I normally begin book reviews on my blog with the tagline “For the Joy of Reading”. In this case, that would be totally inappropriate. There is no joy in this book. There is admiration for the women who had the courage to bring the case that exposed the police spies from the Special Demonstration Squad and the NPOIU which replaced it. The fact that only Helen Steel has chosen to waive her anonymity is evidence of the deep trauma that these women have suffered. There is fury at the police officers who indulged in these tactics of deception and abuse, and let us name them because they do not deserve anonymity. Their names are Bob Lambert, John Dines, Mark Jenner and Mark Kennedy, and the pseudonyms they used were Bob Robinson, John Barker, Mark Cassidy and Mark Stone. But most of all, there is contempt for the senior police officers who allowed, if not authorised, their men to prostitute themselves, not for money, but to gain access to campaigning groups, to obtain information and possibly to discredit those groups by affecting policy decisions. To say that this was reprehensible does not even begin to describe my outrage. And remember, all this was paid for through our taxation, without any transparency or accountability. Let us look at the accounts in the book. The first thing to say is that the police officers were trained to be inveterate liars, and it is not possible to believe a word that they are saying. The second issue is that the accounts in this book of what the spy police officers said is as the women who suffered the abuse remembered it. It is therefore possible that the detail is not entirely accurate. This however is an irrelevance because the police have finally admitted that the women were telling the truth. All the women say that these police spies claimed to be suffering from some kind of emotional trauma, and broke off the relationships, but did not break off contact. Possibly this is true, but as all of them did the same thing, it is equally possible that this was part of their training and was intended to keep the relationship open if they needed to renew their spying on whichever organisation was concerned. The fact that one officer behaved in this way with two of the women that he was deceiving makes me very dubious of the emotional trauma argument. But if it was true, what does it say about the duty of care by the sneior officers in charge of these squads? What is quite clear is that the trauma and despair inflicted on the women who suffered this emotional abuse was never taken into consideration. Those of us involved in protest organisations of various kinds, like in my case the Anti-Apartheid Movement, were well aware that we were being spied upon, that our phones were tapped and that police officers in plain clothes were at our public meetings, and infiltrated our local groups. Indeed, one of my friends has just given evidence to the public enquiry about this. I have to admit that we were more worried about South African police spies from the Bureau of State Security (BOSS) but we assumed that Special Branch passed information on to BOSS. I am not aware that any anti-apartheid women activists were seduced by police spies, but that does not mean that it did not happen, or that it was not even attempted. The courage of the seven women who took this case to court is to be applauded. The mendacity of the police is mind-boggling. My worry is that the success in this case will not stop women being abused in this way. The police have lied to us about this for forty years and more. I can think of no reason why they should not continue to do so. Thos of us involved in left-wing politics of any kind should always be wary. It is not paranoia. It is something we have to do to be safe.