Stop sexing up the spy cops scandal, say victims
The media’s prurient obsession with women's trauma has ensured the inquiry is a depoliticised dead-end, writes Rivkah Brown.
“When Everard was murdered, groups like Sisters Uncut forced a connection between her murder and the misogynistic, racist institution of policing. This connection, and a sense that police power was spiralling out of control, were reinforced by the tabling of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts bill just days before the news broke about Everard. The spy cops scandal, on the other hand, has been framed as discontinuous with the Met’s politics and past – an unexpectedly compelling episode of an otherwise two-star cop drama.
“Indeed, the media’s centering of the grim salaciousness of undercover cops impregnating unsuspecting young women and stealing dead children’s identities to do it – think of Donna McLean’s memoir Small Town Girl: Love, Lies and the Undercover Police, or the Telegraph’s Bed of Lies podcast – has eclipsed the story of the state trying to annihilate the organised left.
“Over 1,000 groups were spied on by police between 1968 and at least 2010, and almost all of these were leftwing. In the interim report, Mitting explains that no undercover officer was deployed into far-right groups between 1977 and 1982, because ‘Special Branch already had excellent sources within the extreme right’, and because they were worried the fash would beat them up.
“On Thursday, Met commander Jon Savell apologised ‘to women deceived by officers into sexual relationships, to the families of deceased children whose identities were used by officers...’, highlighting two groups whose plight has become synonymous with the spy cops. It’s unlikely we’ll ever hear an apology to the one group almost all of their victims belonged to: the left.”
