The recent heatwaves revealed how ill-prepared Britain remains for a hotter future – and how unequal the ability to cope with it has become, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
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The Spycops inquiry: a window on the sinister side of the British state
With undercover policing under the spotlight, these operations will continue with extra efforts to hide them from public scrutiny writes NICK WRIGHT
Students marching in memory of Kevin Gately in 1974
Extreme heat is now one of the defining public health challenges of a warming world, explains Prof IAN WILLIAMS
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Kate Clark pays tribute to Ricardo, whose life spanned the hopes of Allende’s Chile, the horrors of military dictatorship and decades of campaigning for justice in exile
Keir Starmer's early political life suggests a very different future from the one he ultimately embraced, says KEITH FLETT
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THE Spycops inquiry, more properly the Undercover Policing Inquiry, continues to let slip an occasional nugget from the mountainous, if heavily redacted, pile of documents introduced into evidence.
The focus of the inquiry is the investigation of a long period of undercover infiltration into more than a thousand political groups.
The starting date is 1968 and the attention is on two Metropolitan Police units, the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). This reflects one aspect of the secret state’s anxieties as the post-war period of growth began to falter while the freeze on politics that the cold war imposed was beginning to melt.
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