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.

many more dead children abused by police

So, senior police are either incalculably incompetent or they've being lying to parliament again.

To recap: in early February the Home Affairs Select Committee - a cross party group of MPs - held a hearing on the undercover policing scandal (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. She was overseeing Operation Herne, 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.)

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.

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.

She explained that the practice was limited to the two already discredited and conveniently disbanded units responsible for infiltration of political activists.

I think it has been, from the evidence I have seen, confined to two units, and that is the SDS and the NPOIU.

Asked if it was still going on, she - tellingly - sidestepped by saying it was

not sanctioned within the Metropolitan Police or any other police force

This is very reminiscent of the early days of the sexual relationships being exposed. A spokesperson for the Association of Chief Police Officers was similarly unequivocal then, saying

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

We now know he was lying through his teeth, trying to hang out the frontline officers in order to protect their superiors. Pushed on when using dead children had stopped, Gallan would not be specific.

If I were to give a date, I could be wrong and I think I would then be guilty of misleading you, and I do not want to do that.

So, by implication, the statement that it was probably just the two units is something she is confident of. She continued

It has never been practice within most areas of undercover policing to do that. I think that is the first thing we need to state. The practice has been confined, we believe, to two units.

Trying to avoid any liability for what her force has done to people, she stoutly refused to apologise for any of it.

The shock of the dead children scandal meant that, a week after Gallan's testimony, an officer from outside the Met called Mick Creedon was appointed to take over Operation Herne. Six weeks ago he admitted to the Select Committee that the identity theft was actually 'common practice'.

Today's Times exposes it still further.

Undercover officers say that they were trained to use the identities of the dead as cover names and it became "standard practice" in Special Branch units in the Metropolitan Police and across the country.

The method was employed by officers infiltrating targets as diverse as big criminal networks, gangs of football hooligans and violent animal rights groups. Other agencies, ranging from Revenue and Customs to regional crime squads, are also believed to have used the technique.

Gallan's confirmation of a mere two cases was risible, and even the Guardian's estimate of 80 done by the Special Demonstration Squad is a small fraction of it.

So either Gallan is so grossly incompetent that she'd spent 16 months not finding out the basics of what she was investigating and hadn't uncovered what was a foundational part of the officers' training, or else she repeatedly lied to the Select Committee. I leave you to decide for yourself which one is the most likely.

The Committee's chair, Keith Vaz MP, has repeatedly said that it is unacceptable to leave the families whose childrens' identities were used uninformed. The police are steadfastly refusing to do it. However they are, the Times reports, on the brink of apologising. To nobody in particular.

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.