The Defence of the Realm (123 page)

Despite the concern felt by Rees and Callaghan about Militant entryism, there were powerful voices on the NEC opposed to any serious action to prevent it, among them those of Callaghan's two immediate successors as Labour leader, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock. In November 1975 the Labour Party national agent, Reg Underhill, presented a report to the NEC on extreme left-wing infiltration of the Labour Party which concluded that Militant was an independent political organization and therefore clearly contravened the prohibition in Labour's constitution on Party members joining organizations with their ‘own programmes, principles, and policy for distinctive and separate propaganda'.
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The MT leadership gave much
of the credit for sidelining the Underhill report to one of its members, Nick Bradley, the LPYS representative on the NEC, who, it believed, succeeded in persuading the Organization sub-committee that the report should ‘lie on the table'.
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When the report eventually reached the NEC, the Committee voted by sixteen to twelve to take no action.
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As late as 1981 Neil Kinnock believed that, within the Labour Party organization, ‘there was neither the will nor, more important, the organisational capacity to undertake a systematic attack on Militant.'
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The divided views within the Labour leadership about the threat of Militant entryism produced frustration among the F Branch officers concerned with the investigation of subversion in the Labour Party. It was unclear to the Security Service how much of the Callaghan government shared Rees's close interest in MT. F1A/1 commented in January 1978 that F1A/9 had written nine papers over the past two years, often without knowing for whom they were intended and based on the ‘haziest of requirements'. Without feedback from Whitehall, F1 was unable to judge whether its work was of value to government.
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The Security Service had far less doubt about government interest in its intelligence on industrial subversion. During the summer of 1977, with the industrial harmony of the early Callaghan government at an end, television news was dominated by daily confrontations between mass pickets and police outside the Grunwick photo-processing plant in north London, where a hundred mostly Asian female workers had been sacked for joining a union. Despite the fact that several ministers had appeared on the picket line, Callaghan told a meeting at Chequers on 26 June: ‘If things continue on the present basis there could well be fatalities and in circumstances which might be in danger of bringing the Government down . . . The government was not dealing with respectable unionism but rent a mob.'
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Callaghan was particularly worried by the use of mass flying pickets by Arthur Scargill, the Yorkshire miners' leader, who had been arrested on the picket line, and he asked the cabinet secretary for a note on Scargill's first use of them during the 1972 miners' strike. On 5 July he issued a handwritten note asking: ‘Was Scargill at Grunwick today . . .[?] Keep me informed about Scargill's movements. He may have to be warned off.'
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Callaghan was reported to be showing a personal interest in intelligence on ‘future action on mass pickets at Grunwick'.
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Eavesdropping and telechecks at King Street showed that Ramelson saw Scargill's flying pickets of Yorkshire miners as a key element in winning the strike.
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A ‘Day of Action', involving the Yorkshire miners, planned for 8 August, however, was called off by the Grunwick strike committee in response to an appeal for calm by Lord Scarman, who had been appointed to head an inquiry.
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When told the news, Ramelson was heard to ‘mutter a curse'. ‘Once the level of activity was reduced in any campaign,' he believed, ‘it was difficult to restore it.'
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The Scarman Report's recommendation to reinstate or recompense the strikers was turned down by the Grunwick plant owner.
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When the strike committee asked Scargill at short notice to bring the miners to a mass picket on 7 November 1977, he was reported to have replied that there was not time to make the necessary arrangements.
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A furious Ramelson was heard complaining about Scargill's absence: ‘If the fucking miners had been there they [the picket] would have topped 10,000.'
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The strike was eventually called off in the following year.

By the autumn of 1977 Callaghan's main concern was the threat of a police strike. The Police Federation had demanded a massive pay rise of between 78 and 104 per cent.
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The Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, warned that a 10 per cent offer would lead to an immediate showdown. In some areas, notably Merseyside, there was likely to be an all-out strike. In London police withdrawal from traffic duties risked causing chaos. The overall impact could be as devastating as the miners' strike which had brought down the Heath government. Rees was in favour of a 15 per cent pay offer. Callaghan refused, telling Rees that ‘people would laugh at such a breach in government pay policy.' He was ‘prepared to resign rather than . . . give in to the threat of a strike'.
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The Prime Minister heavily censored a draft speech which Rees intended to give to the Police Federation. In the margins of a proposed reference to the police as a ‘special case', the Prime Minister scrawled an emphatic ‘NO. So is beating inflation. Don't use this terminology.'
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On Callaghan's insistence, the Police Federation were offered, and finally accepted, a 10 per cent pay rise with the promise of a committee of inquiry to look at longer-term pay settlements.
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The threat of a police strike vividly illustrates the limits of the Security Service's investigation of labour disputes. Despite the fact that Callaghan feared it might force his resignation, the Service provided no significant intelligence because it did not regard either the Police Federation or its leaders as subversive.

In the 1977–8 pay round settlements averaged over 15 per cent. When Callaghan tried to impose a 5 per cent pay-rise ceiling in July 1978, the relationship between Labour and the unions suffered a spectacular breakdown, despite the attempts of the TUC general secretary, Len Murray, to win support for government policy. There seemed no cure for the ‘British disease' of repeated strike action and chaotic industrial relations.

Early in 1978, Ramelson was succeeded as CPGB industrial organizer
by his deputy, Mick Costello, a hardline Communist whose New Zealand father Desmond (‘Paddy'), a former diplomat turned professor of Russian at Manchester University, was assessed by the Security Service as a KGB agent.
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Security Service Box 500 reports to Whitehall and Special Branches concluded that ‘The Party leadership has had some misgivings about [Mick] Costello's rather brash manner and an habitual unwillingness to admit to error. Ramelson himself has frequently expressed doubts about his political judgement.'
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The CPGB leadership was reported to be worried that the ‘wages struggle' against the 5 per cent ceiling on pay rises was insufficiently political (in other words, not adequately focused on attacking the Callaghan government) and that, while the Party maintained ‘continued strength of influence at senior levels among trade union officials', it was losing ground to the Trotskyists on the shop floor.
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It was also dismayed at the end of 1978 by the extent of Trotskyist influence on the national executive committee of the Civil and Public Service Association (CPSA).
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As the industrial disruption of the Winter of Discontent proceeded, the CPGB mood brightened. A Box 500 report on 29 January described the Party as ‘increasingly enthusiastic about the effects of the public services dispute which it believes could be a significant factor in bringing about opportunities for its political advance'.
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Box 500 reports made clear, however, that the Winter of Discontent was not the result of either a Communist or a Trotskyist masterplan:

Trotskyist groups are finding difficulty in keeping pace with events and in some places are being told by Party officials to concentrate their attention entirely on selling their newspapers. Deason, the industrial organiser of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), believes that many of their members are daunted by the scale of the action and are not clear how to take advantage of it.

In the four unions at the centre of the Winter of Discontent, the Service reported ‘relatively little subversive influence at national level'. ‘Subversive influence' was strongest in the thirty-nine-member general executive council of the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), which contained nine Communists, two Communist sympathizers and two Trotskyist sympathizers. By contrast, the only ‘subversive' among the thirty members of the executive council of the General and Municipal Workers Union (GMWU) was a single Trotskyist. Though the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) had ‘in recent years become notably militant', its executive council of twenty-six contained only one Communist sympathizer. The Confederation of Health Service Employees (COHSE) had ‘no subversives at executive or full time national official level'.
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The Winter of
Discontent was followed by a private ‘acknowledgement by the Communist Party that it has in recent years lost much of its industrial influence at the shop-floor level and that it needs to revitalise its organisation of workplace branches'.

The leading casualty of the Winter of Discontent was James Callaghan. ‘The belief that he enjoyed a unique relationship with the unions, and was a supremely effective agent of industrial partnership, collapsed.'
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Because the Security Service collected intelligence only on the comparatively minor ‘subversive' influences, its reports did not cover most of the industrial disruption which led Labour to defeat at the polls and were of only secondary importance to the ministers responsible for dealing with the Winter of Discontent.

The Security Service's 1972 definition of subversive activities as ‘those which threaten the safety or well being of the State and are intended to undermine or overthrow Parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means' had been accepted both by the Heath government and by its Labour successors during the 1970s. It was quoted in parliament in 1975 and defended by the Home Secretary in 1978.
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In some respects the Service, so far from exaggerating the threat of subversion, had a more realistic view of it than ministers and was less likely than successive governments to see subversion as a key element in industrial disruption. The Service was justified in the mid-1970s in identifying Militant entryism as a subversive threat to Labour Party democracy. Neil Kinnock's ferocious attack as Labour leader on Militant in the mid-1980s
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strongly suggests that Service assessments during the Callaghan government, at a time when Kinnock had taken a much more relaxed view of the entryist problem, showed prescience rather than alarmism.

The Security Service did, however, devote too much of its resources during the 1970s to monitoring often insignificant political activities of the CPGB and its sympathizers. Part of the explanation was that keeping as full a record as possible of CPGB membership had become one of the Service's best-established routines and was needed for the vetting process approved by successive governments. In a small but significant minority of cases, Party membership did pose security risks.
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Many of the young desk officers who spent part of their early careers in the Service studying the membership and activities of CPGB branches felt, however, that the detailed attention lavished on them was out of all proportion to their actual importance. As a trainee desk officer in 1969, Stella Rimington was set to study the CPGB in Sussex where she discovered, despite the cornucopia of radical and ‘revolutionary' movements at Sussex University, that there
were few Communist Party members and a high proportion were elderly: ‘As far as I could see not much of interest was happening so, after I had found out what I was supposed to be doing, I whiled away the time reading Dornford Yates novels under the desk.'
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Six years later, little had changed, as one recruit recalls:

As a newly recruited desk officer in September 1975, I spent only 6 weeks in F1C before being fortunate enough to obtain an early release from the sentence of relentless tedium of paper procedures in the section . . . I found it hard to understand why we were spending as much time as we did investigating the activities of Communist districts/branches in, for example Surrey, Sussex or Hampshire, let alone worrying about attempting to identify someone who was presumed to have sympathies with Communism, perhaps by writing for a leaflet, but of insufficient strength to join the organisation itself . . . My contemporaries were of a similar opinion . . . However, what is surprising is that we did not seriously challenge the assumptions of the [Communist] threat. We merely concentrated on escaping as soon as possible to more interesting/challenging desks. We had no doubt that the Trotskyists were a far more interesting target.
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The strongest supporter within the Security Service of detailed monitoring of the CPGB and its fellow-travellers during the Callaghan era was Charles Elwell, F1/0 from April 1974 until his retirement in May 1979. Elwell believed that ‘many' Communists and their sympathizers were ‘able to exert influence in, for example, education, local government, religious organisations, political parties, local pressure groups etc'. He therefore called for even greater resources to be used to investigate them than they were already receiving.
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Shortly before Elwell retired, he ‘abandoned bureaucratic niceties' and fired off a minute to the DG and DDG complaining that the Service was not paying enough attention to the threat of subversion: