As I’ve written before, the danger with all the scandal over the undercover police ‘spying’ on the activists is that the focus is on the wrong thing.

At the moment, horror of horrors, it seems some of these undercover cops were getting a bit close with the people they were supposed to be monitoring. To the point where “Undercover policeman married activist he was sent to spy on” – except, when you actually read the piece, the implication of the headline and the facts themselves are at odds. He didn’t marry the woman whilst he was undercover – rather, after he left the work he contacted the woman a year later, TOLD her he had been an undercover policeman and only then did they get married. The headline isn’t exactly a lie, it just implies something different than the reality.

But, the big problem here, in my opinion, is not that they got too close. I mean, if you live and ‘work’ with a group, you get close – you really have no choice. The dividing line between the reality of what you are actually doing and what you’re supposed to be doing will blur. To be really convincing, NOT to have a relationship with someone you like would be the unrealistic and unreal thing – possibly leading to you being ‘found out’!

No, the real problem is the lies. The lies by the cops involved. The lies that must have been made in court. And then there is the lies made by the Chief of Police to parliament.

It’s the lies that are the worst of it. I mean to say, if you cannot trust the police to tell the ‘truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ (since they are supposed to be the law enforcement group), then one has to wonder if there is any point in them?

And so, how can this be justified, when, as it was being said by a person that we are supposed to trust, he knew it was untrue.

“We had no plain-clothes officers deployed within the crowd. It would have been dangerous for them to put plain-clothes officers in a crowd like that.

“The only officers we deploy for intelligence purposes at public order are forward intelligence team officers who are wearing full police uniforms with a yellow jacket with blue shoulders. There were no plain clothes officers deployed at all.”

They are touting it as ‘false information’. False information! How dare they! Let us call it was it is. It’s a downright, deliberate lie.

The police cannot be, nor should be in future, trusted to tell the truth. If the ‘top man’ can tell blatant lies then it goes to the very heart of the police – and it’s a very, very sad day. I remember when I was thinking of becoming a magistrate, that the most important thing was that you were to support the police and what they tell you. I believed in that, too, but if I were a magistrate now, I would have very serious doubts about anything the police were to tell me and I would tend to err on the side of the defendant. No longer would a policeman’s word be enough – in fact, I would have to question everything that they said that was not backed up by irrefutable hard evidence.

The police are liars and, if there were a confidence vote, mine would go against them. This is a shame for those of the police (and, surely, there must be some) who are not liars. But then, guys and gals, if your top man can lie so openly and brazenly, what chance do you have?