Discover Top Posts Tagged with #spy cops

Popular Recent

The spycops inquiry may not bring justice, but is an admission of the British state's long history of repressing the left

The spycops inquiry itself may not bring about real justice or change. But every new revelation helps to piece together the British state’s historic repression of the left. The inquiry is an important step towards exposing and resisting state repression, and minimising the harms of future undercover missions targeting our communities.

#ukpol #uk politics #spycops #spy cops #left wing sabotaged by police

Drax is cutting down ancient forests to fuel its North Yorkshire power station. Keir Milburn reflects on the climate camp that tried to shut it down - and the costs of the state's attempt to protect it.

In 2011, the climate camp network decided to disband. The undercover cops had certainly hampered the growth of the climate justice movement. Throughout this whole period, the police acted as the armed wing of the fossil fuel companies, paying scant regard to the legalities of their own actions. But this wasn’t the main reason for the climate camp’s dissolution. In truth, times had changed. The financial crash of 2008 had transformed the political environment, and by 2011 ‘generation left’ was being born in the camps of Occupy and occupied lecture theatres of the student movement. History contains moments of rupture after which movements must change shape and recompose themselves. The climate camp disbanded to allow that to happen. I suspect another such moment is in the post right now.

Watson and Kennedy were undercover for six and seven years respectively. When we include the costs of their support staff, the price of their deployment runs to several million pounds. Of course, there were other prices to be paid. The sense of betrayal when friends are revealed not to be who we thought they were is nothing compared to the experiences of the many women manipulated into sexual relationships by undercover police officers. Some cops even fathered children with women they were paid to spy on. There are other legacies too. These can be seen in the floods of Bangladesh, the forest fires in California and the other extreme weather events occurring with increased frequency.

#climate change #drax #uk #police #spy cops

Lowkey EXPOSES The Dark History Behind Israel’s Murder of Rachel Corrie

#rachel corrie #palestinian resistance #spy cops #Youtube

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.”