A Tale of Two Injustices
JVL Introduction
Jonathan Rosenhead tells the tale of two injustices.
Wrongly convicted in 1972 during a protest against collaboration with South African apartheid, his conviction and that of others was recently quashed. The presence of an undercover cop, relatively recently revealed, did not help the credibility of the disgracefully dishonest police testimony in this case.
In December 2021 while Chair of his branch in Hackney South and a member of the CLP Executive, he was convicted of “undermining the Labour Party’s ability to campaign against racism”.
How long, he wonders, before that judgement is also reversed?
This article was originally published by Labour Hub on Wed 29 Mar 2023. Read the original here.
Justice deferred: it’s just not cricket
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It’s naive to think that the fuzz have stopped infiltrating left wing organisations. I suspect that all that has changed is that they’re less ham-fisted and much better at not leaving a trail, plus, thanks to NSA, GCHQ, Israeli tech etc., spying is now a piece of piss.
Congratulations to Jonathan on having been cleared at least. Never too late for a miscarriage of justice to be rectified.
It is however rather strange that one of the main excuses for expelling members, not least Jewish members, of the Labour Party, is ‘underminining’ their ability to campaign against racism.
Clearly Starmer and his puppets have a dark and sick sense of humour given that they have been doing their best to support the Tory’s racist immigration policy.
Keir has clearly overdosed on a cocktail of 1984 and Alice Through the Looking Glass. Everything is topsy-turvy. I fear for his grasp of reality.
A very interesting read, Jonathan. There must be many other convictions on similar bases, many arrests made as a result of actions by agent provocateurs at demos and maybe false evidence they give or feed back to the police to give.
At the very least the police should have been fined for their egregious behaviour. Jonathan also ought to have had his pain and suffering compensated for.
Has Jonathan been suspended, disciplined in some other way, or expelled?
I am delighted to read that Jonathan Rosenhead ‘s 1972 conviction regarding the Rugby Tour was quashed. Quite right too.
He may remember my late brother Michael Craft (always known politically as Mike) who was extremely active in STST (“Stop The Seventies Tour”.)
I am just writing to assure Jonathan that my brother Michael was not the duplicitous undercover policeman HN298 who dropped him and his brave activist colleagues in it so disastrously.
All good wishes, Rita Craft (JVL member.)
Can I point out that the “Mike Scott” referred to above is definitely not me, the Mike Scott who chairs the JVL Council! I grew up in the anti-apartheid struggle and worked in the AA London office when I left school. Now, of course, I’m fighting against a different apartheid, in Israel/Palestine.
It may well be that my name was used deliberately as a joke: when I was working for AA, there were at least two suspicious break-ins, when nothing seemed to have gone except files. We assumed it was some combination of MI5 and the South African intelligence agency, trying to find out what we were going to do next.
I was ‘befriended’ by an undercover cop (posing as a hippy) at a demo in Trafalgar Square when I was handing out ‘Democracy Under Threat’ leaflets in respect of the proposal to abolish the GLC, although I didn’t have a clue initially. We arranged (his idea) to meet up for a drink at a pub in Hampstead the following week, and I happened to mention that myself and a couple of friends had put together a community newspaper the year before, and how we only had an old typewriter, and the friend who did the vast majority of the typing (she was a trained typist), had to type everything out twice so as to justify it – ie have straight columns on both sides of the text – and how we ended up hiring an electric typewriter for the second issue (which sadly turned out to be the last one).
And so a few days later he rings me, and he knows someone that’s got a second-hand electric typewriter for sale dead cheap, and I have to go to this office block in the East End of London….. Fortunately alarm bells – intuition I guess, cos I knew nothing about undercover cops infiltrating groups – started ringing when I was just a couple of hundreds or so yards away from the office block, and I realised it was a set-up.
When I next spoke to him he was rather annoyed with me, but I never heard from him again!
NB And for sure the Stasi are now more active than they’ve ever been! And targeting left-wing groups and activists and campaigners, as per usual.
English (and other British, with Northern Ireland being the extreme case) has never been under democratic or community control. ‘Public consent’ has always been a hollow pretence, covered with a thick layer of hypocrisy and mighty dollops of demagogy. The crass PCC scheme is a mere dusting of icing sugar on the top of this repellent cake.
The ‘governance’ of the Met is another extreme case, along similar though not identical dimensions.
But what is to be done? Any reform of the British deep state surely includes a the very very minimum the abolition of the loyalty of officers (including all the military) to the Crown in Parliament. Vestiges, personal and institutional, will linger on even after the transformation of the mechanisms of repression and investigation – which will need to be intensified precisely to deal with those remnants. Deep and wide popular participation is the best, if not the sure, guarantee that new and democratic forces and forms of government and governance. Amongst the most bitter and determined holdouts will be senior members of the LP, especially the securocrat Starmer; who could believe that he would wish to abolish, rather than disguise, the ideology of the judiciary, well summed up in the late and unlamented Lord Denning’s dictum that the Birmingham Six must remain in jail, innocent or guilty, since any official admission that senior police officers had colluded to falsify evidence was unthinkable?