Fundamental to the fight: Women on the Waterfront
In 2020, members of Women on the Waterfront, the support
group formed early in November 1995, recorded some of their memories of
1995-98 Liverpool Dockers strike
It’s a fascinating listen.......
Wednesday, 1 June 2022
Fundamental to the fight: Women on the Waterfront
Fundamental to the fight: highlights from the Liverpool Dockers’ mass meetings 1995-98
Fundamental to the fight: highlights from the Liverpool
Dockers’ mass meetings 1995-98
Between 1995-98 Liverpool dockers were locked out of their
workplace after they refused to cross a picket line. Key to this heroic
resistance over such a lengthy period was the gathering together of dockers in
mass meetings. It gave the workers a confidence bred of their own numbers, and
it enabled the organisers to reach them personally with their educational
appeal and organisation methods.
Taken from over 40 hours of recordings, you can listen to
some of the highlights of the meetings in which strategies, that generated
solidarity worldwide, are debated and voted upon. The 130 minutes starts with
speeches from Tony Benn MP, Jeremy Corbyn and John Pilger at a London rally
before the voices of Liverpool Dockers, including Jimmy Nolan, ring out loud
and clear.
Thursday, 26 May 2022
UNKNOTTING THE MURDERS
UNKNOTTING THE MURDERS
A bootlace could be the key to finding out who really
committed the notorious Chillenden murders. But only if it’s tested by the
right people, hears Mark Metcalf
16 - 22 MAY BIG ISSUE NORTH
A journalist who helped reverse the murder convictions of
three men is calling for a specialist forensic scientist to be allowed to
examine a key piece of evidence in the Chillenden murders.
Michael Stone was convicted of murdering Lin Russell and her
daughter, Megan, six, and the attempted murder of Josie Russell, aged nine,
near their home in Chillenden, Kent, in July 1996.
Stone has always maintained he is the victim of a
miscarriage of justice and although he is now entitled to apply for parole he
won’t be doing so because, according to his sister Barbara, “that would mean
Mick would be admitting his guilt”.
Stone’s claims have
been boosted by a recent four-page confession by serial killer Levi Bellfield
that he committed the Chillenden murders and that of Judith Gold, a mother of
three, in Hampstead, north London, in 1990. Satish Sekar specialises in
investigating miscarriage of justice cases.
On Valentine’s Day 1988, Lynette White was murdered in
Cardiff. The police searched for one white person in a horrible sexually
motivated crime but ten months later five non-white people were arrested, three
of whom were wrongly convicted in 1990. None of the five had left so much as a
single DNA cell at the scene or on the victim, or had any trace of her blood on
them. In 1992 the convicted men were released after a successful appeal.
“I got to know all of the wrongly accused men and I worked
with White’s natural mother, Peggy Pesticcio, to get the case reopened twice,”
says Sekar. “I did a lot of research and helped pressurise South Wales Police
(SWP) to go out and find the real perpetrator. Nothing proves innocence more
than finding the real killer.”
In 2003 SWP found the
real murderer, Jeffrey Gafoor, at the second time of asking, and he was
convicted. Thanks to Sekar and other campaigners, SWP was forced to try to
explain what went wrong. Eight police officers and two witnesses were tried for
fabricating evidence leading to the wrongful imprisonment of the so-called
Cardiff Three, one of whom, Yusef Abdullahi, died in 2011 aged 49.
Stone was convicted of the Chillenden murders in 1998 based
on an alleged confession while in jail but his conviction was later quashed
after prisoners’ evidence against him was discredited. Sekar was at Stone’s
2001 retrial at Nottingham Crown Court. He has strong opinions about the way
Stone was represented, particularly his legal team’s failure to fully
understand the significance of evidence given by pathologist Dr Michael Heath.
Dr Heath’s testimony referred to a bootlace found at the
site and used to commit the murder of Megan Russell. It did not contain Stone’s
DNA, which was not present at the site, but his lawyers did not explore whether
it contained other samples that would point to the murderer. “If the jury had
heard this, I expect the verdict would have been different,” says Sekar.
For many years this bootlace went missing and when Stone’s
legal team broached this subject the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC)
failed to locate it. The bootlace has now reappeared but its storage conditions
are unclear.
“However, there is
general agreement that the fibres within the individual knots are likely to be
undisturbed,” says Stone’s sister Barbara, who has campaigned relentlessly on
his behalf.
“Our solicitor requested the CCRC to arrange for the knots
to be untied and tested. They have refused. I feel this typifies the CCRC’s
inability to thoroughly investigate potential miscarriages of justice.”
Sekar wants the
bootlace retested by forensic DNA and bloodstain expert Richard Eikelenboom,
who helped resolve the Schiedammer Park murder that shocked the Netherlands in
2000, when 10-year-old Nienke Kleiss was raped and killed and 11 year-old
Maikel Willebrand left for dead after being strangled with a bootlace and
repeatedly stabbed. Willebrand remarkably survived.
Kees Borsboom was initially convicted but Eikelenboom
believed DNA samples on the bootlace and at other areas of the crime scene
showed he was not the murderer. He was proved correct when Haalmeijer was
eventually arrested for the rapes of two women and confessed to the Schiedammer
Park crimes. Sekar, who covered the Dutch case, says: “It has strong parallels
with Stone’s case. He deserves the same courtesy that was belatedly given to
Borsboom. Eikelenboom should be asked to use his expertise to solve the
Chillenden murders.”
Sekar also hopes to see the case of Neil Sayers re-opened.
In 1999, Sayers, aged 19, was convicted of the horrific murder of his friend
Russell Crookes in woods at Hadlow College, near Tonbridge, Kent, largely on
the word of his co[1]accused Graham
Wallis, who pleaded guilty. Kent Police ignored Police and Criminal Evidence
guidelines as Wallis was asked to make a statement in the back of a police car.
Wallis was just 17, had no solicitor’s advice prior to making a statement and
no accompanying adult with him.
Sayers was given a life sentence and released over a decade and
a half later on parole, but without having to admit guilt. He still maintains
his innocence over 20 years later.
Sayers’ case was mangled by a failure to appreciate the
importance of forensic sciences. Crookes’s partially burnt body was not found
until two weeks after his death. Maggots were taken by the now disgraced
forensic pathologist Heath, who was one of the Crown’s experts against Sayers.
The maggots represented the best possibility of establishing
when the fire took place and death occurred – a vital issue. Heath was never
asked what advice he gave to Kent Police about the maggots, so it remains
unclear if he even advised police to consult an experienced forensic
entomologist, and the maggots were left in a fridge by Kent Police for four
years.
“This was outrageous,” says Sekar. “Imagine taking a
bloodstained handkerchief from a murder scene and storing it badly for years so
that the evidence degraded, losing the killer’s DNA. They have allowed the
entomological evidence – the last opportunity to establish when a significant
post-mortem event occurred – to degrade.”
Heath faced a tribunal in 2006 that cost him his reputation
and his place on the Home Office’s register of forensic pathologists. The
disciplinary panel found flaws in his post-mortems of Mary Anne Moore and
Jacqueline Tindsley, two women whose deaths were followed by the wrongful
convictions of their partners. He was also criticised for his inquiry into
Stuart Lubbock’s death at a party at comedian Michael Barrymore’s home. The
case against him was presented by Charles Miskin QC, who had relied on Heath to
prosecute Sayers.
When Sayers’ legal team subsequently applied to have his
case reviewed the CCRC told him that the review of Dr Heath’s cases concerned
those where medical evidence was critical to the conviction and ruled out any
challenge to his evidence in Sayers’ case.
Sekar says: “The CCRC was wrong. Dr Heath also implied that
the partial burning of the body resulted in extensive fire damage. There is
considerable evidence to suggest that this was not so and that Dr Heath’s
conclusions led to errors in the interpretation of fire-related evidence, which
was another issue of vital importance in this case.
“Dr Heath’s role in these aspects of Sayers’ case was never
considered. Sayers’s case should be re-examined.”
Sayers says: “At 18 I had my life taken away. I feel I’ve
never been given any effective avenue to prove my innocence. Justice seems a
long way off, leaving me very down, frustrated and broken. I want the truth to
be found. So on one hand I want publicity to tell the world about how wrong
everything is. On the other I want to keep a low profile so as not to affect my
work and to be able to live some kind of an ordinary life.”
Returning to the Chillenden murders, Barbara Stone believes
advances in testing techniques could help identify the real culprit and Sekar
agrees. Bellfield won’t give his DNA for testing but one of his children gave a
sample that was tested leading to a partial match for the TV documentary The
Chillenden Murders.
“Bellfield’s
confession helps but does not prove he’s the killer; he could be lying. This
would enable you to check it. If you had a full DNA profile from the bootlace,
does it match Bellfield’s?” says Sekar.
Guilds - history of
Guilds
Trade
unions differed significantly from ancient merchant guilds which predominated
in the medieval period were the feudal order of society predominated. These were first extensively documented in
southern England by a royal inquiry of 1388/89. This was at the height of
the feudalism, the structure of society immediately preceding the growth of
commercial capitalism.
Where there
were enough people in urban areas in a given trade there was also formed
artisan /craft guilds that incorporated masters, journeymen (someone who is
fully educated in their craft) and apprentices into the one organisation in
their field of handicraft. According to Chase (1) these "existed to
advance the masters and to protect the consumer by regulating the quality of
work, as well as to regulate waged labour".
Guilds
enjoyed from the monarch certain privileges, which were overseen by town and
city corporations. This allowed them to exclude outsiders and establish a
monopoly on product standards and prices and working conditions, including
apprenticeship training, and wages.
As such guilds were not incipient trade unions
although there were some occasions when the journeymen, often successfully,
sought to exert pressure on their masters by independently pushing for
increased pay. As early as 1299 there is a record of journeymen
carpenters and smiths being accused of forming illegal associations reported as
'parliaments'. There are also some reports of a small number of unskilled waged
workers — mainly working on a quayside — who combined to successfully seek
privileged access to work and thus demonstrated a recognition of the positive
impact of collective bargaining.
However, as
long as the guild could be relied upon to defend the interests of their
journeymen and protect the interests of the craft as a whole then they did
well. English guilds reached a renewed membership peak in the first 20 years of
the eighteenth century. Thereafter they began a steady decline as free trade
and technological innovation swept them aside as, armed with the revolutionary
ideas of Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, governments abandoned control
over trades in favour of laissez-faire free market systems. Many former
handicraft workers had to seek work in the newly emerging manufacturing
corporations where there was a clear workers-bosses divide and a wage system in
place.
Wednesday, 11 May 2022
CAMPAIGN TO STOP BURNING WASTE
CAMPAIGN TO STOP BURNING WASTE
Claims incinerators are linked to infant deaths
Over 50 new ones planned or approved
BIG ISSUE NORTH 9 - 15 MAY
A father who suffered the loss of two infant grandchildren
is fighting to prevent the rebuilding of a waste incinerator that he believes
may have played a role in their deaths.
The North London
Waste Authority has permission to update the Edmonton EcoPark, which opened in
1969. Following reconstruction, the municipal facility will have the capacity
to incinerate annually up to 700,000 tonnes of waste, a 40 per cent increase.
Trevor Calver’s youngest grandson, aged 15 months, died in
2004. He suffered a second tragedy in 2017 when another daughter lost an infant
baby under a week old.
There are 625 wards in London. Between 2002 and 2013 the
five wards with the highest infant percentage death rates included Chingford
Green and Walley in Waltham Forest, where Calver’s two grandchildren were from.
Concerned and disturbed
“I became concerned about the incinerator many years ago
when I listened to a speaker at a local community meeting. I attended a site
visit designed to show how it protected the environment and I was disturbed
when I witnessed a tyre being burnt,” said Calver, who lives in Chingford,
adding that residents often have their cars covered in ash.
“If we can see such deposits then imagine what damage the
smaller particles produced by the incinerator can do to people, especially
infants.”
Calver has sought without success to get his GP practice to
map out where their patients live alongside the ailments they are suffering. He
would also like to see statistics released on children’s use of asthma pumps in
schools.
Calver’s concerns were heightened when he found out last
year about research by Michael Ryan suggesting that infant mortality rates
downwind of incinerators are above average.
Above average child deaths
Ryan began researching municipal waste incinerators after he
lost two children, one at 14 weeks in 1985, causing him to consider if their
deaths could be related to pollution caused by living near to the Shrewsbury
Hospital incinerator.
Ryan spent a substantial sum obtaining Office for National
Statistics (ONS) infant death figures at ward levels across England and Wales.
He found that infant mortality levels were above average where incinerators
were sited but his attempts to get public authorities to take notice were not
well received. They argued that smoking and maternal deprivation, caused by
poverty, were to blame.
But when Ryan then analysed the figures for the Chingford
Green area of wealthy Waltham Forest, close to Britain’s then largest
incinerator in Edmonton, he discovered that it had the second highest child
death rate in London.
Further analysis confirmed that infant mortality levels
downwind of incinerators are above average whether they are in affluent areas
or poorer areas.
Ryan’s work, extensively
reported in Big Issue North, was used by MPs to ask parliamentary questions.
This pushed Public Health England (PHE) to conduct a study into the impact of waste
incinerators on infant mortality levels. This was promised in 2003, began in
2011 and came out in 2020, six years behind schedule.
The research, which ignored Ryan’s work and was undertaken
by the Small Area Health Statistics Unit at Imperial College, London, agreed
with PHE’s claim that “modern, well run and regulated municipal waste
incinerators are not a significant risk to public health”.
PHE adjusted the data for deprivation, ethnicity and
socioeconomic status before reaching its conclusions. Ryan believes the study
was thus flawed and queries why the researchers did not examine statistics
where waste incinerators have opened in the last decade.
New incinerators
Newhaven incinerator opened in 2012. Downwind of it is Lewes
and Eastbourne, where infant mortality rates in 2013 were zero and 1.1 per
1,000 live births. In 2019, when infant mortality rates for England and Wales
were 4 per 1,000 live births, the figures in Eastbourne and Lewes had risen to
8.7 and 7.9. This corresponds to six infant deaths.
Across the country there have been many local campaigns against
the construction of new incinerators. In seeking to reduce landfill, councils
are increasingly incinerating waste for energy generation, with 11.45 million
tonnes burnt in 2019-20, compared with 4.9 million tonnes in 2011-12. There are
more than 90 plants across the UK, with 22 constructed in the last decade.
Another 50-plus are approved or proposed.
NLWA is under pressure to reconsider its plan and
campaigners, which include London Against Incineration, Friends of the Earth
and Greenpeace, have the backing of local MP Iain Duncan Smith. Considerable
anger has been directed towards the Waltham Forest deputy council leader Clyde
Loakes, who leads on environmental, climate and transport policies, including a
multi award-winning scheme that improved the borough’s active travel
infrastructure.
Loakes has chaired
the NLWA for over 13 years. He is a non-executive director at London Energy
Ltd, which manages the site at Edmonton and is owned by NLWA, and draws an
annual allowance of £13,285.
Neither he nor other Waltham Forest councillors Jemma
Hemsted, Tim James and Emma Best replied to questions from Big Issue North.
An NLWA spokesperson said: “The new facility has been
designed according to population forecasts and future waste volumes.”
They added that once operating “it will generate electricity
to power 127,000 homes and support a district heating network that will provide
heat and hot water for up to 50,000 homes. This will save the need for gas
boilers and displace power plants that use virgin fossil fuels.” NLWA claimed
that the new facility will use the world’s most advanced cleaning technology
and that none of the 21 other energy-from waste facilities in the UK given
planning permission since 2017 are investing in such advanced technology.
According to the spokesperson: “The technology is so
effective that concentrations of pollutants at ground level are expected to be
effectively zero for most of the year.” With regard to Ryan’s research, the
authority claimed: “It is difficult to assess his claims as they are not
published in full by a science-based organisation or in a peer-reviewed
journal… We are following scientific evidence from health experts and academics
from not just PHE and Imperial College but also the Air Quality Expert Group,
the Institute of Occupational Medicine, and Birmingham University, all of whom
have concluded that modern and well-run facilities do not pose a significant
risk to public health.”
MARK METCALF
The spy who duped me
The spy who duped me
Helen Steel was the publicity-shy activist who courageously
and famously fought a burger giant through the courts as one of the McLibel
Two. But the full story of how she and other women were deceived into
relationships with undercover police spies is only now being told. By Mark Metcalf
BIG ISSUE NORTH 4 - 10 APRIL
When McLibel campaigner Helen Steel was finally able, in
Sydney in 2016, to confront John Dines, the undercover police officer who
tricked her into a long relationship in the early 1990s, she still retained
remote hopes he might have had genuinely loving feelings for her during their
time together. Perhaps he even shared some of her anti-capitalist beliefs.
“I said to him that he knew I was in a really bad state when
he left and asked why did he still pretend to care for me rather than put me
out of my misery and say he was never coming back,” says Steel.
“‘What did I have? All I had was a van,’ was his initial
reply. When I pressed him further he responded dismissively by saying: ‘I’m
sorry, I had a really shit time too. It – the whole thing – messed my head up
and I just wanted to put it behind me and make a new start.’ I had this
realisation that he was a completely selfish bastard and he had not cared one bit
for me.”
Now the full story of this abusive relationship – and the
cases of four other campaigners conned by officers of the highly secretive
Metropolitan Police unit the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) into similar
relationships, all sanctioned at the highest levels of the state – is being
told in a new book.
The title Deep Deception was collectively chosen by the five
women. “From amongst many possibilities it best conveys our experiences. The
level of deception and the discovery of it really had a serious psychological
impact on everyone,” explains Steel, who has though courageously fought back.
The widespread use of the officers from the SDS, formed in 1968, to undermine
movements of social justice, environmental campaigns, trade unions and
political organisations continues to be exposed at the ongoing Undercover
Policing Inquiry (UCPI).
When Steel first met Dines in late 1987 at London
Greenpeace, he claimed he was John Barker and infiltrated the environmental
group after the exit of SDS officer Bob Lambert, a Greenpeace member from 1983
to 1987.
“Lambert, or Robinson as we knew him, was involved in
writing the 1986 anti-McDonald’s leaflet that me and Dave Morris were sued
over,” says Steel. “John was involved in the anti-McDonald’s campaign, and in
the McLibel Support Campaign and our legal defence.”
The leaflet alleged that McDonald’s exploited children
through its advertising, promoted unhealthy food, paid low wages, was
anti-union and was responsible for animal cruelty and environmental damage. The
libel campaign was the longest such case in English history and lasted over a
decade. At the conclusion some of the leaflet’s contested claims were found to
be libellous and others, such as McDonald’s endangering the health of workers
and exploiting children, were true. The company also paid its workers poorly
and inflicted unnecessary cruelty on animals.
Deep Deception reveals that Dines waited two years before
asking Steel to go out with him. He had slowly been building up a relationship
with Steel, a gardener, by dropping her off last in his van when he drove
fellow activists home from meetings. It was a common tactic by undercover
officers, including Mark Jenner, who was to have a five-year relationship with
Alison, a political activist at the Colin Roach Centre in Hackney. The case of
Jenner, known as Cassidy at the time, has been explored in a series of Big
Issue North articles dating back to January 2011.
“John told me in
Sydney that he was tasked with reporting on everything that was going on in the
North London anti-capitalist, animal rights, poll tax and environmental
movements – everything that was a bit alternative. I did not go out with him
until 1990. If I had known he was using me to spy on groups of people whose
politics I shared then I would never have had a relationship with him,” says
Steel, who now lives in the North.
As the relationship became more intense, Barker told Steel
he wanted to have children. It was a con. After a period when he would
mysteriously disappear for short periods, citing his mental state, the
undercover cop left permanently in late 1992. Steel was distraught.
In the book she describes how in early 1993 “I felt both
physically and mentally spent. John’s disappearance still consumed my thoughts
every day.” Her attempts to find him floundered.
When the McLibel trial began at the Royal Courts of Justice
in Central London in 1994, Steel walked each day past St Catherine’s House,
which at the time held the register for all the births, deaths and marriages in
England. It was a place she had visited previously when she helped look up
Dines’s family records to help in what he claimed was a search for his father.
She decided to search at St Catherine’s House again and was
stunned to find a death record for someone called Barker who died in 1968,
matching John’s name and place of birth. “In the County of Derby, Philip John
Barker: male, aged 8 years. The cause of death was acute lymphatic leukaemia.”
Steel felt a chill down her spine.
“John had been using the identity of a dead child. John
Barker – the man I’d loved, the man I’d planned to spend the rest of my life
with – didn’t exist. He never had… my whole world had been pulled from beneath
my feet and I didn’t know who I could and couldn’t trust.”
Steel was determined to find out the truth. She travelled to
New Zealand to try to find Dines, who had claimed he had lived there as a
teenager and had moved there after leaving the police in 1994. Following her
visit the Metropolitan Police moved him to Australia to prevent her finding out
the truth, according to a police source quoted in the Guardian.
Semi-official confirmation eventually arrived in 2011 when
the former partner of an undercover officer told her Dines had been one too.
Around this time, it emerged that another undercover officer, Mark Kennedy, had
had several relationships with environmental activists he had spied on. Deep
Deception includes the cases of two women, Lisa and Naomi, both tricked by
Kennedy, who was known as Mark Stone during his time undercover and collected
information on environmental groups such as Earth First. Gradually, activists,
journalists and the whistleblower Peter Francis, one of Dines’s former
colleagues, began revealing the real story about SDS, including the use of dead
children’s identities. Dines, Lambert and Jenner (the latter employed to spy on
me, among others, while working as an organiser at the Colin Roach Centre)
suddenly found themselves in the newspapers.
Seeking to prevent
these human rights abuses, Steel and other deceived women took legal action
against the Metropolitan Police. Some of them had even had children with
officers who, after faking mental breakdowns, suddenly disappeared without
explanation.
All the officers had occupied important positions, such as
secretary or treasurer, in campaigns that covered anti-racism, miscarriages of
justice, corruption and employment rights. Such roles allowed the police to
assemble information on the political activists involved. By getting together
and speaking out, the deceived women destroyed claims by the police that their
experiences were the result of an isolated officer. Steel says: “We knew that
between the eight of us who sued the Metropolitan Police that there were at
least five different officers who deceived women and that the period of
relationships was nearly 25 years. There was obviously a systematic pattern of
abuse, either for the officers’ own purposes or undermining protest movements.”
The civil action against the police proved successful. In November 2015, the
Metropolitan Police gave a full apology, conceding, as part of a settlement,
that they had abused the women’s human rights. This apology has since been extended
to some but not all the other people affected by relationships with undercover
policing. Many women are still fighting their cases.
The exposure of undercover officers deceiving women also
helped push then home secretary Theresa May to set up the UCPI. Beginning in
July 2015 it was earmarked to last three years but seems unlikely to conclude
before 2026 “The police are obstructing justice and are going through documents
from decades back and redacting them to hide the names of those responsible for
these human rights abuses,” says Steel.
“The police want it to be delayed as when the results are
announced they can say what happened is historic, that things have changed and
there is nothing to see here. And yet as we know the Covert Human Intelligence
Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021 makes provision for the use of undercover
law enforcement agents and covert sources and the committing of crimes in the
undertaking of their duty. The police are also still seeking to recruit
informers, as shown in a recent Black Lives Matter campaign in Cardiff.”
In 2016 something made her Google John Dines. “To my
surprise and, after years of finding nothing, a document popped up with his
signature on the bottom. It was the first proof I’d had in over 20 years that he
was still alive.” He was a course director at a police college in Sydney,
training Indian police officers to tackle so-called left-wing extremism.
Concerned he was using SDS tactics to abuse Indian women in a similar way, she
went to track him down, confronting him at the airport where he was meeting his
trainees. “You owe me an apology.”
Steel had to overcome her natural shyness to fight
McDonald’s, find Dines and now fight the secret state. Why should people buy
Deep Deception? “It is a good read and important for understanding the lengths
the state is prepared to go to by organising a secret political policing unit
in order to prevent change from happening and preserving the status quo on
behalf of the rich and powerful.
“This should be deeply alarming to anybody. We could have
got rid of racism, sexism and stopped the destruction of the planet long ago
had there not been massive state interference by these sorts of organisations.”
n Deep Deception: The Story of the Spycop Network by the Women who Uncovered
the Shocking Truth is published by Ebury. Helen Steel is speaking about the
book at 2pm, 10 April at the Trades Club, Hebden Bridge (free, donations
welcome)
Taj Salam (Unite branch secretary at First Bus Bradford) describes a number of strikes he’s been involved in since 1988.
Taj Salam (Unite
branch secretary at First Bus Bradford) describes a number of strikes he’s been
involved in since 1988.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)