Peter Gerald Hain was born to South African anti-apartheid activist parents in 1950 in Nairobi, Kenya, where his architect father was posted. Hain grew up in Pretoria, where both his parents were banned and blacklisted for their activism. The family fled South Africa and moved to the UK when Hain was 16.
Hain campaigned against apartheid and racism throughout his teens, initially in the Young Liberals and the Anti-Apartheid Movement, becoming a leading player in Stop The Seventy Tour and the Anti-Nazi League.
Having joined the Labour Party in 1977, he was elected MP for Neath in 1991 and served in cabinet under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. As secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Hain helped to secure the 2007 St Andrews agreement that ended the civil war. In 2003, Hain voted for going to war against Iraq. He later apologised.
In 2015, Hain stood down as an MP and accepted a life peerage. He sits in the House of Lords as Baron Hain.
Lord Peter Hain was born in 1950 to South African parents who opposed apartheid. Banned and barred for their activism, Walter and Adelaine Hain emigrated to the UK in 1966. Hain, who spent his early childhood in Pretoria, recalls waking, aged ten, to find police raiding his bedroom. Having emigrated, Hain became a teenage UK anti-apartheid and anti-racist activist.
Hain calls himself a libertarian socialist. He joined the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) aged 17 and served on its national committee until 1994, when the apartheid regime collapsed. Aged 18, Hain joined Young Liberals (YL) , rising from head of publicity to chair and then to president.
By 1969, the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) had started to monitor Hain’s YL activities, which included becoming a founder member of Stop The Seventy Tour (STST) , the non-violent direct-action (NVDA) group that campaigned to break cricket and rugby sporting ties between the UK and apartheid South Africa.
STST disbanded in 1970, having halted the UK cricket tour of South Africa. Hain went on to lead NVDA groups including the Action Committee Against Racialism (ACAR) , Stop The Apartheid Rugby Tour and Stop All Racialist Tours. He was arrested on occasion. Where Hain led, spycops followed; at least six SDS officers monitored and reported on him.
In 1977, Hain joined the Labour Party and became a founder member of the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) , remaining active until 1981. In 1991, when the ANL relaunched, he became its parliamentary officer. As MP for Neath, South Wales from 1991-2015, Hain campaigned inside and outside parliament against racism.
Peter Hain was spied on by at least six undercover police officers, sent by the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) to infiltrate, monitor and report on anti-racist and anti-apartheid campaign groups. Spycops watched and reported on Hain from the late 1960s until the mid-1990s, well into his time as a sitting MP and government minister.
The six SDS officers known to have spied on Hain were HN346 Jill Mosdell , HN135 Michael Ferguson , HN336 ‘Dick Epps’ , HN298 ‘Michael Scott’ , HN297 Richard Clark ‘Rick Gibson’ and HN200 ‘Roger Harris’.
Mosdell and Ferguson infiltrated the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM), Stop the Seventy Tour (STST) and Action Committee Against Racism (ACAR). Hain recalled neither undercover and pressed the Inquiry to supply contemporaneous photos.
Former Special Branch officer Wilf Knight claimed Ferguson was Hain’s second-in-command in STST. Hain cannot remember anyone having that role.
Epps infiltrated STST. He reported – falsely, Hain countered – that the group planned to turn violent, scattering tin tacks on sports pitches and plotting to kidnap the South African ambassador. Despite giving no evidence to verify either claim, Epps stuck to his story, perhaps telling his SDS bosses what they wanted to hear.
The 1970 SDS Annual Report claimed to have deployed six undercover officers into STST. Interviewed for the True Spies documentary, Epps said an unnamed senior officer worried that there ‘would be an awful lot of blood spilled on the streets of London, and that was the view that was held in some circles at the time within the police service’.
In his witness statement, Hain noted that SDS reports on Young Liberals and STST meetings indicated that undercover officers had infiltrated private meetings at his parents’ south London homes, meeting and reporting on his teenage sisters.
Scott had followed Hain into Putney Young Liberals. In 1972, the spycop was one of 14 anti-apartheid activists arrested for obstructing the British Lions’ tour bus. Because Scott was tried and convicted in his fake identity, the Undercover Policing Inquiry sent the case for review. In January 2023 three activists had their convictions overturned.
HN297 Richard Clark (‘Rick Gibson’) also named Hain in a report on a March 1976 Troops Out Movement meeting. Hain said he was not involved with TOM and could not remember ‘Rick Gibson’.
HN200 ‘Roger Harris’, who infiltrated International Socialists from April 1974 to October 1977, told the Inquiry that although he reported on meetings that Hain attended, he ‘was never tasked’ to report on sitting politicians.
Political policing
Hain told the Inquiry that he could not recall ‘Roger Harris’ and noted that spycops reported extensively on elected politicians. The police report on AAM’s 1973 annual general meeting named MPs Neil Kinnock, Bob Hughes, Frank Judd, Roy Prentice, David Steel and Jeremy Thorpe among those attending.
‘This minute detail into surveillance of legitimate activity of members of parliament is striking,’ Hain said. He described undercover police reporting on ‘liberal and left-leaning’ elected politicians as a ‘breach of the Wilson doctrine’. He urged the Inquiry to reveal what information UK intelligence shared with South Africa’s apartheid-era security services.
In spring 2021, as Hain prepared to appear at the Undercover Policing Inquiry, he received shocking new disclosure from the police.
In November 2003, National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) officer EN12 Mark Kennedy had filed a report that described Hain, then Secretary of State for Wales, as ‘a South African terrorist’. Hain responded:
What is it in the DNA of undercover policing that allows its officers to get such a biased and reactionary view of the world… that they can make these kind of biased and completely unrepresentative and libellous and defamatory statements about me in this instance and no doubt about others?
In his witness statement, Hain called out ‘inaccuracies’ and ‘pernicious smears’ in spycops reporting. He pressed the Inquiry to reveal who authorised SDS spycops to report on sitting MPs. Summing up, he demanded greater transparency about political policing in the UK. He concluded:
Today, I read with alarm, but no surprise, of the recent revelations of the placing of the likes of Extinction Rebellion and Greenpeace on … [the UK state’s] terrorist watch list. This illustrates why the issues raised in this Inquiry about surveillance on non-violent activity decades ago [are] so relevant.
It reveals just how easy it is for the state to drift into wholly inappropriate surveillance… Who is or is not violent or dangerous; who should or should not be placed under surveillance are critical questions for our democracy that go to the heart of freedom of expression and freedom of association.
Spycops reported deeply personal information about Peter Hain, noting that his sisters – both then minors – lived in the family home in Putney.
Years later, another report noted Hain taking his sons to creche at a Labour Party conference. In his witness statement, Hain wrote:
I do not consider myself a 'victim' in the same way that many of the people who are core participants to this inquiry are victims, This includes the women who have suffered huge damage by being unknowingly misled and exploited through intimate relationships with undercover officers; and grieving families who were spied upon at the most traumatic and vulnerable times of their lives.
But although I am not a victim I am appalled at the activities revealed in these documents. The potential threat such activity had to the struggle against racism and apartheid and the lives of those committed to peaceful democratic change is almost impossible to define.
It is a chilling reminder of how hard those struggles had to be fought with officers of our own state treating us with suspicion and without proper respect for our rights, our privacy and our lives.
As an MP, in January 2015 Peter Hain pressed then home secretary Theresa May to investigate Special Demonstration Squad and National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) practices and policing priorities and to disclose the findings in full. He said:
Can the Home Secretary think of a more grotesquely perverted case of police priorities than one where, instead of hunting down and prosecuting those responsible for the vicious racist murder of a talented British youngster, they infiltrate an undercover agent into the campaign to secure justice?
Will she assure the House that she will look personally at every undercover operation and check that nothing so dreadful is going on today?
Lord Hain applied to become a non-state core participant in the Undercover Policing Inquiry in May 2017 and in December 2019 was called to give evidence. He submitted his written statement on 3 March 2020 and gave evidence to the hearings on 30 April 2021. He received a bundle of around 70 documents, including 50 Special Branch reports dating from November 1968 to January 1995.
On 22 April 2021, Hain’s legal team presented his joint opening statement with Ernest Rodker and Professor Jonathan Rosenhead to the Undercover Policing Inquiry. The team presented a joint closing statement for Tranche One for Hain, Rodker and Rosenhead on 22 February 2023.