Keir Starmer: Riots and Spycops
CONTENT WARNING: This article will include themes of police-inflicted racist violence and police-inflicted sexual assault and rape
Before you read this article, I have to absolutely stress that you must first read another by Lucy Nevitt that already fleshes out in great detail Keir Starmer’s record as Director of Public Prosecutions at the Crown Prosecution Service with regards to sexual assault prosecutions and it’s important to know this information in conjunction with this article: Starmer’s Shambolic CPS
On the 4th August 2011, Mark Duggan was shot and killed by Metropolitan Police Officers in Tottenham, North London. This happened in an environment where there was already tension between the black community and the Met in Tottenham since the Broadwater Farm Riot in 1985. Following his murder, Duggan’s family and local residents marched to Tottenham Police Station and demanded justice. During the demonstration, a 16-year old girl approached the police and threw either a leaflet or a stone at them — witness accounts are unclear. The police immediately swarmed her with shields and batons and attacked her.
In response, two members of the crowd set nearby police cars on fire (although a Metropolitan Commander at the time attests that they were not part of the vigil). Rioting quickly spread across London, and to other cities in England, in response to both Mark Duggan’s murder and the attack on the 16-year old woman. Arson and looting also became features in the riots.
At the time this was happening, Keir Starmer QC, now leader of the Labour Party and the leader of the opposition, was the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). A position which, as Doughty Street Chambers puts it, makes him “responsible for all criminal prosecutions in England and Wales”. In response to the 2011 Riots, which must be stressed were brought about by a culmination of racial tension with the police, poverty and the shooting of Mark Duggan, Keir Starmer as DPP emphasised that the most important reaction to the riots was the “speed of processing cases”, an idea which brought about the implementation of 24-hour court sittings, which defence lawyers described as disorganised and chaotic. This created “panicky” judges that effectively implemented a blanket policy of refusing bail, with judges opting for custody over bail at seven times the normal rate. Eoin McLennan-Murray — the former Prison Governors Association President — described the situation as “conveyor-belt justice” and that “a number of people are dealt with unfairly”. Defence lawyers also argued that the rush to prosecution that Starmer favoured infringed on due process for the sake of expediency.
In speaking to the Guardian in 2012, Starmer said that he prioritised and preferred rapid prosecution over longer sentences as a deterrent — but this doesn’t stack with the guidance he gave to prosecutors. During prosecutions, the CPS issued guidance that those who took part in the riots should be charged with burglary, instead of theft. The difference between the two is simple: theft carries seven years as a maximum sentence, and burglary carries ten years as a maximum sentence. It seems quite contradictory that Starmer, whilst DPP, would say he preferred rapid sentencing (that impacted on due process) over longer sentences when he issued guidance that rioters should be charged with a more serious offence, in addition to any public order offence.
This manifested itself in cases such as that of Anderson Fernandes (pictured below), who walked into a patisserie whose door was open in Manchester during the riots, and helped himself to an ice cream. He took one lick of it, but didn’t like the coffee flavour, so he gave it to a passer-by. His DNA was found inside the patisserie, he was convicted of burglary and sentenced to 16 months in prison. In another, Nicholas Robinson was sentenced to six months in prison for stealing £3.50 worth of bottled water from a Lidl in Brixton.
The ratio at which defendants convicted as being party to the riots were charged with burglary over theft was 3:1. In terms of the makeup of the defendants, across the entire country (where ethnicity was recorded) 43% of the defendants were black, 33% were white and 7% were Asian. Ministry of Justice figures also found that defendants were more likely to have had special educational needs. Of the defendants in England and Wales, a quarter were under the age of 18, with 53% of defendants being under 20. The figures also suggested that the defendants were poorer than the rest of the country at large.
Keir Starmer’s role as DPP during the prosecutions of the 2011 Rioters appear to be that of pushing for rapid prosecutions, which diminished due process, and heavier sentences, with guidance recommending the pursuing of burglary charges over theft charges, against young, majority ethnic-minority men who were in lower income brackets than the country.
But his record from the year 2011–2012 doesn’t stop there, for during his tenure as DPP a major scandal broke out; the revelations that undercover police officers were having romantic relationships with people in the groups they were infiltrating. Or as it came to be known — Spycops.
In late 2010, it was revealed that Mark Kennedy had been working as an undercover police officer in environmentalist movements for 7 years, from 2003 until his exposure in 2010, under the alias of ‘Mark Stone’. He was one of five police officers that were accused of deceiving people into long-term romantic relationships whilst undercover. During his time undercover, he infiltrated environmentalists and other groups such as Dissent!, Rising Tide, Saving Iceland, Workers Solidarity Movement, Rossport Solidarity, Climate Camp, Climate Justice Action and others.
During his time undercover he worked in Ireland, Germany, Spain, Denmark, France, the USA, Italy, and Iceland. Whilst undercover, he pursued romantic relationships with three different people; one that lasted 8 months but continued to befriend this person for the following five years, a three year relationship with another and a six year relationship with another.
The officers with whom women had relationships were all part of the Metropolitan Police Service, with some being part of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) and others part of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU).
The spying by undercover police officers lasted for decades, all the way back to the 1980s. Two children were fathered by an undercover police officer with a woman who did not know his real identity.
Mark Kennedy was part of a militant environmentalist group that sought to take over the Radcliffe-on-Soar coal-fired power plant and shut it down for a week in protest. Using a recording device in his Casio watch, he recorded conversations between activists planning this. He was fully authorised to commit the same crimes as the activists in order to maintain his cover. On the 13th April 2009, 114 people were arrested near the plant. Of those, 26 were charged, with 6 of them denying they were party to the alleged conspiracy.
The Crown Prosecution Service were aware of Mark Kennedy’s status as an informant, and had received evidence in 2009 that could have exonerated the six people that were convicted with conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass that had originally denied their involvement, in the form of conversation recordings from Kennedy’s Casio watch.
However, these recordings were never disclosed to the court by the prosecution, the prosecutors in the Radcliffe-on-Soar power station case being Ian Cunningham and Felicity Gerry. It was not discovered until two years after the arrest of the protesters that the police had handed the CPS this evidence at the time of the hearings. In addition, it was never disclosed to the court by the prosecution that Mark Kennedy was a police informant, which, again, was known to the two prosecutors that were handling the case. An IPCC inquiry stated directly that “It was on 5 January that Ms Gerry, having seen the transcript document [of Mark Kennedy’s recordings that exonerated the six deniers], believed it to support the defence of the six deniers and so telephoned Mr Cunningham. They agreed to offer no evidence for the trial of the six deniers.” This meant that the CPS prosecutors had withheld evidence from lawyers for the defence that they knew about for the entire duration of the trial - which is perversion of the course of justice — and when the allegations by the police that the CPS suppressed evidence surfaced in the Guardian, it resulted in senior judges finding that the CPS had withheld evidence and the 26 people’s convictions were overturned.
That was just the Radcliffe-on-Soar case. This also happened in two other trials involving Mark Kennedy. The other was the case in 2009 of the hijackers of a coal train heading to Drax power station in Selby, North Yorkshire, a case that resulted in the convictions of 29 people. In that case too, it was found that evidence that Mark Kennedy was a police informant was withheld from the court by the CPS. There was also another case, the details of which were not disclosed to the public, involving accusations of conspiracy to supply drugs that was also abandoned because of CPS withholding evidence from the court.
However, this is the moment where we examine Keir Starmer’s response to this. In response to the revelations that the CPS had withheld evidence that Mark Kennedy was a police informant to the court, he commissioned an independent inquiry chaired by retired judge Sir Christopher Rose into the events. The inquiry specifically was into the Radcliffe-on-Soar case, and not the Drax power station case. The report found that “at any stage of this prosecution, there was any deliberate, still less dishonest, withholding of information” — describing the failings as individual and not institutional.
However, critics of the inquiry’s findings at the time, including the lawyer for the defence in the Radcliffe-on-Soar case, Michael Schwarz (who had experience of cases involving undercover police officers as he had worked on a case involving Jim Boyling in 1996 — ironically enough, a case that Keir Starmer was on the side of the activists in) of Bindmans (an LLC with experience working with protesters), described it as “unacceptable that the CPS should produce the Rose report to hide behind”, with others arguing that the report failed to identify the “institutionalised corruption of the legal process”. Following the inquiry, Starmer ordered disciplinary action against Cunningham.
In response to the findings of the report, Starmer called for people convicted in the Drax power station case to challenge their convictions, realising that the CPS was now facing a significant degree of embarrassment and a dent to its public image.
On the 7th December 2011, Keir Starmer went on Newsnight to be interviewed by Jeremy Paxman where he told Jeremy in the (now deleted) interview that there was no evidence of systemic failure at the CPS.
Both the Radcliffe-on-Soar case and the Drax case were overseen by the same Domestic Extremism Co-ordinator, Nick Paul, who shared his office with Keir Starmer in the London CPS office. Shortly after Kennedy was exposed, Paul stepped down as the Domestic Extremism Co-ordinator and took a job at Doughty Street Chambers; after Starmer stepped down as DPP, he joined Paul at Doughty Street Chambers.
After the collapse of the Radcliffe-on-Soar and Drax trials (and Mark Kennedy’s exposure as a UCO that had cultivated romantic and sexual relationships with multiple women during his time undercover), eight women lodged a case against the Metropolitan Police and the Association of Chief Police Officers, arguing that the Undercover Police Officers had breached their human rights by knowingly and deliberately cultivating a sexual relationship under false pretences — wherein the women would not have consented to sex with them had they known they were police officers.
With regards to Keir Starmer’s statement on Newsnight that there were no systemic failures regarding Spycops — this becomes very interesting when only 16 months after he stepped down as Director of Public Prosecutions in 2013, the CPS announced they would not be pressing charges against the police officers that had deceived these women into sexual relationships. If you read Lucy Nevitt’s article at the beginning that I linked, then you know that this is par for the course for Keir’s tenure as DPP, because he issued new guidance that raised the evidential threshold for pressing charges from 50% to 60%, which led to a dramatic drop in rape cases being prosecuted by the CPS — and it is precisely insufficient evidence that the CPS cited as their justification for not pressing charges in this case.
In their decision, the CPS cited case law that courts had previously found that a man agreeing to wear a condom during sex but then failing to could be rape and should be brought to court, and that a man agreeing to withdraw before ejaculation during sexual intercourse but failing to could also be rape and should be brought to court. So it’s absolutely baffling that the CPS didn’t consider that deceiving women into, in some cases, years-long sexual relationships (and in the case of Jim Boyling, fathering two children during that time) under false pretences with testimony from the officers like Mark Kennedy that they had entered into these relationships was enough evidence (of which a lack of was their justification for not pressing charges) to prosecute. If this does not suggest the kind of systemic failure that Starmer had denied existed on Newsnight three years prior, then I don’t know what does.
And it would only be a year later that the Metropolitan Police would issue an apology and acknowledge that the relationships the UCOs had had were abusive, deceitful and a breach of their human rights and freedom from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment.
Keir Starmer’s role in the 2011 Riots cannot be disputed; his push for swift prosecutions was condemned by prison governors and defence lawyers as resulting in potentially unfair trials by creating a system of “conveyor-belt justice” and pushing for harsher charges against largely young, poor ethnic-minority men that were rioting in response to a police shooting of a black man. This resulted in downright cruel punishments, informed by the political context of the riots, such as the cases of Anderson Fernandes and Nicholas Robinson (both convicted on the harsher burglary charges that Starmer had recommended prosecutors pursue).
With regards to the Radcliffe-on-Soar and Drax cases, within which the CPS withheld evidence from the court regarding Mark Kennedy’s role as an Undercover Officer, as noted at the beginning of this article his employers after he was DPP described him as being “responsible for all criminal prosecutions in England and Wales”, which means that in these repeated failures of the CPS to disclose evidence as DPP he was irresponsible at best — even if he wasn’t personally overseeing the cases or prosecuting the case himself, he is still responsible in part for what happens in his organisation with regards to criminal prosecutions the same as how the head of any organisation is in part responsible for the failings and successes of that organisation. He did the right thing in ordering an independent inquiry but considering the actions by the CPS in the years following, I’m deeply sceptical of Christopher Rose’s findings, as are others who campaign against the use of police surveillance. And then finally, it was his guidance that he issued on raising the evidential threshold for rape cases in 2011 that led to the CPS choosing not to prosecute these undercover officers who deceived these women into long-term romantic relationships in 2014, 16 months after he left his post as DPP.
And as a final note, at the time I’m writing this there is currently a major protest as part of the #BlackLivesMatter movement ongoing in London right now, as well as across the world. In 2012, Starmer issued charging guidance on protesters that made it easier for peaceful protesters to be charged as non-peaceful. The guidance included that face coverings and wearing items considered to offer body protection were indicative of anticipation of violence and thus intent to cause “trouble and disorder” — so if you wore something over your mouth or eyes to protect yourself in the event you were hit with tear gas by police officers at a protest, he made it so that you wearing those coverings could be considered as intent to cause trouble and disorder. He also made it far more likely that people “caught with a weapon at the time of the offence” would be prosecuted, which sounds fine on paper — until you realise he didn’t define “weapon”. This can produce cases such as what happened the year prior to the issuing of this guidance, where Frances Fearnie was sentenced to 12 months in a young offenders institution for throwing two placard sticks that didn’t hit anyone — a prosecution also overseen by Starmer’s CPS.
On the left, we must absolutely hold this man accountable for his past record as Director of Public Prosecutions, and demand answers and explanations for these things; especially in the climate following the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements. It is simply not good enough that Labour members be expected to campaign for this man to be Prime Minister in 2024 without answers to these questions.