9

Under constant watch

Q: ‘Would industrial relations managers actually meet people from Special Branch?’

A: ‘Well, Special Branch wouldn’t be doing their job if they didn’t… Sometimes we would go six months without meeting them. Sometimes you would go three to four weeks when you saw them quite frequently.’

Dudley Barrett, head of industrial relations at Costain Group (1982-95)1

The Buckingham Arms pub in central London has the distinction of having been in CAMRA’s Good Pub Guide seven years on the trot. It also has the advantage of being just round the corner from New Scotland Yard. As such it was an ideal place for a Special Branch police officer to have a lunchtime pint with a contact without drawing too much attention.

Jack Winder had been schooled to be discreet. He was a senior official with the Economic League, which had spent decades acting as the interface between corporations and the security services monitoring subversives. As Winder told MPs, at these meetings there were certain rules that needed to be followed.

‘I inherited Metropolitan Police contacts from my predecessor. He stressed to me, “The one thing to remember is that these people can do you a lot of harm, so don’t ask them anything that will embarrass them.” You never ask them a question about information on individuals or anything like that, because of their contacts. The door was open to those people; we had to put a foot in the door. They could do us a great deal of harm if we got on the wrong side of them and they simply said, “They’re dodgy; don’t touch them”.’2

Winder was being a little coy in his evidence. Former Economic League boss Michael Noar has suggested a much more active relationship. ‘Obviously we help them [Special Branch] where we can. If we come across things that we think will be of particular interest to them we send it to them. Now obviously, again in the course of discussions, there is an exchange of information just in the ordinary course of talking.’3

These links with corporations and the targeting of union activists was confirmed by Special Branch officers speaking in the BBC’s ‘True Spies’ series of reports. They made clear that the monitoring of trade unions was a key part of their work. One said:

‘It was very, very important that trade unions were monitored and I as a Special Branch officer did it as efficiently as I could.’

At Ford’s Halewood factory the company submitted to the Branch the names of the latest job applicants.

‘We were expected to check these lists against our known subversives and if any were seen on the list, strike a line through it, go and see our contact and say “so and so is a member of the CP [Communist Party]”.

You call it blacklisting and that’s what it is. If you have a small group of subversives that can bring a factory to a stop then I think the ends justify the means. In any sort of war there are always going to be casualties.’4

Metropolitan Police Special Branch officer Ken Day, who served from 1969 to 1998, spent time cultivating top union sources. ‘People at the very top,’ he said.5 Winder said that the League had good relations with certain trade-union leaders who felt they had problems with the far left. Among them was Kate Losinska, who was president of the Civil and Public Services Association in the 1970s. Losinska was a hero on the Tory right for being, as the Telegraph described her in its obituary, ‘a scourge of leftwing extremism in the trade unions’. She also chaired the Trade Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding, funded by the US Congress and NATO.6

And if they couldn’t draw upon ideological soulmates the secret state could put its own people in place. Seumas Milne’s book The Enemy Within7 exposes perhaps the most infamous union spy in UK history: Roger Windsor, chief executive of the National Union of Miners (NUM) during the 1984-5 miners’ strike. According to an MI5 officer quoted by Milne, Windsor was an agent provocateur, deliberately sent in to work for the miners in order ‘to fuck up the NUM’. Windsor was, of course, not the only union official providing information to the security services during the miners’ strike. As the ex-MI5 officer Cathy Massiter explained: ‘Whenever a major dispute came up it would immediately become a major area for investigation.’8

The construction industry had its own links with the secret state to ensure that an eye was kept on activists. Former UCATT president John Flavin, now an industrial-relations consultant for Laing O’Rourke, says:

‘I was made aware that companies that had industrial-relations [IR] managers met regularly to discuss industrial and trade union activities. I was also made aware that they had regular meetings with a Special Branch officer at a public house in Hammersmith. One of the IR managers said that he attended one of those meetings and the Special Branch people had revolvers and that he never went back.’9

That these meetings took place has been confirmed by a number of the industrial-relations professionals that the authors interviewed for this book. It was easy to see how such relationships between the police and the building firms may have come about when you consider the evidence of Ken Mullier, personnel manager for TCA subscriber Mowlem. He told a World in Action documentary:

‘Most of the major construction companies have their own employees who are ex-policemen and they’re employed specifically for their expertise, if you like, at being able to contact old friends who are still serving in the police force to give them the information they need.’10

One such identified by the authors is former detective superintendent Brian Morris who, according to his Linked-In profile, was employed in ‘specialist squads’ within the Metropolitan Police. Upon leaving the force, he became group security manager for blacklisting firm Laing O’Rourke. He is now programme security adviser to Crossrail.

The police and blacklisting

Given this history, it was not surprising that campaigners wanted further investigation into the role, if any, of the police and security services in the blacklisting operation. And it was ex-police officer David Clancy who first suggested there was something in this suspicion. At Dave Smith’s Employment Tribunal against Carillion, his solicitor David Renton specifically asked Clancy about the police and the ICO officer replied: ‘There is some information that could only have come from the police or the security services.’ There was an audible gasp and a cheer in the public gallery when he said it.

When giving evidence to MPs, Clancy expanded on this. ‘There were entries such as a person being removed from the country and coming back into the United Kingdom,’ he said.

‘This was at a particular time when perhaps people from the Republic of Ireland were being monitored. This was what would appear to have been an Irish national and individuals being given security clearance working on MoD construction sites. There was information in relation to the registered keeper details of vehicles. Where would that come from? In one particular case there was what was referred to as “a special” within the database attached to one individual’s records. That seems to be an in-depth analysis of an individual’s home circumstances and what his neighbours thought about him. In my opinion, that would have been part of, in effect, an intelligence record in relation to an individual.’11

Among all the files released so far, not one relates to any person convicted or even suspected of any kind of terrorist activity.

It took a stroke of luck and some careful digging to develop a much fuller picture. Dave Smith was granted a third-party disclosure order against the ICO that obliged them to disclose all the files that related to him or to the companies in his Employment Tribunal. It was only because the ICO had a lack of staff that they suggested his solicitor, Declan Owens, could look at the files to identify the relevant ones. As Owens was doing this work pro bono, he didn’t go up but suggested that Smith went instead. When Smith read the files of Dan Gilman, Frank Smith and Lisa Teuscher, he realized that they contained information that only the police could know. It was pure fluke that it was Smith who looked at the files, because anyone else would not have realized the significance.

Two files which raised particular suspicions are held on Frank Smith and his girlfriend Lisa Teuscher. Frank, a bricklayer by trade, was a long-time political activist who had been involved in a number of actions on building sites across London calling for better wages and conditions. It was the late 1990s and London was experiencing a building boom but the stocky Liverpudlian had started to find work hard to get. He said:

‘I was in poverty – the only jobs I could get were working on little crap jobs. As a bricklayer, you always wanted to get in with a subbie [subcontractor] or a big job that had continuity, that had a decent run of work. You never start a long job in November to January. So you were always aiming for a job that you could get the turkey out of. For me it just became harder and harder to get onto any job where there was any decent run of work – I could only get little tiny jobs. On one occasion, money was quite bad, Lisa couldn’t understand it and she took a day driving me around different sites looking for a start. It’d be try that one, that’s a big job – I’d go in one after another – nothing. After seeing this and seeing my name on the blacklist, I think my name must have been getting checked out.’12

Frank Smith’s name certainly was being checked out – and not just by the construction companies – but the evidence for this state surveillance is only now emerging.

When Ian Kerr appeared before the Scottish Affairs Select Committee in November 2012, he used it as an opportunity to make clear he had no links with the police. ‘I had no links with any police department whatsoever or any security department whatsoever, and I was never a private investigator, for the sake of this part of the discussion,’ he said.

‘Any information that came in came via the named contacts. The main part of the contacts’ jobs was to keep a very good liaison with their opposite numbers in the unions, which was accepted procedure. There is nothing unusual whatsoever about that. In the process of running a site efficiently, they would have made all sorts of odd contacts.’13

And he agreed that those contacts would have included the police ‘even if it was only to do with a theft off-site, an attempted break-in or a grievance matter to keep the site open where there was an unofficial protest.’

MP Pamela Nash then asked about a line in one of the files of an Irish national saying: ‘An individual has been given security clearance to work on MoD [Ministry of Defence] construction sites.’ She wanted to know if Kerr had a role in the security clearance of Irish nationals working on MoD contracts. There was a very long silence in the room, only broken when Kerr finally asked if that could be answered in private and the chair agreed that it could be. However, it was never followed up and a fortnight later Kerr was dead. Subsequently, his widow Mary said: ‘Ian did tell me that he didn’t think it was in anyone’s best interest to bring up the question of the Irish. I don’t know why. I’m afraid that’s a secret Ian took with him.’14

Kerr’s statement to MPs denying any links with the police contrasted with a posthumously published interview with The Times just two months later. In it, he recalled a meeting organized by The Consulting Association in 2008 when eight construction industry directors were addressed by a ‘key officer’ from the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (NETCU). According to the Daily Telegraph, this then Huntingdon-based police organization had been set up to ‘take over MI5’s covert role watching groups such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, trade-union activists and leftwing journalists’.15 Kerr told The Times: ‘They were seeking a channel to inform construction companies [of the information] they were collecting [and] they were wanting to be able to feed it out to the companies.’

The Times reported that, in return, the NETCU officer asked the companies to pass on their own information about potential troublemakers and Kerr said that a ‘two-way information exchange’ opened up. Kerr also disclosed that codes on the files were used to indicate those who were of interest to Special Branch and that ‘Irish ex-Army, bad egg’ was one example of this.16 Both terms appear on Consulting Association documents relating to Steve Acheson. It turned out that the Information Commissioner had seized evidence of this 2008 meeting in which the senior police officer from the counter-extremism unit had given a Powerpoint presentation to the secret blacklisting body. The ICO allowed MPs on the Select Committee to view a note taken but has refused subsequent Freedom of Information requests on the grounds of breaching the Data Protection Act. David Smith, the deputy commissioner, said:

‘I think it is a bit of an overstatement to call it minutes of a meeting. My recollection is that it is notes of a presentation that the crime unit gave. It is not as though they were having a meeting to agree a course of action.’17

The ICO says that the document was made available to the Scottish Affairs Select Committee to ‘inform their work’ but wasn’t intended for wider publication. Meanwhile the Metropolitan Police have responded to Freedom of Information requests by saying it holds no information about any meetings between NETCU and The Consulting Association, nor in fact any documentation whatsoever from NETCU, which has now been subsumed into the Metropolitan Police. One of the senior managers attending the meeting was John Edwards from Carillion, some two years after the company had supposedly broken all ties with TCA.

In fact, the ICO’s deputy commissioner says that he was not surprised to find evidence of collusion between the police and blacklisting.

‘Given that this was about people who had supposedly caused trouble to the construction industry and therefore there are a range of ways you cause trouble, right from the entirely legitimate raising health and safety to criminal damage. There is a link with crime and so it is not surprising there was some connection with the police. I can see a police officer, if they had known the database had existed, going along to Kerr and saying “we have got this person for causing criminal damage on a building site, you might want to put them on your list”.’18

However, on the entire Consulting Association database of 3,213 names, there are no more than 20 files that relate to theft or similar, less than one per cent of the total. The remaining 99 per cent appear there due to trade union and political activism. State co-operation with the blacklisting operation was unlikely to be part of an investigation into criminals stealing copper.

Security-service infiltration

The involvement of the security services was the most closely guarded secret of the blacklisting scandal. However, information was seeping out from different sources and careful digging. The most explosive evidence came to light when a whistleblower decided to reveal a hitherto unknown and shocking spying operation.

The Colin Roach Centre in Stoke Newington, London, opened in 1993 and brought together several community organizations. It was named after a young black man shot dead in Stoke Newington police station in 1983 – a killing ruled to be suicide but regarded with suspicion by many residents. One of the organizations involved in the centre was the Hackney Community Defence Association, which had proved tenacious in its mission to expose corruption among Stoke Newington police officers. It was also home to trade-union campaigns.

A year after the Centre opened, a man calling himself Mark Cassidy appeared. He said that he was a builder who had lost his father to a drunk driver and come down to London looking for work – but it was just a story. Cassidy’s real name was Mark Jenner and he was an undercover spy for the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS). As Guardian journalists Paul Lewis and Rob Evans revealed: ‘Cassidy delved into radical politics. He had a particularly dubious mission: keeping an eye on campaigners exposing police wrong-doing.’19 As such he gravitated towards the Colin Roach Centre. Mark Metcalf was a co-ordinator at the Centre at the time and is now a journalist. He said:

‘From my campaigning experience it was unusual for someone to simply walk in – most people start their involvement after meeting someone or attending an event. He claimed to have seen TV coverage of a demonstration by the families of people killed at the hands of the police, and radical lawyer Gareth Pierce speaking afterwards, and wanted to get involved. He had come down from his home town of Birkenhead to continue working as a builder and didn’t know many people locally.’20

The Centre was also home to the Brian Higgins Defence Campaign, set up after a UCATT official sued union member Brian Higgins for libel. Jenner chaired some of the Defence Campaign meetings. It may be coincidence but a page in Higgins’ blacklist file dated October 1996 is titled ‘Known Associates of Brian Higgins – (see their separate cards)’. The ICO has redacted the entire page. In addition there are a large number of articles on his file from the magazine that the Colin Roach Centre printed dating from around the same time that Jenner was chairing these meetings.

The SDS was an elite undercover unit set up by the Special Branch in the wake of protests against the Vietnam War to infiltrate subversive groups. The feeling was that the huge demonstrations had exposed an intelligence gap. The SDS would bridge this gap. The officers would adopt fake identities and live for years among target groups, gaining the trust of those they were spying on. That trust extended to forming relationships and even fathering children with the very people on whom they were tasked to find intelligence.

Though now one of the more notorious spying outfits, the SDS was part of a long policing tradition. Plainclothes police officers infiltrating political organizations and spying on meetings is hardly something new. Co-operation between the state and business in gathering information about people they considered posed a risk to the status quo also has a long history. The first camera purchased by the Metropolitan Police was used to photograph the suffragettes. Despite the end of the Cold War, Special Branch had seen an eightfold increase in officers and those engaged in domestic intelligence gathering and anti-subversion work increased fivefold. As one intelligence expert wrote at the time:

‘The Special Branch is supposed to be as accountable as ordinary police forces to local police authorities but this is clearly a fiction. No Chief Constable or Home Secretary would countenance enquiries into Special Branch activities. The Special Branch remains outside of democratic control and is one more element of the secret state which escapes an effective form of oversight.’21

The expansion of who might be considered a subversive and therefore a legitimate target continued to increase. The catch-all phrase was ‘domestic extremism’, which had no legal basis or agreed definition, and, as Evans and Lewis point out:

‘could be applied to anyone police wanted to keep an eye on. In the most general terms it was taken to refer to political activity involving “criminal acts of direct action in furtherance of a single-issue campaign”, but would not be restricted to criminal conduct. Domestic extremists, police decided, were those who wanted to “prevent something happening or to change legislation or domestic policy”, often doing so “outside normal democratic process”.’22

The groups at the Colin Roach Centre, which was as much a trade-union resource centre as anything else, clearly met this definition and so it was little wonder the SDS would try to insert someone into this nexus of dissent. Jenner’s cover story of working as a joiner proved ideal not just for making connections with other builders but also in that he could justify his peripatetic lifestyle. During his time there, he ferried construction union activists to demonstrations and attended picket lines over unpaid wages and victimization.

Jenner also spied on anti-racist campaigners and the efforts by anti-fascist activists to aggressively confront the British National Party and the paramilitary fascist group Combat 18. And some of this information appears to have made its way on to the blacklist files held by The Consulting Association. Three separate trade unionists who were in contact with Jenner had details on how they were ‘observed’ or ‘apprehended’ while protesting against fascists laying a wreath at the Cenotaph in commemoration of Britain’s war dead on Remembrance Sunday in 1999. The files on two trade unionists record a piece of information that they say was known to only a handful of members involved in anti-fascist activity during the 1990s. The three were part of a loose grouping of activists, known colloquially as the ‘Away Team’, who protected labour movement and anti-racist demonstrations from physical attacks by far-right activists. Only around 50 people in the entire country would have known what the ‘Away Team’ referred to, as it was a private joke relating to football rather than a term ever recorded in the press. The information on their membership was gathered by SDS officer Peter Francis, who served for years undercover. All three activists believe this information that ended up on their TCA files could only have originated from undercover police officers.

One of the members of the Away Team who came into contact with the police at the anti-BNP event in November 1999 was Frank Smith. He said:

‘I was stopped, searched and spoken to. I wasn’t arrested, so there would be nothing in my arrest file. Definitely no press reports about it.

Now what has that got to do with me being a builder? How would a building company know anything about that? It could only come from the police.’23

Yet the incident is recorded in his Consulting Association file.

Also in his blacklist file is a line saying:

‘Under constant watch (officially) and seen as politically dangerous.’

His blacklist file starts in 1992 and records his involvement with the Vascroft dispute and the Joint Sites Committee. Special Branch also opened a file on him and the officer who opened that file was Peter Francis. The officer recalls:

‘The file was created some time around 1995. I knew Frank was involved in Militant but it was primarily his role within the Away Team that I was interested in. So I opened what we call an RF – a registry file.

Then, every time I saw him on a demo or I had a drink with him, that would go on the file. “Seen as politically dangerous” is the assessment I would have had of him. In order for me to create a file on him I need to say something like that because he was regarded as being a subversive.’24

Francis, who subsequently blew the whistle on SDS activities, including spying on the family of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence, was not tasked to monitor Smith because of his union activities but because of his involvement in the Away Team. Yet Smith’s blacklist file also describes him as a ‘leading light’ in the Away Team. Quite how a manager on a building site would know this is difficult to explain.

There was more to Smith’s blacklist file than just his union and political activities, though – and it extended to his girlfriend at the time, Lisa Teuscher. One part of his file talks about Teuscher, an American citizen, being involved in ‘several marriages of convenience’. This was untrue. It turned out that she also had her own blacklisting file and the only thing on it is that she is the ‘girlfriend of Frank Smith’. And, by coincidence, Francis had also opened the Special Branch file on Teuscher. At one stage Francis recalls being asked, via his superior, to supply information to the Home Office on her marital status. Teuscher was not involved in the construction industry but was actively involved in anti- racist campaigning. Francis told the authors that a file was opened on her because she was identified as an important member of the far-left group Militant and, in particular, Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE). Following the Special Branch intervention, Teuscher was refused leave to remain in the UK and the Home Office tried to deport her. When she appealed the decision, the British government seized her passport for seven years meaning that the young American could not visit her family. Teuscher has now returned to the US but remembers how her treatment by the British state affected her:

‘Traumatic because they held my passport for seven years. I loved my family. It was so hard not seeing them for so many years. They tried to deport me; I got a lawyer and fought it. I tried to do everything legally but the British government seized my passport. I couldn’t go anywhere. It was very stressful. They accused me of stuff that basically is untrue.’25

Teuscher is particularly upset that her political campaigning was undoubtedly the reason for her battle against deportation.

‘I am outraged. I came to London and was proud to be a member of the YRE. Happy to be spending time usefully fighting racism, especially when we drove the BNP [British National Party] off of Brick Lane. I find it disturbing that throughout my genuine interest to improve society, there was an unknown force in the British government tracking me.’26

The authors informed Teuscher that she was on The Consulting Association blacklist and she has now received a copy of her file from the ICO:

‘I was shocked when I first read my file, it made me feel physically sick. It’s absurd. I don’t see any reason why my name should be linked with the building industry. I had no professional involvement whatsoever. The only reason I am on the list is because of Frank. And that is not a legitimate reason for the police following me or anybody else making notes on me.’

Teuscher eventually won her appeal against deportation but after seven years of constant struggle says that she was worn down and she eventually returned to the US when her passport was returned to her, saying ‘they won in the end’.

It seems implausible that these very specific, virtually unknown pieces of private information about Smith and Teuscher could have appeared on their blacklist files without first having originated from a state source.

Also stopped at the Cenotaph event were teacher Dan Gilman and RMT member Steve Hedley. Both of them had Consulting Association files, though Gilman has no connection with the construction industry. His sole record in the file is his attendance at an anti-fascist event. Hedley is now assistant general secretary of the RMT rail union. His blacklist file covers around 15 years and is filled with details on what he said at union conferences, his involvement in health-and-safety activities, industrial disputes he took part in and his political views. The RMT had its own file held by the TCA although it was never seized. In addition to Hedley, senior RMT official Mick Lynch had a blacklist record, leading to concerns in the union about the extent to which it had been targeted.

Hedley’s file also has details on his participation in the 1999 Cenotaph anti-fascist demonstration. Hedley said:

‘There was absolutely no way a building-site manager would have known that I was on that demonstration. It was nothing to do with work. It was not covered in the papers whatsoever.’27

Hedley points the finger at Jenner, to whom Hedley was introduced at the Colin Roach Centre, as the possible spark for Special Branch interest. Hedley recalls:

‘There was something strange about the guy from the start because he looked like a crusty, long haired, and he’d gone to the Kurdish community centre. I just couldn’t see the connection why somebody like that would be trying to get involved with the Kurds.’

Hedley would bump into Jenner a couple of times a month in the late 1990s whenever anti-fascist activities were going on. Jenner for a while became a key activist for Anti-Fascist Action in north London. He was also on several construction dispute picket lines, including Canary Wharf, Southwark, one close to the Old Bailey and another in Waterloo over unpaid wages by subcontractor Dahl Jensen. Several hundred union members turned up to picket the site and Jenner was there and at other disputes which bubbled up across the capital in the building-boom years. Jenner was also present when Hedley went to Ireland as part of a trade-union delegation to observe the peace process, a trip organized by the Colin Roach Centre. The undercover police officer even stayed at Hedley’s mum’s house.

A whole other life

One person taken in completely by the undercover spy was Alison (not her real name), who was in a relationship with Jenner for five years. Alison said that she had no idea that he had a whole other life as a police officer – let alone his own family with three children. They lived together and both worked at Glastonbury one year for the Workers’ Beer Company, raising money on behalf of the Colin Roach Centre. Jenner would keep reams of newspaper clippings. His cover as joiner extended to having a bag of tools and a fake job with Manor Works in Clapham. Jenner even fitted Alison a kitchen – though she noted at the time that he had trouble using the router. When Jenner left suddenly, he took many of his files and all his pictures with him. Only a few snippets remain, including a 1996 diary that indicates he attended UCATT union meetings in February, attended pay talks in May and a union conference in Sheffield in June that year. Other handwritten notes refer to TGWU, EPIU and UCATT members. UCATT records show that he (under the name Mark Cassidy) was a member of the union from 1996 until 1998.28 Jenner was active in supporting the JJ Fast Foods strike in Tottenham Hale and another note records that he visited a meeting of the RMT Midland District on 12 July 1995.

Alison told the authors she remembers numerous conversations with the SDS spy about the building industry and union campaigns, which she described as a ‘key part of his work’ and ‘a big part of what he did during this period’. She remembers how he even used to ask her mother to type up the handwritten notes that he had taken when returning from union meetings. Whether his role was to spy on union activists or if he was acting as an agent provocateur, Jenner’s considerable involvement with trade unions in northeast London over many years is beyond doubt.

It would not be unusual for SDS officers to be on picket lines because their targets would often join industrial disputes. Peter Francis recalls picketing outside the Mount Pleasant sorting office in central London because he was interested in a member of Militant who was part of that action.

Another Militant supporter who was not a building worker but an elected politician also has a blacklist file. Former Member of the Scottish Parliament Tommy Sheridan came to prominence when he was elected to Glasgow City Council from his prison cell after he had been jailed for stopping a Poll Tax warrant sale. Two years later, in 1994, his file was opened and regularly updated until TCA was shut in 2009. It has details on his anti-roads protests, social housing, speaking on picket lines outside building sites and the various elected posts he held. Sheridan says most of the early entries in his file are not press cuttings but information often from private political meetings that appears to have been passed to someone while he was carrying out his role as a Glasgow city councillor and later an MSP. Commenting on his appearance on the blacklist, Sheridan said:

‘Blacklisting and spying by multinational companies against shop stewards subverts trade unionism. Blacklisting and spying with police collusion on elected representatives of the people subverts democracy.’29

A number of other prominent Scottish socialist politicians also have TCA blacklist files, including former MSP Colin Fox and former editor of the Scottish Socialist Voice newspaper, Alan McCombes. Given the fact that Special Branch were spying on other elected politicians linked with Militant, including the Coventry Labour MP Dave Nellist,30 this has only added to the speculation about police collusion with the blacklist.

SDS officers could be tasked to monitor industrial militants. For instance, a major effort went into the policing of the Wapping dispute because of the violence associated with it.31 When funding for the unit switched from the Home Office to the Metropolitan Police, its million-pound-a-year budget needed to be justified. That meant making its product available to others and one of those was Special Branch’s industrial desk. From its glory years in the 1970s, the industrial section had shrunk to just two detective sergeants and two detective constables by the mid-1990s. Francis, who had a desk next to them before he joined the SDS, said:

‘They were purely there for liaison purposes with industry and with unions. They used to swagger around saying how many lunches they had had. The pub lunches are the cheap end. They would be meeting in hotels.’32

The role played by the industrial section within Special Branch and the almost identical F2 branch of MI5, once headed by Stella Rimington, is well documented.33 The entire purpose of both was to spy on trade unions and for this information to be shared with major employers when deemed necessary.

While the SDS was a secret even within Special Branch, its registry files would have been available to other desks. The source of intelligence would have been sanitized, as the jargon puts it, to ensure it was protected. The phrasing of Frank Smith’s blacklisting file suggests a conversation between an industry contact and someone with access to the Special Branch file and that conversation being related to Ian Kerr by the company source. In the case of Frank Smith, the entries are referenced to 3228, which is code for Costain.

The industrial-relations manager for Costain from 1982 until 1995 was Dudley Barrett. Now retired and living in Wiltshire, Barrett told the authors he attended quarterly meetings of the Economic League’s Services Group and then The Consulting Association. Barrett also revealed he had meetings with Special Branch officers:

‘Whenever I thought it was necessary or they thought it was necessary. Sometimes we would go six months without meeting them. Sometimes you would go three to four weeks when you saw them quite frequently. A few of them became personal friends to be quite honest and vice versa. I can say I was much closer than most people were to them.’34

Barrett claims that ‘they never ever gave us names incidentally. Never: absolutely rigid that was.’ Although, when pressed, he conceded: ‘Occasionally it would happen, if you had strong suspicions and they hadn’t got onto the Services Group thing but they [Special Branch] would only deal with people that they were very, very sure and sound with.’ Although Barrett admits having particularly close relationships with Special Branch, he claims to have known four or five other senior industrial-relations managers and HR directors who attended similar meetings with the secret political police unit.

According to Barrett, Special Branch had a section that dealt with:

‘construction and a lot that dealt with offshore, whereas others were just interested in the Communist Party. The Communist Party was literally trying to overrun this country in 1948-50, names of them were flying about no end: Communist Party members.’35

Special Branch’s interest in monitoring leftwing groups continues. Paul Filby, a joiner from Liverpool involved in anti-fascist activities, told the authors about being approached by two plainclothes Merseyside Police officers in 2013. They were interested in any information Filby had about the activities of anarchist groups on demonstrations. In return, the officers said, they would be able to pay Filby’s ‘expenses’ if he was attending events. The construction worker declined the offer.

The activities of campaign groups were also of interest to another spin-off from the Economic League. Caprim was run by Jack Winder, the League’s former director of research, and Stan Hardy, its director of operations. Winder joined the League back in 1963 after a stint in the army. Hardy, on the other hand, had worked for and run several companies, again after an army career, and didn’t join the League until 1988. He subsequently went to work for the Institute of Directors. Caprim was set up in May 1993 and employed Geoff Hume and Jack Bramwell from the League. Bramwell’s expertise was in security. Among Caprim’s directors was former League chair and sugar baron Sir Henry Saxon Tate. In a smooth performance before MPs in February 2013, Winder’s nonchalant explanation for Caprim’s birth was simply to give himself and Hardy a job. He continued:

‘We thought we had something to offer, which was to continue the part of the League’s work that I had been involved in – that is to say, warning companies about threats to their well-being from all sorts of organizations. As time went on, of course, it became much less about actual parties like the Socialist Worker and so on, and much more about single-issue campaigns.’36

According to Winder, Caprim didn’t offer a vetting service because it was the bad publicity attached to that aspect which had helped bring down the League. It didn’t make business sense to repeat a failed venture. Instead Caprim focused on organizations such as Ethical Consumer magazine, the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) and Reclaim the Streets. CAAT was also infiltrated by private investigators while Reclaim the Streets was targeted by the SDS.Winder identified three specific sectors to which Caprim provided intelligence: the defence industry, pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals. He named GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Novartis, Rhone-Poulenc, Zeneca, Monsanto, Rio Tinto, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley as being among Caprim’s clients. Subsequently GSK told MPs that, while it had taken some information from Caprim, it had been so poor that they had terminated the relationship. For those that retained them, Caprim monitored the output of campaigners and attended their meetings. It coincidentally folded in 2009, just a few weeks after the raid on TCA, supposedly because it lost clients and Winder was looking to retire. It had, though, been barely functional for several years before that, as its directors simply lacked the energy and its competitors, including an expanding police interest, enjoyed better resources and equipment. Competitors included risk-management firms such as Control Risks and Kroll.

One former Morgan Stanley banker who blew the whistle on malpractice at the bank came across Control Risks. Chidi Obihara said companies such as these, well staffed with former police and military personnel, ‘are known across the industry for keeping records on individual bankers’. Obihara, who found himself unable to get a job after going public, added:

‘On their websites… they say they carry out bespoke searches on individuals. At a recent industry conference, I asked one officer of Control Risks who told me she was unaware of any laws stopping them from maintaining an “informal” list of individuals.’37

Unite union members involved in a British Airways dispute in 2014 have also complained about being put under surveillance by the Asset Protection group, which is similarly staffed by ex-police officers.38

Stan Hardy left Caprim in 2000, seeking more interesting and, possibly, more lucrative work elsewhere, while Winder ploughed on. Far more effective was The Consulting Association, which was headed by a far more diligent worker than Winder or Hardy. And this was definitely keeping tabs on individuals.

Spying on environmental activists

While giving evidence to the Select Committee, Kerr told MPs that, in addition to the files on construction workers, there were around 200 files on environmental activists that the ICO never seized because they did not open the filing cabinet. Kerr subsequently burnt all the files not seized. Nonetheless, an idea as to why these environmental and animal-rights activists might have been targeted can be gleaned from interviews with those named, as well as by looking at the battles the construction industry fought from the mid-1990s onwards.

In 1996, proposals to cut a bypass for Newbury through a sensitive environmental site brought campaigners out in force. Police were confronted by a determined and resourceful effort, including the digging and occupying of tunnels and trees in an effort to frustrate the building process. Sir Charles Pollard, the then Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police, made clear in a subsequent interview that Newbury was a line in the sand as far as he was concerned. ‘The ones who were planning and tried to carry out seriously illegal acts are very subversive, in a sense of subversive to democracy,’ he said.39

Special Branch paid informants for details on the occupation while Thames Valley Police took the unusual step of recruiting from the private sector a spy who was inserted into the camp. This person was eventually credited with allowing a key tunnel to be taken by police and helped cause the protest to unravel.

The Consulting Association set up a special group to consider the wider issue. It was called the Woodstock Group – because of the location of its meetings in The Bear pub in the well-to-do Oxfordshire village of the same name. Kerr told MPs:

‘The targets [for the activists] were the M11, Twyford Down, the Manchester second runway and the Bath eastern bypass. It was those sorts of contracts, which were hit very badly. The M11 had a very large oak tree that stood in the way for ages, which became a postal address and had letters addressed to it.’40

At Woodstock Group meetings, examples came up of people who had gained employment in construction companies or occupied offices. The industry wanted information on who these people were. In his private notes obtained by the authors, Kerr records:

‘The outcome of these meetings of the cos [companies] involved in the construction of M11, Twyford Down, Bath Eastern Bypass, Manchester 2nd Runway etc was that the protest movement’s tactics were known about from first-hand reporting back via cos’ [companies] main security contacts and because of the tenacity of these people, cos [companies] took notice and responded responsibly by becoming sensitive to environmental issues.’

The intersection of the state, police and the private sector was never clearer than in the response to these road-building schemes. At Newbury, in addition to Thames Valley Police employing an off-the-shelf spook and Special Branch buying informants, security contractors Group 4 used the services of Threat Response International (TRI) to gather intelligence. This company also succeeded in inserting a spy into Campaign Against Arms Trade on behalf of BAe. In the case of Newbury, TRI information also went to the police.41

The comedian and activist Mark Thomas was one of those on the receiving end of TRI’s efforts to destabilize the anti-arms trade group. He considered Martin Hogbin, who worked for the campaign while passing information to TRI, a friend and it took several years before he realized that he was a paid infiltrator.

The board of TRI is made up of Evelyn Le Chene (who has an intelligence background), Bob Hodges, a former major-general in the British Army, and Barrie Gane, former deputy head of MI6.42 Thomas’ 2014 show Cuckooed, about his experience of being a victim of BAe corporate spying, has won multiple awards, including the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award.

Thomas also ended up on Kerr’s green list and believes this was because of his role in a campaign against the Ilisu Dam in Turkey. This project, backed by the government’s Export Credit Guarantee Department, involved Balfour Beatty. The project would have destroyed a key cultural site and caused thousands of people to be relocated. An alliance of human rights activists, trade unionists, archaeologists, Friends of the Earth, students and the general public came together to get the government and the construction firms to think again.

Thomas said:

‘We took over Balfour Beatty’s AGM completely, the first one. They shut it down early, lost a load of votes, had to recast a load of votes. We cost them about a quarter of a million, just at the AGM. That was interesting. Second one they were well prepared for us. We lost the vote but the company didn’t win it. The abstentions were enormous. They were bigger than those who voted for the company. Which in financial terms is quite a thing.’43

The Ilisu Dam campaign was officially supported by the London region of UCATT, which passed a symbolic green ban against the proposed scheme and is mentioned on Dave Smith’s blacklist file. Balfour Beatty withdrew from the project and, more than 15 years later, the dam has still not been built.

Although a TCA ring binder was the only clue to its environmental files, Unite and the GMB have cross-referenced the names with their membership lists to identify potential victims. One is Ellenor Hutson. Today she is a welfare-rights officer living in Glasgow but during the mid-1990s, she was a road protester at the Newbury Bypass, A30 link road in Devon and the Manchester Second Runway. It didn’t occur to Hutson that she might be on an industry blacklist until a letter dropped through her letterbox from Unite. She said:

‘It was just random luck that I was a member of Unite at the time. I put on Facebook that I had got this letter. I got talking to people about this and I realized I had opposed a lot of the projects the big firms were running. Two other people popped up and said they have called the ICO and they were on it and they were as shocked as I was. I set up a Facebook page and found dozens of people all from the 1990s on this blacklist.’44

These activists had been involved in all the major protests from the mid-1990s up until 2009. Another on the list is Merrick Badger, whose investigative skills successfully uncovered police spy Mark Kennedy. He said:

‘It seems that my details are on the blacklist alongside a lot of other people who were at the protest against Manchester Airport’s second runway in 1997. Curiously, there seems to be little from the larger Newbury Bypass protest. This might be because the particular construction company involved in a given project asked for information to be gathered. Whether this came from spies – as in McLibel – or from attending court cases and combing media reports, or from undercover police, or a combination of them, we don’t know.’45

Another on the list is John Stewart, who chairs the pressure group Heathrow Association for the Control of Aircraft Noise. Described by his Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith as a superbly effective but civilized campaigner, Stewart was told by the GMB that he was blacklisted. Stewart fears this may explain why, when he landed in America in 2011 for a speaking tour, he was escorted off the plane by armed guards and sent back to the UK. He said:

‘The list seems to have been around for some years. It’s worrying that somebody like me, without convictions, can find myself on a blacklist like this.’46

The files for the prominent Scottish leftwing political activists Tommy Sheridan, Colin Fox and Alan McCombes are all referenced as ‘green’ on the Consulting Association index system. This suggests that the greenlist was not solely for environmental activists but also for wider ‘security’ concerns, again raising the spectre of possible police collusion.

Hutson says the fact that her name, date of birth and home town are next to her name suggests the police as the original source. Hutson was arrested between 7 and 10 times, without press coverage, and each time was asked for her date of birth and her home town, which was Colchester. She would not have given that detail to private security guards or detective agencies looking to gather information for injunctions. One person with a now-destroyed file is listed as Grace Quantocks (the Quantocks is a range of hills in Somerset). However, Hutson points out that it was standard practice for activists to adopt the name of a landmark as a surname and give that to the police. For instance Dongas, named after ancient tracks on Twyford Down, was a name adopted by campaigners against a road-building scheme in that area.

The virtue of anonymity

Being targeted by those in authority has always been a hazard for those trying to improve the living standards of working people, so the need to keep workers’ organizations secret was well known. In 1834, the Tolpuddle Martyrs were sent to Australia for swearing a secret oath while forming a trade union in the Dorset countryside. But the martyrs were just one example of vindictiveness by the authorities against agricultural labourers at the time. Eighteen people were hanged during a prolonged bitter battle over rural unemployment and poverty wages. With no legal means of raising their grievances, the fictitious character called Captain Swing was blamed whenever large crowds took retribution against landowners’ threshing machines.

Some 20 years earlier, a slowdown in the industrial revolution had seen workers use the name of Ned Ludd when they fought back against the destitution facing mill workers made unemployed by new looms. As Luddite leaders faced execution, the need to hide one’s true identity was a matter of life or death.

Workers in the building industry facing extremely hostile management have also resorted to using false names to avoid detection. At the simplest level this amounted to deliberately mis-spelling a name during a site induction or using a middle name when making an application. The leading lights in the Joint Sites Committee used the aliases Sean Prophet, Joe Stewart, Jack Mundey and Jerry Kelly when writing articles or talking to employers. All four alter-egos have their own blacklist files. Joe Stewart’s file records:

1992 Mar:

Described as Treasurer of the JSC and Newham UCATT Branch

Long time reporter of various disputes in militant

Note: could be pseudonym

Sean Prophet’s file is 11 pages long and even includes a photo­­­graph of the fictional person, as well as an article written about 300 bags of asbestos dumped by a company in a school playground and numerous press cuttings. It contains entries such as:

1997 March 26th: Along with visited 3230’s Tottenham Court Road Building job to distribute current edition of ‘Builders Crack’, paper of Joint Sites Committee at breakfast in canteen. Gave their names verbally when asked by the site manager. Hence possibility that surnames are spelt differently to that assumed above. Alternatively – names may be false.

Another activist that appears on the blacklist is the Australian union leader Jack Mundey. The legendary leader of the Australian Builders’ Labourers’ Federation (BLF) in the 1970s instigated the Green Bans strategy. BLF mass meetings voted to impose ‘Green Bans’ on particular projects that would destroy the environment if they were approached by local campaigners. Imposing a green ban meant that BLF members refused to demolish green space as part of the project. During the construction of Sydney Opera House, the Royal Botanical Gardens, which included ancient trees of spiritual significance to the aboriginal community, was intended to be demolished to make way for a car park. The BLF imposed a green ban and, as a consequence, the Gardens still remain today. The Rocks community in Sydney, meanwhile, was the site of the first European settlement and the oldest buildings in the entire country, which were to be demolished to make way for tower blocks. The BLF imposed a green ban that saw mass blockades by builders’ labourers rallying thousands of Sydney residents and environmental activists. After a bitter battle, including arrests of BLF leaders, The Rocks was saved and is now a major cultural attraction in Australia; it has recently been granted World Heritage Site status.

In the late 1990s, London building workers used their antipodean hero’s name as a pseudonym and leaflets were published by building workers in the name of ‘Friends of Jack Mundey’. The reference was clearly lost on company main contacts, undercover police officers and Ian Kerr processing the intelligence. So Jack Mundey was added to the blacklist: something he will no doubt be proud of.

During the 2012 sparks dispute over BESNA, the two most interviewed rank-and-file electricians, quoted extensively in the press throughout, went by the names Alan Keys and Eddie Current. But a more sinister usage of pseudonyms has been uncovered. During interviews for this book, blacklisted electrician Steuart Merchant revealed his dark secret, ‘I gave a false name when I joined the single, widowed and divorced club in Dundee.’

Meanwhile, Hutson believes that it may well have been her first action as a 16-year-old which earned her a file. She took part in a demonstration in London in support of striking transport workers, ended up occupying London Transport offices and was arrested. Unknown to her, one of those involved was Jim Sutton, known to colleagues as Grumpy Jim. Sutton was actually an undercover police officer, real name Jim Boyling, who had targeted Reclaim The Streets. She said:

‘I found him quite unapproachable because he was associated with Reclaim The Streets and they had a whole cache. They did actions that were organized very secretly. Later on we found the reason he was grumpy was because he was almost having a breakdown because of the pressure he was under. Later on it was so obvious that he was having problems and was conflicted.’

Boyling was arrested along with Hutson and others. He sat in on privileged legal meetings and went all the way to court without telling anyone that he was actually a member of the Special Demonstration Squad. In the end all but one of them were acquitted. ‘I don’t think he was on that action to mess it up or even to spy on me,’ said Hutson. ‘His primary reason was in order to show willing and demonstrate he was willing to get arrested.’

Also on Kerr’s green list is a ‘Gibby Zodal’ which mirrors the mis-spelt name of a journalist quoted in an article in the Sunday Times about radical newsletter SchNEWS. Gibby Zobel was the co-founder of SchNEWS in Brighton in 1994. The weekly alternative paper arose out of the squatting of a disused courthouse in Brighton and the attempt to turn it into a community centre. It covered animal rights, protests against arms companies, anti-fascist action and the burgeoning anti-capitalist movement that coalesced around anti-roads protests, Reclaim The Streets and other direct-action movements – all familiar areas of TCA and police interest. Zobel subsequently went on to become the news editor for The Big Issue and is now a freelance journalist based in Brazil.

On 18 June 1999 (‘J18’) a huge demonstration called Stop the City of London took place. Thousands of people took to the Square Mile with a mixture of humour and defiance. As Hutson said:

‘J18 was the point where all of the environmental activists started to become anti-capitalist. There had been a current of anti-capitalism before then but it hadn’t really been in the ascendancy. That was the point where it became more common than not to identify as an anti-capitalist.’47

It was a major target for the police spies to discover who was going and what their plans were.

Interestingly, several blacklist files mention sightings of their subject at the event. It seems unlikely, to say the least, that some site manager happened to be passing through, saw a construction worker they knew, and thought to pass the details on to The Consulting Association. The elusive Sean Prophet’s file records: ‘Involved with J18 “Stop the City of London” events on 18 June 1999.’ Dave Smith’s file says:

Re: J18 (Stop the City of London) At Finsbury Square site, then to Bank of England demo returning to site with 4 Eco warriors – attempted entry, but unsuccessful. Leaflet distributed (see JSC file for copy)

Concern is over the developing links between JSC, D Smith and environmental activists. Leaflet from JSC states: ‘Unity between Building Workers & Eco-Campaigners.

Reported that building unions, UCATT specifically want D Smith/Schal issue sorted out. UCATT worried that issue is attracting attention of other pressure groups (ie: environmentalist) not interested in construction.

Quite who is expressing concern is not made clear, but the inference is that the number of groups making common cause that might otherwise have acted independently was prompting observation and, presumably, infiltration. There is one possible source for the entry on Smith’s file. Police spy Jim Boyling, whom we met earlier, had secured a key organizing role on the day through his work with Reclaim The Streets. One of his tasks was to reconnoitre the area and a witness remembers Smith’s picket line at Finsbury Square being mentioned. The witness is almost certain that Boyling visited that part of the demonstration on the day.

Sexual and emotional abuse by undercover officers

Another female activist who found herself the target of undercover police monitoring and on The Consulting Association blacklist is Helen Steel. In the 1990s, the gardener and former London Greenpeace activist was sued for libel by the McDonald’s Corporation for a pamphlet the group had distributed outside fast-food restaurants exposing the company’s record on environmental issues, nutrition, animal and workers’ rights. Steel and fellow activist Dave Morris decided to defend themselves in court and McLibel went on to become one of the longest and most famous court cases in UK legal history and a public-relations disaster for the fast-food giant. During the trial it emerged that McDonald’s had paid for up to seven private investigators to infiltrate London Greenpeace meetings and that Metropolitan Police officers, including Special Branch, had passed private and in some cases false information about the McLibel Two and other activists, including their home addresses, to McDonald’s and to one of the private investigators.

The Met agreed to pay £10,000 to the McLibel 2, plus their legal costs, and most significantly ‘to bring this settlement to the attention of the three Area Commanders of the Metropolitan Police Force and ask them to remind their officers of their responsibility not to disclose information on the Police National Computer to a third party.’

Under the consent order finalized, detective sergeant Valentine also stated he ‘regretted any distress of the claimants caused by the disclosure of their details’ to a private investigator hired by McDonald’s. Sid Nicholson, McDonald’s head of security and a former Met chief superintendent, had stated from the witness box that McDonald’s security department were ‘all ex-policemen’ and if he ever wanted to know information about protesters he would go to his contacts in the police.48

Years later, Steel was to find out that one of the police officers spying on her was her long-term boyfriend John Barker. The SDS officer, whose real name was John Dines, had been tasked to infiltrate environmental activists and used his relationship with Steel to ingratiate himself. Dines’ cover as a kitchen fitter allowed him to be away for several days apparently working. Steel also recalls Dines writing her letters about being involved in union action – including on the Channel Tunnel. ‘It’s possible that he was down there spying,’ she said.49

Steel and Alison are two of the women activists currently suing the police for sexual and emotional abuse by undercover officers. In 2013, Steel found out that she is one of the green activists on the Consulting Association database. So is her McLibel co-defendant Dave Morris. Steel is convinced that if intelligence gathered by undercover police was routinely given to McDonald’s in the 1990s, that the police were also providing similar information to major construction companies at the same time.

It has also now emerged that another undercover SDS officer, Bob Lambert, was one of the co-authors of the original London Greenpeace pamphlet that caused the entire McLibel court case in the first place. Despite being married and having children of his own, Lambert fathered another child with Jacqui, an activist he was spying on. He abandoned the mother and son when his deployment ended following the conviction of two animal-rights activists involved in planting incendiary devices in 1987. Lambert’s deployment was considered one of the high points of the SDS. He was promoted to detective inspector and put in charge of the entire unit, mentoring the next generation of undercover officers.

In November 2014, Jacqui was awarded £425,000 in an out-of-court settlement by the Metropolitan Police for the emotional trauma she had suffered. In a series of media interviews, she claimed her experiences felt like being ‘raped by the state’.50

In 2012 Green MP Caroline Lucas used parliamentary privilege to name Bob Lambert as the person who planted an Animal Liberation Front bomb which burned down the Debenhams department store in Harrow. Lambert denies the allegation. The two ALF activists who were imprisoned for that crime are currently appealing their convictions; a successful appeal would add to the more than 50 convictions already overturned due to the agent provocateur role of undercover police officers.51

On leaving the police, Lambert was awarded an MBE and is currently a lecturer at St Andrews and London Metropolitan Universities, where he purports to be a liberal-minded expert in counter-terrorism and tackling Islamophobia. However, stalwart anti-racist campaigner Suresh Grover from the Newham Monitoring Project, who helped co-ordinate the Stephen Lawrence family campaign over many years, has said Lambert ‘has absolutely no credibility whatsoever with the Muslim community’.52 Grover has also stated:

‘I now know that a number of other campaigns that I co-ordinated, such as the Michael Menson, the Ricky Reel and the Blair Peach campaigns, were spied upon. These campaigns that I have been involved in had absolutely no intentions other than peaceful ones. But from Blair Peach to Stephen Lawrence, from Michael Menson to Nicky Jacobs, from the New Cross Massacre to the Campaign Against the Police Bill, from the Cherry Groce campaign to Broadwater Farm, every single one of these campaigns has been subject to surveillance.’53

‘Domestic extremism’

The police subversion-monitoring unit NETCU, which gave the presentation to The Consulting Association in 2008, is now no more and the SDS has also been wound up. Instead, responsibility for monitoring extremism was handed over to the National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit (NDEDIU) in September 2011. That organization also absorbed the National Public Order Intelligence Unit and the National Domestic Extremism Team as it rationalized competing agencies. Sitting under the Metropolitan Police, rather than the more unaccountable Association of Chief Police Officers, NDEDIU describes itself as supporting: ‘all police forces in helping reduce the criminal threat from domestic extremism across the UK. It works to promote a single and co-ordinated police response by providing tactical advice to the police service alongside information and guidance to industry and government.’54

The NDEDIU goes on to say that it provides ‘intelligence on domestic extremism and strategic public-order issues in the UK. Police will always engage to facilitate peaceful protest, prevent disorder and minimize disruption to local communities. Where individuals cross over into criminality and violence, the police will act swiftly and decisively to uphold the law.’55

In June 2013 it was revealed that the NDEDIU was monitoring some 9,000 people considered domestic subversives.56 Baroness Jenny Jones, Green Party member of the House of Lords and London Assembly member, is one of those on the domestic extremist database.57 All monitoring of domestic extremism is now under the auspices of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command SO15 unit with police spies now deployed by the Special Project Teams of SO15. So state spying on trade unionists and peaceful leftwing activists is now categorized as counter-terrorism.

The increasingly draconian ways in which legal protests were viewed by the state and private sector affected those on the blacklist. In December 2008 Steve Acheson, with the support of Warrington Trades Council, started a picket outside the Fiddlers Ferry power station in Cheshire after he was dismissed from the site. Owners Scottish & Southern Energy (SSE) tried to bring an injunction against Acheson under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The firm claimed that Acheson’s protest presented a potential threat to the national grid and national security. In October 2009 Acheson won an appeal at the High Court in London with the judge describing SSE’s argument as ‘fanciful bordering on paranoia’.58

As construction workers took part in various days of action to highlight concerns over terms and conditions as well as blacklisting they also drew the attention of the police. The City of London police issued a weekly terrorism/extremism update for the City of London business community. The first section has a round-up of terrorist activity around the globe from bombings in Iraq to the execution of prisoners in Colombia. Underneath are the domestic issues. On 28 October 2011 this included a construction industry day of action. On 2 December it warned of an electricians’ strike targeting Balfour Beatty. Underneath it reminds people to remain alert and gives the anti-terror hotline number.59

The authors requested under the Freedom of Information Act any files on the Blacklist Support Group held by the Metropolitan Police, Scottish Police and a selection of other forces. After consulting with the Association of Chief Police Officers, every force decided that it would ‘neither confirm nor deny’ it held such information. This is the exact same response given by the police to the Hillsborough campaigners and the women like Alison and Helen Steel who had long-term relationships with proven undercover police officers sent to spy on them, some of whom also appear on The Consulting Association’s blacklist. The Blacklist Support Group believes that it is currently a target of ongoing undercover police surveillance. A request by Dave Smith under the Data Protection Act for information held on him by the police was refused because it might jeopardize ongoing criminal investigations.

This forms part of a pattern of behaviour that seems aimed at frustrating any attempts to use official channels to discover what the state is doing. In November 2012, Imran Khan and Partners solicitors made a complaint to the Metropolitan Police on behalf of the Blacklist Support Group about collusion between the police and The Consulting Association. Initially the Met refused even to record the complaint, arguing that ‘the complaints process is not the correct vehicle to forward [your] concerns or allegations’ but, after an appeal, it was eventually passed to the Independent Police Complaints Commission. In an astonishing admission as part of correspondence with solicitors, the IPCC said: ‘It was likely that all Special Branches were involved in providing information about potential employees.’ This was then immediately contradicted by Operation Herne, which had been set up to look into the activities of undercover police officers. It said there was no such evidence – but the IPCC stood by its claim, which it said came about after discussions with the Met. Operation Herne has maintained the line that there is no evidence to support collusion.

When Operation Herne published a report in March 2014 on the allegations raised by SDS whistleblower Peter Francis, it quoted an unnamed Special Branch officer as saying ‘the information [in TCA files] was purely one way’, from the blacklisters to the police, and that it was driven by a sense of ‘civic duty’.60 The suggestion that the information flow was one way is described by ex-SDS officer Peter Francis as ridiculous. ‘I’ve never heard of a back-scratching scenario where you get one thing and you don’t give anything back,’ he told the authors.

The report adds:

‘There is no dispute that individuals named by Peter Francis appear on the “blacklist”. However, Peter Francis claims to have been deployed between 1993 and 1997. The Consulting Association record is dated from 1999, two (2) years after Peter Francis’ claimed deployment ceased. There is no available evidence to suggest that SDS exchanged any information with either the Economic League or The Consulting Association.’61

Francis dismisses this conclusion as ‘total rubbish’, pointing out that just because the TCA files date from 1999 only shows that was when the information was added – the Special Branch files had been opened for at least three years prior to that.

As part of its investigation Operation Herne looked at 20 sample blacklist files sent to it by the ICO which the data watchdog suggested could imply police collusion. The details on which files were sent have not been released but the authors have established that Dan Gilman, Frank Smith, Lisa and Steve Hedley were not among them. Francis said:

‘I would like somebody independent of the police to forensically examine all the blacklisting files, to be cross-referenced with Special Branch records to look at the areas of collusion and where they may or may not be.’62

The Herne investigation has subsequently asked to interview representatives from the Blacklist Support Group but that has been declined as its report suggests it has already decided what answers it wishes to hear. Although in continued correspondence with the BSG solicitors, even the police were forced to admit the flow of information was not purely one way.

Sarah McSherry, solicitor from Imran Khan and Partners, said:

‘While correspondence from the police in relation to this complaint continually raises concerns about the quality of their investigation, it is interesting to note that they confirm that they have identified a potential “flow of information between Special Branch and the construction industry”.’63

In March 2014, Home Secretary Theresa May announced a public inquiry into undercover policing. Blacklist campaigners have repeatedly called for a fully independent public inquiry into the part played by the police. The Blacklist Support Group is working alongside the Haldane Society and lawyers acting for the Lawrence family, the women who were deceived into sexual relationships by the police, environmental activists, anti-racist campaigns and socialist political groups in the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance (COPS). All the groups involved in COPS are boycotting Operation Herne. As yet there is no confirmed remit for the public inquiry and it is unlikely that it will start until after the 2015 General Election. Campaigners argue that victims of undercover policing should assist with drawing up the remit for any such inquiry to ensure that it is wide enough to encompass all the different police units and all aspects of undercover policing against legal democratic campaign groups, including collusion with blacklisting of trade unionists. In October 2014, over five-and-a-half years after the ICO raid and the repeated denials by Operation Herne of any involvement by the police with The Consulting Association, John McDonnell MP named detective chief inspector Gordon Mills, head of police liaison at NETCU, as the senior officer who had given the Powerpoint presentation to the blacklisting organization.64

In a letter to Home Secretary Theresa May, McDonnell identifies the companies in attendance as Vinci, AMEC, Skanska, Costain, Sir Robert McAlpine, Emcor and Sias Building Services and writes:

‘Given this record of attendance at this meeting, it is shocking that, in their evidence to the Scottish Select Committee’s inquiry into blacklisting, directors of Skanska and Sir Robert McAlpine denied any involvement of the police. Despite numerous requests under the Freedom of Information Act for documents relating to NETCU’s activities, the response has been that no documents relating to the meeting of DCI Mills with The Consulting Association exist. It appears odd that no report of such an important meeting was written and that no evidence of the meeting is now held by the Metropolitan Police.’

Meanwhile, superintendent Steve Pearl, who ran NETCU, is now a non-executive director at Agenda Security Services, which provides employment-vetting services. His former boss is ex-assistant chief constable Anton Setchell, who was the senior officer in charge of the police’s domestic extremism machinery between 2004 and 2010. A few months after the ICO raid he was interviewed by the Guardian and said:

‘Just because you have no criminal record does not mean that you are not of interest to the police. Everyone who has got a criminal record did not have one once.’65

He is currently head of global security at Laing O’Rourke – one of the construction companies which belonged to The Consulting Association. He did not respond to requests for an interview.