if i were the gm crop industry

Around fifteen years ago several large multinationals tried to introduce genetically modified crops to Europe. They were met with suspicion, and they responded - notably with Monsanto's 'Food Health Hope' advertising campaign that included URLs for anti-GM groups - with a concerted effort to allay fears.

They lost. They said that what they were doing was no different to the selective breeding that humans have been doing for centuries. But thus far nobody has been able to make a scorpion mate with a tomato; the results of such a novel genetic mix are far more unpredictable than crossing two tomatoes. They claimed their new crops would need less argichemicals, but part of the point of things like Monsanto's Roundup-Ready crops was to allow farmers to drench fields in the chemicals without killing the crops.

This leads us on to the really sinister part. GM was planned as a device to get farmers to use patented crops which tied you in to using their chemicals. You know the way Canon, Epson and co sell you an amazing scanner-printer for £40 then charge you £30 a time to get toner cartridges, leaving you skinter than planned or else with a printer that's perpetually out of use? Like that, but with the global food supply.

To ensure that farmers didn't wriggle out of it there were patents filed for 'terminator genes'; plants whose seeds would be infertile, meaning farmers couldn't save some of their seed to plant next year but instead would have to buy new seed every year from Monsanto.

Even as they conspired to take control of food away from those who can't pay, they claimed that anti-GM sentiment was ill informed fear of technology, a luxury only available to well fed rich people. This convenently ignored the fact that governments across Africa banded together to shun GM, and Indian farmers burned crops and protested in their hundreds of thousands, a scale far greater than in the rich nations. 

The UK press, used to food scares like botulism, salmonella, BSE, E coli and all the rest, largely portayed it as a public health risk, which ignored the much more definite threat of corporate control of global food production and impacts on wildlife.


The release of genetically modified organisms isn't like an oil spill or chemical leak. This stuff replicates and multiplies. It cross-pollinates with non-GM crops, leading to new mutations. The UK government allowed field trials, all but one of which showed detrimental effects on local biodiversity.

A 2005 study by the GM companies and DEFRA found that even fifteen years after GM oilseed rape was planted there will still be a GM plant in every square metre of the field.

The field trials were hampered by protesters going into the fields and ripping up the crops before they'd had chance to pollinate. With overwhelming public support, these few hundred underfunded people stopped a multibillion dollar industry dead in its tracks.

A few years later, BASF resurrected the idea. Once again they trotted out the unsubstantiated overblown claims of their new crops being essential to provide food for the starving. The anti-GM campaigners pointed out that BASF's potato grown for industrial starch isn't really a belly filler. That, coupled with outcry from local beekeepers whose premium borage honey production would have been affected, forced another complete climbdown.

So, what to do? GM is already planted across swathes of the Americas. There's an industry that's been geared up for Europe and is jealously coveting this untapped market. If I were them, on the back of two serious defeats, I'd realise this can't be done in one jump. Stepping stones are needed.

For example, the government know they can't simply privatise healthcare in one go, so they transfer fund-holding to GPs (who, though public in service, are essentially private in structure). When, in five or ten years, the GPs find they haven't the time or knowledge to run their own funding, the large corporations will step in and clean up. We'll then get crap doctoring for free and a range of top-up plans for anything that provides real health care.

By the same token, the UK is not going to take corporate-controlled chemically intensive GM crops. So ask, what do the protesters complain about, then tackle that stuff head on. Persons here assembled, I give you the Rothamstead GM wheat trial (and its opponents Take The Flour Back).  

What if we make a GM crop that really is a food crop, really does use less chemicals, and has no patents? The protesters will have to agree or look insane; all of a sudden the geneticists will appear like the reasonable ones. Then, that problem finally dealt with, we will have the way clear to bring in the GM crops that make money.

I'm not saying that's necessarily what's happening with the new GM crop of wheat being tested in the UK. Who knows, maybe the biotech industry has suddenly become altrusitic and has no interest in developing products in order to make profit.

going for the nuclear option

Really, I'd forgotten what it was like living under Tories. Once or twice a week they roll out something utterly outrageous, so obviously cruel, duplicitous and/or corrupt that it stuns you with its gall and makes you feel powerless to stop it even though it's a once-in-a-generation horror. Then a few days later it's superceded by the next one.

Earlier this month I flagged up their new law to monitor every phone call, text and email. Imagine if Royal Mail were obliged to open all letters and keep photocopies for police and security services to look through. This goes beyond that. Through long term logging of your texts, emails and websearching I could get a more complete and accurate picture of you than you could ever describe to anyone.

And this is from the government whose foundational policy document said

We will implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties and roll back state intrusion.

So, another day, another bit of jaw-danglingly bold hypocrisy from the government. That same Programme for Government promised us:

Liberal Democrats have long opposed any new nuclear construction. Conservatives, by contrast, are committed to allowing the replacement of existing nuclear power stations provided that they are subject to the normal planning process for major projects (under a new National Planning Statement), and also provided that they receive no public subsidy.

The government are to bump up electricity bills to subsidise new building of energy sources it deems to be low carbon. This isn't just developing new technologies that need investment to get up to scale. The phrasing - we can only assume deliberately - makes no mention of the word 'renewable'. It includes nuclear power.

once a scab, always a scab

The government have a secret underground bunker that they can escape to in case of attack. From 1952-92 it was at Kelvedon Hatch in Essex. In the 40 years of its service the lawns were trimmed to bowling green standards and the fixtures and fittings were kept polished and gleaming. There was nothing else for the bored staff to do as the facility was always on green alert.

Except once when it went to amber. It wasn't the Cuban missile crisis. It wasn't during Les Evenements of 1968. It was the miners' strike of 1984. The government really feared they'd misjudged the nation and that if people in unions banded together against the freshly militarised police force it could go to civil war. Sometimes you're a lot closer to victory than you dare to think.

But the government had spent a couple of years stockpiling coal so the electricity supply would stay on, they had the media sewn up (the BBC re-ordered footage of police attacking miners and the miners retaliating, putting the miners' response first making it appear an unprovoked assault on police), and they bludgeoned and bribed the impoverished strikers.

Some scabs, centred around Nottinghamshire, returned to work and formed their own breakaway union, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM). Their chief Neil Greatrex and his deputy Mick Stevens led the organisation for many years. They later set the Nottinghamshire Miners Home Charity which ran a home for ex-miners in Chapel St Leonards near Skegness. Greatrex gave himself salaries of over £100,000 plus having his mortgage paid by the UDM.

In the late 1990s the Labour government set up the Coal Health Scheme to dish out £8bn of compensation to 750,000 miners who have been affected by serious medical conditions from their work. Typical New Labour, they had it administered through private solicitors who creamed off millions.

Neil Greatrex and Mick Stevens set up a company called Venside which made over £20m in fees from the solicitors involved in the scheme for referring claims to them. One of those companies was Doncaster firm Beresford's which took up to 30% of the miners' compensation. Partners James Beresford and Douglas Smith's joint earnings went from about £182,000 in 2000 to £23,273,256 in 2006. Taking such 'success fees' is unlawful and they were banned from being solicitors. However it is not criminal and they did not get prosecuted, walking away having trousered millions.

This money should have been caring for diseased old miners. There will be thousands having unnecessarily hard lives because the money went to buy luxury refits at the homes of people like Beresford, Smith, Greatrex and Stevens.

Seeing the UDM's firm so eagerly referring miners to such a dodgy company who were ripping miners off, the scandal put the Serious Fraud Office on the sniff around Greatrex. They discovered that, not content with his riches, over a period of years he had £150,000 worth of work done on his and Stevens' houses, paid for by the charity they'd set up. Police found that he'd got false invoices for the work, saying it was for lifts and a kitchen at the care home. Greatrex and Stevens were charged with 14 counts of theft.

Their trial took place this week. Greatrex lied to court saying the work was in lieu of salary, never mind that it said the work had been done on a care home that the builders never even saw. Even though Mick Stevens can be presumed to have noticed his home improvements, and even though he countersigned the dodgy cheques, he was acquitted of all charges.

Neil Greatrex was unanimously convicted by the jury of theft. The judge said he'll be getting a prison sentence. But, like James Beresford before him, he gets to keep the money.

anything above a whisper will be heard

May 2010: The new Tory-LibDem administration publish The Coalition: Our Programme For Government. On page 11 they tell us:

The Government believes that the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused and eroded fundamental human freedoms and historic civil liberties. We need to restore the rights of individuals in the face of encroaching state power...

We will implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties and roll back state intrusion...

April 2012:

The government will be able to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of everyone in the UK under new legislation set to be announced soon. Internet firms will be required to give intelligence agency GCHQ access to communications on demand, in real time.

= = = = = = = = = = = = =


If you enjoyed this hypocrisy in the Coalition's foundation document, you may also like:

- We will stop the top-down reorganisations of the NHS that have got in the way of patient care

- We will continue public sector investment in carbon capture and storage

- We will restore rights to non-violent protest.

mark kennedy spying to the last

The Mark Kennedy media bandwagon lurched to America earlier this month in the form of a feature article in Rolling Stone (paywalled link).

Rather like his documentary last autumn, it buys into the idea of a divided soul who loved his comrades and after he was sacked from the cops came back to the activists out of camaraderie. In fact, he set up his own private spy firm and came back to keep betraying those activists. He would still be doing it today had the activists not caught him.

Neither the Rolling Stone journo nor the documentary makers mentioned this, meaning either they were told not to by Kennedy's notorious publicity agent Max Clifford, or else they were too lazy to do some elementary googling.

The Rolling Stone piece goes one further: the documentary claimed he came back to activists for the sense of community, but Rolling Stone posit that he entirely gave up activism when he did so. This is demonstrably and unarguably wrong.

So let's set out what is known about this bit of his career in order to make it harder for lazy/puppetted journalists to get away with perpetuating a lie.

After he left the police Mark Kennedy took a break of several months then returned in early 2010, still as the activist Mark Stone. He was active all over Europe, mainly with a sudden interest in animal rights, an odd thing for someone who (despite his recent claims in the press) wasn't even vegetarian.

After Kennedy was uncovered, activists compiled a strictly factual database of all activism he could be verified as having taken part in. It has numerous entries from 2010 after his police career, including his trip to Italy for an animal rights gathering which has also been reported in other interviews with him, as well as animal rights work in Germany, anti-capitalist meetings in France and several animal rights and environmental things in the UK.

The sense of him being torn is hype. Rolling Stone says Kennedy's faith in policing was 'shattered' when he got a beating from the police at a protest in the summer of 2006 (none of the beatings, raids and fit-ups of the activists he loved made him feel that way, though, even when he'd helped to organise them). Yet despite this supposed lack of faith in his role he did not truncate or quit his mission, he continued as ordered for over three years until his superiors decided to withdraw him.

The article claims that he offered to help the activists being prosecuted in the Ratcliffe trial. Well yes, he said 'I'd like to help' to someone who was making him squirm in what he thought was a private conversation (you can hear it in this news report). He made no specific offer, no public offer, and most importantly he did not - then or at any time before or since - ever do anything to help the activists. Thus he upholds his police work.

Kennedy came to the environmental direct action movement in 2003. The police ended his mission in autumn 2009. A serious drop in income is a frightening prospect for anyone, let alone someone on the kind of salary he was used to. When he left the police he had no saleable skills bar his spying. So he continued to stab backs for money, just as he did previously in the police, just as he does these days in the press.

The world of corporate spies is not new. During the McLibel trial it was revealed that there had been meetings of London Greenpeace where genuine activists were in the minority. Most people there were police, private spies watching activists, or a second lot of spies hired to watch the first lot.

One such spy company is Global Open. It was set up in 2001 by ex-Special Branch officer Rod Leeming. It is known to have worked for Eon at the time of the Kingsnorth Climate Camp, a protest Kennedy was spying at for the police.

Kennedy told the Daily Mail that he was approached by Global Open's director Rod Leeming to work for him in January 2010 as he was leaving the police, and that he accepted and worked for them.

Of course, this is a claim of Kennedy's so must be subjected to extra scrutiny. He isn't just a liar in the normal sense but appears to be someone beyond that point who cannot actually determine truth from falsehood. His string of self-contradictions are evidence of this. But the lies tend to be things that mitigate him, things that make him out to be the victim, to be a good guy who has sympathy with all sides. Any statements that don't feed into this myth - and in fact make him look like more of a bastard, like being a private corporate spy - are more likely to be credible.

All companies in the UK have to be registered, and the names and addresses of directors are made public. The Guardian revealed that in February 2010, as he was leaving the police, Kennedy set up Tokra Ltd. He registered himself as the sole director and called himself 'logistics officer'. The address he used was the Bedfordshire work address of Heather Millgate, who was then a director of Global Open.

The fact that Kennedy did not stop spying after he left the police is perhaps the most damning aspect of his story. This is the one area where he appears to be far worse than any of the other officers so far exposed. He chose of his own free will to continue betraying the activists he lived among, scuppering their work and undermining the things they held most dear.

If, as he claims, he did genuinely feel any sympathy for the activists' cause then that makes him even worse; he not only wronged these people, he knew it to be wrong but did it anyway for money. Either he ideologically wanted to ruin them or he loved them but loved his own bank balance even more. Whichever it is, Mark Kennedy's post-police career was not one of someone who cared for the activists he lived among.

bob lambert mbe vs sir fred goodwin

Bob Lambert was a part of the Metropolitan Police's Special Demonstration Squad for over twenty years. In that time he infiltrated assorted environmental and animal rights groups and then oversaw other officers doing the same. He formed at least two serious intimate relationships under his false identity, fathering a child with one of the activists he spied on, then seeing a non-activist as a way of appearing normal. His invasion into her life included having Special Branch officers raid her home.

It's these long term committed relationships that have been perhaps the most shocking aspect of the undercover policing scandal. Officers used their training to get not just the political trust but the deepest emotional attachment of people on an entirely fraudulent basis, weaving themselves deeply into lives and families. The person targetted will open themselves up as much as they ever have, share their innermost selves, foresee an indefinite future together, perhaps have children (a quarter of the exposed officers fathered children with women they spied on).

Put simply and without fear of exaggeration, it is the most complete invasion of privacy possible, the most complete intrusion into a citizen's life that the state could enact.

Then, without any warning, the superiors decide the mission is over and the officers disappear, leaving these women robbed of years of their lives and unable to trust others or even their own judgement any more.

Not only is this all morally abhorrent, but according to Jon Murphy of the Association of Chief Police Officers it is completely against the rules to even have sex with the people targetted.

It is absolutely not authorised. It is never acceptable for an undercover officer to behave in that way...

It is grossly unprofessional. It is a diversion from what they are there to do. It is morally wrong because people have been put there to do a particular task and people have got trust in them. It is never acceptable under any circumstances... for them to engage in sex with any subject they come into contact with.

The HMIC report into the Mark Kennedy case, even though it's the police investigating themselves, unequivocally concedes that Kennedy was guilty of 'disproportionate intrusion' into people's lives. With the exception of the longevity of his relationships, there appears to be nothing Kennedy did that wasn't also done by Lambert.

In some respects Lambert went further than Kennedy, siring a child and having major relationships outside activist circles, undermining the justice system by being prosecuted under his false identity. Lambert was later in charge of putting undercover officers into those same protest groups, as well as undermining justice campaigns like that of Stephen Lawrence's family.

Just after he left the police force, in June 2008, Bob Lambert was given an MBE 'for services to the Police'.

Fred Goodwin was knighted for his services to banking but crashed RBS and, as that meant he had flushed away huge sums of public money and in fact done gross disservice to banking, he was stripped of his knighthood.

What does it take to get Bob Lambert - who spent his police service not only acting grossly unprofessionally but did so repeatedly; ran the operations of others who did the same; who is guilty of the most profound intrusion into citizens' lives; whose actions obstructed justice by several avenues; and all of it at huge public expense - to be stripped of his MBE for services to the police?

bob lambert: still spying?

Of all the undercover police officers exposed so far, Bob Lambert is one of the worst. The longevity of his involvement, the range of campaigns he helped to weaken, and his personal life behaviour - there seems to be nothing appalling that any of the other officers did that he didn't do too, and he seems to have done much that others didn't.

He was an undercover police officer in the 1980s, infiltrating London Greenpeace. He had a long term sexual relationship with one of the activists he spied on, fathering a child. He later formed a relationship with a non-activist just to help his social plausibility, and had her flat raided by his colleagues at Special Branch to bolster his image as a hardcore activist.

He then went on to oversee the deployment of other officers in the 1990s, including Jim Boyling's spying on Reclaim the Streets and Pete Black's undermining of anti-racist groups including justice campaigns like that of Stephen Lawrence's family.

The relationship with Boyling was perhaps especially close, as BristleKRS noted

Both Boyling and Lambert are accused of lying to courts to preserve their cover; both Boyling and Lambert duplicitously entered into sexual relationships with activists on whom they were spying; both Boyling and Lambert sired children by these women. Is this coincidence, or an indication of the nature of the training Lambert offered his protégés?

Their work together continued beyond infiltrating activists. After devoting the major part of their careers to undercover work they abruptly shifted focus, setting up the Muslim Contact Unit in 2002. This police outfit is aimed at building bridges with muslims and muslim communities. And maybe that's all it is.

But if I were the police, wanting to have undercover officers in muslim groups in the wake of 9/11, I'd have to think of a new tactic. Having a legion of trained white folks wouldn't help me be surreptitious. So, what if they openly approached muslims as police but had this nice supportive role? They would then be well placed to identify people who could become a ring of informants. They would also be highly trained and very experienced at the tricks and tactics of gaining people's trust and making them confess things they want to keep secret.

I have absolutely no evidence that's what the Muslim Contact Unit is. I just find it very peculiar that, of all the available officers, they chose two of the country's most experienced undercover infiltrators to set up and run it.

perpetrating acts of a serious and violent nature against citizens

Margaret Thatcher famously decried Irish Republicans, saying it can never be right to use violence for political ends. She was, of course, in charge of the British soldiers on the streets of Northern Ireland at the time, fought the Falklands War and was vociferously supportive of torturer-dictators such as General Pinochet.

'Violence' sounds like a bad thing, so if we commit an act of violence and want to feel good then we must think of it as something different, something less unpleasant. I've been told that political violence is wrong by someone who, less than an hour later, was justifying the bombing of Dresden.

The fact is that everyone believes political violence is right if the case is strong enough. We've seen riots bring about positive change in this country on innumerable issues ranging all the way from the abolition of the Poll Tax to the right of farms to sell home made cider.

But it's interesting to see that the state makes accusations and connotations of certain foes being violent irrespective of their actual conduct. The recent report by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary about Mark Kennedy describes his employers, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, as being concerned with countering people who

were not individuals engaging in peaceful protest, or even people who were found to be guilty of lesser public order offences. They were individuals intent on perpetrating acts of a serious and violent nature against citizens going about their everyday lives.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CLIMATE PROTEST VIOLENCE

One of Kennedy's main efforts in the UK was infiltrating climate change activists. So, as I said the other day, he was there from the start, actively participating in the first Climate Camp at Drax in 2006. On that occasion Kennedy was among the unarmed non-violent activists beaten and hospitalised by armed and armoured police. He was there with undercover officer Lynn Watson who had played a key organisational role in the Camp.

The following summer Climate Camp was near Heathrow airport. One evening a small group of riot police forced their way on site. There were only 20 or so, and what we didn't realise was that there were many more in vanloads waiting down the lane. It was an attempt to provoke violence and give them the excuse to come charging on in numbers.

However the police incursion was swiftly surrounded by a very large group of campers who did not react violently but chanted 'off off off' as they steadily shuffled the police back beyond the camp perimeter. We then fell absolutely silent and put our hands in the air; holding our ground but no baiting, no taunting, no threat, no words or movement of any kind. It was the single most powerful piece of non-violent direct action I have ever seen, and was all the more so for its total spontaneity.

Later on that week protesters marched out with a banner saying 'we are armed only with peer-reviewed science' (not the snappiest of slogans, but still a good point well made), and they had pages of scientific reports taped to their hands.



The police attacked, ordering people to the ground then kicking and beating them. Here are two mounted officers trampling an isolated woman who is trying to escape, still armed with her two sheets of A4 paper.



In June 2008 a group of activists stopped a coal train that was approaching Drax power station and started shovelling the cargo overboard (video here). All across the media this was described as a hijacking, which in many ways is accurate, but I can't help feeling that the word conjures up images of staff being bound and gagged, of threats and reckless danger. As was made clear in the subsequent court case, the activists followed railway protocol for stopping trains and had done a safety assessment before deciding to go ahead with the action. The judge called them 'eloquent, sincere, moving and engaging', and pointed out that the train driver had spoken of them being 'polite, orderly and responsible'.

In the summer of that year Climate Camp was at the proposed site of a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent. Kennedy was there co-ordinating transport for that too. The police put scare stories in the media about finding a 'cache of weapons' (padlock and chain, kitchen knives) and parliament was told 70 officers had been injured at the protest. Freedom of information requests later revealed that none of the injuries came from protesters but instead included injuries to police such as 'stung on finger by probable wasp'. (Is that better than being stung by an improbable wasp?) More on that stuff can be found here.

At Kingsnorth the police did, again, force their way on site in riot gear and beat people for being near the gate. Also, for days on end they would come and surround the site at 5am; one officer every few metres along a couple of kilometres of perimeter, a metre or two beyond the fence, in riot gear, standing silently awaiting orders. This - as was clearly intended - got everyone in the camp out of bed to come to the fence.

If you sealed off a housing estate or a festival with riot cops at 5am, giving no explanation, someone amongst the hundreds of outraged people inside would be likely to throw something. The police would then have an excuse to come on and beat that person, the violence would escalate, and you'd have a riot on your hands. Not even a housing estate in fact, you could probably do that in a shopping centre or at Last Night of the Proms and it would kick off. Yet at Climate Camp people behaved in a less violent way than average people would be expected to.

A few months later at London's G20 protests in April 2009, baton-wielding riot police waded into the climate demonstration. As at Heathrow, the activists neither retreated nor responded in kind. Instead, they put their open palms in the air and chanted 'this is not a riot, this is not a riot'. Again, the police incursion failed. Later on they kettled the protest before attacking it with baton charges and dogs.



THE REAL THREAT

Mark Kennedy had been heavily involved in organising Climate Camp for its duration, presumably alongside other undercover officers and informants. The police knew full well that the threat to the safety of the public, and thereby any possible excuse for bloody repression, was non-existent. That they responded with such violence shows it was not about proportionality or risk to life and limb, it was about threat to the status quo.

It's not a person's behaviour that is deemed unacceptable and gets them targeted as a domestic extremist, it's their politics. You can be a pensioner with no criminal convictions who protests against arms factories and you're a domestic extremist. Meanwhile those who do sow violence and hatred on the streets are treated differently if their views are less objectionable and methods less likely to succeed. In a leaked email last year Adrian Tudway, National Co-ordinator for Domestic Extremism, said that (unlike Climate Camp) the English Defence League are not considered extremist.

LET'S PUT IT ALL TOGETHER

Last week the Metropolitan Police finally admitted that they'd acted unlawfully in not telling people that their phones were being hacked by journalists at News International. Why would they not have warned people, except that they didn't want to disrupt the hacking or expose their part in it? This shows that the hacking is not the odd constable taking a few quid for accessing data; the cover-up implies that it was widely known, that this is institutional corruption.

Add what we know together and it is appears widely yet quietly acknowledged that we have an institutionally corrupt, institutionally racist, institutionally violent police force.

institutionally violent

When police attack protesters the right wing press are always quick to talk of a peaceful march hijacked by those intent on violence and how the police had to step in. Police forces abroad may attack those who pose no threat of violence, but our jolly old British bobbies would never do such a thing and you'd have to be a soap-dodging anarchist to suggest otherwise.

One of the interesting things about the coverage of the Mark Kennedy affair is when he got beaten up by police. At the first Climate Camp, at Drax power station in Yorkshire in 2006, Kennedy was part of a small group that was trying to get through the perimeter fence. Officers in riot gear set upon a woman getting through the fence, batoning her legs, so Kennedy intervened and the officers hospitalised him.

They kicked and beat me. They had batons and pummelled my head. One officer repeatedly stamped on my back. I had my finger broken, a big cut on my head and a prolapsed disc.

I can't find any right wing media or pundit questioning the veracity of Kennedy's story. As there are pictures and it's verified by the activists with him at the time as well as Climate Camp medics, it is indisputable.

Leaving aside the hilarious irony of coppers laying into one of their own, the acceptance of this is profound. It is the acceptance that yes, the police will seriously injure people for no real reason, far beyond anybody's definition of reasonable force.

This is not one officer losing their head in a volatile situation, but the generic workaday tactic of armoured officers against defenceless nonviolent citizens.

It's the same casual blase use of violence that we see in the notorious footage of PC Simon Harwood's deadly assault on Ian Tomlinson. It's the same thing seen a thousand times the day Tomlinson was killed, and on countless other days elsewhere.

It appears that we've reached a stage where, with its wealth of incontrovertible evidence, this is broadly accepted. If that's so it shouldn't just be quietly known but declared and acted upon.

mark kennedy: the hmic report

The latest report on undercover police infiltration of activists came out last week. Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary looked into the work of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) who ran the network of spy cops until 2008, and especially at the work of their officer Mark Kennedy.

Radio 4's Today programme said that HMIC are independent and 'this was not the police investigating themselves'. The report was written last year by Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Chief Constable of Merseyside, now Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. When it finally came out it was presented as the work former Surrey Police Chief Constable, Sir Dennis O'Connor.

This was the second attempt at releasing Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary's findings. They were all set to publish last October, and were widely believed to say Kennedy was a rogue officer off mission, and no outside oversight is needed for undercover cops.

But with just hours to go before publication the whole thing got pulled after the Guardian published a report of another undercover cop, Jim Boyling, who went through a court case under his activist alias. This proved that it's not about one cop and, as Boyling's bosses must have known about his prosecution, the beyond-the-lawness of the undercover unit is something systemic.

The new version of the HMIC report makes passing reference to this, merely dismissing it as outside the report's remit. This raises an important question; if the Boyling revelations are not the subject matter of the report, why did it need to be withdrawn and given a four-month rewrite?

The most obvious answer is that the report was going to hang Kennedy out to dry but say everything else in the garden was rosy. If that's so, the original report was either a pile of lies or else the product of pathetically superficial research into its subject. I'll leave you to decide for yourself which is the more likely.

BEHOLD THE NEXT SCAPEGOAT

This time it's gone one level up; they've decided it was one rogue officer and his one rogue unit. But nothing worse than that, honest. The report says that those who were asked to sign the approval to deploy officers weren't aware of what they were authorising; indeed, it says the NPOIU kept it from them.

No single authorising officer appears to have been fully aware either of the complete intelligence picture in relation to Mark Kennedy or the NPOIU's activities overall, or of the other intelligence opportunities available to negate the need for an undercover officer. Additionally, it was not evident that the authorising officers were cognisant of the extent and nature of the intrusion that occurred; nor is it clear that the type and level of intrusion was completely explained to them by the NPOIU.

You might have thought it would occur to them to ask.

Even more shocking is that the people running the operations make their own job up. The actual undercover officers are trained before they are deployed but, the HMIC report says, neither those who authorise them, nor their supervisory handlers known as 'cover officers', receive proper training.

The cover officer is the personal daily liaison that the undercover officer speaks to. The psychological stress of being an undercover cop is easily imaginable and probably all but universal. A cover officer's twin roles are to ensure someone keeps doing something that's profoundly fucking them up whilst also being responsible for them not getting fucked up.

With the cover officer's boss handing out plaudits for the intelligence received, it's easy to see how the undercover officer gets left in place for too long. It's also easy to imagine how they get pushed to garner information by any means available.

The HMIC report timidly posits

appropriate training for Cover Officers in dealing with people who are in extremely testing operational conditions needs to be considered.

So not only is it not happening yet, but in future it only needs to be considered?

What of the ranks above, the ones who authorised the spying? Even if they are being told the full truth or it occurs to them to check, have they got any clear idea of who they should and shouldn't target? In a report full of qualifiers and conditional language, the statement is startling in its plainness:

there is no formal training provision for authorising officers

It's just their own decision and gut feeling, then. Gene Hunt is alive and well.

To tap a single phone call takes the approval of the Home Secretary. To send in an undercover officer to integrate into your life, have children with you and then leave without warning when the mission is over, it only needs the approval of a police Superintendent.

There were insufficient checks and balances to evaluate and manage Mark Kennedy's deployment. The measures in place (such as monitoring intelligence reporting on Mark Kennedy's activities whilst deployed) proved ineffective... the evidence suggests the risks of intrusion into the lives of members of the public while undercover were not well managed

Later on it makes an allied point with a key difference in phrasing

Mark Kennedy operated outside the code of conduct for undercover officers. This suggests that NPOIU operational supervision, review and oversight were insufficient to identify that his behaviour had led to disproportionate intrusion.

The use of conditionals is crucial here; it only 'suggests' that his supervision was inadequate, but it baldly accepts that there was disproportionate intrusion in the lives of those he spied upon.

WHEN IS A ROGUE NOT A ROGUE?

The idea that Kennedy was going wildly astray and that his superiors didn't really know what this £5,000 a week asset was doing is just laughable. As I said in October, from Mark Kennedy's intelligence reports that were later disclosed to Ratcliffe defendants we know he was recording things in minute detail, right down to people's biscuit preferences.

Kennedy - for whatever negligible amount his word may be worth - repeated last week that he was in contact with his cover officer every day of his seven year deployment. He alleges that his bosses had complete access to his phone calls, texts and emails.

Even if we disregard what this walking bullshit engine claims, as the report's quote says, his activist persona of Mark Stone would have been reported on by other undercover officers and informants (we know he worked alongside Lynn Watson for some time). Did they also fail to report what they were seeing and doing? Or do his bosses know more than they're letting on?

Kennedy also reasserted that his long term relationships with activists were never discussed. But if he was in contact every day when he was at his partners' houses or on holiday with them, did he not say where he was? Even if it didn't occur to his cover officer to ask where Kennedy was and what he was doing - which would often, surely, have been a major point of the phone call taking place - Watson and co will have seen what was happening.

Despite the fact that most exposed undercover officers had such relationships, and that it goes back to at least the 1980s, the report claims that those in charge hadn't really considered that it might occur.

Mark Kennedy, by his own admission, had intimate relationships with a number of people while undercover, and in doing so encroached very significantly into their lives. NPOIU documentation did not provide assurance that such risks of intrusion were being systematically considered and well managed across the organisation.

As to whether officers are permitted to have such relationships, whether it even forms an encouraged part of the strategy, the report stays deafeningly silent about it.

The Association of Chief Police Officers' Jon Murphy has been unequivocal in the past:

It is absolutely not authorised. It is never acceptable for an undercover officer to behave in that way.

Yet in the wake of the HMIC report's glaring omission, it has been reported this week that 

Undercover officers are not banned from having sex with targets because it would give those they are infiltrating an easy way to “test” them, police chiefs and inspectors said.

The report clarifies a point that's been much discussed in the last year.

The law does allow for an undercover officer to participate in criminal activity, but this must be authorised, and the limits of the authorised conduct made clear. In addition, specific restrictions must be placed on the behaviour of the undercover officer, such that:

- they must not actively engage in planning and committing the crime;
- they are intended to play only a minor role; and
- their participation is essential to enable the police to frustrate the crime and to make arrests.

It's clear that Kennedy's deployment at Ratcliffe fails on all three counts. You can comfortably argue that his shining star case of the G8 protests in 2005 fail on all three counts too.

DOMESTIC EXTREMISTS

Kennedy's unit, the NPOIU, had a serious job to do.

The NPOIU was involved in the successful collection of intelligence on violent individuals, whose criminal intentions or acts were subsequently disrupted, and who were in some cases brought to justice.

These were not individuals engaging in peaceful protest, or even people who were found to be guilty of lesser public order offences. They were individuals intent on perpetrating acts of a serious and violent nature against citizens going about their everyday lives.

Against this backdrop the report, like many police who deal with protest, talks of those spied on as 'Domestic Extremists'. The report concedes it's a loose term but settles on a definition;

activity, individuals or campaign groups that carry out criminal acts of direct action in furtherance of what is typically a single issue campaign. They usually seek to prevent something from happening or to change legislation or domestic policy, but attempt to do so outside of the normal democratic process.

This means anyone who blockades a shop doorway or stands in a road is on the list, alongside firebombers and armed gangs of racist thugs. It would certainly have included the Suffragettes and indeed the legion of womens' rights groups who found the suffragettes too extreme. Black civil rights campaigners in 1960s America were arrested for having sit-ins at racially segregated restaurants and cafes. Had the term existed then, they too would have unarguably been domestic extremists.

People who protest and take direct action are often a nuisance; they often intend themselves to be. That is, in fact, part of the 'normal democratic process'; it's just not the electoral system. If you are not a threat to life and limb then nobody can credibly argue that you warrant the intrusion of an undercover police officer in your home and family for years on end.

The struggle for the right to protest does not only take place in the streets and in what we discuss, but in the words we use to discuss it. 'Domestic Extremist' is a piece of political phraseology dressed up as something neutral, like 'pro-life' or 'pro-choice'. Every time it is used it reinforces the political point it was designed to trojan-horse into our minds.

It is used to conjour up images of rabid, terrifying obsessives threatening the lives of random people with violence; that done, we can then feel that anyone labelled as one probably deserves surveillance, beating and jailing.

Among the HMIC report's recommendations are

ACPO and the Home Office should agree a definition of domestic extremism that reflects the severity of crimes that might warrant this title, and that includes serious disruption to the life of the community arising from criminal activity.

Yet this is just as conveniently broad and vague as the previous definition. It certainly covers the traffic chaos caused by a peaceful anti-war march blocking a road.

The NPOIU has now become part of the National Domestic Extremist Unit (NDEU). They run a database of political activists. It merrily conflates numerous levels of activism, described in the HMIC report as

protest associated with extreme methods used in environmental protest, animal rights and violent political extremism

However, despite having a 'weeding policy' of removing ex-activists, they are retaining information on many people who pose no danger. In producing the HMIC report a number of cases on the NDEU's files were examined and it was found found that

the rationale for recording and retaining the intelligence was not strong enough

It also found that Mark Kennedy was only one of many undercover officers to become private corporate spies.

A number of police officers have retired from NDEU's precursor units and continued their careers in the security industry, using their skills and experience for commercial purposes.

The ex-officers still like to use the database though, as the HMIC admitted there have been

attempts by retired officers to then contact and work with NDEU

What's the NDEU up to now? We're not really told. What's to be done? In future undercover officers must be approved by the Office of Surveillance Commissioners. You can judge their effectiveness in this matter already. They're the people who've been overseeing the authorisations of undercover police up till now.

A CONTROLLED EXPLOSION

Rather like the way the authorities are granting access to the truth about the Hillsborough Disaster now because it's 20 years later and nobody's career's at risk any more, so the HMIC report roasts Kennedy as off-mission and blames his unit the NPOIU, who conveniently no longer exist. This isn't the police fessing up; it's finding a scapegoat that won't hurt them.

It's clear Mark Kennedy is one of many. It's risible to suggest he went seven years without major details of his action being noticed. It just went unquestioned. "We're the good guys; therefore anything we do is right; therefore anyone who disobeys us is wrong; therefore anything that undermines them is good."

But now they behave as police at all levels do when accused of wrongdoing. Irrespective of the strength and clarity of the evidence and of the immorality of the misdeed, they clam up for as long as possible, lie when forced to speak, and try to appease any sustained clamour for justice by pushing a low ranking grunt out as a sacrifice.

The report concedes that Kennedy ended up spending a long time a long way beyond defensible behaviour. Either he did this himself due to negligence and shoddy oversight, or else this was the deliberate strategy of his superiors. There is no third option. Either way, his bosses are culpable.

Given what has been exposed - up to now all of it by activists and journalists, the few scant unredacted details in the HMIC report are only there because the first version was exposed as a whitewash - the report has had to admit that the system of oversight doesn't work. But by focusing on just Kennedy and the NPOIU it ignores the fact that the police have spent forty years with dedicated squads doing this to political activists, and that political policing reaches much further than that.

There appears to be nothing in Kennedy's behaviour, aside of the length of his deployment, that was unusual. We know of eight other undercover officers who behaved similarly, at least six of whom had intimate relationships with the citizens they spied on, two of them fathering children.

The obvious implication is that other officers before him were likewise wrongly intruding into the lives of activists; if Kennedy warrants a shiny important report, then what about the rest?