Undercover cops spent decades doing the establishment’s dirty work by spying on the left. As spycops.info‘s Tom Fowler told the Canary:

a huge part of their role was destabilising, undermining, and destroying social movements. And the way they did that was by fostering internal division, through gossip and scandal, by taking personal disagreements and turning them into political ones.

Speaking about how left-wingers can learn the lessons of the spycops political-policing scandal and successfully challenge the growing confidence of the far right, he said internal division is:

something that the left often does without the help of undercover cops, and it’s a huge problem. And I think by not doing that, we protect ourselves much better against infiltration than any other single thing we could do.

Fowler gave the infiltration of his own group as an example, explaining how the spycop in question would regularly look for “gossip or scandal” that might succeed in:

making people fall out, making the group become very inward-looking, getting involved in purity tests about people having the right line on particular issues. All these things really undermine campaigns and make them much, much less effective.

Fowler previously talked about the likely role of state interference in “current campaigns that are dysfunctional“.

Political policing empowered the far right and it has only increased

In the current “era of neoliberal policing”, Fowler said:

police employ civilian staff for all sorts of roles, from front of house right through to the use of professional infiltrators.

But while the tactics will have changed, he stressed:

Political policing has never gone away. If anything, it’s just grown.

For example:

there’s been a huge increase in the ability of using electronic surveillance in a multitude of ways… [and] huge numbers of special branch officers are working in desk-based roles.

And while we don’t know everything about how the state is using its apparatus against ordinary people trying to build a better future, he stressed:

we can be fairly sure that the information they’re after is the same information they’ve always been after… it’s information that’s ideal for vetting, or as we would call it, blacklisting… full names, addresses, their connections with other people, their trade union affiliation, their kind of employment, where they work, who they work with, who they know.

This targeting of left-wingers has helped to ensure they’re “kept out of the civil service, kept out of the BBC and other aspects of the media”. And he added that:

because the far right weren’t targeted in this way, they’ve been able to continue to influence British society in a way in which the left has not, despite the fact that they have much less support.

To beat fascism, actions speak louder than words

Fowler insisted that:

In terms of what we can do in order to cope with the rightward drift of mainstream politics, I think more than anything else we need to be confrontational.

He continued:

It’s no good working really hard on getting the right form of words together. You’ve got to go out there and actually put your body in the way. And that means turning up. That means mobilising.

And he said:

If we fail to do that, then we hand the future to the far right.

To avoid that happening, we absolutely need to learn the lessons from the spycops scandal – which Fowler has called “just the tip of the iceberg“. And that doesn’t just mean putting our bodies in the way. It also means remembering that our real enemies aren’t the people we mostly agree with but disagree with on a couple of issues. The enemies are fascism and the political and economic establishment that is willing to hand Britain to the far right in order to protect the obscene privilege of a few ultra-rich individuals.

The state-fascist alliance thrives off distractions and craves division on the left. Let’s stop giving them what they want!

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

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