As the UK spycops inquiry continues, a prominent target of police overreach reflects on their internationalism—and ours
~ Dave Morris ~
Victories continue to stack up in the campaign to expose and challenge the Met Police’s spycops scandal. First their secret political policing unit was outed. Then the authorities were forced to call a public inquiry. £82 million (and counting) of public funds later, we have forced the Met and Security Services to release tens of thousands of secret reports on campaigners. These expose the range of disgusting police tactics employed.
All the Met have to show for it so far is a series of grovelling apologies they’ve been forced to make for the targeting of women activists for abusive sexual relationships, and for the monitoring of anti-racist organisations and family justice campaigns. And to cap it all the Inquiry judge ruled last year that the spying operations should have been closed down in the early 1970s.
One aspect of the Inquiry, officially limited to “England and Wales,” which has emerged is the Met and MI5’s obsession with “international links.” For example, in 1978 the pacifistic anarchist group London Greenpeace was added to a UK Terrorism Briefing sent to the government’s cabinet. Why? Because it was making links with those abroad opposing nuclear power plants and uranium mining.
The spycops, originally set up to undermine opposition to the Vietnam war, soon started to report on the anti-apartheid movement. In July a spycop in the Inquiry witness box admitted MI5 had close links with other security service “partners” abroad, including the South African government’s notorious ‘BOSS’ security service.
We look forward to hearings in 2025 which will reveal how spycop Mark Kennedy travelled to Iceland and Germany to report on environmental activists. Most of these spies, when they “disappeared” at the end of their deployments, pretended to have emigrated. It is becoming clear that local special branches and police abroad helped them.
Governments, and their police and security services, have always collaborated together globally, as do corporations and military organisations. They just don’t like it when activists do the same.
In the 1990s there were some determined efforts to develop ongoing international links among grassroots anti-capitalist movements. This included the development in 1996 of the Peoples Global Action anti-capitalist network in Mexico, followed by gatherings in Spain 1997 and Geneva 1998. In the UK, the Reclaim The Streets movement was particularly involved.
There were also mobilisations related to major financial and political gatherings, such as the Battle of Seattle in 1999 at the World Trade Organisation meeting in the USA, later G8, G20, Rio Earth Summit, COPs climate summits etc.
One international campaign I was involved in was against McDonald’s. This features in the latest Inquiry hearings, which started in October. In 1990 the McDonald’s Corporation junk food transnational sued members of London Greenpeace. The group had produced leaflets attacking its exploitation of workers and suppression of union activity, unethical advertising targeting children, promotion of unhealthy junk food, damage to the environment caused by packaging and beef production, and industrial-scale cruelty to billions of animals. The resultant court case became the longest and one of the most controversial in English legal history.
In response, the incredibly effective McLibel Support Campaign (1991-2005) was set up to ensure the corporation’s efforts to censor their critics failed. What’s Wrong With McDonald’s? leaflets had been handed out in the low thousands before libel writs were issued in 1990 — by the end of the trial millions were being given out globally.
We were sent various versions of that flyer in at least 20 languages — all put up on mcspotlight.org, possibly the world’s first internet site targeting a corporation, encouraging people to print them off and adapt/distribute them themselves. On the Saturday after the trial verdict in 1997 two thirds of McDonald’s 750 stores in the UK were leafleted. October 16th, ‘UN World Food Day’ had been re-designated ‘World Anti-McDonald’s Day’ and on that day in 1999 we had feedback from 425 protests outside stores in 345 towns in 23 countries.
The success of the campaign involved no PR firms, marketing budget, paid staff, or formal backing from any large organisation, and was up against maybe the world’s largest and probably most successful marketing firm. Indeed, McDonald’s spent an estimated £10m on legal costs for the trial (in contrast to the defendants’ £35k), and utilised a global advertising budget of $2b per year.
However, we had demonstrated — as if we didn’t already know — the huge potential of coordinated grassroots action and people power. That, and the other examples above, is of course exactly what no government wants, what the spycops were obsessed with monitoring and undermining, but which is the essential basis for ending oppression and creating a decent society for everyone.
So let’s send our admiration and solidarity to all those around the world who are contributing to such vital struggles.
This article first appeared in the Winter 2024/25 issue of Freedom Anarchist Journal
