Undercover policing of ‘extremists’: will we ever know the truth?
An official Undercover Policing Inquiry is under way in London, following a series of revelations about the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), an undercover unit of Metropolitan Police officers that operated against various radical political groups and individuals from 1968 to 2008.
Today’s hearings focused on famous Marxist activist Tariq Ali, born to a wealthy family in what is now Pakistan, but mainly based in England since his student days. Undercover police and MI5 officers monitored Ali going back to 1965 when he was President of the Oxford Union. Most famous for organising protests against the Vietnam War, Ali was one of the leaders of the International Marxist Group (IMG).
In relation to Tariq Ali and other less well-known targets, it has become obvious that the SDS had long-term agents inside militant ‘anti-racist’ and ‘anti-fascist’ groups. For example one heavily-redacted Special Branch document released today gave nine pages of names of anti-NF demonstrators at a march in Southwark, South London, in March 1980.
The Inquiry will later discuss SDS infiltration of anti-BNP groups in the 1990s. Earlier press revelations have included interviews with an officer who infiltrated ‘Youth Against Racism in Europe’, a front for the Trotskyist group Militant Tendency, who held one of several violent protests against the BNP bookshop in Welling, SE London.
Some accounts have suggested that undercover Met officers were present both outside the bookshop among the demonstrators, and inside the bookshop among a small group of nationalists defending the premises.
So far just two such police infiltrators inside the BNP have been named. One used the name Alan ‘Nick’ Nicholson and was supposedly active in BNP circles during 1990 and 1991. The other used the name Darren Prowse and supposedly attempted to join the BNP in 2007 before his mission was aborted.
We expect to hear more as the Inquiry progresses about the SDS role in targeting both the far left and racial nationalists. However the Inquiry is likely to ignore or hush up suggestions that the authorities deliberately stirred up violence between ‘anti-racists’ and the BNP, as well as between nominally radical racial nationalist groups and the BNP during the 1990s.
Wisconsin liberal attacked by BLM mob
Overnight yet another historic American statue came down: this time the victim was former Vice-President John Calhoun (1782-1850) whose statue had stood in downtown Charleston, South Carolina since 1896.
Meanwhile in another state capital a thousand miles north of Charleston, a liberal state senator was attacked by ‘Black Lives Matter’ rioters in Madison, Wisconsin.
State Senator Tim Carpenter, a 60-year-old LGBT etc activist, was punched and kicked by the mob when he photographed them. The rioters had earlier destroyed another two statues, including one of an anti-slavery activist, Col. Hans Christian Heg.
Senator Carpenter might now realise that these riots are not ‘political’ in the normal, civilised sense of the word. His crime (and that of Col. Heg) was simply to be White.
The paradox of course is that many of the rioters are themselves White, but they are determined to destroy their civilisation in an orgy of self-hatred.
Anti-fascist gangster shot dead
Paul Massey – one of Britain’s leading organised crime figures – was shot dead near his home in Salford on Sunday night.
Massey was a former leading activist in the anarchist group Class War, and together with members of the infamous Noonan family had played a bizarre double role in violent ‘anti-fascism’ and straightforward brutal criminality.
However during the past year he had posted several tweets supporting UKIP, and less than three weeks ago sent a tweet apparently accusing Dominic Noonan of being a paid police informant.
Paul Massey’s mysterious tweet less than three weeks before his murder – seemed to accuse fellow gangster and ‘anti-fascist’ Dominic Noonan of being a police informant.
In 2012 Massey was a candidate for Mayor of Salford: his campaign manager Nic Seddon was later jailed for murdering his own parents. In April 2015 another close friend of Massey’s, former boxer Paul ‘One-Punch’ Doyle, received a 16-year jail sentence for his role as boss of a heroin and cocaine empire.
Paul Massey (far right) as a pall bearer at the funeral of Class War anarchist Ken Keating in 2011, where Massey gave the oration.
The murder of Paul Massey might spark a new Chicago-style gang war on the streets of North West England. It should also lead to a long overdue examination of the links between this gangland milieu and ‘anti-fascist’ politics – but sadly it won’t: not in the mainstream media at any rate. However it wouldn’t surprise me to see the national press taking a close look at one or two of Massey’s UKIP associates and family friends…
Former Class War anarchist and gangland ‘Mr Big’ Paul Massey endorsed UKIP at the General Election.
Food for thought…
CHANNEL 4, 12Oct09: The Enemy Within (49mins).
An extremist ideology is sweeping across Europe. Fundamentalist terrorist groups are operating in London. They want to end the British way of life and a minority are prepared to bomb and kill to get what they want. But the year is 1892: Victorian England…
