By Dave Featherstone and Ben Gowland

In his recent biography of the Labour politician Harold Wilson, Nicholas Thomas Symonds, the Shadow Secretary for International Trade and MP for Torfaen, narrates Wilson’s role in the 1966 seafarers’ strike involving the National Union of Seamen (NUS). Characterising the seven week dispute as a chess game he notes that “Wilson at least had the advantage of seeing his opponent’s thinking before the next move.” This was because “MI5 was regularly updating him on the communist activity in the NUS that he was convinced was at the core of the dispute.”

He contends that while “the evidence from MI5 strengthened Wilson’s resolve” it also meant that there was a substantial part of the material he could not make available even to colleagues, meaning that his public statements could appear “ill-judged.” The briefings of the then MI5 Director GeneralFurnival Jones, he observes, “sat alongside the civil service notes on Wilson’s desk with the NUS headquarters having been bugged.” (p.235)

Thomas-Symonds’s framing of Wilson’s role in the 1966 dispute raises a number of issues including the attitude of key Labour Party politicians to state surveillance and the role MI5, or ‘the secret police’ as they would be described in other contexts, has played in relation to major strikes in Britain. That these concerns relate to a significant, but now largely forgotten industrial dispute, may make these events seem a matter of arcane interest only to labour historians.

What is significant about Thomas-Symonds’s account, however, is that a Labour front bencher can present the bugging of a major trade union during an industrial dispute as unremarkable and not worthy of comment or criticism. Rather than position this as part of a broader culture of anti-democratic and authoritarian political pressure, his account serves to normalise and legitimise such surveillance.

Our contention in this article is that the normalisation and legitimation of secret service surveillance of what was then a politically moderate union articulate in significant ways with authoritarian elements of the politics of the current Labour Party leadership. The project of the current leadership is shaped by authoritarian articulations of political cultures in various ways. This ranges from support for hardline Conservative legislation curtailing the right to protest and to the systematic controlling behaviour exerted towards dissent in the Labour Party itself.

This is particularly significant in a context where the discontents of authoritarianism and entrenched systematic state repression of dissent is being exposed on numerous fronts in the UK. Recent examples of note include the ‘spycops’ scandal, revelations of systematic blacklisting in the construction sector and the surveillance of anti-racist activists engaging with the institutional racism of the police, such as the Lawrence family, which is shaped by histories of monitoring and harassment of anti-colonial dissent as noted in Priyamvada Gopal’s recent book Insurgent Empire.  

Rather than being constructed as incidental or exceptional to the UK state what Leon Rosselson refers to as “all that bugging and burgling and intercepting mail” in his ‘Ballad of a Spy Catcher’ needs to be seen as integral to dominant political cultures and attitudes to the left and oppositional movements. AsCourtenay Griffiths KC, one of the barristers who has represented blacklisted building workers, phrases it, “the surveillance of dissent is an institutional pillar of our political order”. (Cited by Dave Smith and Phil Chamberlain, Blacklisted: the Secret War Between Big Business and Union Activists, 2015, p. 348).

Such surveillance is, he argues, “a mode of governance” and has central implications for democratic rights to protest and organise. The normalising of state surveillance of the NUS indicates the extent to which such a “mode of governance” is part of a political common-sense world-view of established figures.

These critical reflections on the Wilson government’s role in the NUS strike are a significant moment in Thomas-Symonds’s biography of Wilson, Harold Wilson the Winner, which has been published at what appears to be an apposite time for the Labour Party. Opinion polls place Starmer’s Party in a significant lead over the Tories with projected election results giving a Labour majority in Parliament for the first time since 2010.

Thomas-Symonds’s return to ‘Wilson the winner’ then promises to offer historical reflections and lessons on how Labour under Starmer might win and what to do following that victory. Whatever lessons for success can be gleaned from the biography are, however, accompanied by an apologia for or oversight of significant anti-democratic and anti-progressive tendencies demonstrated by Wilson. This has clear resonances with Starmer’s rightward and increasingly authoritarian trajectory as Labour leader. Wilson was a winner and Starmer may yet be one, but at what cost and to whom?

In the contemporary strike wave during 2022-2023 in the UK, an investigation of the relations between Wilson’s Labour governments and trade unions seems appropriate. Particularly telling is Wilson’s response to the 1966 National Union of Seamen (NUS) strike during his first period in office. The strike was fought over demands for a 40 hour week, increased wages and overtime pay to compensate for the long and irregular working periods spent at sea, as well as contesting the role of the 1894 Merchant Shipping Act which gave ships’ officers near dictatorial powers over crews.

It was also the outcome of significant unofficial movements in the union which had contested the notoriously autocratic cultures of the leadership, which were very close to shipping owners. Communists had been involved in these movements and were significant figures in some of the strike committees during the dispute, receiving advice from Bert Ramelson, the Party’s industrial organiser. But the demands of the strike itself reflected broad-based dissatisfaction with both the seafarers’ labour conditions and the undemocratic character of the NUS. 

Wilson engaged in a red-baiting campaign against the seafarers, notoriously vilifying leading figures on the left of the union as a “tightly knit group of politically motivated men.” With the NUS pay claim exceeding the wage-restraint policy adopted by Wilson’s government, he brought the full weight of the British security and intelligence state to bear on the workers.

Wilson’s government declared a national state of emergency in response to the strike and Wilson received continual intelligence reports on the NUS leadership and their operations from MI5. MI5 bugged the NUS executive’s offices and fed Wilson lines that he used in the Commons to single-out Communists within the NUS and to paint the union as being led by ideologically motivated subversives and extremists. Indeed, Thomas-Symonds tells us of the concerns expressed by Labour cabinet members at Wilson’s hard-line approach, but for matters of national security Wilson was unable to reveal the source for his attack lines on the NUS, that is, the security services.This is ironic given that sections of the same security services were later to turn on, and conspire against, Wilson himself.

This culture of red-baiting had a significant impact on the experience of those involved in the strike. Tony Wailey, who was a young seafarer in 1966, recalled a changed atmosphere on the picket line after Wilson’s speech, with “people…  shouting down at you from buses and you couldn’t remember that before. And you swear you [saw] and hear[d] that bloody word communism more times in the next few days than you’[d] ever done in your life.”  (Tony Wailey ‘Seamen’s Strike, Liverpool, 1966’ History Workshop Journal 5: 1, 1978, pp.118-119).

These tendencies exhibited in Wilson’s response to the 1966 NUS strike towards using state power to shut down dissent and social and political activism and the sacrificing of wages and labour conditions on the altar of a balanced budget resonate loudly, we believe, with Keir Starmer’s stances on a range of issues in the past year.

Starmer’s refusal to back pay rises to even match inflation, which a raft of unions across the nation are demanding, has echoes of Wilson’s stance over wage restraint. This is underlined by Starmer’s acceptance of the Tory narrative that there is a ‘black hole’ in the budget that needs to be addressed through public spending cuts and curbs on wage growth. Further still, Wilson’s distancing of his Labour Party and government from the “politically motivated men” that were constructed as leading the NUS astray was mirrored in Starmer’s policy of banning Labour MPs from joining picket lines in the autumn of 2022.

Finally, Wilson’s use of the intelligence services to subvert and oppose the legitimate right of workers to strike and to fight for better pay and conditions has echoes in the authoritarian streak which is carefully documented in Oliver Eagleton’s book on Starmer. This ranges from orchestrating 24-hour courts following the urban insurrections of 2011 that saw jail sentences handed down for stealing bottles of water and bags of rice to Starmer’s support of the Tory government’s hardline response to Just Stop Oil protestors with harsh new jail sentences prepared for blocking roadways.

Returning to Thomas-Symonds’s formulation: Starmer may win the next General Election. But what, we ask, would that mean for social activists, the right to protest and for working-people organised in trade unions?

In his essay‘The Secret State’ published in the late 1970s, the socialist historian E.P. Thompson contextualised Wilson’s red baiting during the seafarers’ strike as part of a broader statism in post-war Britain. He argued that a key influence on such statism was “the rapid erosion of Empire” which had “perforce retracted the imperial ideology” and “brought it back home – into the security services, the army, and the police. where experience gained in Ireland, India, or Rhodesia” looked “restively for new fields of application.”

He contended that these services were “the last refuges of imperialism, within which a ghostly imperial ideology survives its former host.” (p.157). This articulates a pattern also outlined by current scholars and  activists, such as Adam Elliott-Cooper and Priyamvada Gopal, that the silencing of dissent and the modes of governance and surveillance identified by Courtenay Griffiths drew on the transnational circulations of colonial ideas and logics.

There are also concerning throughlines in this respect that can be drawn between Wilson and Starmer regarding foreign policy. Starmer has claimed that the foundation of NATO was one of the great achievements of the post-war Labour Government alongside the formation of the NHS.

Starmer is silent, however, on the racialised forms of anti-Communism which were foundational to the formation of NATO. Thompson notes that Ernest Bevin, who was central to Labour’s support for NATO had “archaic imperial impulses” which out-Churchilled Churchill. (p.243). Starmer’s support here for NATO and its accompanying imperialist interventions was famously lacking when Wilson had to confront Ian Smith’s apartheid regime in Rhodesia.

Wilson did however find the stomach for intervention in other contexts. In 1969 the Wilson government authorised the use of British Marines to ‘restore order’ in the small Caribbean island of Anguilla following a unilateral declaration of independence by the Anguillans, one of a number of repressive acts of Wilson internationally.

The invasion of Anguilla is absent from Thomas-Symonds’s biography. While recognising that Anguilla is a relatively small player on the world stage, this omission represents part of a broader pattern of the normalisation of British state authoritarianism demonstrated throughout the text.

The independence declaration came after the Anguillans’ wish to secede from the larger territory of St Kitts-Nevis: Anguilla had been blocked by the territorial government and Whitehall had failed to reach a satisfactory compromise. The use of military force to shut down the democratic self-expression of the Anguillans was regarded as a major overreaction on the part of the British government by progressive groups in the West Indies. Left trade unions such as Trinidad’s Oilfield Workers Trade Union as well as Black Power groups in both the Caribbean and UK strongly condemned the invasion and rightly understood it as a flagrant act of imperialist authoritarianism.

Comparisons were readily made between the willingness to use military force to shut down the democratic self-expression of Black West Indians in Anguilla and the drawn-out diplomatic negotiations utilised in dealing with the White Supremacist rogue regime of Ian Smith in Rhodesia. The devaluation of non-white lives and the dispensation of formal diplomacy in favour of naked force in dealing with peoples and nations of the Global South are resonant with British imperial interventions in the 21^st century such as the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Anguilla intervention signalled the neo-colonial foreign policy posture that Britain would take as decolonisation progressed. Starmer takes up the mantle of this posture, we argue, in the present with his aforementioned positioning in regards to NATO.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the British state through the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) and Ministry of Defence would consistently surveil and repress social and political movements and trade unions deemed hostile to British interests in the former empire. In the West Indies, the Black Power movement that emerged in the late 1960s saw the FCO produce anti-Black Power propaganda materials, track the movements of individuals associated with Black Power and indeed block the international travel of such figures through prohibited persons lists and working with national governments to rescind passports. A key group here was the FCO’s Information Research Department (IRD) which was established in 1948 to produce anti-Soviet and anti-communist propaganda but by the 1950s had evolved into targeting any group deemed hostile to the interests of the British state.

The IRD was engaged in surveillance and psychological warfare operations across the globe and targeted not just communists and Black Power groups, but also anti-colonial nationalist governments in Africa and trade unions across the former empire. The IRD operated domestically in Britain as well, producing files on the NUS during the 1966 strike and monitoring the broader trade union movement in Britain up until the late 1970s when the department was shut down.

These histories of neo-colonial surveillance and intervention demonstrate that the “surveillance of dissent” which Courtenay Griffiths KC noted was a central pillar of the British state and governance which extended globally, including during the period of decolonisation.  This raises key questions about the terms on which current and past Labour Party leaderships have been articulated with authoritarian political cultures.

Stuart Hall argued that the UK labour governments of 1966-1970 and 1974-1979 “classically set ‘the unions’ against ‘the nation’, the ‘sectional interests’ of workers against the ‘national interest’”. (pp.134-5). We argue that the current Labour Party leadership is continuing in the same vein on various front as can be seen by Starmer’s backing of the Tory line over wage rises driving inflation and his subsequent failure to back trade unions calling for major pay increases in the contemporary moment.

The actions of the Wilson government, both domestically and abroad, and the rhetoric and posturing of Starmer emphasise how articulations of the ‘national interest’ become defined in exclusionary ways and underpinned by forms of surveillance and anti-democratic pressures. It is clear in this respect that Starmer envisions the Labour Party as one that will absolutely seek to curb popular dissent, be it expressed through trade unionism or other socio-political activism. In this sense he stands in a long Labour Party tradition which Thomas-Symonds’s biography so comprehensively demonstrates.

Further, this increases the risks that, if Starmer is elected, key grievances are simply deferred, as has been the experience of previous Labour Governments which has served to merely prepare the ground for further right wing populist agendas such as Thatcherism. If Wilson and Starmer are winners, then the losers would appear to be anyone who seeks to meaningfully reshape or challenge the British state and establishment in a more equitable fashion.

Acknowledgements

This essay draws on research carried out for a Leverhulme Trust funded project on ‘Trade Unions and the Spaces of Democratisation in Britain, the Caribbean and Greece’. The views expressed in the article are of the authors alone. We would like to thank Felicity Callard, Andy Cumbers, Henry Dee, Diarmaid Kelliher and Lazaros Karaliotas- for comments on, and discussions related to, this article.

Dave Featherstone is a Reader in Human Geography in the School of Geographical & Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow. Ben Gowland is a Departmental Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Oxford.

Image: Harold Wilson. Source: File:Lord Harold Wilson Allan Warren.jpg. Author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Warren, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.