Yet another new angle on the increasingly boring saga of innocent, oppressed Asian Satpal Ram was raised in an article which appeared in the Daily Express (nowadays simply The Express) in May 1999.
The sap this time is a grinning female journalist named Charlotte Bradshaw. Admittedly she qualifies her assertions with “He says” and “Allegedly” but she accepts without reservation the claim that Clarke “refused to co-operate with the female doctor who was treating him and subsequently died.”
The barrister who represented Ram at his 1995 appeal is quoted. And this time I will qualify the statement with the word “allegedly”. If Ian Macdonald QC really believes that Ram is innocent then either he has been misled or hasn’t read the case papers properly. Or he needs a reality check.
The new angle is that the Free Satpal Campaign, which we are told was started in the weeks following Ram’s trial, has been beset by obstructions and constant threats from wicked racists, including the BNP.
To the best of the current writer’s knowledge, the British National Party – with whom I have some contact – was not au fait with the Ram case at this time. Obviously, individual members living in the West Midlands and elsewhere would have heard of it, but (and again to the best of my knowledge) the first time the BNP covered it was when the party published a heavily edited version of the current writer’s article From Murderer To Martyr... in the January 2001 issue of its magazine Identity. (I had previously offered the article to a number of mainstream publications).
The great irony is that the only BNP member I know for certain had heard of the case before that believed Ram to be innocent! I won’t name him although he is a well-known London activist. I met him at a meeting of a financial pressure group in Central London. I can’t recall off-hand who raised the subject but it may have been him. He had read about Ram in the Guardian (yes, BNP members do read the Guardian) and said that his was obviously a miscarriage of justice, and that Asians didn’t always get a fair deal from the system either. He is now older thanks to Father Time, and wiser thanks to me!
The reference to BNP/racist harassment of the Free Satpal Campaign is the only such reference I have found to date, and is symptomatic of the ever increasing spiral of lies these shameless schemers continue to foist on an ill-informed public.
April 18, 2001