Fifteen years on, one of the women who blew the lid off the Spycops scandal talks to Freedom about her political insights — and what the Undercover Policing Inquiry has revealed about the workings of the British secret state

~ Interviewed by Uri Gordon ~

You’ve just launched your book Disclosure, how did it go?

It’s been really great actually, I was kind of nervous because I didn’t really think about it for a long time and then suddenly it was like ‘Oh my God that’s happening next week’ but it was really good—we did the talk at Hay on Wye, Housmans bookshop which was really lovely, and Sumac centre in Nottingham—it was lovely to be back at the Sumac, it felt really vibrant when we were there, and people were saying that’s something that’s happened in the last year or so, like since COVID. After it was trashed by the spycops stuff and then COVID now it’s finally starting to get back to being an exciting community space so that was really lovely to see.

It’s coming on to 15 years since Mark Kennedy was exposed and the huge snowball that followed, with the Undercover Policing Inquiry still moving on with lots of issues and delays. But looking back, what did you learn through the inquiry that you hadn’t already known about infiltration, entrapment…

OK so this is quite complicated, because the political police that were spying on my groups were not trying to send people to gaol for the most part, and I think there’s quite a big difference between the political police who are reporting back on everything you do, every aspect of your social network, every conflict or embarrassing thing that’s ever happened in your life with a view to maybe being able to leverage it; this kind of weird shadowy ideological political policing is obviously very different from the undercover police officer who is there to gather evidence and get people sent to gaol.

But there’s stuff that I learned right at the beginning when Mark was first uncovered, because it’s not like we didn’t think they might be spying on our meetings. But when it turned out to be Mark, and it turned out to be Jim Boyling, and Rod Richardson, and Lynn Watson, then I really learnt that, you know, the people who are socially awkward and make you feel uncomfortable and maybe come to one meeting and don’t get involved in very much and then leave—who were the people we always assumed were the spies—are just socially awkward people. And again, in my naiveté this surprised me at the time, but the spies have read How to Make Friends and Influence People cover to cover, and they’re charismatic, they’re trained in emotional manipulation, they’re right in there at the heart of stuff, and they’re living in your house and sleeping in your bed.

So that was a learning curve. The Undercover Research Group put together a very good document with “15 questions to ask” if you suspect someone in your group is a cop, it’s also got a lot of disclaimers about how not to destroy your group with paranoia and rumours.

Let’s zoom out to the bigger picture, what are we finding out through the UCPI?

The insights that we’ve gained into the big picture are massive. Lots of people are quite rude about the Inquiry—and yes it’s a public inquiry run by the British state, and it’s mistreating the victims in horrible ways, but the information that is coming out of it is incredible. First of all, just in terms of insights into the workings of the secret state. One big story that didn’t get enough attention is how the Conservatives in 1983  had the police dig dirt on CND to discredit Labour—that’s straight out of the tin-pot dictatorship play book.

But another thing that you see, and I say this in the book, is that the secrecy around it creates this glamour and this air of exciting spy stuff—but in fact so much of it is incredibly bureaucratic. For these officers to be sent undercover you have this whole employment structure of handlers, and people who are filing the reports, and a budget line that is coming from the Home Office that they have to justify every year so that people keep their jobs. I hadn’t really thought about that part and there’s so much of it in the disclosure that I got around Mark, things about expenses and management, and I’m sure there’s way more that was not disclosed just because the court didn’t think it was relevant. So on the one hand there’s the deep state and the ideological war that is being waged on the progressive left, then on the other hand you have all this petty middle-management and people trying to keep their jobs.

The other thing that the inquiry is giving us is this incredible history of social movements— because the cops were everywhere and writing everything down. The Special Demonstration Squad was set up in 1968 after the riots in Grosvenor Square against the Vietnam War, and ran right up until 2008, so forty years. And sure a lot of it is wrong or misunderstood, or they’ve reported on really weird and inappropriate stuff, but the overall picture you get of political movements right the way across the left is absolutely fascinating.  

An interesting example was the Brixton riots in 1981. And the intelligence around that is really interesting because what they basically say is ‘there’s no one you could have spied on to stop this happening’, this was a spontaneous outbreak of community anger, essentially in response to the police’s Operation Swamp and the general racism and brutalised policing that was taking place. But did you know, what the Met actually did was try to blame the anarchists. Scotland Yard basically did a press release saying violent anarchists kicked off the riots in Brixton, and they arrested and prosecuted some people from the squats in Brixton, but at the same time the spycops in the field were basically saying ‘you do realise that these people had nothing to do with making Brixton happen?’.

But there’s also a whole bunch of stuff that we’re not even seeing, I suspect because the police didn’t get a look in and it was being handled by MI5. So the miners’ strike we saw almost nothing about.

You talk about a ‘game of broken telephone’ in terms of how intelligence gets more and more politicised as it goes up the pipeline. Can you say more about that?

So this is the process where raw intelligence goes into intelligence reports for internal consumption, and from there it gets passed on, ‘sanitised’ they call it, into higher level documents that are going to senior police officers, the Home Office and wherever else. And the language changes, and the mischaracterisations get more stark as you go higher up the chain.

The really classic example is that you have lots of intelligence about hunt supporters violently assaulting hunt saboteurs. And then you move to read the funding applications and the annual reports, the authorisation documents that are being passed up the chain to be signed off by senior officers, commissioners, Home Office. And now they say things like ‘Hunt sabotage causes significant problems for police in many areas, often resulting in violent assaults including grievous bodily harm’—just not who harmed who. So the statement is not untrue but if you read that underlying intelligence you understand that there is some very creative editing going on here, and that happens a lot. Or the police could know that an attempt to get into Drax power station and get up on the buckets intends to do no damage, but that will be recorded in their early intelligence but left out of the reporting about  ‘attacks on British infrastructure’. Because they need to make themselves sound important.

What about your political insights? What would you say today to people who might, for example, talk about the “illusions” of democracy and human rights?

I’d say that those illusions are actually quite politically important. These days I find myself talking a lot about human rights and about democracy, because what I discovered is that if you believe you already live in a police state and just allow those illusions to die, then you increase the available space for the police state to expand. The fact that the general population is quite attached to the idea that they live in a free country with human rights and democracy is really fuckin’ important. And I totally remember us being like ‘well you know it’s the police, it’s just what they do’—and that’s not OK, you need people to believe that human rights and democracy are important otherwise the state just gets away with trampling all over society. Those things just weren’t in question in the same way that they are now, yes they were coming after protest but we had a lot more political space, even with the Criminal Justice Act and the 2001 Terrorism Act.

Last question: do you think they’re still at it? I mean the sexual relationships specifically.

The short answer is ‘yes I do’. I don’t have any particular evidence for that, but I believe that they’re still doing it. It’s still a legal grey area around sexual relationships. There are instructions to undercover officers to not have sex with people that they’re spying on, but there is no law that prohibits it, and in fact the CHIS Act basically makes anything that they’re authorised to do lawful, however illegal.

The police have also said they’re no longer sending undercover officers to spy on political movements—which may be true, it may be a straight-up lie—but what we also know is that Martin Hogbin was uncovered at the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, and he was a corporate spy working for British Aerospace. There was also a corporate spy we know in London Rising Tide, these are private contractors who were hired by the companies that we’re protesting against. So my big question is, if the police are no longer sending officers to spy on these groups—who is? Are the police paying private contractors to provide them with intelligence? Are companies bypassing the police and just going straight in? At the same time, I think the digital age has changed a lot about how people organise politically, and probably also around how spying happens. I hope that the work that we’re doing means people are more aware and it is less easy to spy on groups, but yeah my gut feeling is that they haven’t stopped.

Disclosure: Unravelling the Spycops Files by Kate Wilson. W&N, 2025. 352pp. ISBN 978-1399614290