In December 1976 SPL recommended a more positive and systematic approach to devising counter-subversion initiatives, probably with the covert release of damaging information on subversives to the media chiefly in mind. The DDG, John Jones, was extremely wary, arguing from the experience of the Heath administration that such initiatives were ‘in the main ineffective’:
The whole concept of trying to manage counter subversion in the media [is] of very doubtful value. It is natural for Ministers and senior officials to attempt to manipulate the news and the media. This is part of the stuff of politics. The results of such attempts have almost invariably been unforeseen and I think it unrewarding that officials should attempt to plan and launch in the media campaigns to counter subversion.
. . . In the field of counter subversion generally I see the Security Service as the provider of objective and factual information and comment to official departments and agencies about the security status of individuals and groups . . . We should be very chary of becoming involved in schemes to use our information publicly or through non official bodies. If we are consulted about such proposals our first concern must be to protect our sources and to preserve our non-partisan status in political matters.15
Fearing that the definition of subversion was in danger of being confused with opposition to the policies of the Callaghan government, Jones warned the DG, Sir Michael Hanley, before his first attendance at the SH in February 1977:
There is a natural tendency for senior officials (and in this they reflect the views of the Ministers they serve) to equate subversion with activity which threatens a Government’s policies or may threaten its very existence . . . In the heat of the day the objective impartiality in these matters which we must observe tends to become blurred, certainly in the minds of politicians and sometimes in those of their officials. It is in the long term interests of the Security Service that we adhere firmly to the objective non-partisan approach of our Charter and the current definition of subversion assists in this.16
The Communist-influenced left-wing minority on the TUC General Council had its greatest impact during the final two years of the Callaghan government. The Alternative Economic Policy adopted by the TUC in 1977 began as a Communist initiative, proposed by Ken Gill, the Communist leader of the draughtsmen’s union, TASS. At its annual conference in September, the TUC voted for a return to ‘unfettered collective bargaining’. Gill recalls an occasion when he was part of a TUC delegation to 10 Downing Street and had to ring his office during a break in the meeting. He felt a tap on his shoulder, turned round and saw the grinning face of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, who had presumably been reading MI5’s Box 500 reports (so called after the Service’s SW1 Post Office box). ‘Reporting back to King Street, Ken?’ Healey asked him. In addition to the Communists Ken Gill and, briefly, Mick McGahey on the TUC General Council, there was a core of non-Communist union leaders with a high regard for Ramelson, who listened to his policy advice and took part in the left-wing caucus which he organized: among them the public employees’ leader Rodney Bickerstaffe, the seamen’s Jim Slater, print union leader Bill Keys, Alan Sapper of the television technicians, Ken Cameron of the Fire Brigades Union and the tobacco workers’ Doug Grieve.17
Initially, however, some members of the Callaghan government were more concerned by political than industrial subversion. At his first meeting with Hanley on 11 November 1976, the new Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, raised the issue of Trotskyist penetration of the Labour Party.18 In 1971 the ‘total hard membership’ of Trotskyist and other ‘Far Left’ groups had been estimated as ‘probably no greater than one-sixth that of the CPGB’.19 Though Trotskyists increased in number during the remainder of the decade, they showed their usual capacity for internecine ideological warfare. The Security Service monitored three main overt Trotskyist groups – the Workers Revolutionary Party (which stole a march over its rivals by purchasing Trotsky’s death-mask), the International Socialists (from 1977 the Socialist Workers Party) and the International Marxist Group – and the more clandestine Militant Tendency, the name usually given in public to the Revolutionary Socialist League, which sought to infiltrate the Labour Party. In 1975 Director F had tasked F1A with a wide-ranging investigation of the extent of subversive infiltration and influence in the Labour Party. F1A/1 noted that previous work in this field had been ‘primarily concerned with the Communist threat. Now, however, it is to comprise intrusions by the Ultra Left.’20 In 1961 the Labour leadership had sought the help of the Security Service to identify ‘crypto-Communists’ within the parliamentary party.21 By 1976, however, its main concern was attempted ‘entryism’ by the Militant Tendency (MT), under the autocratic leadership of Ted Grant. According to his one-time Trotskyist comrade Roger Protz, ‘Grant looked like a tramp, always wore a dirty raincoat from which old copies of the FT bulged, and looked as though he slept under a hedge.’22 Cocooned in his self-declared ideological infallibility, however, Grant was one of the most single-minded fanatics in British politics, absurdly telling Tony Benn in 1973 that, himself apart, ‘there is no one else in the world who follows Trotsky correctly’.23 The basis of Grant’s political strategy was the secrecy of his organization. The Revolutionary Socialist League, unlike its Trotskyist rivals, which Grant despised, denied that it existed. Militant Tendency kept up the public pretence that it was not an organization at all but simply an informal group concerned with the production and sale of the weekly newspaper Militant. In private, however, MT members were instructed to join their local Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) and try to take them over.24 Militant was thus unquestionably subversive: a secret organization with a covert strategy designed to undermine the future of Labour as a democratic political party and turn it against the ‘parliamentary road to socialism’. Though smaller than the Workers Revolutionary Party and the International Socialists during the 1970s, MT was far more influential, able to exploit both the moribund state of many CLPs and the reluctance of Labour’s left-dominated National Executive Committee (NEC) to embark on the round of proscriptions and expulsions necessary to remove Militant ‘entryists’ from Party membership.
At his meeting with Merlyn Rees on 11 November 1976, Hanley found the new Home Secretary, unlike the NEC, ‘fully seized of the importance of subversive penetration of the Labour Party’.25 Rees told the DG that ‘He had spent his life in the Labour Party but unfortunately the Party was no longer what it had been.’ Rees’s most immediate concern was Trotskyist penetration of the CLP in his own constituency, Leeds South. A Security Service note on ‘Subversive Influences in the Labour Party in Leeds’, forwarded to him on 22 November, reported that the CLP chairman in Leeds South-East was an MT member and that the CLP secretary was believed to be a leading member of the Trotskyist Socialist Charter Movement (SCM). In Leeds North-East the CLP chairman was said to work closely with Militant. In Leeds South, the chairman of the Young Socialists was ‘in touch’ with Militant, and the CLP delegate to the 1975 Party conference (who had since moved to Leeds South-East) was an SCM member.26 Further details of leading Militant Tendency activists in Leeds were sent to Rees on 17 December.27 Callaghan also had to deal with vociferous, though less influential, MT critics in his Cardiff constituency.28 The Security Service provided the Home Secretary, at his request, with a list of the forty-three constituencies in which Trotskyist groups were most active,29 as well as details of nine constituencies in which Trotskyist influence was considered sufficiently strong to pose a threat to a sitting Labour MP.30
Thanks to letter and telephone checks, eavesdropping on the MT annual conferences and agent penetration, the Service believed it had identified about 75 per cent of the Militant membership.31 The Militant Tendency, it discovered, was secretly run by a thirty-strong Central Committee, elected at its annual conference, which met every two to three months and was mainly composed of full-time MT workers. Although, for security reasons, the MT did not give formal titles to the officials it claimed it did not possess, Te
d Grant remained its acknowledged leader with Peter Taaffe, the editor of Militant, as his deputy (and later rival).32 In 1976 MT secretly claimed to have increased membership from 765 the previous year to 1,030, organized in eighty branches under a system of district and regional committees. MT employed thirty-seven full-time workers but considered it needed six more.33 In May 1976 it held its first ever National Council (NC) meeting in conditions of great secrecy, taking elaborate security precautions to ensure its venue was not disclosed to outsiders and appointing stewards to verify the credentials of all who attended. The precautions, however, failed to prevent Security Service technical and agent penetration, which revealed that the NC agreed an optimistic target figure of 2,000 members by the end of 1976 and decided that all members should attend MT training courses.34
The first major success of Militant entryism was in the Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS), where it had won control by 1970.35 From 1972 the LPYS annual conference was able to elect a representative to the NEC, thus giving Militant in effect a reserved seat on it for the remainder of the 1970s and most of the 1980s.36 The Young Socialists also became a springboard for Militant penetration of local Labour Parties. The secret annual MT policy statement of 1974 declared:
We must dig roots in the wards and the Y[oung] S[ocialists]. Many are still shells dominated by politically dead old men and women. They are now ossified little cliques. They will begin to change with an influx of new members. The YS branches where we have support are already a springboard for work in the wards and G[eneral] M[anagement] C[ommittee]s.
The 1975 policy statement instructed: ‘We must consciously aim to penetrate every constituency party in the country.’37 In 1976 Militant’s youth organizer, Andy Bevan, was appointed Labour Party national youth officer, a position he retained for the next twelve years. On Bevan’s first day at Transport House he had to walk past a demonstration by his new colleagues, protesting against his appointment. The colleagues, however, were protesting not against his Trotskyism but against what they claimed was a breach of closed-shop agreements. Within a few years he had made himself sufficiently popular among the same colleagues to be elected chief shop steward.38 The Security Service reported in 1976 that, encouraged by its success in the LPYS, Militant had appointed a full-time organizer to co-ordinate penetration of CLPs and urge its members to influence the choice of resolutions and delegates to Labour Party regional and annual conferences and to gain seats on their General Management Committees. In 1976 members of the MT Central Committee were selected as prospective Labour Party candidates in Liverpool Crosby and Edinburgh North, and MT sympathizers were selected in Croydon Central and the Isle of Wight.39
The Security Service took a more relaxed view of CPGB and Trotskyist penetration of universities and the media: ‘When Communists and Trotskyists do become involved in disturbances directed at the university authorities, their activities are rarely co-ordinated by party headquarters.’ The Service calculated that the proportion of students with ‘subversive affiliations’ remained constant throughout the 1970s at about 0.6 per cent. Though the executive and officials of the National Union of Students included ‘a considerable number of subversive individuals’, ‘In practice, subversive elements in the NUS leadership have never been able to turn the union into an effective instrument for mobilising mass militant activity by students.’ Within the media, the Security Service believed that ‘a Trotskyist element’ in Granada Television was responsible for a small number of ‘distorted’ World in Action current affairs programmes in the mid-1970s – but that ‘this element subsequently dispersed.’ In 1976–7 it reported that ‘Ultra Left’ production staff were responsible for three or four ‘similarly distorted programmes’ on Thames Television’s This Week. But:
There have been virtually no instances of subversive bias in the presentation of news bulletins by the BBC or the I[ndependent] B[roadcasting] A[uthority] companies. The reason no doubt lies in the careful selection of key personnel by management, their careful monitoring of the product in the interests of objectivity, and, not least, the competition that has grown up between the BBC and the independent companies in the presentation of news.40
Successive governments of both political complexions did not always succeed in taking such a balanced view.
In August 1977 Merlyn Rees visited the Security Service, together with his PUS, Robert Armstrong, for extensive briefing by the DG, DDG, Director F and two senior F Branch officers on Communist and Trotskyist subversion within the Labour Party, industry and the unions. Rees revealed that he favoured a scheme to redraw constituency boundaries in order to get rid of the city-centre constituencies which, he believed, were those most easily exploited by subversives.41 By 1977 Militant Tendency was believed to have gained a foothold in some eighty-eight CLPs and to pose a threat to twelve sitting MPs.42 Secretly recorded by the Security Service, Peter Taaffe told the annual conference that Militant cadres, despite disappointing recruitment figures, were the ‘spinal column of the future mass revolutionary organisation’, which would be ‘an indispensable weapon of the Revolution in Britain’.43 Militant members of CLP delegations to the annual Labour Party conference increased from thirty-five in 1976 to fifty-five in 1978.44 Though MT membership was still below 1,500 in 1978,45 Taaffe made the wildly exaggerated claim that year that MT played a decisive influence in 100 CLPs and a significant role in 225.46
Despite the concern felt by Rees and Callaghan about Militant entryism, there were powerful voices on the NEC opposed to any serious action to prevent it, among them those of Callaghan’s two immediate successors as Labour leader, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock. In November 1975 the Labour Party national agent, Reg Underhill, presented a report to the NEC on extreme left-wing infiltration of the Labour Party which concluded that Militant was an independent political organization and therefore clearly contravened the prohibition in Labour’s constitution on Party members joining organizations with their ‘own programmes, principles, and policy for distinctive and separate propaganda’.47 The MT leadership gave much of the credit for sidelining the Underhill report to one of its members, Nick Bradley, the LPYS representative on the NEC, who, it believed, succeeded in persuading the Organization sub-committee that the report should ‘lie on the table’.48 When the report eventually reached the NEC, the Committee voted by sixteen to twelve to take no action.49 As late as 1981 Neil Kinnock believed that, within the Labour Party organization, ‘there was neither the will nor, more important, the organisational capacity to undertake a systematic attack on Militant.’50 The divided views within the Labour leadership about the threat of Militant entryism produced frustration among the F Branch officers concerned with the investigation of subversion in the Labour Party. It was unclear to the Security Service how much of the Callaghan government shared Rees’s close interest in MT. F1A/1 commented in January 1978 that F1A/9 had written nine papers over the past two years, often without knowing for whom they were intended and based on the ‘haziest of requirements’. Without feedback from Whitehall, F1 was unable to judge whether its work was of value to government.51
The Security Service had far less doubt about government interest in its intelligence on industrial subversion. During the summer of 1977, with the industrial harmony of the early Callaghan government at an end, television news was dominated by daily confrontations between mass pickets and police outside the Grunwick photo-processing plant in north London, where a hundred mostly Asian female workers had been sacked for joining a union. Despite the fact that several ministers had appeared on the picket line, Callaghan told a meeting at Chequers on 26 June: ‘If things continue on the present basis there could well be fatalities and in circumstances which might be in danger of bringing the Government down . . . The government was not dealing with respectable unionism but rent a mob.’52 Callaghan was particularly worried by the use of mass flying pickets by Arthur Scargill, the Yorkshire miners’ leader, who had been arrested on the picket line, and he asked the cabinet secretary
for a note on Scargill’s first use of them during the 1972 miners’ strike. On 5 July he issued a handwritten note asking: ‘Was Scargill at Grunwick today . . .[?] Keep me informed about Scargill’s movements. He may have to be warned off.’53 Callaghan was reported to be showing a personal interest in intelligence on ‘future action on mass pickets at Grunwick’.54 Eavesdropping and telechecks at King Street showed that Ramelson saw Scargill’s flying pickets of Yorkshire miners as a key element in winning the strike.55 A ‘Day of Action’, involving the Yorkshire miners, planned for 8 August, however, was called off by the Grunwick strike committee in response to an appeal for calm by Lord Scarman, who had been appointed to head an inquiry.56 When told the news, Ramelson was heard to ‘mutter a curse’. ‘Once the level of activity was reduced in any campaign,’ he believed, ‘it was difficult to restore it.’57 The Scarman Report’s recommendation to reinstate or recompense the strikers was turned down by the Grunwick plant owner.58 When the strike committee asked Scargill at short notice to bring the miners to a mass picket on 7 November 1977, he was reported to have replied that there was not time to make the necessary arrangements.59 A furious Ramelson was heard complaining about Scargill’s absence: ‘If the fucking miners had been there they [the picket] would have topped 10,000.’60 The strike was eventually called off in the following year.
By the autumn of 1977 Callaghan’s main concern was the threat of a police strike. The Police Federation had demanded a massive pay rise of between 78 and 104 per cent.61 The Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, warned that a 10 per cent offer would lead to an immediate showdown. In some areas, notably Merseyside, there was likely to be an all-out strike. In London police withdrawal from traffic duties risked causing chaos. The overall impact could be as devastating as the miners’ strike which had brought down the Heath government. Rees was in favour of a 15 per cent pay offer. Callaghan refused, telling Rees that ‘people would laugh at such a breach in government pay policy.’ He was ‘prepared to resign rather than . . . give in to the threat of a strike’.62 The Prime Minister heavily censored a draft speech which Rees intended to give to the Police Federation. In the margins of a proposed reference to the police as a ‘special case’, the Prime Minister scrawled an emphatic ‘NO. So is beating inflation. Don’t use this terminology.’63 On Callaghan’s insistence, the Police Federation were offered, and finally accepted, a 10 per cent pay rise with the promise of a committee of inquiry to look at longer-term pay settlements.64 The threat of a police strike vividly illustrates the limits of the Security Service’s investigation of labour disputes. Despite the fact that Callaghan feared it might force his resignation, the Service provided no significant intelligence because it did not regard either the Police Federation or its leaders as subversive.
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