Society
Picked up on the picket line
Published 19 February 2007
The New Statesman 15 July 1977
Denis MacShane, former minister for Europe and Labour MP for Rotherham, is a prominent critic of the Metropolitan Police inquiry into the cash-for-peerages scandal. Thirty years ago, on the eve of becoming president of the National Union of Journalists, he was himself the subject of police attention: he was arrested on two different picket lines in the same month.
Selected by Robert Taylor
In the past month I have been arrested twice by the police. The first time was at the back entrance to Mr George Ward's Grunwick factory by Dollis Hill tube station. The second was 250 miles further north outside Lord Gibson's Northern Echo building in Darlington where 108 members of my union, the NUJ, are on strike.
Three weeks ago, a report on Grunwick in the Sunday Times claimed that it was currently fashionable to get oneself arrested on a picket line. It may be for some, not for me. I hated being arrested. Whoever typed out those fatuous words had clearly never heard the extraordinary depressing and lonely sound of a cell door clanging shut behind him. Yes, the door really does clang, a heavy metal bong as a hundred weight of steel slams into its frame. And the jailers still carry their long cell keys and big rings of metal just like in John Wayne pictures. But the cells, at least at Wembley and Darlington police stations, don't have bars on windows. They don't have windows at all. Just four inch square slabs of reinforced opaque glass like the ones you walk over on the street. They let in some light but a glimpse of the sky would have been welcome.
Nor could the man who wrote that 'Insight' report in the Sunday Times have experienced the smell from the open lavatory inside the cell. The second time around, in Darlington, I quickly adjusted to it, but there is no pleasure, and less fashion, in the smell of a badly run public lavatory. Nor either in the messy indignity of being finger-printed. I had thought – and again how the cinema and TV are responsible for all ideas of police procedure – it was simply a matter of a dainty dab of thumb and first finger on an ink pad and then onto paper. Not so. Every finger, even the pinky, is carefully rolled in ink and then held firmly down onto a printed form. Finally, the palms are covered in ink and an imprint taken (I wonder if there are amateur palm readers in the police who are let loose on all those palm prints – 'I see a tall dark stranger who will take you away'). Your hands end up covered in glutinous black ink. 'You journalists ought to be used to it,' quipped the finger-printing man in Darlington. 'After all, it's the same as printer's ink.'
The awful thing is that until those two arrests, although I have been too close as a reporter to the police in action to swallow the 'aren't they all wonderful' line, I have always kept firmly within the law. My only previous brush with criminality was a speeding conviction six years ago, and that for doing 37 m.p.h in a Fiat 500. Princess Anne probably goes faster on horseback.
The sergeant who arrested me at Grunwick was quite adamant that I had destroyed my career. 'Fucking rabble. That's all you are. Fucking rabble,' he kept repeating as we entered the green police coach designated for arrestees. I couldn't work out a riposte as the arm-lock he had effected around my neck in the 40 yards between picket line scrum and the police coach had left me quite breathless.
'Fucking rabble,' he said again as he pushed me into a seat and sat down beside me. 'You probably don't know this but having this on your record will ruin you, you little cunt.' It was only as I recovered my breath that I realise my right foot was hurting considerably. Trying to move it I found out why. A large police boot was placed firmly on it.
'Excuse me, sergeant. You're on my foot. Could I have it back.'
'Am I?' he said, looking down.
'Oh dear, so I am.' He lifted his boot and slammed it down back on my foot. 'What a pity.'
This particular exercise was interrupted when a young man, a complete stranger, knocked on the side of the bus window and asked if I was aright. I gave him a name to contact when my sergeant looked across me and snapped the window shut. That wasn't enough however and as the man kept talking to me the sergeant leapt of the bus.
'Right, cunt, your coming inside.'
'What for?' said the stranger.
'Obstructing the police,' said the sergeant, as he hustle my would-be Samaritan into the coach. As peace settle I took out a pen to set to action when he snatched it from me.
'Give me that back,' I said, perhaps a shade peremptorily, considering my circumstances.
'No way, cunt,' he said. 'This is now one pen, prisoner's property.'
'Come on, I'm only going to write with it.'
He looked at the pen,a pricey Parker ball-point and as I made a half-hearted reach for it held it between his hands and snapped it in half.
'Oh dear, one broken pen, prisoner's property.'
At Wembley police station he led me off the coach with a peculiarly painful rigid arm lock. It wasn't his local nick and someone had to point the way to the charge room. The way there was down a sloping corridor. 'You're fucking lucky there aren't any stairs to fall down, aren't you?' Perhaps I was. I hope he was kidding, though.
In Darlington the police hardly swore at all. The nearest thing to an oath was muttered 'Anarchy, anarchy' from a sad faced inspector watching the parade of local reporters and sub-editors being charged. Some 40 odd people have been arrested on the Darlington picket line, not as impressive a total as the Grunwick arrests but given the relative size of the picket line – the Darlington journalists have been lucky to get more than 70 pickets for their mass turn-out – the Durham constabulary must feel like they have done much better, proportionately, than their brothers in the Met.
The inside of the cells was as miserable as at Wembley. My first companion was even more depressed than I was. He was a local court reporter and knew all the police by their first names. What was worse, his girlfriend, to whom he was engaged, was a policewomen; and he worried over her career prospects. The next one in was one of Darlington's most respected journalists and clearly in possession of that rat-like cunning that Nick Tomalin once wrote was an essential quality for successful reporters. As the cell door shut he reached into his socks – shoes, belts and ties had to be left outside and pulled out cigarettes and matches. He had heard from pickets arrested the previous week that the police wouldn't let you have a smoke – so in the ride from the Northern Echo to the police station he had carefully transferred cigarettes and matches into his socks.
It was a small victory in a rotten night. The cell was then livened up by a drunk picked up for fighting outside a kebab house. He was markedly scornful of the sheepish, shamed-faced journalists confronting him and regaled us with times past spent inside a police cell. He also explained what the initials ACAB scrawled everywhere on the cell walls stood for.
'All coppers are bastards,' he told us as he lurched to the cell door to shout more abuse at a policeman passing down the corridor.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
