[A-List] UK state: counter-subversion & The Guardian

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

For utter hypocrisy you need look no further than The Guardian today. Not so
long after publishing MI5-friendly smears of the "Walter Mittyish" Harold
Wilson courtesy of Joe Haines (!), plus having dished out thousands of
pounds to serialise the banal memoirs of ex-MI5 chief Stella Rimington,
whose key role in spearheading MI5 efforts against the NUM during the
miners' strike of 1984/5 remains a mystery, the Guardian now postures as the
defender of due process and open government.



UK's real enemy within

Union bosses bonded with Special Branch

Leader
Thursday October 24, 2002
The Guardian

There was a time when the names of Ray Buckton and Joe Gormley were the
stuff of everyday argument. Today, they are as unfamiliar to the younger
generation as the political landscape they inhabited in the 1970s and 1980s.
But Mr Buckton, who led the train drivers, and Mr Gormley, in charge of the
miners, were feared and respected in equal measure during the bare knuckle
fights between government and unions. Both could stop the country in defence
of their members' interests - and often did.

So the revelation that Mr Buckton and Mr Gormley were informers for special
branch paints a very different picture from that presented by received
wisdom. Were there really 23 senior trade unionists talking to special
branch's industrial section? Could Mr Buckton, whose members' wildcat action
ensured he was the man commuters loved to hate, have ratted on the trade
union movement that cherished him? Or for that matter, did Mr Gormley
despise the militant members of his union so much he would betray them? As
both men are dead, neither can dispute special branch's claims. If true, it
reveals hitherto unexposed sides of both trade unionists and also points to
the scale of the surveillance network that spied on the public.

It is not news that parts of the police, secret services and political
establishment were paranoid enough to believe new social movements needed to
be infiltrated and undermined. There were plenty of subversives to pick on -
from tiny and exotic leftwing organisations to CND and civil liberty groups,
unions and anti-apartheid demonstrators. Offices were burgled and phones
tapped. The extent of this irrational distrust can be seen by the number of
files MI5 kept on political activists, including some of today's cabinet
ministers. Breaking or bending the law is no defence of democracy, even in
febrile times. What it suggests is that these investigating forces were the
real enemy within.