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The Herald Scotland
29-06-2025
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
History will judge this Labour government for targeting protesters
There, Donna told me about the man she knew as Carlo Neri and how he used her to gain access to the activists she hung around with. Neri, whose real name was Carlo Sorrachi, affected to like the things she liked, told her he loved her, and asked her to marry him. Then, when she had served her purpose, he disappeared. Donna has since written her own book about her experience: Small Town Girl. The public inquiry which, back then, had not yet taken evidence, has heard similar stories from other women, whose lives were co-opted by a state intent on stamping out dissent. Some of the undercover officers fathered babies with their duped partners: tiny bundles of collateral damage, their lives forever tarnished by the deceit that led to their conception. Beyond the emotional fallout, two aspects of the scandal stand out for me. The first is the way the groups chosen for infiltration were cherry-picked. The Special Demonstration Squad (then called the Special Operations Squad) was set up in 1968 to target Vietnam War protesters. In the following 50 years, it sent officers into, amongst others, the anti-apartheid movement, Camps for Climate Action, and the campaign to bring the killers of Stephen Lawrence to court. Right-wing groups were largely left alone. Read more Dani Garavelli Most of those left-wing groups are now regarded as having occupied the moral high ground. Anti-apartheid activists were standing up against the iniquity of the South African regime while Margaret Thatcher was still refusing to introduce economic sanctions. The climate action groups were ahead of the curve on the crisis facing the planet. The Stephen Lawrence campaign exposed the institutional racism the Met was trying to cover up. The second troubling aspect is the degree to which the police were prepared to cross legal/ethical lines in order to gain paltry intelligence. The women who unwittingly slept with undercover officers see themselves as victims of state-sanctioned rape. Meanwhile, many of the officers acted as agent provocateurs, actively encouraging the acts of sabotage the police could act on and the courts punish. One law for those upholding the status quo, and another for those challenging it. You might think these revelations, which have been entering the public domain in dribs and drabs over the last few years, would have given the establishment pause for thought; that governments, under whose auspices the police operate, might have asked themselves searching questions about how this was allowed to happen, and the double standards being applied. Instead, the Conservatives introduced two pieces of legislation — the Police Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 — designed to further restrict the right to demonstrate, by criminalising long-established forms of civil disobedience such as chaining yourself to fences or disrupting major road networks and national events. Earlier this year, a report by the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) claimed the aggressive police use of these new laws, along with the demonisation of peaceful protesters, had become so pronounced it amounted to repression. The powers are most often used against activists who threaten those policies the government is hellbent on pursuing: the expansion of roads and airports and oil fields, for example, and the freedom to support any heinous regime it regards as useful. Yvette Cooper is targeting Palestine Action (Image: PA) Far from reversing this trend, Labour has entrenched it. Yvette Cooper unsuccessfully defended her predecessor Suella Braverman against claims the government had acted unlawfully when it reduced the threshold for police intervention from 'serious disruption to the life of the community' to 'more than minor'. Now she seems determined to proscribe Palestine Action, a protest group which is committed to 'ending global participation in Israel's genocidal and apartheid regime'. This would place it on a par with Isis, the IRA and Al-Qaeda, and criminalise not only those who take part in action, but anyone who expresses sympathy or support. So what did Palestine Action do to deserve this treatment? Did it threaten or perpetrate acts of violence? Did it cause widespread alarm or endanger lives? There is no evidence to suggest so. Mostly, its activities have involved vandalism at factories and military bases it claims to be involved in supplying weapons or assistance to Israel. In 2022, it broke into the Thales factory in Glasgow, causing more than £1m of damage to munitions produced there. Then, last week, it sprayed red paint into the engines of two Airbus Voyager aircraft. Read more: Are there problems with such tactics? I would argue there are. Thales and our military bases are also producing weapons and carrying out missions unrelated to Israel's attacks on Palestinians. Thales' Belfast factory has a contract to supply 5,000 air defence missiles to Ukraine. Aircraft from RAF Brize Norton have been involved in dropping humanitarian aid to Gaza. If there is one thing Russia's invasion of Ukraine has taught old anti-war types like myself it is that there are times when a strong defence capacity is essential. But these are arguments about specific choices, not the legitimacy of dissent. They are not a justification for increasing the gravity of the offence or the punishment meted out to those who commit it. The vandalism Palestine Action inflicted is already a criminal offence. But the four people arrested in connection with the Brize Norton attack have been arrested not, as you might expect, in connection with criminal damage, but under the Terrorism Act. This despite the fact that attacks on military air bases are not new. In 2017, two men cut through fences at BAE Warton in an attempt to target fighter jets destined for Saudi Arabia and attacks on Yemen. They were charged with but acquitted of criminal damage. In 2003, a group of anti-war protesters broke into RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire to sabotage US bombers before they flew to Iraq. Keir Starmer knows this because he defended them on the grounds they were trying to stop the planes from committing war crimes. Apparently, Starmer has no such qualms about war crimes now or at least not the ones being carried out by Israel. It's impossible — isn't it, given the way events have unfolded? — not to notice that the crackdown is being carried out selectively, and with one particular brand of activism in mind. That's what the smearing of pro-Palestinian protesters on peaceful marches exposes. A pro-Palestine protest at Westminster. (Image: PA) But the proscription of a particular group on political grounds is dangerous on multiple fronts. It may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, tipping that that group into violent acts its members would not otherwise have countenanced. And it sets a precedent for the future proscription of any protest group whose goals any government doesn't like. When suffragette statues were being attacked by trans rights activists last year, Cooper described them as honouring 'women who fought for freedom and justice' though they committed acts similar to the ones she is now trying to proscribe, and were mostly loathed by the politicians of their day. History will judge her government for its targeting of those who — in the face of establishment recalcitrance — are also driven to take direct action. Perhaps future Home Secretaries will praise pro-Palestinian protesters as champions of freedom and justice. But how many more will die in Gaza before that day comes?
The Guardian
09-03-2025
- The Guardian
Revisited: the spy cops scandal (part 2)
This episode first aired on 9 December 2020. In 2018, Frank Bennett's sister Honor received a hand-delivered letter from a public inquiry about their 18-year-old brother Michael Hartley, who had been reported missing at sea, believed dead, 50 years before. For a moment, they thought Michael had been found, but in fact, the letter revealed that their dead brother's identity had been stolen by a police officer who had penetrated two leftwing organisations. Using this false identity, the police spy had deceived a woman into a sexual relationship and had been prosecuted during his deployment. Frank talks to Anushka Asthana about his childhood and the impact his brother's death had on him and his family. Knowing that, years on, his brother's name had been used by police has had a huge impact on his mental health, he says. Frank describes the police's behaviour as 'disgusting'. Anushka also talks to Guardian investigative editor Paul Lewis and Guardian investigative reporter Rob Evans about their decade-long investigation with activists to uncover the activities of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS). Over four decades, at least 139 police officers were given fake identities to closely monitor the inner workings of more than 1,000 political groups. Some of those identities had been stolen from dead children to lend credibility to their aliases – and some officers, in a macabre ritual, even visited the graves of the children whose identities they were using. The work of activists and the Guardian has resulted in a judge-led public inquiry on a statutory level with other significant inquiries, such as Lord Saville's investigation into Bloody Sunday and the Chilcot examination of the Iraq invasion. If you have been affected by this podcast, the Samaritans are available for counselling on 116 123. Archive: Channel 4 News; BBC; YouTube; Independent; ITN
The Guardian
06-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on undercover policing: the struggle for accountability continues
Information in the public domain about the undercover policing of protest groups from the late 1960s onwards would not be there were it not for the extraordinary courage of a group of women who were conned by officers into long-term sexual relationships. It is more than a decade since the investigation of this, and other wrongful actions, by undercover units was taken over by a judge-led public inquiry. Following revelations that officers had spied on Stephen Lawrence's family, Theresa May, who was then the home secretary, ordered that inquiry. ITV's new three-part documentary, The Undercover Police Scandal: Love and Lies Exposed, made in collaboration with the Guardian, emphasises that there was nothing inevitable about this outcome. The series, which features remarkable home-video footage of one officer, Mark Jenner (known undercover as Mark Cassidy), is a gripping and shocking account of the way that five women were tricked into romantic relationships lasting years. As well as the insidious conduct of individuals, the series sheds light on the systemic nature of the abuse and the tenacity of the women who uncovered the truth. Undercover police, like the intelligence services, have a role to play in protecting the public from dangerous criminals. But the methods of the secret unit that these officers belonged to, the Special Demonstration Squad, were abusive and wrong – as the Metropolitan police admitted when it settled a civil case 10 years ago. The women spied on were grossly unsuitable targets. The activists in the film were involved in non-violent leftwing protests. When Mark Stone (in reality Mark Kennedy) was unmasked in 2011, efforts were made to present him as a 'rogue officer'. But this too was false: a tradecraft manual obtained by this newspaper recommended 'fleeting' relationships as a tactic. We now know that 50 or more women were manipulated into relationships by at least 25 officers, several of whom had children with partners who did not know their real names (the mother of Bob Lambert's child learned his identity from the press). Whose idea was all this? Who authorised it in specific cases? Was the officer the sole conduit for intelligence or were conversations bugged? What kinds of discussions with supervisors took place when women began to speak about having children, or suffered bereavements and asked their boyfriends to attend funerals? Despite the inquiry, vast amounts of material remain hidden. Of the four men featured in the series, so far Lambert is the only one to have testified at the inquiry. John Dines (known undercover as John Barker), with whom Helen Steel spent two years before he deserted her, has refused to appear. Last year, one officer, Trevor Morris, described the Met's official apology to the women as 'outrageous'. Years of reflecting on what happened have made these women eloquent witnesses as well as skilful detectives. Almost all the undercover officers using these tactics were men, some of them married with children. Their victims derive some satisfaction from having outsmarted the secret state. But nothing can turn back the clock or get back those stolen years and feelings. The officially sanctioned deception and abuse of multiple young women by British police officers was a disgraceful episode. It is not enough to pledge that it will never be repeated. Continued resistance to full disclosure, and accountability, must end.
