#spy cops

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.

“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.