It has been more than a decade since this newspaper broke the story of Britain’s politicised secret police. In March 2010, a former officer from the undercover policing unit, the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), did a lengthy interview with the Observer’s Tony Thompson, in which he detailed for the first time many of the practices that have since become public knowledge: the infiltration by undercover police officers of peaceful political organisations, including environmental, socialist and anti-racist groups, dating back to the 1960s; the fact that officers based their undercover identities on the birth certificates of dead children; that many of them (the “deep swimmers”) had been embedded in these groups for years; and that it had been common practice for officers to form sexual relationships with activists.
The story took on new prominence when activists unmasked one of the officers, Mark Kennedy, also in 2010. Five years later, in response to the public outcry, the prime minister at the time, Theresa May, announced an inquiry into undercover policing. And there, in a spectacularly un-spectacular British way, things got stuck. There has been no big public reckoning, no truth or justice. To date, the undercover policing inquiry has racked up costs in excess of £50m, but there is still no date set for even its interim report, with hearings set to continue into 2024 and beyond. The inquiry has performed to perfection its dual function of creating the illusion of a political response, while firmly kicking the issue into the long grass. As a crime author friend observed wryly to me: “The best form of cover-up is a public inquiry.”
