The British state unjustifiably targeted hundreds of left-wing groups for decades with a disgusting political-policing project. And the ongoing inquiry into the spying operation known as Spycops reveals one big establishment game, involving not just the police but also the courts, MI5, corporations, and the press. Tom Fowler from spycops.info goes to every hearing of the inquiry. And he told the Canary how the state’s underhand tactics overwhelmingly served the interests of the economic and political establishment.

State apparatus in service of the rich and powerful

The “vast majority” of spying, Fowler asserted, was about protecting the interests of the rich and powerful. The spycops mission was supposedly about ‘stopping subversion’, he said, but “subversion is a very open-ended thing”. Because in reality:

there’s very few organisations that they were targeting that were actually trying to overthrow parliamentary democracy

And the information they gathered was actually “of little policing value”:

In terms of public order, we’ve heard repeatedly from other sections of the police that their intelligence wasn’t much use.

In reality, it seems police spying was more about protecting establishment interests, including the reputation of the police itself. As Fowler stressed:

protecting the rich and powerful… [is] the whole role of large sections of the state, in my opinion. And yeah, we see that throughout it.

He previously told the Canary that the state’s efforts are “the reason why our society has developed in the way it has”, saying anyone seeking to build a better future must learn the lessons.

And while justice still seems far away for the people whose lives the police turned upside down (and for society as a whole), some things have been changing slowly. One is the police’s own public position. As Fowler stressed:

the Met Police are accepting that the wrongdoing of the SDS [Special Demonstration Squad] as a unit – not in hindsight, as they had previously, … but by the standards expected at the time – it was unacceptable behaviour.

MI5, politicians, corporations, and the press were all in on Spycops

The inquiry itself is highly problematic, leaning heavily in favour of the establishment. People whom police spied on often haven’t been able to see evidence before entering court, for example. The judge, meanwhile, “has been very accommodating” towards the spies, moving timetables around and allowing some not to testify or do so anonymously, remotely, or in writing. And even then, “they don’t comply with what the inquiry’s asking of them”. On top of that:

The inquiry does a huge amount of its work in secret. So… the bits of the inquiry that we get to see, which already seem incredibly in the state’s favour, are only a small part of the entire process.

This means the inquiry hides “huge amounts of information” from the people the spying operation affected. And it leaves them feeling that:

the inquiry has joined this conspiracy of the establishment

And it’s not just the inquiry letting ordinary people down. Because other parts of the state had their hands in the spycops pie too.

For example, ex-spycop Trevor Morris slipped up last year by suggesting the spies collected information while MI5 smeared activists. But Fowler stressed that “it goes deeper than that”, because:

We’ve seen memos between MI5 and the SDS with shopping lists of information they wanted to know, particular addresses, the relationships between individual people. So it seems that the role of MI5 is all over these deployments. It’s not just that… they were getting to see copies of the reports, but they were actually asking specifically for what information needed to be done.

Politicians may have also played a role in directing things too. And “there’s a lot of evidence to suggest” that information from the spies went to both establishment media and private companies. In particular, there was a “revolving door” between “the consulting association that did the blacklisting and the SDS”. Blacklisting efforts sought to block people likely to defend workers’ rights from entering workplaces, specifically in the construction sector.

In short, this scandal exposes information about the establishment’s class war against ordinary people that we may have never known otherwise. And if we don’t want the rich and powerful to win that war, we absolutely must learn all the lessons we can from the spycops inquiry.

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

This post was originally published on Canary.