Let’s be clear: spy cops are the result of political choices – and that’s a danger
What becomes clear, from reading through the long list of national campaigns and local groups that undercover police spied upon, is that certain sections of the police see environmentalists, leftwingers and social justice campaigners as such a potential threat that scarce taxpayer resources and precious police time should be spent spying on them.
The extent of this political policing is only just emerging because of excellent, investigative journalism and hours of legwork by campaigners. It has gone on for decades and it continues today. The only difference with modern policing is the extent to which they can use electronic surveillance and data collection to potentially intrude on the private lives of millions, rather than thousands. We need to recognise the political choices that some police officers are expected to make, so that parliament can separate the politics from the crime fighting and ensure that the police become neutral upholders of the law.
There is a clear link between the women who want police spies out of their lives, the labelling of thousands (including myself) as domestic extremists, and the recent clampdown on anti-fracking protesters. All these campaigners have been on the receiving end of the police making political choices about which laws and what resources they can employ to deal with people they perceive to be domestic extremists.
I realise that saying the police are making political choices is controversial and needs evidence, so let me be clear. I have no problem when an officer acts against someone breaking the law, even when I disagree with that law – it’s their job. However, I do have a problem when a section of the police, over a period of several decades, choose to target and invade the lives of innocent women who have never been convicted of any crime. Or when undercover officers choose to hand over the names of trade unionists to blacklisting firms. Or when senior officers choose to take several million pounds-worth of officer time away from fighting mainstream crime in Lancashire, so that they can defend the corporate interests of a fracking firm. Or when senior police choose to target anti-fracking campaigners with the resources given to them to defend us from terrorists.
A series of parliamentary answers have confirmed what I’ve known for some time – that it is the police, rather than the Home Office or parliament, who decide how to categorise campaigners as “domestic extremists”. The reason I asked these questions is because the Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA) found itself on a counter-terrorism policing document. The HSA is a charity, advocating non-violence and regularly meets police to liaise. Indeed, a key part of its campaign is helping the police to enforce the anti-hunting laws by providing information and recordings that can be used as evidence when it suspects a crime has been committed. Yet the HSA found itself alongside such groups as Boko Haram, the Taliban, National Action and Combat 18 in a document circulated by the police to all their Prevent partners in local authorities and education.
The police document contains an explanation of how they see the overlap between protest and domestic extremism. It refers to protests that “cross over into unlawful intimidation, violence and public disorder”. This might sound reasonable until you consider that many non-violent protests can result in “public disorder” as the police see it, despite it being little more than people sitting down in the road, or locking themselves on to machinery, to stop it being used. “Unlawful intimidation” has also become a lot broader with the use of injunctions that ban protesters waving banners outside the offices of contractors, or subcontractors of companies that are damaging the environment. The HSA itself advocates that its campaigners avoid contact with hunt supporters because of the many deaths threats and violent intimidation that those opposed to hunting have had to deal with. So why did the HSA logo, rather than that of one of the hunt associations, end up on this list?
First, I asked the Home Office if it checked, or had seen the advice to partners being produced by the counter-terrorism police? It doesn’t. Next, I asked if it knew that the HSA was on a list produced by counter-terrorism police. It said it was an operational issue. I then asked what definition of domestic extremism the police used and got this: the government’s definition of extremism is set out in the 2015 counter-extremism strategy. The strategy defines extremism as: “the vocal or active opposition to our fundamental values including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs. We also regard calls for the death of members of our armed forces as extremist.
“There is no legal definition of extremism. It is an operational matter for the police what definitions they choose to use.”
This is much the same answer I got in 2013 when I questioned the Met police about the way they had put nearly 8,000 people, including me, on to the domestic extremism database. As a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority I was able to pester them into adopting the far tighter definition of domestic extremist recommended by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, which crucially limits it to “serious crime”.
The adoption of this tighter definition did lead to the numbers on the domestic extremism database dropping by several thousand, but it didn’t completely resolve the problem. In 2015, Siân Berry who was then the Green party’s London mayoral candidate and a local councillor (she is now co-leader of the Green party of England and Wales), found herself on the list, despite being neither a terrorist, nor involved in any sort of criminal activity. The police defended this by saying that theirs was just a working definition, not written legislation and it was ultimately up to them to interpret it.
The drift towards seeing “domestic extremism and terrorism” as a continuum is hardly new, but it has been taken to a new level with the use of Prevent in educational institutions and with the use of intrusive surveillance powers. Parliament has passed powers designed to keep us secure against a tiny, violent minority, but these powers are being used against large swaths of the population who come under the broader definition of domestic extremism. This is both an attack on liberty and a complete waste of valuable but dwindling resources.
There are obvious dangers to democracy in the police making political choices about when to use the draconian powers given to them to deal with terrorism and serious organised crime. It is time for parliament to define who is a domestic extremist, and also to enshrine a right to protest that specifically stops the police from using tools such as the terrorism laws, undercover officers, or the resources of the counter-terrorism command, against people engaged in peaceful protest, even if that protest involves them breaking minor laws such as blocking the highway.
As a Met police-accredited domestic extremist, I can assure the Home Office that the police are seriously misusing their power and their resources – that is not an operational issue, that’s a serious political issue and our government must step in and set things straight.
• Jenny Jones is a former chair of the Green party
• This article was amended on 16 October to correct the number of people put on to the Metropolitan Police’s domestic extremism archive from nearly 80,000 to 8,000