In April 1979, Celia Stubbs, her partner Blair Peach and fellow members of International Socialists joined an anti-Nazi counter protest of 5,000 people outside Southall Town Hall. They were protesting against a National Front election meeting there, after years of violent racist attacks on the local South Asian community, including the 1976 murder of Gurdeep Singh Chaggar.
Fourteen witnesses said an officer from the Special Patrol Group (SPG) police unit hit Peach with a baton. Taken to hospital with brain injuries, Peach died that night. Stubbs and fellow activists launched the Friends of Blair Peach Committee (FBPC), campaigning to identify his killer and hold that SPG officer and the Metropolitan Police to account.
Despite a police investigation into Peach’s death by Commander Cass, which identified SPG officers being responsible for Peach’s death, no one has ever been brought to justice. SDS reports dating from 1974-1998 revealed that at least eight spycops monitored Stubbs as she campaigned to find her partner’s killer.
Stubbs went on to found Inquest, a charity to support families seeking justice for relatives killed in prison, police and state custody. SDS undercovers spied on and reported on Stubbs’ private life and political activities through the 1970s until at least the late 1990s.
Celia Stubbs was born in Singapore in 1940 to a family that moved between Malaysia, England and Australia, and settled in the UK in 1950. Stubbs emigrated to New Zealand as a married woman.
After her marriage ended, Stubbs and her New Zealand-born partner Blair Peach moved to the UK. The couple set up home in south London. Stubbs was a social worker and Peach, born in 1946, taught English and drama at a Southall primary school.
Both were members of International Socialists (IS), later the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) , and the Anti-Nazi League (ANL).
In the late 1970s, far-right groups including the National Front (NF) launched racist attacks on people from minoritised groups. In 1977, left-wing groups and activists from targeted communities set up the ANL to mobilise anti-racist action.
Police reports dating from 1974 to 1998 were released to Celia Stubbs via the Undercover Policing Inquiry, revealing that she was spied on for at least 15 years by at least eight SDS officers – whose real and cover names were not disclosed to her.
The 27 documents Stubbs received show she featured in a spycops report five years before a Special Patrol Group officer beat and killed her partner Blair Peach in Southall in April 1979 and that police spies reported on events organised to mark the tenth anniversary of Peach’s death.
The earliest police report, dated October 1974 , noted Stubbs’ name and address, her ex-husband’s name and the fact that they had separated, having had two children together.
However, spycops reporting on Stubbs ramped up in earnest after April 1979. Stubbs wrote in her first witness statement that:
There is clear and powerful evidence that [Blair] was killed during contact with the police and I have expressed that suspicion, which later became a firm belief, since Blair’s death. I believe that was the key reason, if not the only reason I was placed under surveillance by undercover officers.
Weeks after Peach died, HN106 ‘Barry Tompkins’ became one of the first undercover officers to monitor the Friends of Blair Peach Committee (FBPC). Tompkins also supplied information about Peach’s funeral but denied being responsible for this reporting.
HN21 , whose real and cover names are withheld, said he attended and reported on Peach’s funeral, having infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party and the Anti-Nazi League , but could not say who tasked him to do so.
Stubbs went on to work in the 1990s with police-monitoring groups the Colin Roach Centre and Hackney Community Defence Association, which spycops also infiltrated.
In 1998, HN15 Mark Jenner (‘Mark Cassidy’) reported on Hackney trade unions planning a protest to mark the 20th anniversary of Peach’s death.
Spying on family justice campaigns
Celia Stubbs was spied on for at least 15 years by at least eight SDS officers whose real and cover names the Undercover Policing Inquiry did not disclose.
Stubbs slammed the Metropolitan Police for ‘improper surveillance’ that ramped up ‘while I was grieving the death of my partner and trying to campaign for justice for him’. She said:
The killing of Blair Peach is an important episode of alleged police misconduct of the most serious kind that remains unresolved.
I believe my case and the circumstances of my surveillance shed light on a significant aspect of how the police behaved in response to Blair’s killing.
They abused their surveillance powers. They deployed them not to protect the public from harm but to protect themselves from facing justice.
Celia Stubbs found it ‘extremely distressing’ to learn that the SDS and Special Branch spied on her for campaigning peacefully and lawfully to find out who killed her partner, ‘as if she was a criminal or a threat to law and order’.
Stubbs found the tone of police reporting on her ‘demeaning and dismissive’. Her closing statement noted:
Celia Stubbs was seen by Special Branch as nothing more than “a mere propaganda tool” for the left. That she may have been a victim pursuing a just cause of accountability for the Metropolitan Police killing her partner did not register with Special Branch…
[Police] interest had nothing to do with fear of public disorder or fighting crime, it had everything to do with the Metropolitan Police and Special Branch perceiving accountability and justice as a nuisance and a threat.
Stubbs slammed the failure of the Metropolitan Police internal investigation to establish ‘what happened and how Blair was killed’ and described the inquest into Peach’s death as ‘a travesty’.
The Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) invited Celia Stubbs to give evidence in December 2019 and she submitted her witness statement in January 2021. The Inquiry released 27 police reports to Stubbs, dating from October 1974 to July 1998.
In May 2022, Stubbs attended the hearing to give evidence in person. Her legal team presented her closing statement in February 2023.
Disclosures to Stubbs came from police reports dated 1974-1998, indicating that at least eight SDS undercover officers spied on her. The Inquiry withheld many officers’ real and cover names.
The documents revealed that SDS officers mingled with mourners at Blair Peach’s funeral to gather names and photographs – causing Stubbs ‘significant distress’.
When Stubbs took the stand, Counsel to the Inquiry aired police video footage of Blair Peach’s funeral, without warning her, that showed a mourner handing her flowers. Stubbs found the footage ‘extremely upsetting’ and ‘violating’. She said:
I was surprised by how upset and angry I felt. It seems they had lost all sense of the fact that Blair had been killed by police officers and that our distress about this was criminalised.
Stubbs’ closing statement to the Undercover Policing Inquiry noted:
First, that the SDS, on behalf of Special Branch and the Metropolitan Police, targeted and covertly gathered intelligence on Celia Stubbs and the campaign for justice concerning Blair Peach over a period of decades.
Second, the purpose of gathering such intelligence had nothing to do with public disorder, it was concerned solely with protecting the Metropolitan Police from criticism and its officers from justice.
Deploying undercover police to gather intelligence on Stubbs for that purpose ‘was wholly unjustified’, the statement concluded:
The targeting of any peaceful justice campaign by undercover officers would be wholly unjustified, but it was particularly duplicitous and abhorrent in circumstances that the Metropolitan Police knew full well that Celia Stubbs and the Blair Peach campaign was seeking to uncover a grave injustice and the true circumstances in which Blair Peach had been killed by an officer of the Special Patrol Group.