An undercover police officer has admitted that his bosses told him he could “do pretty much what you want apart from kill anybody“. And one of the actions of the self-professed “professional liar” and “cunning evil bastard” was to deceive an activist into a serious 5-year relationship. The spycops scandal keeps getting more absurd — and more disturbing.

On 15 December, former spycop Mark Jenner began giving evidence to the ongoing inquiry into the British state’s unjustifiable, decades-long political policing of hundreds of left-wing groups. And he has only managed to expose his callousness further.

Tom Fowler from spycops.info, who goes to every hearing of the inquiry, said on 17 December:

Once again, I’m left feeling ‘this is the worst one yet’.

Jenner spied on numerous campaigns, but mainly those exposing police corruption. As other cases have shown, the state’s political policing wasn’t just about protecting the rich and powerful, but also about protecting the police itself. And this was the reason Jenner established a long-term relationship with ‘Alison’.

Fowler spoke to historian Mary Davis on Jenner’s final day of questioning. Davis is a friend of Alison’s, and called Jenner “a very right-wing, nasty, nasty man” and “a racist bigot”. But she also said:

The misogyny is there, and it runs deep.

The spying and fake relationships shattered women’s lives. But the conversation explored how the sheer length and depth of Jenner’s deception with Alison was particularly extreme and disgusting. Alison herself, meanwhile, sees the state’s actions as highly abusive, calling them:

unethical, immoral and, I hope we can prove, unlawful.

Spycops meant almost no limits to police abuse

As Fowler reported during the inquiry, Jenner revealed he:

• “didn’t exercise sound judgement“
• “didn’t demonstrate integrity“
• “is a man who lies regularly when it comes to spycops matters”
• “lied because he didn’t care“

He also said that:

everything he did as a #spycops officer was with the knowledge and approval of his line managers

And that:

being inside the SDS [Special Demonstration Squad] meant everything he did was inside the law.

That meant “sex with somebody in a false identity”, regarding which Jenner claimed:

with the benefit of hindsight, it was necessary

He also called it “inevitable“.

Jenner also spied on a campaign challenging “police brutality and racism“, but told the inquiry:

• “he had no understanding of indirect racism or stereotypes or anything like that back in the 1990s”
• “he did not take any steps to understand the community in Hackney in which he was being deployed”
• “there were no internal complaints about racism in uniform because it always went unchallenged“

There were many other comments exposing the nature of the spycops operations, which add further detail to the state’s abusive political-policing campaign. But in short, the police set vile characters like Jenner on the general public to do essentially whatever they wanted in order to protect powerful interests.

As Davis told Fowler, we need to keep spreading information about the spycops scandal as widely as possible, and we must not allow the state to bury what it did. Because the whole affair gives us a small but vital window of insight into how the state has screwed us all over. And if the corporate media won’t amplify what has gone on, we must!

Featured image via womenslibrary

By Ed Sykes

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