Currently reading
More Africa posts coming soon, readers, whether you want them or not, but in the meantime, I'm planning on leavening the mix with some tidbits from "Smear! Wilson and the Secret State", by Robin Ramsay and Stephen Dorrill. It's an excellent book about the various MI5 and other plots of the Wilson era, some of which also appeared in Peter Wright's "Spycatcher". Really interesting and readable stuff; unfortunately out of print but there are lots of second hand copies available on Amazon. So far, the most interesting thing I've turned up is that back in 1964, there were Labour Atlanticists then too, but back then they were all implacably opposed to the UK having an independent nuclear capability - the idea of "purely national" nuclear deterrents was regarded by the Very Sensible Indeed as dangerous, silly, French, and something very much to be avoided in favour of sheltering under the nuclear umbrella of Uncle Sam (the MLF). How things change.
Re Smear!, I'm shocked to discover it came out 17 years ago. Here's what I said at the time (New Statesman and Society, 13th September 1991).
ReplyDeleteThis book has two main concerns, one of which is to rehabilitate Harold Wilson. You remember Wilson - the master of shabby deals and empty phrases, the man who gave the world Lord Kagan and Lady Falkender. It doesn't look hopeful.
In fact, Dorril and Ramsay argue, a Wilson revival is overdue. In the first place, Wilson's current standing owes a lot to the unparallelled campaign of character assassination to which he was subjected. At its root was Wilson's promotion of East-West trade in the fifties, which convinced elements of MI5 that he was under Communist control. Private Eye appears to have been used to great effect in this campaign, painting Wilson as part KGB asset, part crook, with seedy businessmen for friends and Lady Falkender for a mistress. Mud sticks: by 1976 this last allegation was common knowledge. It was also a lie.
As well as MI5's fantasies, Wilson had more practical difficulties. Isolated within his Cabinets (which consisted largely of ambitious right-wingers), he also faced unremitting hostility from the overlapping networks that make up the "permanent government": the secret state, the armed forces, the Civil Service mandarinate and the City. Soundings were made repeatedly among City and military leaders and MPs of all parties, discussing deposing Wilson in favour of a "businessman's government". As Royal consent would have made possible a constitutional coup, approaches were also made to Lord Mountbatten. In the event the economic crash which would have given the coup its pretext never happened, though some carried on hoping: as late as 1975 James Goldsmith was heard to forecast that "chaos would ensue and out of the disorder would emerge a new kind of order".
Labour Prime Ministers do tend to arouse this sort of opposition. What is distinctive about Wilson is that he came close to understanding it. Wilson's famous "paranoia" about buggings and BOSS (amply justified here) is only half the story. The secret services do the dirty work: the economic wing of the Establishment is the City of London. Wilson's corporatist policies may have been unattractive to the unions; they were poison to the City, and Wilson knew it (Wilson was perhaps the last Labour leader to describe financial institutions as "money-lenders"). In 1964 Wilson set up the Department of Economic Affairs, specifically to take control of economic policy from the Treasury (and the City). The permanent government hated it; the permanent government wrecked it and attempted to destroy Wilson.
Far from being the Communist of MI5's nightmares (or dreams), Wilson was never a socialist: he was a Keynesian and a machine politician, whose attitude to the Left was distrustful at best. For all that, many of his concerns - control of finance capital, investment in non-military research - are still key issues for socialists. Nor is it entirely fair to say that Wilson failed; if anything he was defeated, both by the Labour Party's Gaitskellite Tendency and by the vested interests at the heart of the British Establishment. Perhaps the members of the next Labour Government will take note.
As for the book's second concern: the authors, who also edit the magazine Lobster, aim to bring study of the permanent government within the pale of contemporary history. In this respect Smear! is a landmark. Institutions like MI6 and materials like the Colin Wallace papers have generally been the province of a few easily-dismissed "conspiracy theorists", leaving the Cabinet Office and the Crossman diaries to the "serious" historians. This is the first major work to bridge this artificial divide. After reading it, it is inconceivable that it could be the last.
Oh that's really great, thanks very much Phil! I see that you came down on Stephen Dorril's side of the argument about how to spell "Stephen Dorril", rather than mine.
ReplyDeleteI see, by the way, that the inconceivable happened. (re, last para.)
"In 1964 Wilson set up the Department of Economic Affairs, specifically to take control of economic policy from the Treasury (and the City)."
ReplyDeleteI always thought it was a means of neutering George Brown. I mean, if Wilson really thought it would work, he wouldn't have put Brown in charge, would he? Wilson, after all, had been successful as a senior civil servant; he understood administration.
i haven't read it for several years, but one of the things i liked was its depiction of the utter internal opacity of the post-imperial uk secret state, as a workable organ: that it's in fact a bunch of paranoid agencies incentivised towards conflict with one another, and lack of mutual transparency, with vast legal and technological access to data, yet a structure (and indeed a politics) that renders the accurate or useful* processing and interpretation of this data impossible
ReplyDelete*useful even for its own purposes, let alone ours (which are of course very different)
Frank Herbert's concept of BuSab seems ever more appropriate...
ReplyDeletegowachin law would certainly liven up debate about us supreme court choices
ReplyDelete