Files from Special Branch show intricate police surveillance of trade unionists and campaigners against nuclear weapons, war, and racism

A large number of files detailing the covert police surveillance of campaigners and trade unionists have been published online following the launch of a new project.

They show the elaborate lengths to which the police have gone to gather information about the activities of political groups over decades.

The police’s own records of these surveillance operations can be read on the website, the Special Branch Files Project, which went live on Wednesday. The records - released under the freedom of information act - have been collected together in the online archive.

These files catalogue the police’s intricate, and often intrusive, efforts to keep track of protesters at meetings and demonstrations, both large and small.

Sometimes no detail is too minor, it seems, to be logged. For instance, police filed a thorough report on the monthly meeting of the Highgate branch of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in June 1982.

It was a meeting attended by six campaigners. It was held at someone’s home, but the unidentified source was in a close enough position to be able to report that the meeting had started at 7.30pm and finished at 10.20pm.

The source supplied police chiefs with a copy of the agenda and reported how the meeting stuck to it, discussing the group’s parlous finances and plans to distribute leaflets. The group had only ‘five fully paid-up members’, recorded the police report (which can be read here).

The files (see here) chronicle the surveillance of anti-apartheid campaigners in Britain from 1969 to 1995.

Police spied on anti-apartheid campaigners for decades | Guardian Undercover Blog Read more

The documents on the website were compiled by Special Branch, the secretive police body tasked with the job of monitoring political organisations that threatened the state.

They show how police found out about the inner workings of political groups, what protests were being planned by campaigners, and what happened at those protests.

The files record, for instance, how many attended protests, who spoke and what they said, how they travelled to the demonstrations, and so on.

In October 1983, for example, police compiled a 47-page report on a demonstration organised by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). This report (here and here) details how more than 200,000 campaigners took part in the march through London.

Police noted down the slogans written on the marchers’ placards (“welfare not warfare”, “ban the bomb” and so forth) and the names of numerous local groups that attended the demonstration. Read the documents here to see how Special Branch spied on CND in the 1980s.

Special Branch has drawn on sources from the top to the bottom of political groups. Their identities are not given in the files. Instead they are labelled a “secret and reliable source”, the jargon within Special Branch for a human source (as opposed to, say, an electronic intercept).

This disguise means that it is not possible to see whether the information has been supplied by an undercover police officer or an informant (a member of a political group who has been recruited by police).

The files on the new site date from 1968 when Special Branch established its first unit of long-term undercover officers to infiltrate political groups.

The documents (for example here) highlight how the unit, which became known as the Special Demonstration Squad, was set up at a time when the establishment feared that progressive protesters could tear down Britain’s economic and political system.

The Special Branch files on the monitoring of the campaign against the Vietnam war in the late 1960s can be read here.

Trade unionists and their leaders have often been put under surveillance by police. See here for example how police kept track of trade unionists during one of the most bitter disputes in British industrial history - the Wapping strike 30 years ago that involved thousands of newspaper workers.

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A series of internal documents (here) from the 2000s show how the police struggled to look after the welfare of its undercover officers.

The new site has been established by a group of investigators and journalists including Eveline Lubbers, Nicola Cutcher and Jac St John.

The project was set up because of police intransigence. In 2005, the freedom of information act came into force. In the early years of the act, the police released a number of Special Branch files, but after a while, they clamped down.

When the public asked for copies of documents that had already been released, police routinely refused to hand them over.

In theory, once a document is released under the act, it is released to the world - as the Metropolitan police itself notes here.

The group decided to collect together the Special Branch records that had been previously released and publish them in one place on the internet. In two articles here and here, Cutcher describes the impetus behind the project.



Lubbers, from the Undercover Research Group (which examines covert police operations), has also written about the importance of the project here.



The project has been supported by two funders, the European Center for Press and Media Freedom and Journalismfund.eu, while the website is sponsored by Greenhost in the Netherlands.

Disclosure: I have been involved in discussions about setting up the website. I have contributed documents to the project, as have other journalists such as Solomon Hughes and Martin Rosenbaum (of the BBC).

