By Jonathan Rosenhead

In June 1972, I was convicted for trying to block a coach taking the English rugby team to Heathrow for a flight to South Africa. In January this year, over 50 years later, that conviction was finally quashed on appeal.

A year earlier, in December 2021, I was suspended from membership of the Labour Party. At the time I was Chair of my branch in Hackney South and a member of the CLP Executive. But it seems that I had “undermined the Labour Party’s ability to campaign against racism”. How long will I have to wait for that judgement to be reversed?

Anti-racism and lack of justice link these two events, if rather perversely. But first I will  explain what led to my arrest in 1972, and why there was a 50-year gap before my conviction was quashed. And then I’ll get back to the Labour Party.

On a basky summer day in 1972, I was arrested with 15 or so others in the car park of the Star and Garter Hotel, Petersham, Surrey. We were charged with obstructing the highway, and were duly convicted at Mortlake Magistrates Court. I was fined £10 plus £10 costs. On Tuesday 17th January 2023 my conviction, and those of the only two others we could locate after 50 years, were quashed at Kingston Crown Court.

To explain the reason why I was in that car park we have to go back to 1969. The Stop The Seventy Tour movement (or STST as it became known) was formed to campaign for the cancellation of the 1970 tour of Britain by an all-white South African cricket team. With charismatic leadership from 19-year old Peter Hain it took off. An unlucky South African rugby team touring Britain over the winter of 69-70 provided a trial run for protests against sporting apartheid. It was hit by massive demonstrations, pitch invasions and inventive disruptions before the government finally persuaded the MCC to call off what would have been a cricketing disaster.

STST had uniquely and improbably achieved its objective and was wound up. But some of us who had been involved in STST thought that the direct-action strategy should continue, against both sporting and economic collaboration with South Africa.  And that is why in May 1972 some twenty of us were in that hotel car park just outside Richmond, hemming in a coachload of rugby players. Bizarrely this quite insignificant scuffle proved to have a 50-year afterlife. That was because what we didn’t know until quite recently was that one of ‘us’ was an undercover policeman.

It turned out that our group had been one of the first of what was to be a thousand plus political groups, almost all on the left, that were targeted by Met police spycops units over some forty years. Their behaviour became more and more outrageous. They spied on Stephen Lawrence’s family, they fathered children with activists whose groups they had infiltrated, and so on.

When information about this began to emerge, the Undercover Policing Inquiry was established, and from 2015 – but oh so slowly – the police were forced to disgorge a mountain of historical records. An enterprising Guardian journalist who spotted my name in these previously secret files got in touch with me, and I found myself a lawyer.

What follows is what we have been able to piece together. We still don’t know the real name of the undercover cop; when he appeared by Zoom at the Undercover Policing Inquiry he was referred to as HN298. But it was as ‘Mike Scott’ that he was arrested in the car park in 1972, and then convicted of the same offences as the rest of us. What we now know is that he didn’t let on that he was a copper, not to those arresting him, not to the court officials, not even to the prosecuting barrister. Crucially when we had our consultations with our wonderful defence solicitor Ben Birnberg, ‘Mike Scott’ was there too. And feeding information straight back to his superiors.

Why does this matter – apart from the sneakiness of it? It mattered to the outcome of our 1972 trial, because our defence was simply that we were in a car park, not a highway, so couldn’t be obstructing one. The police gave evidence, lying through their teeth, that we were on the nearby road. Had word of our defence been filtered through to them?

In the end it was the presence of HN298, incognito, throughout both the legal proceedings and our consultation with our lawyer, that led to the trial outcome being reversed 50 years later. The Inquiry Chair Sir John Mitting referred our conviction to the Criminal Cases Review Commission which eventually recommended that an appeal against the decision should be allowed. And of course we did.

The Chair of the CCRC said that they had seen “evidence of deliberate and persistent non-disclosure by the police which was sanctioned by senior officers. The court was misled, and the defendants’ basic legal rights were breached… the misconduct by the police in this case was so egregious that a judge in possession of all the facts would have decided it was necessary to halt proceedings in order to protect the integrity of the criminal justice system.”

Counsel for the Crown Prosecution Service, a very senior KC, told the court that there were no surviving court records, or any evidence of the offence that we were supposed to have committed. So the CPS could not resist the appeal. The judge so ruled, and we became officially innocent. Which we had been all the time. He ordered that the fines and costs should be returned to us, multiplied by 10 to allow for inflation. A hot dinner is planned.

Anti-racism has been a thread in my political activism over the 60+ years since I first joined the Labour Party. In the 1960s it was my initiative while Labour’s Parliamentary Candidate that led to the formation of the Kensington and Chelsea Inter-Racial Council, an organisation which identified and campaigned against racial discrimination. My twenty years of campaigning about Ireland was principally about police technologies and brutality, but it also connected to work on anti-Irish racism. And then there is close to another twenty years concerned with the rights of Palestinians.

Where, by comparison, is this “Labour Party campaign against racism” that I am judged to have undermined? If anyone has seen it, please let me know. What I see, rather, is outright racism – and misogyny too – among Labour senior staff waved through by the leadership. I see the Forde Report identifying Labour as in effect operating a hierarchy of racism. I see one of the finest anti-racists this country has produced barred from re-standing in his constituency.

I see Keir Starmer’s militant pro-Zionism fuelling a campaign against anti-racist Jews.

So who is undermining the fight against racism?

Professor Jonathan Rosenhead is a life-long anti-racist activist. He was the Labour Party candidate for Kensington South at the 1966 general election.

Image: https://freesvg.org/cricket-illustration. Creator: OpenClipart. Licence: CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0)
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