Did police know their informant was a paedophile?

The recent conviction is especially troubling for those who had children at Newbury Bypass protest camp

~ Helen Beynon ~

The man I now know as Nicholas Gratwick was exposed as a police informant around a decade ago. I had not given him the time of day until a couple of weeks ago, when an activist friend asked me if I’d be willing to share my memories of Gratwick with a Guardian journalist. ‘Radio Nick’, as he was known, turned out to be on trial for a range of offences connected to child abuse and possessing indecent images of children—offences that the UK National Crime Agency called some of the worse ever encountered by specialist child abuse investigators.

Shock waves ran through my old activist circles, with one question surfacing again and again – did the police who deployed him as an informant know of his behaviour? As Gratwick does not have a record for such offences dating from the time, this is hard to prove, and it is unlikely we will ever know. Yet, some activists recall police officers telling them there was a paedophile on the camps, and of course, a lack of a criminal record proves little here.

The recent conviction is especially troubling for those who had children at Newbury (both locals who welcomed Gratwick into their homes and those on the camps), or who remember how many young and vulnerable people, including teenagers recently out of care were involved.  For me, the revelations brought back some odd memories of Gratwick talking about pornography to me at a social gathering – something which, at the time, I thought was just an attempt to shock me.

I first met Gratwick the day he turned up at the Newbury bypass protests in early 1996. I was working in a little upstairs office that the campaign rented and, as usual, it was chaos. Work had just begun on the motorway that would destroy ancient woods and heaths, damage two clear-flowing chalk streams and wreck nine miles of open countryside. Camps were springing up along the route, with tree top walkways and tree houses spanning the land.

In those days when mobile phones were rare and expensive and the internet unheard of, the office was where people came for information. There would be people from the camps seeking news, new people turning up and wondering where to go and what to do, journalists seeking new stories, and a small group of us who somehow juggled all of this and kept the busy hub going.

Gratwick arrived and said he was an engineer who could help us set up a short-wave radio network—something that was invaluable for passing messages along the route of the road. He quickly got stuck into this and helping with other useful things like driving our vans. For several months, he acted as a semi-official ‘quartermaster’ helping distribute all the ropes, climbing equipment, tools and so on that needed to go the camps. In hindsight, this is a pattern of behaviour that undercover police officers also deployed to win trust and get quickly to the core of a campaign—although plenty of us who did these jobs were not undercovers of course!

At the time, Gratwick aroused my suspicions. Every morning, I would head out to the route early to see where security guards and workers were gathering for the day’s round of tree-felling. Over a couple of weeks, Gratwick kept pressuring me to get a radio fitted in my car—at the time I thought it strange how much he really wanted me to do this and had a distinct sense that he was keeping tabs on me. In the end, a kind benefactor bought me a mobile phone, but Gratwick’s insistence played on my mind.

In the years after Newbury, Radio Nick turned up on climate camps, anti-capitalist demos, in the Greenpeace office, various other campaigns and social events, including at least two weddings I know of. Like undercover officers I have known, his politics and reasons for being on protests seemed flimsy. Also, like many undercover officers, Gratwick formed a relationship with at least one young woman. When Mark Kennedy and other undercover police officers were exposed more than a decade ago, Gratwick was revealed to be not a cop, but a paid informant, acting either on his own or as part of a spy-company working under contract.

Gratwick currently awaits sentencing, but prison for a grass and a child abuser will not be a lot of fun, I suspect. As I write, the next stage of the UK’s Undercover Policing Inquiry is getting going and it feels as if most of us who have been close to both informants and ‘spy-cops’ are beyond being shocked about the depths that the state will sink to for information on environmental and social justice campaigners.

The post Did police know their informant was a paedophile? appeared first on Freedom News.