I think you should take a moment to leaf through the testimony, to the Home Affairs Committee, on the undercover police officers who deceived a number of women, with whom they had relationships. During the course of these relationships, they pretended to be people who didn’t exist – in fact, they had taken their identities from the birth certificates of dead children. Then, when their posting was over, they simply disappeared and never saw the women again. Bob Lambert – who we know from his work promoting Islamist hatemongers – apparently abandoned a child, as well.
These women were deceived – by the State! – for years and years. Whole periods of their lives – a publiclly sponsored lie. You can’t fix that.
How can you read an account like this and not weep?
“As a human being it is very difficult not to have sympathy for somebody that I cared about deeply, but it is also important to remember that that person that I cared about deeply did not in fact exist,” she replied.
She adds that she still has questions about what happened.
“Who was listening in to our most intimate phone calls? Who saw our holiday photos? Was there anybody following us when we were on holiday?
“Who made the decisions about what happened to my life, where I was allowed to go, who I was allowed to see, which I thought was my free will but actually was being manipulated by this person who was being controlled by other people?”
Yes, people get hurt in accidents during the course of law enforcement – sometimes it is the police force’s fault, because of something that the police did or failed to do. But this was not an accident. This was something that was authorised, encouraged by the Police. Sometimes people get hurt by policemen who intentionally injure them, and sometimes that is covered up – but this is something quite different: essentially, an institutionalised plot to harm a series of women.
Certainly, everybody should assist the police – and many would choose do so in circumstances in which they ran some personal risk. But these women had no choice at all. They were grossly traduced, in the most intimate way. I honestly wonder if a court might not find that these women were were raped, by these police officers, and by the State – how could sex with a wholly invented person not constitute the obtaining of consent by the most fundamental deceit? How could anything be more corrosive of the trust between the public and the police?
Yes, these women might very well have met some other man who treated them badly. Life is not a bed of roses. But when we hear of those who emiserate the lives of others, we do not shrug and turn away: we regard them as morally pernicious, we feel anger.
These actions were evil. Those who authorised them, the institutions which permitted them, our State, did a wicked thing.
I would be very surprised if most people in this country, including most police officers, did not feel the same way.
