Spycops inquiry exposes police efforts to destroy left-wing movements

The long-running spycops inquiry has revealed what one expert calls “the secret history of Britain“. Officially known as the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI), the inquiry, led by Sir John Mitting, has been looking into misconduct by undercover officers who infiltrated left-wing movements, stole the identities of deceased children, and entered into undisclosed, unlawful romances.

New exchanges show how absurdly incompetent one agent was and confirm, yet again, the state’s commitment to sabotaging left-wing movements.

Undercover officers unjustifiably targeted hundreds of left-wing groups for decades. As expert Tom Fowler told the Canary previously, this campaign “fundamentally changed Britain“.

When a spycop messed up

The agent, who went by the false name of ‘Simon Wellings’, made a costly blunder. Wellings, as the Guardian reported:

jeopardised his own covert deployment by mistakenly recording himself discussing individual campaigners with other special branch officers.

In a ludicrous turn of events, Wellings was at a spycop meeting when he looked up an activist’s phone number and dialled it by accident. The call went to voicemail, which recorded his ongoing conversation with other officers. This silly mistake blew his cover.

Between 2001 and 2007, Wellings infiltrated numerous campaigns and sent thousands of surveillance reports back to his superiors.

These, as the Guardian found:

included details of campaigners’ bank accounts, housing, personal relationships and finances.

They also noted that:

Campaigners said Wellings routinely made up and over-inflated his surveillance reports about them, exaggerating, for example, the level of violence in protests.

Their reporting highlighted that:

Internal police documents show that, after he was exposed, the police considered whether to leave the anti-capitalist group he had infiltrated “intact” or whether to “mount a destructive operation”.

‘Destructive’ police operations against the left

Activist Chris Nineham, whom the state is still targeting today, was a member of the groups that Wellings targeted. And after Nineham’s appearance at the spycops inquiry, Fowler hailed him for hammering home that:

this was not just about spying. This was about disruption. This was about sabotage.

As Fowler insisted, the undercover cops and the network of repression around them were “doing so much to destroy movements”.

He added that the evidence shows:

the police did destroy – do destroy – movements, as we have long said. But more than that, they talk about doing it and they put it in their files.

Guy Taylor, who was in the same left-wing groups as Nineham, summarised that Wellings’s appearance at the inquiry proved the agent:

was a fantasist and a liar and inflated everything

And even though the proceedings didn’t use the court’s time in a very efficient way, Taylor stressed that between the witness testimonies and Wellings’s own words, the former agent had totally “crumbled and died” under scrutiny. Indeed, as Fowler asserted, the chair himself even asserted that:

he believed… the evidence from other people… and gave [Wellings] the opportunity to change his position

Fowler concluded:

that just doesn’t happen and I think that spoke volumes

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.

Featured image via the Canary