‘I’ve never had any great illusions that the British justice system was on the side of ordinary people’
In his latest Martin Shipton Meets podcast, our chief reporter talks to Rob Griffiths, the Cardiff-based general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain, about his acquittal in a Welsh nationalist bomb trial and his belief in the continuing relevance
THE general secretary of the British Communist Party has spoken about how he was wrongly accused of organising a Welsh nationalist bombing campaign in the early 1980s.
In a podcast discussion, Rob Griffiths told of his time as a leading figure in the Welsh Socialist Republican Movement, many of whose members were accused of criminal activity such as the burning of second homes.
He said: “I got arrested quite a few times and so did hundreds of other people in Wales. I was arrested after playing a leading part in protests outside police stations and police cells against those arrests.
“I was arrested for the third time and charged after 48 hours in the police station with very serious offences. I was accused of planting a bomb in an army recruitment office ... in Pontypridd.
“I was accused of helping somebody evade arrest, knowing or believing them to be in possession of explosives. I was accused of conspiracy to cause explosions.
“But of course there wasn’t a shred of evidence to connect me to any of those, other than what I’d supposedly admitted in private to police officers while in detention.
“I didn’t sign anything, nothing was recorded and you really can’t invent thousands and thousands of words that were supposedly said.
“When you’ve hardly heard them say anything, you’re going to make mistakes, so in a sense it was fairly easy in front of a fair-minded jury to point out that I couldn’t possibly have made all these admissions in the police station, presumably out of a desire to spend the rest of my life in prison, when there was no other evidence against me.
“There was no evidence against most of those who were charged with very serious offences. But thank goodness for the jury system and for open-minded, fair-minded people.”
The case came before the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (Pace), which obliged police to tape-record interviews with suspects.
He said: “There have been a series of scandals and miscarriages of justice, based supposedly on what people have admitted of their own free will while in police custody, so Pace was a long way from being entirely satisfactory.
“Nevertheless, by demanding some viable proof that people had actually made these admissions, that Act has made some difference.
“If it had been in force at the time we were arrested and charged, then most of those cases would never have come to trial.”
Asked what had been going on, he said: “I think the police were under great pressure from the higher echelons of the legal and political establishment to try and put people into the frame for what had been happening in Wales.
“I think as well some very senior police officers certainly seemed to take everything very personally when they were criticised and when protests were organised outside their police stations.
“In fact, in custody they made absolutely no secret of their personal animosity towards a number of us.”
He spent a few weeks in prison on remand after his initial arrest, but others spent as much as a year in prison: “People lost their jobs – close family members, in one case somebody’s father, actually died as a result of all of the pressure.
“So it was quite a traumatic time, but there were people who had it much worse than I did.”
Asked what he took from the experience, Griffiths said: “I’ve never had any great illusions that the British justice system was on the side of ordinary people, by and large, although I’m certainly not denigrating the work that many ordinary police officers do.
“But I’ve always thought the legal system in Britain was biased towards property and wealth. To have it confirmed in quite so stark a way I suppose does come as a little bit of a shock.
“There were also political lessons to be learned from it. There’s no point in being so far ahead of public opinion that you completely lose touch with people. You isolate yourselves and you end up achieving little or nothing.”
Afterwards he joined the Communist Party, which he saw as a bastion of working class socialism which took the Welsh national question seriously, supporting the Welsh language and Welsh medium education as well as maximum devolution for Wales.
Asked why the party had rarely achieved electoral success, he said: “Anti-communism is almost the state religion in Britain, and has been since 1917, especially after the onset of the Cold War.
“It’s also experienced a lack of resources, which means it’s always been difficult to counter a lot of that propaganda.
“Our electoral system doesn’t favour small parties, of course – I’ve always been a supporter of a proper system of proportional representation.
“And then of course there’s the position of the Labour Party as the monolithic left-of-centre party in Wales and the one to which trade unions are affiliated. In the trade union movement it’s much more likely that Communists will win elections, because people know them, have worked with them and been represented by them. Even people on the right politically respect the work that Communists do.”
He said the Soviet Union had made “overwhelmingly a positive contribution to the course of history in the 20th Century. It set an example of how ordinary people can win state power.
“Despite the mistakes – sometimes terrible mistakes – that followed, it showed how Socialist and Communist governments can transform the lives of many millions of people for the better.”