“….In Britain, a series of scandals revealed that dozens of innocent people had been
held in jail, some for over 15 years.
They included the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six.
Most of them were Irishmen who'd been accused of being members of The IRA and planting bombs in English cities.
Every time they had tried to
prove their innocence, they had been blocked by some
of the most senior figures
in The British Establishment, despite overwhelming evidence of false confessions and faked evidence.
Eminent men at The very
Centre of Power, from the most senior Law Lord to The Attorney General and to The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, all of them, it was alleged, knew
that The Prisoners were innocent.
But They had Done nothing,
and The Evidence remained
locked away...
..because they had an unshakeable
conviction that The Establishment must never be shown to be wrong.
Finally, in March 1991,
The Birmingham Six were
freed at The Old Bailey.
“Ladies and gentlemen.
For 16 and a half years,
we have been used as political
scapegoats for people
in there at the highest.
The police told us from the start
that they knew we hadn't done it.
They told us they didn't care
who'd done it.
They told us that we were selected
and that they were going to
frame us just to keep
the people in there happy.
That's what it's all about.
To save face.
Justice? I don't think them people in there have got the intelligence nor the honesty to spell the word, never mind dispense it.
They're rotten —”
But there were others, also
at the heart of power in Britain,
who seemed to have lost all
contact with reality.
The intelligence agencies,
from MI6 to GCHQ,
whose job was to watch and monitor
what was happening in the world,
had completely failed to predict
the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Mrs Thatcher, who had supported the spies throughout the 1980s, was shocked.
Her foreign policy adviser wrote...
"All that intelligence that they
gave us didn't tell us
"the one thing we needed to know.
"That the Soviet Union
was about to collapse."
It was a colossal failure
of the whole Western system
of intelligence.
But some of the spies still didn't
believe what was happening.
Sir Percy Cradock was head of
the Joint Intelligence Committee.
Despite everything, he was convinced
the Soviets were just
faking the collapse.
They were just up
to their usual tricks.
They were still planning
to take over the world.
Both Britain and America were
societies that had been built on Empire and Conquest through
violence and the exercise of power.
But neither of them
had ever faced up to this.
And instead, they had both built
dreamlike myths
about their exceptionalism,
to shield and protect themselves.
But in both cases, those myths
were rooted in fear.
In Britain at the start
of the 20th century,
not only were those in charge
frightened by what
they had done abroad,
with the slave trade and in China,
they now had a feeling
that it was coming closer,
that something dangerous might also
be happening inside England itself.
The Empire had led to giant
industrial cities
rising up all across England.
They were dark, frightening places
where millions of people
lived in appalling conditions.
What alarmed those in charge was
the violence and the anger that
was building up there among what
was called The Masses.
But the danger also seemed to come
from the top of society as well.
From the new industrialists and
bankers, who ran the global empire.
They also seemed to be
out of control.
There was a wave
of financial scandals
and no-one seemed to be
able to stop them.
The novelist EM Forster wrote...
"England is being menaced by the
inner darkness in high places
"that has come with this
commercial age."
Trapped by what they saw
as a danger below
and corruption above,
the middle classes retreated.
They turned away into another
imaginary version of England,
where there were none
of these threats.
It was invented for them by a whole
generation of writers,
artists and musicians who,
in an act of
collective imagination,
created a complete dream
image of England's past...
..one that still haunts
the country today.
At its heart was a vision of a
natural order in the countryside,
outside the cities.
One of the key figures was a man
called Cecil Sharp.
He travelled through England
recording old songs,
and he filmed himself and his
friends learning old rural dances.
Sharp made it absolutely clear
that this was a political project.
His aim was to create a new
kind of English nationalism
which had, at its heart,
the idea of the folk.
It was a concept that he had
taken from German nationalism -
the innocent rural people
and their culture.
Now, is the sort of dancing he does
the dancing that would have been
