Meeting on UK undercover policing highlights need for an independent inquiry
By
Paul Mitchell
23 February 2017
Last week a number of organisations and individuals involved in the exposure of police surveillance and infiltration of protest groups and political parties held a meeting, “Strikers & Spy cops—from Grunwick to now,” in central London.
During the course of the meeting it became clear, as the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) has maintained from the start, that the state is using the ongoing Undercover Policing Inquiry (UPI), chaired by Lord Justice Pitchford, to review and refine its repressive policies. The role of the UPI is to clean up the fall-out from several high-profile court cases, rather than conducting an independent investigation of anti-democratic measures against political organisations and individuals.
In its submission to the UPI, the SEP rejected its terms of reference, which means that hardly any political organisations have been designated as core participants. This is “especially peculiar, given that the focus of the inquiry is the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), which was specifically created as part of high-level political operations against the left.”
The SEP submission demanded “the immediate release of the names of all undercover police operatives, especially those active in the Workers Revolutionary Party (and its forerunners and successor organisations), their pseudonyms and dates of operation.”
The London meeting heard how undercover police officers from the SDS and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) had infiltrated hundreds of political groups since 1968, using a multitude of deceptive techniques. These included using the names of at least 42 dead children, and officers forming long-term…