Picture of me on a psychiatric ward (Ward 3 of Leverndale Hospital in Glasgow) after being brought back in a police van from the social at the end of the first day of the Scottish Socialist Party conference (on the 7th of October 2006).
Tortured by police handcuffs
The Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) had a conference on Saturday the 7th and Sunday the 8th of October 2006, at Glasgow Caledonian University. I was a political prisoner on a psyciatric ward (Ward 3 of Leverndale Hospital) at the time and did not have sufficient leave to attend (I think I was limited to an hour in the hospital grounds). As I have done on many occasions since first being a political prisoner in the summer of 1998, when there has been an important event on that I have not had permission to go to, I went AWOL (absent without leave) to attend anyway.
Two male police officers turned up at the social at the end of the first day of the conference (since I was AWOL and they knew I was there). I have sometimes put up a struggle when the police have turned up to reincarcerate me and this was a particularly important occasion since there were many important activists around. If I had surrendered meekly, other SSP members may have concluded that I was not a serious and genuine socialist. I have not used violence on such occasions, however, and this occasion was no exception.
After they failed to persuade me to cooperate voluntarily, the police started using force. They put handcuffs on me, linking both my hands together behind my back, fairly quickly. They then tried to get me in the back of the police van. Even though the two police officers were helped by an off-duty nurse who was a member of the SSP (Charlie McCarthy), and despite the fact that they forced me into the back of the police van a few times, I kept my body straight and they were unable to close the door. After quite a long struggle, they resorted to calling for reinforcements, and when two further male police officers came, they bundled me in the van quite easily.
I do not blame Charlie for helping the police officers. I have always got on well with him, including earlier that evening, and due to him cooperating he was able to win their confidence and travel in the van with them back to Leverndale Hospital.
However, I must comment on one thing that Charlie said to me – what if his daughter was being raped and I was occupying the time of police officers who could otherwise help her? My answer to that question is that I am struggling for a much better world in which far fewer bad things (including rapes) take place. There is always a balance to be struck between taking action to improve the world and caring about individuals; I have always taken both into account. If political activists were always worried about minor things like police officers’ time, we would do very little (not even organising any demonstrations) to change the world or prevent adverse changes, and politicians would take us towards some sort of fascist society (such as George Orwell predicted in his book Nineteen Eighty-Four) where change may even be impossible. At the time of writing the contents of this page (December 2007), the drift towards fascism is not such a big danger (then Home Secretary John Reid, who I regard as a fascist infiltrator in the Labour Party, is no longer in the Cabinet and has even announced that he is retiring as an MP) and the balance of priorities in my mind can safely take individuals more into account.
I have always taken individuals into account to some degree, rather than adopting a single-minded approach always putting the future of the world first. I consider myself to have a female-type mind, with more of a caring attitude to other people than most men, particularly those who have some sort of idea of the world they want to live in and a plan of how they can help achieve it. Many such men do
care about individuals as well, but that is more of a by-product of their plan for influencing the future of the world. They tend to believe that “the ends justify the means”, and would be willing to adopt any strategies that they thought would lead to the sort of society they advocate, constrained merely by the idea
that “the means determine the ends” (so adopting unethical strategies would be likely to lead to an unethical society).
One way in which caring about individuals influenced my behaviour was in phoning my mum earlier in the day to tell her I was at the conference, because I was concerned that she would worry about me (a particuar concern since her second husband had died earlier that year). Although I didn’t say where the conference was being held, phoning my mum could well have increased the likelihood of me being picked up. However, there are so many spies about, including amongst SSP members, and other methods of surveillance such as CCTV cameras, that they would have probably found me anyway (particularly since I had nowhere to stay that night and would have had to rely on SSP members to put me up). It was arguably better to get picked up at the social, after I had made a significant impact, although I wanted to stay AWOL for the second day of the conference. There are good infiltrators within the police force, who may have helped things turn out relatively favourably. Could I have rescued the SSP from the crisis arising from the defamation trial of former leader Tommy Sheridan, which had already led to the split-off party Solidarity being formed, even if I had stayed AWOL indefinitely? The answer to this extremely hypothetical question is surely no, and I would now suggest that the SSP getting wiped out (rather than keeping the odd token MSP in the May 2007 Scottish parliamentary elections) was better for the future of the world. I am exploring such issues in my on-line book
If handcuffs were intended purely for restraint, they would be made out of rubber. Because they are made out of metal, they can also be used for torture. On a previous occasion also in Glasgow, I had been handcuffed to two police officers, and when I was making particularly important points, the hostile one twisted his handcuff around to inflict pain. I could withstand that level of pain due to having experienced considerably more for a sustained period of time with a broken ankle coming back from a holiday in Ireland, so that did not put me off. However, handcuffs are also designed to be self-tightening if you struggle, and since I was face down in the van, they acted as though I was struggling which I did not intend to do, and the pain got so severe that I think I would have said anything to get them removed!
I was astonished to see the state of my face (as shown in the photograph on this page captured on a mobile phone after returning to the hospital), since I was completely unaware of the cut or bruising, due to the extreme pain caused by the handcuffs. I presume it happened in the van, due to me moving around as a result of the torture,
since an SSP member would surely have said something if it had happened beforehand.
This experience gave me a new insight into torture; I really admire those who experience it without buckling, but I know that I wouldn’t be able to, while I am on psychiatric medication (that reduces my willpower) at least.
