by Mark Thomas
But this isn’t just what happened to me, other women went through similar experiences. It causes serious psychological trauma. Some have suggested we’ve nothing much to complain about – men often lie about their age or background, we should just get over it. But there is a vast difference. This is an entirely false persona, a false name, false date of birth, false job, false personality, false politics, false marriage status (most of these cops were married). And to cap it all they are there to spy on you and your friends, and to try to undermine the movements for change that you support – it’s a very real violation.
John disappeared in 1992 and I finally had confirmation that he was an undercover policeman in 2011. I had spent almost nineteen years trying to find out what had happened.
Around the same time, Mark Kennedy was exposed by campaigners as an undercover policeman. He’d had a seven-year relationship with a campaigner and other relationships too. The response of the police was to claim that he was a rogue police officer who had gone off the rails and done his own thing – it was an isolated incident. I was so angry at this I got together with other women who had long-term relationships with undercover policemen and we began legal action to expose the reality and try to stop it happening again. The eight of us involved in the case had relationships with five different officers over a period spanning about twenty-five years. And there are other people bringing cases too, some of them had children as a result of these deceptive relationships.
So despite police protestations, it’s clear these relationships were an institutional tactic, not an individual one.
Since our case started and with the statements made by whistle blower Peter Francis (an ex-undercover cop in the Special Demonstration Squad), people have been shocked by the extent of police intrusion into people’s lives, with revelations about spying on family campaigns for justice, including the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, and evidence of the police assisting with the blacklisting of trade unionists and other political campaigners.
It’s important everyone is aware of the efforts by the state and powerful institutions to undermine movements for social progress, so we can all learn how to resist them. But it’s also important not to let our own fear or suspicion of others undermine our efforts too. We should also take heart from the fact they do infiltrate our campaigns – it shows they know we can and do have an effect when we communicate with others about the change we want to see in the world. So keep on at it!
policespiesoutoflives.org.uk has more details about our case. We’ve also linked up with the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance to work with other people and groups affected by undercover policing, campaignopposingpolice-surveillance.com.
Helen Steel
Police Spies Out of Our Lives
GUY’S STORY
Simon Wellings was a slack bastard.
He rocked up to Globalise Resistance in 2001 and got involved in everything; local, international protests and innumerable planning meetings. In 2002 he was elected to the steering committee. He travelled to protests in New York, Seville, Geneva and all over Europe and the UK. He was always in the organising teams for actions, but rarely in the more analytical or theoretical conversations. He had a car, was never short of a few bob and was quickly deemed indispensable.
He forged good friendships with a number of us, sharing personal information, finding out frustrations, desires and things I shudder at the thought of being recorded in a file somewhere on Scotland Yard’s server. He used to complain about not being able to get laid, that openness encouraging reciprocal sharing of similar info. He always came across as earnest and more than a little under-confident. He spent time with us outside the meetings and political actions, coming to a mate’s place in Devon for a party over a weekend.
In January 2005 an activist emailed me an mp3 of a voicemail message. Listening to the message was unnerving. ‘Yeah, he’s done a lot of stuff for Globalise Resistance but flirts with the anarchist side of things’ … ‘She’s [name deleted]’s girlfriend, they’re very overtly lesbian, they’ve been together for a long time.’ It didn’t take an expert to tell it was someone in the know being quizzed over images of protesters, giving information about relationships and connections between different activists, in GR and further afield. The background noises suggested they were in a police station. There were activists from across the spectrum mentioned and described. Sexuality and intimate relationships were especially noted.
I couldn’t place the voice, but it sounded familiar. A couple of months later, stuffing envelopes in the office, listening to music on the computer, I took a phone call, muted the music and set up a planning meeting with Wellings.
Turning up the volume after the call, the music had shuffled onto the recording and the penny dropped.
The first words in the planning meeting we’d arranged were, ‘Simon, you’ve been rumbled, fuck off’. He protested his innocence, he cried, he was almost convincing. Others cried, one or two decided he was innocent. We left it there – without a confession and with a small element of doubt, going public wasn’t an option, and we didn’t want to increase levels of paranoia amongst activists.
We eventually went public in 2011, Mark Kennedy/Stone was in the news, undercover cops were being exposed. On the advice of the Ratcliffe protesters’ solicitor it was time to go public with the phone message recording. Newsnight journalists were interested and published a picture of Wellings prominently on their website. The Met Police phoned and requested that Newsnight removed the picture. That request was enough to convince Newsnight’s lawyers that Wellings was indeed a cop.
A slack bastard cop who made accidental phone calls at the most delicious of times.
Guy Taylor
Globalise Resistance
DAVE’S STORY
Being a member of a trade union is a perfectly legal activity enshrined in UN and EU human rights conventions. Yet it is hardly big news that major companies do not like union activists. Trade unionists have often complained about being victimised for standing up for their fellow workers. Sometimes reps get overlooked for promotion, occasionally they get sacked and in very exceptional cases activists find it impossible to get work with any firms in their chosen industry. For decades there have been rumours of blacklisting in the UK building industry but we were always accused of being paranoid conspiracy theorists.
But in 2009, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) raided the premises of an organisation called the Consulting Association and found the documentary evidence. Secret files held on 3,213 workers contained names, addresses, national insurance numbers, phone numbers, car registrations, photographs but also union membership and union credentials. The blacklist files contain press cuttings plus entries recording times when workers complained about unpaid wages or raised concerns about site safety. Other files record a union petition against homelessness, that someone was a Buddhist and even that an individual wore Anti Nazi League badges! Some of the individual files are nearly fifty pages long.
The chief executive of The Consulting Association was Ian Kerr, who had previously worked for the notorious Economic League before it was closed down in the 1990s. But his paymasters were household names such as Balfour Beatty, Carillion, Kier, Costain, Laing O’Rourke and other major building contractors, who used the illegal database to check the names of prospective workers. If a name matched, the worker was refused work or sacked. Every time a firm checked a name they were charged around £2. In the last year of the Consulting Association, during the building of the Olympics Park, Sir Robert McAlpine and Skanska were both invoiced over £28,000 each: industrial scale blacklisting. The secret corporate spying organisation even had its own constitution that stipulated attendance at the quarterly meetings had to be at Director level.
For union activists this systematic blacklisting resulted in repeated dismissals and long periods of unemployment. Skilled workers lost their homes and had their children on free school meals, families divorced – al
l because they supported the union.
Most of the information on the blacklist files are attributed to senior managers but some entries came from corporate spies infiltrating union meetings. But it was not just multinationals that spied on us.
Ex-Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) undercover police officer Peter Francis (who spied on the Lawrence family) has given an interview to the Guardian confirming that he was instructed to spy on Frank Smith, a union and anti-racism activist. Frank Smith’s blacklist file has an entry that reads ‘under constant watch (officially) and considered to be politically dangerous’, it also has information about his American girlfriend, who was also under surveillance by Francis. How would any manager on a building site know this personal sensitive information? Where would the information originate from, if not from the police? And this is not an isolated case. Campaigners have discovered there are a number of other blacklist files involving anti-racist and environmental campaigners that never worked on a building site in their life.
And Peter Francis is not the only example of police collusion. In the 1990s another undercover officer Mark Jenner posed as a building worker in east London, attending picket lines and even chairing construction safety campaign meetings. Unsurprisingly, extensive reports about activists who participated in these campaigns appear in their blacklist files. One of the people that Mark Jenner spied on was Steve Hedley, currently the Assistant General Secretary of the RMT union.
In 2008, an officer from the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (NETCU) gave a PowerPoint presentation at a secret Consulting Association meeting. According to an interview Ian Kerr gave to The Times, the blacklisting body and secret police unit agreed a ‘two-way exchange’ of information. Notes of that meeting are held by the Information Commissioner’s Office which has refused an FOI request to make them public.
The Blacklist Support Group submitted a complaint about police collusion to the IPCC. This has now been handed over to Operation Herne, the investigation into undercover policing. The IPCC have written back admitting that Special Branch officers across the UK routinely provided information about prospective employees.
Blacklisting is no longer an industrial relations issue; it is a conspiracy between multi-national construction firms, the police and the security services. The parallels with phone hacking are obvious. There is however a significant difference with phone hacking, where the police involvement was supposedly due to individual corruption. The police collusion in blacklisting is not one or two rogue officers but standard operating procedure by the state to target campaigners under the guise of ‘domestic extremism’ and routinely share information with big business.
If your politics are vaguely left of centre, it hardly comes as a big surprise that the state sides with big business against the trade unions. But in a democratic society, workers should be free to join a trade union and participate in peaceful protest without the fear that their every move will be recorded and that they will be denied the opportunity to provide for their families.
In any civilised society, the senior managers who deliberately orchestrated this conspiracy would be behind bars. But we live in a time when the pursuit of profit is valued above all else and the lives of real people, our children and partners, mean nothing to multinational corporations. I do not have a scintilla of respect for the directors who blacklisted two generations of union members. As for the cheerleaders and apologists in the legal and public relations professions, I wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire. But make no mistake. For those of us whose working lives have been ruined by these wretches, this is personal. And we intend to hound these human rights abusers until we get justice.
Dave Smith
Blacklisted engineer
Blacklist Support Group
CREDIT: JANE HOBSON
A NOTE FROM PETER HIRST
I first met Mark when we were both students at Bretton Hall Higher Education College, a place situated almost exactly equidistant from Wakefield and Barnsley. The college is long closed, but the buildings are still there and the grounds are now famous as the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The college accommodation seems likely to become a boutique hotel; a stately home built on the exploitation of local coal and local people briefly available to all as a centre of educational innovation under Alec Clegg,1 now fated to become an exclusive hotel for the monied.
Bretton, a manicured Capability Brown inspired velvet rut. Students came from all over the country to study there. I lived at home in Wakefield, with my girlfriend from school. Mark came from London. Fame was on the TV, the New Romantics were high in the charts. Bretton Hall looked nice and clean and safe – it was like going on holiday every week to a place where people had a chance to make sense of themselves and their lives in comfort. Mostly they were nice, clean middle-class people away from home dyeing their hair, getting drunk for the first time and losing their virginity – an opportunity everyone should have without the burden of debt.
I met some brilliant people there and saw that life was not bleak for everyone, everywhere. Some people had parents who were limited companies, some got cars for their eighteenth birthday, some people didn’t get The Smiths.
While we were there, the callous, cruel and greedy policies of the eighties’ free-marketeers were being introduced in Britain despite the calamities they had caused elsewhere in the world. Low taxes for the rich, greater trade freedom and privatisation of commonly-owned assets – an agenda that benefits only the super-rich and ruins the lives of everyone else and the planet itself. But those Tropicana drinks were free and Bretton College often looked like a place where the mantra was ‘Fame costs, and this is where you start paying – in sweat’. The lie that hard work would be rewarded and everyone had an equal chance to self-expression, a career and leg-warmers – if only they would work hard! Two miles away Woolley Colliery was full of hardworking people whose reward would be to be vilified for fighting to protect their communities in a grim struggle for a decent life.
Bretton was a cocoon – all enthusiasm and art, very little politics, populated by comfortable, well-manicured, polite people, reminiscent of the Eloi in The Time Machine. And while Mark always rocked the leotard and alice band, he wasn’t content to merely feed, play and mate.
Wakefield was a Tetley Bitter drinking town and the pubs were packed from Thursday through to Sunday with beered up locals pretending they were in a Duran Duran video. The Labour Club was not like this. At all. Ever.
It was a truth, universally accepted, that a young person in the eighties should be in search of a party to belong to. I joined the Labour Party and attended several meetings but somehow the detailed discussion of how best to resite bus stops on Park Lodge Lane seemed something of a distraction when the evils of Thatcherism were there to be fought. I was honestly amazed that anyone could even consider voting Conservative at any time, my reaction to election losses for Labour was not based on any real understanding of polling or policy – I was simply shocked. My parents were not particularly political, my dad was a Labour supporter of the old school ‘fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’, he was a fan of Harold Wilson. He didn’t do anything political except vote and read the Daily Mirror.
Mark and I were kindred spirits, eager and restless – doers, not talkers – and so we set off on a political Odyssey with the Labour Club as our Argos. We fought for the miners, for student grants, for CND and against union busters. For Cuba, against nursery closures, for anti-apartheid. We met wonderful, wonderful people.
Those of us who believe that we have a responsibility to leave the world and the people in it in better condition than we found it, need positive stories and places where those stories will get heard. A repository of hope, where the belief is that, in the end, our endeavours will result in a world that is a fairer and better place. Far too much of the storytelling has been in the hands of the media, owned and controlled by those with a big share in the status quo.
The Red Shed is full of stories that ar
e not known or celebrated, but this is the place where Mark and I chose to go and still choose to go. London is many towns all accreted together. Bretton an educational pastoral idyll. Wakefield town centre full of places where many drank to forget – but the Red Shed is, at its best, a place to go to remember and to use that memory to draw strength for other challenges. To remember that nothing worth having ever came easy, to remember the heroism of struggle and the joy of solidarity even in defeat.
Maybe the Labour Club was the start of Mark’s political and performance journey, but Mark’s search for truth and justice began a long time before he came to Bretton Hall, Wakefield or the Red Shed – not that it matters. It doesn’t matter because his commitment, loyalty and love for the club has sustained the club and energised the fiftieth anniversary celebrations and those of us who have joined him on his search for the schoolkid singers and the school.
Peter R Hirst
A NOTE FROM RICHARD COUNCIL, SECRETARY OF THE RED SHED
Who would have believed that a red shed could be on Broadway! Well not quite, but you don’t know.
Fifty years a socialist club, never a derogatory description of us and genuinely true for the thirty-four years I have been a member.
We have seen good times and bad, many battles both local and national, a financial fight for our survival and just as importantly, we are still here to tell the tale.
The club is a living and breathing entity which spans politics across the left – has seen the occasional Tory councillor and MP cross our doors (and buy a round for those in the bar!). We are the home of new music, of environmental politics, of good real ale and CAMRA, the local TUC, trade unions and even the Labour Party and so much else.
We are proud of all of this.
We are a simple wooden building purchased and supported by Labour Party members since September 1966.
