[A-List] UK state: counter-subversion

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

I can handle the thought of Joe Gormley being a Special Branch informant,
but Ray Buckton? Is this factual information we are getting or it is a form
of retrospective smear? Mind you, Buckton retired in some comfort to
Portugal, where he died not so long ago. And what of Roger Windsor, former
financial director of the NUM now holed up in the south of France? Will we
finally get official confirmation that he was an agent of MI5?

At a time when New Labour is ratcheting up the rhetoric of reaction against
the firefighters, in noticeable contrast to its conciliatory tones directed
towards the poujadist fuel blockaders of two years ago, these revelations
(or whatever) are timely reminders of why there can and could never be even
the relatively tame social democracy of the kind Harold Wilson envisaged for
Britain, and why a revolutionary Marxist perspective is absolutely essential
to understand exactly the nature of the forces arrayed against the UK left.
All of which makes "leftist" Tony "Reg Varney" Banks' challenge to Ken
Livingstone all the more contemptible, as the article below correctly
implies.

-----

The spirit of the narks

The government's denunciation of the firefighters has echoes of a murky
industrial past, writes Seumas Milne

Thursday October 24, 2002

Tony Blair's decision to denounce the leaders of the firefighters' and rail
unions yesterday as "Scargillite" is an unmistakable sign that the
confrontation with Britain's firefighters is now as much a political as an
industrial one - at least on the government's side.

Gone is the studiedly relaxed attitude towards the radicalisation of the
trade unions that the prime minister was so keen to display during the
summer, in the run-up to the TUC and Labour conferences.

Now he is in full jaw-jutting Thatcher-revivalist mode, ready to do battle
with what he appears to believe are the last camp-followers of the enemy
within incarnate.

It is all so different from the understanding shown towards the fuel tax
blockades by self-employed truckers and farmers two years ago.

While mild mannered transport minister Nick Raynsford brands the Fire
Brigades Union "criminally irresponsible" and one-time militant strike
leader John Prescott blusters that industrial action is "simply
indefensible", Blair and Gordon Brown are uncharacteristically at one in
their resistance to a genuine compromise with the firefighters.

Instead, Blair has declared that the dispute is being politically driven by
the "far left". His message is plain: this is an illegitimate dispute and
will be treated as such.

There are powerful echoes of the recent past in such prime ministerial
charges. What they have often led to in practice has been spelled out in the
latest revelations of the security services' infiltration and subversion of
the labour movement.

The forthcoming BBC series True Spies can be criticised for a tendency to
take the self-serving claims of retired police special branch officers at
face value and a certain lack of scepticism about the absurd concept of
"subversion".

But its first-hand accounts of what all governments have been prepared to do
to weaken the left and suborn independent trade unionism in the name of
democracy could not be more timely.

As the cold war has receded into history, veterans of the secret state have
been prepared to yield up a little bit more of their seedy, anti-democratic
world: the large-scale blacklisting of union activists, the use of agents
and informers at all levels of the labour movement, the destabilisation and
undermining of strikes, and the betrayal of their members by trade union
leaders who secretly worked for the security services.

The former special branch officers who have been boasting of their exploits
to the BBC say that 23 senior trade unionists were "talking" to them in the
1970s - and that's not counting those working as narks for MI5.

Some will have done so for ideological reasons, others may have cooperated
unwittingly or been blackmailed or bought. That Joe Gormley - the bluff
"moderate" National Union of Mineworkers president during its successful
walkouts of 1972 and 1974, later ennobled by the Tories - turns out to have
been a special branch informer, who tipped off his handlers about strike
plans, is mostly a surprise because he might have rather been expected to
pick up the phone and talk to government ministers direct.

"He was a patriot and he was very worried about the growth of militancy in
his union", the ex-branch man explains. The claim that the well-liked
leftwing train drivers' leader, Ray Buckton, was a special branch contact
will come as more of a shock, even if some in his old union had privately
harboured suspicions about his loyalties.

But no one by now should be surprised to hear of the blanket targeting of
the miners' union by the security services during and after the strike of
1984-85, of agents at the heart of the NUM or that Arthur Scargill, Tony
Blair's spectre of industrial insurrection, has been the single most
lavishly targeted object of the secret state's attentions in Britain since
the second world war.

For all the growing body of evidence of state-sponsored penetration and
subversion of the labour movement, it is easy to exaggerate its importance.
The spooks and narks were only part of a wider effort to weaken the
influence of the left in the trade unions over the past half century. An
exotic array of state and business-sponsored outfits and blacklisting
organisations were mobilised to work alongside them, usually under an
anti-communist banner.

In most disputes, they will have only had a marginal impact on the course of
events - other industrial and political pressures were much more
significant. But the emerging gruesome record does have the advantage of
highlighting the ever-present dangers to effective trade unionism of the
corporate and state embrace.

Although some of it was connected with the cold war, that was mostly an
alibi for a more prosaic domestic concern - to weaken the power of organised
labour in the economy.

And while unions generally have far less industrial clout than they did when
firefighters last staged a national strike 25 years ago and the security
services are supposed to have wound down their counter-subversion
operations, special branch and MI5 will doubtless be using the leftwing
affiliations of FBU and Aslef officials during this dispute as an excuse to
try and tip the industrial balance.

As one civil servant told an FBU negotiator who complained about phone
tapping during the firefighters' strike of 1977: "We've got to know what
you're going to do". Whatever its subterranean support, the government has
only itself to blame for a dispute that has been such a long time in the
offing. By failing seriously to address the public sector pay crisis in its
first term, while refusing to act over the continuing salary explosion for
high earners, it guaranteed that crisis would come to a head in the second
term.

The formula linking firefighters' wages to the best paid manual workers that
settled the 1977 strike had long since stopped delivering the goods. By
blocking the kind of offer that might have led to a deal in the summer and
delaying the setting up of its pay review until September, the government
made sure the dispute would finally boil over. Now it has had to fall back
on moral blackmail, misrepresentation of the FBU's real negotiating position
and rubbishing of the union's leadership.

It would be reassuring to imagine these were government blunders. The
evidence is not encouraging. There were New Labour mutterings about taking
on the firefighters (and no-strike deals for emergency service workers) even
before the 1997 general election.

By blocking London Underground from going to mediation in the recent tube
workers' dispute, the government effectively tried to prevent the settlement
that Ken Livingstone eventually signed to bring the strikes to an end.

When it comes to the firefighters, there are plenty of ways out for the
government if it wanted to take them. If it doesn't do so, it will be clear
that Blair and Brown are out to crack the union as a way of stemming the
current tide of union confidence and militancy.

Downing Street is known to believe that if the firefighters are seen to be
successful, the prospects for the left in the crucial TGWU and GMB elections
will be strengthened. Blair has described the string of elections of radical
union leaders, such as the FBU's Andy Gilchrist, as the "last spasm" of the
hard left.

That is wishful thinking. But he shows every sign of being determined to
stop the contagion spreading by isolating the FBU. The interest of the
entire trade union movement is now to make sure that does not happen.