no reason
Who just happened to be feelin' that way without warnin'
And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished
And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence

But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now's the time for your tears

Gary Younge's anger well expresses the outrage at George Zimmerman's acquittal, but his headline says Open season on black boys after a verdict like this, implying a change. That open season was declared long before we were born.

stopping the wind

The 2010 Coalition agreement spelt it out in clear terms.

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 receive no public subsidy. 

So, the most ardently pro-nuclear stance was one in which they were entirely privately funded. Liberal Democrats will oppose it nonetheless.

Two weeks ago Liberal Democrat Danny Alexander announced £10bn of public guarantees to investors in just one new nuclear power station, Hinkley Point.

This week the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) published a report on the smothering at birth of Britain's offshore wind industry. With so much coastline and much of it relatively shallow, this country has an enviable position to establish  massive offshore wind infrastructure. It is much more expensive than building on land, but then it also avoids many of the problems such as spoilt landscapes. Additionally, out at sea you get greater production and efficiency as there aren't the obstacles that create turbulence around turbines.

However the government's lack of enthusiasm means we are building much less than anticipated. It had been expected that a hefty kickstart would see turbine manufacturers set up factories in the UK, but because of the reduced potential this hasn't happened. Increased capacity would, in turn, reduce the cost of offshore wind, leading to increased uptake. More renewable energy, more jobs, everyone wins. Except the fossil and nuke corporations such as EDF, currently lining up to build Hinkley Point as well as the new 'dash for gas' stations such as West Burton.

Will Straw, associate director at the IPPR, said: "The current policy trajectory could achieve a worst of all worlds outcome – low volume [of energy generated], low jobs and high costs.

It's a straight choice - runaway climate change or stopping the fossils to switch to renewables. A large proportion of our old coal stations are closing in the next few years. What we choose to build now decides the source of our electricity for the next forty years. With the new gas stations, the government is setting us up to fail our already paltry carbon emissions targets. Unlike Labour they are refusing to commit to decarbonisation by 2030 and are striving to scupper EU targets for the same date. The greenest government ever. Vote blue, go green.

The lack of investment in renewables and the duplicitous state funding of new nuclear are not two stories. They are one. Money is being steered away from what is sustainable to what is in the interests of the energy giants. They have ceased to offer inadequate solutions to the climate crisis and are now blatantly disregarding the entire issue.

Meanwhile, despite it being banned in many parts of Europe, the UK is pressing ahead with fracking for shale gas even though its climate impact is comparable to coal. The same right wingers who decry the eyesore of wind turbines are happy for fracking drills to cover the countryside (it's been seriously sugggested we could be looking at 50,000-100,000 in Lancashire alone). So again, this looks feels like one story, not two, and that there are other motives at work. And again, follow the money to the shareholder dividends.

This isn't just about climate, it's also about fuel poverty. The government's own Committee on Climate Change said whilst gas is cheaper in the short term, by 2050 a gas-based electricity system would cost households £650 per year more than renewables. This makes the tax breaks for fracking look like an attack on social justice as much as climate justice.

MAKE THE CHANGE

The climate imperative means we have to act now, against the corporate distraction and deceit. It was like this five years ago. But with such a huge swathe of the population aware of the scale of the climate threat, it was relatively easy for small campaign groups acting in unison to have a big impact. Being the only folks with solutions that matched the scale of the problem, being so clearly right that they could prove it in two minutes to a 5 year old with a crayon, it swiftly changed the course of events. The NGOs did what they do best with lobbying, local organising and commissioning reports. The direct activists added the ramshackle pizzazz that tipped the scales.

When Climate Camp went to Heathrow to occupy land earmarked for a new runway in 2007 they expected to be vilified and dismissed. By the end of the year aviation emissions had been forced into the Climate Change Act and plans for the runway were eventually shelved. The following year they didn't know if they'd be facing the bulldozers at the site for the new coal power station at Kingsnorth. Not only did that plan get dropped, so did the raft of others that were due to follow.

The first of the projected 40 new gas fired power stations are being built. Next month Climate Camp style action returns with Reclaim The Power, a camp at the nearly-finished West Burton power station in Nottinghamshire running from 16th to 21st August. The pressure has worked before and it can work again, but only if those who know it's right come together to make it happen.



 

if i were special branch

Cast your mind back a year or two ago to the rattling clunk of a million dropped jaws when Mark Kennedy was unmasked. Remember the slew of front page reports, the amazement that someone had been trained and deployed to act as he did.

Now he is reduced to a bit player. Not that anything Kennedy did has been found to be untrue or diminished in any way, it has only shifted relatively. It turned out that he was actually a latecomer among hundreds of officers who behaved identically, and there are even darker deeds done beyond the like of his. The known wrongdoing has expanded a hundredfold, so our outrage should be multiplied by the same amount.

This police scandal is larger than any that came before it. It is larger than the Stephen Lawrence case and the institutional racism it exposed, because it includes that. What's more, it includes more institutional racism than we previously knew of and, worse still, secret measures to protect and perpetuate it.

It is far, far beyond the phone hacking scandal that involved corrupt police being covered up by their superiors. Huge numbers of people had their privacy breached by hacking but none had state agents sent to live with them, integrate into their families and father their children. Also, beyond the private lives of citizens, the undercovers had a far more damaging mission. They were, as solicitor Harriet Wistrich termed it, given a counter-democratic remit.

And yet all this comes from the stories of a mere ten officers, leaving well over 90% still in the shadows. What more is there still to be revealed?

From what is known, nobody is more implicated than Bob Lambert. He infiltrated London Greenpeace and co-wrote the notorious What's Wrong With McDonald's leaflet, then left just as it saw the group sued for libel in the longest case in English history. During his time, unbeknownst to his wife and children, he had sexual relationships with four women and fathered a child with one. "Raped by the state" is how one of them describes it.

Afterwards he moved up a notch and supervised deployments. He oversaw Peter Francis' infiltration of black justice campaigns including that of Stephen Lawrence, he put Jim Boyling into Reclaim The Streets. Peculiarly, he and Boyling then formed the Muslim Contact Unit ostensibly as an outreach project but, as I've said before, the most credible explanation for using your most experienced infiltrators and spies is, well, infiltration and spying.

The new book Undercover has by far the most complete picture yet of Britain's secret police. In it, Lambert is interwoven with most of the spies and is personally responsible for some of the worst excesses of the undercover squad.

BREAKING SILENCE BUT NOT BREAKING COVER

As the tide of shit rapidly swells around him, last week Bob Lambert broke his silence to talk to Channel 4 news (in two parts, here and here). The man who is so skilled a deceiver that colleagues said his work was "hands down regarded as the best tour of duty ever" is now doing damage limitation. You do that by appearing to be meek, confessing some unpleasant but established truths, then casting doubt on the most unsavoury parts.

He admitted much of what we already know - taking the identity of a dead child to form the basis of his activist persona, misleading courts by being prosecuted under that false identity, having two serious relationships with women and fathering a child. He missed out his third relationship and a fourth brief liaison, but still.

He claims that the women he abused were not targeted, that it was love and 'just happened'. Yet the pattern of approaching the women, then preparing to leave by feigning mental distress and cheating on his partner, is identical to that of other officers. But more than that, like the others, he was trained in sophisticated tricks of making people identify with him and trust him. When in his role he cannot have been anything other than targetting anyone he befriended, let alone became lovers with. Those women thought they were meeting The One when they weren't even meeting a person, they were meeting a set of techniques. It had no informed consent, it was deceit and abuse. It most certainly was not love.

He flatly denied planting the Animal Liberation Front firebomb at fur-selling Debenhams in Harrow. So the question remains; who did? He was trying to get the bombers jailed. One of them says there were only three people involved. On Lambert's intelligence, two of them were caught red-handed and sent down. Either there was a fourth person that nobody has mentioned before and whom Lambert failed to have arrested, or else Lambert was the third bomber.

But, most boldly and implausibly of all, Lambert flatly denied that the Lawrence campaign was infiltrated. Yet we know that other officers under his command were infiltrating black justice campaigns in London at that time. We know that Peter Francis is telling the truth about the police's racist victimisation of the main witness to Lawrence's murder, Duwayne Brooks, a fact established by the MacPherson Inquiry. The idea that the squad was doing this to campaigns that posed less of a threat to police credibility, that they were doing it to those around Lawrence and yet somehow thought it wouldn't serve their purpose to do it to the Lawrence family themselves flies in the face of all we know about how the police work and the way that, above public order or any other consideration, they prize their reputation.

Former Met officer Chris Hobbs describes a regime so single-minded in the protection of its reputation that anyone rocking the boat is given rough treatment. Hobbs, who spent 23 years in the Met, including Special Branch, before leaving in 2011, said: "It's run like a dictatorship and if you dare challenge the system then you've had it. If you take on the Met as a whistleblower you'll never win. I was forcibly retired after making my concerns known."

It is precisely because of this brand awareness that the Lawrence case is the real Achilles heel for the Metropolitan Police. They were deeply humiliated, had their innner workings dragged into the limelight, and then were forced to declare that they had come clean, reformed and it would never happen again.

In fact, since the Lawrence case numerous innocent people who entirely reasonably presented a threat to the Met's credibility - Delroy Lindo, Roger Sylvester, Jean Charles de Menezes, and beyond the Met in the case of Christopher Alder - have suffered similar smears and dirty tricks campaigns, whilst corrupt police have been painted as put-upon heroes. Let's remember the Evening Standard's headline the day after police killed Ian Tomlinson in 2009.

But Lawrence remains iconic; to have their record on this dragged down again, to be proven to be even worse than anybody hitherto thought, would be the most damning blow to the Met.

DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE

So by giving a bumbly presentation, repeatedly using the interviewer's forename and fessing up to what is already known, Lambert gives the impression of someone coming clean. By bizarrely saying of the men he jailed as the ultimate aim of his deployment that "in my heart" he was their friend and he had "a genuine respect for their cause and still do," topped with an apology to two of the women he had relationships with - but honestly didn't target - he hopes to look contrite and at least conjure a cloaking question mark over the current firework display of explosive revelations.

It's the best shot they've got and, if I were Special Branch trying to save face and utterly uninterested in justice, it's what I'd do too. But because it defends so much of what is already established and indefensible, Lambert fatally undermines himself with ludicrous implausibility.

He can't even concede the fact of Duwayne Brooks' persecution, a campaign so trumped-up that Brooks walked free from court without opening his mouth, later received £100,000 in compensation and - a true rarity - a written apology from the police. Lambert's interview comes in the same week that the senior officer in charge of the inquiry into Lawrence's murder, John Grieve, admitted secretly recording a meeting with Brooks and his lawyer. As Brooks said last week,

Does anyone actually believe the covert recording only happened once? There will be more to come out. It seems a bit odd that he’s just come out and admitted to it once.

Lambert's claims would be risible if they weren't subjecting the Lawrences to yet more insult and lies from the police who spent years treating them, in Doreen Lawrence's words, "like white masters during slavery".

His admission to taking the identity of a dead child was mitigated with the claim that it was standard practice and, more, was "well known at the highest levels in the Home Office". It is always tempting to believe that a cover-up goes to the very top, and in this case it may well be true. However we have to be cautious and recognise this for what it is.

Lambert spent a long time undercover before becoming second in command of the Special Demonstration Squad. Whatever judgement is made on the undercovers falls most heavily on him. He has an academic career built on his, ahem, 'counter-terrorism' experience that hangs by a rapidly thinning thread. He is desperately covering his arse and trying to deflect blame away from himself and his squad. Some of that can be done by blaming individual officers below him (tellingly, they're starting with one who divulged squad secrets). The other option is to push shit uphill and accuse those above him in the Home Office.

Just as the police responded to the exposure of their orchestration of a miscarriage of justice in the Kennedy-Ratcliffe trial by leaking documents implicating the Crown Prosecution Service, so now we should be unsurprised to see them to blame government and rogue officers. Anything to protect the institution, its methods and culture.

Their refusal to implement even the mild recommendations of the HMIC report into Kennedy's unit, coupled with the way their new, supposedly tougher oversight for undercovers actually preserves all the previous tactics, shows a force that does not want to stop such violations in the future, let alone examine them in the past.

As the key figure so far exposed, we can expect the decoys, deflections and bullshit to centre around Bob Lambert. His performance so far shows he retains his lifelong commitment to injustice, and everything he says must be viewed through that filter.

self-investigation: when is the met not the met?

Operation Herne is the police's massive self-investigation into the undercover policing scandal. It was the Metropolitan Police investigating itself until the use of dead children's identities was revealed, coupled with Herne's boss Patricia Gallan lying to parliament about it all.

In what was claimed to be an attempt at independence, oversight was transferred in February to a different senior police officer, Chief Constable Mick Creedon of Derbyshire. A fortnight ago I blogged his bold claims that he would do a better job than any independent inquiry and it is 'almost insulting' of anyone to suggest police mightn't properly investigate themselves.

But still, getting control to him at least moves it away from the Met, right? Buried in a Channel 4 blogpost last week comes the news that Herne's staff level is increasing.

another 11 officers are to be seconded to that inquiry team, bringing the total to 44, of whom 75 per cent will be made up of Metropolitan police officers and staff.