What happened to the undercover police inquiry?

TWO years into the public inquiry into undercover policing and campaigners spied upon by the state this week claimed that progress has stalled and no information had been revealed about the officers involved. Jon Robins reports:

Speaking at an event at the Labour fringe on undercover policing and police surveillance, core participants in the undercover policing inquiry together with  their lawyers accused the government of delay and expressed concerns about the new chair of the inquiry.
Helen Steel is one of eight women activists who began legal action against the police having discovered that former long-term partners had been undercover policemen. Steel, who was representing the Police Spies out of Lives group, told delegates they were as much in the dark as the day that the inquiry was launched in July 2015. ‘More than two years into the inquiry and we still have had no disclosure about the relationships or the officers involved. The public has learnt absolutely nothing new about the extent of police in the abuse or how this was allowed to happen,’ she said.
In May this year, Sir John Mitting took over the chairmanship of the inquiry from Lord Justice Pitchford, who had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease. The inquiry has long become bogged down as the police have called for proceedings to be held in secret to protect the identities of the undercover officers – as reported on the Justice Gap (here).
‘The inquiry has finally acknowledged upwards of a thousand groups were spied upon but still hasn’t released the names of those groups,’ Steel told the meeting organised by the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers. Steel argued that whilst the police were prepared to confirm that they sent undercover officers into Isis, ‘they claimed it would be too dangerous to confirm the names of the thousand campaigns spied upon by the Special Demonstration Squad and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit,’ she said. ‘It beggars belief.’
In a message to the meeting Michael Mansfield QC, the president of the Haldane Society, claimed to be ‘under no illusions as to the extent to which agencies in the state have taken an interest in me’ in relation to his work on political cases such as Orgreave, Hillsborough and the Shrewsbury pickets.

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Whatever happened to the undercover policing inquiry? - The Justice ...

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