by Andy McSmith
Even after the Ealing case, the idea that in every male there is a natural supply of sexual aggression that requires expression lingered on in the minds of some judges. In 1988, Sir Harold Cassel refused to pass a prison sentence on a former policeman who had sexually assaulted his twelve-year-old daughter because his wife was pregnant and consequently unavailable to him at night, causing ‘considerable problems for a healthy young husband’.37 In April 1990, Judge Raymond Dean, aged sixty-seven, congratulated an Old Bailey jury who had cleared a Chelsea property dealer of rape, saying: ‘As the gentlemen on the jury will understand, when a woman says “no” she doesn’t always mean it. Men can’t turn their emotions on and off like a tap like some women can.’38
CHAPTER 3
PROTEST AND SURIVIVE
Away from the small islands ruled by Margaret Thatcher, the continent of Europe was split between the vast military alliances, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, who eyed each across a physical and ideological border that sliced Germany into two and kept Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania sealed off from their neighbours to the west and south. NATO’s strategists feared that a ‘missile gap’ was developing that might threaten the principle of mutually assured destruction that supposedly deterred the hostile alliances from going to war. The nuclear weapons that NATO held in Europe were carried by ageing British Vulcan bombers and American F1-11s. If these aircraft were scrapped and not replaced, NATO would be unable to launch a nuclear strike against the Warsaw Pact other than with long-range missiles held in silos in the USA. But would the Americans want to fire those missiles and risk retaliatory strikes on their cities, if the Red Army rolled into West Germany? NATO feared that their Warsaw Pact counterparts might calculate that Washington would not risk millions of American lives for Western Europe’s sake, and that, without the means of launching a nuclear strike from European soil, NATO’s nuclear deterrent would lose its credibility.
When James Callaghan was prime minister, in 1976–9, he did not seem to think that the problem was urgent, but Margaret Thatcher emphatically did. She had been in office for only a week when she was telling Helmut Schmidt, the German chancellor, that Germany needed more missiles. Schmidt did not think German public opinion would warm to the idea, so in September 1979 she decided that 144 American-owned ground-launched cruise missiles should come to the UK instead. Another sixteen were to have been deployed in Germany, but Schmidt rang Downing Street on the off-chance that she might be persuaded to take them off his hands. She agreed and, in June 1980, 160 cruise missiles were delivered to Greenham Common in Berkshire and to the RAF base at Molesworth in Cambridgeshire.
It also worried Mrs Thatcher that Britain’s own nuclear deterrent, Polaris, introduced in secret by a Labour government in the 1960s, was out of date. In December 1979, a small group of ministers agreed that they should buy the more modern and potentially destructive Trident missiles from the USA. President Jimmy Carter was at first reluctant to sell, having staked his reputation on disarmament talks, but changed his mind after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979. A deal was announced in the Commons on 15 July 1980. Four months later, Carter was defeated by his Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan. Reagan and Thatcher were soulmates. In time, their relationship would be the closest there had ever been between an American president and a British prime minister. But in the short term, Reagan’s arrival complicated her plans because he wanted to scrap the old Tridents and replace them with updated versions. Since the technology was undeveloped, it was impossible to say what it might cost. Despite the ghastly state of her government’s finances, Mrs Thatcher agreed to buy at whatever price.1
To her, it was all a matter of retaining a credible nuclear deterrent to protect Western Europe from invasion, but others took the view that, at best, she was indulging in useless expense, and, at worst, she could be preparing the country for collective suicide. The average age of the Soviet Politburo was over seventy and there were fears, which proved misplaced, that when younger leaders took over they might be more aggressive in pursuing the goal of destroying capitalism. If nuclear war broke out, the Warsaw Pact’s first target was obviously going to be Britain, where so much nuclear hardware was stored. Philip Noel-Baker, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, warned that ‘nuclear warfare will destroy civilization, and perhaps exterminate mankind’.2
Some of the experts on the other side of the argument accepted that there was a real risk of nuclear war, but did not think that it would destroy the human race. They did speculate, though, on how the population might react if a nuclear bomb hit a British city. They hoped that, if proper preparations were made, they could count on people to rally, as they did during the Blitz; but as the eminent historian, Professor Michael Howard, argued in an influential letter to The Times in January 1980, it would necessitate investing much more money and care in civil defence to ensure that the country could recover quickly from a ‘limited’ nuclear strike – which, he avowed, might kill 20m people. Otherwise, he warned, the UK’s ‘independent deterrent’ would be shown up as an ‘expensive bluff’.3
In February 1980, The Times revealed that the government had updated a booklet called Protect and Survive, a civil defence manual originally published as a series of six pamphlets in 1949–50. The revelation provoked considerable public interest, but anyone who applied to Her Majesty’s Stationery Office for a copy of the pamphlet, including the French embassy, was told that none was available.4 An organization called Civil Aid, a voluntary group set up to prepare the population for a nuclear attack, stepped into the breach by publishing a pamphlet along similar lines, full of practical suggestions for staying alive after the bomb had dropped. ‘If you saw a frog running about, you would have to wash it down to get rid of active dust, cook it and eat it,’ the vice-chairman, Robin Meads, told a press conference.5 An opinion poll in April 1980 suggested that 40 per cent of the public thought that nuclear war was likely to break out within ten years. It was also reported that about 300 firms were marketing fallout radiation suits, etc.6 A month later, the government gave in to public demand and published the official version of Protect and Survive, which included what became a famous illustration of an idyllic nuclear family – Dad, Mum and two small kids – who had sensibly built a shelter out of bags filled with earth, sand and so on, so that they could crawl into it armed with supplies to survive the nuclear strike together. Wisely, the booklet refrained from recommending a diet of radioactive frog.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) had existed since 1957, when it was founded on a wave of popular support after the Suez crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary had made the threat of nuclear war seem real. President Kennedy’s success in handling the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and the disarmament talks that followed took the urgency out of the problem, and for the best part of two decades CND limped along, half-forgotten but still there, run by volunteers from a cramped Georgian building in Bloomsbury. Suddenly, in February 1980, it was attracting so many recruits that it could afford a full-time general secretary, a Catholic priest named Bruce Kent. By April, he and two other paid staff were having to cope with forty to fift y letters a day from people wanting to join. New CND groups sprung up everywhere. In June, a new group came into being in Newbury, the nearest town to Greenham Common, where the cruise missiles were stationed. They were led by Joan Ruddock, who worked at the local Citizen’s Advice Bureau. Nationally, membership more than doubled in 1980, to around 9,000. In 1981, it more than doubled again, to 20,000. By 1984, it had reached 100,000.
The man who emerged as the public face of a revived CND was the historian E.P. Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class and other works of popular history. In 1980, he produced a pamphlet, later expanded into a book, whose title Protest and Survive was a parody of the government pamphlet; its sounding-off point was Professor Howard’s letter to The Times. Thompson argued that:
once ‘theatre’ nuclear war commences, immense passions, indeed hysterias, will
be aroused. After even the first strikes of such a war, communications and command posts will be so much snarled up that any notion of rational planning will give way to panic. Ideology will at once take over from self-interest. Above all, it will be manifest that the only one of the great powers likely to come out of the contest as ‘victor’ must be the one which hurls its ballistic weapons first, furthest and fastest . . .7
On 5 September 1981, a group of footsore women arrived uninvited at the perimeter of the Greenham Common base. They had walked from Cardiff to deliver a letter and, they hoped, to receive a verbal reply. The letter, handed to the base commander, said: ‘We fear for the future of all our children and for the future of the living world which is the basis of all life.’ Their request for a debate was ignored, so the women set up camp. That temporary arrangement would be there in one form or another for the next nineteen years as Britain’s most lasting and visible protest against nuclear weapons. This hardy band was known simply as the Greenham Women, for the good reason that their camp was women only. Men were permitted to visit during the day, but at night there was a curfew. Some of the women there were veteran feminists who had lived independently of men for years; others paid a personal price for being there at all. One had been told by her husband, ‘You either stay at home and be a proper wife and mother, or you go to Greenham, but not both.’8 Though the peace camp failed to chase away the missiles, it was a phenomenal demonstration of female self-confidence. Thousands of women took part, blocking the gates, cutting the fence, dancing on the silos. On 12 December 1982, about 30,000 women linked arms in a human chain around the entire perimeter, which they decorated with children’s toys and pictures. Early in 1983, forty-four women were up in front of the magistrates. When sentencing was about to begin, a line of policemen marched into court to separate the defendants from the spectators, who included dozens more Greenham women, whereupon the defendants and spectators all stood on their chairs and began to sing. That Easter, they formed a fourteen-mile human chain from Greenham to the atomic research facility at Aldermaston, via the Royal Ordnance Factory at Burghfield.
The fear that there was something sinister about the nuclear industry inspired one of the decade’s best drama series, The Edge of Darkness (1985), created by the writer Troy Kennedy Martin of Z Cars fame and produced by Michael Wearing, and spread over six episodes on Monday evenings on BBC2. It was the story of a detective, played by Bob Peck, looking for his daughter’s killers and learning that she had been involved in left-wing politics, making powerful enemies in the nuclear industry. ‘Monday is suddenly the best night of the television week,’ one critic enthused.9 Kennedy had wanted to call the drama ‘Magnox’, but was advised by BBC lawyers that the name was the property of British Nuclear Fuels.10
CND’s leaders were always careful to emphasize that they opposed all nuclear weapons, not least those that the Warsaw Pact were pointing at Britain. It was always likely that the movement would be infiltrated by Soviet fellow travellers, or even paid agents. The KGB appears not to have been interested, but the East German intelligence service, Stasi, retained a regular informant. This was the historian Vic Allen, a professor at Leeds University, who for a time was on CND’s national committee and came fift h in a field of five when he ran for the CND presidency in 1985. When he was exposed as a Stasi informant in 1999, he defended himself on the grounds that everyone who knew him also knew where his sympathies lay.11
Coincidentally, he was not the only agent operating in CND’s Yorkshire region: there was a well-known figure in left-wing circles called Harry Newton, who had been a trade union activist since the late 1950s and was a long-standing member of CND. He died in 1983. At about that time, an MI5 officer named Cathy Massiter became disturbed by the freedom with which her fellow officers were finding reasons to snoop on CND. For instance, they decided that an interview that Joan Ruddock gave to a Soviet newspaper in 1981 constituted contact with a hostile intelligence agency, and set to work. Ms Ruddock said:
Between 1981 and 1986, I was frequently subjected, as a direct consequence of my involvement in CND, to frightening and intimidating behaviour. I shall never know whether those events related to MI5, but I feel certain that my privacy, and that of my family, was systematically invaded, and my character, impugned, with absolutely no justification.12
Cathy Massiter thought this was wrong, but in the secretive world of spies there was no complaints procedure through which she could voice her objections, so she resigned and wrote a brief letter to a magazine explaining why. She disappeared from public sight for nearly two years until an alert BBC producer contacted her and persuaded her to take part in a programme about MI5. She made a series of allegations, which she backed up in a sworn affidavit, including that MI5 was not only watching the miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill, and listening in to his telephone conversations, but had been doing the same to Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman, who until 1982 were leading officers of the National Council of Civil Liberties. Harman was by then a Labour MP, and Hewitt was press secretary to the Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Massiter also revealed that Harry Newton had been an MI5 informer for so long that he was almost an agent provocateur.
She had come out of the cold just as MI5 was struggling to recover from the Michael Bettaney affair, which suggested that they were so busy investigating innocent people that they missed what was happening under their noses. Bettaney was an officer in counter-intelligence who, hoping the Soviets would pay him to be a spy, pushed an envelope full of secrets through the letter box of Arkadi Gouk, senior KGB officer in London. Suspecting a trap, Gouk consulted his deputy, Oleg Gordievsky, who was secretly a British agent. Bettaney was arrested and sentenced to twenty-three years in prison, of which he served fourteen. The resulting commission of inquiry heard that a woman colleague had seen Bettaney drink two bottles of neat whisky at a party and set fire to himself, after telling anyone who was prepared to listen that he would rather be working for the Russians than the British. She had not felt able to pass on this information, because there was no one in MI5 whose job was to listen to the concerns of middle-ranking staff.13 As a result of these two scandals, MI5 appointed its first staff counsellor in 1987, and ever since there has been someone, usually a retired permanent secretary, in whom employees could confide any doubts they had about their colleagues or their work. This seems to have worked, because it was ten years until the next scandal, when an MI5 officer, David Shayler, was arrested for passing documents to a journalist.
It might be thought that the radical Left would have been grateful to Cathy Massiter, but she actually received a very mixed reaction. Pat Arrowsmith, one of the best known of the first wave of CND activists, had known Harry Newton for twenty-five years – or thought she had. She refused to believe Massiter’s story,14 even though Massiter gained nothing personally from actions that cost her a career and the universal condemnation of her old colleagues. ‘It is difficult to convey now, from the standpoint of the twenty-first century, how amazing and shocking this event seemed to us then,’ said Stella Rimington, who was then Massiter’s section head and was on her way to becoming the first female director-general of MI5:
We had been brought up to accept that not only did you not talk in public about the work that you did, but more than that, you did not even tell anyone that you worked for MI5. Yet here was this erstwhile colleague, someone we all knew well, talking about her work on nationwide TV and what’s more giving an interpretation of it which to us seemed distorted and unrecognisable. It was breathtaking.15
It could hardly have been ‘breathtaking’ if what she said had not been essentially true.
What made CND formidable was not just the large numbers it could draw into the streets or around Greenham Common’s perimeter, but more significantly the support it picked up within the Labour Party. Some party activists who had taken part in Aldermaston marches in their adolescence, twenty years earlier, now held positions of influence, giving rise to the prospect that a Labour gover
nment might abandon nuclear weapons.
The convulsion in the Conservative Party that had brought Margaret Thatcher to the fore was as nothing compared with the agonies that the Labour Party went through after the fall of the Callaghan government. The membership of the party was undergoing a change, accelerated by defeat. There are no accurate figures for Labour Party membership at the time, because of a quaint convention that every constituency Labour Party was deemed to have 1,000 members for the purpose of casting a vote at annual conference; but the best available evidence suggests that membership went up from around 284,000 to around 300,000 between 1978 and 1981.16 During that time, as many as 20,000 party members may have left to join the breakaway SDP. So it is possible that by 1981, 10 per cent of the party had joined since the fall of the Callaghan government.
There is no doubt about who most of the recent recruits were. They were the students who had packed protest marches in the late 1960s, who in their early twenties had considered themselves far too radical to join the stuffy Labour Party but, ten years on, were thinking that it was time to be involved in mainstream politics. Wards that had been run for years by long-serving Labour councillors, never discussing anything more contentious than street lighting, were suddenly having to cope with university-educated radicals who wanted to talk about nuclear weapons, or Nicaragua, or why Jim Callaghan was a class traitor. The most famous of the Vietnam demonstrators, Tariq Ali, announced in the Guardian in 1979 that he was joining the Hornsey Labour Party, setting off a chain reaction that nearly led to the Hornsey party being disbanded, and which ended with Tariq being formally expelled in October 1983. Feminists who had made a point of organizing themselves separately from men during the 1970s were also joining up, having decided that they did not need to keep their feminism to themselves. John Silkin, a former cabinet member who ran for the deputy leadership in 1981, remembered it as a strange time when ‘it was a disadvantage to have been in the Labour Party for more than two years’.17