Undercover police spied on Camden pub union meeting

The documents also suggest intelligence on the workers was then being fed to MI5.

A recently declassified file attributes the information to “a secret and reliable source” – but the Undercover Policing Inquiry has labelled it as being written by a known undercover officer.

The spy cop provided a detailed write-up of discussions between members of various unions at the Cock Tavern in Phoenix Road, Euston.

The document includes a list of Metropolitan Police Special Branch reference numbers, showing the force was maintaining files on numerous unions, political groups and striking workers.

They included the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR), the Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians (UCATT) and civil rights groups like Anti-Fascist Action and Newham Monitoring Project.

The meeting at the Cock Tavern was to discuss the sacking of blacklisted construction workers from a Surbiton building site.

The sacked workers had been slapped with a High Court injunction banning them from picketing, meeting or even talking about the dispute.

One – a UCATT member from Northampton called Brian Higgins, originally from Glasgow – gave a speech at the north London pub on March 4, 1986.

As he detailed the “bleak” and “difficult” situation to more than 20 attendees, a spy cop was listening in and later produced a report for Special Branch.

That report was then also stamped for “Box 500”, which refers to MI5.

But Brian died in 2019, before his long-held suspicion that he and other blacklisted trade union members had been spied on by undercover officers could be confirmed.

An undercover Metropolitan Police spy cop infiltrated and reported back on a union meeting at the Cock Tavern in Euston (Image: Published by the Undercover Policing Inquiry) Appearing before the inquiry in 2020, fellow former UCATT member Dave Smith, of the Blacklist Support Group, asked: “What possible national security threat can there be, that a dying man isn’t allowed to see a copy of a file that the police produced on him, wrote about him, in the 1990s?

“I am in touch with Brian Higgins’s family and I’m putting it politely by saying that they’re not very happy about the way they’ve been treated either by the police or by this inquiry.”

Now, four years later, the first spy cop file on Brian has finally been published.

It has been attributed to an undercover officer dubbed HN82, who used the cover name 'Nicholas Green'.

He is now dead, but the inquiry is continuing to cover up his true identity.

'Green' spied for the Met’s Special Demonstration Squad from 1982 to 1986, infiltrating Anti-Fascist Action, Red Action and Socialist Workers Party branches in Finchley, Barnet and Finsbury Park.

Brian Higgins's daughters Monica and Noelle said he had always told them he was being spied on by undercover police, but that the recently released file had finally proved him right. However, he died in 2019, meaning he never knew he was vindicated (Image: Higgins family)

More from Newsquest on the Spy Cops inquiry:

• Undercover spy cop 'organised Debenhams animal rights bombings'
• Did the Metropolitan Police help firms blacklist workers for being left-wing?
• 'I was spied on by undercover cops... It sounds like insane conspiracy theory'

Brian’s daughters Monica and Noelle said their dad had “always said” Special Branch was spying on him over his campaigning for better workers’ rights.

“It’s a bit of a strange feeling to see it in print,” they said in a statement issued through the Blacklist Support Group.

“Treated as enemies of the state, as if you were planning civil unrest or domestic terror attacks! It’s unbelievable, but shows how scared the state are of militant workers and how far they are prepared to go.

“The police saw this as politics, but the impact on our family was very personal.”

Mr Smith said: “Speaking at meetings during an industrial dispute is a perfectly legal union activity; it is not subversion.

“Despite police denials, the UK political police units were gathering intelligence on trade unionists prepared to stand up for workers’ rights.

“There is now conclusive evidence that Special Branch infiltrated trade union meetings and kept files on every trade union in the UK.

“To get to the truth of this anti-democratic state spying on trade unions, all the spy cops files need to be disclosed to those who were spied on.”

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

“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.”