Streams of consciousness

Streams of consciousness

I first published this as a comment over at Liberal Conspiracy blog. It was largely off topic, still I think it deserves a wider audience so I have republished it here.

It was no secret before, nobody thought to ask. I don’t troll. But, now and again I will play mind games. I still smile when I think of the amount of times some on Guido’s blog thought I was you. Had I posted under my own name, Guido would not have allowed my comments through. Remember how many attacked me not under their own names. I learned about this from you, although you were pointing out how the Right did it, I thought I could do this. Three years ago I was computer illiterate. Two years ago I got a computer. In between then and now, I went on CIF. It was an education. Got involved in some flame wars, and was the last man standing along side billstickers. Sunny called me a racist. It wasn’t true. In the end he apologised. I’m still on the banned list at Iain Dale’s Diary, which is a shame because it means Total Politics refuses to acknowledge Total Bollocks written by axetogrind. As Jailhouselawyer is a co-author of the non-aligned blog, it does not take a rocket scientist to work out who is behind it. Communication is a fine thing. Recently, in New Zealand the police decided to offer the lad a job who has Aspergers Syndrome and was involved in computer hacking fraud big time. So, why am I on the dole? I’m in the job market. Why has the foremost expert on prison law and criminal justice not got a job? Are people frightened of me? Not because of violence but because of what I know? I would go to the source if I wanted to know something.

Tonight I caught Diana Johnson MP trying to avoid me in the street. She didn’t when she wanted my first vote in 25 years prior to the last election. Ok, she had her dog with her and my dog Rocky did let her’s know he was Top Dog. He’s not really aggressive, nor dangerous, he does some chest beating. I see through him, I know he’s scared at times. Tell me about it. I was 20 and looked 14 with a mental age about the same, in a man’s world, “Monster Mansion”, HMP Wakefield. I was like a shadow on the wall. I look up and and the vultures are waiting to swoop down on this “chicken”. I look around and see the biggest guy around, I decide to form an alliance with him. Henry a gypsy, Romany, he said. When Dale claims to know where the term chav comes from, he was wrong, even the Telegraph knows it comes from Romany for boy. Nowt wrong with a chav. The term has been bastardised. Can’t blame the youth of today for it. Henry was convicted of rape, a senior police officer’s daughter. He said she consented and it was only when it was discovered who she had had sex with that it became rape. I don’t know the facts, I didn’t judge him, I felt I needed a friend to help me get through in a maximum security prison. Henry was without doubt the strongest physically pound for pound on the Wing, and in the prison, at weightlifting, until I took it up and at first he laughed at me. But, I soon became the strongest pound for pound at Bantam weight 9 stone, 127 lbs. Sorry Europe, I don’t understand metric. It doesn’t compute. To cut a long story short, Henry was used by the screws to sort out a problem inmate. Then at the end of the Association period, we walked out of his cell and I pointed out to him the group of six inmates at the other side of the Landing. I said don’t run, confront them or they will go after you like a pack of wolves. We walked over and it went off straight away. I had read about Alexander the Great, we stood back to back, a young Screw tried to blow his whistle but couldn’t get a peep out because he was so shit scared. I indicated to Henry that we ought to throw the Screw over the landing onto the safety netting for his safety. His bum hitting the wire sent off a little peep on his whistle. It was heard by Officer Daley, my Personal Officer, he came running to hit the alarm bell. I noticed his face was as white as a Senior Officer’s shirt. Then I got distracted from what was happening about me because I was in the middle of a fight. Henry got hit on the head by a stainless steel food tray. Split his scalp open like a knife cutting into a green outside red inside melon. Blood everywhere, down his face, T-Shirt. It looked worse than it was. Nevertheless, Henry panicked when another three inmates jumped in on the other side, and broke ranks and fled, Banging himself up in a Pad. He said afterwards, when he was licking his wounds, it was only then that he realised he had deserted me in the face of nine enemies. I thought I had the situation contained, when I feel a pair of arms come from behind pinning mine down. I flipped him over my back and shoulders, and recognise Mr Daley on his way down.” Oh sorry, Mr Daley”, I said, stooping to pick him up, “You caught me unawares. Are you ok?”. Can’t say I thought much of his thinking going for me when nine others were going for me at the same time. Perhaps, he had his reason(s). Soon after, the Heavy Mob arrived. By then it was all over. I was safe. I had survived. Henry was in the hospital for treatment and observation. I asked Mr Daley if I could bang up in Henry’s Pad instead of my own, he said it was ok. There was a 25 inch TV on a shelf above the door, it was plugged into a spare light socket, and there was a V-Shaped portable-TV ariel on the window ledge. One day, a woman in a block of flats across the road saw the TV ariel through her binoculars and phoned the prison to report it. She was asked why she was looking at the prison through binoculars as it was against the Official Secrets Act. I was not then a Jailhouselawyer so I didn’t know. I did opine, when I entered the gates of Armley Prison in Leeds in 1971, that the law stopped outside of the prison gates. Twenty years later, Lord Justice Woolf, following the Strangeways Prison riot on April Fools Day 1990, in his Report stated that justice stops outside the prison gates. I was B Wing’s Three’s Landing Cleaner, it was written in marker pen on a huge white board at the Centre Office. Next to Hirst: 836208. Mr Daley shouted me one day, I looked over the Three’s Landing, He said go and check Henry’s window ledge to see if there is a portable-TV ariel on it. There was, I moved it to mine, then went back to check the window ledge and went to report that there wasn’t the last time I looked. It was a honest response. Was he issuing a warning to get rid of it from view? They didn’t want Outsiders knowing what went on inside our prisons.

Tonight, I accosted Diane Johnson MP, who I haven’t seen since the last General Election. Both dogs got agitated a bit, I was short of breath after running after her and Rocky wanting to go and remind her dog who’s Top Dog around here. And Kathleen who has ME, had just said I was bad tempered, as in short tempered, with Rocky’s whining whilst we were talking in Judge Humphrey’s and his partner’s kitchen in their house. He’s a dog. Dogs like food. He’s a Golden Labrador X with some kind of a hound the Rescue Centre informed me. Therefore, he sniffs for food and other scents more than most breed of dog. IMHO. Just an observation.

I said to Diana Johnson, as she went behind her iron railings and gate, I was considering chaining myself to the railings, as a protest about the lack of government response to the ECtHR judgment in the Prisoners Votes Case. I said, Kathleen has ME, and it was not fair that I have to go begging there for money. The government states that I need £110 per fortnight to survive, NatWest Bank and Yorkshire Water have decided 50% of that will be taken for overdrawn on nothing in my account, when a DD goes in and the money is not there to cover, and the other is for back debt. I have back pain. Not severe, just tingly. It’s the Chill Out Zone, John Lee Hooker playing. I said, why is it when I am so knowledgeable on crime and prison and law and the rest of it, I am unemployed.

In the kitchen, Kathleen got an ash tray out for us to have a smoke. Oh dear, I thought, and said, this is what I was trying to tell you, I took the tobacco pouch out of my shirt pocket and displayed the dog ends I had been smoking from my saved emergency rations. Old habits die hard.

When I came out after the five years, I went to Bath. Where Clarence Mitchell lives. It was 1974. That’s three years and seven months, it would have been three and four but for the escape from Lewes Prison in May 1973. I had the money that Henry and I had earned running a smuggling racket with Ronnie Rackett a civilian workman in the Building Yard. One time we got an order for a 3.10 shotgun and a .38 revolver, Security (Burglars) turned the jail over when word got out. It was intended to do a hit, gangster on gangster, I said to Henry we should rethink the situation, it would have been bad PR for the Prison Service, therefore we would have got a hard time as a result. The guns went out the same way they had come in, in a compressor towed by a dumper truck. They even had the Army in with metal detectors scanning the football field gardens and veg patch.

Was there a man with night-vision binoculars watching some activity in Praia da Luz on the evening of May 3 2007?

Martin, Kathleen and Humphrey’s son is at Oxford. He works on and off for Dianne Johnson MP, who I mentioned I was talking to earlier tonight. I said, we really have to look at the issues of penal reform giving that neither the government nor penal reform groups do anywhere near enough. Lets hope Shami Chakrabati gets Liberty involved. I said, I felt that the government was stalling until the Tories get in at the next election… Thatcher is becoming a faded memory. My reasoning was that the government would rather, if they felt they were going to lose, abdicate responsibility to the Tories. I did not support the government move to go to war with Iraq. Still, I voted for Labour. My elected MP could be asking questions in the House, why the State is letting me down badly. Why soon it will be eat or heat in the fuel poverty of Winter.

From Hull to eternity…