The BBC has reported that “MI5 lied to three courts while defending its handling of a misogynistic neo-Nazi state agent who attacked his girlfriend with a machete”. It’s also emerged that secret service bosses then tried to persuade the BBC not to run the story.
Unfortunately, violence by state enforcers against women is nothing new – as Spycops survivors will attest to.
MI5: the lowest of the low
MI5 has apologised for its “serious error” in covering for agent ‘X’, who violently “terrorised his partner”. The latter’s lawyer, meanwhile, said:
I think this raises real concerns about MI5’s transparency, about whether we can trust MI5’s evidence to courts.
The BBC explained:
Exposure of MI5’s false testimony will also damage its credibility in other court proceedings, where judges are obliged to give enormous weight and deference to the Security Service’s evidence.
These often involve secret hearings which are closed even to those most affected
The Security Service claims its “neither confirm nor deny” policy is to “keep agents safe”. But the BBC questions how “it may stand in the way of agents being held accountable when they abuse their positions or commit crimes”.
Trying to silence the BBC – MI5-style
Further to this, and as the Telegraph reported:
The head of MI5 rang the BBC director-general in an effort to get a story about an abusive undercover agent pulled from publication, it has emerged.
Sir Ken McCallum contacted Tim Davie directly…
The BBC claims the director general of the Security Service tried to “cast doubt” on the truth of the allegations being made against the MI5 agent.
The corporation refused to drop the story, and the Government then took it to court in order to prevent details of the case being made public.
The Telegraph noted that “Suella Braverman, the attorney general at the time, sought an injunction preventing [the BBC] from airing the programme.
The British state throws women under the bus to protect the rich and powerful
Away from MI5, and the massive Spycops scandal revealed the extent of political policing in Britain, and there have been constant delays in the search for justice, making it “one of the longest public inquiries in UK history”.
For decades, secretive police units used undercover officers to infiltrate activist organisations. As the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance reported in 2023, police targeted “around 1,000 campaigning and left wing groups”, only three of which the Inquiry Chair found to have been “‘a legitimate target’ for undercover policing of any kind”. As Madoc Roberts, one of the film-makers behind the Spies Who Ruined Our Lives documentary, previously told the Canary:
unless you joined all the dots together, you wouldn’t have known that this was political policing, until you discover that it’s 1,000 groups and that all the groups just happened to be left-wing…
I think it is one of the biggest scandals that we’ve seen.
In 2024, the Canary spoke to Jessica, who is involved in ongoing civil claims. She told us how an undercover officer groomed her when she was a vulnerable 19-year-old “for no reason”. And she slammed “the absolute pointlessness” of what police spies did. She insisted that:
the institutional sexism along with the institutional racism and institutional corruption and institutional misogyny… play a massive part in everything that they did
She added “the more we find out, the worse it looks”.
You can see the trailer of vital documentary Spies Who Ruined Our Lives here.
Featured image via the Canary
