Zelo Street published a very interesting piece on Sunday about our buffoonish Prime Minister’s signal lack of action in passing a report on possible Russian interference in British election. This report was prepared by the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee, chaired by Dominic Grieve, who appeared on Sky News to give an interview about it. The Committee is cross-party and non-partisan, considering topics like espionage, actions against our partners and subversion. The report was passed to Johnson to sign off on the 17th of October. The Prime Minister should have taken a maximum of ten days to clear it. He still hasn’t, which means that it will have to wait until April or May 2020 for publication. Downing Street replied that the process usually took six months. This was flatly denied by Grieve, who reiterated that it was only programmed to take 10 days, and added
“The suggestion that six weeks are needed is just astonishing. I really begin to worry about what the No 10 spokesmen are saying nowadays. They’re going out with things which are quite simply whopping untruths”.
What makes this particularly suspicious is that Johnson was not passed to see certain confidential information when he was our disastrous Foreign Secretary. And questions have been asked about his, Dominic Cummings and Matthew Elliott, Cumming’s former colleague on Vote Leave, connections to Russia.
The Sage of Crewe writes
‘From there, one has to ask why Cummings, and perhaps Elliott and Bozo, want to stall the publication of that report. If there are credible accusations of interference by Russian state actors, let’s see them and see how they stand up. Likewise claims of interference by other foreign states in UK affairs – and especially elections.
For the report to be stalled, and a pack of lies advanced to excuse the stalling, merely compounds the suspicion that one or more of Dom, Matt and Bozo may not come out of publication smelling of roses. It could, of course, be leaked next week. Just a thought.’
But hold on! Isn’t Corbyn and the Labour party, who are evil subversives working for the Russians? Wasn’t there that allegation that Corbyn was a Czech spy, and that Michael Foot was the KGB agent codenamed ‘Comrade Boot’? Yes there were, and they were both lies. As was the deranged belief amongst the CIA, including the chief, James Jesus Angleton, that Harold Wilson was also a KGB agent, which Maggie also believed.
Now it seems that perhaps it’s the Tories and Boris, who are really in league with the Russians and have something to hide. Just like the allegations against Trump, whom BoJob resembles more and more.
I found a very interesting piece for conspiracy watchers over at Zelo Street, posted on New Year’s Eve 2017. It discusses a report in the Irish Independent that Charles Haughey, the Irish Taoiseach, was a sent a letter from the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1987 warning him that MI5 wanted them to assassinate him. It said that MI5 and MI6 had set up a smear campaign against him, and that the two intelligence agencies and British special forces had used them to kill Irish nationalists from 1972 to 1978 and again in 1985. The letter was written on UVF headed noted paper, and signed Capt. W.E. Johnston, the pseudonym used by the leaders of the UVF in their correspondence. The letter revealed that the MI5 agent gave the terrorists details of Haughey’s cars, his photographs of his home, his island, Inishvickillane, his yacht, Celtic Mist, and details of his trips to Farranfore airport in Kerry and the aircraft he used. The Loyalists said that they had no love for Haughey, and had killed 17 men using information provided by the British security services, but they weren’t going to be used by the British dirty tricks department.
The letter was released under the Irish government’s 30 year rule. A more detailed version of the story appeared in the Groaniad, which claimed that Gerry Adams had been seeking to find a way to stop the IRA’s campaign of violence in 1987. It was also reported by the Beeb.
Zelo Street commented on the very selective memories that they Tory faithful have about Thatcher. They love her for supposedly standing up to the EU superstate, while forgetting all that guff about Britain being in the heart of Europe. She’s supposed to have taken a stand against terrorism, but there were allegations she ran a shoot to kill policy in Northern Ireland, that led to the SAS blowing away a party of IRA terrorists in Gibraltar. When the Thames Television documentary Death on the Rock revealed that British forces had the IRA unit under surveillance all the time, and could have captured them without bloodshed at any moment, it was stripped of its broadcasting license. Zelo Street describes that as just being a piece of ‘routine vindictiveness’.
The article concludes
‘But the issues raised by this revelation – the manipulation of Loyalist paramilitaries by UK security agencies, and what Mrs T knew and when – remain unaddressed.
And one conclusion can be drawn all too readily: when those on the right start calling “Terrorist sympathiser” on the likes of Jeremy Corbyn, they need to be reminded of exactly who the real terrorist sympathisers are. They aren’t in the Labour Party.‘
Not that Haughey may have been entirely pure and innocent of terrorist plotting himself. Well over a decade ago Lobster reported that the Irish Republican magazine, An Phoblacht, had run a story claiming that Haughey had been funnelling guns and weapons to the IRA in Northern Ireland. They IRA were to start a campaign of unrest, which would allow the Irish military to enter the province as a peace-keeping force. And Lobster has stated since its very beginning in the early 1980s that the British secret state was running all manner of dirty tricks in Northern Ireland, including embedding special SAS undercover units in the regular army as covert death squads.
Thatcher bears the ultimate responsibility for the plot to assassinate Haughey, because, as the Zelo Street article points out, the secret services report to her. Evidence from the other dirty tricks MI5 was running in that period shows that she had exactly the same opinions they did. The head of the CIA, James Angleton, and the leaders of MI5 all thought that Harold Wilson was a KGB agent, as did Thatcher herself, and MI5 ran a smear campaign in order to remove him from office and install the Tories. I don’t doubt for a single minute that the British secret state was very glad that she won the 1979 election, or that they had any reservations about any order they received from her to murder the Irish premier.
This report of an assassination plot by MI5 against Haughey is another piece that there really are conspiracies and covert plots by secretive groups to affect government. They’re run by the world’s intelligence agencies, big business, right-wing pressure groups like the Freedom Association and diplomats, through organisations like the Pinay Circle, the World Anti-Communist League, and Western Goals. They are very real, unlike stupid and murderous conspiracy theories about reptoid aliens from Zeta Reticuli and Jewish Communist bankers. But the latter rubbish is all too often held up by academics and writers like David Aaronovitch to discredit research into these real covert groups by claiming that they are representative of the milieu as a whole. They tar everyone with the same brush so that people won’t accept the reality that there are real extra-parliamentary groups seeking to determine government policy and the fate of whole nations.
There are real conspiracies. This was one of them, and Thatcher was terrorist supporter.
Robin Ramsay, the editor of Lobster, has some very interesting comments about the recent libels in the Torygraph about Jeremy Corbyn meeting a Czech spy, going under cover as a diplomat, in his ‘The View from the Bridge’ column in the latest issue, no. 75.. Or rather, not about that story so much – he considers most of it invention, especially the part about money changing hands – but about another story in the same issue of the Torygraph about Rob Hayward. Hayward was the General Secretary of the Labour Party from 1972 to 1982. According to the Torygraph article, he had secret meetings with KGB officials at the Russian Embassy, where he talked about circumventing the power of the parliamentary Labour party, which would allow him to come out with the same agenda alongside the Communists. The article was written by one Giles Udy, who is described in his publisher’s blurb as a member of the council of the Keston Institute.
The Keston Institute specialises in the study of religion in the Soviet Union and the Communist states. It was set up by the Reverend Michael Bourdeaux, Sir John Lawrence, Leonard Schapiro and Peter Reddaway. Ramsay writes of it and its founders
Schapiro wrote books for, and Reddaway was a member of, the Information Research Department (IRD) the Foreign Office’s anti-subversion, anti-Soviet organisation about which a great deal has been written, not least in these columns. Schapiro was also a member, and briefly chair of, Brian Crozier’s Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC). 6 In other words, the Keston Institute is a product of the Anglo-American anti-Soviet and anti-communist apparatus created during the Cold War. This explains why Mr Udy was given access to surveillance tapes of the Soviet embassy in London. If it isn’t funded by them, Keston liaises with the British security and intelligence services. With the arrival of Jeremy Corby and a left-leaning Labour Party membership, the dust is being blown off a lot of old files all over Whitehall . . . .
The Cold Warriors are back. All the bug-eyed paranoiacs, who were convinced that Harold Wilson was a KGB spy, whose number included James Jesus Angleton, the head of the CIA, and Margaret Thatcher, are now back at it running red scare stories against Jeremy Corbyn. ‘Cos he threatens the course of western capitalism by wanting to renationalise the health service, parts of the national grid and the railways. And this is clearly enough to panic the secret state’s guardians of neoliberalism, the same kind of people who used to rant about ‘union subversion’ and thought up schemes to have left wingers, including journos, interned somewhere in the Hebrides or Shetland after a right-wing coup had overthrown the Labour government.
Lobster is at https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/. Go to number 75 on the side column, click on it, and open ‘The View From the Bridge’. This piece about the Torygraph is entitled ‘Just Like Old Times’, because, obviously, it is just like old times when the British Secret State was doing its level best to bring down Labour.
Looking through the chapter on British television in John Clute’s Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia (London: Dorling Kindersley 1995), I found this entry for the forgotten SF drama 1990. Produced by Prudence Fitzgerald, with scripts mainly written by Wilfred Greatorex, this ran for 16 episodes from 1977 to 1978. Clute writes
In 1990s totalitarian Britain the welfare state is all-powerful. A maverick journalist helps infiltrators from the freedom-loving United States, and assists British rebels in fleeing there. Intended as a dire warning of trade-union socialism, the series’ caricatures in fact make the venture risible. (P. 101).
The Wikipedia entry for the series also adds the following details along with other information on its plot, characters, cast and crew:
The series is set in a dystopian future in which Britain is under the grip of the Home Office’s Public Control Department (PCD), a tyrannically oppressive bureaucracy riding roughshod over the population’s civil liberties.
Dubbed “Nineteen Eighty-Four plus six” by its creator, Wilfred Greatorex, 1990 stars Edward Woodward as journalist Jim Kyle, Robert Lang as the powerful PCD Controller Herbert Skardon, Barbara Kellerman as Deputy PCD Controller Delly Lomas, John Savident, Yvonne Mitchell (in her last role), Lisa Harrow, Tony Doyle, Michael Napier Brown and Clive Swift.Two series, of eight episodes each, were produced and broadcast on BBC2 in 1977 and 1978. The series was never repeated but was released on DVD in 2017. Two novelisations based on the scripts were released in paperback by the publisher Sphere; Wilfred Greatorex’s 1990, and Wilfred Greatorex’s 1990 Book Two.
and includes this description of the show’s fictional background to its vision of a totalitarian Britain:
Exposition in this series was mainly performed by facts occasionally dropped into dialogue requiring the viewer to piece together the basic scenario.
This state of affairs was precipitated by an irrecoverable national bankruptcy in 1981, triggering martial law. In the general election, only 2% voted. The economy (and imports) drastically contracted forcing stringent rationing of housing, goods and services. These are distributed according to a person’s LifeScore as determined (and constantly reviewed) by the PCD on behalf of the union-dominated socialist government. As a consequence, the higher-status individuals appear to be civil servants and union leaders. An exception to this are import/export agents, which appear to be immune to state control due to their importance to the remnants of the economy. The House of Lords has been abolished and turned into an exclusive dining club. State ownership of businesses appears to be near-total and prohibition of wealth and income appears to be very high. The reigning monarch is male due to the unfortunate death of the previous monarch (queen Elizabeth the 2nd) but his identity is never made clear. The currency is the Anglodollar (replaced the pound sterling in 1982 due to economic collapse) which appears to have little value overseas due to the international boycott of British exports. The armed forces have been run down to the extent that they are little more than an internal security force. This is made clear in one episode where the RAF is depicted as consisting of little more than a handful of Harrier Jump Jets and a few dozen counter-insurgency helicopters. Despite this National Service has been re-introduced (via the Youth Behaviour Control Act 1984 which enforces conscription and Genetic Crimes Act 1985, which makes sexual offences punishable by hanging). It is said that in 1986 two Army Generals and a retired Air Chief Marshal attempted a coup against the government, but it failed.
There’s also a Wikipedia entry for Greatorex, the show’s creator, which states
Wilfred Greatorex (27 May 1921–14 October 2002)[1] was an English television and film writer, script editor and producer. He was creator of such series as Secret Army, 1990, Plane Makers and its sequel The Power Game, Hine, Brett, Man At The Top, Man From Haven and The Inheritors.[2] He also wrote the screenplay for the 1969 film Battle of Britain.[1] He was described by The Guardian newspaper as “one of the most prolific and assured of television script-writers and editors from the 1960s into the 1980s”.[3] Starting off as a journalist, he got his big break as a TV writer on Lew Grade’s ATV service writing dramas about journalism, such as Deadline Midnight and Front Page Story.[3]
As a TV script editor he also worked on series such as Danger Man[1] and was also creator/producer of The Inheritors, Hine and The Power Game.[1] Papers discovered at a Norfolk auction house in 2011 reveal that ‘Hine’ had a budget of £84,000, the equivalent of close to £1m some forty years later.
In 1977, he came up with the dystopian drama series 1990 for BBC2, starring Edward Woodward. Greatorex dubbed the series “Nineteen Eighty-Four plus six”.[4] Over its two series it portrayed “a Britain in which the rights of the individual had been replaced by the concept of the common good – or, as I put it more brutally, a consensus tyranny.”[3] The same year he also devised (with Gerard Glaister) the BBC1 wartime drama Secret Army. The show later inspired the sitcom parody ‘Allo ‘Allo!.[5]
The show’s clearly a product of the extreme paranoia that gripped the Tories in Britain during the mid-1970s. The total collapse of the economy seems to have been inspired by the country’s bankruptcy in the mid to late 1970s, when the country was forced to go to the IMF. It also shows the fears that the Labour party was planning some kind of extreme left-wing coup. This was the decade when the Times was urging the formation of a national government, and various figures in intelligence and politics were considering organizing a military coup against the minority Labour government. Ken Livingstone also states in his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour, that MI5 had also compiled a list of subversives, including journalists, politicians and trade unionists, who were to be rounded up and interned in a camp somewhere in the Hebrides. Behind much of this paranoia was the belief, held by James Jesus Angleton, the head of the CIA, and many others in the Tory party, including Maggie Thatcher, that Harold Wilson was a KGB spy.
The series has long been forgotten. I can’t remember ever hearing or reading about it, apart from the entry in Clute’s Encyclopedia and the Wikipedia pages. The show was clearly quite successful at the time, as it lasted two seasons, but I can’t remember anyone I knew having watched it, or even mentioning it in the school playground.
Nevertheless, this is interesting, as the series was clearly written from an extreme right-wing stance, albeit one of that was shared by much of the Tory media during the 1970s. It definitely shows the alarm the Tories and a large section of the middle class clearly felt at trade union militancy and the Labour left’s desire to extend nationalization, as well as the experiments with worker’s control under Tony Benn. In fact, despite the accusation often heard during the ’70s and ’80s that Labour wanted to nationalize everything, the party only wished to take into public ownership 25 more companies. This is far from complete nationalization. As for worker’s control, this was confined to three firms, which were failing anyway. These eventually collapsed, but many of the workers involved in these projects felt that the experiments had been worthwhile and had shown that workers could run businesses.
And it also shows how blatantly biased the BBC could be against the Left.
There’s been considerable discussion on blog’s like mine and Mike’s about the Beeb’s bias against the Labour party and especially Jeremy Corbyn. Mike’s put a number of articles commenting on this bias. The BBC claims it is impartial, and whenever anybody complains about the bias in its programmes, as Guy Debord’s Cat did recently, they receive a bland, and slightly pompous reply telling them that they’re wrong. Researchers at Cardiff, Edinburgh and Glasgow universities have found, however, that the Corporation is far more likely to interview, and treat respectfully the opinions offered by Conservative MPs and experts from the financial sector, than trade unionists and members of the Labour party. Barry and Saville Kushner have commented on how the Beeb uncritically accepts and promotes the idea of austerity in their book, Who Needs the Cuts, to the point of shouting down anyone, who dares to disagree. There’s even been a book published exposing the Corporation’s bias, The BBC and the Myth of Public Service Broadcasting.
The existence of this explicitly anti-Socialist SF drama shows how far back this bias goes. In many ways, I’m not surprised. The corporation is largely staffed by members of the upper middle class. It’s one of the country’s central institutions, and so reflects the views of the established political, business and media elites. Hence it shared the British right’s groundless fears of some kind of radical socialist takeover in the 1970s, and their bitter hatred the Labour party and Jeremy Corbyn today.
This is another great video from the American comedian Jimmy Dore, in which he provides another piece of historical evidence to show why no-one should trust the CIA about anything, let alone the recent allegations of Russian hacking and a supposed dossier they’re using to blackmail Trump. Dore shows a short clip about the 1975 Church Committee, which was convened to investigate whether the CIA was interfering in foreign politics and spying on US citizens. And it concluded that the agency was.
Dore rightly points out that the CIA was out of control, it was interfering in the affairs of foreign states, and that this has continued since then. He cites the way Colin Powell stood up and lied about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq along with the president and the secretary of state.
The American government more recently has suppressed a report revealing that the CIA tortured and anally raped suspects being interrogated through ‘anal feeding’.
And he also rips into the mainstream news media, which supported these official lies and sacked those journos who told the truth. Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize winning journalist, was sacked from the New York Times because he told the truth: there were no weapons of mass distraction. Phil Donohue was also fired, because he also told the truth. Hacks like Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, who repeat and promote these lies, are rewarded.
He makes the point that it’s no wonder that no-one trusts the mainstream media, and that they’re going to the internet. There are almost no real journalists left, journalists, who actually bother to report the truth. He names these true journalists, who include Glen Greenwalt and The Intercept. As for NBC and MSNBC, which retail this rubbish, the companies that owns them has been identified as the worst company in its treatment of workers. He then states that this is the reason Rachel Maddow is paid $30,000 a day: to shut her up and stop her from pointing this out.
This is an angry, embittered tirade, and it’s entirely right. The CIA was and is out of control. Its leader, James Jesus Angleton, was convinced that Harold Wilson was a KGB agent. Over the years Lobster, the parapolitics magazine, has carried numerous stories about the lies and clandestine interference and political manipulation the CIA and the other intelligence agencies and their British counterparts have been responsible for. Larry O’Hara’s Notes from the Borderland is doing the same thing. And the same lies are being retailed by our news media.
Don’t trust them, nor the Beeb when it claims that it’s Reality Check team will objectively counter fake news. This is just more lies to support American military and corporate dominance.
Private Eye’s continued attacks and smears against Jeremy Corbyn on behalf of the New Labour establishment aren’t the first time they’ve run smears against a Labour leader. Of course, the Eye’s business is mocking just about every public figure, including and especially politicians. But sometimes this becomes something much more sinister: deliberate disinformation on behalf of the Secret State.
In the 1970s the British and American secret services were convinced that Harold Wilson was a KGB agent, including the head of the CIA, James Jesus Angleton. Various individuals connected with MI5 discussed overthrowing him in a coup, and imprisoning radical journalists, along with other subversives, in an internment camp in the Outer Hebrides. I’ve blogged about this before. It’s in ‘Red’ Ken’s 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour. Francis Wheen, a Guardian journalist and frequent guest on BBC Radio Four’s topical comedy quiz, The News Quiz, also discusses the paranoia about Wilson and the plots to unseat him, including the formation of private armies and articles by the Times demanding that he be replaced by a coalition government. One of those, who also believed Wilson was a Soviet agent was a junior Conservative politician, Margaret Hilda Thatcher. Many of these conspiracy theories were based on forged documents circulating in the media, which look very much like they were concocted by MI5 as a deliberate attempt to spread dissatisfaction. And one of the magazines that ran this disinformation was Private Eye.
Lobster, in issue 17 for November 1988 ran an article by Steven Dorril, then the magazine’s co-editor with Robin Ramsay. Entitled ‘Five at Eye’, this reported and commented on a piece published the year previously by the Guardian that the Eye may have been used to spread this deliberate black propaganda. Much of the material was published in the Eye by Auberon Waugh, who predictably denied any secret service involvement. In fact, Waugh had extensive connections to MI5 and also the extreme Right. He tried to join the Foreign Office, being recommended by MI5’s head, Roger Hollis. Hollis’ brother, Christopher, was his godfather. Christopher Hollis had been a member of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, was a contributor to various far right periodicals like Action and the World Review. During the War Waugh’s family had connections to those working in Middle East intelligence including Tom Driberg, the Labour politician, who also contributed to the Eye and MI5. Another colleague was Roger Fulford, who had also worked with Hollis. Auberon Waugh’s first job was at the Torygraph, and Dorril comments that it looked very much like an internal MI5 posting. In the 1970s the Washington Post claimed that the London papers were ‘flooded’ with intelligence assets, specifically referring to the Torygraph. One of Waugh’s closest collaborators at the Eye was Patrick Marnham, a contributor to the magazine’s ‘Grovel’ column.
When Wilson was re-elected in 1974, Marnham started receiving information packs from MI5 through a colleague on the Times. This material discussed Wilson’s position at the Board of Trade issuing import licences to a group of import-export dealers, known as the ‘East-West Traders’, who did business with the Soviet Union. Martin Tomkinson, another Eye journalist, stated he had a contact with the intelligence agencies, who believed that Wilson was too concerned with promoting Anglo-Soviet trade. The traders, who included Sir Rudy Sternberg, Lord Plurenden and Lady Beattie Plummer, were suspected by MI5 of being Soviet agents. In fact, Wilson discovered that Sternberg was a spy, but for MI6. Dorril’s article also contains a selection of pieces from the Spectator and the Eye, and the MI5 documents leaked to Marnham, with appropriate comments. The article also contains snippets from Dr Kitty Little’s pamphlet, Treason at Westminster, which was similarly paranoid about the East-West Traders, and by Peter Dally, who wrote for Asian Outlook. Both Dally and Birdwood were British representatives to the World Anti-Communist League, a far-Right organisation that included extreme Conservatives and outright Fascists and Nazis.
Reading between the lines, my guess is that there still is a link to MI5 at the Eye, despite the fact that it has, on occasion, been quite prepared to challenge the official line, such as over the Lockerbie bombing. All of the Eye’s founders – Richard Ingrams, Peter Cook, Willie Rushton, Auberon Waugh were British public school establishment. One other frequent contributor was John Wells, who was the French teacher and headmaster at Eton. Its present editor, Ian Hislop, comes from the same background. The real radical at the Eye was Paul Foot, of the ‘Footnotes’ column, which has continued after his death as ‘In the Back’. Foot was accepted, however, because he also came from the same middle class, public school background, and shared their tastes.
If the intelligence services are involved, it’s probably because Corbyn and the Labour left threaten the dominance of the Israel lobby within the Labour party. Blair was very close to the Zionists through Lord Levy, and the accusations of anti-Semitism directed against Jeremy Corbyn and members of the Labour left stem from the fact that they have criticised Israel for its persecution and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The Zionists have become particularly shrill and defensive because the BDS campaign is having an effect in forcing Israeli businesses out of the occupied territories on the West Bank. Despite the inquiry and its finding that Blair was what his opponents had told the world all along – a warmonger – this is all about protecting Israel and maintaining the neocon policies in the Middle East.
Earlier this evening I reblogged a piece from Vox Political, where Mike discussed a piece in the Canary about Cameron’s plans to isolate Islamist radicals in a special prison, rather like Guantanamo Bay. Mike raised the obvious and chilling question of whether this would be a concentration camp, especially with the government’s secret courts providing the legal basis for the Nazi-style Nacht und Nebel round-up and imprisonment of radicals.
I believe Mike’s fears are entirely justified. In the mid-1970s there were sections of the establishment that openly advocated a coup against the-then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. They’re discussed by the journalist and frequent guest on the News Quiz, Francis Wheen in his book, Strange Days Indeed: Paranoia in the 1970s. They’re also discussed, along with other intrigues and campaigns by MI5 and MI6 against the Labour left in ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone’s book, Livingstone’s Labour: A Manifesto for the Nineties. He writes
As the economy disintegrated under Wilson’s mismanagement, there began to be talk of the need for a change of government or even a coalition of the great and the good drawn from the British establishment. In the summer of 1967, the CIA, the FBI, MI5, MI6, and the Australian and New Zealand security services met in secret in Melbourne, Australia. They were addressed by Golitsin about his Wilson allegations and Wright presented information which he claimed raised the question of the loyalty of Willi Brandt. This meeting was followed by a visit to MI5 by Angleton who claimed to have confirmation from another source, whom he claimed could not be named, that Wilson was indeed a Soviet agent.
Matters began to hot up when the press baron Cecil King, a long-standing MI5 agent, began to discuss the need for a coup against Wilson. He informed Peter Wright that the Mirror would publish any damaging anti-Wilson leaks that MI5 wanted aired, and at a meeting with Lord Mountbatten and the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Solly Zuckerman, King urged Mountbatten to become the leader of a government of National Salvation. Zukerman pointed out that this was treason and left the meeting which came to nothing due to Mountbatten’s reluctance to act. (P. 53).
He also states that one army intelligence officer states that the security services had also convened meetings to determine the location of a possible internment camp for radicals in the Shetland Islands. One of those involved in this process was George Young, who had been the deputy head of MI6. ‘Red’ Ken quotes this passage from Young’s Subversion and the British Riposte, published in 1984:
(A) security counter-action need cover no more than 5,000 persons, including some 40 MPs, not all of them Labour; several hundred journalists and media employees, plus their supporting academics and clerics; the full-time members and main activists of the Communist party and the Socialist Workers Party; and the directing elements of the 30 or 40 bodies affecting concern and compassion for youth, age, civil liberties, social research and minority grievances. The total internment could easily be accommodated in a lesser ‘Gaelic Archipelago’ off the West Highlands.
Livingstone goes on to state that in the end the talks of coups amounted to nothing through a variety of factors. King lost his place at Mirror newspapers because of his increasingly erratic behaviour, which got worse. In 1974 he gave a speech to a group of officers at Sandhurst, urging them to overthrow Wilson in coup. ‘They thought he was made’, says the Bane of Thatcher. (p.54)
He also states that MI5 was also behind smears that Ted Heath was gay. Apparently the Tory MP Captain Henry Kerby was used to spread the rumour that the Tory Prime Minister was gay and had had an affair with a Swedish diplomat. Says Ken ‘I suspect that for some in MI5 being a Swedish diplomat and homosexuality were virtually synonymous anyway.’
Livingstone says that this sound like something from one of Frederick Forsythe’s grotty novels, but it’s all true and deadly serious. I’m sure he’s right. And the same kind of rumour mongering started again in the 1990s about the late former Labour leader, Michael Foot. It was Golitsin again. According to the defector, Foot was a KGB spy codenamed ‘Comrade Boot’. Really. And the conduit for the smear, which cost Murdoch a liberal actions, was the Times under its editor David Leppard.
You’d like to think that MI5 and MI6 had changed since the days of Thatcher. David Cameron, however, is despite all his verbiage about ‘One Nation’ Toryism, a Far Right authoritarian. I simply don’t think you can discount the idea that he would start rounding people up as subversives, not just Muslim radicals, but anyone, anyone at all, if he could get away with it. And his decision to start setting up special jails of Islamists seems to confirm it.
Cameron’s is a government of ‘filofascisti’. It’s the terms the Italians used to describe the ’80s generation of Yuppie Fascists. Rather than appear in Blackshirts and jackboots, they all adopted sharp business suits, and posed for the cameras like the models in GQ adverts for suits. The desire to imprison, beat, and attack immigrants, trade unionists, Socialists, Communists and others remained. Just as it is with Cameron and his pack of thugs.
The Independent yesterday carried a bizarre story about the claim by an unnamed general that the armed forces would revolt if Jeremy Corbyn became Prime Minister. The article began
There would be very little support for a military coup if Jeremy Corbyn won the next election, a poll has found.
An unnamed British army general told the Sunday Times newspaper last month that the Labour leader could face a “munity” from senior military officers, “by whatever means possible, fair or foul”.
But a YouGov poll found that only nine per cent of the population would be sympathetic to a coup if Mr Corbyn became Prime Minister.
British Army ‘could stage mutiny under Corbyn’, says general
“The Army just wouldn’t stand for it. The general staff would not allow a prime minister to jeopardise the security of this country and I think people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul to prevent that. You can’t put a maverick in charge of a country’s security,” the general told the newspaper at the time.
Does anybody else find it more than a little strange that a military coup against a democratically-elected political leader can be even considered, here in the United Kingdom?
It is extremely bizarre, though it may not be quite so alarming as it first appears. Firstly, the general is talking about protests by military staff and mass resignations, with the possibility of a coup. The army has protested against decisions by politicians before. I was told by an ex-army friend at College that the army had organised a mass meal at Stonehenge in protest against cuts in military expenditure and mass redundancies by Thatcher’s government. This seems far more likely than any kind of coup, or even, it has to be said, of mass resignations by disgruntled military staff.
The mere talk about a coup does, however, bring back the days in the 1970s, when MI5 and the head of the CIA, James Jesus Angleton, were convinced that Harold Wilson was a Communist spy. Among the others so convinced was one Margaret Thatcher, then merely a Conservative MP. There were rumours of private armies being set up to counter the threat of a Soviet-backed take over by Wilson’s Red troops. As industrial discontent deepened, even the Times started mooting the idea of a coup and the replacement of Wilson’s administration by a caretaker government including more moderate members of the Labour party, like Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins.
It also reflects some of the hysteria amongst the Republicans in America, who are also talking about coups. The Young Turks in this video, posted on the 12th September this year, discuss a poll which showed that 43% of Republicans would support a military coup against a government. 41% of Americans generally would also support a coup against a government that was beginning to violate the constitution. Cenk Uyghur, the Turks’ main anchor, states that it’s only progressives that oppose a military dictatorship in America, and actually stand up for the values of the Constitution.
Now, an awful lot of Republicans really are convinced that Obama is closet Muslim-Communist-Nazi infiltrator, intent on setting up a ‘one world dictatorship’ and take their guns away.
Somehow, I don’t think that poll and the British general’s treasonous utterances are entirely coincidental. It looks the general has been infected by the same paranoia as the Republicans on the other side of the pond.
Or, more likely, he thinks the British public is.
It also looks to me very much that the Tories are running a Red Scare campaign against Corbyn. Remember Cameron’s foam-flecked rant denouncing Corbyn as anti-British, and their claims that he supports Islamist terrorism? The general’s comments seem to be another attempt to undermine Corbyn’s popularity by presenting him as a dangerous subversive, in league with Britain’s enemies. Cameron attempted to pass that off as reality by misquoting Corbyn as opposing the CIA assassination of bin Laden. Corbyn did oppose it, but not because he supported al-Qaeda, but simply because he wanted the terrorist brought to trial for his crimes.
The Tories are trying to smear Corbyn, and this bizarre remark by an unnamed general is part of it. It also reflects badly on the Times, which has a history of smearing left-wing politicians. Remember the allegation that Michael Foot was a KGB agent, codenamed ‘Boot’? That was also rubbish. So is this, but it does show a certain desperation by the Dirty Digger. In his career as a press baron, Murdoch has shown himself far more of a threat to British democracy, freedom of speech and open and responsible government than Corbyn ever has.
Last week I put up long blog post about Adam Curtis’ article, ‘Bugger’ at his site on the BBC discussing the long history of incompetence and paranoia in MI5. In it I mentioned the fiasco over the former spy, Peter Wright, and the publication of his book, Spycatcher. Wright was one of the spies, like the head of the CIA, James Jesus Angleton, who believed that the British Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was a KGB agent. Wright published his book, Spycatcher, in 1987. This was immediately banned in Britain because it was considered to have broken the Official Secrets Act with one of its disclosures. The ban became an unenforceable farce, however, as the book was freely available just about everywhere else in the world, and so people took to ordering it from America. Never slow to mock the sheer stupidity of the authorities, Spitting Image made several sketches satirising it and Wright himself.
Here’s Spitting Image satirising the ban on Spycatcher:
In this sketch, the Gorbachevs watch Blind Date and discuss Spycatcher, concluding that Maggie would have made a great Soviet leader:
And in this sketch, ‘The Spy Who Came in from Australia’, a Bond spoof, Wright is portrayed as writing his book simply because he was annoyed about not getting his pension. The sketch mentions MI5’s bugging of CND’s phones, and their destabilisation of the Labour Party.
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