a permanent state is all around us, in shadow

  • Post last modified:August 26, 2024
  • Reading time:98 mins read


This is the fifth and final part of Samantha Asumadu’s series on the ‘permanent state’.

I did the best writing of my life in 2018/2019. I was in the midst of a trauma induced breakdown (see chapters 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 33 and 38 of my new book) but that didn’t seem to affect the quality of my writing.

I get extremely productive and write well under pressure and throughout traumatic experiences. I think It’s the heightened fear. I feel like I have to finish things before I am either thwarted or murdered. It’s not worth it though. I’d rather the peace.

A lot of that writing features in Between a Rock, a Hard Place and a Dystopia. However I didn’t even really know that I was a writer until 2018 when Kojo told me “you’re a writer”, after reading the first draft of Beyond Reproach? Labour, the Left and White Supremacy.

Before that I had always solely identified as a filmmaker, who happened to have founded an organisation to foreground the voices of people of colour.

Really I have Hicham Yezza, Adam Elliott-Cooper, Assed Baig, Justin, and Symeon Brown to thank for encouraging me back then. We had a WhatsApp group, aptly named Burnout that usually got popping in the morning over this or that in 2018.

To start at the beginning – kind of

I’ve only ever told this whole story once. And I sounded mad. I’ll never know the truth unless they expand the SpyCops inquiry to include 2022. Currently it ends in 2014. Of course I may be in those documents anyway as a former short-term boyfriend has been named as one of those under surveillance. We’re no longer in contact but at the time (and now) he was a journalist writing mostly about Israel and its agents in the UK. He was getting constant scoops then and now. But his platform is small and has never written for the mainstream press.

We went out for a couple of months around 2014/2015. But to tell the story I have to go back to 2010. I came back to London from Uganda; my intention was to find funding for my second film, Born Again in the United States of Uganda. Something I had been filming for a few months every time I got the opportunity:

Back in London, my sister was pursuing her own dream of training to become a pastor. After her daughter died from complications of sickle cell she had become religious, stopped partying, and stopped drinking. I was concerned and just didn’t understand having gone to Catholic schools throughout my childhood and teenage years. I had an aversion to organised religion but wanted to understand more so I could support my sister.

Confused by this turn to religion from my previously secular sibling and wanting to understand what being ‘born again’ meant, I sought to find out more about the burgeoning Pentecostalism congregations in Uganda. I read the local papers and found an advert for a church just a short drive from where I lived. 

There I met with the head of the church; the self-styled Bishop Kiganda with a view to following him for a documentary. What I didn’t know when I stepped into his luxurious office at the side of his rundown church was that he was one of the pastors alongside Pastor Ssempa at the helm of a notorious anti-gay movement and leading advocate of the ‘Kill the Gays’ bill.

Three months later when I’d gained his trust and that of the others in this largely male movement of pastors, the world caught on to what was happening in Uganda. I found myself at the centre of a global story, and an unwitting participant in the video for a viral anti-gay song featuring Pastor Ssempa Eat da poo poo, that was beamed across the world.

Born Again in the United States of Uganda was about the anti gay bill, prosperity gospel, money laundering and ‘the Family’ also known as ‘the Fellowship’: a secretive neo-conservative boys club who believe in free trade, abolition of abortion, and being anti-gay. The boys club consists of both Democrat and Republican politicians and others with a lot of money. They fund the national prayer breakfast in America and the national prayer breakfast in Uganda. It’s rumoured that Uganda’s president of over three decades is a member. 

The MP who wrote Uganda’s infamous anti-gay bill, Bahati, is a member. In 2010 the Texas Republican Party brought out a manifesto. It had striking similarities to the anti-gay bill that came out almost simultaneously. I came back to London in 2011 to try and find funding to finish my film.

I needed over a hundred thousand pounds in my estimation to be able to do the film justice. I’d need to not only go back to Uganda, but Nigeria and America too. This was the text that went along with the trailer I made and the application to ITVS – an American film fund. There is a web of entanglement between US evangelicals, fundamentalists, conservatives and African clergy that exists to maintain a power structure and a severe homophobic agenda that serves the hard-core religious groups.

This documentary will be the definitive film that shows that the American evangelical right invests heavily in financial and advocacy effort in influencing religious Africans to shun gay rights and that the Ugandan Anti-Gay Bill was an import from the West. Uganda is the test bed for Texas.

The ecstasy was short-lived. I didn’t get awarded the money. Another film similar on the surface to mine did. Another film about the Anti-Gay Bill, and the underground gay scene which the two white American filmmakers, neither of whom had been to Uganda I found out, were more interested in than the money laundering and corruption I wanted to investigate.

C’est la vie. 

Going underground

So, I went underground. And found Twitter. I would chat with British and American anarchists until 4am in the morning or later; good times. Some of them were as much on the periphery as me, which became apparent a few years later when Novara Media was founded by Aaron Bastani. His ‘break the house’ party was legendary. It was there I was first in the company of James Butler, his eventual co-founder, and even Laurie Penny was there. 

The former was about to move from the rented accommodation and a last house party was the only way to celebrate that. Aaron Bastani had been along for the anarchist ride. Clearly no longer, considering his appearances on GB News.

I consider myself an anarchist at heart and a socialist in practice. I’m not sure what he would call himself these days. I was pretty lost in those few months. No second film, no boyfriend. I started questioning my position on this earth. That led to a perhaps unhealthy obsession with Twitter but it also led me to finding some people that I had never considered before – anti-imperialists, I soon learned.

I found a meeting that was to be gathered somewhere in North London that would be the founding of the small, nascent, and barely existent anti-imperialist movement until the recent war on Gaza.

At the centre of the 2010 were charismatic characters like Sukant Chandan, Lowkey, Pablo Navarette, Adam Elliot-Cooper, Jody McIntyre, Akala and others. The women were less known. Nonetheless, it birthed films, music, writing, protests, and campaigns.

It was a campaign called Hands Off Somalia that I joined which is relevant to the title of my book. Hands Off Somalia was convened by a group called the Revolutionary Communists, known colloquially with the acronym RFRI. They included a woman who calls herself Nikki, who is now part of Prisoners Advice Service, who organised many protests, had a newsletter and so on. For this campaign they got involved with some Somalis who were on the periphery of the anti-imperialist movement. They were fierce poets and public speakers. I was in awe. They were the first hijab wearing women I had met. A far cry from the depiction that the mainstream media would have you believe of meek, controlled, and subservient.

One woman was particularly charismatic. We’d added each other on Facebook back then and I hadn’t thought of it again. Until 2022 when out of the blue she called me.

Kill the Bill

I was in the midst of organising the Nationality and Borders Bill fight back. I had brought lots of different campaigns together, and I did an interview for Al Jazeera, which reported:

Samantha Asumadu, a campaigner for representation in the media, told Al Jazeera: “I only knew about the bill on Friday through the New Statesman piece, that said that up to six million people were at risk of being deported.”

In that recent report by the New Statesman magazine, reporters alleged that the the bill focuses on minorities – who currently make up nearly six million people in England and Wales – and who could be at risk of deportation if they were to commit a crime that was deemed applicable by the government.

Asumadu called for cross-community action to resist the bill.

“The goal is to stop the Nationality and borders bill in its entirety. Collaboration among all groups is are only and best option. Muslims, Sikhs, Jews and more have come together in the last few days to oppose this bill. The opposition will only grow as it approaches its next trading [sic] in the House of Lords.”

And wrote an article for openDemocracy – Why we need to join forces to oppose the Nationality and Borders Bill Democracy – and two for Ceasefire Magazine – On the Nationality and Borders Bill and the UK Left and For the Culture: Reflections on Black & Brown Activism.

It was apparently the openDemocracy article that the charismatic woman I previously mentioned read and made her want to get involved. She’d missed the Zoom meeting I convened with 23 different groups, but I sent her a link to the recording. I’d had no reason to distrust her before:

Duly she turned up at the first protest held outside Downing Street where she made a beeline to meet some of the other organisers and quickly became second within the group. Some of whom I had known before; Dome I hadn’t but they all had long track records in community organising. Checking out her Facebook a few weeks later it seemed she had done little since 2010 since I first met her. Perhaps some university? It wasn’t clear.

The group used all the tools available for us to communicate – email, Twitter and WhatsApp. It was Twitter that caused the final fragmentation.

Before that however alongside our protests, there was another organisation called Kill the Bill. They were organising huge protests, larger than ours. Thousands were on the street. A friend and I went along, and met the Somali woman and a friend of hers. By that time another person who had no track record – other than his insistence had been arrested once at a protest and a Twitter account – had joined us. He was by the looks of things South Asian. He would repeatedly bring up this arrest as a symbol of his bona fides. None of us cared. We had no intention of getting arrested, even with encouragement from him.

After this massive protest I found myself in a cafe with these three characters. It was there I started to feel uneasy. The South Asian guy began to talk about the royal family – saying it was their fault for the bill – I didn’t take the bait, and said my mum loved the royal family. Then he moved on to another FGM campaigner I knew who happened to be good friends with Boris Johnson’s wife and attempted to get me to stage her off. I said, gosh, I haven’t seen her for ages, last time was at a party somewhere in North London, she’d been looking good! 

Eventually he left and me and the Somali woman and her friend went outside to chat. I hushed them and said ‘can you turn your phones off’. They looked at me incredulously. Whilst I wish I had never watched Homeland, London Spy, or any of those TV shows or read any John Le Carre books (I love him really) they are good for teaching/understanding spy craft. And on the flip side, learning evading tactics. I said “please just turn your phone off” and then laid out my suspicions to them. And left. 

Enter the wreckers

I then noticed photos I had taken in Cardiff of me and Shirley had gone missing from my phone. The next day my laptop stopped working. Soon after that I left the Nationality and Borders bill campaign group completely. Other than being in a DM group on Twitter that I never looked at, my involvement was over. One of my good friends remained however and she gave me a call out of the blue a few weeks later, saying that the Somali woman had accused her and others of being spies, and the group was having a meltdown. I said I’d give the Somali woman a ring seeing as I had brought her into the group and known her for years (I hadn’t seen her for 12 years). We had a chat. It seemed fine.

Then she and her friend announced in the DM group that someone had screenshotted a message they had put in the group and it was circulating outside. In affect accusing someone in the group of being a spy and selling us out. I knew this was rubbish. And as far as I was concerned had confirmation that this woman and her friend were wreckers – spies or informants. It didn’t matter which, but they had destroyed the careful, painstaking work we had done to first get together then put on two protests, get a petition to over 200,000 signatures, publish writing etc.

Whilst I left, the paranoia didn’t abate. In fact it had only just got started. I reached out to Tom Fowler. Tom Fowler was targeted by undercover officers for many years whilst part of South Wales Anarchists and active in environmental and social justice campaigns. He has spent much of the last 14 years taking legal action against the police, doing live reports from the SpyCops Inquiry, launched in 2015, and producing the Spycops Info Podcast. 

Tom said:

I mean, like, Yeah, I can’t say I got anything really to like, I can’t really shine a light on it. But there are lots of bad faith actors in all these things. As well as undercover officers. There’s like informants, infiltrators, there’s grasses, there’s a whole corporate world of infiltration that doesn’t come from the state. One of the big the big roles of all this intelligence gathering, gathering is what they call vetting what we would refer to as blacklisting. So you know, the idea that someone would be sent out to like, kind of update a vetting of somebody by questioning people who are associated with them sounds perfectly, like a believable sort of thing that would happen. I don’t I don’t know anything about this particular case. But yeah, I mean, I’ve cut off these people. I’m not going to name names. I don’t want any trouble. But they did ruin that. But yeah, the I would say it’s down to those two women, at least, the organising stuff,

I’m gonna, I’m gonna, on top of that, you know, there, there is a lot of people in activism who are fucking funny types, funny fish. And like, you know, there’s plenty of ways in which groups get destroyed by the internal dynamics of it. I would say that my personal experience, the people who did that world, and they would they were encouraged in the planes are fanned by undercover officers who nobody thought was doing things like that. But then you look back at it. And you saw the way in which they lifted up the voices of those who were, you know, there’s a role within that as well. Disrupting undermining and destroying groups was a big part of what their deployment was about, right. It wasn’t just about intelligence gathering. Yeah. The whole sector of the state, it’s about undermining and destroying groups.

TV shows, more than anywhere – even my time spent In Congo where I trekked guided through the forest and was told by the ranger violence still broke out there and later interviewed broken looking ex FDLR fighters in a tent administered by either the UN or an NGO – is where I learned the disturbing behaviour I exhibit when in the midst of a triggered PTSD meltdown: 

  • Turning all the lights on in my flat when I enter.
  • Checking every room and cupboard for intruders.
  • Only speaking on WhatsApp or Signal.
  • When feeling under threat making everyone I meet turn their phones off.
  • Taking longer routes when walking, stopping intermittently, occasionally doubling back on myself.
  • Putting my phone on aeroplane mode.
  • When feeling under threat taking all the cash out of my bank account so I can’t be tracked by credit or debit card transactions.
  • Leaving household items in particular places so I can check if anyone has been in my flat whilst I was out.
  • Playing loud music so whoever has bugged my flat can’t overhear me.

There’s probably more. 

Hypervigilance

This all sounds like paranoid stuff to the general public. However when I talked to an actual investigative journalist and also talked to author Michela Wrong, she understood completely having been hyper-vigilant because of the book she had just published and the Rwandan government’s reaction to it. 

Foreign correspondents understand living in fear because we have done stories that meant we had to, if we were to expose what was happening. In Congo I was followed by a mining company only because I was doing a story on blood minerals. In Uganda I was scared because after covering a landslide and nearly being buried alive and fearing my death that day, I then had to cover the Al Shabab bombings of Kampala in 2010. I wasn’t supposed to be in Kampala but had missed my flight to London the week before so subsequently covered it for CNN. 

For me, (undiagnosed) PTSD has manifested because I have seen and been tangentially involved in so much bad shit during my short time as a breaking news reporter and foreign correspondent that bad things seem to happen a lot more (to me and those around me) than actually happens in reality. For example I haven’t gotten on the tube for 12 years because of what happened in Bududa.

Last month I was told that I do not have PTSD, But I do have trauma-informed claustrophobia due to the landslide:

Yes I am a big old troll where it comes to spies and informants and their handlers:

It’s unlikely a tube tunnel is going to collapse on me but it feels like if it’s going to happen to anyone it would happen to me. It’s unlikely I will get caught up in a city where there’s another terrorist attack but in my brain it seems very likely that I will. It had seemed unlikely that I would ever come across as big a story as the blood minerals one I did in Congo 12 years ago. However then came #NationalityAndBordersBill followed quickly by #JusticeForIPPs, all massive and necessary stories, meaning to me and my overtaxed brain those odds about tunnels collapsing got smaller again.

So even though these shows are all fiction, done very well, they bring danger and violence closer but also present ways to combat some of the intrusion of being at the other end of the state.

Thus as the story below shows basically everyone is a spy until they are proven not to be a spy, they have a normal job, such as nurse that doesn’t allow for travel whenever you feel like it. Or I have known them for at least 20 years:

A Black Lives Matter group in South Wales has been closed following an alleged infiltration attempt by the police. Swansea BLM cited concerns for their members’ safety, harassment and threats from the far right as the primary reasons for shutting down its operations. The news emerged after one of the group’s main organisers, Lowri Davies, revealed last year that a police officer tried to persuade her to become an informant, secretly recording the approach and publishing it. In a statement published months after, the collective explained that the decision had been taken following concerns for their members’ welfare. 

“We’re dissolving our organisation for a number of reasons, including the physical and mental safety of all our team members. Whilst we have found that our organisation has done some important work, we have been subject to an attempt of infiltration at the end hands of South Wales Police, doxxing and targeted harassment from Voice of Wales and some far-right members turning up at members’ homes.” 

Justified paranoia – but that doesn’t make it right

For a brief moment last weekend whilst messaging with author and journalist Matt Potter, who I interviewed for a podcast called The Information War, that my transcription service tells me was about:

The discussion centers on the concept of an ongoing information war, tracing back to 1999, emphasizing the integration of cyber and physical warfare. The conversation highlights Russia’s use of cyber attacks and disinformation since the Kosovo conflict, noting the rise of “hacker industrial complexes” and the role of script kiddies. The Ukrainian government’s call to hackers to join the “Ukrainian IT Army” is discussed as a strategy to counter Russian cyber threats. The conversation also touches on the naivety of Western approaches to cyber warfare, the impact of social media on political movements, and the need for radical empathy in global conflicts. 

I convinced myself that Matt was a spy, which is ridiculous when you consider his body of work! 😂😃😄 (Matt’s first book tracked post-Soviet pilots running arms, drugs, and worse from Afghanistan to Somalia.)  The reason was literally because of a band name I had tweeted that I had  forgotten I had tweeted. He referenced my tweet in a message and because I didn’t remember ever writing a tweet with ‘The Metres’ in it on Twitter (I had done it automatically from the source) I went to investigate and only calmed down once I found the tweet I had sent unwittingly earlier that day.

Crazy stuff.

So my paranoid PTSD meltdown three weeks ago was more than justified in the context of the Nationality and Borders Bill organising and subsequent IPP exclusive that thousands left in English and Welsh prisons have been left without release dates, despite controversial indefinite sentences long being scrapped. But not my suspicion of a perfectly nice man chatting to me about music, vinyl, and books on a Saturday morning rather than finishing his overdue manuscript:

Thankfully I finally spoke to a doctor two days later (I had been waiting three weeks for a telephone appointment with my GP) about the PTSD stuff. I explained to her about Congo, the bombs and the landslide. 

She said “you’ve had quite a life”.

Then I said yeah “but it was a poem that pushed me over the edge” 😃😄😆 She was surprised that I had never been diagnosed before. She asked me what service I would be transferring from. I said i hadn’t realised until around 2017/2018 that I even had PTSD. That I have had therapy/CBT numerous times before but they NEVER mentioned I might have PTSD or ADHD. Internally i was saying ‘If they had things wouldn’t have got this bad’. 

Racist assumptions or neglect I don’t know, but it was definitely an abdication of duty of rather than disappear into the ether, making me look like a spy in 2016, and 2019 a lot of pain and trouble for people/a person other than me could have been avoided if I had been diagnosed/had the correct therapy in 2010. CBT does not cut it.

Writing this book has meant reliving some old pain. My brother says that finishing it will relieve my anxiety meaning even potentially finally getting rid of my eczema which is invariably exacerbated by my anxiety. My book research was mostly of the low brow variety – looking up WhatsApp messages, old Facebook and Instagram statuses.

Whilst reliving pain can be cathartic I suppose, it has also pushed me to places that maybe would be best left in the past. As well as reading my old social media I had to read my old articles from 2018/2019. Some were published, some were just on my old blog that doesn’t exist anymore. 

I have been notifying people that they are in the book since 2022. Some couldn’t care less, others did. One particular person in 2022 who I sent a chapter to felt that I had betrayed him and our confidences going back years. Whilst I think it’s important to have an outside critique once in a while, we all come with our own biases and perceived relationships/slights etc. 

The chapter I wrote was coloured by the fact that I felt he had betrayed me or our friendship. I should say back in 2019 when he had I thought chosen someone else over me. It turned out that wasn’t the case. And just speaking to each other resolved a lot of the differences and I realised I had been unfair to him in parts of the chapter. 

Which starts:

I always thought Madani was perfect. Radical and perfect. Radical, successful and perfect. Busy too. But never too busy for me.  I think he reached out to me (via his assistant) as founder of Media Diversified. He thought we were radical too. And on our way to being successful. He was determined to help me get there. And it would shore up his cred as radical while he was at it.

Not all but part was unfair. But today it becomes even more important as he too was a friend of me and my charismatic peers from around 2012 onwards. I’m as sad for him today as I am myself, Anthony, Lowkey, Adam, Symeon, Pablo, Akala, Malia, and others affected by the ‘permanent state’:

SpyCops is not a lesson of history, but a lesson of our present

I spoke to Tom Fowler on 30 July, four days before the hacking of my social media accounts, the same same day I scanned and found AirTags in my vicinity and the day my laptop stopped working again. Here is an abridged version of our interview in which according to the AI summary of our conversation says:

the conversation delves into the UK’s spy cops scandal, where undercover police infiltrated activist groups since 1968, using stolen identities of deceased children. The inquiry, initiated by Theresa May in 2015, is chaired by Sir John Mitting and involves numerous legal representatives. The first tranche covered 1968-1982, suggesting the unit should have been disbanded. The second tranche, 1983-1992, is ongoing. Key points include the use of trauma for empathy and withdrawal, the infiltration of various political movements, and the long-term impact on activists and their families. The inquiry aims to uncover the extent of police misconduct and its broader societal repercussions. Plus it  delves into the inquiry, revealing that over 1,000 left-wing groups were infiltrated by undercover units, while only one far-right group, the BNP, is known to have been infiltrated. The inquiry, which began in 2015, is expected to conclude by October 2026. The conversation highlights the historical lack of police action against the far-right and the impact of undercover operations on social justice movements. It also touches on the broader issue of police corruption, including cases of sexual misconduct and the use of covert surveillance. The speakers emphasize the need for public awareness and accountability, urging listeners to follow the #Spycops hashtag for updates.

Tom: They were, when it happened, spread across the country, or just in London, or where all over the country, initially was eight women in that group, and now it’s 60.

Sam: Yeah. What sort of groups were they in that were infiltrated?

Tom: I mean, basically, I mean, like, it goes the same. There’s over 1000 groups infiltrated by the undercover units. They’re almost exclusively left wing, progressive environmentalism, anti racism, human rights, women’s rights, evil group found is there’s a real lack of reporting on the far right. We heard about one officer who infiltrated the BMP last week, hm, 56 and, I mean, like it was, I mean, it was fucking pathetic. He infiltrated for 10 months. I mean, he gave one report at the start of his deployment. He didn’t then report them. Another four months. He just did incredibly little. He was absolutely petrified the entire time. He was worried that fellow undercover officers were going to out him. Because, I mean, essentially, he didn’t say this, but you get the impression that, and as we know from previous investigations that happened in the past, that there’s sympathy for the far right within the British police and within special branches, particularly, we heard from our officers that were were tasked with infiltrating anti-racist groups the 1970s who said the National Front weren’t a problem. They cooperated with the police. It was only because they were getting attacked by lefties. Police really refused to make a connection between the racist murders that were happening and, like, the growth of the far right. So, I mean, like, for example, when we looked at the BNP HQ that used to be in Welling in the late eighties, it was like, set up there in 89 and there’s big protest against it 93 that’s like, which the police, like, absolutely battered everybody… they did police horse charges into like, people sitting in the road… But like, you know, the area around the national BNP HQ there was, like, that’s where Stephen Lawrence was killed. That’s where there was a number of racist murders in that area. I’m not using the names that might get it wrong, because there’s so many, there’s so many names you kind of end up with. 

Tom: But so there was lack of a feeling that, you know, because the far right believed in the queen. I mean, that sounds insane, right? But like, you know, we heard a lot from a lot of the undercover officers talking about, like, the protection of the Queen’s peace is the highest calling of any police officer. And they just didn’t see the far right as like, a threat to social attitudes in the way in which the far left was and is. And you can, like, see the kind of the whole thing about, they talked about public disorder and subversion, but what they’re really, actually concerned with is social attitudes they didn’t want. Like, we heard from undercover officers during tranche, one who, I mean, this is direct quote. ‘There’s a lot of long haired, long haired layabouts in need of a good clout’. And like, that’s, I mean, that’s literally how they saw it. I mean, they saw the new left of the late 60s and the social attitudes that went with it. You know, one of the earliest groups to be infiltrated was Women’s Liberation Front. I mean, their demands were things like, you know, ban rape in marriage, allow women to have bank accounts. You know, children born out of wedlock should have the same legal rights as unborn in wedlock. Incredibly minor things. Sometimes we forget how far this country’s come on, some really basic stuff. I mean, rape in marriage was only made illegal in 1990 it was 1974 before a woman could open a bank account in the UK. It simply wasn’t possible for women to get a mortgage before that. These kind of social attitudes, these changes, social actions which were happening were real. You can see, like the SDS as part of a rear guard action against all those slowing them down from happening in any sort of sensible pace. Like it’s the way in which Britain really has, like, kind of lagged behind the views of its population. I mean, there’s lots of ways that they do.

Sam: The state has lagged behind Jimmy, the permanent state

Tom: Yeah, behind the views of the population of the country. Yeah, absolutely.

Sam: And do you think there’s a difference between the permanent state, as in SDS, blah, blah, and the governments that come in?

Tom: Yeah. I mean, whoever government is in power, it’s the Tory state, right? It’s like the aristocracy owns this country. We just live here.

Sam: There’s two things I wanted to pick up on what you just said. One, you said there was one person who has given evidence, who did infiltrate the BNP for 10 months, etc. You also said there was 1,000 groups that were infiltrated. So are you saying there was only one far right group that was infiltrated out of all of their deployments?

Tom: That’s all we’ve heard of so far. Now there is a number of undercover officers who have got such a high level of anonymity. We don’t have their cover names, we don’t have their real names, and we don’t have a cipher for them. There’s a lot of bullshit being put out by the inquiry about how dangerous their deployments were, and it sort of inferred that these were officers were infiltrating the far right. But we don’t have any details about that. We don’t know if that was them infiltrating the far right proper, or, like, some aspect of it, or something unrelated. Were they infiltrating the anti-fascist groups? Because we heard also about another officer in the 70s who infiltrated a left-wing party, the Workers Revolutionary Party. And whilst he was infiltrated doing that, they were doing a lot of anti-fascist work, and they got him to go undercover into the far right. So he was like an undercover officer in the left pretending to be left wing activist pretending to be a right wing activist to report back to. So I mean, you know, we get examples like that that happen, and we know that the role of Searchlight in infiltrating the far right has been significant in the past.

Sam: Explain what Searchlight is, please.

Tom: Searchlight is an anti fascist magazine set up by Gerry Gable… and they’ve had very, very close links with the security services. They send their activists undercover into far-right groups. There’s a lot about them that’s really dodgy. It’s not an area I have that much of a specialist on. But… the point I’m making is, is that there was obviously some monitoring of the far right that took place, but we have no evidence beyond this one officer or the role that the SDS took in that.

Sam: But Joe, you’ve got a lot of evidence on the left wing groups from like, you know, that’s that’s suspicious. Basically, you’re suspicious of that, yeah?

Tom: But it feeds into, you know, certainly when we talk about, like, the really big fascist mobilisations of the 1970s like Southall places like that. You know where Blair Peach was murdered, the Red Line Square where Kevin Gately was murdered. You know that these, these are incidents that there was no undercover police officers in the far right, but there were significant numbers in the far left, right?

Sam: Can I ask another you said these undercover cops, they were going in. So it’s, you know, boots on the ground. What were they? Was there any technology involved? Is there any phone tapping?

Tom: All those things that are undoubtedly all those things are part of what the British state does. Theoretically, the police are governed by more specific more of the law than security services. So it would take a warrant to tap someone’s phone historically, whereas it would take the oversight of one senior officer to deploy an undercover officer into someone’s life. So particularly for the early years the unit, it’s the it’s the human infiltration, the covert human intelligence source, which is used willy nilly, really, whereas it would take a lot more paperwork to do things like wire tapping. Obviously that changed massively in the modern era. And like, you know, when you, when you start looking into this stuff, you start being really, like, kind of, I used to be very quick to make suggestions for how things are done now, I would I’m more wary of doing that now, because the more you know about the past, the less you want to speculate. But we certainly live in a year of neoliberal policing, where the use of private firms to do police work is commonplace, the use of informers for criminal cases is – the national former database has exploded over the last couple of decades – and the use of covert, electronic covert surveillance is everywhere, right? So, I mean, obviously that has changed massively, but when we talk about the historic period, it really is human beings.

Sam: So there’s two BBC articles from 2013. The first one is called Mi5 spy unhappy with ex’s calls. I’ll read you a little bit of it:

An Mi5 five spy accused of assaulting his fellow spy. Ex- girlfriend went to another phone to call her at work when she ignored him. A jury has heard the woman referred to by her Mi5 pin number 2363, then answered the call but became uncomfortable. The Crown Court heard the defendant, using a false name Mark Barton for security reasons, denies two assaults counts and one of harassment, a sexual assault charge was dropped during the trial… So a former line manager of the woman who was a spy as well, told the court that a few weeks before the woman complained to police about Mr. Barton’s behavior at the end of august 2011 he was aware of an occasion when 2363 took a telephone call that she was uncomfortable with taking… Earlier this week, the court heard that Mr. Barton was out of control. After 2363, left him, she said that after following her from a work party, Mr. Barton had lifted her off the tube in a bear hug and forced her to return to his flat. And Mr. Barton had wanted to discuss their relationship and did not accept the romance was over. The woman said she tried to leave but Mr. Barton physically restrained her, throwing her into a cupboard… The trial was going to to continue the next Monday.

Sam: That’s the first article. Now I don’t know. Do you know of any on about any spy on the spy, like abuse, like that, is that something that’s come out?

Tom: I mean, it’s certainly not that many much about there have been a number of cases of Mi5 agents behaving appallingly, that there’s been a number of cases. I’m not sure if this is the same one as there’s another one which was, I think, more recent than that of an Mi5 officer who was sexually abusing his partner. I would say, like the SDS, though, they are spies, they are cops. These are police officers. They’re not special agents. They haven’t had anything like that kind of training. They come from a very different background. They’re not allowed to kill people like Mi5 officers are. They are allowed to arrest people though which Mi5 officers aren’t. There’s a much, much bigger scandal than all of this that like relates to the way in which men treat women, right? I mean, we live in a deeply misogynistic society, a patriarchy, when men feel they have a right to women’s bodies. And that manifests itself in a multitude of ways, you know. Surprisingly enough, people who were given the license to break society’s norms in the name of the state abuse that to abuse people, particularly when there’s no oversight. And there was no oversight with these cases, and there’s very little oversight on my phone, yeah. So, yeah, I’m sure there is, like, a multitude of cases like,

Sam: Yeah, I mean something you said just made me think of something that I’ve been doing recently, because I found that on Twitter that I get, like, every day, there’s some sort of court case or tribunal or something of a police officer who have committed some crime, and it can be any police, it’s not just the Met, it’s not even just GMP, it’s all over the shop. They’re getting convicted of rape, of drug dealing, of abuse. It’s actually thieving off dead people. It’s mad. So I created this hashtag, like police crime daily. I wasn’t online yesterday. I wasn’t able to update it, but I’m sure there was more cases that came out every single day, and it’s tip of the iceberg, right? Because the vast majority of police officers don’t get held to account for their crimes.

Tom: Yeah, it’s endemic. It’s endemic.

Sam: Yes, I’ll just go on to the other other article. I think it may it may be about the same case and the reporting of it, but, yeah, so. So this one is in July 2013:

Mi5 spy assault and harassment claims, total nonsense. an Mi5 spy has dismissed as total nonsense allegations that he harassed and assaulted his former girlfriend… The defendant, who is using a false name for security reasons, told the jury that he did not think his ex girlfriend had ever been frightened of him. Mark Barton denies two assaults and one of harassment against the woman. A charge of a sexual assault against Mr. Barton has been dropped during cross examination. The prosecutor Alison Morgan, asked Mr. Barton if he had ever been violent towards his ex girlfriend, referred to in court only as 2363, and he said, ‘that’s a ridiculous suggestion. That’s absolutely total nonsense. I’ve never been physically aggressive to her in my life’. Asked if she’d been scared of him he said, ‘there’s absolutely no way she was frightened whatsoever’… then asked if he told 2363, three’s mother that the couple would be married in two years. Mr. Barton told the court. I did not say we would be married in two years, but I made it very clear that I was very committed to her.

Sam: I mean, it goes on like that. I can’t actually get to where if he was convicted or not, which is a shame they seem to have stopped reporting on it after a while. That’s not too great, is it?

Tom: There’s a series To Catch A Copper, and if you’ve seen it, it’s like, fairly recent series. And I mean, like, essentially, it’s one of those ones where they use police footage. I mean, the police cooperates with it, where they show police footage of police abusing their position, and then the investigation into them, and then they all get off.

Sam: It’s been nine years for a short period. What do you see? How long do you think this is going to take to do all six tranches, and what will, what accountability will there be after this?

Tom: Okay, so, I mean, I’ll answer the second one part. First, absolutely none whatsoever. There’s no question of anybody getting any response, any responsibility, any blame being pinned onto anybody. The police will go away completely scot free for all their crimes. The point of the inquiry is not to do that. It’s purely to learn the lessons. And there’ll be a bunch of recommendations that will come out of it. In terms of when it reports. The last government demanded it be finished by October 2026. Totally unreasonable, totally unlikely that would happen. The inquiry intends to, like, speed up its process to try and be finished by then. It means we’re just rushing through the important detail of the inquiry whilst we spent so many years like faffing around appeasing police fears about anonymity.

Sam: I wanted to ask you about, like, some specific things just to, just to end us off, because my interest in this is actually personal as well. I mean, I’ve been, I’m a I’m a journalist, I’ve also been an activist in the past. And and something came up on my Twitter a little while ago. It’s, you know, Batt Murphy, who are a team of lawyers, they wrote in a statement at today’s undercover police inquiry hearing ‘the Met has apologised unreservedly for undercover officers spying on family, campaigns and community organisations seeking justice, and in particular to members of Black and Asian communities seeking to hold the Met to account’. So I asked, just in general, like, where do we find a list of which groups and people they were surveilling? Because I had weird things happen to me over the years from 2013 onwards, though, I mean, I’m quite paranoid person. I used to be a foreign correspondent. I was in Congo, and I was followed by mining companies specifically because of work that I was doing there that was about blood minerals. So, somebody replied to me, and they sent a list. The current list of 246 core participants is on the UCPI website. So I looked at it, and I replied again, well, wow, there’s a guy I used to go out with for a few months on there, which, which is, which was quite shocking to me. Well, no, not shocking, because he’s a journalist. He’s a good you know, he’s an activist journalist. He does some really great work on like Israel and Palestine. He’s done that for years. I’m not going to identify him at all. It was a short relationship. So this, this other person, this friend of mine, replied to me, saying, so if you were, in fact, of a close relationship with someone who were themselves under SDS, MPOIU surveillance, ‘I would expect you to have been subject to a background check at minimum, but in and of itself, that would not qualify you for inquiry participant status’. Like, can you comment on that? Is that something because, because the relationship I had was after 2010?

Tom: the person you’re talking about is a co participant because they were spied on. A lot of people who were directly named in a lot of the documents have been refused core participant status. So the core participant is quite high bar it would appear to be to become a core participant. Yeah, it only relates to stuff before 2010 in terms of what the security services and Special Branch have been up to when it comes to monitoring or activists since then, we don’t know, and we’re unlikely to find out through this process, we definitely need to run sort of other process for that. But yeah, there’s, I mean, there’s a huge number of people who were what what they call collateral intrusion into their lives, who are simply being disregarded by the inquiry and any of these processes in terms of the effect that it had on them.

Sam: Okay, well, I mean, I’m still, I have a little worry about this, and I’ll tell you why. So, I mean, the person told me that a lot of these SDS officers from the 68 to 72 period are dead. So that, I mean, not that they were going to be accountable at all, but they can’t even participate, or can’t be exposed.

Tom: If they’re abroad, they don’t have to give evidence. So a lot of people have moved abroad. They start when the inquiry started. They live in the UK, and they thought, actually, do you know what I’m going to abroad? so in one case, hn 109, says he’ll kill himself if he’s called to give evidence. So the inquiry hasn’t called him to give evidence. It’d be interesting to see how many other former undercover officers try that technique as a method of not giving evidence themselves.

Sam: Well, I mean, you alluded to it. We don’t know any inquiry won’t cover what’s happened since 2010. You said that they were is about social attitudes. Was there any actual legislation that they were trying to to uphold, like we’ve got the Public Order Act now. What did they have in the 70s? Was there anything official

Tom: Criminal justice acts and public order acts a hallmark of British governments. They come out every couple of years. There were numerous bits of legislation all through the 70s, the SDS were not managed through any piece of legislation. The closest thing was RIPA, which was released in the early 2000s which gives a certain sort of free framework. More recently, Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021 legalises basically anything you can rape and murder as an undercover officer, and it’s perfectly okay, perfectly legal. I mean, if you look at, like, kind of the mood music, but that will Lord Walney report. I mean, they’re, they’re demanding, you know, higher levels of infiltration of groups again, but yeah, in terms of legislative framework, there wasn’t for the majority of this through the STS. The CHIS Act had support of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer said it was just formalising what already happens anyway.

Sam: Yeah, that’s something that’s, that’s a, that’s a theme of what I found. You know, the work is going on. The boots are on the ground. It’s just legislation catching up with what actual policy is on the ground. Something I wrote about in my exclusive for the Canary, published on 30 July:

According to Netpol, a campaigning group that challenges police power by working on the front lines with movements for social justice, the Bill “seeks to revive the amendments that it lost in the Lords”. The PCSC Act and Public Order Act were just laws catching up with actual operational policy.

Sam: When the Nationality and Borders Bill was announced, my organisation, myself, we got together with about 22 other organisations to try and oppose it.

Bad-faith actors are vetting you

A this point, I recounted to Tom my story of Hands Off Somalia, the Nationality and Borders Bill campaigning, what happened in the cafe, and the potential infiltration of the group.

Tom: There are lots of bad faith actors in all these things, as well as undercover officers. There’s like, informers, infiltrators, there’s grasses, there’s a whole corporate world of infiltration. It doesn’t come from the state. One of the big, the big roles of all this intelligence gathering, gathering is what they call vetting, what we’d refer to as blacklisting. So you know, the idea that someone would be sent out to like, kind of update, the vetting of somebody by questioning people who are associated with them, sounds perfectly like believable sort of thing that would happen. I don’t, I don’t know anything about this particular case.

Sam: I’ve cut off these people. I’m not going to name them. I don’t want any trouble, but they did ruin that. But yeah, I would say it’s down to those two women, at least the organising stuff.

Tom: On top of that, you know, there, there is a lot of people in activism who are fucking funny types funny fish and like, you know, there’s plenty of ways in which groups get destroyed by the internal dynamics of it. I would say that my personal experience, the people who did that were like that. They were encouraged and the blames were fanned by undercover officers who nobody thought we were doing things like that. But then you look back at it, and you saw the way in which they lifted up the voices of those who were, you know, there’s a role within that as well, disrupting, undermining and destroying groups was a big part of what their deployment was about, right? It wasn’t just about like, intelligence gathering, yeah, you know that the whole sector of the state, it’s about undermining and destroying groups.

Sam: I mean, you mentioned the guy who got to the top of his his organisation?

Tom: Rick Gibson with the Troops Out movement, yeah. I mean, he, he really pioneered the whole way of using sex as a way in which of bringing people onside, he had sex with a number of women in the groups that he was infiltrating, which led to those groups he was in, like supporting his candidacy to be the regional organiser and the national organiser for the Troops Out movement in the mid 1970s. Yeah, that kind of that seemed to be a bit of a blueprint, then, for later officers who use sexual relationships as a primary method, not just to building their legend, but like, giving access to privileged information.

Sam: so, you know, their handlers, would their handlers be near? Are these? What does the handler do?

Tom: So much of these roles informal, so there’s not, like, some rule about, like, how many, how many meters away they had to be the old times, but certainly they were kept in close contact. What we know from Kate Wilson’s case of the IPT is that Mark Kennedy was communicating with his handler every couple of minutes, sending him text messages, making phone calls. It’s constant, relaying of information constantly, really about both his professional deployment and his personal life – massively overlapped throughout the whole time period.

Sam: So what to just to end off, what is the one thing you want the public to know? Because there’s been a bit of reporting. I’ve seen some in the Guardian. Your Twitter feed is like my Bible to go for when I want, you know, just, you know, daily updates, I just click on your profile and have a read and know what’s going on and so, but not everybody’s following you on Twitter. Let’s say two questions. What do you think of the reporting so far from the mainstream press on this?

Tom: So, I mean, the problem is, is that we’ve got a very tabloid influenced media in the UK, sex, the sex angle has dominated the majority of the reporting. Certainly, I think a lot of editors, when presented with new information about this case, go, we covered that sex story 10 years ago. I think there’s, there’s a willful ignoring of the democratic angle, the suppression of dissent in general. It seems human interest. I mean, that’s not to downplay the human interest element at all. The lives were destroyed, personal relationships were damaged beyond repair. You know, I mean, like, I’m somebody whose personal life was completely destroyed by this. Like, I don’t, I don’t downplay any of that at all. There’s a much bigger story about what I said the beginning. It affects all of us. It’s not just about those of us who, like, were directly impacted. And that’s the story that doesn’t really get told very much. If it does get mentioned in passing, it’s certainly something which campaigners forefront brought that element to it, as well as the institutional sexism. Yeah, the coverage is very limited, frustratingly so, given that, like, police corruption is such a popular topic in Britain today for like, fiction and stuff. So, you know, we were sat in court all day talking about real police corruption, and in the evenings, everybody was on about this fictional police corruption, and they weren’t interested in the real stuff, which was kind of weird, you know.

Tom’s interview brought up lots of additional questions for me, not least about the government’s independent adviser on political violence and disruption. John Woodcock, or Lord Walney as he is now called, Keir Starmer when he was Director of Public Prosecutions, and his now-right hand woman, Sue Gray a senior civil servant up until recently.

The (un)civil service in action

In 2021 she led the inquiry into Party Gate and gave a rare interview, indeed her first ever one, to an Irish outlet. According to our transcription service, the interview:

featured an interview of Sue Grey, who held a significant role in the propriety and ethics team at the cabinet. Speaker 2 clarifies that the titles “Deputy God” and “most powerful woman in Britain” were given by journalists, not a self-proclaimed title. Speaker 2 also discusses their experience running a pub in Newry and their unsuccessful bid for the head of the civil service position, speculating that their reputation as a disruptor may have hindered their chances. The interview touches on the perception of Speaker 2 as a potential spy, which they dismiss. Speaker 3 then introduces themselves, mentioning an assault incident at Nando’s and expressing gratitude for the support received

Here’s an abridged version edited for clarity:

Interviewer: You’re bit of a mystery. I mean, I’m just going to read out some of the titles that I’ve heard applied to you, “Deputy God”, that’s a good one, the most powerful civil servant you’ve never heard of, or the most powerful woman in Britain. Do you recognise those titles?

Gray: They obviously relate to my former job. The Deputy God title was that I worked for Gus O’Donnell, and his initials are God, and so I was his deputy. And therefore I was Deputy God. I, you know, most powerful person you’ve never heard of. I actually was just doing my job. And I think that was some of your journalist colleagues probably actually devised that.

Interviewer: But I suppose the mystery around you, this is the first interview you’ve ever done. You were the director general of the propriety and ethics team at the cabinet, and it said you did have the power to make or break political careers, and that is exactly what you did.

Gray: So I would always have just given my advice to the prime minister, and it was obviously then was the prime minister’s decision, but the job I was doing then was very different to the job I do now. And I don’t necessarily recognise all that you’re saying about me. I’m not actually sure many permanent secretaries in Whitehall have run a pub in Newry…

Interviewer: And you were with your husband and that venture, of course…

Gray: And he’s not very good at it. So, he hated the pub, and actually most of the customers didn’t like him either, because he was quite miserable in it. So he after six to eight weeks, it was making him a bit fed up, so I sent him back to London, and I carried on running the bar on my own. Whenever he was back, when he would come back for a short time, I would make sure that I booked him to sing and play music in the bar on a Thursday and Saturday night, and that went down quite well. But as for his bar skills, they’re not the best. I think I felt I was being a bit pigeon holed in Whitehall in a particular role. So I thought, do something very, very different, and that’s what I did. I did go for the head of the civil service job, and I really wanted that job. So I’m going to be completely honest, I was disappointed not to get the job. I really wanted the job, but had to get over it. And you know, why didn’t I get the job? I’m not sure I’ll ever quite know, but I suspect people may have thought that I perhaps too much of a challenger or a disruptor. I am both, and perhaps I would bring about, you know, perhaps I was there to be too much change. And yes, I wanted to have change.

Interviewer: Did you think you obviously thought the civil service needed change… I’ve even had someone put it to me that you are a spy.

Gray: I know you’ve had that put to you. And I think if I was a spy, I’d be a pretty poor spy. If people are talking about me being a spy… 

On 2 June this year the Guardian published an article authored by three journalists , Jessica Elgot, Pippa Crerar, and Rowena Mason, titled Why Labour staffers and MPs don’t say no to ‘power behind the throne’ Sue Gray. It was a mythmaking article added to her legend in all sense. They said:

Gray is not only interested in the mechanics of government, but in policy. “She has been painted as this very Whitehall figure, but she’s very political,” one colleague said. “She’s not the voice of caution. If anything, she has been telling shadow ministers: ‘You own this issue, you can legislate, make your mark, don’t be too timid.’”

Those policy interests were first revealed in Starmer’s biography, written by Tom Baldwin, for which Gray agreed to be interviewed. Her proposal for the party to look at the wider use of citizens’ assemblies was picked up by the national press and quickly disavowed by the party, though it gave an illuminating insight into Gray’s character.

Far from being a Whitehall creature, she is invested in active citizenship and inspired by how consensus was built in Ireland by citizens’ juries on equal marriage and abortion. But among Labour staffers, there has been little discussion of the substance and more on whether it was appropriate for the interview to take place.

The first some aides heard about it was from Baldwin himself. “It’s a book about Keir,” said one. “It feels a bit odd for her to have done it.”

In the interview, Gray said:

she was working on the creation of a unit at the centre of government that would be “focused purely on mission delivery and transparency of performance”.

Sue’s time in Northern Ireland has come in to sharp focus in the face of the recent and ongoing pogroms by the far right and paramilitary groups who we discussed in the fourth article/podcast of this series. 

Hacking, betrayal – yet no atonement

On the 13th August I interviewed Dr Adam Elliot-Cooper for my book Between a Rock, a Hard Place and a Dystopia. I told him something that I had only told in full to a couple of people before: Biz Pears from the Financial Times, the comedian Ava Vidal, and Ayaz Rafik a former columnist at Media Diversified. I told him exactly what happened in the months leading to closing Media Diversified in 2019.

The AI transcription summary said:

The conversation covers various personal and professional topics. Speaker 1 discusses personal challenges, including being hacked and dealing with betrayal in a professional context. They mention the importance of documenting historical activism and the impact of not doing so. Speaker 1 also talks about a book project covering East Africa and London activism from 2007 to 2018. They express frustration over being betrayed by colleagues at Media Diversified, detailing financial mismanagement and deception.

Here’s the conversation edited for clarity:

Sam: You gotta try and do something When you’ve retreated into the heteronormative nuclear family.

Adam: Oh my God. How many syllables was that? But, yeah. But, you know, a lot of people don’t practice what they preach. Do they like? What do they call the word um, Praxis in there? Okay, yeah. Like, you get a lot of revolutionary men who don’t, don’t actually help out at home and stuff.

Sam: It’s nice to hear your voice. It’s been a while. I’ve spoken to Simeon quite a bit recently because of the work. Well, I don’t know if you know, I know you’re not online much, but because of this investigative work I’ve been doing, I’ve had somebody hack all my Twitter accounts, all three, hack my laptop. Just, just really make life difficult, difficult, in the sense that I get very paranoid and worried about it, you know. And then there was air tags on my phone, and so, um, so, yeah, I spoke to Simeon about, could the Black Writers Union put earlier statement out or something, just so? So it looks like I’m not just by myself. I’ve got some institutional support, basically.

Adam: That’s horrible, things happen. Yeah? I remember when, yeah, at the monitoring group, they the fascists hacked our work computers and deleted all of our files.

Sam: What the fuck I didn’t know that. I remember you telling me that lots of stuff happened at the monitoring group, but I never quite found out what. What actually happened?

Adam: Yeah. Lots of, yeah. Lots of, what’s been around little bail on pumps been around since the 70s. So, yeah, lots of thing going down over the years,

Sam: Okay, that’s cool. That’s cool. Yes. So thank you very much for agreeing to speak to me. Of course, that’s not necessarily, of course, I don’t think, but no, I appreciate it. So so a little bit about the book, so you know where I’m situated. And, yeah, so it isn’t a memoir, but it’s also a kind of history of East Africa in the late 2000 you know, the late noughties, I should say so, 2007 to 2010 and then it’s a short kind of history of London more than anything. And then a history of London anti-imperialist scene, plus the white left scene, kind of an activism in the in sort of 2011 up until 2018-ish, including Media Diversified. For media diversified only me and Yasmin know everything. And well, Yasmin doesn’t even know everything, so, so she knows a big part of Media Diversified ‘me’. And Manveer knows a different part me, and Marcus knows a different part. If I don’t write it down, it’s just lost. And so, and I think that early 2000 and 10s period, the anti imperialist stuff that didn’t go very far is quite important as well, because at that time, I was like, I knew Pablo Navarette, and he made me an associate or producer on this film with Lowkey. So I knew Lowkey a little bit, all of those people, and then I knew you. I do not know how I met you, or whatever it might have been through Black students, through Malia. I’ve no idea, but I’d remember, maybe, yeah, because I forgot about Malia for a little while, and finally I thought, oh my god, Malia. She was really important person, uh, figure, in my life and a lot of people’s lives in the early 2000 and 10s, until they monstered her. So I’ve asked her for an interview, but she’s quite I mean, she’s been quiet for years. They literally got rid of that woman from the public space. I know she’s an editor at Red Pepper, but it’s terrible. And I know Sarah, my friend, was really close to her, so she told me, you know, she was affected by it. Of course you would be. I mean, some people have got tougher skins, but even me, I was affected by shit. And even though mine’s a mental health thing, it did affect me, some of the crap that I got daily from white people and black and brown people. You know, I don’t think you know what happened to Media Diversified in 2019?  Why? Why we? Why I took over again from Henna and Maurice, because I thought Henna was going to take over permanently, but they really, they really fucked me over. Well, yeah, because, basically I went on a sabbatical, and I told her, and I made Henna a director as well, just so that she had an investment into the to the organisation, and that she would, you know, hopefully do stuff. I before I left, I got all this funding so she could pay herself. She could pay Morris and and Samira, you know, I didn’t take any of that money. I pursued that money for two years. I didn’t take a thing. I just left it to them. And I thought, yeah. And then, you know, I came back, and I was like, I still didn’t want to be involved. But I then I I was helping out, because people saw me, because Media Diversified had gone really quiet. They were publishing stuff, but they weren’t too social. So every time things came up, people would come to me and asked me, could do, what about this? Sam What about this? Can I publish this? And I’m like, I’m not the editor, man, what’s going on? And so I got involved on that basis. And then, yeah, I’d had meetings, a couple of meetings, with them over five months. Yes, I was back for five months, and we’d meet together. I see, is there anything you need to tell me, or anything these people lied to my face for five months? Henna, in the meantime, had made Maurice and Samira directors as well, meaning that if we had some sort of vote, I would be voted out. I see they did not tell me. I found out by accident. Henna sent me some papers to sign, and I actually read them… and I was like what are these directors? How many directors? What’s going on? And so I emailed her. She didn’t reply. And so I emailed a couple  of questions to Yasmin: did Henna make some more directors, or what’s happened? And she said, I have no idea. We’ve hardly met since you went, Sam. I was like, what? And then so I spoke to Samira, what is going on – Henna made you a director? And she said, Yeah, me and Morris, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I actually, I don’t even think. She said, sorry the stupid cow. And I said, five months I’ve been with you guys, and I asked you to, you know, to tell me if there’s anything you need, to tell me they lied to my face for five months..

Adam: that’s bad. That’s really bad, really bad.

Sam: And what happened is, in the end, I did, and in the meantime, they’ve been doing consulting work for various people, saying it’s Media Diversified and just taking all the money and not putting it in media diversified bank account… So we got this funding, and they were splitting it in three parts, so they pay everyone, and we got a payment, and it was in the bank account. They hadn’t taken it yet. And so I start emailing Henna, what is going on? I’ve got my friend who’s a company secretary, so she’s looking through things and seeing what is this. And so she puts a list of questions to Henna. Henna’s gone quiet. She’s not saying a fucking thing yet. And then what she does is she goes into the bank account and takes all the money out and she was leaving and they should invoice and so people started emailing me, asking me to be paid their invoices. She’d taken the fucking money I just paid people out of my own money. Absolutely, absolutely mad. And I didn’t put it out publicly because I didn’t want to smear Media Diversified and people, you know, all the chat that would have happened, all the crap, of course, I just, I just hated them for that. What she did over months, and I didn’t know she was trying to take my life, be me in some way, but me as a real fucking capitalist who fucking takes money off other people. I just, it’s just horrendous, what she did.  So then I’m finding all this stuff, like, right? I’m taking this back. I am not having them in it. So she’s trying to, like, secure the website. But what she doesn’t know I’ve got the like, the website, Media Diversified, is linked to my email or something like that. So what I could do is change the password, and change all the passwords for the for the website. I didn’t know until I saw Usayd last month, he said, “you know, Henna emailed me around that time, saying, Could I help her with the website? And I said no”, because he doesn’t know her, and all he knows of her is she likes money, and so he didn’t do anything. I didn’t even know this part of the story. She’s trying to get the website back from me. And you know what? The chapter in my book, it’s called DJ Takeover, because I went through everything, I changed the passwords of everything. I locked them out of everything. I went to the bank and said, cut it off. Do not let them take any more money out. Jesus the drama. The drama was so deep, I think I told Biz Pears about it all, and Maurice was involved with all of it. And it’s not surprising now you see that he’s Fraser Nelson’s best friend. These people I trusted, trusted to my soul because I’d worked with him for years. Can you imagine somebody lying to your face for five months. I wouldn’t have said anything if she wanted to make them directors. She could have told she could have asked me. I would have said yes. That’s the thing. I thought they were invested. So I would have said yes. But instead, they did it in a sneaky, nasty fucking way, and it made me paranoid. It made me not trust people. It still makes me not trust people.

Adam: That’s really horrible, yeah, and you put so much work into that project as well.

Sam: We built it over years, but you know, with my mental health and all of that. It was just too much for me. In the end, I couldn’t take it. It was still hurtful. Sorry. I haven’t talked about it for a long time, and now I’m supposed to be interviewing you, were you able to listen to any of the counseling

Adam: I haven’t listened to a podcast in ages, unfortunately, sorry, yeah. 

Sam: So the reason I asked it Sukant is I just did like a two hour interview with him, and what I wanted to talk about is the early days, like when I vividly remember this meeting I went to. I can’t remember where he held it, but it was him and Carlos were the top people, sort of, who convened this meeting. It’s a room full of people, and the people I met there. I don’t think you were there actually, but I did meet some British Iranian people… You know the people I met, Shafi and so on…

Lurking in the shadows

On 10 August I posted the following on Instagram. 

Went to Kew Gardens last week and interviewed Sukant Chandan, who was born into a family of leading anti-colonial resistors in Kenya and India. I’ve known Sukant since 2011. I was interviewing him for my book, Between a Rock, a Hard Place and a Dystopia, but it was such a great chat I turned it into a podcast: The Activist – Forged in the Fires of Junglism

Sukant has been committed to the anti-colonial grassroots since 1994, when at the age of 16 he organised an anti-racist police patrol watch at Eid celebrations on Southall Broadway. He is also a committed Junglist, on Pirates and inna dance, and been a MC since 1996 as MC RebelBase.

I hope Lowkey, Hicham Yezza, Pablo and Akala will listen to this 🙏🏿 I think it will show you a side of Sukant you’ve never seen before. It delves in to history, his activism, fallouts, Grime, Libya and there’s some fucking great Jungle in there

Sukant told me his origin story/legend and had been successful in convincing me of his bona fides, which I hoped to convince others of. Because I felt sorry that he was not in contact with other people who had been in the anti-imperialist movement he had founded alongside Carlos Martinez. And his mental health struggles he told me about back in 2012 had stayed with me. His frequent emails and WhatsApp messages checking in on me had always touched me too:

On 15 August someone who calls themselves William Crow contacted me on Twitter. He replied to a song I had posted of David Bowie and linked me to a Jungle tube he said it reminded me of. I replied to him saying “Are you a Junglist?👀”. He identified himself as a Junglist:

I sent him the podcast I had recorded with Sukant Chandan a few days before, The Activist – Forged in the Fires of Junglism, In which Sukant had created a big legend and I had allowed him to myth make. 

He quoted the podcast back to me and we proceed to chat back and forth first publicly, then in DM and then on Signal. An Ai transcription summary of our discussion on Sukant says the following:

The conversation revolves around a series of interactions on Twitter and Signal between Speaker 1 and William Crow, who bonded over their shared love for jungle music. They discuss various personal and political topics, including William’s involvement with Palestine Action and his struggles with mental health and ADHD. Speaker 1 expresses concerns about potential undercover agents due to past experiences with infiltrations. William shares his family photos to alleviate these concerns and discusses his dissertation and activism work. They also plan to attend a jungle event in Manchester and discuss potential collaborations and investigations

  • William offers to help Speaker 1 (Sam) with investigations in Manchester, sharing his own experiences with the police and ambulance services.
  • Speaker 1 (Sam) mentions planning to visit Manchester and suggests meeting William and another mutual friend, Harry Stokes, to listen to jungle music.
  • William transition to a more secure communication platform, Signal, to discuss their work further.

Building Trust and Sharing Personal Stories

  • Speaker 1 (Sam) and William continue to share personal stories, including their experiences with mental health and medication.
  • They talk about their love for Manchester and their experiences with the city’s culture and people.
  • Speaker 1 and William discuss their political views and social issues, including their thoughts on Palestine Action and their work.
  • They talk about their experiences with mental health and the challenges they face in their daily lives.
  • William shares his thoughts on the effectiveness of medication and the broader issues of poverty and economic inequality.
  • They discuss their experiences with tattoos and the role they play in their lives, including the pain and symbolism behind them.

He ended our conversation by saying please tell people on Twitter to email their support for Palestine Action detainees. Was that another attempt to identify subversives, whether that be anti-imperialists or trans people, who they think inherently subservient and who the permanent state, with the help of people such as Claire Fox, try to legislate against?

Unwarranted scrutiny – just for being a Black woman in journalism

On Friday 24 August Women Press Freedom also known as the Coalition for Women Journalists published an article. It followed a long conversation with myself and the author, her investigating, and reading. She said the following:

The situation mirrors an incident two years prior when Asumadu suspected her laptop had been compromised. At the time, Asumadu was trying to distance herself from activism by focusing on her book. Her writing process was interrupted when her Chromebook asked for an unfamiliar login—an email address that closely resembled hers but wasn’t hers. Despite taking it to IT experts, they couldn’t resolve the issue or explain who was behind the attempt. This led to a year of leaving the laptop unused, fueling paranoia about surveillance and hacking.

In another unsettling episode, she recounted how photos taken with a contact she suspected could have been surveilling her, mysteriously disappeared from her phone when she had not deleted them. The photos remained in her cloud storage.

Asumadu has not ruled out the possibility that British security services may be involved, given her investigative work, including her interview with Tom Fowler, a man with deep insights into state infiltration of activist networks, and her inquiries sent to prominent figures and outlets investigating the recent riots in the UK. Asumadu also thinks that her past activism against the Nationality and Borders Act, which she believes disproportionately targets marginalized groups, has also made her a target for surveillance and far-right agitators.

“Whilst I don’t always know where a threat is. I know there is a threat,” says Asumadu. “Security services/special branches etc. follow both activists and journalists. Activists are hyper-vigilant in different ways. They are used to their groups being infiltrated. The thing with me is. I am an activist and a journalist. So, I am hyper-vigilant in both ways. It’s served me quite well so far.”

In the meantime publishing the same day, my editor at the Canary said this:

Samantha Asumadu is a highly experienced journalist, broadcaster, and editor. She has been a working journalist since 2010 when she lived in East Africa. Asumadu has done breaking news reporting for CNN and France 24. She created news pieces for AFP, filmed in the DRC for DW Global, and also directed a documentary for Al Jazeera English.

Now, Asumadu has opened herself up to further scrutiny. She said:

“Recently I embarked on a five-part investigative series about state surveillance and government authoritarianism for the Canary. Three parts have been published and there are two to go.”

Her work for us covered the notorious Forde Report into racism within the Labour Party. It also looked at how the state is silencing and imprisoning peaceful activists. Asumadu most recently delved into the links between the recent far-right race riots and the ‘acceptable’ faces of this kind of ideology like Douglas Murray.

People who have read my work for years were incensed, one even saying, 

independent media professional and @thecanaryuk writer Samantha Asumadu has been subject to attempted hacking.

I am relentless – and rightly so

There was even some new information in the Canary editorial that I wasn’t aware of. I haven’t had any mail for over two weeks. Usually I would have reminders about not paying my rent. I have had none. Speaking to the former editor in chief of an Independent publication, he told me:

I’m convinced there’s a different unit or team that works out of/ adjacent to Whitehall and outside the ‘normal’ security services structures that does basically low intensity digital attack.

I seek patterns, that’s how I do investigative journalism plus asking questions, often seemingly obtuse questions, but lots of them. Relentlessly. And at the same time I try to keep myself from falling over the edge into psychosis.

It’s possible I have apophenia. I try my best not to self diagnose though. I noticed that many people in my circle and in my periphery had taken the Civil Service Test in the early 2000s but then had only briefly or had not gone on to work for the civil service:

For example Anthony Anaxagorou’s partner and mother of his child had taken the test. She told the Observer in 2019 that:

I wanted to be a spy – or anything that was exciting and took me to different places.

Helping to build her legend the Observer’s theatre columnist, Arifa Akbar, wrote in an article entitled, Sabrina Mahfouz: ‘People used to say they expected me to be a lot more foreign’  about her adaptation of noughts and crosses set to tour the UK and her anthology of Muslim writing picked for Emma Watson’s book club. The article noted that:

Her parents never tried to direct her passions, so she was able to dabble and experiment as she wished. She began a classical archaeology degree at King’s College London, but changed to English literature and classics because the original course was too scientific for her liking. By her 20s, she had changed direction and signed up to the civil service’s fast-stream programme with the Ministry of Defence… That career was stymied by her not receiving top secret security clearance, for reasons she sees as being linked to class and ethnicity.

Then there’s Andrew Neilson the director of campaigns for the Howard League for Penal Reform for the last seventeen years, who was previously a Ministry of Justice press officer and chair of the Poetry Society, who both I and Anthony Anaxagorou have had unfortunate unsolicited runnings into on X:

We asked questions of both Sabrina Mahfouz and Andrew Neilson, At the time of publication we have had no reply

Pushing through, regardless

Last weekend I asked the writer of the Women Press Freedom article whether these people wanted to kill me. She didn’t directly answer but did say:

ADVICE I WAS GIVEN BY AN EXPERT: I think it’s good idea, to take note of your exact location coordinates, the time and any other details about the tag, I’m not sure how they work exactly. But document what you can, so you can send to access now, and they can advise you properly. Stay with people you trust ❤️

I really think you should stay with friends until you feel safe. I know they were useless before but if you are feeling this unsafe you should go to the police. Report feeling unsafe and feeling you are being followed. I understand you feeling so stressed, and I want you to be safe above anything else. Please report to the police if you feel it can escalate. From my experience, working with journalists this is generally a tactic to intimidate and doesn’t escalate physically, and speaking publicly as you have normally helps too but you need to do the best for you right now. Secure your digital security with the help of the experts and go to police, maybe you know a friendly officer?  And document everything.

Whilst I don’t know and friendly police officers, I have documented everything. It is a habit I have. 

Subsequent to that I purposefully reached out to people I know who were either rich, powerful, editors in chiefs or lawyers. I told them the situation. I sent them the two articles and told them I may need their help. I know that asking people for help or advice makes them more beholden to you than giving your help. It’s an ego thing, human nature. I posted photos of my self at journalism awards events in order that the permanent state knew I was not just a line freelancer. I had powerful connections, if not money and state power myself.

I managed to push through and work despite the most challenging of circumstances and for that I am proud.

Black and brown people who work as spies for the state must be psychopaths no?

They’re literally working against their own interests if they are doing spy shit for Mi5 on behalf of the Home Office, right? Isn’t that the definition of a psychopath, they think they are special? Adding to my theory here.

On the flip side, foreign correspondents are mostly ADHD and subsequently all get PTSD. The best foreign correspondents – that is, the survivors – are psychopaths. I am however getting good at spotting the difference between your garden variety narcissist and a spy. With Black and brown narcissists as Professor Yasmin Gunaratnam pointed out to me last week:

identity can become a commodity, something that is an extension of the ego, rather than the site for politics. You can then end up flogging it on different markets. Like selling off the family silver.

I believe the same goes for white working class narcissists.

White, middle-class narcissists and spies are a whole other kettle of fish. Who knows why they do what they do.

In my interview with Matt Potter in 2018 he told me that:

the rise of Trump and Brexit and so on, is the creation of whether you want to call them useful fools, or whether you want to call them kind of, you know, there’s this word floating around, so and so is an asset. So and so it’s a Russian asset. And actually, that’s I’ve always found that to be a very frustrating word. It covers a multitude of sins. So it could that could mean, and in intelligence circles, it can mean somebody who is an informant, paid or or lent on or otherwise, who just isn’t a member of the intelligence service, but he’s effectively a spy, or it could mean somebody who is just bumbling along and doing things that the accuser claims is useful to the opposition, in which case it’s just about everybody on Earth.

In 2018, myself and Ava interviewed investigative journalist Mark Watts for our NDA (No Dickheads Allowed) podcast. Watts pointedly reminded me that Tony Blair thought the Freedom of Information Act was his “biggest mistake”.

Being yourself is a hell of a responsibility; one that some people do not take on

When I set out to write this article, I intended to focus on Keir Starmer. It was going to be the revealing of him as a spook. I teased it in the third article by ending on calling him the man, the legend. A play on the fact that spies create what’s called a ‘legend’, which Tom Fowler explained to me, how much work goes into it.

But Keir has always been public. He literally had a title called the Director of Public Prosecutions. However, when asking about him I came across a wall of silence. Nobody would talk to me. It was as unsettling as the silence around the Forde Report. which I wrote about in the first article in this series. I contacted barristers who he had worked with before he was DPP at Doughty Street Chambers, I contacted other barristers he would have interacted with during the London Riots, investigative journalists who have taken a critical stance on the permanent state, and authors who had written about the British state, cyber warfare, and and even a former colleague who had worked at Brunswick financial PR company (on a punt).

Nobody replied. Not one single person.

According to the Times, in a keynote speech on 26 August the prime minister will prepare the public for potentially unpopular decisions, such as tax rises, by blaming the ‘rubble and ruin’ left by the Conservatives:

Sir Keir Starmer will compare the government’s job to the efforts of communities, such as in Middlesbrough, to clean up after the recent riots. Keir Starmer will say that he needs 10 years as prime minister to rebuild the country following the ‘rubble and ruin’ left by the Tories. He will also compare the ‘hard work’ of the British people cleaning up the streets after the riots to his job of cleaning up the country after Tory rule. 

The Independent’s headline for the same press briefing was Keir Starmer issues stark warning: ‘Things will get worse before they get better’

It is a speech to pave way for unpopular decisions.

Author and poet Sylvia Plath once said:

It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.

I believe I have been a useful fool, an asset and an agent of change.

The latter us why I was targeted by the permanent state.

The former was because I was more useful than a their informants and agents put together. That’s because I have love for people whether they be Black, white, Muslim, Jew, or brown. These narcissists and psychopaths also known as informants and spies can feel no love. Nonetheless I feel sorry for them.

As Albert Camus said:

Some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

Imagine having to do that.

Featured image via the Canary and additional images via Samantha Asumadu





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