The Metropolitan Police destroyed secret files, before they could be seen by the Spycops inquiry. John Rees reports 

In a shocking revelation during the Spycops public inquiry, the police have admitted that they destroyed files relating to the Stop the War Coalition, the National Union of Mineworkers and a number of individuals including leading lawyer Michael Mansfield KC.  

The Metropolitan Police Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) spied on campaigners for decades, and the public inquiry was set up when it was revealed that the SDS spied on the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence. 

It has already heard testimony from victims of police spies, including women activists with whom undercover police officers fathered children and conducted relationships without revealing their true identity.  

The interim report of the inquiry under Sir John Mitting has reported that the SDS should have been wound up almost as soon as it was established in the 1970s. 

The new revelation, just released by the inquiry, shows that the Metropolitan police deliberately destroyed secret files before they could be seen by the inquiry. 

These included reports on the Stop the War Coalition, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Fire Brigades Union, the National Union of Mineworkers, the building union UCATT, the Jean Charles de Menezes Campaign, as well as former MP Dave Nellist and top KC Michael Mansfield. 

No one knows how much information was destroyed and so the inquiries contention that most of it will be in other files to which it has access is simply unprovable.  

Even the Metropolitan Police had to admit to the inquiry that it was a ‘significant failure’ to destroy the files without allowing the inquiry to access them first, and without telling the inquiry that the files were being destroyed. 

The inquiry is ongoing and is currently hearing evidence from SDS manager Bob Lambert, who, after his career as a police spy, reinvented himself as an expert on police relations with the  Muslim community.