The massive Spycops scandal reveals the extent of political policing in Britain. And there’s a must-watch documentary on the issue that’s available to watch for free. To find out more, the Canary spoke to the film-makers behind it.
For decades, secretive police units used undercover officers to infiltrate activist organisations. As the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance reported in 2023, police targeted “around 1,000 campaigning and left wing groups”, only 3 of which the Inquiry Chair found to have been “‘a legitimate target’ for undercover policing of any kind”.
In the run-up to the next part of the Spycops Undercover Policing Inquiry, due to begin on 30 September, the Canary has already spoken to Tom Fowler, who goes to every hearing of the inquiry, and Jessica, who is involved in ongoing civil claims. But the Canary also talked to independent film-makers Madoc Roberts and Justyn Jones from The Spies Who Ruined Our Lives, a new documentary on the Spycops scandal which takes a comprehensive look at the whole affair. You can read our full interview with Justyn and Madoc below, and check out the trailer of their vital documentary here.
‘Mainstream outlets weren’t telling the whole Spycops story’
THE CANARY: Madoc and Justyn, how did you start working on this film?
JUSTYN: We inherited the film. My production company Small World Productions, very much was linked with Undercurrents. Undercurrents was part of the activist movement, at the start of this century and in the late 90s. It did the first sort of video activism and published it on VHS, I think, in those days. And I was very much linked to that small world that created Undercurrents.
So we were very close to the activist movement. I’ve been a documentary maker for many years. And when it came out that there were spies, there was a load of interest in getting that story out. Soon after Kennedy came out, we started trying to get the the activist side of it. But a lot of the women involved were not willing to talk. They were in shock and were very traumatised. Then I met Jason Kirkpatrick, who was one of those affected, and he wanted to make a film and was getting some interviews together. And he was in touch over the years and trying to get the documentary together until, I guess, 2018/2019, and he approached me and said ‘was I still interested?’.
So Madoc and I decided to take it on for several reasons. Firstly, it was being told, but it was being told as case-study segments. It was being told by people like Newsnight, Dispatches, on ‘one woman: I’ve been betrayed’, and it was a bit sensationalist, and it was being done in slices. What was not being told was the whole story – the 360 story. And we felt it needed to be the whole story that we told. It needed historical perspective. It also needed to address really key questions which affected everyone, which were ‘your right to protest’, ‘your right to association’, ‘your right to think freely’, and also the injustice of infiltrating legitimate, progressive protest groups. All that was not being told in these reports.
‘No outlet would commission the documentary’
JUSTYN: So Jason and I and Madoc, we decided to take on Jason’s archive. He’d done some really good interviews with the whistleblower, Peter Francis. He’d done interviews with Jackie. And also Sarah. So he had 3 or 4 key interviews from the time. So with the inquiry coming up, we thought it would be very good to make something with new perspectives, particularly from people who were appearing in the inquiry. Because firstly, it’s in the public domain, and therefore it’s not something that we’re hunting down. Secondly, it’s fresh in their minds, and therefore we could talk to people like Tariq Ali, Peter Hain, Diane Langford, Madeleine, who was the first one who had a relationship to appear. They were prepared to talk and they could also talk about their experience in the inquiry itself. So that’s what they went about doing.
MADOC: So that’s how it came about. And we did try and get it commissioned. I think I’ve been round the houses three times.
JUSTYN: I must have been to all the broadcasters and international channels three times and you either get ‘oh, we are looking into it, but this isn’t quite the angle we’re interested in’ or ‘the story’s been done’. Although you do sometimes get more ‘I’d never get it commissioned’, which I did get from one broadcaster. As the years went on, nothing came out of the pipeline, did it, Madoc?
MADOC: No. I mean, we were told there were other documentaries being made, but none of those have emerged. But I think one of the important things as well, as Justyn says, is it was being dealt with piecemeal and almost salaciously. You know, the stuff about Stephen Lawrence is some of the first stuff to come out, the stuff about dead children came out, and it was all treated in an almost salacious sort of way, as a little news story. And as Justyn said, we could give it that sort of historical aspect.
‘Professional groomers with huge resources’ – political policing of the left
MADOC: But the important thing as well was what you miss when you don’t have the historical aspect is the aspect of political policing. Political policing is something that happened in East Germany, isn’t it? You know, political policing is something that happened behind the Iron Curtain. We don’t do that, do we? And then all of a sudden, all this stuff was coming out bit by bit. But unless you joined all the dots together, you wouldn’t have known that this was political policing, until you discover that it’s 1,000 groups and that all the groups just happened to be left-wing.
They would give you the excuses, ‘oh, it’s a bad apple – he’s a rogue cop’, all this sort of stuff. And what in fact was happening is, these people were professional groomers in a way. They had huge resources behind them that were supplying people’s names there, you’d get their medical records. These people had everything. Tom says it in the film, ‘these men could be the perfect boyfriend – they knew everything about these women before they went in’. So I think that political aspect was important.
But also, the fact that it started in 1968. I mean, what was happening in France and that was in the May. The riot in Grosvenor Square, which was when the SDS [Special Demonstration Squad] started, was a few months later in October. So obviously the British saw what was happening in France, saw that there potentially was gonna be a revolution and panicked and thought, ‘OK, we’ve got to do something about this’.
All of these files that we’re seeing are MI5 files, not police files. The police files were destroyed. These are MI5 copies of the files that were kept. As we know now thanks to these, MI5 didn’t use the police prior to 68. The way the MI5 works is that you have officers and you have agents, and the officers find agents who are willing to do things for them. They’re often criminals or people who are willing to break the law, people who are willing to do things that are outside the law, people who are willing to take risks, and also people who are vulnerable, people who are looking to clear their criminal record and have a fresh start in life.
This, for the first time, was MI5 saying ‘ok, we’re not gonna use criminals anymore – we’re gonna use the police’. And that’s when it really becomes political policing.
The state tries to make excuses and “kick it into the long grass”
MADOC: It’d always been political before that. One of the main organisations that MI5 infiltrated was the Communist Party of Great Britain. But this was an opportunity now to use the massive resources of the Met, the thousands of police officers – obviously, only a certain number are gonna come forward to be undercovers, to actually do active political policing in Britain. And then, when it was discovered, you get this pattern that develops where first of all they just deny it. Then they say, ‘oh, he’s a rogue. He’s gone rogue. He’s a bad apple.’ Then, once they’ve discovered that there’s a huge unit that’s existed of 140, or whatever, cops infiltrating, they then say, ‘ok, we need an inquiry to kick it into the long grass’. And that pattern repeats time and time and time again.
We see it at the Ratcliffe Power Station. Keir Starmer was actually there on the day that the Ratcliffe Power Station trial collapsed. He was in Nottingham. And as a result of that inquiry of that case failing, he launched an internal inquiry to find out what had gone wrong. And he limited that inquiry to just look at the case of the Ratcliffe Power Station. But at that time, he knew that there were people in jail who had potentially been spied on by spycops. Yet he followed the police line of ‘it’s just one bad apple, one rogue cop’, by making sure that inquiry had such a narrow remit, that it would only ever be able comment on the Kennedy case. I know that Police Spies Out of Lives have called for Starmer to be questioned in front of the inquiry. Nothing’s happened yet. We’ll see what happens.
For me, that was one of the main things – that it’s political policing in the UK. We never thought it would happen. We probably thought that it might happen a bit. But we never thought it would happen to this extent.
THE CANARY: Is there any indication that Starmer’s actions were intentionally favouring the establishment?
MADOC: There is actually. A QC then did a report later on and said that the CPS had not looked into it properly. You’d have to look up the actual case. But you know, he’s just one of them. He’s just one person. It was just, in this case, he happened to be the DPP at the CPS and it fell on his table and those were his actions. So judge him by his actions.
“We’ll probably never know is how high up this went”
THE CANARY: What are some of the key issues that need highlighting more?
MADOC: Watching the evidence on the last days of the inquiry recently, with Trevor Morris, one of the most dramatic moments was when the camera was turned off. When he was asked ‘did you smear the Stephen Lawrence campaign?’ and he said ‘no, that’s MI5’s job’, at which point the camera got turned off. It’s like a bit of theatre, isn’t it? You know, someone’s gone off script. So ‘cut!’. The question to ask is ‘who’s controlling that, who’s turning the camera off, who’s got the powers? Is it the TV technician? Is it a technician or is it somebody else? And I think the thing that we’ll probably never know is how high up this went. Who knew? Who was calling the shots? That, we’ll probably never know. All we know is that it happened, and that it obviously had a political aspect to it.
What’s gonna be the outcome of the inquiry? The important thing is not just the outcome of the inquiry, which is probably going to be an attempt to say a few platitudes saying this is terrible and probably the line ‘we’ve changed now’ will be heard at some point. But the work that people like Tom is doing and Police Spies Out of Lives – the research group – they are making historical documents. Without them, the inquiry would happen in a little dark room somewhere, with no real names being mentioned, nobody looking into the background. Nobody fact checking. It would just go through. You’d get to the end of the inquiry. There’d be a report. And that’s it. They’ve done it then, and they’ve dealt with it.
So what this film does is add another layer to that. It records the voices for posterity, for people to look at in the future. And that’s what documentaries should be doing. That’s what television and films should be doing, giving those people – who’ve got an important bit of history to tell – a voice when they are potentially being denied it elsewhere.
The documentary helps to “get it out of the long grass, and we put it in the front of the lawn, right outside the patio door”
JUSTYN: One of the motivations to make the film is precisely because they’re trying to kick it into the long grass. Everybody’s saying ‘we’ll wait until the inquiry’s over until we get to tell the story’. But then, that’s exactly what they want people to make the decisions on, because then they’ll either be dead or they’ll be beyond caring. So we felt if we made a film, we’d actually take advantage of the inquiry being in the public domain. We don’t have to wait for it to end. Why do we have to wait for it to end? We can make a film that actually shows what has happened so far.
And we would like it, if we can find the time and the energy and resources, we might try and make it an evolving film. So we might have a version two by this time next year. If we update the film so it becomes something like a running information base that compiles things that are happening so it’s not in the long grass. We get it out of the long grass, and we put it in the front of the lawn, right outside the patio door.
One of the reasons of the film is to be counteracting the long grass.
The story “needs to be told in the whole and it needs to be told now”. Giving a broad perspective and showing “why this matters to everybody”.
THE CANARY: Would you say that the main message is ‘this needs to be about the whole story, about the whole context of political policing, it’s not a one off’?
JUSTYN: We’re just facilitators. That’s all we’re doing, because we feel the story needs to be told and needs to be told in the whole and it needs to be told now.
We want to make sure it’s a platform for Tom, for Jessica, to show people. It’s such a monster issue. It’s so complicated. We’ve got enough material for a series. The 90 minutes is a real cut down. There are loads of things we haven’t touched on, in terms of the trade union side of things, in terms of the personal impact on the groups that were destroyed. So there’s loads of it that is not in there. We could make a series, but we don’t have the resources. This is what we could get out, just us. And we don’t have the resources to go further, so we’re just handing it over to the movement, as a way of giving a 90-minute awareness-raising, in a nutshell, ‘this is what it’s about’. And it gives perspective, it talks about everybody involved, and why this matters to everybody.
MADOC: One of the things that we’re doing to get around the fact that we failed to get it broadcast is making the film available for free. It’s nonprofit. We did it off our own backs. It’s never going to be a blockbuster in a cinema or anything like that. But what we do want to do is make it available to people. So if you’ve got a group who are concerned about this issue or you feel that it could have an educational function for people, we’re making it available. On our website, we have got a link where you can contact us and we’ll send you a copy of the film for you to show to your own group. So that’s one way of hopefully spreading the story.
JUSTYN: We had a viewing in a cinema in Cardiff. What came out of that was that a lot of the younger activists felt it was very useful. Suddenly, they were getting a perspective on the activist movement, what people had done before, when they had done it, what had worked, what had not worked, how the effect of the spycops had totally ruined their organisations. So then they’re more prepared for the activism they want to do today. And therefore, they’re more informed and they were maybe less likely to make the same mistakes, be more suspicious of the ‘perfect recruit’. So they’re far more prepared. That’s one of the other benefits of the film is that it raises that awareness and that learning.
Aiming to educate – but only with your support
THE CANARY: How can people interested in this help you on the money side?
MADOC: If we did go on to make other versions of it, yeah, it would be great to have the money because it would make things easier. Things like archive music, etcetera. You can pay people rather than beg, borrow and steal and all that sort of stuff.
But all we’re doing at the moment is just making the film available for people to sit down, watch, discuss, hopefully become educated, hopefully educate others. That’s all we’re doing. People can contact me and and we’ll just send them a copy of the film.
JUSTYN: Yeah, we’re not looking to raise money at all. We’re looking to just get it out there and that will then give us an idea of the level of support there is and the level of interest there is. And once we know that, we might, in a year or maybe two years, say ‘well, shall we make a sequel?’ And we’ll know then, we’ll have a list of supporters and so we can then maybe have an initiative with, I don’t know, maybe The Canary can help us – I’m sure that we’ll be coming to you for your support, and say ‘we want to make an updated re-edited version two with all the inquiry stuff from the coming 12/18 months.
It might be something in the future that we’ll need resources for, because it means we can make it quicker. And we’ve got to earn a living in between all this. We can make it quicker and we can buy in resources which is like archive and stuff like that so we can make it fast, and we can hire people.
MADOC: And we can react quicker. This has taken us three years. And obviously, lockdown got in the way, but yeah, this has taken three years when normally something like this would take less than half that time. So again, we’re slow reactors in a way, because we haven’t got the resources to do it.
“Everybody’s got a network”
THE CANARY: So you would like people to organise local screenings?
JUSTYN: If somebody’s interested in the film, the first thing we’d like them to do is to watch it. And then, if they’re inspired by it and they want to do something else with it, then they can organise a local showing and also use their influence to maybe get it to their friends and encourage further distribution. So it’s all by word of mouth really. That’s how it’s going to gather momentum.
We’ve all got a network. Everybody’s got a network. Just watch it. Share it.
‘A massive scandal that ruins any respect you have for the police’
THE CANARY: At one point in the film, the voiceover says ‘this is one of the biggest scandals in British history and the legal and moral implications cannot be understated’. Why is that the case?
MADOC: I think it would be hard to deny the fact that it is one of the biggest. I mean, if you look at all the big scandals that we’ve had – we’ve had the Stephen Lawrence campaign – they’re all part of this. All those scandals around the Met and the police, they all come up in this. So I think it is one of the biggest scandals that we’ve seen. But the irony of it all is it just gets treated as ‘a story for today, a story for this week’, and then it’s dropped again and then it’s dropped again. Yet it started in 1968, and we’re only getting to know about it in the last 10 years or so. It’s a massive scandal.
As a boy, I respected the police. I was brought up to respect the police. I’ve worked on lots of television programmes about the police and I’ve worked with good police people. I’ve worked with the lady who was the inspiration for Prime Suspect – a fantastic woman who now goes into prisons to help alcoholics in prisons. She does fantastic work. But what this does is ruin any respect you have for the police. Now, that’s wrong. Because in a country, you need to be able to respect your own laws. Then you find that the people who are telling you to respect those laws are behaving like this.
“They can’t come clean because of where it goes”
JUSTYN: I think what’s really bad is that they don’t come clean. They never, ever come clean. They’re always trying to sort of put up barriers, trying to blame other people, and also punish the people affected. It’s like they’re punishing people with the interrogation. So it’s like a double punishment. Why don’t they just come clean, open it out and move on? But they won’t. It also begs the question of – they can’t come clean because of where it goes. And it goes up.
MADOC: They’ve got all the information. If they looked at their records, they know exactly how many cops there were, they know exactly how many women were affected, they know exactly how many children of Spycops there are out there. They could just come clean and have done with it and just say ‘this is what happened’. They won’t do it. And as Justyn says, it’s because it goes up.
But we’ll never find out where it went to. So all we’re left with is this feeling that we’ve been betrayed. Not as much as the women. But our vision that we were encouraged to have of Britain as this great democracy. Where’s that? Where’s that after this?
The broadcasters “don’t want to touch” Spycops documentary
JUSTYN: And it’s very disappointing that the broadcasters generally are very unwilling to shine a light into these dark corners, and particularly when it’s on clear public display and it’s accessible. I spoke to several other production companies, and they were mystified why there were no strong documentaries on this, given the state of public confidence in the Met particularly, and the recent cases against the Met which have been outrageous in their racism and misogyny. It’s extraordinary that we haven’t had really strong investigative documentaries about the police. We’ve seen it in the news, but it has not been supported much or enough in documentaries. There’s a real reluctance. They don’t want to touch it, the broadcasters. And I’m not the only independent producer to be struck by that.
MADOC: And we need a documentary about the media’s role in it.
We need more and more engagement “to shine a light on it all”
THE CANARY: Tom and Jessica, would you like to add anything about the next stage of the inquiry?
TOM FOWLER: The other inquiry starts again on the 30th of September. It’ll be running till the beginning of December. That bit should be quite explosive. It will be a lot about the cover-up of relationships. So I hope that there’ll be an increase in interest over that period.
JESSICA: There’ll be opening statements from us, and also the MPS and the designated liars for the police themselves. So it’s gonna be quite a lot of testimony from very important officers at the time, like Bob Lambert. And hopefully, they’ll be asking him questions about Debenhams and his part in it burning down and things like that.
It’s important just to raise awareness and advise people when the hearings are going on, to follow Tom Fowler on Twitter because, with a 10-minute delay, he tweets what’s going on in the hearings. And even though I’m sat sometimes right next to him, I still follow him to understand what’s going on in the hearings because it’s a lot to take in. So as much engagement as we can get is what we need to shine a light on it all.
Featured image via the Canary
