07 January 2019
"Undercover policing, however, is just one weapon in an entire armoury of political policing. The undercover policing scandal, which the Spycops in context papers are a response to, cannot be adequately understood without a wider historical view of the British state’s counter-subversion apparatus."
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See: Spycops in context: Beneath the undercover policing scandal (Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, link):
"Isolating the undercover units from the rest of the political policing system – Special Branch, MI5, specialist cabinet committees, the Information Research Department and more – allows the SDS and NPOIU to be viewed as rogue aberrations, not indicative of anything fundamental about Britain’s social order.
A broader historical view of the coercive branches of the state paints the SDS and NPOIU in a different light. This view reveals the units to be part of a long-running system of political policing, the function of which is to contain and undermine deep dissent against the status quo. "
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