By the time I began to write my story back in the 1990s one of my preoccupations had become the lack of access to justice for people without much money, ‘social status’, or connections. Distance in time and space, as I had by then immigrated to Canada with my wife and four children, had helped me to put this issue into a sharper perspective.

The lack of justice, or the lack of access to justice, was probably the major cause of the violence I witnessed while growing up in Britain. Riots broke out in several major cities during the 1980s, often in reaction to the notorious SUS laws, their discriminatory implementation, and deaths of black men and women at the hands of police officers. There had been peaceful demonstrations, but they were mostly ignored – as governments like Margaret Thatcher’s seemed to view demands for justice and civil rights as a challenges to be suppressed. All too often, the response to marches and demonstrations was the use of force by English police and in the case of the North of Ireland, lethal actions by members of the RUC and British armed forces.

Policing represents where most people have their first connections with a system of justice and many police forces in England have largely failed the less well-off people of Britain, particularly those coming from an ethnic minority background. In my novel there is a range of disparate characters that are searching for justice in their different ways but the common theme is that their varying actions have come about because of failures of policing and in the judicial processes. Carmen campaigns for answers following the death of a black man travelling from college; the Brothers of Islam take action after the police fail to tackle crimes such as drug dealing, prostitution and theft on the Blackmore estate; Robbie Walker and his friends are moved to violently respond after no officers are held to account for the deaths in custody of two young black men. The murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993 in a racially motivated attack and the deaths of two black men from Wolverhampton – Clinton McCurbin during his arrest in a town centre store in 1987 and Oliver Pryce (someone I knew very well) who died in a police van in Middlesborough in 1990 as he was restrained while suffering a psychotic episode – influenced the direction of my novel. After several failed attempts at writing a story that detailed deaths in similar circumstances and the impact they had on surviving family members, I decided to make these fictionalised events the background story and bring the reactions of the wider community to the forefront.

Policing fails everyone when it is partial and discriminatory and that was also blatantly obvious in the part of Ireland that was policed by the discredited, and then disbanded, RUC. After making a number of trips to Ireland I felt that I should include something of the great injustices that were happening there in the in the 1990s. Every side of the conflict in Ireland committed atrocious acts that can never be condoned nor justified but it was the actions of British State proxies called the Ulster Defence Association that left a lasting impression on me as they had happened close to the times I had visited Ireland. The UDA had killed over 400 non-combatants over the course of the Troubles and in February

1992 it murdered five men and wounded nine others in Sean Graham Bookmakers in Belfast but was only declared an illegal organisation by the British government in August of that year. The UDA went onto kill three more men and wound nine others in James Murray’s Bookmakers three months later; murder another eight and wound thirteen in the Rising Sun Bar in Greysteel on 30th October 1993; and kill six men watching a World Cup game in a bar in Loughinisland in 1994. These victims were not, to use that horrible phrase ‘collateral damage’, but intended targets and to add to the egregiousness, they were carried out with the collusion of members of the British state apparatus.

The families of the victims from all sides of the conflict in Ireland continue to look for justice, as do the families of the scores of black people who have died at the hands of British police and I found it impossible to continue with my novel without including an Irish experience. In the book, Robbie Walker travels from England with his friend Danny Maguire and is warned in Belfast to take heed of what he has seen and remember that the people who govern that part Ireland also governs where he lives and how ruthlessly they protect their own interests. More than a quarter of a century since I wrote those lines the Conservative British Government introduced the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill in 2022. As well as being criticized by victims’ groups, Amnesty International and the Council of Europe, it has succeeded in bringing together political opponents and has been roundly condemned by Irish politicians from every quarter, who characterise the legislation as ‘an attempt to conceal the truth and protect British state forces’. It is a move so outrageous and counter to every vestige of justice that the Irish government has been moved to challenge it in the European Court of Human Rights.

https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/black-country/families-dead-police-custody-victims-18412737