1 month ago
33
On Monday, 15 July, CND General Secretary Kate Hudson gave evidence at the ‘Spycops’ Undercover Policing Inquiry that is investigating decades of undercover policing work and its impact on individuals and organisations.
Kate was representing CND which is a ‘core participant’ in the Inquiry, owing to the fact that it was infiltrated by undercover police officers during the 1980s at the height of CND’s mass campaigning against cruise missiles. The session looked particularly at the use of undercover policing within CND and the wider anti-nuclear movement between 1983 and the early 1990s.
CND legal team came from the Public Interest Law Centre (PILC), and the session unveiled “a clear and deeply alarming use of political undercover policing by the then Conservative government” and the “most explicit example of subverting parliamentary democracy uncovered” by the inquiry so far.
While British intelligence had concluded before 1983 that CND did not represent a threat to national security, we revealed evidence that infiltration of CND by undercover police was for political purposes: because of CND’s mass support, because its work was powerfully informing public opinion, which in turn could affect how people voted in the 1983 general election. Information gathered by undercover officers of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) was passed to Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine and his Defence Secretariat 19 (DS19) unit, which distorted and manipulated information to smear and discredit CND.
DS19 was set up ahead of the 1983 general election and these dirty tricks were used in particular during the election to undermine and discredit – by association with CND – our founder member and Labour Party leader Michael Foot, and to impact on the outcome of that election.
You can read PILC’s overview here.
You can read CND’s statement to the UCPI here.
You can watch Kate’s evidence session here.
The post CND, spycops and the secret state appeared first on .
