The impact of the spying copper was a proper jaw dropper. As details have emerged since the weekend, the jaw has stayed firmly dropped. Anyone peddling the story to a Hollywood movie mogul would be told to take the plot away and make it more credible.
It appears that Kennedy, aka Mark Stone, was not acting alone. So how does this sort of decision to infiltrate campaigning groups take place? Simon Jenkins wrote a very informative - and worrying - article in the Guardian.
“Running Kennedy – let alone his colleagues – cost the taxpayer £250,000 a year, or £1.75m over seven years. Whether tree-hugging and the occasional trespass constituted threats to national security is moot. A gilded sledgehammer was clearly being deployed to crack a few nuts. They were not a serious terrorist threat. The denouement was a costly fiasco. This is what happens when authority has too much money and no one in charge to impose a sense of proportion.
It is significant that Kennedy did not work for any police force. He worked for a murky organisation called the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). With a budget of £5m this operates as a branch of the National Domestic Extremism Unit (NDEU) which, in turn, works alongside the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (NETCU). Ask where this stands, and you will be told it reports to the Association of Chief Police Officers' Terrorism and Allied Matters Committee, codenamed Acpo(TAM).
Only those who have tarried in the foggy corridors of the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Metropolitan police can have any notion of the Orwellian extravagance of these places. Agencies, units and groups cruise shark-like round the feet of terrified Home Office ministers. Their staffs, expenses, overtime and accommodation are crammed into London's Scotland Yard and Tintagel House. If challenged, they incant their motto: "We keep you safe."
Kennedy's bosses in the NPOIU work for Acpo, but this is not what it seems. It is not, as its name suggests, the police officers' staff club, nor is it a public body of any sort. It is a private company, incorporated in 1997. It is sub-contracted by Whitehall to operate the police end of the government's counterterrorism and "anti-extremism" strategies. It is thus alongside MI5, but even less accountable.
Acpo was once a liaison group. But, like all bureaucracies, it has grown. It now runs its own police forces under a police chief boss, Sir Hugh Orde, like a British FBI. It trades on its own account, generating revenue by selling data from the police national computer for £70 an item (cost of retrieval, 60p). It owns an estate of 80 flats in central London. While the generous logistical support it offered the greens was doubtless gratis, we do not know if E.ON UK, the operator of Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, paid for security intelligence from Kennedy.
As a private company, Acpo need not accede to Freedom of Information requests and presumably could distribute its profit to its own board. The whole operation is reminiscent of the deals set up by the Pentagon with private firms to run the Iraq and Afghan wars, free of publicity or accountability. There is no more vivid testament to the illiberalism of the Blair regime than these eccentric arrangements. They were all approved by the likes of David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, John Reid and Jacqui Smith.” Simon Jenkins Guardian 12/1/2011
New Labour were an absolute disgrace when civil liberties issues arose. This case spells out just what a bunch of second-raters they were when faced by the security industry. Whether it was the tendency to want to appear tougher than the tories on security issues or whether the security services had some good skeletons to pick at is still open to question. Unfortunately the move to roll back the worst of their excesses by the Coalition seems to have stalled. This case should jolt some sense into them - but do not bank on it.
“It recalled Chesterton's satire on the early Met police special branch, The Man Who Was Thursday, in which all the members of the "supreme anarchist council" turned out to be policemen. So, are the greens all policemen, and if so what is their game?” ibid
Who watches the watchmen?
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