Running Commentary: Patriots at work (1987)

The Running Commentary column from the September 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Patriots at work

In the whole of the world there are probably no more fervent patriots than Peter Wright and Oliver North.

To prove it, they were prepared to go to unusual lengths. North arranged to supply arms to the Contras in defiance of a Congressional decision against it and then made elaborate arrangements to hide the evidence in the memory holes and the shredding machines of Washington. One senator described it as a military junta established to circumvent the checks and balances of the American Constitution.

Wright, in his own words, "bugged and burgled" his way wherever and whenever it suited his purpose. He knew of other officers in M15 who tried to organise a romantic covert operation to undermine the democratically-elected Wilson government — on the grounds that, in the view of these officers. Wilson was a "menace". And he kept quiet about all this until he went into an embittered retirement.

Both of these men justify what they did on the grounds that they were acting in the "national interest"; both deny that they would ever contemplate doing anything likely to harm "their" country. Peter Wright is now rather too old and sick to look like an example of tragic heroism; but Oliver North — well, we all know about the adulation his confessions provoked among his fellow patriots in America.

But one thing patriots are supposed to worship and to protect is the way of life in "their" country — which must include its system of government and its laws. Obeying the law is not a matter of convenience or expediency — something to be done at one time and not at another, something for others to do but not for yourself. If a country's governmental system and its laws are "good” — as Wright and North, as staunch patriots, must think — then to obey them and to conform to them should be a matter of pride and pleasure rather than of anguish and hardship.

So what are we to make of these patriots, who claim the right to choose when and how they accept what "their" country represents? Of course they cannot claim to be consistent or sincere in their beliefs. But that is only the beginning. Patriotism — which, as we have said, is no more than a belief — is not consistent or logical. We are justified in being proud only about our achievements but the place where we are born, our parents, the nationality label which is stuck on us, are accidents and not achievements. So the basis of patriotism — pride in country — is false.

Patriotism claims that the artificial national state boundaries of capitalism divide the human race not just in terms of territory but of ability and temperament: but there is no evidence to sustain this. Across all the boundaries — of race and sex as well as of nation — the class divide of capitalism operates and it is the only one which is of any significance when we consider human interests and progress to a better society.

So if Wright and North are confused — or deceitful, cynical, ruthless, whichever is preferred -— they are really only behaving as patriots must. And that should be enough to convince anyone of the case for international working class unity.

Gorbachev’s gift

We all know how Mikhail Gorbachev is seen as a "liberalising reformist" leading the Russian people to "communism". He urges people to work harder and improve productivity and factories to become more independent in pursuit of greater profit.

Gorbachev, however, is not just good at telling others what to do. He is himself participating in the process of glasnost and perestroika (openess and restructuring). With this aim in mind the state capitalist boss has donated 50,000 roubles (£50,000) to the Soviet Cultural Fund for a statue of Vasili Tyorkin to be built in Smolensk (Central Russia). Vasili Tyorkin is the soldier hero in a poem by Alexander Tvardovsky.

This money, we are told by Soviet Weekly (11 July 1987) came out of the foreign royalties for Gorbachev's books and other writings. As a member of the Russian ruling class, with a few roubles to spare, Gorbachev is quite happy to use his pin money like this for two reasons.

Any new monument which is not another tribute to Lenin will be welcome by most people and will enhance the popularity of the present leader.

A statue which helps to spread absurd patriotic notions that Russia is worth dying for is likely to be welcomed by the whole Russian capitalist class since it is their way of life that the working class might one day be called on to defend in war.

Mike Tavener

Dictatorial democrats

This is a good time to remember that the Gang of Four broke with the Labour Party partly because of their anger and dismay at that party's persistent internal feuding. Break the mould of these outworn, traditional parties, they argued, and instead fashion a new one in which reason and moderation would prevail. Then all disputes would be settled simply because nobody would be adopting preformed, dogmatic stances. Sounded good, thought a lot of people who were also fed up with Labour's apparent will for its own destruction.

Trouble — serious trouble — started when the Alliance, having kidded themselves that they were about to become a serious prospect to have an influence in the government, were so badly mauled in the last election. The response of the mould-breakers to this was anything but innovative. They resorted to the excuse which Labour and Conservative Parties regularly use when they lose an election. There is nothing wrong, they asserted, with our principles or our policies; the problem lies with our failure to present them effectively enough.

In the case of the Alliance, they decided that they had suffered precisely because they were an alliance — that the regular appearance of two Davids on our TV screens cost them crucial support among workers who like consistency, strength and single-mindedness in their leaders. It was thus that the Alliance came up with the idea of a formal merger between the Liberals and the SDP — one party, one leader.

Now moderation and reasonableness should have welcomed such an idea — or at least been prepared to discuss it in an objective. constructive frame of mind. In fact, the campaign leading up to the referendum on the merger was notable for its lack of these very things. Abuse and mud-slinging would be moderate terms to describe what was said by some Alliance members about others.

If that were not enough many members of the SDP. including some of its leaders, made it quite clear that if the vote went against their wishes they would not accept it. David Owen adopted this attitude. Rosie Barnes was another: "If merger takes place." she said. "There will be a Social Democratic Party which remains behind. Four of the MPs will remain Social Democrats and David Owen will be our leader

So this is a good time to ask: What sort of democrat is it (and what sort of democracy do they envisage) who contests an issue leading to a vote but has no intention of being influenced if the majority is against them.

The merger debate in the Alliance has revealed, if it were still needed, the true nature of that organisation — as another party of capitalism with all the cynicism and trickery of those they claim to despise.

Power to the people (1988)

From the February 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Standard apologises for being a little late with the news but last month Margaret Thatcher became the longest-serving Prime Minister of the century. The great, national sigh of gratitude and relief which greeted the fateful day when she passed the record of Herbert Asquith was quickly blotted out by the sound of frantically hammered typewriters, as political scribes launched into yet another assessment of her time in office, now compared with that of Asquith.

Modern capitalism demands that its executives in the state machine work a great deal harder now than they did eighty years ago. Thatcher, for example, rises at 6am and carries on throughout the day until the small hours of the next one. Only under protest does she take one brief holiday a year. Asquith, who was accustomed to taking several leisurely breaks, would have been horrified; but Thatcher revels under the pressure, drawing energy from the sense that she is at the centre of decision-taking, where policies are laid down and changes are wrought. She is, the scribes were agreed, politically dominant now; amid the column inches of awed admiration for her, a certain phrase began to creep in more and more often elective dictatorship. It means that Thatcher, having won power through the votes of millions of workers, uses that power as if she has an eternal grasp of it — as if she is a dictator. Her method is to ensure that British capitalism is run as she wants it to be by purging her government of all doubting or dissident influences and surrounding herself with people who, although nominally her advisers, rarely if ever question what she is doing.

An example of this was in the appointment of the new Cabinet Secretary, to replace Robert Armstrong who will be remembered for his squirming euphemism about being "economical with the truth" long after all his other work is forgotten. Poor Armstrong, going faithfully into the jaws of a ruthless cross examination on the other side of the world and, as always seemed inevitable, ending up an international laughing stock. But at least it proved one thing; it laid to rest the old myth that it is the Civil Service which runs capitalism rather than the people who are elected to be the government. Armstrong's successor, Robin Butler, is renowned as a Thatcher devotee, having been her principal private secretary. An all-powerful Civil Service would hardly have allowed such an appointment, so soon after Armstrong s humiliation.

But as the myth of the omnipotent Civil Service faded, it was to some extent replaced with concern over the influence of the lobbyists. These are the people who operate behind the scenes of government, with the object of influencing decisions in favour of the organisations who have hired them. Lobbying is a growth industry — if that word can be applied to it — which has expanded over the past few years from a few small firms competing for a small total annual fee into a business with some big companies, often subsidiaries of advertising agencies (of course Saatchi and Saatchi has one) able to command fees in tens of thousands for their services. The lobbyists need to know their way around the corridors of power; many of them once worked as senior civil servants or advisers to politicians. Recent events where they were active were the Westlands affair, the Guinness bid for Distillers and the SAS attempt to take over a slice of British Caledonian. While there is no reason to accept the lobbyists' estimates of their own influence — they have an obvious interest in exaggeration — it is true that they are an addition to what seems to many people a mass of confused influences, all operating on the government, which effectively blanket out any democratic content. There is Thatcher behaving as if she is a dictator; there is the civil service, through their position of the permanent factor whichever government is in power; there are the lobbyists, working behind the scenes to distort and frustrate governmental decisions. In all this, what happens to the wishes of the voters? To the promises on which the government was elected? Is there any point in ever voting again?

Anyone who suffers nightmares about a Britain in the grip of the faceless mandarins of Whitehall, or of the slick operators in the public relations business, can be re-assured. Whatever influence these people may be able to exert they can operate only within a certain system (after all, no recalcitrant civil servant has ever sabotaged a minute so as to help along the case for abolishing capitalism). We live under a social system based on a class division, into owners and non-owners — into capitalists and workers. This society cannot be democratic — it has to have its secrets, whether they are military, commercial or governmental (as Robert Armstrong knows only too well). The owning capitalists hold a privileged social position — privileged in their access to wealth, to information, to power and to the process of decision taking. The working class are never asked about decisions like the take-over of British Caledonian; it is simply not within the scope of their social position under capitalism.

This situation exists because the working class allow it to. At present the capitalist class — the ruling class — hold power but they do this through the fact that the working class agree to it. The workers are the majority; they are the useful, productive people who design and produce and operate all that society needs. As the majority they have the potential power; at present they surrender this power to the capitalists by voting in their millions for one or other of the parties which, whatever their incidental differences, are agreed that capitalism should continue. People who are concerned about the subversive distortion of governmental decisions should consider where the responsibility lies — how it is that an undemocratic system can be energised, again and again, through millions of democratic votes.

And that brings us to the important question of what can be done about it. How do we bring Thatcher's elective dictatorship to an end? How do we unmask the shadowy figures behind Whitehall's desks? How do we see off the subversive lobbyists? Well it is possible to have a society in which all people stand in equality in the sense that they all have the same rights of access to what society produces, whether it is wealth or a service or information. This will be a society which will work on majority consent, in the interests of the majority. It will have a universal, human unity in its objects and its achievements. Minority class interests will not exist and neither will the mess of deceits and cynicism which they entail. So there is no need to be down-hearted at Thatcher's record; like all the events of capitalism, it puts some important questions and offers some illuminating answers. We can change things; as soon as the society of common ownership and free access arrives, the Socialist Standard will not be late with the news.

Ivan

Official Secrets (1988)

From the August 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

The present Official Secrets Act. with its notorious "catch-all" Section 2, went through all its parliamentary stages in 1911 in just 30 minutes. As a result section 2 has been variously described as "a mess”, "a blunderbuss" and now. in the present White Paper on secrecy laws, as "unsatisfactory" and "in need of reform". The proposed new legislation is likely to be much more carefully drafted and. as a consequence, potentially more of a threat to those who want to find out what the state is up to.

As the Official Secrets Act (amended in 1920) stands, it is a criminal offence to disclose or receive any official information without prior authorisation. The White Paper proposes to legislate more precisely on which kinds of information cannot be disclosed without being subject to criminal sanction. Broadly speaking those areas are defence, security and intelligence; international relations; information obtained in confidence from other governments or international organisations; information useful to criminals; and information relating to telephone tapping and the interception of mail and other communications.

Despite this narrowing down of the categories of information to be covered by the new law, no-one should be under any illusion that this will be a "freedom of information" measure. Leaks of other "less serious" material will be dealt with by means of internal civil service disciplinary measures. In other words civil servants who leak information are likely to be quietly sacked without even having the chance to defend their actions in public. Furthermore, disclosure of certain kinds of information will be subject to an absolute ban — significantly some of those areas which have caused the government embarrassment in recent years. These are telephone tapping (details of which were revealed by former MI5 officer. Cathy Massiter) and the activities of GCHQ; disclosure of any information by serving or former members of the security and intelligence services (such as Peter Wright, author of Spycatcher); and confidential information from foreign governments.

It is also worth remembering that, despite the concentration on the Official Secrets Act, there exist approximately 100 other pieces of legislation that prevent certain categories of information from being disclosed. These range from price-sensitive material to information relating to the nuclear industry and also include information on health and safety matters.

What quickly becomes apparent from a close look at the White Paper is that very little (if any) information not disclosed today is likely to be available as a result of the proposed new legislation. So, far from being the "liberalising" measure that Douglas Hurd, the Home Secretary, has claimed it to be, by tightening up the existing law the current proposals will ensure that successful prosecutions for unauthorised disclosures can be bought more easily. And after the embarrassment caused by Clive Ponting's acquittal and the interminable fiasco over Spycatcher, that is precisely what the government wants to achieve.

For, in addition to the more precise specification of what kinds of information cannot be disclosed, the legislation will seek to outlaw the defence that disclosure is "in the public interest" — successfully used by Ponting in 1985. In other words, no civil servant will, in the future, be able to speak out about official negligence, malpractice or dishonesty without risking imprisonment.

The ending of the "public interest" defence and the abolition of the "prior publication" clause (that is. that a piece of information is already in the public domain) will particularly affect newspapers. They will no longer be able to make such disclosures as those by The Observer in 1984 that MI5 was secretly black-listing certain BBC employees who were deemed subversive, nor would it be able to publish details about the recent Stalker case, on the grounds that it was "in the public interest" to do so.

Furthermore there are other new laws in the pipeline which will require senior civil servants and employees of the security services to sign contracts of employment obliging them to maintain a life-long silence about their activities. Any breach of contract would lead to loss of pension rights and the possibility that they would be sued for damages by the government.

At the same time as official information is becoming more difficult for "us" to obtain, information about individuals' private lives is becoming easier for "them" to get their hands on. partly due to the potential created by new information technology. Currently Home Office. DHSS, Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise computers are being linked together to form the "government data network", which will allow information to be exchanged between government departments' own data banks. This will allow a huge amount of information on all of us to be networked together, enabling the possible construction of comprehensive “personal profiles". Once this happens it is unlikely to be very long before a national system of identity cards is introduced.

Why is this issue of information and access to it of importance to the working class? Increasingly we are subject to a diet of information that is distorted, manipulated and censored. That affects not only what we know about the world but also how we view and understand it. For example, we are frequently told that “we" are all better off now, and yet statistics about the distribution of wealth in this country are no longer available and so we have no means of assessing such statements. Information presented to us as "news" is frequently taken directly from government press releases or “leaked" officially. In other words we are hearing the news that the government wants us to hear.

Information and control over it are about power. Attempts to deprive us of information while at the same time building up data banks on our private lives, constitute a consolidation of class power.

Janie Percy-Smith

After Spywatcher — What? (1987)

From the November 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Will anything of lasting value come out of the Spycatcher affair? That was a question I asked myself on a hot evening in August. Along with many others I was packed into Bristol's Watershed centre to listen to readings from the great forbidden book. One well-thumbed copy was to be raffled at a pound a ticket. Another was to be given away by a local magazine, to the winner of a competition in which you had to image yourself a loony right-wing security agent bent on destabilising the Thatcher government: what rumour would you circulate? The Chair of the meeting reported apologies from a host of celebrities who were on holiday. It didn't matter that the TV cameras weren't here, he said (with only a hint of disappointment in his voice). We still roasted under the spotlights because a trade union camera was recording the proceedings.

The event itself had been preceded early in the morning by a warm-up bout between local MP William Waldegrave and a representative of the National Council for Civil Liberties on Radio Bristol. The NCCL representative had spoken in indignant and stirring tones about censorship and freedom of speech, but without any qualifications. This enabled Waldegrave to complain that the NCCL itself believes in censorship (because it supports the Race Relations Act's embargo on incitement to racial hatred). That point went unanswered, as did the counter-accusation against Waldegrave, that he ignored the seriousness of the charges made in Wright's book by echoing the government line about secret service officers' lifetime obligation of confidentiality. Never mind, a discussion was promised after the readings that evening. That might be worthwhile even if the Waldegrave view was almost certain to go unrepresented.

The readings themselves were entertaining if unremarkable. We can be fairly sure that all the interesting charges made in the book are now already in the public domain, and all that remain are the trimmings. So we heard about the familiar alleged plot to subvert the Wilson government. Khrushchev's vanity, the madness of the alleged plots against Nasser, and the dangers posed for secret service infiltrators of left-wing groups by the promiscuity of their members. The book was well-written and clearly very funny, usually unintentionally. I checked on the safety of my raffle ticket and kept my fingers crossed.

Came the discussion. The Chair suggested, at inordinate length given the tight time schedule, that we confine our attention to four main areas. Alas, he spoke with more insistence than clarity, and when I compared notes with a friend after the meeting we could still only discern three. The first person to emerge from the darkness and brave the spotlight and microphone said he was an ordinary person who belonged to no groups and had never spoken to more than half a dozen people in public. He was just upset to be told he couldn't read the book. A number of journalists spoke with convincing passion on a matter which affects them to a greater degree than, and in a different way from other people. There was the inevitable contribution from a member of the Smash The State Tendency, prompting early departures from the hall. "Thank you. comrade", said the Chair icily. But mainly it was "Thank you, Brian", 'Thank you. Dawn", as a succession of figures, doubtless familiar with one another, made their points

A CND representative reminded us of the extent of surveillance over members and conveyed successfully how upsetting it could be to be on the receiving end. A pleasant man from the Green Party said they were entitled to their paranoia too, and told of delayed mail and phones which didn't work around election time. Well, yes, problems suffered by tens of thousands at other times too. But then, as we all know by now, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. A lawyer pointed out cases where the public interest had been held to outweigh any duty of confidentiality. We were urged to support NCCL and the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom.

Towards the end of the meeting the Chair remarked on the unanimity of the opposition which had been expressed to the banning of the book and invited anyone to speak in favour. No one did. The MI5 man (for he was surely there, and surely a man?) kept silent.

My own feeling was that the set pieces we had heard did little to advance understanding or to place the Wright Affair in a wide enough context. To be sure, more than one speaker reminded us that the dirty tricks of secret service agents go on under Labour as well as Conservative governments, that it was a Labour government which pushed through the Prevention of Terrorism Act in ten days, that it was under a Labour government that the ABC trial took place. And we had been urged to look at the broader political issues, and agitate for more accountability. But accountability in what form, and to whom?

Justified feelings of outrage had been expressed, but it was outrage of a very limited kind. Something had been done which was unfair by the rules of the game, but no one questioned the nature of the game. Did the speakers think there should be a secret service at all? If so, how far did they think it would be compatible with its effective functioning to demand that it be publicly accountable? If not, did they recognise that paranoia notwithstanding, other foreign powers had agents who got up to dirty tricks which might affect us? Were they all, as they seemed to be, content with the minimal degree of genuine accountability which elected representatives are subject to? If so, how much control could that possibly leave us, the ordinary members of the public, over "our” security services? If not, what ideas might they have for moulding a more adequate set of democratic institutions than those associated with twelve crosses in a lifetime? Without the raising of fundamental questions like these, there will be many more Peter Wrights and many more undetected dirty tricks.

Keith Graham

Spy stories (1987)

From the January 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Does it matter whether or not Roger Hollis and Lord Rothschild were Russian spies? The fact that Hollis was the head of MI5 and Rothschild also worked for the security services makes no difference. In fact it only goes to prove what 1 had always thought anyway. Either MI5 and M16 are staffed by incompetents: after all if Hollis was a spy then he (not to mention Blunt, Maclean, Burgess and Philby) couldn’t have been very good since the information that he gave to the Russians doesn't appear to have done much to help them gain the upper hand. Also to have appointed one double agent might have been an oversight, to appoint two was certainly careless but to appoint five and then put one of them in charge is simply astounding. Or maybe the security services are only a form of job creation for the otherwise unemployed and, no doubt unemployable, members of the international ruling class. Some take up horse-breeding or art history, others do "good works" and some go to work for the security services.

Here they can play a game that has rules of etiquette as complicated as those of cricket, is more exciting than polo, and uses a language more cryptic than that in clues to The Times crossword. What’s more you can make up the rules as you go along, swap sides half way through the game or even be on both sides at the same time. And when you're too old to play any more then you can write a book about it all and take part in a new and even more exciting game which is played by lawyers and politicians for high stakes but again with rules that are made up as they go along, conducted in coded language and with rules of etiquette beyond the grasp of us in the lower classes.

So why is it that the British government is so anxious to stop the publication of one ex-MI5 agent's reminiscences? After all it can't be for reasons of "national security" (secret code for the interests of the British capitalist class) since Peter Wright worked for the security services at the very time when they had let a group of young wags from that other refuge for the unemployed ruling class — Cambridge University — join the club. They had thought that it might be a bit of a hoot, rather a jolly jape in fact, to play for the Russians while they were still in the British team. So if there was anything in Peter Wright's book worth knowing then someone would undoubtedly have told the Russians already.

So if it's not the Russians that they don't want to see the book what's the problem? Well of course there is the difficulty that Peter Wright's behaviour just isn't cricket. After all when a chap is allowed to join the club it simply isn't the done thing to go and spill the beans about the high jinks and pranks that some of the other chaps get up to just because he's financially embarrassed. And besides it might give some of the other chaps the idea that they can break the club oath that they took when they were allowed to join. After all signing the Official Secrets Act was meant to stop the members breathing a word to anyone, about anything that goes on inside the club no matter how trivial, cross your heart and hope to die.

But it's not just a case of the ruling class stamping their feet and getting petulant because someone's not playing the game properly. It's more serious than that. It's not because of the Russians that the government is trying to ban Wright's book. Neither is it acting in a fit of pique: no government would be prepared to put its most senior civil servant through the mill in the way that Robert Armstrong, the cabinet secretary, has been in the Australian court over the past few weeks just because of pique. No. the only plausible reason to explain why the government wants so badly to ban Wright's book is that it contains things that are politically embarrassing, that it doesn't want us—workers in Britain—to find out about. (However, if the source of the embarrassment is simply the revelations that the security services put Harold Wilson under surveillance while he was Prime Minister, then I will be forced to accept the "incompetent" theory rather than the "job creation" theory. Only a bunch of totally incompetent security agents could possibly think of Harold Wilson as a political subversive). After all this is supposed to be a liberal democratic country and plots hatched in secret by security agents don't quite fit the picture. Also it might get workers thinking about who else MI5 is watching: it was only last year that another ex-MI5 operative. Cathy Massiter, told how she had been instructed to spy on members of CND, the National Council for Civil Liberties and trade unionists. That didn't fit very well with the liberal democratic rhetoric either.

The truth is that knowledge is power, and control of information is an important source of that power. To talk about freedom of information or even a free press or freedom of expression in Britain gives a highly incomplete and partial picture of the way things really are. The government controls the information that we, the working class, have access to in a number of different ways. Firstly there is the Official Secrets Act that not only makes it an offence to give information to "the enemy" but also makes it a crime for any civil servant or contractor to disclose any information learned in the course of his or her job or for anyone to receive such unauthorised disclosures. In other words there is no right to know anything at all about the work of the government or civil service. It is entirely at the discretion of the government and senior civil servants whether or not to release information. Obviously they will try, wherever possible, to only release information that shows them in a good light. And they can do that through, for example, reports and government statistics selectively made public at the most opportune time and through timely briefings during which truths, half-truths and outright lies are fed to tame Lobby journalists and then regurgitated as "news" for our benefit. But newspapers collude with the state in other ways too. For example they have representatives on the "D-Notice" committee which designates certain areas—especially relating to defence and the security services—as no-go areas for the media and sends out guidelines to that effect to all newspaper editors.

Secondly, the government can influence the broadcasting media through its powers of patronage, which means that it decides who sits on the nominally independent Board of Governors of the BBC and its ultimate control of the airwaves which enables politicians to lean very heavily on broadcasters as was the case with the Real Lives programme, or more recently when Norman Tebbit, on behalf of the Tory party, accused the BBC of bias. In certain instances, as was the case during the Falklands War, it will use outright censorship in order to ensure that only approved information reaches us.

Thirdly, the content of newspapers and television programmes is affected by the fact that ownership of the press and broadcasting media is concentrated in the hands of a small number of media moguls, notorious for their reactionary views and often working hand in glove with politicians who periodically reward them with knighthoods and peerages for their loyalty.

So the antics of Robert Armstrong in court in Sydney may appear to be just another daft ruling class parlour game but the fact that the government is deadly serious about it suggests that we should also take it seriously. It is, to use Armstrong's own memorable euphemism, symptomatic of the way the ruling class is always "economical with the truth".

Janie Percy-Smith