Latest news with #KateWilson
Otago Daily Times
4 days ago
- Politics
- Otago Daily Times
Music proposed as way to calm bus hub conduct
Music could be used to soothe savage behaviour at Dunedin's city centre bus hub, a regional councillor has suggested. Cr Kate Wilson said she was not suggesting following the lead of former speaker Trevor Mallard, who blasted music in an attempt to deter protesters camped outside Parliament to protest government control during the Covid-19 pandemic. But she questioned the absence of music as one of the "actionable insights" contained in Collective Strategy principal consultant Angela Davis' 29-page report on developing and refining the approach to safety in the central city. "Sound can be very calming," Cr Wilson said. "We often build 'traffic calming' areas into design, but we don't do 'people calming'." She said she was "intrigued" the report had not canvassed the concept, which she understood was used in hospitals. Council regional planning and transport general manager Anita Dawe said it appeared not to be one of the strategies used elsewhere, which Ms Davis examined in the report. "I do know it's successful in supermarkets — it changes shopping behaviour," Ms Dawe said. The Otago Regional Council's public and active transport committee yesterday received the report, commissioned by the council for the central city advisory group — the multi-agency group created in the wake of the fatal stabbing last year of 16-year-old Enere McLaren-Taana. Cr Alexa Forbes, who chaired yesterday's committee meeting, said the report appeared focused on "preventing crime through inclusion and visibility". "It doesn't actually rule out sound, or music." Council chairwoman Gretchen Robertson said there were benefits to working on safety issues with other agencies in a collaborative way. It was a "privilege" for the regional council to run public transport, and the council wanted public transport to be "welcoming and [a] preferred mode of travel", she said. The council had taken a close look at what it could do in the short term to improve safety and had taken "well reported" steps to improve safety at the bus hub. But the report also contained statistical analysis showing the bus hub was not the only problematic area in Dunedin's city centre. The report revealed most documented "victimisation" in the city centre occurred very early on Sunday morning. " I don't think that's a youth issue," Cr Robertson said. "This is a whole-of-community issue. "I think it requires collaboration," Cr Robertson said. "It requires looking at the hub. "It requires looking broader than that as well to the central city." Council chief executive Richard Saunders suggested there was more of a leadership role for the Dunedin City Council in safety issues than the regional council. "The issues largely arise in public space, which are the responsibility of the territorial authorities," Mr Saunders said. "So they have a critical role to play in the management of that public space and any bylaws that may seek to change behaviours in that space. "The fact that the group is focused on inner-city safety, not bus hub safety, speaks to the role of DCC in terms of that overall management of that public space through the city. "They won't achieve anything on their own, but the leadership, I think, is quite a critical piece. "And I suspect the reference in here points more to leadership in the public space than it does within the transport network." The city council has been approached for comment.
The Independent
25-05-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
We had a 12-month romance. Then I found my boyfriend was really an undercover cop sent to spy on me
It had been a 12-month-long whirlwind romance that ended amicably, but little did Kate Wilson know a phone call six years on would change her life forever. Ms Wilson was in her mid-twenties when she met who she believed was Mark Stone at an activist meeting in Nottingham in 2003. The pair hit it off and began a romance which lasted over a year - but it was all a lie. Mark Stone was actually Mark Kennedy. An undercover police officer sent by the now-disbanded National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) to spy on an activist group Ms Wilson was associated with back in the early 2000s. Speaking at Wales' Hay Festival, which The Independent has partnered with once again, Ms Wilson described the impact of the immense invasion of privacy and her fight for justice. 'I met Mark at the end of 2003, after he shown up in the summer and befriended some of my friends who were living in Nottingham,' she said. 'We had an awful lot in common. He even liked country music which was pretty much unheard of in the circles I was in. He said he was from Battersea and from a broken home. 'He used to get emotional saying how his mother had brought up two sons on her own - but none of it was true.' When the relationship ended, the pair kept in touch, with Kennedy visiting Ms Wilson abroad in Barcelona and Berlin. They remained friends until years later, when she got a phone call from another woman Kennedy had been in a relationship with for six years, telling her that he had been an undercover police officer the entire time. 'We were really close friends right until I got the phone call. A friend of mind said 'Mark's a cop, we've got the proof and we're going public and I don't want you to find out from the internet,'' she said. Kennedy, who resigned from the Met in 2010, had sexual relationships with as many as 10 other women while undercover. Ms Wilson's revelation led to legal action against the Met and the National Police Chief's Council (NPCC), both of which have admitted to a number of breaches of Ms Wilson's human rights and apologised for the 'hurt and damage' the intelligence operation caused. In 2021, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) ordered the Met Police and NPCC to pay a total of £229,471 to Ms Wilson 'by way of just satisfaction for the breaches of her human rights'. She is one of 60 victims of the spycops scandal. Taking place over more than 40 years, from 1968 to at least 2010, the operation is now the subject of a decade-long public inquiry that has already cost £88m and is due to conclude in 2026. 'There is a fundamental problem with secret policing,' Ms Wilson told an audience at the culture and arts festival. 'There's an institutional problem with the fact there's no accountability, but there's also a personal problem when you take these individuals - who are mostly men - and you take them out of all of the normal social controls that make people behave decently. 'They give them new names, they give them a mask, they tell them no one will ever find out who they were or what they did. 'You remove them from their families and give them a whole bunch of power over a group of people - and horrific things happen.' She sat down to discuss her ordeal with investigative journalist Oliver Bullough in a wide ranging talk at Hay Festival about her new book Disclosure: Unravelling the Spycops File. 'I'm doing alright now but there was some very dark moments,' she said. 'When it first happened I believed that not trusting was a good thing. I thought I had been really naive and trusting was a bad thing. I kind of wore my distrust like a badge of honour. 'I think one of the most important things to me about rebuilding trust is realising that that you can't have a community without trust and actually working to rebuild that stuff because its such an important part of what we do.' Addressing Ms Wilson's case previously, Helen Ball, the Met's Assistant Commissioner for Professionalism, said: 'It is important to note that since Mark Kennedy's deployment there has been enormous change in undercover policing, both in the Met and nationally, and I want to be clear that this case in no way reflects modern-day undercover policing.' Chief Constable Alan Pughsley, the National Police Chiefs' Council lead for undercover policing, also commented on the 'significant changes' to the way undercover policing is conducted. 'The selection and training of all undercover officers have been standardised and is licensed by the independent body, the College of Policing,' he said. The Independent
The Independent
24-05-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
How I discovered my partner was an undercover police officer sent to spy on me
It had been a 12-month-long whirlwind romance that ended amicably, but little did Kate Wilson know a phone call six years on would change her life forever. Ms Wilson was in her mid-twenties when she met who she believed was Mark Stone at an activist meeting in Nottingham in 2003. The pair hit it off and began a romance which lasted over a year - but it was all a lie. Mark Stone was actually Mark Kennedy. An undercover police officer sent by the now-disbanded National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) to spy on an activist group Ms Wilson was associated with back in the early 2000s. Speaking at Wales' Hay Festival, which The Independent has partnered with once again, Ms Wilson described the impact of the immense invasion of privacy and her fight for justice. 'I met Mark at the end of 2003, after he shown up in the summer and befriended some of my friends who were living in Nottingham,' she said. 'We had an awful lot in common. He even liked country music which was pretty much unheard of in the circles I was in. He said he was from Battersea and from a broken home. 'He used to get emotional saying how his mother had brought up two sons on her own - but none of it was true.' When the relationship ended, the pair kept in touch, with Kennedy visiting Ms Wilson abroad in Barcelona and Berlin. They remained friends until years later, when she got a phone call from another woman Kennedy had been in a relationship with for six years, telling her that he had been an undercover police officer the entire time. 'We were really close friends right until I got the phone call. A friend of mind said 'Mark's a cop, we've got the proof and we're going public and I don't want you to find out from the internet,'' she said. Kennedy, who resigned from the Met in 2010, had sexual relationships with as many as 10 other women while undercover. Ms Wilson's revelation led to legal action against the Met and the National Police Chief's Council (NPCC), both of which have admitted to a number of breaches of Ms Wilson's human rights and apologised for the 'hurt and damage' the intelligence operation caused. In 2021, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) ordered the Met Police and NPCC to pay a total of £229,471 to Ms Wilson 'by way of just satisfaction for the breaches of her human rights'. She is one of 60 victims of the spycops scandal. Taking place over more than 40 years, from 1968 to at least 2010, the operation is now the subject of a decade-long public inquiry that has already cost £88m and is due to conclude in 2026. 'There is a fundamental problem with secret policing,' Ms Wilson told an audience at the culture and arts festival. 'There's an institutional problem with the fact there's no accountability, but there's also a personal problem when you take these individuals - who are mostly men - and you take them out of all of the normal social controls that make people behave decently. 'They give them new names, they give them a mask, they tell them no one will ever find out who they were or what they did. 'You remove them from their families and give them a whole bunch of power over a group of people - and horrific things happen.' She sat down to discuss her ordeal with investigative journalist Oliver Bullough in a wide ranging talk at Hay Festival about her new book Disclosure: Unravelling the Spycops File. 'I'm doing alright now but there was some very dark moments,' she said. 'When it first happened I believed that not trusting was a good thing. I thought I had been really naive and trusting was a bad thing. I kind of wore my distrust like a badge of honour. 'I think one of the most important things to me about rebuilding trust is realising that that you can't have a community without trust and actually working to rebuild that stuff because its such an important part of what we do.' Addressing Ms Wilson's case previously, Helen Ball, the Met's Assistant Commissioner for Professionalism, said: 'It is important to note that since Mark Kennedy's deployment there has been enormous change in undercover policing, both in the Met and nationally, and I want to be clear that this case in no way reflects modern-day undercover policing.' Chief Constable Alan Pughsley, the National Police Chiefs' Council lead for undercover policing, also commented on the 'significant changes' to the way undercover policing is conducted. 'The selection and training of all undercover officers have been standardised and is licensed by the independent body, the College of Policing,' he said. The Independent has partnered with the Hay Festival once again to host a series of morning panels titled The News Review, where our journalists will explore current affairs with leading figures from politics, science, the arts and comedy every morning.
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- The Guardian
Spies, lies and betrayal: my ruinous relationship with an undercover cop
In February 2004, Kate Wilson – then 25 and known to her friends as Katja – decided to make a Valentine's card for her partner, Mark. He was an affectionate person – he would write her poems, give her gifts, text her love messages – and she wanted to reciprocate in some way. 'He was quite demonstrative and I was not. That was a little bit awkward for me,' she says. 'The gesture of making a card for Valentine's Day, which to my anarchist self was soppy and commercial, was a big deal.' More than a decade later, Wilson read the incident back, as recorded in a police log: Sunday 15th February. 19.37 Call from Source who has received a Valentines card from Katja. This has put Source's mind at rest re the challenges about being an undercover/informant. For the entire course of Wilson's 16-month relationship with 'Mark Stone' – who she now knows was Mark Kennedy, an undercover police officer – their conversations, weekends away, gifts, lunches, dinners and family events were reported by him (the 'Source') to a police handler and duly logged. A trip to Ikea with her parents: 'Call from Source who has left Ikea with a vehicle full of furniture and mattresses on the roof. The Wilson family are in their vehicle in front of Source.' His gift of a mountain bike just before a trip to Ireland: 'REASON: Ease of transport within Dublin. Provide facility for quality time to reinforce bond/relationship. Provide joint interest.' Even the death of Wilson's grandmother: 'Source believes that they may invite Source to the funeral. I told Source that from a position of intrusion we should make excuses as to why Source does not attend.' Kennedy spent seven years as an undercover police officer, infiltrating a group of environmental activists and at the same time, according to Wilson, sleeping with at least 11 women who knew him as Mark Stone. He is perhaps the most well-known of the 'police spies' brought to light by Guardian reporting, who are now the subject of the long-running undercover policing inquiry. The highly secret police policy of infiltrating protest groups stretches back decades, and targets were wide and varied. More than 1,000 groups came under its radar, including trade unions, Greenpeace, the justice campaign for murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, a branch of Hedgehog Rescue, School Kids Against the Nazis and Eat Out Vegan Wales. Deployments typically lasted years and the officers selected were often married and settled, in order to have secure bases to return to. At least 25 formed intimate relationships and four are alleged to have fathered children with women who were unaware of their true identities. Several of these women launched legal action, but funding challenges forced them to settle without receiving answers to their wider questions, or any real disclosure from the police. Only Wilson was able to pursue a human rights claim right to the end through the investigatory powers tribunal and, for this reason, she is the only woman to have received any kind of 'disclosure'. To support her case, police were forced to hand over boxes of files (more than 5,000 pages) logging much of Kennedy's undercover career. It included his relationship with Wilson and also their 'friendship', which had continued until his true identity was revealed. Wilson has now written a book, Disclosure, which recounts this mind-bending experience, seeing her life reflected through this fairground hall of mirrors. 'I'd always believed I was the centre of my own life story and this just knocks it all sideways. I'm a character in somebody else's spy story,' she says. 'It absolutely occupied my every waking moment for a good few years – and, to a certain extent, it still does.' Wilson met Kennedy in the autumn of 2003 when she was training as a translator and was an active member of the environmental advocacy group Earth First! Kennedy was deployed on Operation Penguin, then headed by Nottinghamshire police. (Later, his management moved to the Metropolitan police.) He sat beside Wilson at a meeting of a group known as Nasa (Nottingham Assembly of Subversive Activists) held at the Sumac Centre, a community space in Nottingham. Ironically, Wilson now knows that one of the Sumac's founder members, Rod Richardson, was also an undercover officer – someone she already knew, who might have briefed Kennedy about her in advance. 'As soon as I found out that Mark had been a cop, the questions started,' says Wilson. 'Was I the target of the job, a tool of the job or a perk of the job? Was he just looking to sleep with a popular blond woman 10 years his junior? It's impossible to know.' From the start, the two seemed to have lots in common. They both grew up around the Battersea/Wandsworth area of London. They loved caravans and country music. But in truth, Kennedy had been raised in Kent, and when he moved on from Wilson to his next undercover relationship, he was suddenly more interested in whisky tasting and drum'n'bass. 'They were trained in emotional manipulation, and one of the things that all the women who were in relationships with these men describe is this mirroring, where the officers really shared our interests,' says Wilson. Kennedy presented as a slightly damaged working-class boy from a broken home, recovering from a dark period of drug dealing but now working as a delivery driver. He was enthusiastic about everything – charming, attentive, curious. 'We got together very soon after meeting,' says Wilson. Within months, Wilson had moved into the house that Kennedy was already sharing with her friends. 'He was the first partner that I moved in with, so that was quite a big decision.' The relationship continued until February 2005, when Wilson moved to Spain ('Text from Source,' the police log reads, 'Katja is just pulling out of Dover'). 'I'm very lucky that I left him,' she says. 'I was very young. I wasn't looking to settle down. He made a big thing about how I broke his heart, though obviously it wasn't like that. I went on to live in Barcelona, then Berlin, and he visited me everywhere. He was one of my closest friends.' It was October 2010 when Wilson learned Kennedy's true identity. He had been exposed when 'Lisa', his girlfriend after Wilson, had found a passport in his real name and a phone with messages from his children: not only was he a police officer, but he was also a married father of two. When someone called Wilson to tell her about it, she was weeks into a medical degree at the University of Barcelona, studying to be a doctor. 'I was focused, dedicated and on this path,' she says. 'This totally derailed me.' As an experienced activist, Wilson had heard of police infiltration. 'It wasn't something I'd never thought about,' she says. 'But Mark was somebody I'd loved for a long time. I'd had dinner with him just two months before. What none of my political background prepared me for was that the principal emotion on finding out that someone was a police spy would be grief. It was as if he'd died – but he hadn't, he'd never existed. He was gone but he was also out there giving interviews.' After his exposure, Kennedy hired the publicist Max Clifford and appeared in the media. 'Watching was so strange,' she says. 'I got the impression that he wasn't sure who he was any more. In the first appearances, he'd cut his hair and appeared very strait-laced, very much 'Mark the cop'. But as time went on, he let his hair grow and looked punky. In a documentary, he appeared in an All Cops Are Bastards T-shirt.' One of Wilson's early reactions was to email him. 'You have all these questions,' she says. ''Why?' is a big one. You think, 'Well, Mark has all the answers,' but I'm not sure he did.' Part of their email exchange is included in her book, but Kennedy is vague and dishonest. One of his replies reads: 'I hope you will understand when I say that so many things never went anywhere. You and others were never mentioned by me ever … There is no black and white only a huge grey area in which I was trapped.' 'I think he's a very messed-up man who doesn't know which way is up,' says Wilson. The impact on her life was devastating. 'There was a lot of insomnia, waking early in a cold sweat, like something was really wrong but not knowing what,' she says. 'Only years later, I realised that I no longer listened to music and I'd stopped reading books. I just couldn't put my emotions at risk. Medicine is a very demanding course. I couldn't focus, I couldn't concentrate.' At the end of her first term, she failed the exams by one mark. 'The tragic thing is that I could probably have gone to the uni and got some support and time away, but how can you begin to explain this? I didn't even know where to start. Would they think I was some kind of terrorist?' Instead, Wilson left the course – and that was how she was able to pursue her legal claim to the end. Initially, she joined seven other women in a civil action led by lawyer Harriet Wistrich from the Centre for Women's Justice against the Met, in which five officers were implicated. However, all but Wilson settled with compensation and an unreserved public apology from the police, who refused to give answers and information through a policy of 'neither confirm nor deny'. The fact that Wilson had lost a potentially lucrative medical career meant there was funding for her to fight on with a human rights claim. It took years but, finally, the police were forced to surrender files; they arrived randomly, in boxes, pages upside down, passages redacted, all jumbled, in no chronological order. A team of friends and family had to help her sort through, index them and make sense of it. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Kennedy's reports, as set out in Wilson's book, is how trivial they are. ('Source is engaged 'Carol singing' outside Putney rail station with Katja, family and friends raising funds for Amnesty International.') In fact, one of the presiding judges in Wilson's case made a similar observation. At one point, Kennedy mentions activists' plans for 'an aquatic assault on ships'. In reality, this was a dozen people riding inflatable dragons to stop a ship docking for an arms fair. 'It was absolutely disproportionate,' says Wilson, 'but you can't think of this as an operation with 'higher level', 'greater good' importance. What you see when you look at the files is that Mark had a job. His handler had a job. His handler's boss had a job. And they wanted to keep their jobs so they needed to justify what they were doing. I'm sure Mark and his handler were absolutely aware how petty it was, but every intelligence report helped keep them in work. Understanding that took me quite a while.' As Mark Stone, Kennedy didn't just passively observe – he influenced outcomes. 'He was one of the core group, proposing, organising, recruiting for the actions that were then used to justify his deployment,' says Wilson. She is unconvinced by the argument that, in some contexts, undercover policing is an important tool. 'What we're seeing is that it's very, very dangerous. You're putting people into positions of power and separating them from all the social controls that make them behave respectably. They're anonymous. Their families don't know what they're doing and the people that they're doing it to are never expected to find out. 'When the police are asked if they considered the damage that would be caused when women realised the truth, the answer they keep giving is that 'no one was ever supposed to know'. And if no one will ever know, it means they're free to do whatever they want.' Wilson's legal case took more than a decade, and in 2021, the investigatory powers tribunal found the Met responsible for 'a formidable list' of human rights violations during an 'unlawful and sexist' operation. Compensation was settled the following year. Along the way, Wilson qualified as a nurse and now works abroad. Her life has changed fundamentally. 'One of the most insidious and damaging things is the loss of trust,' she says. 'Not trusting strangers is OK, but this is not trusting people close to you. It ruined my life in some ways: until this happened, I'd always lived in collective communities, but slowly, slowly, it became impossible. You can't live in a community if you don't trust people.' Her political activism changed, too. 'I don't feel comfortable going into those spaces, so my activism is more or less limited to working with victims of spy cops.' At present, much of her focus is on the undercover policing inquiry, ongoing since 2014. 'We are chipping away, getting answers, but it's a lot like getting blood out of a stone.' Although the inquiry's original chair had said that women deceived into relationships would be given the fullest possible accounts, including the man's real name, this hasn't happened. Earlier this year, one officer, known as HN1, was allowed to give all his evidence anonymously. Kennedy's appearance is likely to be next year. 'I hope he'll be truthful and help some of the other people he has damaged to understand why,' Wilson says, 'but I really don't hold much hope. I don't know where he is or what he's doing, and I don't know that he would have anything useful to tell me. That ship sailed a long time ago.' Disclosure: Unravelling the Spycops Files by Kate Wilson is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on 29 May (£20). To support the Guardian buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Scottish Sun
24-04-2025
- Science
- Scottish Sun
Chilling Asian Hornet warning as 1st nest of killer insect embryos found in UK this year
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) KILLER insect embryos have been discovered in the UK for the first time this year, according to experts. The ruthless species, also known as the yellow-legged hornet, can spell disaster for pollinators such as honey bees. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 2 An Asian Hornet nest was found in the UK this month Credit: getty 2 A full nest can eat the equivalent of 50 bees a per day Credit: getty Originating in south east Asia, the invasive hornets made its way to Europe as a stowaway and quickly became established. The embryo nest found this month, contained one queen who was preparing to multiply, was found in Langley, Kent on April 16 this year. She was the seventh queen found this year on the mainland but the first to be discovered with a nest. Last year, a total of 24 nests were found, destroyed and taken to a laboratory - where scientists studied the contents to learn more about the insects. Asian hornet queens can hibernate overwinter in the UK before emerging in the spring to lay eggs. Spring is a crucial time for the Animal and Plant Health Agency's National Bee Unit, who attempt to disrupt their breeding cycle before they can become a bigger threat. A full nest can eat 11 kilos of bugs per season - an equivalent of 50 bees per hornet per day. So far this year, queens have been found in Kent, East Sussex, Shropshire and Hampshire, according to official data, with the first captured in Shropshire in January. Jersey in the Channel Islands has also seen a significant number of queen sightings this year. Members of the public can report sightings of the hornets, which are smaller than their European cousins and have distinctive yellow legs, on the Asian Hornet Watch app and online. How asian hornets are taking over the UK Experts believe it is thanks to members of the public that they have been able to find and destroy queens sooner. Kate Wilson, Head of the Animal & Plant Health Agency's National Bee Unit, said: 'Yellow-legged hornets cause significant damage to native pollinators, including our much-loved honey bees. 'That's why APHA's National Bee Unit continues to take swift and effective action to stamp out the threat posed by yellow-legged hornets, all as part of ongoing monitoring and surveillance work to protect our pollinators. 'Thanks to increasing reports to the Asian Hornet Watch app and online, it is not unexpected that sightings may occur earlier in the year. 'We encourage the public to remain vigilant and continue to report any potential sightings to us.'
