[A-List] UK state: counter-subversion

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

So how long before we can see, finally and at long last, unexpurgated, Ken
Loach's "Questions of Leadership"?


Gormley and Buckton named as special branch informers

Richard Norton-Taylor
Thursday October 24, 2002
The Guardian

Joe Gormley, the miners' leader who presided over two successful strikes
against the government in the early 1970s, was named yesterday as a police
special branch informer.

Ray Buckton, the long-term leader of Aslef, the train drivers' union widely
derided as militant, was also a special branch informant, it was claimed
yesterday.

The two men, both dead, are said to be among as many as 23 "senior trade
unionists" who regularly passed information - unpaid - about their tactics
and internal disputes to a secret unit of the special branch called the
industrial section.

According to former special branch officers interviewed for the forthcoming
BBC2 series, True Spies, the intelligence was shared with the security
service, MI5, which at the time was also busy targeting union leaders,
leftwing groups and civil rights organisations that it considered
subversive.

As NUM president, Mr Gormley is remembered as a leader of the dispute which
led to the three-day week and the downfall of Edward Heath's government in
1974.

Perhaps even more surprising is the claim that Mr Buckton was a special
branch in formant. He was always regarded as a leftwing stalwart.

"We found ourselves actually going to unions and talking to top union
officials about what was going on," says Ken Day, a former Metropolitan
police special branch officer. "One of them would be Joe Gormley." Another
former officer, identified as Alan, says of Gormley: "He was a patriot and
he was very wary and worried about the growth of militancy within his own
union."

The activities of Jack Dromey, chairman of the strike committee at the
Grunwick printing works in north London in the mid-1970s, were also
monitored. Mr Dromey, national organiser of the transport union - and
husband of Harriet Harman, the solicitor general - called the security
services' activities "sinister and outrageous".

-----

The big unions, like the TGWU, are still absurdly portrayed by the Tories
and much of the media as a potentially dangerous fifth column in the body
politic. Yet without the timidity and inaction of some of the famous union
'barons', the legislative attack on trade union rights in the Eighties
probably would have failed, along with the devastation of the steel and
mining industries, and the privatising of the docks.

This perspective on the unions has always been something of a taboo. It was
considered so threatening during the early part of Thatcher's reign that a
1982 television series by Ken Loach, Questions Of Leadership, for the
fledgling Channel 4, was withdrawn and then drastically cut. Consider the
opening sequence of the Loach films. Over archive film of a mass meeting of
trade unionists during the Thirties Depression, the sound-track begins to
play the chorus from Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe:

Bow low ye lower middle classes;

Bow, bow ye tradesmen;

Bow ye masses . . .

As the mockery continues, the pictures dissolve to a parade of earnest young
men, standing on platforms, exhorting the masses. Then they grow older,
florid, comfortable, and become portraits of self-satisfaction, dressed in
the ermine of the House of Lords. They are Joe Gormley, Vic Feather, Richard
Marsh, all former trade union leaders (soon to be joined by Lord Len
Murray). The commentary says, 'There are some trades union leaders who have
in their own person achieved the harmony of the classes.' Rank and file
trade unionists speak about the meaning of 'democracy' within the big
unions, referring to 'small bureaucratic, centralised groups of people . . .
that prevent individual members from playing a role within the union and the
general direction the union is going'. Were these not the familiar media
words of right-wingers complaining about the 'militants' infiltrating their
'democratic' institutions? Yes, but in the Loach film the voices came from
ordinary trade unionists analysing the hold of the trade union establishment
on the organisations and fortunes of millions of ordinary people.

from John Pilger, "They Never Walk Alone, Part One"
http://pilger.carlton.com/print/48727