Name Thieves, False Fathers, and Policing by Uninformed Consent-
UK Undercover Police Face Questions in Latest Phase of Inquiry

State-sanctioned rape, the theft of dead children’s identities, physical abuse, the abandonment of children born under false pretenses, violent misogyny, racism and exploitation: the latest news from the police spies inquiry, exposing the UK police’s decades-long campaign of clandestine abuse.

Name Thieves

It’s 1968. A boy, just turned 18, has gone to work on a ship in Hull to help his family; his father has walked out, and they need money to support his brothers and sisters. He goes missing, and is presumed dead. His name was Michael Hartley.

Years later, Michael Hartley reappears; except it’s not him. They don’t have his sense of care, they’re not the boy who wrote home about how much he loved to hear from his family when he was stationed abroad in a brief military stint; they’re not the boy who sacrificed what could’ve been a carefree young adulthood to provide for his siblings. 

He’s supposedly a communist, supposedly a radical; he’s convicted for flyposting, he has a sexual affair with a female activist- with her not knowing who he was, her uninformed consent constitutes rape. He’s not Michael Hartley, he’s a policeman, infiltrating the Revolutionary Communist Group and the Socialist Workers Party in the 80s, as part of undercover policing unit the Special Demonstration Squad’s (SDS) campaign of terror by espionage against over 1,000 left wing groups, starting from the year Michael died, 1968. 

In 2018, his siblings are told the police have news about Michael. Filled with all sorts of emotion, they are sat down, and a police officer tells them that Michael is still supposed dead, still missing. But, his identity was stolen, and another man used it to destroy lives, organisations, movements. The boys mother had sadly died of suicide due to, among other reasons, grief, in 1977, 9 years after
Michael passed. 

His brother, Frank Bennett, gives testimony at an inquiry set up by Theresa May when she was Home Secretary, and expected to last til 2026 at least, which has already cost upwards of eighty million pounds. “When you think about the things that these people got up to using somebody else’s ID… Before we held onto those memories (of Michael), and now they’ve all been tainted.” He protested the culture he perceived in this world of police espionage he had been unwillingly catapulted into. The officer who took Michael’s identity told the inquiry that “as the SDS was always meant to be covert, we did not expect the families to have ever found out.” Bennett called out this culture of “do what you want. There’ll be no repercussions. Because nobody will find out.”

Policing by Uninformed Consent

“No one will ever know who you are. We were told there would never be a day like this,” protested (better, tantrummed) Trevor Morris, a spy with the SDS who was tasked with infiltrating the Socialist Workers Party. The SWP became the most compromised organisation in the whole spycops case, with 26 known infiltrators entering the organisation. Morris spied on other orgs too, including the Joy Gardner campaign, which sought justice for a Jamaican woman killed by officers trying to deport her. It wasn’t the first nor the last campaign for racial justice which was spied upon by police at this time, which the police wholeheartedly apologised for at the beginning of the proceedings. Morris, however, rebutted this apology, which he called “outrageous.”

It’s not the only thing he wouldn’t apologise for. “Bea”, an SWP member working at their bookshop, entered into a relationship with Morris, under the impression that he was just another activist. A single mother with two children who had just come out of a physically abusive relationship, she and Morris spent a year in an on/off relationship. It was a sexual relationship, which, when Morris was asked if he used contraception, he said only “sometimes”. 

He was asked to apologise, but he wouldn’t- she was his cover, he said, she meant he wouldn’t be compromised, he looked more normal. We “couldn’t understand” what it was like to be an undercover officer at that time. He compared it to women sleeping with Nazi German soldiers to gather information in World War Two. He claimed he was also affected by the relationship, and asked people to think of his situation, his “mental health”. “Sex” without full and informed consent is rape- saying she might have consented anyway if she’d known about him.

He also stole his name, in what was known as the “Jackal technique”. He stole his name from a young black child who had died of sickle cell disease. While claiming with one breath that his name had been chosen for him, his witness statement (which he was pulled up on by the family of the child, who were there at the inquiry) said otherwise. He had said previously he had gone through records and found a young black child to imitate the identity of. To rape under the name of. He did all this, he retorted, for his country. 

In a twist that went viral, Morris accidentally let slip that slandering campaigners was “the secret service’s job”, which led to the livestream being abruptly cut and the clip was shared across social media countless times. He also broke down crying after being pressed on his incessant spying on racial justice campaigns, a black man himself. 

In a bizarre and unsourceable statement, Morris claimed that, according to the “home office”, 1,300 officers had used the Jackal technique in 2003, with many more having previously used it every year. This, however, is completely unverifiable, and seems far-fetched. Nonetheless, it does provide a rare insight to the scale of the use of this tactic, of stealing dead children’s names and dragging them through the dirt.

False Fathers

These were two moments of institutional sexism & the oppression of children endemic in the UK undercover policing program. It was exposed in this most recent, dramatic round of the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI)- Tranche 2 (Phase 1), spreading out over the course of July-August 2024. This is looking at cases in the 1980s-90s, around the time of the infamous spycop Bob Lambert, who burnt down a Debenhams store in Harrow as part of his infiltration
of the Animal Liberation Front. He fathered a child, whilst undercover, with a fellow female activist, which we’ve known about for a few years now.

Three undercover policemen, including Lambert, had already been revealed to have had children with female activists, in what the police themselves described as a “wider culture of sexism and misogyny which allowed it to happen” in a recent apology. Now, a fourth undercover policeman (Malcolm Shearing) has said that one of his colleagues (Alan Bond) had a child with another female activist. He remembers talking with the officer at the pub, over a drink, about his sexual exploits, when he told Shearing about the child. 

With this number growing, it’s clear that violent misogyny in the form of rape and abandonment was (is?) not just an institutional failing, but an active tactic of the police in this era (now?). To destabilise movements, the police tried to destroy the lives of women who hold these movements together. How many more children have been abandoned? How many more women have been raped by the SDS in the name of dismantling the activist left? 

Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and Bernie Grant were all spied upon because of their anti-racist activism. Morris made clear that many, many MPs were spied upon at this time. From the start of the inquiry we’ve heard about how antiracist campaigners in particular were targeted; notoriously the family of Stephen Lawrence, a black teenager murdered by racists. The police were infamously inadequate at bringing the killers to justice, and while neglecting resources to the investigation, they spared no money in spying on the Lawrence family in their search for justice for their dead son. They were not alone. 

This inquiry is littered with the exploitation of dead and abandoned children. The policy for creating identities for undercover police was the Jackal technique- to use birth certificates of children who died in infancy. Families have fresh grief thurst upon them by the sick necromancy of undercover policing, terrible wounds reopened. 

140 spies, 1,000 organisations spied upon, less than five of which were far right. Whilst Morris was being interviewed, the far right were rioting across the country, something he continually brought up as an example of why spycops were necessary- but of course, these people were never, and we can infer, are still not their targets. Targets from the 60s-90s included not only activist groups but law firms, religious groups, and charities like “The Islington Managua Friendship Association”, who existed to raise funds for poor communities in Managua, Nicaragua. It involved “a handful”of people.

We only know fractions of the truth. The previous Conservative government passed the “Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021,” which gives the government the power to allow illegal acts to be carried out by undercover police operatives in the UK. This has not been overturned by Starmer’s Labour government, alongside other oppressive legislation like the PCSC act (remember #killthebill?) and the Official Secrets Act. Police espionage destroys lives, communities, organisations; it creates cultures of complete distrust in movements which stymies them. The culture of misogyny has injured many women’s lives- undoubtedly many more than we know about, already so many. 

You can look up Police Spies Out Of Our Lives, Undercover Research, Netpol, Rob Evans, Tom Fowler, the latter of whom’s live commentary on the inquiry has been incredibly important in the creation of this piece, and to whom I thank for his work, having been himself spied upon by undercover police. These orgs and individuals are working tirelessly for justice against an incredibly slow inquiry- the most expensive inquiry in the history of the state, at around £82 million so far.

There are still so many spies out there who still believe- or cling to the belief- that there will “never be a day like this.” Let us fight to ensure each dog
has his day.