Former Dagenham union secretary frustrated at spy cops inquiry

“If someone had said to me at the time that there were undercover police officers spying on my union meetings, I would have told them to shut up," says Dave Smith.

"It sounds like an insane conspiracy theory. But I now know there were at least three of them.”

The 59-year-old ex-construction worker says he was spied on for almost 20 years, beginning in his 20s.

In 2020, he found himself sitting in front of what has become known as the Spy Cops Inquiry, giving evidence.

“Blacklisting isn’t a conspiracy theory,” he testified. “It’s a conspiracy fact. And it’s a conspiracy which not just multinational companies, but the police – political policing units that are part of this inquiry – colluded with.”

Dave has been recognised as a core participant in the Undercover Policing Inquiry.

In 2009, evidence revealed he had been placed on a construction industry blacklist.

The reason, he said, was that he’d had the temerity to raise health and safety concerns and complain when wages were not paid.

As secretary of the Dagenham branch of the Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians (UCATT), he’d had a duty to raise such concerns – but it put a target on his back.

He now knows he was not only blacklisted by his industry, but also spied on by the state.

“Some of these undercover police officers were on our picket lines,” he alleges.

One, said Dave, joined UCATT’s Hackney branch and even chaired meetings of building workers raising concerns about site safety.

“He would come back from union meetings about deaths on building sites and unpaid wages and he’d taken pages and pages of notes,” Dave claims.

“He would give those notes to his girlfriend’s mum and she would type them up for him. We now know he was probably going and presenting her work straight to Special Branch.”

In spring 2025, Dave is due to appear before the inquiry a second time – but his patience with the exercise is starting to wear thin.

“It’s been 15 years of my life,” he sighs. “This all started in 2009. It’s now 2024.”

The Blacklist

In 2009, following an investigation by the Guardian, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) raided an address and seized a cache of documents which many had long dismissed as a fantasy: the fabled construction industry blacklist.

The ICO invited anybody who suspected they might be on it to apply for a copy of their file.

When Dave’s arrived, it proved what he had suspected for years: he had been blackballed from jobs on building sites.

Some people’s blacklist files included their addresses, National Insurance numbers, car registrations and even medical records.

But most alarmingly, says Dave: “You can see some of it is from the police. It’s obvious.”

In the 1990s, he helped build the Jubilee Line extension. When workers complained about a lack of fire alarms and extinguishers, that went in their blacklist files.

“Most of the time I’m complaining about unpaid wages, or toilets overflowing,” he says. “There’s a leaflet in there about asbestos that I’d given out. It’s obvious that all comes from managers on building sites.

“But then there’s some stuff about, ‘This person was observed on a protest against the National Front laying a wreath at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday’. And when we compare files, we find three people have all got the same thing.

“You’ve got to think: How is that coming from a manager on a building site? Did he just happen to be walking past the Cenotaph? And know the names of all these people?

“There’s quite a lot of stuff like that. There’s meeting records of what somebody said at a left-wing conference. That’s not a manager on a building site. That’s an undercover copper.”

A recently declassified file revealed Dave's friend and fellow UCATT member Brian Higgins had been spied on at a Camden union meeting. The file was stamped for 'Box 500', which is code for MI5 (Image: Published by the Undercover Policing Inquiry) Working with journalists, blacklisted workers have managed to identify some spy cops, as well as their methods.

“There’s like a playbook that they used; what they say and how they present themselves and then how they leave. So once you know that, you have suspicions,” says Dave.

“The downside about all this is that people are looking everywhere and pointing fingers of suspicion.”

“Bonkers”

That is a consequence of the revelations – but there were also consequences of the spying and blacklisting.

“If you were a blacklisted construction worker, you couldn’t get a job,” Dave testified in 2020.

“When other workers were taking their kids to Disneyland, we were defaulting on our mortgages.

“There was long periods of unemployment which affected not just us but our families. The wives of blacklisted workers have talked about getting two or three jobs in order to pay the bills; not being able to send the kids on school trips; not being able to buy the kids trainers.”

Some blacklisted workers, Dave testified, took their own lives.

The thought that police officers were in any way complicit disgusts him, but so too does the way in which the inquiry seems to him to be bending over backwards to spare their blushes.

Spy cops already named online and by media outlets are still being anonymised.

“It’s bonkers,” he says.

As the inquiry recently began hearing embarrassing evidence – including that an undercover police officer planted a bomb in a shop – transparency was rolled back.

“It’s meant to be a public inquiry,” Dave complains. “It started out in the Royal Courts of Justice with a huge public gallery, where lots of people could get in.

“Now it’s in the International Dispute Resolution Centre. You would be lucky to get 20 people in the public gallery. You have to register in advance.

“For a short period of time they live streamed everything and then you could watch the evidence hearings back. But the judge has just declared there will be no live streaming for the next four weeks. There’s only a transcript – an edited transcript – that’s put online five days after the hearings.

“All these coppers were abusing people’s human rights for years, but now they’re being given reporting restrictions to protect their family lives.  

“So the police’s human rights are more important than the human rights of all the people they spied on.”

Worse still, says Dave, the state was wasting time spying on construction workers with progressive politics in an era defined by neo-Nazi marches and attacks.

“The racism embedded throughout all of this is absolutely appalling,“ he says. “Some of the reports are using racist and antisemitic and homophobic language about the people they are spying on.

“These undercover units were even spying on family campaigns for racist murders. Doreen and Neville Lawrence [parents of Stephen] are not criminals. Their son was murdered by racists. Why are the police spying on them?”

“Farcical”

“It’s such a big scandal, but it’s so downplayed,” says Dave. “Phone hacking was everywhere for ages. Hugh Grant seemed to be on TV every other night for about three years.

“This is about normal, working-class people who were fighting for their rights and for a better world, or fighting because their son was murdered by racists, and the police were spying on them – and it barely makes the papers.”

Dave Smith, of the Blacklist Support Group, said it was 'bonkers' that spy cops, already named online and in media reports, were still having their identities covered up by the Undercover Policing Inquiry (Image: Charles Thomson)

More from Newsquest on the Spy Cops inquiry:

• Undercover spy cop 'organised Debenhams animal rights bombings'
• 'Dad always said he was being spied on... It's strange to see it in print'
• Did the Metropolitan Police help firms blacklist workers for being left-wing?

He testified in 2020: “If the purpose of spying on us which has been dressed up all the way through this is to stop public disorder and serious criminality; then we’ve had three undercover police officers spying on us for over ten years – why were none of us arrested?

“It’s not about stopping public disorder. It’s about spying on people that the British state consider to be inconvenient to them. And that means left-wing trade unionists.”

Eight years into the inquiry, says Dave, he and others are still awaiting disclosure of their police files, to see the full extent of the spying.

“They promised us our files when we first started,” he says. “They could have given them to us years ago.

“They’re waiting until a couple of days before people give evidence. Sometimes people have been given 200 pages and then you’re supposed to write a witness statement responding and then go in the witness box in a public inquiry within two weeks. It’s farcical.”

In the past few weeks, a file has finally been declassified and published showing Dave's friend and fellow UCATT member Brian Higgins was spied on by an undercover officer at a Camden union meeting.

But it was released more than five years after a terminally ill Brian pleaded to see his files, meaning he died not knowing for sure that documents existed which vindicated his long-held belief that he had been spied on.

Dave appreciates that the inquiry has a huge amount of material to process, but suspects the delays are in part due to the anonymity granted to spy cops, whose names are redacted from every page before release.

Asked by Newsquest, the inquiry confirmed he was right.

“The work of the inquiry is vast in scale, covering over 50 years of undercover policing in England and Wales,” a spokesperson said.

“Nearly 250 groups and individuals have been designated core participants and we have received more than one million pages from the Metropolitan Police Service alone.

“Prior to being released, each of these documents must be reviewed for any security and privacy restrictions.

“The inquiry aims to be as open and transparent as possible. The default position for all core participants and witnesses is that they do not receive any anonymity. However, whether civilians or former undercover officers, they are entitled to make applications for anonymity.”

The Standard reported that Peter Skelton KC, acting on behalf of the Met, told the inquiry in July many of the political and social groups spied on in the 1980s and early 1990s were unnecessarily targeted.

Mr Skelton said: “The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) wishes to acknowledge that in many cases, the value of the intelligence produced during long-term, open ended deployments by SDS officers did not justify the duration and depth of their intrusion into the private lives of those with whom they had contact.”

He also said the Met apologised for the "discriminatory policing" used in spying on anti-racism campaigns.