When Dave Nellist entered parliament in 1983 as the Labour MP for Coventry South East, he became one of Westminster’s best-known socialists.
He was seen as a workers’ MP on a worker’s wage, donating more than half his salary to left-wing causes.
But within a few years, he was embroiled in a bitter political dispute inside the Labour Party that ultimately led to his suspension and expulsion.
He was associated with the Marxist newspaper Militant and his support for the mass campaign of non-payment of the poll tax.
Now, more than 40 years later, one question remains unanswered: what did Britain’s political police, the Special Branch, know about him?
It is a question that should be answered by the Undercover Policing Inquiry – where I represent Nellist as his lawyer – but they don’t seem willing to do so.
This is despite a BBC documentary, ‘True Spies’, showing that Special Branch accepted directions from MI5 to infiltrate his constituency office.
The Metropolitan Police has recently admitted that it destroyed Special Branch files which may have been relevant to the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI).
The public inquiry has not had the opportunity to decide whether they should have been preserved or not, and certainly we haven’t seen them.
Expelled
Among those documents now deemed by the police as irretrievably destroyed includes a batch of documents titled “Militant Tendency formerly Revolutionary Socialist League formerly Deane Group of Trotskyists.”
These are files directly linked by the UCPI to Dave Nellist. The timing is striking. The file was opened on the 26th September 1991, the day after he was suspended by the Labour Party.
It was also on the eve of their annual conference, which prevented him and Terry Fields (another Militant-supporting suspended MP) from attending and seeking support from delegates.
However, 500 supporters rallied outside and were led by Jeremy Corbyn MP on a march around the conference building.
Nellist was subjected to an internal investigation until his eventual expulsion from the Party in December 1991. He continued as an Independent MP until the 1992 General Election.
It cannot be a coincidence that the file origin date was the very day after his suspension.
The timing raises questions as to the use that it was put and the customers that it served, including whether it formed part of the internal Labour Party investigation.
Did the Metropolitan Police hand their files to Labour’s National Executive Committee to help with the expulsion of Nellist?
The police now accept that the material relevant to the Inquiry has been lost forever. That admission should concern anyone interested in democratic accountability.
An MP Under Surveillance?
For years, the Metropolitan Police have maintained that members of parliament were not monitored simply because they were MPs.
Yet the UCPI has already established that Special Branch opened a personal file on Nellist in 1983, the year he entered parliament. Why? No credible explanation has ever been provided.
Why also was another Special Branch file opened the day after his suspension and why have associated files now disappeared and been destroyed forever?
These are not speculative questions. They arise directly from the Metropolitan Police’s own disclosure.
Whether there is any connection between those events and the activities of Special Branch cannot now be properly examined because the documentary evidence that might assist has been destroyed.
The Metropolitan Police’s own evidence before the Inquiry makes uncomfortable reading.
In 2016 the force told the UCPI that destruction of Special Branch archive material had been suspended for the duration of the Inquiry.
That assurance made obvious sense. How can a public inquiry investigate the past if the historical record is still being destroyed?
Yet four years later the Metropolitan Police established an Archive Review Team to look at approximately six million pages of Special Branch records.
Some files were retained. Others were scanned. Others were destroyed.
Commander Dominic Murphy has now acknowledged that a critical safeguard failed.
The Inquiry should have been given the opportunity to review proposed destruction before files were destroyed.
Instead, that process was overlooked. It is now impossible to determine whether some of the destroyed material fell within the Inquiry’s terms of reference.
Stop the War Coalition and CND
The destruction extends far beyond files on one former Labour MP.
Among the irretrievably destroyed files are records relating to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Stop the War Coalition, the National Union of Mineworkers, the Fire Brigades Union and the defence lawyer Michael Mansfield KC.
Taken together, they expose something much larger than an administrative failure.
For decades, Special Branch devoted extraordinary attention to organisations that posed no public order threat.
As Lindsey German, the convenor of Stop the War, explained: “We have all been spied on for decades simply for campaigning against war, racism and inequality, which are our rights in a democracy.
“The real threat to democracy comes not from us but from a secret state which is still spying on and harassing activists. It has been at great cost financially and politically to working class people and campaigners.”
The Undercover Policing Inquiry has already heard overwhelming evidence that undercover officers infiltrated these organisations for years, reporting not on serious crime but on democratic political activity.
The destruction of files now deprives the public of part of the historical record explaining how those decisions were made.
Political policing
On behalf of our clients, we have demonstrated that political policing was never simply the work of a handful of rogue undercover officers.
The evidence points towards something far more systematic.
Senior Metropolitan Police officers received annual reports from the Special Demonstration Squad.
Government departments were informed.
Targeting strategies were approved through structures reaching beyond Special Branch itself.
This was political policing as state policy, not merely operational excess.
Whilst angry, the clients I represent do not find this surprising at all. For them whilst the British state presents itself as politically neutral, it is not.
History repeatedly shows that its institutions devote disproportionate attention to movements seeking fundamental social and economic change.
During the Cold War, socialism itself was frequently treated as a security issue.
Trade unions became intelligence targets. Anti-war movements were monitored.
Campaigns against apartheid and nuclear weapons attracted undercover surveillance.
The question is why the institutions of the state consistently regarded movements challenging established political and economic power as matters requiring secret intelligence gathering.
The destroyed files may have helped answer that question.
As Dave Nellist says: “The destroyed files may have contained information on the identity and activities of the person West Midlands Special Branch placed in my constituency office.
“More importantly, the files may have revealed how high up the political tree the decision was made to spy on an elected MP.
“From the 1960s, the Wilson Doctrine, named after the then Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, promised that an MP’s communications would not be intercepted – that is, spied on – without prime ministerial approval.
“This doctrine was specifically and publicly reaffirmed by each prime minister from Harold Wilson to Gordon Brown.
“Was that doctrine followed, and was surveillance authorised by the prime minister of the day?
“Or was it ignored, and was the decision taken at a much lower level, raising questions of a lack of political oversight of the security services?
“The destroyed files may have provided a clue. Was that why they were destroyed?”