#58 A LAW UNTO OURSELVES.....

"The Law is ......a ass"   (Mr Bumble,  Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens).

The Rule of Law is the cornerstone of a civilised society, it is said, and the cement which holds other blocks together. Justice requires that people who break the law must be persuaded through punishment and rehabilitation to desist from doing it again. Sociologists agree that society would descend into amoral chaos without these limits on behaviour.  It helps if people not only obey the law for fear of punishment, but also respect it,  because it seems right, and for the protection it affords them. If it is seen not to be fair and just, people's disrespect will undermine its power over them.

Nowadays we don't hang people for stealing sheep, though we used to. So the law is not monolithic and immortal: it changes as society changes, but being an essentially conservative institution, it often lags behind social change, and contemporary public opinion. History is littered with the stories of pressure groups who wanted to align the two, to drag the law up to date by changing it; sometimes they did this by illegal or extra-legal means.

Most of us, most of the time, abide by the Law: by the spirit, if not by the letter. So we pay our taxes, we try not to harm other people, and we slow our vehicles when instructed to. It's a kind of contract, though reinforced by penalties for not complying. However, the Government and local councils do not always come through with their side of the deal. And when their decisions are simply wrong we do not get to punish them or to make them change their minds except by the slow method of voting them out.

While we get to do this every few years, it is not as democratic as we think: we have to vote for a diminishing range of policies as the major parties converge to win the votes of the middle-ground. And in between elections political parties (particularly the governing party) 'make it up as they go along', in other words they introduce policies that were never in their manifesto. Similarly with local government, who introduce 'measures' as if they were laws which we must obey, and as if they had a mandate to do so from the electorate.

To take a trivial example: did you vote for speed humps? Of course not. And you probably did not object to them to your Council because, intuitively they seemed to be a good idea. Now we find that they are not: they have not significantly reduced accidents, they slow motorists down, briefly, who then accelerate immediately - which is more dangerous, and which produces more pollution which kills more people and the planet. Of course, it has been a bonanza for the manufactures of shock absorbers and suspension parts, and for garages, and Tarmac, and roadworks companies, but that is just an unintended consequence. Fortunately we have a Government of such integrity that it would never be influenced by lobbying or political contributions from these interest groups...

Again, did you vote for a 70mph speed limit, even on motorways? Do you feel that the current policy of telling  motorists to return to the inside lane after overtaking is wise? It has become accepted, and yet 'lane-changing' (which this multiplies up, exponentially) has been recognised as the major cause of crashes since the inception of motorways in the late 1950s - more important than speed, itself. Very clever, where on earth did this lunatic idea come from? Anybody's guess. Yet law-abiding motorists hoot drivers who are doing 70 in the middle lane these days as though they were pariahs, even though there is a clear outside lane to overtake in.

These are marginal matters, but how do we change laws that are outdated or simply wrong? Equally importantly, how do we influence Government between elections to show resistance to their policies when we cannot vote them out? Protest demonstrations are the the first answer, though the mass of the population will only be aware of these events through the media, with all its selectivity and bias. We are much more aware of this these days but back in the days of CND and Vietnam protests there was a close correlation between a newspaper's political position and the numbers of demonstrators it

reported as taking part.  The police and the Telegraph would claim the lowest numbers (usually palpably an underestimate) through to the Mirror and the Guardian in ascending order (with the BBC somewhere in the middle). Violence would be exaggerated in the images (and occasionally provoked) while docile Grannies tended to be neglected. 

There is another side to the coin: occasionally, far from dragging its feet,
Government is ahead of the mass of public opinion. Brexit  would be a case in point, but the Labour Governments of 1964-70 passed legislation on divorce law reform, homosexuality, abortion, race and sex discrimination and equal opportunity. We should not be surprised, or only at the scale of their achievements: nearly every piece of progressive legislation since 1945 has been introduced by a Labour Government, despite their smaller share of power. However, the point is that a democratic vote on each of these issues, like a referendum, would have probably produced the opposite result, particularly on race. It was, after all, the era of Enoch Powell and the emergence of the National Front (who polled 25% of the votes in Bethnal Green).

As our society becomes less and less equal, and more polarised politically, we might expect more people to take their grievances onto the streets, either in protest or direct action. As Martin Luther King memorably said: "A riot is the language of the unheard". In the 1960s, when the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament's marches and leafletting no longer satisfied the more radical members of the movement, the Committee of 100 took things further through civil disobedience: mostly sit-downs in Trafalgar Square and government premises. Mass arrests were made for the first time since the suffragettes and forced their way into the headlines. A decade or so later, an unlikely source of radicalism - a movement to free a wrongly-imprisoned man ('George Davis is innocent, OK?') - committed many kinds of criminal damage with their hand-painted graffiti slogans, and stuck two fingers up at the Establishment by digging up the cricket pitch at Headingley, just before a Test Match. That worked: Davis was freed. (See 'East Enders' later in this post). Now, of course, I am not trying to incite anyone to riot or civil disobedience, nor indeed would I dream of doing it myself, I am simply recording as historical fact that it worked for George Davis, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and their followers. Fine company to be arrested with, in spirit.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.  Aristotle

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organised conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.   Frederick Douglass 

It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it.      Maya Angelou

Rosa Parks was the queen mother of a movement whose single act of heroism sparked the movement for freedom, justice and equality. Her greatest contribution is that she told us a regular person can make a difference.    Marc Morial

Sometimes charities I have donated to before call me and ask me to cough up some more: They get short shrift, I say 'no', on principle. I am a pensioner on a fixed income. I give what I can afford, on a monthly basis. It's no good asking me for more because there isn't any, or I'd be giving more in the first place. Now I interrupt them before they get into their spiel and refuse, pointing out that they shouldn't be trying to exploit the people who have already given, but concentrate on those that haven't. And I say that if they harass me again, I'll cancel the standing order, too. Then I replace the receiver. Hard? I don't think so: it's a kind of emotional blackmail of people they think are proven bleeding-hearts, and I tell them that, and that they should re-think their strategy. End of.

In the mid-70s a rash of slogans appeared on walls and bridges all over the East End of London, and beyond:  ‘GEORGE DAVIS IS INNOCENT, OK’.  Like Banksy later, the artists came and went in the night, having struck the first blow in a courageous and innovative campaign to free a wrongly- imprisoned man. Davis had received a 17 year prison sentence for an armed robbery he could not have committed. Within the space of two years he was transformed from a minicab driver into a national figure; the campaign that freed him dealt two blows to the authorities: it demonstrated the appalling reliability of identification evidence used alone, and ventilated the continuing stink of corruption around some of the activities of the Metropolitan Police. If Davis was innocent, some police officers were very, very guilty for ‘fitting him up’.

Davis had been found guilty of taking part in an armed wages snatch at the LEB offices in Ilford. He had an alibi in the shape of testimony from his best friend, Peter Chappell, that he had seen George in Bow at the time the robbery was going off 3 miles away in Ilford. There was no forensic evidence to link him to the crime or the place. The only evidence was ID evidence, with all its known flaws.  Of course you can ‘remedy’ some of these flaws if you put your finger on the scales a little, and that is what happened. At the police station where the ID parades were taking place several witnesses ‘happened’ to see photographs of the defendants before they saw them in the flesh on the line-up. It is surprising that the case was not thrown out when this emerged in court. George got 17 years, when his only previous offence was receiving a stolen record player. You do not have to be a criminologist to recognise that there is a world of difference between the kind of person who buys some knock-off gear in a pub, and one who embarks on an a robbery with guns he may need to use.

As the prime alibi witness, Peter Chappell knew George was innocent: it became his mission to convince the rest of the world.  He combined a naïve idealism, creativity and entirely selfless courage, which coalesced into an obsessional drive to get George out – at any cost to himself. (He was an altruist: his wife Shirley told me how just before one Christmas he had won £3000 on a bet. Rather than treat the family, the two of them went running round every butcher they could find, buying a joint of pork for this old dear who didn’t have anything, and another who’d just lost her husband and so on.) So he felt he didn’t have a choice, he was the key to George’s freedom, and he had to take the initiative. So with Rose Davis, George’s wife, they embarked on this campaign, the like of which had never been seen on behalf of a ‘criminal’ prisoner, but which made headlines round the world and ultimately persuaded the Home Secretary to relent and let him out on licence. Graffiti slogans, leafleting, fly-posting, demonstrations, marches, sit-downs, publicity stunts, lobbying, vigils, every single weapon in the protesters’ armoury was deployed to maximum effect, and some advertising professionals remarked that the campaign could work for their agency anytime, such was their easy command of the media. Others wondered if there were professional hands behind it as they couldn’t credit what was achieved by amateurs.

Well, some professionals came into the campaign later – not for their professionalism but their commitment – but they were not media/PR/advertising people. Until then it was entirely an East End show, with Peter Chappell as the ringmaster, Rosie as Mother Courage, and assorted members of the community, who knew absolutely nothing about protest, the workings of the law and the Government, about the media and how to handle them, but just learned it as they went along, and grew enormously in the process. Peter led from the front: compared with his stunts, the odd prosecution for flyposting seemed trivial so everyone got towed into committing these illegal acts, or similar.  Peter, in a graphic expression of his frustration, got busy driving his van into the gates of Buckingham Palace, then crossing the Channel to do the same at the British Ambassador’s residence in Paris – anything to get the Campaign and its message into the media. And he judged, rightly I think, that people would say “If he’s prepared to do THAT for his friend, Davis really must be innocent, no-one would do that for a guilty man”.  But the piece de resistance, and the watershed of the Campaign came with Peter’s idea that they should disrupt the Test Match at Headingley. Accordingly they travelled to Leeds, stopping only once, at a services, to steal some cutlery, having decided to cut up the pitch but neglected to bring any tools to do it with. Professional? Not really.

Howls of outrage from The Establishment. I don’t remember any single event in my lifetime that so much enraged The Lords, the MPs, the C of E, the political parties, the saloon bars, the sporting establishment, it seemed like almost everyone except me. But it had worked: blanket coverage on the front and the back pages, all the news bulletins, journalists queuing to interview Rosie and Peter, there could be practically no-one now who hadn’t heard of George Davis – and that he was innocent, OK?

A different initiative was the play “George Davis is Innocent, OK”, at the Half Moon Theatre, not far down the road from Rosie’s place. I went with my girlfriend (PL) in early December. It was a great production: funny, acid, satirical, rousing, moving, and the more so because it was all true, and still unfolding. It was that which made me join the Campaign, more than my slight knowledge of the case. I signed my name in the book outside and had a few words with the bloke sitting there. He introduced himself: Peter Chappell, doing what he did every night for the run of the play. Three weeks later he rang me up: they were having a vigil for George outside Scotland Yard over Christmas, would I like to come? I said yes.

Come Christmas evening, unable to eat any more, and not feeling like TV, I took off for Scotland Yard. My brother in law had lent me his car because mine was ill. I didn’t think at the time that turning up in a smarts sports car wasn’t very clever. I was given a cautious welcome, a bit chilly round the edges. So when I returned the next day I limped my ageing Mini up there, but still felt on the outside. And when I went to Rosie’s flat for a meeting the next week I had to borrow my girl-friend’s Renault 4, if anything the reception was worse. Later it was explained to me: I had activated the Campaign’s suspicion (verging on paranoia) about penetration by police informers. Turning up in 3 different cars in a week, is not something most people can do, though it’s easy for policemen. Secondly, I was educated, middle class and suspiciously free with my time (I was unemployed at the time) and so what was I doing getting involved with this largely working-class campaign in a very working class area on largely working class issues: I should be doing a good job and earning good money. I was not offended – these things were facts – but I was curious as to how I was going to win trust and get accepted. One thing helped: I noticed that on my journeys home from Bow to Stoke Newington after meetings, I was followed by another car. It was unmistakeable, and I knew the Hackney area well enough to take a couple of back-doubles each time, and see the following car blindly follow me, ignoring the main route and going twice round the houses in the process.

Why? No threat to the State, me. The police were desperate to know what stunt we might have planned next, and so they tapped some of our phones to get a hint of plans. We tested this a few times: how else could they know that we were meeting at a particular place and turn up themselves? I think there was an element of simply trawling to find us doing something illegal and add that to the charge sheet.  But so much trouble and expense to catch minnows. There is something else: to the extent that we were right about George, they were wrong. In other words if George was innocent, then some of their number would be guilty for fitting him up, and corruption charges end careers. And we had to be stopped because we were threatening to make a monkey out of the Met.                                                                                          

The other route to acceptance came through Rose. I had a car and I had time and she needed to run around all over the place and so I was able to drive her. So we spent a good deal of time together, and became good friends, in an entirely innocent way: mates would be the better word. I also came to admire her, her extraordinary strength and courage, and her willingness to put herself in situations which utterly terrified her, just because she believed in her husband. I will never forget her standing up in the Public Gallery in the Appeal Courts in the Strand, and lecturing and haranguing the three senior judges, keeping it going all the way to the door as the ushers dragged her out – and then apologising for swearing at the very end.

Did I commit illegal acts for the Campaign? I couldn’t possibly comment on that. More importantly, what I did do was a crash course in techniques of protest with a bunch of people who had finally accepted me and who I never would have met under any other circumstances, and I am very grateful for that. The Campaign effectively ended with George’s release, and that took place so suddenly and in the midst of such a media feeding frenzy, that the people who had freed him hardly got to see him.

The tragic part of the story is that George’s experience in prison, as a national celebrity changed him. I supposed he began to believe in his own publicity (or ours) and convinced him that he was now, untouchable: the police wouldn’t dare try to fit him up again.  Wrong. This time he was well and truly set up to participate in a raid on the Bank of Cyprus in Seven Sisters Road, was caught bang to rights and sent to prison for 15 years. We were all horrified and embarrassed, Rosie was devastated, and some very bent policemen got the last laugh.

30 or more years on I got a call from a solicitor, Bernard Carnell: would I be prepared to testify in George’s appeal against the conviction for the LEB robbery – he had only ever been let out on licence, never cleared – and as he was getting on, he wanted to clear the books. With some reservations, I agreed. He was cleared on the basis of ‘new' evidence which had been available to the Police and Prosecution – but not the defence – for 35 years!  Meeting up with him and Peter again at the Appeal Courts, after half a lifetime was strange but moving. George and Rose’s son, Ricky, was there, who I used to play football with in the front of their flats before meetings, when he was 8 or 9: a really nice young man.   I asked after Rose, knowing only that she’d divorced George (can’t think why). Rose had lost her daughter and she herself died of lung cancer in 2009.  And the supreme irony: George had remarried, to the daughter of a Chief Inspector of Police…..

You couldn’t make it up.