The inquiry into undercover policing continues its lengthy way after being set up by the then Home Secretary, Theresa May in 2015. Its purpose was to investigate the activities of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) and the ‘National Public Order Intelligence Unit’. The first hearings did not begin until 2020, mainly because the Metropolitan Police delayed and obstructed the passing of information to the Inquiry. Its official report might not now be produced until nearer 2030, well into the long grass. This follows the usual purpose of official Inquiries, which is to suffocate and tie up in legal knots any real opposition to the system, eventually reporting when most of the people involved are either retired or dead.
The Inquiry, under Judge Mitting, was set up to head off the outcry following the disclosure that undercover police officers infiltrating environmental, campaigning and socialist organisations had deceived young women into forming relationships with them which had in some cases led to the women having children. These relationships were developed by the undercover cops to give themselves credibility as political activists. Once the cops’ period of infiltration had ended, they disappeared from the lives of the women involved, abandoning the children they had fathered. The cops’ identities themselves were based on those of dead children which were then used to provide driving licences, passports etc in the dead person’s name. Up to now the Inquiry has ruled that the majority of even these cover names of the undercover cops should not be revealed. More than 1,000 groups were spied on but fewer than 100 actually named.
The ruling class has always attempted to infiltrate, spy on and disrupt the activities of groups it deems to be ‘subversive’ or a threat to the state. The Special Branch itself was formed in 1883 to spy on the activities of Irish revolutionaries in Britain. The SDS was part of the Special Branch. It was originally named the Special Operations Squad and was set up by the Labour government in 1968 in response to the massive demonstrations against the Vietnam war. It was rebranded as the SDS in 1972 by the Conservative government of the time and officially disbanded in 2008. Its grubby work is now carried out by, amongst others, the National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit, set up in 2004.
What has become clear from the evidence and testimonies already presented is that the undercover cops and their superior officers deliberately targeted young women as a means to gain credibility in their roles as activists. The fact that up to now four of these cops have been found out to have fathered children and then abandoned them when their deployment ended exposes the sexist depravity the forces of the state will sink to in defending their imperialist system.
The information gathered and reported on by these undercover cops ranges from what seems the farcical reporting of babysitting rotas to the activities of the Stephen Lawrence Campaign to political disputes in the Troops Out Movement (TOM) – an organisation formed to oppose the British occupation of the north of Ireland. One of these undercover cops worked his way up to become a member of the leading body of the TOM, the National Secretariat, directing its national work and political strategy. No wonder then that it continued in its ineffectual, liberal, non-confrontational policies and reserved its energy to oppose and undermine any anti-imperialist politics such as those of the RCG that attempted to radicalise TOM’s political positions. As another undercover cop who had infiltrated TOM stated in his evidence about the organisation, ‘It had no subversive objectives and as far as I am aware, did not employ or approve the use of violence to achieve its objectives’.
When any attempts at analysis of the organisations they infiltrated have been made by these undercover cops the common theme has been that none of them posed any real threat to British imperialism. Unwittingly they provide an indictment of the politics of the middle class left in this country since the end of the second world war.
Bob Shepherd
