Are you old enough to remember when it was hippies........................hippies everywhere?

Remember those cops dressed as clowns who were kicking about a few years ago? Well it turns out apparently that one of them was….a cop! More details emerge every day in relation to “Lynn Watson,” an undercover cop who infiltrated the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army. It comes hot on the heels of the tale of Mark “Stone” Kennedy, another state plant paid to spy on activists.

Let’s be clear. SSY has no gripe with people who want to dress stupidly and/or take direct action against capitalism - particularly given our own penchant for such things. The Clowns occasionally managed to use their incredible irksome behaviour to outsmart the cops and should be admired for that. We did however know that there would be coppers in their midst. No doubt they did too – given that many of them are seasoned activists. There have been a multitude of stories in the press but nothing we don’t all know anyway. But its worth fleshing out some of what has been revealed for the hell of it.

Most of it centres around the actions of Mark “Stone” Kennedy. Mark spent 7 years undercover, spying on environmental, anarchist and left-wing activists. He recorded their meetings using a modified watch containing a micro-chip which were then downloaded onto Inspector Gadgies PCs. Based on information obtained by Kennedy, 114 people were arrested and many put on trial, having done nothing other than talk about occupying the Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station. 20 were convicted of various nonsensical charges while the trial of 6 others descended into farce. The trial collapsed because the police withheld tapes that would have cleared the activists and the role of Kennedy was also crucial. It was claimed that Kennedy was prepared to give evidence in favour of the activists thus exposing the state plot to plot against the state. The collapse of the trial has led to no less than 3 totally “independent inquiries” by the Association of Cunto Polis Oligarchs (ACPO), the Independent Piggy Confectionary Convention (IPCC) and Serious & Organised Clown Army (SOCA). No doubt the police will decide that the police are bad and need to be abolished. We won’t hold our breathe.

Kennedy’s revelations in the press since being exposed have including the fact that he was basically paid by taxpayers to have sex with activists – a tactic apparently sanctioned as an acceptable form of “intelligence gathering” by his seniors. This week there was a demonstration in support of women from Reclaim the Streets , a group of London activists, among others who were conned into having sex with cops they thought were friends. The former member of the Special Demonstration Squad stated this week that promiscuity helped them to “blend in” because – you guessed it – we’re all fucking. I’d like to point out before we move on that tricking people into fucking you is not OK and in my insanely monogamous experience crazy lefties are no more or less likely to fuck around than anyone else. Obvious exception aside.

Kennedy confirmed this week that he was far from alone and that there were a network of undercover officers paid for with our dosh to check what we are doing. And more importantly, to first provoke and then fuck up any opposition to the political and economic elite. “Lynn Watson” was an activist outed by Mark Kennedy as a spy. She kicked about the Leeds area spying for a bit. She was involved in the Camp for Climate Action as late as 2008 having previously been involved in Aldermaston Women’s Peace Camp not to mention an being an Action Medic and of course, a clown. Various tit-bits from her bank details to a video of her in Clown make-up dicking around are coming out every day. But again, nothing we wouldn’t have guessed. She basically came in, made a mess and left like thousands before her.

Every state monitors and disrupts its enemies. That is in fact the PURPOSE of a state. The Black Panthers were destroyed by the CIA flooding the group with drugs, cops and paranoia. The Democratic Socialist Party in Australia counts among its members a former informant who eventually realised that the people she was spying on made more sense than they people she was spying for (I think it was a woman but my googling fails me). The façade of democracy is destroyed when the state acts to disrupt the forces who fight for a more democratic future. I can only imagine the epic boredom state plants must endure to get sketchy details of the half baked plans made by the left. We must avoid the temptation of spending all day asking where the spy is. In the end crippling paranoia is just as dangerous as the actions of the state. But it confirms that the state does watch us and maybe we should be rather more careful at times rather than blabbering our plans all over facebook or even, quite frankly via phone or email. On a positive note it makes you think that maybe, just maybe we are a threat to those we seek to overthrow. We all know they are watching…except them

In a hilarious twist, the UK’s most senior public order police officer, Bob Broadhurst, told Parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee in 2009 in relation to the G20 protest in London that:

“The only officers we deploy for intelligence purposes at public order are forward intelligence team officers who are wearing full police uniforms with a yellow jacket with blue shoulders. There were no plain-clothes officers deployed at all.”

This week he scurried back to apologise to MPs for misleading them insisting he…didn’t know. I knew there were undercover cops in London at the G20 and I was sitting behind my desk in Glasgow refreshing the BBC News page at work. The claim that the polis didn’t know where the bacon was is laughable.

In short, the entire saga brings new (although hardly shocking) light on the amount of money and time being spent monitoring what we do. Don’t be paranoid – Don’t be disheartened. I distinctly remember my last encounter with the Clown Army, at Gleneagles at the G8 when they shouting “booo…miserable socialists” at us as they passed by. An older man behind me mumbled “we’re only miserable coz we’re surrounded by cops.” Just remember there are infinitely more clowns in the cops than cops in the Clowns.