‘POLICE, including Special Branches, supplied information that appeared on the blacklist, funded by the country’s major construction firms, the Consulting Association and/or other agencies, in breach of the Data Protection Act 1998.’
That the police and Special Branch acted illegally is now a finding of the Independent Police Complaints Commission. It wrote that, ‘On the balance of probabilities, the allegation that the police or Special Branches supplied information is “proven”,’ the Independent Police Complaints Commission admits in an extraordinary written response to the allegation put by the Blacklist Support Group.
It has now been confirmed by the state that police spies, from the Special Branch, were used to infiltrate the trade union movement, posing as trade union activists. They gathered information about trade unionists and their meetings and passed that information on to the ‘Consulting Association’ who then made it their business to attempt to ensure that these trade unionists never worked on a building site ever again.
Dave Smith, secretary of the Blacklist Support Group, said: ‘When we first talked about police collusion in blacklisting, people thought we were conspiracy theorists. We were told “things like that don’t happen here”. With this admission from the Met Police, our quest for the truth has been vindicated. The police are supposed to detect crime; instead they infiltrated trade unions and provided intelligence to an unlawful corporate conspiracy. ‘This is why we need the public inquiry into undercover policing to be open and transparent, in order to get to the truth about how police intelligence was shared with private sector third parties including major companies.’
Public inquiries, however, when it comes to exposing the secrets of the capitalist state, tend to be, without exception, a complete whitewash. There is a public inquiry going on this very moment … into the police spying on campaign groups. Police from the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) assumed the identity of dead children, entered campaign groups like Greenpeace, formed relationships with activists, fathered children with activists, then disappeared as quickly as they appeared, abandoning the mother of their child and abandoning their own child.
The state is now attempting to keep the identities of the undercover officers who have infiltrated more than 1,000 political groups and trade unions since 1968 a carefully guarded secret.
Among the campaign groups that police infiltrated was the Stephen Lawrence campaign. Stephen Lawrence was murdered by racists in 1993 and his family have campaigned for justice ever since. Stephen’s mother, Doreen Lawrence, says the public inquiry into police spying is ‘cloaked in secrecy and anonymity’. A public inquiry which is neither public nor an inquiry!
On Wednesday, the victims of undercover police spying shouted ‘no justice, no peace’ and ‘sack Judge Mitting now,’ as they all stormed out of the public inquiry and blocked the main entrance of the Royal Courts of Justice. Judge Mitting has point blank refused to reveal the identities of the majority of police officers who were involved in undercover policing and who deceived women into relationships. Unite assistant general secretary, Gail Cartmail said: ‘Unite entirely endorses the walkout by the victims of undercover policing … As information continues to trickle out there is growing evidence that many of these officers were heavily involved in the blacklisting of construction workers, which ruined hundreds of lives.’
The capitalist state is desperate to protect its apparatus of police spies. As far as it is concerned, the state and its machinations are above any law. This is because it is their law, a class law for the ruling class. Class law is there to protect the ruling class, the bosses and the bankers, and their profits. The police and the army are their tools.
There is only one way to defeat the spies of the capitalist state and that is to smash the capitalist state itself with a socialist revolution. The working class will then expropriate the bosses and the bankers and replace bankrupt capitalism with a socialist planned economy.