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The Red Menace: British Communism and the State 1920-51
From its origins to the height of the Cold War the Communist Party of Great Britain (hereinafter CPGB) played a starring role in the demonology of the authorities as the perceived main threat to the British Constitution. While the paranoia of some sections of the state needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, it is a mistake to categorise the response of Diehard politicians and secret policemen as the stereotyped reaction to the 'Red Menace'. Indeed state management of the CPGB was to prove a lot more devious and sophisticated than some of the more 'ferocious anti-bolsheviks' in the security community would have wished [1]. Exactly as the Cold War warrior view of the CPGB as a monolith manipulated by Moscow, with ratchet like obedience to the whims of the Comintern and or Stalin is a myth, so is the interpretation that there is a uniform paranoid reaction by the state to the 'threat' posed by the CPGB [2].
The cautious accelerated opening of the Public Records, under the Open Government Initiative (OGI) is slowly transforming our knowledge of the secret state. The pioneering academic research of Christopher Andrew, Nicholas Hiley and Bernard Porter, which have produced scholarly and often amusing histories of both the achievements and shortcomings of the British intelligence and security communities in the twentieth century, is now being documented in recent releases [3]. While the most fascinating material, as far as the CPGB is concerned, relates mainly to the second world war, there has also been interesting radio intercepts from the Government Code and Cypher School relating to Comintern messages to the CPGB between 1934 and 1937, as well as the Venona material on KGB and GRU espionage during the war [4]. These provide useful additional information to that available for some time, from long released Cabinet Office documents relating to the political surveillance of 'Revolutionary Movements' in the United Kingdom between 1920 and 1924, (mainly the CPGB) and some Home Office files from the later 1920s [5]. The interwar period between 1924 and 1939 remains a problem as little, so far, has been declassified. Some indication of the extent of the material can be gauged from the recent publication of the HO 144 lists, one of the two main Home Office categories of record pertaining to public order and the CPGB, which are closed for 75 or 100 years and contains over thirty files relating to aspects of the political surveillance of the CPGB and its 'solar system' of front groups. Much of the remainder is to be found in the HO 45 series, which has not so far listed its holdings, and has a closure period of 50-100 years. Although certain material has, under the OGI, been subject to consumer led accelerated opening, the vetting procedures and permission from Special Branch makes the process subject to lengthy delays.
The second world war, however, is not only an interesting period for state-CPGB relations, but files relating to this theme have recently been released into the public domain. There are several fascinating Home Office general files relating to Communist propaganda, the political surveillance of the CPGB, communist activity in youth organisations and the About Turns of the period. Also of considerable interest are the minutes and papers, from the Cabinet Office, of the Home Defence (Security) Executive (HD(S)E) between 1940 and 1945, one of whose chief concerns was the state management of the CPGB, both during the anti-war period of the party before 22 June, 1941 and the more anti-Nazi than Churchill position after the invasion of the Soviet Union [6]. This includes the minutes of the 117 meetings of the subcommittee on Communism between February 1941 and 1945. This met more times than the HD(S)E, the main talking shop which supervised Britain's internal security during the war [7]. It will be interesting to see whether material pertaining to security service surveillance and the state management of British communism will be released in the papers due to be declassified from MI5 files on the second world war, at the end of this year.
State attitudes towards the CPGB derived from the social dislocation at the end of the first world war. The impact of the Russian Revolution, growing social and political discontent in the aftermath of war, the frustrated rising expectations of the failure to create the 'homes fit for heroes' to live in, structural unemployment and the collapse of law and order in Ireland created considerable anxiety for the Colonel Blimps and those vainly trying to return to the ordered certainties of the Edwardian age, which had forever passed away. The long gestation period before the eventual emergence of the CPGB, more than a little helped by cajoling and a head banging exercise on the fractious participants conducted by the Comintern in Moscow, ensured that the CPGB would become a scapegoat to explain state anxiety to pervasive discontent between 1919 and 1922.
There were also several other worrying factors for those concerned at social unrest. While all sections of the economy were hit by deflation, defence and security felt the main force of financial cuts. The military point blank refused to continue aiding the civil power except as a force of last resort, despite the Chief of the General Staff being the redoubtable, reactionary and bellicose Sir Henry Wilson. Although all four Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police in the interwar period were 'brass hats', the militarisation of the police was to be in organisation only. Greater civil security was to be achieved by higher productivity and greater efficiency by the police, on far fewer resources. MI5 was cut back from over 800 to less than 30 members in the interwar period and Special Branch, too, underwent drastic pruning. It was not surprising, then, as social unrest mounted, as the Labour Party with its socialist constitution became the second party of the state, and both the IRA and the suffragettes could be perceived by Diehards as being rewarded for their violence and unconstitutional behaviour, that the secret state should become a last ditch redoubt for those that wished to preserve the world that never was. The CPGB, emerged at precisely the right moment as a revolutionary metaphor, whose strength was vastly inflated and exaggerated by Britain's security agencies, as a result of the resources, direction and control they received from Moscow. The first world war had created the British security industry, saving us from the dastardly, and mainly mythical designs, of the 'Hun'. Now the undermining of the British state had passed under new management; the Communist octupus whose tentacles were operated by the Comintern, and who were quickly seen as the perceived threat who controlled and manipulated the CPGB from Moscow in a concerted conspiracy to undermine the British state.
While some of the actions of the authorities had some of the elements of farce to meet a non-existent threat, there were enough moments of uncertainty in the interwar period, and social discontent, to ensure the survival of Britain's new security apparatus in peacetime. Most interestingly, the most serious challenges to the authority of the state, the General Strike in 1926 and the Hunger March organised by the National Unemployed Workers Movement in 1932 were both portrayed as communist conspiracies by MI5, MI6 and Special Branch even if, sensibly, most politicians rightly concluded that they reflected industrial rather than political discontent [8]. But the strength of the liberal tradition in both administration and government made many in Whitehall sceptical of the scaremongering of the security buffs, diehards and secret policemen. Even within the security community there were divisions reflecting the bitter struggle between overlapping agencies for diminishing resources, and between a more liberal and objective military professional intelligence tradition and the Diehards. While all were militantly anti-communist, some wished to deliver a knock out blow by banning the CPGB, whilst others, more sensibly, recognised that driving 'the enemy within' underground, was less efficient than maintaining political surveillance, which enabled subtler forms of political management and manipulation.
These divisions in the interwar period reflected both tactical and ideological differences. While it is a mistake to categorise the security and intelligence communities and secret policemen as reactionaries, and most politicians and administrators as being more relatively liberal, these 'ideal type' caricatures do reflect some aspects of reality. The problem was that although all were fiercely anti-communist, most of the different security authorities were suspicious of each other and politicians and civil servants had different agendas, the former obsessed by high politics and public opinion, the latter by the law, and all concerned by the most efficient means of spending less to obtain a greater degree of social cohesion. Hence the interwar period saw much rationalisation and cutting corners to maintain internal security.
Victory in the security wars of the interwar period was to go to MI5. Sir Vernon Kell, the head of MI5 between 1909 and 1940, was to see his fortunes alter dramatically over the period. Outmanouevred by the alliance between the wartime Director of Naval Intelligence, Sir Reginald 'Blinker' Hall, and the head of Special Branch, Sir Basil Thomson, in 1919, Kell's role was reduced to keeping the communist virus out of the armed forces. Thomson was made responsible for civilian security, but his Directorate of Intelligence quickly fell foul of Lloyd George's suspicions that its high profile alienated the Labour movement, which became increasingly concerned about agents provacateurs tactics by professional intelligence agents. The Directorate of Intelligence was closed down in 1921 and its functions taken over by the more discrete Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police. Surviving an attempted takeover by MI6 in 1923 and 1925, Kell was to be rewarded for his parsimony and efficiency, when he became the beneficiary of another security review in 1931, when his empire was expanded with the creation of the Security Service, responsible for both civilian and military security. MI5 was made responsible for the direction and analysis, while Special Branch became the police arm although it retained the political surveillance of anarchism and the IRA. This meant that MI5 became responsible for the state management of the CPGB.
Interwar security agencies were also influenced by two very different traditions of political surveillance and policing. One of the solutions to the postwar realities of economic cuts and social crisis, was the establishment of private intelligence organisations associated with patriotic middle class societies like the British Commonwealth Union, the Middle Classes Union and the British Empire Union [9]. By their very nature these were often dominated by right wing views, funded by Diehards like the Duke of Northumberland, and influenced by the antisemitic, anti labour and obsessional anti-communist views of the grand dame of British conspiracy theory, Nesta Webster. Orchestrated by 'Blinker' Hall, National Propaganda emerged as a right wing think tank which pooled 'intelligence' about the Soviet conspiracy to undermine the British Empire in the 1920s, gathered by such organisations. The resources of this organisation were later taken over by the Economic League; its director, John Baker White was not only fiercely anti-communist, but he was also to be responsible for a McCarthy style blacklist, designed to weed out alleged communist sympathisers and radicals in British industry, until it was exposed in 1991. Baker White's mother was also a personal friend of Nesta Webster. There were also direct lines of contact between the 'patriotic' organisations and MI5. Important figures like the agent runner Maxwell Knight, and the agent James McGuirk Hughes, were recruited into MI5 from the patriotic organisations.
However there were also more liberal and professional intelligence and policing influences in the security community. While no less hostile to threatened public disorder and as suspicious of the revolutionary activities of British communists as the Diehards, nevertheless the influence of General Sir Nevil McCready was to be crucial to state management of revolutionary and extremist organisations in the interwar period. McCready had been responsible for the successful military-police strategy in defusing civil unrest in South Wales between 1910 and 1911; this had been achieved by a rigidly neutral stance which did not use the military directly in the employer's interest, and by the acquisition of objective intelligence on the actions of capital and labour, which was often used to defuse potential flashpoints. Macready, as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in 1918-19, although he sacked the strikers in the Police strike, he was also responsible for the crucial evidence to the Desborough Commission in 1919, which emphasized that management of civilian security depended on the militarisation of the administration of the police using the lessons learned in South Wales. The fact that his hand picked successor, Brigadier-General Horwood, and the new head of Special Branch, Major-General Sir Wyndham Childs, both worked with Macready in South Wales, was not without significance. Childs was nicknamed 'Fido' by the Home Office, because of his devotion to Macready. Horwood's takeover of Thomson's Directorate of Intelligence in 1921 symbolised the victory of the more professional over the ideological approach to political surveillance. Horwood still wished to outlaw the CPGB, but was prevented from doing so by the Home Office who considered this would both make political surveillance more difficult, and infringe civil rights to freedom of expression providing no illegal acts were being contemplated.
What is noticeable in the released records is both the monotonous refrain from MI5, MI6 and Special Branch about the revolutionary objectives of the Comintern and the CPGB, and, apart from moments of crisis like the industrial discontent between 1919 and 1922, and the General Strike in 1926, the far more sceptical view of most politicians and civil servants. While Whitehall valued what it considered objective intelligence about CPGB activities, it was more discerning about the propaganda fed it by the security authorities. Thus, for example, the inaccuracy of reports of Hunger Strikers armed with offensive weapons in 1932, and of the persistence of false information about the CPGB forming paramilitary working class defence organisations, led to increasing scepticism. The state became selective in the use of the persistent drip of exaggerated reports of CPGB behaviour from the Security Service.
Even after the CPGB early move to the United Front in 1932, and the transition to the Popular Front in 1935, the reaction of the Security authorities remained the same. Such manouevres were seen as merely changes in tactics, a machiavellian ruse to infiltrate and then takeover other radical organisations. Anti-fascism was interpreted by MI5 as not primarily designed to defeat Mosley on the streets, or to organise a working class defence of the Spanish second Republic, but a means of undermining reformist trade unions and the Labour Party, and of subverting potential revolutionary competition from the Independent Labour Party. For MI5 only CPGB tactics varied; when it was more advantageous communists denounced other radicals as 'social fascists' (particularly after the General Strike), while when greater advantage could be gained from working with other working class organisations or progressive groups, the creation of front organisations, or infiltration was the tactic employed. The steady growth of the CPGB in the 1930s, from 10,000 to over 17,500 in 1939 led to increased concern about the need to isolate the CPGB and prevent its permeation of the Labour Party and trade unions in particular.
The second world war saw the paranoid views of the security service with regard to the CPGB infect all levels of the state apparatus. The Nazi-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939 turned the demonology of security buffs into a widespread concern about a communist 'fifth column'. The first 'About Turn' of the CPGB in the war, from militant anti-fascism to anti-war evoked much cynicism in the state [10]. MI5 particularly emphasised the change of line, and argued that even the most principled grovelled to Moscow when the chips were down. In fact the CPGB line in 1939, which portrayed Hitler and Chamberlain as two sides of the same coin, could be relatively easily adapted to the new line; 'against Fascism and War' now became 'against Imperialist War' and advocated Leninist tactics of revolutionary defeatism after October 1939. Both the state and the CPGB were cautious in their behaviour; the authorities did not wish to evoke sympathy for communists by overreacting and making them martyrs through persecution. The CPGB did not wish to create public hostility by behaviour which could be construed as unpatriotic. In practice CPGB behaviour, as opposed to sloganising and the dissemination of propaganda, was little different from the 'war on two fronts' policy of the first few days of the war, although criticism of the 'men of Munich' was stepped up, a neutral attitude to the war was adopted and criticism of Hitler largely disappeared from the Daily Worker.
Although the CPGB was more active in its opposition to the war than the British Union of Fascists, the state was very careful not to evoke sympathy for them through overt persecution. The initial discussion of how to neutralise the CPGB in the HD(S)E 'disclosed the delicacy of the whole question' [11]. Whereas interning Fascists was perceived as uniting the country during the fifth column scare, the CPGB was treated with kid gloves. One of the principle reasons for the collapse of France in 1940 was seen to be the divisions created, and the subsequent fall in morale occasioned by the internment of Communist MP's and Mayor's at the outbreak of war. An unofficial 'Sixth Column' network informed the Ministry of Labour of 'suspicious characters' in industry and shop steward attempts to impede production [12]. However the authorities were well aware that communist criticisms often genuinely reflected economic grievances, and given the important role CPGB shop stewards played in engineering and strategic industries like aircraft production, the situation was carefully monitored.
Special Branch sources, which accurately portrayed the process of the changing of the line at the outbreak of war, also followed the alleged debate on CPGB response to the threatened Nazi invasion during the Summer of 1940 in the Political Committee. This suggested that the CPGB should do nothing to hinder the invader, as a Nazi Britain would be inherently unstable, rapidly disintegrate and create a revolutionary situation from which the CPGB, possibly with Soviet assistance, could seize power [13]. CPGB members should also be trained to take advantage of the chaos following a Nazi invasion, and be instructed in the rudiments of control of local government. While MI5 and the HD(S)E did not wish to compromise their sources of information, measures were taken to lessen the 'threat' posed by the CPGB. Raids on CPGB printing presses were stepped up, communist criticisms of Air Raid Precautions were countered, the Ministry of Information increased censorship of Communist pamphlets, the Convention campaign was carefully monitored and finally, in January 1941, the Daily Worker was closed down. This effectively hindered the dissemination of CPGB propaganda, and through the gradual throttling of communist influence in the crisis the CPGB were not perceived as being persecuted, thus avoiding a significant division in public opinion.
The 'highly charged electric current' following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, produced the second 'About Turn' of the war [14]. Overnight the CPGB turned an intellectual somersault and reverted to virulent anti-Nazism. Strange behaviour on both sides was to develop in state-CPGB relations. On the surface 'God save the King' was in full harmony with the 'Red Flag', as his worship the Mayor sang the praises of our new noble ally, the Soviet Union, from the same platform as the CPGB. The CPGB now adopted the unlikely stance as the 'apostles of national unity', published such epics of industrial collaboration as 'Our Production Campaign' and denounced as 'Trotskyists' those who opposed the Essential Works Order and opposed industrial conscription. In practice, from the state's perspective, the communist ugly duckling had turned into an unwanted swan. Steps were taken to minimise the impact of CPGB propaganda and to 'steal the thunder of the left' as the Ministry of Information ensured the takeover of all CPGB propaganda activities, new regulations were put in place to ban political meetings on industrial premises and the influence of communist shop stewards on Joint Production Committees were carefully monitored [15]. MI5 reminded the HD(S)E that the aims of the CPGB had not changed; it was still the violent overthrow of state power. The current desire to boost the war effort was merely a 'camouflaged plan' to disguise their real intentions. Lord Swinton, the Chairman of the HD(S)E in 1941, concluded that 'the communist game is still the same; but it is being played on a much better wicket' [16]. Political surveillance of the CPGB was stepped up and the CPGB's campaigns for lifting the ban on the Daily Worker in 1941-2, the creation of the Second Front (1942-4), the opposition to the release from internment of Sir Oswald Mosley (1943-4) and opposition to British intervention in Greece (1945) were ignored. As tensions between Britain and the USSR developed, particularly over Poland, so the views of MI5 and the Security Executive became more widespread. By the end of the war the Chiefs of Staff were arguing that the CPGB was a Soviet 'fifth column' Trojan Horse in British Societ The coming of the Cold War was to extend such an analysis to the whole state.
Richard C Thurlow, University of Sheffield
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1. |
R Thurlow, The Secret State, (Oxford, 1994) pp.107-172
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2. |
Ibid, p.110
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3. |
C Andrew, Secret Service (London, 1985), N Hiley, 'The Failure of British Counter-Intelligence against Germany 1907-1914', Historical Journal 28, 4 ,1985 pp.835-862, N Hiley, 'Counter-Espionage and Security in Great Britain during the First World War', English Historical Review 101,1986 pp. 100-126, B Porter, The Origins of the Vigilant State (London, 1987), B Porter, Plots and Paranoia (London, 1989)
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4. |
PRO HW/15, PRO HW/17
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5. |
PRO CAB 24, PRO HO/45 'Disturbances'
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6. |
PRO CAB 93/2-CAB 93/7
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7. |
PRO CAB 93/5 Minutes of the Committee on Communism
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8. |
R Thurlow, op. cit., pp.110-125
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9. |
J Hope, 'Surveillance or Collusion? Maxwell Knight, MI5 and the British Fascisti', Intelligence and National Security 9, 4, October 1994, pp.651-675.
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10. |
R Thurlow, '"A Very Clever Capitalist Class": British Communism and State Surveillance 1939-45', Intelligence and National Security, 12, 2 April 1997, pp.1-27.
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11. |
PRO CAB 93/2 HD(S)E 4. 29 May 1940
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12. |
PRO HO 45/25552/832463/172
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13. |
PRO HO 45/25552/832463/106, Special Branch 25 June and 2 July 1940, CAB 93/2 HD(S)E 46, Swinton to Anderson, 24 January 1941
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14. |
PRO 45/25573/865000/5 Special Branch 23 and 28 June 1941
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15. |
PRO CAB 93/3 SE/130 'The Communist Party Policy of the Ministry of Information'
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16. |
PRO CAB 93/3 SE/122 'The Communist Party of Great Britain'
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