Great Britain. Metropolitan Police Office. Special Branch - Special Branch: a history: 1883-2006

O N 2 OCTOBER 2006 , the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police (MPSB) ceased to exist when, as part of a larger operation designed to modernise the Metropolitan Police and improve its efficiency, the Branch which in 1986 had been renamed Special Operations 12 (SO12) was merged with another unit, the Anti-Terrorist Branch (SO13), to become SO15. The move was greeted with dismay by past and present members of the redundant department, who were proud of its fine traditions and felt that the knowledge and expertise that had been accumulated and honed for well over a century were to be diluted and allowed to disappear into thin air.

While numerous books published over the years describe particular aspects of Special Branch work, there is no comprehensive history covering the whole of its lifespan, not least because the confidential nature of its work has inhibited the disclosure of some of its more interesting, but covert, operations. However, in recent years, and particularly since the passing of the Freedom of Information Act in 2000, there has been a growing tendency for some security and other official organisations to be more forthcoming about their evolution, past In contrast, the greater part of Special Branch archives has remained closed, and much of its past and recent activity has continued to be unnecessarily shrouded in mystery.

There are of course valid reasons why certain matters should remain secret, and while each has to be judged on its merit, they can be summarised as those disclosures which might:

(a) prejudice ongoing enquiries;

(b) prejudice human or technological sources;

(c) damage the United Kingdom or its relations with another country; or

(d) be not financially viable due to lack of resources or manpower.

Most government papers on which a time restriction has been imposed are available after thirty, seventy or 100 years. The Metropolitan Police has resisted disclosing many documents even after the expiry of such periods and this has made the task of historians more difficult. The primary sources cited in this book are all within the public domain; they include the few Special Branch reports that have been released, contemporary news reports and documents sent by the Branch to the Security and Intelligence Services, the Cabinet Office, the Home Office and the Foreign Office, and subsequently released by them. Together they show the substantial contribution to the security of the state made by the Special Branch during its lifetime. We have also drawn on a number of interesting articles by writers on the internet and, inevitably, on the recollections of former members of the MPSB. No single book could adequately cover the vast number of cases with which the Branch was involved, but we hope that the examples we have been able to give will illustrate how the Branch helped to enable the government to distinguish between those who sought to destroy the state and those who merely wished to express a different political view about how it should be governed.

In the early part of the book, we follow the fortunes of this unique part of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) from its inauspicious birth in Queen Victorias reign, describing the ever-widening range of its responsibilities and activities during the challenging times of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and concluding in the later chapters with its loss of identity and eventual demise in the massive reorganisation of the Metropolitan Police to cope with a new type of terrorist threat at the beginning of the twenty-first century.