On February 10 the UCPI rolls into another month collecting in-person and sometimes in-public evidence for Tranche 2 Phase 2 of the inquiry. This covers the SDS during 1983-1992 which is its second operational decade, when its MPS business developers might have anticipated it to be moving from its “norming” phase to its “performing” phase.

Those of us who been following its progress since it started meeting (sporadically) in public, and also I suspect the inquiry team,  know that there is nothing normal  about the SDS.

The inquiry’s interim report issued after Tranche 1 struggled to find much evidence of performance, and no rationale for its continuing existence during the first decade. It feels to me that that  this judgement will be reinforced for Tranche 2. But it will need to take account terrible things were done and abuse, committed by a large number of undercover officers, under the watch of tolerant and negligent middle and senior management and those that commissioned the espionage.

Had the targets of the SDS  espionage  been engaged in serious organised crime, or murderous terrorism, or posed a real and imminent  threat to democracy in the UK the common law and its legal mechanisms may have judged some – but only some – of the SDS’s wrong doings as proportionate to Keeping the Sovereign’s Peace. It is possible that the Common Law principle of Defending The Realm might be invoked. But that is the Common Law principle that legitimises armed forces and secret services not civilian police forces.

It is now clear incontrovertibly that the SDS targets were not doing that any of those things that would have rendered civilian police officers’ abuse of fellow citizens, defamation, trespass,  entrapment,  intrusion of privacy, breach of human rights and last by not least deliberate commissioned miscarriages of justice as in any way  not proportionate to maintaining the cornerstones of the common law.

Earlier on in this now prolonged session of session of evidence gathering we heard from a small number of activists targeted by the SDS. Their evidence was clear, credible and at times painfully honest. It was in stark contrast with the incoherent, rambling and incredible evidence given by the representatives of the state who perpetrated and tolerated the abuse.

To make matters worse most of the perpetrators have been granted anonymity by the inquiry on the grounds of incredible and imaginary physical threats; or worse still the real danger of personal disgrace or professional reputational ruin.

If there was any evidence of a conspiracy by activists it was  a conspiracy to create a fairer, more compassionate and democratic country by acclamation and weight of numbers, or consumer pressure,  not physical violence.

At the inquiry activists have only had to resort  to anonymity requests to prevent the state witnesses using the UCPI as platform. From which repeating and embellish historic and fabricated libels, privacy intrusions  and defamations.

Since the Christmas break we have heard evidence from witness who worked as line managers of UCOs – a Detective Inspector and above them the Detective  Chief inspector of the squad with a Detective Sergeant  acting as the administrator for the Squad. They were known as the “Back Office”, to distinguish them from the up to twelve undercover  “field officers”, who were either detective constables or detective sergeants. The Backoffice administrative capacity  was usually augmented by a recently appointed constable or sergeant learning the ropes for several months in the office before going into the field.

As we learned more about bureaucratic administrative side of the squad’s activity it was hard to avoid recalling the German Jewish philosopher  Hannah Arendt’s description of the “banality of evil”. It was first articulated by two activist core participants Donal O’Driscol and “Alison”.

 

Arendt was born in 1906 and studied philosophy with Heidegger at University in Marburg and obtained her doctorate in Heidelberg when she was just 23. She was born to secular middle class secular Jewish parents in Hanover. In the early nineteen thirties she began research the growing antisemitism surrounding the Hitler and the Nazis. When in 1933 Hitler came to power, the Gestapo arrested her and held her for eight days. On release she fled Germany for Prague and then Geneva before settling eventually in Paris. Following the German invasion of France she was interned as an enemy alien but managed eventually to escape to the United States where she settled permanently, writing several  important works about totalitarianism . 

In 1961 the New Yorker asked her to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel. Eichmann was a senior Nazi official responsible for organising all the transport arrangements for Hitler’s Final Solution. After the war he escaped to Argentina living in anonymity there until in 1960 he was tracked down by Israeli agents and rendered to Israel to stand trial. At the subsequent trial Eichmann used  the defence that he  had been only following instruction and was an administrator not a mass murderer. He was found guilty and hanged on June 1 1962.

Arendt’s account of the trial would form the core her subsequent book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil” (1963) All the contemporary accounts of the man suggest that Eichmann was not particularly ideological motivated and did not meet the profile of a mass murdering psychopath. In generalising from this specific trial Arendt makes the point that the evil acts of totalitarian government (right and left)  is entirely dependent on thoughtless bureaucracy and the unquestioning obedience and moral disengagement of the bureaucrats that enables them to cold-bloodedly do the sort of acts more often associated with feverish psychopaths.

Those are important  generalisations about unquestioning obedience and moral disengagement that apply to all forms of collective and corporate wrong doing  irrespective of the severity of the wrong doing or the number of victims. In applying Arendt’s more general point derived from Eichmann’s life and work to the MPS’s political policing it is important to retain a sense proportion and not to try to associate the almost universal and absolute revulsion at the cold-blooded bureaucracy of Eichmann and all the equally ordinary people who worked for him to deliver the Final Solution.

We can best do that by being specific, which is why I have called this blog “the banality of political policing” following it with the start of an appreciation of the quantity and quality of the wrongs done.

There is nothing  mitigating or redeeming  about the ignorance and disengagement the results in the this banal offensive behaviour; and timidity in the face of a mere instruction to do something that should never be contemplated or the drive to excel in the efficiency and effectiveness of its achievement only serve to amplify and exacerbate the offence.

Arendt  was talking about totalitarian states, but it not surprising to see the  banality of instructed offences replicated in organisation dominated by  command governance arrangements.

The MPS is definitely that sort of organisation and during the break in public evidence I thought about how to map and represent that command structure for undercover policing. Perhaps drawing on some of the training and experience I had had in another command driven social economy the NHS.

The other task I had set myself was to explore something that the UCPI had had only just started asking state witness  about which whether they were freemasons or not.

These are two pieces of work that canbot be dropped neatly into a blog  but I have produced two shortish panphlets to download from here.

The first is a tabulation of the command structure for undercover policing  for each one of the years to be covered by the inquiry. It is a pdf  so you don’t have to have any particular software to read it and, if you know how you can open it on your kindle.

It has been drawn from a  spreadsheet that I have been compiling to aid my own understanding not in competition or an alternative to the work on powerbase and the dedicated websites.  It is not yet complete and may never be  and it have some mistakes in it when I updated it I will add some version control. But I am fairly pleased with its representation of a command structure that stretches from the UCOs all the way upward through the MPS and then onward through civil service and into parliament and government.

I hope it may help in understanding not just the inquiry but also in working out where the root causes of all the disastrous harms of undercover political policing  are to be found. As with the Final Solution the root cause cannot be exclusively pinned down to banally unethical and unthinking UCOs a the bottom of the structure.  At every new level of command there were not only commissioned acts and decisions that contributed to those harms, but a myriad of opportunities to reflect on the impact the course of action being supported and pursued, and risks that was presented to the ordinary citizens to whom every single person in that command structure owed a duty of care. The list of harms negative outcomes that need to be fed into this root cause analysis are the ones listed above:

  • civilian police officers’ sexual abuse of citizens
  • abuse of the right of the child
  • defamation
  • theft
  • trespass
  • entrapment
  • intrusion of privacy
  • breach of multiple human rights
  • deliberately engineered miscarriages of justice

 

There was an interesting coincidence  in producing the 1-spy guide to freemasons within the MPS. Shortly after the Tranche 2 period ended the Home Affairs Select Committee in Parliament, in 1996, started to undertake an inquiry into freemasonry in the judiciary. Most of the evidence the inquiry received related to the MPS during phase 2 and some was not published but it is presumably accessible by the UCPI. During the Commissionership of Sir Kenneth Newman, in 1985,  the standing orders that regulated policing in the capital were replaced by a new document “The Principles of Policing and Guidance for Professional Behaviour”. This stopped  stop short of an outright ban on the metropolitan police joining the craft, but only just. In act the that may have been in the planning the forces most experienced “master mason’s” brought forward plans to create an a “mark masons” for Scotland Yard officers who had spent most of their careers in the capital.

Even before Newman’s retirement in 1987, news of the new and mutinous development of “The Manor of St James” lodge was becoming font page news.

 

Although it was to be nearly a decade before the Home Affairs Committee was taking evidence about the freemasons in the MPS,  “The Manor of St James” was an important part of that evidence. In the interim period a photograph of the members of the lodge in the regalia at the Mark Masons’ Hall in Mayfair had been leaked by a an anti masonic officer . A copy was sent to The Guardian and one to Labour MP Chris Mullins who was on the Home Affairs Select Committee. Mullins was a former investigative journalist and researcher for World in Action and author of the novel “A Very British Coup”  who had been one of the prime movers for the select committee investigations.

The committee took evidence from Martin Short and Brian Woollard as well as the United Grand Lodge of English freemasons. The new recently appointed MPS Commissioner, Paul Condon, who had succeeded Imbert also gave evidence trying to persuade the committee that there was no cause for concern. As he was preparing to leave Chris Mullin  approached  and showed him the photograph saying "I thought you might like to have a look at your alternative command structure.".

On January 29 1997 The Guardian  reproduced the photograph on the cover of its supplement Guardian 2 accompanying a story about the Lodge by Nick Davies. A few weeks later Paul Condon would wake up to find that Tony Blair had appointed Mullins as the new Chair of the Home Affairs Select committee. It was his job to oversee the production of the final report into “Freemasons in the Judiciary”. It is that photograph taken on 1986 that forms the basis of the Masonic Rogues gallery.

Although it was to be nearly a decade before the Home Affairs Committee was taking evidence about the freemasons in the MPS,  “The Manor of St James” was an important part of that evidence. In the interim period a photograph of the members of the lodge in the regalia at the Mark Masons’ Hall in Mayfair had been leaked by a an anti masonic officer . A copy was sent to The Guardian and one to Labour MP Chris Mullins who was on the Home Affairs Select Committee. Mullins was a former investigative journalist and researcher for World in Action and author of the novel “A Very British Coup”  who had been one of the prime movers for the select committee investigations.

The committee took evidence from Martin Short and Brian Woollard as well as the United Grand Lodge of English freemasons. The new recently appointed MPS Commissioner, Paul Condon, who had succeeded Imbert also gave evidence trying to persuade the committee that there was no cause for concern. As he was preparing to leave Chris Mullin  approached  and showed him the photograph saying "I thought you might like to have a look at your alternative command structure.".

On January 29 1997 The Guardian  reproduced the photograph on the cover of its supplement Guardian 2 accompanying a story about the Lodge by Nick Davies. A few weeks later Paul Condon would wake up to find that Tony Blair had appointed Mullins as the new Chair of the Home Affairs Select committee. It was his job to oversee the production of the final report into “Freemasons in the Judiciary”. It is that photograph taken on 1986 that forms the basis of the Masonic Rogues gallery.