Aziz Choudry

Dear All,

Please join us for a panel with the wonderful Aziz Choudry, Eveline Lubbers, and the grassroots activist ‘Jessica x’ for a talk on State surveillance, monitoring, and infiltration, and repression of activist movements. The panel aims to pose the question of ‘what can we learn from repression’?
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The use of secret police, security agencies and informers to spy on, disrupt and undermine opposition to the dominant political and economic order has a long history. This panel reflects on the surveillance, harassment and infiltration that pervades the lives of activists, organisations and movements that are labelled as ‘threats to national security’.

Activists and scholars from the UK, South Africa, Canada, the US, Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand have recently exposed disturbing stories of political policing to question what lies beneath state surveillance.

Problematising the social amnesia that exists within progressive political networks and supposed liberal democracies, Aziz and Eveline will argue and demonstrate how, ultimately, movements can learn from their own repression, developing a critical and complex understanding of the nature of states, capital and democracy today that can inform the struggles of tomorrow.

Jessica will then provide us with another story very close to home.

In 2017, she found out that ‘Andy Davey’, her first boyfriend was in fact an undercover officer.

He is Andy Coles, Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough until his role as spycop was exposed last year. She is still campaigning to have him step down as a Tory councillor.

We believe that to speak in Cambridge could be a very special occasion for her. Just as important would be for us to hear and learn about her story.