The BBC crime drama Sherwood signifies the moment our campaign about spy cops abuse has cut through the noise.
Set in a “red wall” former mining community in Nottinghamshire, the main storyline follows a police manhunt for killers on the loose. The writer, James Graham, interlaces this with an intriguing subplot about an undercover police spy who has continued to live under a false identity since having been deployed to monitor the striking miners decades earlier.
Previous attempts to capture the significance of the spy cops scandal on screen have tended to focus on the personal torment of the policemen trapped by their double lives, as was the case with the BBC’s Undercover (2016) and Informer (2018). Sherwood is no exception. A fascinating subject for drama, perhaps, but a far cry from the sociopathic, narcissistic actions of the real spy cops whose behaviour shows no trace of such soul-searching. So before the series began, I wondered how the spy cops theme would develop. Would the representation be sensitive? Would it feel authentic? And would it help our campaign?
The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) is a core participant in the public inquiry into undercover policing and represented by the human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce – clearly the inspiration for Lindsay Duncan’s character who delivers a powerful monologue about Thatcher’s war on trade unions. Although there is no evidence as yet that officers from the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) or any other undercover police unit operated in mining areas (although it is known that special branch had at least one agent high up inside the NUM, known as “Silver Fox”), it’s clear that MI5 and special branch regularly used informers and bugging devices against NUM members. SDS officers gathered intelligence on several trade unions, so the choice to root this story of state infiltration in the miners’ strike is more symbolic than anything.
With all drama, we’re invited to suspend our disbelief. In Sherwood, I found this tricky. While there was at least one real undercover police officer who went Awol, choosing to remain in the world they were spying on, this was far from the norm. The female officer in question did not continue to use her spy cop’s cover name – her superiors would never have allowed that. There is no evidence, therefore, that any real undercover police officer (the vast majority of whom were men) hung around for life, continuing to live as their fake identity. Quite the opposite: they used, abused then abandoned us. And that’s what their managers sanctioned.
I understand that Sherwood is a drama, not a documentary, and it’s clear that Graham has done his spy cops homework. It was moving to see a TV reckon with state espionage in the name of neoliberalism and the wreckage it leaves behind, but it’s unfortunate that once again television audiences are invited to empathise with the police officers struggling with inner turmoil. And that the real-life racism, sexism and emotional abuse perpetrated by the real spy cops goes unexplored.
With others, I’ve campaigned for a decade to raise public awareness of this policing scandal in order to ensure such a lawless, secret unit can never be allowed to operate again. These undercover deployments sabotaged progressive movements, manipulating and exploiting people like me. Since 2015, I’ve been involved in the expensive, drawn-out, and frustrating undercover policing inquiry: first due to report in 2018 with a current end date of 2026. Just last week, however, there was a reference by Matthew Rycroft, permanent secretary to the Home Office, at the home affairs select committee who, in what seemed like an off the cuff remark and in answer to a question about the inquiry’s excessive costs, said: “The home secretary could choose to close [it] down.”
If this happens, it will be a travesty. To ensure it doesn’t, the public must be watching the inquiry’s progress. The more people understand about what the spy cops did, the more important and more relevant the inquiry will become. For this reason, and despite its flaws, Sherwood is a useful as a conversation starter. Reaching new audiences beyond our social media echo chambers, it has raised public awareness of the existence of spy cops and hinted at their damaging influence. I hope civil servants, politicians and the inquiry team have been watching, and understand that the spy cops scandal has hit the mainstream. It’s not going away and neither are we.
Alison is one of eight women who first took legal action against the Metropolitan police over the conduct of undercover officers and a founder member of Police Spies Out of Lives. A core participant in the public inquiry into undercover policing, she is one of the authors of Deep Deception – The Story of the Spycop Network by the Women who Uncovered the Shocking Truth. Twitter: @AlisonSpycops
-
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.com
