Glastonbury/Bob Vylan has me thinking about another time British media censored artists for speaking up against the crimes of empire.
The song is named after the Birmingham Six, a group of six Northern Irish men who were falsely convicted for the 1974 Birmingham Pub bombings after being tortured into giving false confessions. The song also references the Guildford Four, another group that falsely confessed to the Guildford pub bombings in 1974. This post is only going to touch on the Birmingham Six.
While the confessions of the Birmingham Six were ludicrously thin, including no details and contradicting each other in almost every respect, including the pubs that the bombs were left in, they were allowed as evidence in the case. The men were not evaluated for injuries after signing their confessions and were promptly thrown in prison where they were badly beaten by prison guards, ruining any chance of establishing evidence of their torture. All of the prison guards were later acquitted of all charges.
Despite all of these inconsistencies, the Six were convicted on the back of their confessions and questionable forensic evidence. Amidst mounting public pressure, the convictions were ruled to be "safe and satisfactory" in a January 1988 appeal and the men remained in prison.
All of this set the stage for the Pogues, an Irish-English band well known for their politically outspoken nature. Their album If I Should Fall from Grace With God was released in September 1988, only eight months after the failed appeals. While Terry Woods' contribution to the song, Streets of Sorrow, is a beautiful reflection on living in Ireland during the troubles, the real star of the show here is Shane MacGowan's Birminghan Six. This song expressed the anger many people felt towards everyone involved in the case in no uncertain terms:
There were six men in Birmingham, in Guildford, there's four
That were picked up and tortured and framed by the law
And the filth got promotion, but they're still doing time
For being Irish in the wrong place and at the wrong time
During a live performance on Channel 4, the band performed this song and were cut off by the program cutting to commercial mid-song. The song was subsequently banned for violating a law restricting the broadcasting of Irish Republican groups and was accused of supporting "convicted terrorists".
In a (less than) happy ending, the Birmingham Six were released in 1991 on appeal. While they were rewarded anywhere from £800,000 to £1.2 million, they were also forced to pay between £80,000 and £100,000 for the "room and board" fees while they were locked in prison. While a commission in 1997 charged the police superintendent and two other officers with perjury, nobody was convicted and nobody involved in the false conviction were ever charged. If I may quote the Pogues one last time:
A curse on the judges, the coppers, and screws
Who tortured the innocent, wrongly accused
For the price of promotion and justice to sell
May the judged be their judges when they rot down in hell
This won't happen, but theoretically you would work with left-wing groups to get the word out while maintaining plausible deniability in public. You would also need to purge the higher ranks first and replace them with people you already have selected and allow them time to get the infrastructure in place to make the selection process ideologically sound. But yeah that's a multi year process and the entire power of the political machine would be pushing against you.