“a scenario in which a Labour government, acceding to trade union and other militant demands, radicalised its policies against the private sector and the UK’s Nato commitments.”

have to do with the IRA? Why were they thinking about what they’d do if a left-wing Labour government came to power? Surely anything other than giving it their unswerving loyalty would be a violation of their mission.

I see no evidence whatsoever in the text that they planned to perpetrate this. In fact, the last paragraph quotes the source text as saying the IRA might do such things.

The incidents built into MI5′s futuristic vision include a deliberate fire at one of London’s main water treatment plants, an attempted terrorist attack by frogmen on the Isle of Grain oil refinery, a vehicle bomb attack on a radar station, and a suitcase bomb without warning on the London Underground …

Isn’t the second paragraph exactly what MI5 is meant to worry about? Especially as actual real terrorists were letting off real bombs and killing actual people at the time?

Still, it’s a data point of sorts, but I doubt it tells us much more. The security services thought there was serious political tension in 1974-5? Who didn’t?

The highest ranked military plotter against whom there is evidence, held the rank of Colonel, which given the stable, professional ethos of the British officer caste, hardly counts.

What the military did was hype up a security operation at Heathrow, sending a message if you like, but that message was definitely not that we, the military, are bent on a coup.

What we need and do not have yet, are memoirs written in retirement which give fact and flavour of the approaches the plotters made to the military, how these were received and dealt with.

It is not impossible that these have been written and are lying in locked rosewood writing bureaux awaiting the death of the author.

“The incidents built into MI5′s futuristic vision include a deliberate fire at one of London’s main water treatment plants, an attempted terrorist attack by frogmen on the Isle of Grain oil refinery, a vehicle bomb attack on a radar station, and a suitcase bomb without warning on the London Underground …

The paper suggests that MI5 believed the security of the state was under threat from the political pressures building up during the 1970s, and was preparing plans to deal with such a threat, which it saw as mainly coming from the left.”

My reading of the article leaves me puzzled. Did MI5 really plan against these incidents, or plan to enact them so that a state of emergency could be called; were these considered potential IRA actions? Without these considerations, the security services and the ‘establishment’ forces that would support them are made to look foolish and incompetent. They did, however, wield not inconsiderable influence. Perhaps competence and calm consideration were not necessary virtues for a job in the security services.

They have no particular problem with the current flavour of Labour government. Dorril and Ramsay’s book is very good on this. The forces lined up against Wilson were not those of global capitalism or any such – he was on the right of the party by most standards – but those of US foreign policy. Wilson was an oddity in that he’d never been part of the Atlanticist element of the Labour right. Blair (and Brown, both via Mandelson) definitely are.

They’re both veterans of the British American Project and all that cavalcade of organisations, the ones that it is presumably unserious or “conspiratorial” to refer to as secret societies. They’ve got exactly the pedigree in terms of their political and career development that the anti-Wilson elements wanted. I suspect that at a conservative estimate it would these days take twenty years before there was any chance at all of electing a government that would have any chance of being overthrown.