PARAPOLITICS AND NEW LABOUR

MI5 were not involved in the efforts of the Situation Group based in the Ronald Reagan White House (and supported by Rupert Murdoch) to engineer a right wing leadership succession in the Labour Party from 1983. Rather, the British American Project (which many Stalinists and former Stalinists later joined) had its origins with blue chip foreign policy think tanks and hitherto CIA initiatives inside the labour movement itself.

After the Belgrano was sunk to deliberately scupper peace talks over the Falklands (and ensure Thatcher's second election term) MI5 may have used its private subcontractors e.g. to burgle the home of Hilda Murrell. I do not believe that MI5 ordered the murder of Hilda Murrell but I do believe that they helped cover the murder up and that Andrew George (if not framed outright) could not have carried out the 1984 murder alone. Some years prior to this, Tony Blair may have spied on the left in Oxford, for MI5, according to certain theorists, and MI5 were definitely involved in the smearing of John Stalker in 1987 - something else that Christopher Andrew omits to mention in DEFENCE OF THE REALM. While he admits to the dossiers kept on trade union and CND activists, Andrew declines to mention how Arthur Scargill was smeared by F-Branch during the miners strike or how the private subcontractors who spooked on anti-nuclear activists (like Sapphire Investigations, involved in the Hilda Murrell murder) also sent dossiers on anti-fascists to the National Front.

If you want to know about current MI5 or Home Office agendas (or those of the permanent government, within the coercive state) then you really have to read between the lines of Christopher Andrew's account - or else look elsewhere. Likewise with regard to divisions in the intelligence community whereby bitter MI5/MI6 rivalries described by Fred Holroyd in 1970s Northern Ireland have been repeated in spades in the contemporary Middle East.

In 1989, Brian nelson was compromised by intelligence rivals in Northern Ireland, because Nelson wanted to target the Republican leadership (including Gerry Adams) and shut down sectarian murders committed by the UDA. But MI6 were already in talks with the IRA leadership with regard to a negotiated settlement. Then, in the March of 1993, MI5 manipulated a small time arms deal between British fascists of the paramilitary group, Combat 18, in Perry Barr, Birmingham, and renegade UVF factions (later the LVF) in Portadown to challenge the UVF leadership at the heart of the Combined Loyalist Military Command. This and a much more accomplished sting operation that involved arms shipments from Poland, this time in the November of 1993, is believed to have been engineered in order to force the CLMC leadership into what became the Fernhill House Peace Proclamation. But if this were true, why did MI5 support the sectarian and fascist opponents of the CLMC in Johnny Adair's C Company and Loyalist Volunteer Force?

Rupert Murdoch and the rise of New Labour, British American Project, MI5 and the Murder of Hilda Murrell

MI5 were not involved in the efforts of the Situation Group of the Ronald Reagan White House (and supported by Rupert Murdoch) to engineer a right wing leadership succession in the Labour Party from 1983. Rather, the British American project (which many Stalinists and former Stalinists later joined) had its origins with blue chip Foreign Policy think tanks and hitherto CIA initiatives in the labour movement itself.

After the Belgrano was sunk to deliberately scupper peace talks over the Falklands (and ensure Thatcher's second term) MI5 may well have used its subcontractors e.g. to burgle the home of Hilda Murrell. I do not believe that MI5 ordered the murder of Murrell but I do believe that they covered the murder up and that Andrew George (if not framed outright) could not have carried out the 1984 murder alone.

Some years prior to this, Tony Blair may have spied on the Left at Oxford (for MI5) according to some theories, and MI5 were definitely involved in the smearing of John Stalker in 1987 - something else that Christopher Andrew omits to mention. While he admits to the dossiers kept on trade union and CND activists he declines to mention how Arthur Scargill was smeared by F-Branch during the miners strike or how the private subcontractors who spooked on anti-nuclear activists (like Sapphire Investigations, involved in the Murrell murder) also sent dossiers on anti-fascists to the National Front.

MI5's official history part III: The Wilson Plots and the INLA

By 1979, I'd come to a parting of the ways with Army Intelligence. This followed my involvement in fighting against fascists in Brick Lane during ANL Carnival 2. Later, following a spell in police and army cells I was very much a civilian, very much a Trotskyist and very much anti-the-security-forces by the time I was involved in the battle of Digbeth Hall in Birmingham. But it was the open hostility of the armed forces and intelligence community to Labour plus the social and political crimes of Thatcherism that set me on this path.

In 1979. two of the conspirators against Harold Wilson died in the form of Airey Neave and Lord Mountbatten - the latter of whom was to have been figurehead to a military coup plot in 1968. The INLA were deemed to be the most likely culprits in each case but were in disarray following the great train robbery trial of 1977 in the Irish Republic. Dominic McClinchy, when he boasted of his involvement in the Neave killing to Roger Bolton of BBC Television got the details wrong and the mercury tilt mechanism (a favourite of the Special Forces since Aden) was beyond the technical capabilities of the INLA. The Mountbatten murder was eventually accredited to the IRA but they, too, didn't have the resources to murder both Mountbatten (in Sligo) and the paratroopers killed in Warrenpoint (which WAS down to the IRA) on the same day at the same time.

In 1980 another INLA police informant killed the fascist paedophile John McKeague from East Belfast, ahead of disclosures that MI5 were involved in running a child sex ring at the Kincora Boys Home in Belfast. This doesn't feature in Christopher Andrew's whitewash about MI5 any more than the framing of Colin Wallace (hitherto Army Information Policy, Lisburn) on manslaughter charges in Arundel, after he blew the whistle both on Kincora and wider MI5 involvement in the plot to detsbilise Harold Wilson - much of which was concentrated in Northern Ireland. Wallace's conviction was later overturned. Equally, there is nothing in Andrew's book about how Britain's intelligence community contrived to manipulate the dynamic and direction of the 1974 UWC Strike via the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, as a dry run for wider plots against Wilson in Britain itself.

Of course, not all the plots against Wilson originated with MI5 nor can every act of political subterfuge in the 1970s and 1980s be laid at the doors of Curzon Street. What Andrew's book reveals is how Wilson's file was re-named after the right wing figure of Michael Hanley succeeded Sir Roger Hollis as Director General, following the Wright-Pincher smear. This suggests that such plot escelated in the 1970s, as against the 1960s, and also that a culture of "plausible deniability" was being developed at the time. During this period, under the Ambassador's Agreement that defines US bases in Britain as sovereign US territory, the American NSA bugged Wilson's government on MI5's behalf so none of the information had to be handled by the Cabinet Joint Intelligence Committee. Building on an established relationship with the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation in the 1960s, MI5 relied on South Africa's BOSS to carry out certain dirty tricks against the Lib-Lab coalition - especially as regards Jeremy Thorpe's entrapment on conspiracy to murder charges. The real target as always was Wilson.

MI5's OFFICIAL HISTORY A CASE OF DAMAGE LIMITATION (CONTINUED)

Of course I have a vested interest in challengiing the view of MI5's history offered by Christopher Andrew. Not least, this is because I've written a novel about the plots against Harold Wilson's government (HOLLYWOOD BOWL) that focuses specifically on the CECIL KING COUP PLOT of 1968 - and which I'm currentl adapting as a TV long form drama.

But there is also a convergence between this fictional work and my own personal history, both as a former Army Intelligence Soldier (who was once briefly tipped for a job in MI5) and then as a left activist. These days, (and in response to the commentary on BBC Radio 4 this morning) I am well aware that superficial credence was lent to the ridiculous claim that Harold Wilson was an agent of Warsaw Pact intelligence (specifically of the Bulgarians) by KGB defector GOLYTSIN, who basically told his CIA interrogators in Maryland (James Jesus Angleton among them) everything he wanted to hear. Angleton, who used Golytsin's wish-fulfillment to secure his own rise in the CIA ranks, passed these fictions about Wilson to fellow Right-winger, Peter Wright, in MI5's K-Branch. Wright then fed the same information to Chapman Pincher of THE DAILY EXPRESS as part of his intrgue, both against Wilson and the then MI5 Director General Sir Roger Hollis.

Meanwhile (and much to the frustration both of Angleton and Wright, MI5 refused to expose Soviet funding of the Communist Party's MORNING STAR newspaper - even though they had firm evidence that such funding existed. This is because they recognised, even then, that a Right wing Communist Party that had broken strikes in the 1940s and supported Churchill's bid for the premiership in 1945 (being expelled from the Labour Party in 1946, accordingly) was "not" (to quite Herbert Morrison at the time) "a party of the left in any shape or form." The Stalinised Communist Party of Great Britain, whose theorists later contributed to the rise of New Labour, played no role in the resurgent class struggle of the 1970s other than to oppose it. Meanwhile, thanks to K-Branch's recruitment of Oleg Godiefsky, KGB operations in Britain were rendered impotent from about 1970.

Books as Weapons

Greetings to Blogger-land!

a bit of a digital luddite myself I've finally succumbed to the blogg revolution primarily out of frustration, with the elitist cabal that is the literary review press under historical conditions of the further transition from postwar social democracy to the coercive state. If you're a generic crime writer whom no one has ever heard of, want to develop crime fiction intelligently as a paradigm of social and political investigation and condemn New Labour's betrayal of democratic socialism, its embrace of market forces and further erosion of British democracy as started under Thatcher then forget the middle class mutual appretiation society in the review press and broadsheets even noticing you exist.

This year I've published three crime novels set in my native Birmingham that form part of a second city/Jaded Jerusalem Quintet, all through lulu.com These are REDEMPTION SONGS, BARGAIN and POWER IN THE DARKNESS. All use the crime genre to explore the current social crisis and deal with issues such as police corruption, alienation and social exclusion, racism and fascism - in short, all the really important stuff that used to make British crime thrillers so great.

As an example, REDEMPTION SONGS has a dodgy black cop drawn into a conspiracy to set up a crime while BARGAIN has a Bosnian asylum seeker drawn into a vigilante conspiracy. POWER IN THE DARKNESS satirizes New Labour while having a Dissident Irish Republican and al-Qaeda terror plot in Birmingham manipulated by Right wing forces in the government and MI5.

Do I want to sell copies of these books???? You bet!! Do I want reviews???? You bet........Not just on this blogg but to ANY aite, (BLAIRWATCH, INDYMEDIA,) to which you may be linked. You can look up the books on LULU.COm or my own company web site which is www.blindsamurai.com On the other hand, you ought to be able to connect directly to the books on http://www.blindsamurai.com/presenting/nov_story/novstory.html

All feedback appreciated both to this bloggspot and my own e-mail address that is corkfilms@hotmail.com

Look forward to hearing from you.

Remember Gramsci's war on position. Let's build a bloggers counter-hegemony together


Yours in struggle and blogging

ROGER COTTRELL