PRESUMED GUILTY

A note dropped through the letter-box last week from the British Home Secretary Michael Howard, telling me that I’m not welcome at his place any more, which was a surprise and a sore disappointment, since not only has there been a cease-fire in the meantime but I was welcomed in by kind strangers the last time I called.

The particular place of Howard’s that I’m now told to steer clear of is Full Sutton prison in Yorkshire where Patrick McLaughlin from Derry is still held, doing life with a 20-year minimum for a bombing conspiracy in London is 1985. When I called at the prison to see him a few months ago prison officials were helpful and genial and seemingly interested in my view that Patrick is innocent and shouldn’t be there at all.

I wrote a couple of articles about Patrick’s case after seeing him, including one here in Hot Press. But now a cryptic note from the prison tells me that the Home Office has banned me from seeing him again. They don’t give a reason, and under law they don’t have to. But I reckon there’d be a welcome on the Full Sutton mat for me still if I’d written that Patrick was guilty as hell and if I’d held up his Old Bailey trial as a model case of justice being seen to be done.

With all his other worries and reasons not to be cheerful, Patrick won’t be especially downcast at being deprived of my rambling conversations. But the fact that we can’t discuss the case directly will make it harder to put together a pamphlet we’d planned about his trial, which we had hoped to publish later this year.

He had another set-back recently, too, when two women who had been in his company around the time of the bombing and who now live in Donegal made it clear through their local TD Mary Coughlan that they are unwilling to go back to London to testify on his behalf. The two were “terrified”, Ms. Coughlan told the Derry Journal, believing that they are under threat from the INLA to keep quiet.

I don’t believe they have any real reason for fear, but if they see it differently they’re scarcely to be blamed for wanting to keep well away. It’s far from certain anyway what value to Patrick their evidence would have been. But even so, in the absence of any other clear way forward, the small group of relatives and friends who have been campaigning for Patrick had put great emphasis on the Donegal women and the possibility of their evidence helping to convince the Home Office to refer the case back to the Court Of Appeal.

Says Patrick’s sister Geraldine, “In a way we knew this would happen. We’ve had too many slaps in the face at this stage to expect anything to go right for us.”

It hasn’t been easy trying to highlight Patrick’s case, partly because there’s so little to it. It isn’t like Birmingham or Guildford which everybody could always remember because so many had died in the bomb blasts, and the arrests and trials had been surrounded by high drama and massive media coverage which verged on the hysterical.

But tell people about Patrick McLaughlin who is doing life for the Chelsea barracks bomb and a faraway look comes into their eyes. McLaughlin . . . Chelsea barracks bomb . . . weren’t there horses killed in that?

No. Nobody and nothing was killed in the Chelsea barracks bombing, nor a brick of a building dislodged. Maybe there wasn’t even a bomb. Explosives and bits and pieces which could have been made into a timing device were found in a holdall on a pavement in Chelsea on a Monday morning in November 1985, half-concealed in a swirl of autumn leaves. Bomb disposal officers blew it up to make it safe and weren’t capable of causing an explosion. Hardly anybody remembers the Chelsea barracks bomb because there’s hardly anything to remember.

There isn’t much to remember about Patrick’s trial either, not in comparison with the bitter conflicts of evidence which marked the Birmingham and Guildford trials. Ninety percent of the story of the bomb-that-maybe-wasn’t was agreed between prosecution and defence. Apart from Patrick’s friends and relatives, very few recall the details of the Old Bailey proceedings.

Patrick had been one of 25-30 people at a drinking-party in a squat in north London on the night before the holdall with the explosives was found. He was as drunk as the next person and at some point he passed out. Maybe the device discovered in a street on the other side of London the next morning had been put together in the squat during the party, as the prosecution claimed. Patrick doesn’t deny it. He just doesn’t know.

He wasn’t beaten up or put in fear of his life by the cops to force a “confession”. Dodgy forensics were deployed against him, but nothing comparable with the elaborate forensic conspiracy in the Birmingham case. Unlike Guildford, there was no question of alibi evidence which the cops ignored or refused to check out.

As far as we know, potential defence witnesses weren’t threatened by the police. It’s not suggested that documents or statements which might have been helpful to Patrick’s case were withheld from his lawyers. He was badly damaged by verbals from one senior cop, but even that wouldn’t have been crucial had the judge been half fair.

It was the judge, a Kenneth Jones, who did for him. But that, too, is hard to demonstrate without combing through the transcript of a 10-hour summing-up and trying to match his account of particular aspects of the case with the record of the relevant evidence. Even then, it isn’t clear misrepresentation of the facts that emerges. The main damage was done by the tone of the summing up, and by Jones’ sly way with words.

One example Jones told the jury that: “He (Patrick) agreed later to stand on an identification parade and eventually he was, late on 21 December, charged with this offence and cautioned.” The jurors may well have taken this to mean that Patrick had been charged as a result of having stood on an identification parade. But there had been no identification parade. There was no identification evidence of any kind against Patrick. His offer to take part in an identification parade had not been taken up by the police.

Insofar as the brief passage of events Jones had been dealing with was suggestive of anything, it was innocence. But his wording left the jury with the opposite impression.

Almost all of the case against Patrick is like that. Hints and happenstance, implication and innuendo. There was no smoking gun which we can now prove was planted. You try to get to grips with the facts and your fist closes on smoke.

Two television current affairs programmes that I know of have looked at Patrick’s story and pulled back. “It’s hard to see what we’d hang it on,” one producer told me earlier this year and suggested that I come back to her when I’d come up with “something solid.”

It’s possible, even likely, the holdall/bomb was pieced together in the house where Patrick and the others were partying. It’s more than likely that the police picked Patrick out as a likely suspect and then routinely ornamented what evidence they could find against him. The office of the DPP selected the most easily “provable” charge, conspiracy.

It’s beyond a doubt that the judge delivered a biased summing up. And on this basis, after 11 hours of debate during which they returned four times to the court to ask for clarification of the evidence, the jury, by a 10-2 majority, found him guilty. And although nobody had been injured or a window-pane broken, Jones gave him life and laid down that he’d serve 20 years before being eligible for parole.

He’s been in now since December 1985 and as things stand hasn’t any hope of release until early 2006. His father is in poor health, his mother desperately ill. The eldest of his four children is a lively 16-year-old who misses her father dreadfully and picks minutely over the details of the case all the time, in the hope of spotting something we have all missed.

The lives of Patrick’s sisters, Valerie and Geraldine, and his brother John, and their families, are dominated by his imprisonment, visiting him, keeping up his morale, writing to MPs, TDs, councils, church-people, trade unions, journalists, attending conferences to hand out leaflets. For periods, it’s near enough full-time employment.

Patrick has been promised that he’ll be moved back soon from Full Sutton to Maghaberry, which will at least make it easier for those who haven’t been banned to visit him. And there’s always the hope he’ll be included in an amnesty. Or that somebody will come forward who does know who did it and knows that Patrick wasn’t involved, and who will be persuasive enough to convince Home Office officials that a terrible wrong has been done here.

But nothing is certain except that, whatever else happens in these parts, Patrick’s family and friends won’t be at peace until he’s free.

F F F F F

None of the schemers and clowns who have been so free with their prescriptions for the ills of other African countries recently has had much to say about the momentous events in Nigeria, where millions of workers have been on strike against a military dictatorship and an austerity programme imposed at the instigation of western banks.

The strikers are demanding the resignation of the Babangida military government and the release from prison and installation in office of Moshood Abiola. Abiola last year won a presidential election which was immediately aborted by senior military officers determined to hold onto power.

Civil servants, teachers, factory workers, market traders, students, postal workers and, most important of all, oil workers have taken part in strikes and demonstrations which have rocked Africa’s biggest and potentially richest country over the past two months. The strikes have forced Shell to admit that it may be unable to meet its orders world-wide. And they have united people from every tribal and ethnic group in a single mighty effort to secure democracy and a decent life.

In view of the near despair in which so many reports from Africa are steeped, and in view of the hand-wringing about “tribalism”, frequently referred to as “endemic”, and in view of the common implicit assumption that the mass of African people are unsuited to or incapable of democracy, a more naive person than myself might have expected not only major coverage of what is happening in Nigeria but statements of support from political groups and relief agencies and perhaps even offers of assistance from government.

But not a bit of it. Africa as victim and supplicant is what the west wants. We can handle that. Africa fighting for democracy and a decent life is different, because that fight has to be waged against western interests.

Nobody thinks of calling on Clinton to intervene in Nigeria to support the fight for democracy because the notion of Clinton backing working people against Shell is self-evidently ridiculous.

Little attention is being paid to Nigeria because the truth about democracy and a decent life in Africa emerges too clearly from what’s happening there.

More years ago than I feel comfortable remembering I went to see Chrissie Hynde indoors at the RDS and was swept away by the sheer beauty and tensile strength of her voice, and by her sassiness and strut and unrestrained girly raunchiness, and the vibe-wave of warmth between her and a compression of young women front and centre of the stage, oh and by her liveliness and loveliness and her sharp glittering songs and by every single thing else about her.

And there she was outdoors in the same place a couple of Sundays ago, the Last of the unbought Independents, after marriages and mayhem and tragedies which came in combination against her, so soft and strong and dark and sweet, singing of children and women and death and joy, and cats like you and me who got lost along the way but never lost heart, and bring on the revolution. She’s never faltered. The only adequate response to seeing her and hearing her is to whoop in celebration of her magnificence.