The long-running Undercover Policing (Spycops) Inquiry is in the news again. And everyone on the left has a very good reason to follow its revelations. Because they give us important insights into how the rich and powerful keep their privilege at our expense.

Tom Fowler goes to every hearing of the inquiry into the political policing project that unjustifiably targeted hundreds of left-wing groups for decades. And speaking to the Canary last week, he insisted that:

It’s the secret history of Britain. It’s the reason why our society has developed in the way it has, not just because of these individual officers that infiltrated these individual campaigns, but the wider infrastructure of repression, of which we’re getting to see a little corner of.

He added:

The undercover officers are just the tip of the iceberg, and there’s so much more than that.

Why the spycops scandal must matter to all of us

For Fowler, learning from the scandal is essential. Everyone needs to know about it and realise “how serious it all is”, he said, because:

One of the reasons why the undercover police were able to be so effective is that people didn’t realise what levels of interest the state has in any form of political dissent.

And he pointed to the likelihood that the state continues to use similar tactics today, emphasising that:

A lot of the time when we’re not successful in our campaigns, or… social movements that we’re involved in fall apart, it’s not because the people involved are somehow inherently incapable of organising together. It’s that the state’s taking a really large interest. I’m sure that continues to this day, with current campaigns that are dysfunctional.

In the state’s box of “dirty tricks”, he stressed, it wasn’t just the vile abuse of racist and misogynistic spycops. It was also plain-clothes police at demonstrations, surveillance units “at the other side of the bar, watching”, “informers and corporate spies”, and more.

But another really important tool for the state, he asserted, is fostering division.

The state sees us as “all part of the same thing”

Fowler stressed that:

Whatever political movement you’re active within now… in the recent past, there will have been a campaign doing a very similar thing.

But “one of the roles” spycops had was precisely “destroying institutional memory” so that we don’t focus on that bigger picture. Because while “we tend to look at our own movements as lots of disparate things”, he said:

The police don’t see it like that… They see that as one unbroken line straight through different organisations, different time periods, different parts of the country. They see it as all part of the same thing. I mean, they make jokes about the fact that people think they’ve got these big differences between each other.

For left-wing struggles to succeed, he argued, we need to remember “we’ve got a great more in common than we have got as differences”. And he added:

If people who… wanna campaign for a better world can work together and understand their own history, they can be a lot more effective as campaigners.

Following the spycops inquiry, he insisted, is one way of informing ourselves about that history. And it’s an important step towards resisting state repression better in the future.

Featured image via the Canary