How close did Britain come to a military coup in the late seventies? Papers from 1976 - released today under the 30 year rule - add to the growing body of evidence that sections of the ruling class were certainly thinking along such lines.
According to the Financial Times, MI5 was ‘preparing plans’ to deal with any threats to ‘the security of the state’ emanating from far left pressure on the Labour government of the day, led by Harold Wilson (pictured):
‘The security service MI5 forecast that the stability of the British state could be severely threatened by a developing economic crisis and the growing militancy of the left during the 1970s, according to documents released to the public today.
In the final days of the Wilson era, MI5 drafted a contingency paper based on 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.
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.
I am old enough to remember that year firsthand, of course. It was the unforgettable year I left school, earned my first pay cheque, saw the early punk bands, and smoked my first joint. Hey, I was almost a grown up.
The political landscape was very different from that of 2006. The major industrial relations battles of the first part of the seventies had left their mark on everybody, of course. But as your average music-obsessed 16 year old, I was not particularly politically aware.
I was class conscious in a way, in the loose sense of knowing the difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’, and feeling increasing antipathy towards ‘them’.
I was working 40 hours a week in a shoe factory and hating every minute of it. It didn’t take a crash course in Marxist economics to start me wondering why I was sticking heels on soles all day just so that the bloke who owned the factory could spend most of his time playing golf.
I would have voted Labour without really having to think about it, if only because my dad did. But I was still two years away from having the vote.
And that political outlook was more or less generalised, at least in terms of how the young men and women I knew at the time felt. As far as I can remember, it was typical of older working class people, too. But it was a long way from revolutionary socialist class consciousness. Or, from another perspective, perhaps far too close to it.
Even at the time, groups like the Workers Revolutionary Party speculated that certain layers of the establishment were making clandestine plans for a military clampdown.
Much of their case was built on extrapolating isolated remarks in books by military men, and hints dropped in editorials in The Times. But the cranky nature of that particular sect probably made it easy enough to dismiss the idea as a bad case of far left paranoia.
With the 'Spycatcher' and Colin Wallace revelations in the 1980s, the argument suddenly became a lot more persuasive. Robin Ramsey and Steve Dorril did an excellent job gathering the strands together in their 1991 volume 'Smear'!, presumably long out of print.
There can now be little doubt that there were coup plots against Harold Wilson, a democratically elected and recognisably Labour prime minister. Earlier this year, the BBC broadcast a drama documentary on all this, which claimed that Lord Mountbatten of Burma had been lined up as Britain’s Pinochet in waiting.
OK, as soon as I can get a day off work, I’ll go down to the Public Records Office in Kew and check out the MI5 documentation now in the public domain. It should make interesting reading.
Posted at 15:20, 29 December 2006
Comments (12)
Those forces which plotted against Wilson are still very much with us, there are powerful people in the establishment who will do anything to bring down a Labour government.
Not only the silly old Healyites but EP Thompson was talking about this. In the late '70s he wrote a series of articles on what he saw as a sharp decline in civil liberties and speculated about sinister forces in the British establishment keen to curtial democracy. You can find some of the texts in his collection 'Writng by Candlelight' - they still make great reading.
[Those forces which plotted against Wilson are still very much with us, there are powerful people in the establishment who will do anything to bring down a Labour government]
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.
From th FT, reporting papers from 1976:
"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.
The available evidence is of a serious minority in MI5 with a coup mentality and a conspiratorial sense of extra-democratic grievance, set against against polite, sceptical listeners in the military top brass.
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.
I dont expect the british public would sit idly by whilst a government it elected is crushed under the heel of the toff jackboot. So nothing to get too worried about really
Didn´t Lord Carver admit all of this years ago? Admittedly, not the same as MI5 papers, but a big hint. I think the AWL pamphlet "Socialism and Democracy", made mainly up of the text of a public debate between Michael Foot and Sean Matgamna, goes into more detail than I can currently remember - and I seem to remember that booklet being one of the better things published by a group on the far left (or so it seemed to me at the age of 16).
Didn´t Lord Carver admit all of this years ago? Admittedly, not the same as MI5 papers, but a big hint. I think the AWL pamphlet "Socialism and Democracy", made mainly up of the text of a public debate between Michael Foot and Sean Matgamna, goes into more detail than I can currently remember - and I seem to remember that booklet being one of the better things published by a group on the far left (or so it seemed to me at the age of 16).
In the final days of the Wilson era, MI5 drafted a contingency paper based on 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.
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?
Is it legal for MI5 to plan stuff like that?
It certainly is. I would argue that '5 has a statutory duty to plan for the consequences of an attempt to sabotage the London water supply.
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.
Maybe so, but what does this:
"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.