Against Police Spies

The Public Inquiry into Undercover Policing is currently holding hearings - to find out more as it happens follow @tombfowler and @copscampaign

Lambert arranged for the #spycop infiltrating the campaign to meet a top cop to discuss what evidence could be used to smear the family & their campaign.

Bob Lambert had by this time become head of the Special Demonstration Squad. When public outrage & pressure at lack of action in the case led to the 1998 MacPherson Inquiry, the Met wanted to discredit campaigners as much as possible.

Police had long been accused of incompetence & racism in their handling of the case; some officers locally had corrupt links with families of the racist killers. Instead of addressing this the Metropolitan Police Special Demonstration Squad spied on the family & campaigners.

One of the most shocking revelations that tipped the balance was that #spycops had infiltrated the campaign for justice by the family of Stephen Lawrence, murdered by racists in South East London in 1993.

Further pressure from campaigners and a flood of revelations forced them Home Secretary Theresa May to announce a public inquiry into undercover policing in 2014.

We felt that a man who had used his undercover status to get away with sexual exploitation of four women (fathering a child with one who he then abandoned when his deployment ended) was not a trustworthy person to be teaching young students. In the end Lambert resigned

When it became known Lambert was lecturing on criminology at London Metropolitan University, a campaign was begun both within LMU and by local residents for him to be sacked...

The outing of Bob added to the exposure of Mark Kennedy a few months before, and helped build momentum in the work by activists to expose other spies and the wider picture.

This was a significant step in the gradually emerging picture of #spycops infiltration of campaign groups over decades. Lambert was (then) only one of a handful of known undercover officers, & the only one who had re-surfaced publicly.

Activists who had known ‘Bob Robinson’ agreed it was him. A group of former members of London Greenpeace, a group ‘Bob’ had infiltrated, stood up at at a Unite Against Fascism conference & outed him. He ran away and was filmed jumping into a cab...

Information inadvertently let slip by another former spycop, Jim Boyling, longtime protege of Lambert, pointed to this connection. But he looked quite different & time had gone by. 2 of us in fact went to film Lambert speak at a conference.

In 2011 some of us got wind that Bob Lambert, then a quite well known academic working on ‘radical Islam’, might be the same person as Bob Robinson, 1980s animal rights & environmental activist, who had disappeared in 1987.