Chris Mullin MP to stand down - a shame, we need more like him

I read in The Independent today that Chris Mullin MP is to stand down after 23 years in Parliament.

He is best known to the public as the man who secured the release of the Birmingham Six. I attended a talk he gave at Warwick University in 1992 (I think) when I was a student there. I remember him commenting on the aftermath of the Birmingham Six case. This case was, of course, one of the darker episodes in British criminal history. Obviously for the atrocity committed by IRA cowards who threw bombs into pubs. But also for the further outrage that saw followed it: the police 'fitted up' 6 Irishmen that they knew very well to be innocent. They were physically and psychologically abused before confessions were fabricated and they were given life sentences. If the death penalty had been available they would have been hanged.

Mullins knew justice had not been served and began a long and lonely campaign to prove their innocence and secure their release.

He was finally vindicated when the men were released. In doing so he had exposed police corruption and inevitably made enemies. At the Warwick talk he told the audience how he had received middle-class hate mail calling him a 'sancimonious little git'. It made us laugh but it could have been worse; in proving the men's innocence he also tracked down the murderers who had actually carried out the bombings.

The irony was that the police knew the identities of the real bombers, as they did in the case of the Guildford Four. The so-called 'Balcombe Street gang', captured in a stand-off with police in London, were the culprits. But how could they be prosecuted when the police had told the world they already had their bombers? Thus the dead were insulted yet again: innocent men were convicted of their killings and the guilty deliberately allowed to walk free.

Chris Mullin's pursuit of the guilty exonerates him from any claim that his actions were politically motivated. He had no wish to exculpate, or otherwise excuse, the guilty. Personally I always wished that the bent coppers who fitted up the Six had themselves been thrown in the slammer for 25-odd years, just to see justice served. And the IRA creatures who actually carried out the killing given life sentences. But for some unfathomable reason it never happened. I suspect part of the reason was that so many members of the judicial system, the police and the public still believed the Six to be guilty. They are not.

Chris Mullins can be admired for other reasons too. The current vogue is for MPs to be associated with duck ponds, wide-screen TVs and 'flipping' their second homes. The expenses scandal, in other words. As described in today's Independent article, Mullins claimed not so much as a bathplug during the scandal. And amazingly, he still makes do with a black-and-white TV set in his house. You see, he doesn't see the point of anything grander at taxpayers expense. The Independent reports he used to cause trouble by refusing chauffeur-driven cars because he thought them a waste of money. What would we give to have MPs like that filling the Commons?

Ok, he didn't get everything right. In the 1980s he supported unilateral nuclear disarmament, which would have split NATO, left us vulnerable to nuclear blackmail by the Warsaw Pact and probably prolonged the Cold War, rather than ending it as Reagan did. It was, after all, because the arms race bankrupted the Soviet Union and exposed their economic weakness that Gorbachev began his process of Perestroika.

Mullins also supported socialist dinosaur Tony Benn in his campaign for deputy leadership, including his proposal for mass nationalisation. In the Independent Mullins says he baulked at this nutty proposal; not surprisingly, as no nation on earth has sustained economic progress through such a policy.

Still, we can forgive Chris Mullins these minor indiscretions. He did the right thing and is a man of principle and integrity. I was impressed by him when I heard his talk, many years ago, and by his subsequent Newsnight appearances. He changed the way we look at the police, the criminal justice system and arguably the death penalty. This funny-looking little man will be missed by Parliament and by politics in this country.