... http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10074/

... It’s no surprise to see a police agent go green ...

... what decent policeman could want to oppose such worthy aims?

... "so much of respectable and mainstream opinion in the UK sympathises with the aims of the eco-activists today, if not always with their tactics"

... "Despite their self-image as radical harbingers of change, these environmentalist protestors espouse essentially conservative and conformist views about the need to curtail economic growth and impose austerity in the name of combating climate change. This approach has won them a lot of mainstream sympathy and support." ...

... "The judge praised the defendants for their commitment to the cause, and noted that the ‘glowing references’ they had received from professionals repeatedly referred to them as ‘honest, sincere, conscientious, intelligent, committed, dedicated, caring’. M’lud concluded, sounding as if he was handing out the prizes at a posh school speech day rather than sentences at a criminal conspiracy trial, that ‘you are all decent men and women with a genuine concern for others, and in particular for the survival of planet Earth in something resembling its present form’. And what decent policeman could want to oppose such worthy aims?"

... "This case reminded me of the point that Lenin, leader of the Russian Revolution, made in relation to the police agent Roman Malinovsky, who in 1912 had managed to infiltrate the Bolshevik Party central committee and caused many activists to be not merely arrested but imprisoned or even executed by the Tsarist state. Yet in order to achieve that nefarious aim, Malinovsky had to prove himself as a revolutionary and help the Bolsheviks to set up a legal daily newspaper. Thus, ‘While with one hand Malinovsky sent scores and scores of the best Bolsheviks to penal servitude, and to death, with the other he was compelled to assist in the education of scores and scores of thousands of new Bolsheviks through the medium of the legal press’. It also seems fair to assume that if radical movements of other times discovered a police agent in their midst, their first act of retribution might not have been to tell the BBC and the Guardian how upset they were."