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'...Dixon feared that “the more vociferous of the Left” were intent on engineering “a breakdown in our current system of government and achieving a revolutionary change in the society in which we live.”
Give him “twenty men, half a million pounds, and a free hand,” he proposed, and this “revolutionary” threat could be dealt with. The outcome was the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), which would operate as part of the Special Branch until its disbandment in 2008. The SDS was to become the master of long-term infiltration, penetrating nearly every significant group on the British Left...
A high number of officers were sent into the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), with the SDS Tradecraft Manual of the 2000s still dedicating a whole section to the party...'
#read: the 'SDS Tradecraft Manual' (.pdf): https://www.ucpi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/20180319-TC-Documents_Final_Version.pdf
@jd
Aye. I have personal experience of this mob. They were very, very scary. I'm ashamed to say they scared me into backing out of direct action for about ten years.
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'...The targeted groups were concerned with justice for murdered black people, halting the mass slaughter of animals, preventing the collapse of our natural world, helping to bring down apartheid, combatting fascism, and so on. How much social progress has the UK lost thanks to these operations? How many campaigns failed, how many reforms and power shifts didn’t occur because key activists were secretly state agents? As another former undercover officer, Peter Francis, put it: “Once the SDS gets into an organization, it is effectively finished […] If the SDS had been in existence at the time of the suffragettes, their campaigns would never have got off the ground.”...'