'Revolution is the only solution' http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2009/sep/05/michael-mansfield-interview
His career has shadowed recent history from striking miners and the Diana crash to the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. So at 67, is the barrister Michael Mansfield still fighting the establishment? Aida Edemariam 5 September 2009 The last time he was considering a retreat from the bar, about 12 years ago, Michael Mansfield wrote a novel. Shamelessly inspired by John Grisham, it was about a plane crash over London and a reluctant lawyer hired by the victims' relatives to take on the establishment (the secret services, the Thatcher government) and find out exactly what happened. It was never published an indissoluble difference of opinion with Random House, says the QC; "I wanted it to be fundamentally a political novel" and he went back to full-time lawyering, and eventually non-fiction. This time he's written a memoir, a "collage of recollections and reminiscences" where almost every case (chosen, he writes, to highlight a particular legal issue), seems to follow a similar arc: crime, miscarriage of justice/cover-up/whitewash, then Mansfield taking on the establishment, generally in the form of the police, but also forensic scientists, intelligence officers. Lockerbie gets only one brief mention in the book he was an observer at the first appeal, rather than a participant before being subsumed into an anecdote about varicose veins and vanity; but when we meet at Tooks, the chambers he established in 1984, there is no disguising his interest in the transfer to Libya of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. So keen is he to draw his particular line in the sand, in fact, that I begin to suspect he might be angling for a job. "Why didn't somebody like the justice minister and I'm not against release on compassionate grounds, if it's genuine why didn't someone say to the Scottish court of appeal, and if they did, why haven't we been told, 'There's a second appeal here. Why don't you expedite the appeal, to see whether you uphold the conviction, or you don't.' Now if they'd done that and they upheld the conviction, then the next stage, if he is seriously ill, which wouldn't have caused so much fuss, is you say OK, I'll transfer him as a convicted prisoner to serve his remaining days in Libya. Now, what's the problem with this? Have I missed something?" Suddenly you get a whiff of what Mansfield might be like in court bullying and supercilious according to some; incisive and un-cowable according to others, a force to be reckoned with, if not always easily quoted his sentences, outside court at least, loop and fragment and accommodate all manner of baggage before arriving at a full stop. A week later, and he has done his homework. "The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred a report of 800 pages to the Scottish court of appeal in August 2007. Now the big question is, why hasn't the appeal been heard? If it's 800 pages long, there's got to be serious questions about the conviction. Everybody has assumed that it is a safe conviction, but I believe it is far from being a solid or safe conviction." It turns out, he says, that the only witness was shown a picture of Megrahi before having to identify him formally. And "the identity parade didn't take place for 10 years! There isn't any other direct evidence linking Megrahi to the bombing." Furthermore, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission "uncovered a lot more contact between the witness, a Maltese shopkeeper, and the prosecuting authorities the American and British police than had previously been known. He was even paid sums of money by the authorities." It's still far from obvious how an unaccompanied bag containing a bomb got on the plane … and so on and so on. "Anyone following this case must have recognised that if there was a second appeal it may not have sustained a conviction, and that would have placed everyone in a very difficult position. This material requires a public judicial inquiry." Mansfield is a big man, and, at 67, beginning, like a mountain that has suffered a recent landslide, or a balloon half-filled with sand, to succumb to gravity. A large square ring on his ring finger matches his cufflinks; a chunky silver link chain is visible under an open-necked shirt (he attaches a collar and tie for the photograph). Often called a champagne socialist, he was roundly mocked for fighting Mohamed Al Fayed's corner in the Princess Diana inquest; look at the great left-wing crusader went the line, shilling for cash (not that there wasn't plenty of that, at £575 an hour). Perhaps, but apart from the implicit racism of some of the coverage, which would have denied Al Fayed a fair hearing (and the fact that Mansfield really does believe that the car crash was not an accident), this was to misunderstand the nature of Mansfield's politics, which, he readily admits, never involved bringing a pre-existing belief system to bear on the world. "Some people think that I've got this Marxism running through the body, a propagandist, or whatever they think I am in fact, it couldn't be further from the truth." His politics is, rather, reactive and incidental, shaped piecemeal by each successive case he has taken on. "People have said to me, you know, where are you in all this. And from time to time I've made some rather glib comments like, 'Well, I don't know where I am, because actually I'm more interested in where you are.' And then you identify, or not, with that position, and then articulate or express it or represent it or whatever and then when the next one is added and added, and they're all locked into that situation." Which would easily cast him as a kind of political mercenary the job of a barrister, after all, is to take on each case and fight it, regardless but he is unusual in that he has made more of it than that, and I believe him when he writes in his book of his faith in the possibility, for nearly everyone, of regret and rehabilitation; that he is mortally offended by the aridity of the prison system and outraged by abuses of authority, and while the anger he says fuels him can have a rather practiced quality, that doesn't mean it's not there. He began as a true-blue Tory, in Finchley, north London his mother canvassed for their MP, Margaret Thatcher, and cajoled him into the Young Conservatives so he could meet the right type of girl. His father, who had lost a leg in the war, was a Great Eastern railway controller at King's Cross station who, determined that his son should acquire the confidence to go to Oxbridge, worked three shifts a day to pay public school fees and died of throat cancer days before Mansfield failed to get into any university at all. Outraged, Mansfield travelled to Keele University and bearded the admissions tutor at lunch; he was given an interview, and a place, there and then. Despite having no connections which he insists were necessary at the time he decided to read for the bar, and scraped through on his third attempt. His break, and the case that shaped a career that can read, grippingly, like an alternate history of the late 20th century, came in 1972, when, because he had read philosophy at Keele, he was asked to defend the Angry Brigade. It earned him a reputation as a subversive when, as he writes, "nothing could have been further from the truth." The first Irish case he defended, the next year, was different: listening to the Price sisters, who were eventually convicted of helping plant four bombs in London (one of which went off outside the Old Bailey, destroying Mansfield's car), politicised him despite accusations of treachery, he came to believe that "in the English system you're innocent until proved Irish." He would go on to defend Judith Ward, the Birmingham Six (it took 17 years, and established his reputation as a decimator of scientific evidence), and to represent families in the Bloody Sunday inquiry, which he has just heard is to report, finally, by the end of this year. Another theme developed through what he calls, slightly uncomfortably, the "black cases": the Deptford Fire, and then the murder of Stephen Lawrence. He always knew it was a great risk to bring a private prosecution, even though his experience was as a defence lawyer rather than a prosecutor, but he insists he feels no guilt about its collapse. "I feel entirely justified. It was a desire of the Lawrences: they were really very upset and hadn't had the attention they felt they needed. And we did get it past committal and to the Old Bailey." It failed partly because, even though Mansfield argued about the psychological impact of trauma on memory, the judge ruled Duwayne Brooks's evidence unreliable. Brooks has always felt aggrieved that he was not supported as a witness and that he was given almost no notice before he was called to give evidence. "He may say that," retorts Mansfield now. "But as a prosecutor I'm not allowed to talk to witnesses, because there's a risk that I might hint at what they need to say." Although the collapse was, he writes, "one of the most emotionally searing moments of my entire career" (another was the conviction of Angela Cannings (now overturned) for the cot deaths of three of her children, and the (also now overturned) conviction of Barry George in the killing of Jill Dando) he is proud that the Macpherson inquiry eventually came to its famous decision that the police were guilty of "institutional racism". The police do not tend to come out of their encounters with Mansfield looking particularly impressive, or particularly able to learn from past mistakes. Although, he says, he was taught at university that history does not repeat itself, he has been disappointed to discover that it does: he remembers "kettling", for example, happening as far back as the Orgreave miners' strike (when he represented miners beaten up by police), "and probably before". He is scheduled to give a speech to a meeting of police superintendents this month. He plans to call it "institutional denial", and to use as examples not just the Lawrence case, but the Jean Charles de Menezes case (where he represented the family), and the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests this year, when their "first reaction was, 'Oh! Nothing to do with us, we didn't do anything.' Second reaction: 'Um, yes, um, I think we did touch him, yeah. We might have pushed him out of the way, for his own safety.' Explanation number three: apparently the family were told at one point by the police that they thought they weren't genuine police officers, they were protestors dressed up as police officers." Such strategies do far-reaching damage, he believes, to public confidence, and to the police themselves. "The institution itself internally suffers, because the myth is that if we put up a bold front, defend all [our people] in the end that doesn't help. What it does is it deludes the people on the ground that they can do whatever they like they've got a licence and they're out there. Because our seniors will support us to the end. It's good that they feel they have support but they shouldn't feel it's blanket support such that they abrogate their own responsibility. The damage is both external and internal, and it is serious." How much should we trust the police? "Well, I have a fair trust of the uniformed officer, on the street. I think they are endeavouring to do a really good job, but they're up against it. I think where my faith breaks down, I'm afraid, is with the higher echelons. I've now seen so many of them, over the years, that basically I have a feeling that they just shut their eyes that they're consumed with a different kind of power structure, just like the politicians. And it becomes a uniformed issue … like De Menezes it was top-heavy. You had loads of these senior people wandering around. You had too many chiefs and not enough Indians. They haven't got the transparency and they haven't got the accountability." Having said which, he doesn't feel that political control of the police, such as that claim by Boris Johnson's deputy Kit Malthouse this week he has taken of the Met, is the answer either. "I want to see them accountable to a body of ordinary people, not politicians." He feels the same way about intelligence. He has encountered his fair share of redacted documents, and when the redaction was lifted wondered, again and again, what on earth the fuss was about; more worryingly, and more recently, he has been involved in terrorism cases where, as in the ricin trial, what turned out to be extremely flimsy evidence was used to fan public fear. "I think the ultimate sanction should be the knowledge that it can all be subject to public scrutiny, if there's a public demand for an inquiry." Mansfield is particularly concerned that over the last 20 years the hallowed idea that someone is innocent until proven guilty has been increasingly eroded. "The Tories were bad enough, but New Labour" who he says have created 3,600 new crimes "have switched the emphasis. It's not quite as bad as you've got to prove your innocence, but they have shifted the burden of proof on a number of things over to the defence." He gives as an example the new law that makes taking a photograph of a police officer a criminal offence. "If you're going to defend yourself, you can't just say 'I'm not intending to give it to a terrorist'. That's not enough. It's over to you to prove it. That is a very dangerous precedent." He once claimed, about the process of police investigation, but I suspect more generally, "that revolution is the only solution". Does he still feel that? The answer takes in voting methods, the economic situation, corruption, moat-cleaning, KitKats, and the upcoming election, but boils down to yes: "This is an opportunity for the public to say as they did in Eastern Europe and it doesn't have to be quite as dramatic as that to come out en bloc and say together, we've had enough." How likely is that, really? "Well, how likely was it that the iron curtain was going to come down? Everybody thought it never would. So I want to say to people, if you want to change things, you can do it." -- Michael Mansfield's Memoirs of a Radical Lawyer is published by Bloomsbury -- Mansfield on the cases that made his career The Angry Brigade trial, 1972 (A group who planted 25 bombs in protest against the industrial relations bill) "I hadn't met any so-called 'terrorists' before, but Angela struck me as a very unlikely one." Price sisters trial, 1973 (The sisters were part of an IRA group which planted four bombs) "It was impossible not to be attracted to these two passionate and committed people." Orgreave trial 1985 (The case against miners arrested during the 1984 strike collapsed) "It appeared to the jury from this simple exposé that officers who claimed to identify and pursue rioters were talking out of the back of their helmets." Birmingham Six appeal, 1987 (Six men convicted of bombing two pubs in 1974; all were eventually acquitted) "Being a convicted Irish bomber in that period was almost synonymous with the stigma attached to leprosy." Stephen Lawrence prosecution, 1993 (Lawrence was murdered by five racists) "One of the most emotionally searing moments of my entire career [was] when I returned to court to tell the judge that I did not feel it would be right or proper to continue." Barry George trial 2001 (George had his conviction for Jill Dando's murder quashed in 2007) "The distance from the Old Bailey to home at that time was roughly seven miles, so off I went, pounding the pavements, going over and over what might have gone wrong and what I had misjudged." Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed inquest, 2008 "I have always believed that whatever had caused the crash, it was not an accident." . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
