19.06.1997

Shades of John Maclean

In February the Bridgewater Four were released from jail after 18 long years. Falsely accused of murder, they had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1979. When the state, faced with overwhelming evidence, could no longer deny their innocence, Michael Hickey, the youngest of the four, walked free along with the others.

Earlier this month he appeared in court again. Charged with theft and carrying an offensive weapon (a machete), his appearance was distressing. He was dishevelled, inarticulate and disorientated - clearly a victim of the system’s inhumanity.

Hickey was just l6 when charged, along with three others, with the murder of Carl Bridgewater, but never gave up fighting to prove his innocence. During the winter of 1983-84, the coldest of the decade, he spent 89 nights on the roof of Gartree prison in an heroic protest. When he finally came down, he was kept in hospital for just 24 hours despite suffering from frostbite and was immediately placed in solitary confinement for three months as ‘punishment’.

The treatment he endured took its toll and he suffered three mental breakdowns during his imprisonment, which included a seven-year spell in a top security hospital, where the drug ‘therapy’ imposed added to his ill health.

His mother, Ann Whelan, now calls for psychiatric help for Hickey. Describing the elation of the Four’s release, she says:

“They could choose to walk where they liked ... but mentally they were still in prison. They were tortured by what they had been through” (The Independent June 11).

A long incarceration in the state’s jails is a stressful and traumatic experience for anyone, but those most vulnerable to mental breakdown are the innocent. However, even the most highly motivated political prisoners can suffer psychologically as a result of particularly vindictive treatment, for which their determination to resist and dedication to the cause of the oppressed cannot always compensate.

One of the most well-known cases was that of John Maclean, the heroic Scottish revolutionary socialist, who was jailed several times for his intransigent opposition to the imperialist war of 1914 to 1918 and for his open revolutionary propaganda against the British state.

It was during his second term of imprisonment - in 1916-17, when he was jailed for anti-war propaganda - that the effects began to show. Maclean was a member of the British Socialist Party, which launched a campaign for his release in June 1917. A front page article in The Call, the BSP’s weekly newspaper, stated:

“... There are however many champions of popular liberty still suffering the effects of a reactionary government’s vindictiveness. Our comrade John Maclean’s mental and physical powers are being undermined in gaol ...” (June 21 1917).

The same issue published a draft resolution, issued by the John Maclean Release Society, urging working class organisations to adopt it. The draft resolution was explicit in its reasons for demanding his release:

“(1) That John Maclean has already been in prison since April 12 1916; (2) that, as a result of the imprisonment, John Maclean has had a severe physical and mental breakdown, in consequence of which he had to be removed from the prison at Peterhead to the prison at Perth; (3) that it is believed that a continuance of the imprisonment will mean that, at the end of the sentence, John Maclean will leave prison an absolutely ruined man; and (4) that it is felt that if these facts be fairly and clearly represented to His Majesty’s government, they will not desire to inflict on John Maclean a punishment which might be worse than death ...” (ibid).

The campaign clearly had an effect, for Maclean was released, for whatever reasons, on June 30, despite his sentence of three years’ penal servitude just 14 months earlier. Immediately he threw himself back into revolutionary agitation, which led to a further prison sentence the following year. At his trial in May 1918 Maclean stated his much repeated allegation that his food had been drugged during his previous imprisonment and informed the court that he would refuse to eat prison food should he be jailed again. As a result of this refusal Maclean was force-fed after being sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, but the mass upsurge forced the authorities to release him early once again, this time after only six months.

Bob Pitt, in his excellent pamphlet, John Maclean and the CPGB, shows however that there was never any evidence that Maclean’s food had been interfered with in prison. In fact Maclean began to believe after his release that any food he was offered might be poisoned, often refusing to eat outside his own home and sometimes even the meals prepared by his wife.

Maclean developed a paranoid mistrust of other revolutionary leaders, dubbing Willie Gallacher and Theodore Rothstein - prominent leaders of the BSP and the early Communist Party - as state agents. Indeed by 1921 he labelled the entire CPGB leadership as “conscious and unconscious tools of Lloyd George and the propertied class of Britain” (‘Open letter to Lenin’, quoted in R Pitt John Maclean and the CPGB London 1995). Maclean’s delusions led him to deny his earlier insistence on the need for an all-Britain revolutionary party and to set up the short-lived Scottish Workers Republican Party in direct opposition to the CPGB.

The state was unable to break John Maclean’s revolutionary intransigence, but it certainly succeeded in breaking the rationality of his communist internationalism - a significant factor in retarding the full potential and development of the CPGB. Unfortunately, there are some left nationalists in Scotland who, wanting to claim him as their own, maintain that Maclean’s anti-CPGB paranoia was in fact a rational statement of Scottish nationalism. Indeed some even go so far as to claim that there was “no evidence that he was mentally unstable” and refer to “the scurrilous stories spread by Gallacher and other CPGBers concerning Maclean’s state of mind” (W Knox Scottish labour leaders 1918-39,quoted in ibid).

We need to establish the truth, not imagine events as we would like them to be. The cause of genuine internationalism and working class liberation cannot be served by denying, despite all the evidence, the fact of Maclean’s mental instability caused by his treatment at the hands of the bourgeoisie.

The case of Michael Hickey is a forceful reminder of the power of the state and its prisons to break even a most courageous fighter.

Peter Manson