Spycops 2024

The Spycops Inquiry has been going on with nothing like the profile it deserves given the astonishing things it’s revealing about policing in Britain in the past few decades. We’ll be publishing some proper coverage of it in the next few days. In the meantime some quick thoughts.

See As a ‘spy cop’, Bob Lambert betrayed a string of innocent women. The official inquiry must ask harsh questions of him – and the state in which George Monbiot writes:

“Bob Lambert worked for the Metropolitan police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) in the 1980s and 1990s, first as an undercover cop infiltrating environmental and animal rights protests, then as operational controller of the squad, supervising other spy cops doing similar work. In the course of his undercover assignments, while posing as a radical activist called Bob Robinson, he deceived four unsuspecting women, innocent of any crime, into starting relationships. He stole his identity from a dead child.”

“With one of the women, Jacqui, he fathered a child. Two years later, he vanished. She discovered his true identity by chance more than 20 years later, and has yet to recover from the devastating shock. She says she feels “raped by the state”. The person she loved and trusted was a ghost. “I feel like I’ve got no foundations in my life …. your first serious relationship, your first child, the first time you give birth – they’re all significant, but for me they’re gone, ruined … I was not consenting to sleeping with Bob Lambert, I didn’t know who Bob Lambert was.”

This is St Andrews University’s principal, Louise Richardson being questioned about employing Bob Lambert (MBE) AFTER he’d been exposed as a police spy – who had fathered a child with an activist he was having a relationship with:

“I think hiring people who have had real-world experience in an institution which is teaching counter-terrorism is entirely legitimate … I’m not going to get involved in what people do privately whoever they are.”

That’s an incredible thing to say.

Apart from the human scandal of the way ordinary people, peaceful activists have been treated, the political ramifications of all of this are remarkable.

One of the accused, Richard Walton, is a particular example of how these people acted with not just impunity but were actually rewarded for their actions.

George Monbiot writes: “Richard Walton, the commander accused with Lambert of involvement in spying on the Stephen Lawrence campaign, retired just after the IPCC concluded he would have had a “a case to answer for discreditable conduct”, avoiding potential disciplinary proceedings. Did he shuffle off into obscurity? No. He authored a report by the dark-money junktank Policy Exchange, calling for stricter penalties for environmental protesters. His recommendations were adopted by the government and incorporated into the draconian 2022 Police Act. So while the spy cops face no consequences, peaceful protesters, on his recommendation, now receive massive prison sentences.”

This is some of the background to where we are with Just Stop Oil protestors.

To recap, the inquiry revealed astonishing abuses by a highly political police force. As Monbiot states not only were the activists overwhelmingly peaceful – many of them doing great work – some of them were even involved in the campaign for justice for Stephen Lawrence:

“The great majority of the people being spied on were peaceful activists who presented no danger to democracy or human life. Many were involved in campaigning against corporate abuses. Some of the spying, like Lambert’s infiltration of a campaign against McDonald’s, looks like policing on behalf of corporate power. But even that was not the worst of it. Police spies were also used to infiltrate the campaign for justice for Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager murdered by racists in 1993, whose case the Met, as a result of institutional racism, failed properly to investigate. Police spies were allegedly deployed to find “dirt” that could be used to smear Stephen’s family. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC, now the Independent Office for Police Conduct) found that Lambert “played a part” in the intelligence gathering by spies inserted into the Lawrence campaign.”

The revelations are astonishing (or not) but what is emerging is that these officers, far from being brought to justice were rewarded and lauded. These were not rogue officers, these were officers carrying out actions as instructed from on high. More soon.

Follow Police Spies Out of Lives – Support group for legal action against undercover policing (@out_of_lives) for updates.