At the end of a very long and well publicised trial for corrruption, the former Deputy Leader of Liverpool City Council, Derek Hatton, was acquitted earlier this year. (See U.K. daily papers on 13 and 14 March 1993. The Independent of that date had as the heading to its second Hatton story, ‘Prosecution hung on two ambiguous diary entries’.) This is the latest instance where there is almost enough evidence to show that the prosecution was mounted by the state simply to discredit an individual. Millions of pounds are being spent trying to ruin the reputations of individuals in the UK. The obvious other examples which spring to mind are:
Colin Wallace
— framed on a manslaughter charge then the victim of a disinformation campaign by state sources.
Dr. Hugh Thomas
— on whom the state spent an estimated £3,000,000 in 1985/6 in a failed attempt to convict him of fiddling his medical expenses. At one point the medical records of every person living in Wales were examined! This bizarre episode was either an attempt to discredit Thomas’s allegations about Rudolph Hess and the doppelganger in Spandau, or a pre-emptive strike to ensure that if Thomas ever goes public on what he knows about Kincora and other Northern Ireland stories the state has some dirt to throw at him. Either way the state failed, and Thomas was acquitted.
Arthur Scargill
— smeared all over the media as recepient of a cheap morgage (in some versions a morgage paid for by Moscow and/or Libya) which didn’t exist. (It astonishes me that Terry Pattinson at the Daily Mirror and Roger Cook at Central TV, in particular, have stayed in their jobs after fronting stories on this not only completely false but so obviously sourced back to the secret state. The question arises with them as it does with the police: what do they have to do to get the sack?) NB on this paragraph see the correction in Lobster 26.
Kevin Taylor
— Manchester businessman, Chair of Manchester Conservative Association, whose life and business were ruined by MI5 and the police looking for dirt with which to smear his friend John Stalker, then deputy chief constable of Greater Manchester. (See The Poisoned Tree, Kevin Taylor [Sidgwick and Jackson, London 1990].)
There are two key questions about incidents like these. At what level is the decision made to attack, say, Hugh Thomas? And secondly, when the police and/or prosecuting service find they have no evidence against Hugh Thomas (or Hatton, or Taylor), how are they persuaded to ignore this fact and carry on as if they did have said evidence?