Thread by @copscampaign

Dave Smith, blacklisted trade unionist & core participant at the #SpyCopsInquiry, begins his opening statement. He speaks on behalf of the Blacklist Support Group, representing union members who were unlawfully blacklisted by major construction firms

Mitting says Smith can't use the real name of #spycops officer Carlo Neri, which is Carlo Soracchi. Smith says he won't do it. But we will. This is Carlo Soracchi

Smith: When BSG first spoke about #blacklisting for union activities we were ignored by the authorities & ridiculed as conspiracy theorists. But it isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s conspiracy fact – & it involves the collusion of the police and the security services

Smith: Trade unions arose during time of the industrial revolution & British Empire. As dynastic fortunes were made in the slave trade, parliament was passing the Combinations Acts to make trade unions illegal. State agents have spied on working class organisation ever since.

Smith: Hostility towards trade unions – just like racism & sexism – has become so deeply ingrained in the mindset of the British establishment that it’s carried on through the generations.

Smith: in 1834, year of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, in London the Master Builders agreed every craftsman wanting work had to sign 'the document', a declaration that they’d would never join a trade union. Failure to sign meant dismissal or refusal of work, which meant destitution

Smith: In 1919 Tory MPs, CEOs & ex-military intelligence officers set up the Economic League, ‘a crusade for capitalism’ keeping left wing union activists under surveillance & out of work. They had direct formal & informal links with police & MI5. Thousands of workers lost jobs

Smith: The #SpyCopsInquiry will find that after the Economic League closed down in 1993, Cullum McAlpine, director of Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd, bought part of the Economic League blacklist to set up The Consulting Association to blacklist construction workers.

Smith: This secret body was comprised of major construction companies including; Balfour Beatty, Laing O’Rourke, Costain, Skanska, Kier, Bam, Vinci, AMEC and AMEY. It illegally orchestrated #blacklisting of construction workers.

Smith: Consulting Association CEO was ex Economic League employee Ian Kerr. In 2009 it was raided & files on 3,213 people seized. Details on file included name, NI number, address, photo, phone number, car reg, & info about their medical history & family members.

Smith: When a blacklisted worker was elected as a union rep, raised concerns about safety on site, submitted an employment tribunal or took part in a protest, it was recorded on their Consulting Association blacklist file.

Smith: The Consulting Association didn’t have spies everywhere. Instead, construction companies nominated a contact, usually a director, who received information from managers on site & forwarded it to Ian Kerr.

Smith: Every job applicant on major building projects had their name checked against the Consulting Association blacklist. If there was a match, the worker would be refused work or dismissed.

Smith: Each #blacklisting name check cost £2.20; the last set of invoices for Sir Robert McAlpine alone, when the company was building the Olympic Stadium, was for £28,000. This isn’t a few managers chatting, it’s industrial-scale systematic blacklisting of union activists.

Smith: Because of #blacklisting, in the middle of the building boom highly qualified and experienced workers found themselves virtually unemployable. While many construction workers took families on holidays, blacklisted workers defaulted on their mortgages.

Smith: Partners of blacklisted workers had 2 or 3 jobs to keep the family afloat. One wife of a blacklisted worker has spoken about the painful decision not to have a 2nd child because of the family’s financial hardship. Families lost their homes & there were divorces

Smith: In the 1990s I worked, & was a union safety rep, on the Jubilee Line Extension. Some of my fellow workers who took part in a safety dispute over the lack of fire alarms at London Bridge station ended up being blacklisted.

Smith: Some of those blacklisted workers took their own lives. No one can say that blacklisting was the sole reason, but prolonged periods of unemployment & family tensions aren’t good for anyone’s mental health. #Blacklisting has contributed to deaths.

Smith: Blacklisting causes workers’ deaths in other ways. When union safety reps are sacked for highlighting unsafe conditions such as asbestos, electrical safety or poor scaffolding, it sends a message to other workers & creates a climate of fear: heads down rather than speak up

Smith: #blacklisting safety reps is factor in the workplace fatality rates in construction, the sector with consistently the highest number of deaths of any major industry in the UK.

Smith: Parliament was so outraged by the Consulting Association that it introduced the Blacklisting Regulations 2010. In 2016, a High Court trial was settled when the UK’s biggest building firms made a public apology & paid damages for their blacklisting activities.

Smith: This #SpyCopsInquiry will find that is wasn’t just the major firms who kept union activists under surveillance & contributed to #blacklisting – it was the political police at the heart of this public inquiry too.

Smith: The police’s internal #spycops investigation, Operation Herne, said ‘Police, inc Special Branches & the Security Services, supplied information to the blacklist funded by the country’s major construction firms, The Consulting Association'

Smith: Prior to the Consulting Association’s founding in the 90s, Operation Herne found: ‘Special Branches throughout the UK had direct contact with the Economic League, public authorities, private industry & trade unions.’

Smith: The #SpyCopsInquiry has already seen that, from the start, spying on left-wing trade union activists was a central part of the Special Demonstration Squad #spycops activities.

Smith: Special Branch files were effectively a database for MI5, private firms & others to find out about trade union activists.

Smith: The #SpyCopsInquiry has already seen that, from the start, spying on left-wing trade union activists was a central part of the Special Demonstration Squad #spycops activities.

Smith: Many trade unions had their own Special Branch files.

Smith: 2 years after the SDS #spycops started in 1968, the Special Branch Industrial Unit was established “with the aim of monitoring trade unionists from teaching to the docks” & developing a network of contacts in industry inc company directors & General Secretaries of unions

Smith: Police investigation Operation Herne said Special Branch Industrial Unit had a dedicated officer as official liaison with Economic League.

Smith: Industry informers had 2-way sharing of info with Special Branch Industrial Unit. Intelligence gathered by both undercover & uniformed officers was available to the Industrial Unit and was passed onto both major employers and #blacklisting organisations

Smith: #spycops often worked for Industrial Unit before or after being undercover. One was HN336 who told us yesterday that Chief Superintendent Herbert Guy ‘Bert’ Lawrenson, head of the Met Police Special Branch C Squad in early SDS days, went to work for the Economic League

Smith: Operation Herne didn't even mention Lawrenson. Blacklisted workers expect the #SpyCopsInquiry to examine relationship between officers from the Special Branch Industrial Unit and their former boss Bert Lawrenson

Smith: as well as Special Branch files, police intel on political activists was on the National Domestic Extremism Database (NDED), originally compiled by the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) which the Inquiry is focusing on.

Smith: NDED has info on thousands of citizens the state considers domestic extremists, many of whom have committed no crime whatsoever. Another unit responsible for the NDED was National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (NETCU).

Smith: Supt Steve Pearle, head of NETCU, said it was to take over MI5's role spying on CND, trade union activists, & left wing journalists

Smith: In Oct 2008, Det Chief Inspector Gordon Mills of NETCU gave a presentation to a secret Consulting Association meeting inc 8 senior managers from #blacklisting firms, on left wing ‘emerging threats’ for which ‘companies needed to have strong vetting procedures in place’

Smith: This was a company, Consulting Association, whose work was illegal. The Consulting Association constitution required companies to send a director to secret quarterly meetings.

Smith: In a witness statement compiled for the High Court blacklisting trial Ian Kerr, Consulting Association CEO said NETCU: ‘wanted an output for their information… I gave them the email addresses of the contacts in the construction industry & they would feed them information’

Smith: NETCU and & Special Branch Industrial Unit are now absorbed into Counter Terrorism Command - State spying on unions is now classified as counter-terrorism!

Smith: Sharing of police intelligence across all sectors of industry continues through Operation Fairway & the National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit's Industrial Liaison section

Smith: in 2010, the National Coordinator Special Branches urged police forces across the UK to become “more proactive” in putting on Special Branch briefings, to share information with academics & contacts in business & the public sector.

Smith: Special Branch clearly know that when they tell an employer someone is on a database of extremists, it will affect lives.

Smith is now focusing on a small group of union activists on the blacklist who, from the early 1990s until mid 2000s, were spied on by three separate SDS officers: Peter Francis, Mark Jenner & Carlo Soracchi.

Smith: Mark Jenner, Special Demonstration Squad #spycops officer, infiltrated the construction union UCATT as ‘Mark Cassidy’. Claiming to be a joiner, he attended Hackney Branch of UCATT, his union subscriptions were paid by a bank account set up by Special Branch.

Smith: #spycops officer Mark Jenner attended picket lines, protests, meetings & conferences. After each meeting, his partner says pages of handwritten notes were typed up at home, presumably to be used as intelligence to be fed back to Special Branch.

Smith: #spycops officer Jenner also infiltrated the Colin Roach Centre, which was the home to Hackney Trade Union Resource Centre, & 2 small union groups infiltrated by Mark Jenner: the Building Workers Safety Campaign & the Brian Higgins Defence Campaign.

Smith: #spycops officer Mark Jenner actually chaired meetings & used his position 'as a worker fighting for safety at work' to contact union branch secretaries from UCATT, UNISON, TGWU, RMT, EPIU, NUT & CPSA

Smith: Jenner wrote letters to safety body London Hazards Centre, & @INQUEST_ORG, the charity campaigning over deaths in police custody. Brian Higgins & John Jones were leaders of groups Jenner infiltrated & both have entries on their blacklist files relating to those campaigns

Smith: I personally remember Jenner being particularly disruptive at meetings we both attended in Conway Hall. While spying on picket lines over unpaid wages at Waterloo, Jenner also came into contact and spied on other #SpyCopsInquiry participants.

Smith: One of these was Steve Hedley, currently Senior Assistant General Secretary of the RMT rail union. In the 1990s, Hedley was in a union delegation to Northern Ireland as part of the peace process organised by the Hackney Trade Union Resource Centre & the Colin Roach Centre.

Smith: Jenner was also part of that delegation and stayed at Hedley’s family home during the trip. [NI police have said sending unbriefed #spycops to NI was ‘an act of madness’ bbc.com/news/uk-northe…]

Smith: The trade union movement is proud of opposing fascism. At the time of #spycops Peter Francis’, Carlo Soracchi & Mark Jenner’s deployments, fascists were terrorising communities, planting bombs & committing racist murders. They also targeted union offices.

Smith: construction union activists stewarded labour movement events to protect from fascist thugs. One loose network who helped, myself included, was known as the ‘Away Team’. #spycops Peter Francis, Mark Jenner & Carlo Soracchi all spied on us.

Smith: we accuse #spycops officer Mark Jenner, & through him the British state, of interfering with the internal democratic processes of an independent trade union.

Smith: They did it by covertly joining the union UCATT, participating in debates & voting at meetings on policy motions; by distributing literature favouring a particular candidate; by calling for the sacking of an elected union convenor; & by creating divisions

Smith: Jenner also deceived ‘Alison’, an activist for the National Union of Teachers, into a 5 year relationship during his deployment. Misogynist abuse of women activists is one of the most disgraceful human rights violations of the whole #spycops scandal
policespiesoutoflives.org.uk/our-stories/al…

Smith: When Jenner’s deployment was coming to an end, another #spycops officer, using the name ‘Carlo Neri’ [real name Carlo Soracchi] was sent to spy on the same group of activists.

Smith: on more than one occasion, #spycops officer Soracchi incited Frank Smith, Dan Gilman & Joe Batty to fire bomb a charity shop in North London. Joe Batty was a TGWU union steward who the Inquiry has denied Core Participant status

Smith: Soracchi claimed the shop was run by Roberto Fiore, leader of Italian fascist party Forza Nuova. Fiore fled Italy after being wanted by Italian police in connection with the terrorist bombing of Bologna railway station in 1980 that killed 85 people.

Smith: we accuse Carlo Soracchi of being an agent provocateur, of deliberately attempting to entrap union members by inciting them to commit arson. The spied-upon activists wanted nothing to do with the idea: they are trade union & anti-fascist activists, not terrorists

Smith: ‘Carlo Neri’ [Carlo Soracci] also deceived a Transport and General Workers Union rep from a homelessness charity, Donna McLean @Donna__McLean, into a relationship. policespiesoutoflives.org.uk/our-stories/do…

Smith: Soracchi orchestrated a split from Donna McLean @Donna__McLean & moved in with Steve Hedley as a lodger. In Oct 2004, Hedley was victimised & sacked from the Channel Tunnel Rail Link project, a dispute that appears on his #blacklisting file.

Smith: Soracchi turned up on the picket line, spying on union members showing solidarity with Hedley.

Smith: I'm not allowed to say Carlo Neri's real name [Carlo Soracchi] here. I've known it for over 5 years. When I piblushed @blacklistedbook in 2016 we opted not to publish, but it's been in the public domain for 18 months.

Smith: 4 weeks ago I wrote an article for Tribune about the #CHISBill which allows #spycops to commit any crime with impunity. I cited Neri's incitement to arson, with his real name.

Smith: I'm banned from saying Carlo's real name at the #SpyCopsInquiry - instead of getting to the truth as is its purpose, it has more restrictions than elsewhere!

Smith: #spycops did not just spy on trade unionists; the intelligence it gathered was passed onto employers and found its way onto the blacklist.

Smith: #Spycops officer Peter Francis admits opening the Special Branch file on Frank Smith in the early 1990s which included entries about his anti-racist role in the Away Team and his relationship with an American woman, Lisa Teuscher.

Smith: Francis says the blacklist file uses his words 'Under constant watch officially and seen as politically dangerous'- there's no way a construction manager would know this!

Smith: Francis also gathered intelligence on Lisa Teuscher, primarily because of her role in the anti-racist campaign group Youth Against Racism in Europe. Spycops had her leave to remain in the UK removed. She has a blacklist file despite not being in construction at all

Smith: No one is suggesting #spycops personally provided info to the blacklist. That was not their job. It was more senior officers from the Special Branch Industrial Unit or NETCU who were tasked with sharing information with “industry contacts”.

Smith: Another glaring example of where info from Special Branch registry files appears on the blacklist relates to an incident in Nov 1999. Every Remembrance Day, the National Front lay a wreath at the Cenotaph. Frank Smith, Dan Gilman & Steve Hedley were in a counter-demo

Smith: Operation Herne has confirmed that the three core participants were observed by police on the day and that intelligence about their participation at the Cenotaph was added to Special Branch files.

Smith: Within a few days, the same information appears on the blacklist, marked as supplied by Costain. Two senior managers for Costain had close relationships with Special Branch #spycops; Dudley Barrett (now retired) and Gayle Burton (now a senior executive at the Jockey Club).

Smith: If the purpose of this police spying operation was genuinely to detect serious criminality or public disorder, why, in over 10 years of spying, were none of us ever charged or prosecuted with a serious criminal offence? It's political policing, not disorder.

Smith: We accuse Special Branch Industrial Unit & NETCU of supplying information to the blacklist.

Smith: Despite police claims, they aren't neutral. The state is never neutral in a major dispute between big business and trade unions. Police collusion in blacklisting is not an aberration or the actions of a rogue unit, it is standard operating procedures for political police.

Smith: 7m people are union members. To spy on members or officials is to spy on the union as a whole. The 7m must be told which branches and reps weren't what they thought.

Smith: Yes, we want the names of the trade unions and all of the 1000 political groups that were spied on by the spycops to be released. But we also want much more than that. We want the names of contact & companies that were provided with info about union members

Smith: Construction found its blacklist, but clearly there are others, in the North Sea trades. The BBC kept a Staff Transfer Register (of those vetted by MI5), the Subversion in Public Life database run by the security services.

Smith: the retail sector’s National Staff Dismissal Register blacklist was actually funded by a £1million grant the Home Office!

In 2002 BBCdoc True Spies, #spycops said Ford's Halewood factory in Liverpool provided Special Branch with a list of all job applicants to vet.

One of the #spycops in True Spies stated that:
“It was very, very important that trade unions were monitored… We were expected to check these lists. You call it blacklisting and that’s what it is. In any war there are always going to be casualties”.
Seriously? In a WAR?

Smith: Assistant Chief Constable Anton Setchell, was the officer in charge of the UK police domestic extremism #spycops between 2004 and 2010, is currently head of global security at #blacklisting Laing O’Rourke

Smith: Superintendent Steve Pearl, who ran NETCU, is now a non-executive director at Agenda Security Services, Barrie Gane, the former deputy head of MI6 sits on the Board of Threat Response International: both companies spy on activists for corporate clients.

Smith: Control Risks, private security firms that employs ex state spies had a £59,000 contract with Crossrail to keep union activists under surveillance. Those spied on included Frank Morris, first union rep on the publicly funded project, was sacked within days of being elected

Smith: Given the mass privatisation over the past four decades, has there been a blurring of the lines between state and corporate spying? Which companies got contracts? How much taxpayers’ money have they been given? If state spying is now privatised what is the oversight?

Smith: Unfortunately, we are extremely sceptical that the #SpyCopsInquiry will be a success. Everything we know so far about the spycops scandal in relation to trade unions and blacklisting is because activists have uncovered it.

Smith: Steve Acheson has one of the largest blacklist files in the country and was almost unemployable for nearly a decade, nearly losing his home. It is people like Steve who have helped uncover the truth – not the police.

Smith: When the Blacklist Support Group first complained about police involvement in blacklisting in 2012, the Metropolitan Police refused to even accept the complaint!

Smith: When lawyers got the complaint accepted, the the Independent Police Complaints Commission, confirmed that: “it is likely that all Special Branches were involved in providing information about prospective employees”

Smith: NETCU, #spycops unit that worked for 7 years & was subsumed into the Met, claims all files have been destroyed, not a single page still exists. That is a blatant lie. I imagine they're still being accessed.

Smith: As the Hillsborough families, the miners wrongly imprisoned, the Birmingham 6 can all tell you it's not name calling to say police are capable of lying. Why do they get the benefit of the doubt?

Smith: In 2018 the police were still saying only 1 #spycops officer had joined a union. Any officer spying on unions without being a member would have stuck out a mile. They're still lying to us.

Smith: We want our police files. But they say they 'neither confirm nor deny' that they have such a file, due to national security.

In July 2018, the Blacklist Support Group held a meeting with #SpyCopsInquiry team, where we specifically requested that police files for Brian Higgins and John Jones be released. This was because the two core participants were both severely ill and in their seventies

Smith: We were given assurances by the Chair of the Inquiry that everything possible would be done to make this disclosure happen. More than two years later, the files have still not been released. Brian has died.

Smith: What possible national security reason can there be for denying a dying man access to his police file from the 1990s? Higgins' family are outraged at their treatment by the Inquiry.

Smith: Police internal #spycops investigation Operation Herne's reports are being relied on by the inquiry. What's striking is their use of language. They qualify with ‘alleged victimisation’ and ‘supposed blacklisting’, even though they had the files there in front of them.

Smith: There are 74 Appendices in Operation Herne – including witness statements with the former Special Branch contact with the Economic League - none of which have been disclosed to us

Smith: thanks to the officers compiling Herne for their glowing review of the @blacklistedbook written by myself and the investigative journalist @philchamberlain: “the most comprehensive collection of material on the subject”. We'll use that in our future marketing

Smith: But seriously, their assessment also demonstrates the need for accounts from activists who have uncovered the truth, to be treated with as much (if not more) validity as witness statements from the officers - the Inquiry must put these voices at the centre

Smith: the #spycops annual reports are PR exercises for their bosses, like construction firm reports on everything they've built but never mentioning fatalities on site. The Inquiry must stop taking police documents as objective.

Smith: even these heavily redacted files raise concerns that there are other documents that may be of relevance. They explicitly mention the Shrewsbury Two Defence campaign which set up by rank and file members of the construction unions to support Des Warren and Ricky Tomlinson

Smith: the @Shrewsbury24C union activists were imprisoned in a notorious miscarriage of justice involving collusion between the security services and major construction firms. 50 years on, keeping the files secret isn't national security, it's a cover-up

Smith: SDS annual reports refer to the 1972 national building workers strike as being a central area of concern. If the SDS was keeping union activists under surveillance during the 1972 strike, they were spying on blacklisted workers were the very activists leading the dispute

Smith: rather than being transparent and accessible, the #SpyCopsInquiry has set up as many barriers as possible to prevent core participants, the public and the media from being able to view or listen to proceedings. Oral evidence is only possible to be viewed by pre-registering

Smith: Those lucky enough to be selected must travel to London during a lockdown to sit in a hotel room and watch the proceedings on a TV screen. The only other way to view evidence is via a transcript feed, which is like being transported back to the 1980s to watch it on Ceefax

Smith: This just doesn’t work. Journalists can’t check quotes, which makes it impossible to post reports in time for the TV and radio news. BBC reporter @BBCDomC says 'from a practical perspective as a working reporter, a public inquiry becomes largely impossible to report'

Smith: At the start of each day, the #SpyCopsInquiry chair states that “members of the public, are entitled to hear the same public evidence as I will hear and to reach your own conclusions about it." This is patently not true.

Smith: But it's easily resolvable if the #SpyCopsInquiry live streamed all evidence, exactly as the Grenfell public inquiry is doing. Unfortunately there seems little chance of this, and we seem to be watching a good old fashioned establishment cover-up take place before our eyes

Smith: the treatment of blacklisted workers by the British legal system does not make us optimistic. The multinational corporations that ruined so many lives were literally able to buy themselves out of a High Court trial involving over 700 claimants.

Smith: Blacklisted workers do not expect the state investigating itself to provide ‘justice’. Our participation is based on the slim hope that some evidence of the anti-union bias, institutional racism & institutional sexism of the British state spying machinery will be exposed

Smith: We are here to shake the tree and see what falls out. Keeping this dark underbelly of anti-democratic political policing hidden is against the public interest – it only helps the perpetrators of wrong doing - not the survivors or the British public.

Smith: Police can claim all they like they were protecting democracy. But by spying on trade union members & colluding with our blacklisting #spycops are actually protecting big business and capitalism. For the avoidance of all doubt: capitalism & democracy are not the same thing

With that, Smith extends solidarity to all non-state core participants at the #SpyCopsInquiry & says it's been an honour to work with them to fight for truth & justice over the years.

That concludes his statement. The Inquiry will break until 11.40.