Colonel
Thomas Pride’s Purge of Parliament in 1648
The comments in a recent edition of the Sunday Times attributed to a serving British army general contained the not so veiled threat of mounting a military rebellion in the event of a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour government getting close to exercising the levers of power. The anonymous general painted a scenario which would involve “mass resignations” by high level officers in the British armed forces in what he claimed would “effectively be a mutiny.”
Although a source for the Ministry of Defence sought to dampen the
remarks by issuing a condemnation of the comments, they have caused much alarm.
The comments come in the midst of a concerted media campaign aimed at
discrediting the leader and proposed policies of the Labour opposition party.
While there is some room for treating words expressed anonymously with some
caution, events in the recent political history of Britain suggest that they
should not be readily dismissed.
There is much evidence that elements within the British military and
the security services have acted against serving governments which the
Establishment have viewed as threatening the interests of the United Kingdom as
they perceive it. Targeted were the Labour administrations headed by Harold
Wilson in the 1960s and 1970s. Threats of coups and efforts geared towards
destabilising Wilson’s government have been credibly corroborated over the
years.
It was also reported that Tony Benn, the late Labour figure whose Left
wing positions inspired great revulsion on the British political Right was
threatened with assassination in the event of his ever assuming the leadership
of an elected Labour government. The source of that threat is said to have
emanated from the late Airey Neave, an Establishment figure in the Conservative
Party who was well-connected to the British military and the security services.
Those who are aware of the manner in which state intelligence
organisations can feed information to the public for the purpose of creating
alarm as well as carving out what the powers that be perceive to be a threat to
the well-being of society, may conclude that recent media activity seeking to
discredit Labour’s lurch to the Left culminating with the threat of a military
rebellion, bear the unmistakable hallmark of the implementation of a ‘strategy
of tension.’
This is an excerpt from a wide-ranging essay that I wrote in early 2013
entitled ‘Democracy, Terrorism and the Secret State’ covering plots which were
engineered by the military and security services.
In Britain the
‘secret state’ was active during this era of the communist threat, reaching the
stage where at two distinctive points in history, the possibility of a military
takeover of the country became mooted and later heightened to the extent that
plans for action were substantively laid out.
Both coups were to
have been directed against the socialist administrations led by Harold Wilson,
the first plot occurring in the late 1960s and the second, a culmination of
intrigues perpetrated by Right-wing operatives in British military intelligence
and the domestic security service, MI5.
The latter part of
the 1960s witnessed certain events and trends which caused certain members of
the British elite to be alarmed at the direction in which the former imperial
power was heading.
One key event was
the devaluation of the pound in 1967, a symptom of the continuing perceived
‘degradation’ of a waning nation-empire still traumatised by the humiliation of
the Suez debacle of 1956.
Another was the
deteriorating situation in Northern Ireland, where the bourgeoning civil rights
movement of the Roman Catholic community was being transformed into a
militarised struggle led by a revived Irish Republican Army (IRA).
There was also the
perception of Wilson and the Labour Party being tolerant of the ‘Ban the Bomb’
movement and a drift towards a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament.
Furthermore, fears about the increasing power of trade unions and controversies
related to the uneasiness felt about non-white immigration may have added to
the sense of a nation in perpetual crisis.
In 1968, meetings
were held at the instigation of the newspaper baron and M15 agent, Cecil King
who took the lead in an enterprise which proposed that the army would depose
the elected government and install a military alternative with Lord Louis
Mountbatten at the helm.
Wilson’s electoral
victory in 1964 signified a lurch to the Left, a direction in which elements in
the United States government looked upon balefully. The CIA’s ‘spy-hunter’,
James Jesus Angleton, believed that Wilson was a Soviet-plant. The thesis went along
the lines that Wilson had been compromised years before by Soviet agents when
as chairman of the Board of Trade, he made several trips behind the ‘Iron
Curtain’.
What is more is that
the sudden death in January 1963 of Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, came to be
believed by Angleton and some in the British intelligence community to have
been engineered by the KGB in order to pave the way for Wilson to succeed him
as the leader of the party.
Gaitskell was on the
Right of the Labour Party, and he had proposed the then radical measure of
ditching Clause Four of the party’s constitution on common ownership. Wilson,
on the other hand, was identified with the Left-wing of the party.
What followed was a
dirty-tricks campaign mounted by British intelligence operatives. Code-named
‘Operation Clockwork Orange’, its remit was to smear a number of British
politicians including not only Wilson, but significantly, Wilson’s political
rival from the Conservative Party, Edward Heath.
Heath’s brand of
‘One Nation’ Toryism and perceived weakness in his handling of the increasingly
belligerent trade unions did not meet with the approval of members of the
Establishment who wanted a more Right-wing leader and agenda from the
Conservatives.
This sort of thing
was not without precedent in British political history. The infamous ‘Zinoviev
Letter’, a 1924 forgery which came by way of an asset of MI6, was purportedly a
communication from Grigori Zinoviev, the president of the Comintern, enjoining
British communists to stimulate “agitation-propaganda” in the armed forces.
Thus, four days
before the British General Election, the Daily
Mail had as its banner headline the following: “Civil War Plot by
Socialists’ Masters: Moscow Orders To Our Reds; Great Plot Disclosed.”
The Labour Party
lost the election by a landslide.
The early part of
the 1970s, a period which on the European continent was marked by an
intensification of the ideological polarisation of the political Left and Right
with malcontents on the Left favouring the use of urban violence in place of
the ‘ineffectual’ results of mass street demonstrations, saw the birth in
Britain of an organisation calling itself the Angry Brigade.
The Angry Brigade,
an anarchist group, temporarily provided Britain with a taste of continental-style
guerrilla warfare which involved targeting figures of the state such as
government ministers and judges as well as the bombing of foreign embassies and
establishments of those states which its members considered as ‘imperialist’ or
‘fascist’.
The “law and order
issue” became the short-handed appellation of choice in referring to the
battles between the radicalised forces of the Left and the apparatus of state
authority which permeated the political and cultural discourse.
The question of how
these deep-rooted tensions were going to be resolved were framed in terms
ranging from a revolution which would profoundly alter the status quo to that
involving the state preserving its authority through the implementing of extreme measures.
The sentiments representing
one version of a possible resolution to society’s discordant drift, namely one
providing the template of the ‘strategy of tension’, even made its way into the
public eye through the realm of popular entertainment.
In 1971, the ITV
network aired an episode of the TV series, ‘The
Persuaders!’’ entitled ‘The Time and The Place’ wherein the playboy heroes
stumble upon a plot to carry out a coup d’etat by members of the British
establishment which is being co-ordinated by a member of the aristocracy.
The idea is to have
the prime minister assassinated during a live TV debate on a contentious law
and order bill, which according to its opponents and proponents represents
either a “death to democracy” or a “return to sanity”.
The assassin, who
appears to be a subdued and detached figure nestled in the audience, is to be
activated Manchurian Candidate-style with a gun hidden in the compartment of
what on the outside is a book. The murder would then present itself as the
justification for a takeover of the government and the imposition of martial
law.
As one of the foot
soldiers of the eventually failed conspiracy explains, “the public will be
outraged, and when Croxley (the Lord leading the coup) makes an impassioned
plea for strong action, the people of this country will not only approve of a
new government, they’ll demand it.”
The aforementioned
fiction from early evening light entertainment nonetheless did reference one
consistent aspect of the prevalent understanding among the mass of Britons
about the nature of their governance: namely its alluding to the existence of
the Establishment; a group of powerful people who although unelected and
unseen, consistently influence the direction of the country.
It also followed
that any plan to effect any radical change in society such as by a military
coup would find its conception and execution from persons belonging to such
Establishment.
Traditionally, the
British Establishment referred to those of high-born status and usually with an
old school tie/Oxbridge background, who along with others in high government
positions of the judiciary, the armed forces, civil service, courtiers within
the royal family, the police and security services, have a tendency to form
coteries within the exclusive enclaves of gentleman’s clubs.
The fictional Lord
Croxley meets with establishment figures in the grandiose settings of a club to
finalise the details of the coup which bears traces of reality to the claimed
influence of the real life Clermont Club at which some argue that a plot to
overthrow the Labour government in the 1970s was hatched.
It is useful to note
that the Establishment does not necessarily merge with the concept of the ‘Deep
State’, i.e. the ‘state within a state’ of which the Turkish derin devlet is considered the standard.
This other aspect of
the secret state; that of a parallel government manipulating events in the
background without the knowledge of the incumbent, visible elected power, has,
unlike in the case of Turkey and Italy, never been specifically identified in
the British context, although her majesty the Queen is once believed to have
alluded to the “powers at work in this country about which we have no
knowledge.”
However, what is not
disputed is the existence of an influential establishment alongside at least a
sizeable element of the secret service which plotted against the Labour
government in the 1970s with the aim of destabilising it. Wilson himself had
made intimations to the reporters Barrie Penrose and Roger Courtiour of “dark
forces threatening Britain.”
There are
historian-experts in the field such as the author Rupert Allason who assert
that the intelligence services in the United Kingdom, unlike some of their
European counterparts such as in Italy, is not composed overwhelmingly of
individuals of a Right-wing bent. Those with Leftist tendencies, he has argued,
were always represented.
While the personnel
of the British secret service have tended to come from the elite of society,
they did, after all, produce the notorious Cambridge set consisting of the
likes of Burgess, McClean, Philby and Blunt, who indoctrinated earlier in their
student days by the communist ideology, would later turn traitors against their
country.
By the mid-1970s
during Wilson’s second tenure as prime minister, the nation had already been
through a three-day working week during Heath’s confrontation with the powerful
miners union. Militant unions and a Left-wing agenda which could compromise
Britain’s commitment to the free market economic system as well as to NATO was
a cause of great concern.
Thus it was that in
this noxious atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia of the existence of
pro-Soviet subversive elements within the political classes, the intelligence
services and the powerful labour unions that a group of MI5 agents led by Peter
Wright, the author of Spycatcher,
“bugged and burgled” their way across London, he claimed, “at the behest of the
state.”
Harold Wilson was
convinced that he was being watched and that insidious information about him
was being disseminated from sources within the security services; part of the
executive branch of the government which he was supposed to control.
Apart from the
troublesome spooks who were lurking in the shadows, he was also of the mindset
that waiting in the wings were high-ranking figures of the military, both
serving and retired, who were ready for the signal to overthrow his government.
Not since 1648, when
Colonel Thomas Pride strode into the august precincts of the English
legislature one December day to bring an end to the ‘Long Parliament’, had
anything of the semblance of a military coup d’etat taken place in the
‘mother-nation’ of democracy.
It seemed then to be
a most unlikely development.
But Wilson, who
privately complained of being undermined by the security services, also took
note of a “ring of steel” mounted by the army around London’s Heathrow Airport,
first in January and again in June of 1974. The first occurred on the eve of
the February general election in which Labour was returned to power after a
narrowly contested result.
Although explained
as security measures in response to unspecified terrorist threats, Wilson
considered these manoeuvres to be clear warnings pointed in his direction.
Warnings came from
elsewhere. General Sir Walter Walker, a retired former high echelon figure
within the command structure of NATO, expressed dissatisfaction over the state
of the country and wrote to the Daily
Telegraph calling for “dynamic, invigorating, uplifting leadership…above
party politics” which would “save” the country from “the Communist Trojan horse
in our midst.” He was involved with Unison (later renamed Civil Assistance) an
anti-Communist organisation which pledged to supply volunteers in the event of
a national strike.
Another military
figure, Colonel David Stirling, the founder of the elite SAS regiment, created
‘Great Britain 75’. Composed of ex-military men, its task would be to take over
the running of government in the event of civil unrest leading to a breakdown
of government functioning.
These two, however,
were red herrings according to Peter Cottrell, author of Gladio: NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe, who claims that these
public utterances were a distraction from “what was really going on.”
But the Rubicon was
not crossed. There would be no tanks rolling down Whitehall along with the
probable modus operandi of solemn martial music preceding the presumed clipped
upper class tones of a lord or general proclaiming a state of national
emergency and the establishment of a junta.
In the end, however,
the British Right won. Wilson abruptly resigned in March 1976, thoroughly
exhausted by the campaigns directed at him, while Edward Heath lost the
Conservative Party leadership to Margaret Thatcher, the choice of the Right.
(c) Adeyinka
Makinde (2013 & 2015)
Adeyinka
Makinde is a law lecturer with an interest in security and intelligence
matters.
