Thread by @copscampaign

Finally today at the #SpyCopsInquiry, Oliver Sanders QC, representing 114 #SpyCops. Brace yourselves, his opening statement at the first Inquiry hearings was shocking, rowing back on matters of fact & responsibility the Met have long agreed & accepted campaignopposingpolicesurveillance.com/2020/11/03/ucp…

Sanders reiterates Skelton's point that without complete evidence there can't be fully informed findings [all that shredding paying off now, huh?]. This is reliant on what MI5 retained & have supplied. Some officers remember reports & events that have no documents.

Of the fraction of material that survives, a fraction of that in turn is released to the public, and even then it's redacted [all that lobbying the Inquiry to keep things secret paying off now, huh?] so people get the wrong idea.

The secrecy means the public especially misses out on out dangerous stuff the public can't be told about, and gets an even more skewed idea of the real picture

Spied-on groups had a spectrum of members, so just because one member says they were no threat it doesn't mean that others weren't dangerous, or that the group wouldn't be hijacked by dangerous people.

The SWP had a lot of teachers, social workers, etc at branch level who were moderate & law abiding, But others were interested in violence & disorder, spoke to the PLO, wanted to take over other campaigns, etc.

Some people targeted by #SpyCops have extreme anti-police views. Police are seen as the embodiment of the establishment, so some groups have an anti police narrative to stir up resentment towards the establishment

There are 'contentious incidents' such as the deaths of Blair Peach & Kevin Gately [who were killed by police]. We need to be sure we deal with facts not hearsay.

Police will talk of threat to public order, civilians will dispute it. We say the Inquiry needs to get more contextual evidence rather than simply choose one side to believe.

eg officer HN336 remembers anti-apartheid activists damaging cricket grounds. No media coverage was found so it was suggested that he was confusing it with something else, but in fact there was a documented bunch of things as described by the officer.

There are the SDS annual reports for the Commissioner, & there are reports for Special Branch that have now been found & are being redacted. Beyond that, look at contemporaneous Hansard & media [all those briefings to journalists about 'rent a mob' paying off now, huh?]

[Sanders & Skelton have not just obviously agreed a line, they're basically paraphrases of each other. Sanders is going on about the need for historians to testify to the inquiry now]

The Inquiry should look at contemporaneous publications by the groups targeted by #SpyCops [sounds fair, but bear in mind numerous officers wrote as activists eg campaignopposingpolicesurveillance.com/2018/03/31/199…]

Some evidence puts emphasis on the cause being just, eg anti racist & anti apartheid. This is irrelevant to public order policing - order must be maintained no matter the politics of those who threaten it. It doesn't matter if the police agree or not.

Police can't be expected to decide which causes were just or will be thought just in the fullness of time. So them spying on anti-apartheid campaigners Stop The Seventy Tour would have been the same if it were a far right group [except you hardly spied on the far right]

Public order isn't just an absence of violence - intimidation & obstruction are disorder & liable to escalate. with large events there's crowd psychology that can be hijacked by dangerous people. So a protest being harmless may be due to the police's successful handling of it

It's obvious that if the South African cricket tour had gone ahead, the Stop The Seventy Tour campaign would have had a big impact, so it's right that they were targeted by #SpyCops. Activists say rugby fans hated them for disrupting. With drinking involved, it's a powderkeg

The SDS was only a handful of officers among 26,000 Met, so it's not like it'd have made much odds to redeploy them into something more useful to the public [such as catching the killers of people whose justice campaigns they spied on & undermined]

The SDS was cost-effective public order policing and we won't be told otherwise.

Every #SpyCops officer says they hoovered up all info they could & reported it unfiltered, it wasn't up to them to discern.

The kind of stuff they reported appears in other Special Branch reports, whether it's from the SDs or others. Plus, MI5 used it & we don't know what was useful to them.

Any reporting on members of groups would inevitably include personal info. It identifies them, & it might be useful to either Special Branch or MI5. Yes, it included details about children but it doesn't hurt them

Some activists had children and used that to influence other children. National Union of School Students pamphlet encouraged strikes and disruption [what was that you were saying a moment ago about the spied on people causing riots & stuff?]

It's not the #Spycops fault they reported irrelevant things. Why did MI5 retain the seemingly trivial stuff for so long? MI5 Witness Z should explain.

Mitting now returns to the Stop The Seventy Tour 'attacking cricket grounds'. The spycop refers to digging up Lords pitch & pouring oil. But Mitting has checked & this never happened. It was elsewhere, another time.

It was the Third Test at Headingley in 1975, a 'George Davis is Innocent' protest. Mitting spoke to the officer, who accepted he may be misremembering. If you think the Inquiry has got something wrong, then re-examine. But otherwise, don't make assertions without checking.

Sanders says there was another cricket pitch attack, but still a different place, a different time & with weedkiller rather than oil. So why didn't Mitting suggest that to the officer? [not sure why that makes any odds, the spycop was still wrongly accusing Stop The Seventy Tour]

That concludes the #SpyCopsInquiry hearing for today.

The #SpyCopsInquiry is back tomorrow 10-2.15.
Opening statements:
Diane Langford (activist)
"Madeleine"(deceived into relationship)
Phillippa Kaufmann QC, for people in relationships with spycops
Matthew Ryder QC, for anti-apartheid activists & Blair Peach's partner Celia Stubbs

@threadreaderapp unroll as only a great unroller can