Chapter 2

Labour Party: the enemy within and without

Labour government: the foundation of Cold War British anti-communism

By the waning months of 1945, Karl Marx’s opening sentence of the Communist Manifesto, written almost 100 years earlier, still weighed heavily on the minds of many throughout the UK. The fear of the spectre of communism was not confined only to the Vansittarts and Smithers of the nation; it plagued and occupied the minds of those in the British security services, mandarins filling departments in Whitehall, the armed forces and the members of the newly formed Labour government.

Initially, for many communists, and the left-wing of the ruling party, this fear came as a shocking revelation. For a socialist government to display such anti-communist opinions and to go so far as to enact measures to suppress the ideology seemed against the basic premise the Labour Party stood for. The victory of Clement Attlee over Winston Churchill in the General Election of 1945 signalled that the British citizenry did not desire a return to normalcy, but a radical transformation of the status quo. With the release of the Beveridge Report – which read in parts more like a manifesto than a white paper – the battleground for the inevitable postwar electoral duel between the two main political parties was decided. After six years of sacrificing their ‘blood, sweat and toil’ against the Axis powers, the time had come for correcting societal ills and fostering a fairer nation. In this effort, the voting public turned to the party promising to create a more egalitarian society and seize the means of production for the good of building a ‘New Jerusalem’. It did not shy away from campaigning on these goals. As its election manifesto stated: ‘The Labour party is a socialist party, and proud of it. Its ultimate purpose at home is the establishment of the “Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain”.’⁸ The manifesto did urge patience and cautioned that tearing down the old society would take time, declaring ‘Socialism cannot come overnight, as the product of a week-end revolution.’⁹ If further evidence was needed of how the Labour Party sought to govern, an observer needed only to listen to an excerpt from its official anthem, ‘The Red Flag’:

Then raise the scarlet standard high,

Within its shade we’ll live and die,

Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,

We’ll keep the Red flag flying here.

Look round, the Frenchman loves its blaze,

The sturdy German chants its praise,

In Moscow’s vaults its hymns are sung

Chicago swells the surging throng.

With words indicating a willingness to die for the socialist cause and talk of traitors and cowards, it held a revolutionary fervour that the British populace could not misconstrue. A verse of the song praised international solidary between workers in France, Germany, the US and Russia: a sentiment usually associated with Marx and his call to arms – namely, ‘workers of the world unite’. As Labour took power on 1 August 1945, it did not appear that the song and its significance were a product of a bygone era. The government benches filled with 393 Labour MPs rose in one unified voice to sing it, marking the first time the song had been played in the halls of Westminster. The ‘peaceful revolution’, as Attlee designated his socialist government, had begun.

Classifying the Attlee government as a ‘revolution’ radically stretches the meaning of the word; it resulted in the formation of a welfare state and the nationalisation of only 20 per cent of the country’s industry. Neither of these governmental policies were unique and in the postwar era were characteristic features of numerous industrialised nations.¹⁰ While in power from 1945 to 1951, Labour never utilised public ownership as a means to control the economy.¹¹ As Richard Toye pointed out, ‘Attlee government’s policy in the 1940s was merely interventionism under the barest veneer of planning’.¹² By 1948 the Labour government was satisfied with accepting a mixed economy dominated by the private sector. Herbert Morrison even proposed limiting any further nationalisation.¹³ A command economy never materialised – neither did a socialist commonwealth. Also, Attlee’s UK did not transform into a hospitable society for fellow revolutionary comrades in the struggle for workers’ rights. Especially not for members of the Communist Party, which had pledged to do its ‘utmost to develop … unity and to strengthen the organizations of the labour movement and their active support for the Labour government’.¹⁴ The Labour Party did not wish to form a popular front or create a ‘social democratic bridge’ to reach out to the CPGB.¹⁵ By 1945 Labour had been fighting for two decades against the CPGB’s attempts to infiltrate the party – on direct orders from Moscow – thus its leaders were wary of any type of general communist ‘mischief’.¹⁶ Now in power, the party leadership had had enough. The men who filled the positions of prime minister (Clement Attlee), deputy prime minister (Herbert Morrison) and foreign minister (Ernest Bevin) were all devoted socialists but were by 1945 also committed anti-communists and some of the earliest cold warriors.¹⁷ One might think the new realities of the Cold War changed these men, as they were professed democratic socialists and committed to social democracy in the years prior to the conflict. In the preceding years, after having ascended to power, they supported the right-wing authoritarian regimes of Iran, South Korea and Greece, showed devotion to the idea of empire and held to the basic tenets of capitalism. Not so: no dramatic shift had occurred. For underneath all the rhetoric of ‘revolutions’, the celebrated imagery of ‘red flags’ and the declared beliefs in a ‘Socialist Commonwealth’ lay a dominating sense of moderation and pragmatism within these Labour leaders dating back to the 1930s, which remained unaltered with the emergence of the Cold War. Although a party of the left, Labour showed ‘as great an interest in defending the West and its traditions’ as the Conservatives.¹⁸ From the party’s inception, it functioned, as historians have noted, as ‘the most effective bulwark against reaction and revolution’. Andrew Thorpe argued that during the interwar period, Labour did more to block the rise of the extreme left than any other British institution.¹⁹ Its leading figures, who came to power in 1945, had long been dedicated to halting both class warfare and any type of Marxist-inspired uprising and stopping a formal link to non-democratic leftist elements. Attlee’s distrust of communism was deep-seated, going back to his time as deputy leader.²⁰ Nor was Morrison one of the enthusiasts in the Labour Party for the Soviet experiment; while initially pro-Soviet in his youth, he rapidly formed a base hatred for any ideology which did not safeguard constitutional procedures.²¹ Putting ideas into deeds, in 1923 he proposed to the Labour National Executive that the party move against communists in the trade unions and the local parties.²² In 1937, when general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), Bevin went so far as vowing to ‘smash the trade unions’ if they ever came under the influence of the Communist International.²³

During the interwar period, despite Labour’s consistent opposition to domestic communism and its stalwart commitment to the democratic process, a ‘rising euphoria’ existed in the party for the Soviet Union and its workers’ paradise.²⁴ It formed a paradox and one of Labour’s diverging perceptions of the Soviet Union and the CPGB. Labour viewed domestic communists as disrupters and would-be infiltrators, while they saw those in the Soviet Union as trailblazers for progress and freedom. Herbert Morrison notwithstanding, most in Labour held a soft spot in their hearts and minds for the Soviet experiment.²⁵ The party, as a whole, fondly looked East with a level of admiration for the economic and foreign policies of the newly formed state – which many still referred to as Russia. Stalin’s anti-fascist stance in the mid-1930s appealed to many in Labour; especially welcomed by the party was his early support of the Republican cause in Spain.²⁶ This later proved to be a double-edged sword. When Soviet-backed communists in Spain began murdering their compatriots, a number on the British left saw their euphoria turn to horror. Both George Orwell and Arthur Koestler returned from Spain as emerging anti-communists.²⁷ A number in the Labour Party also soured to the concept of Stalinism. The show trials and purges ordered by the Soviet dictator gave many on the British left the impression that 1936 Moscow had somehow been transformed into revolutionary Paris gripped in the Reign of Terror.²⁸ Nevertheless, during the late 1930s the growing anti-Stalinist faction inside Labour remained circumspect in forcefully denouncing the Soviet abuses, since, by all appearances, they still rested in the minority. One of the most notable persons in this wing of the party was Clement Attlee, who, despite direct knowledge of the show trials, remained silent.²⁹ This was not so with Morrison, who openly attacked the central governing tenets of the Soviet Union. In a July 1936 article for the Daily Herald, he boldly – for the time – stated that ‘the economic condition of the Russian workers is definitely inferior to that of our country and of most of the Western communities’, then added that ‘the [Soviet] political dictatorship is irksome, tyrannical, injurious to intellectual freedom and the speed of economic advancement’.³⁰ As the murderous purges continued into 1937, opposition rose inside the party. That year Attlee found the changing political situation safe enough to denounce Stalin’s brand of totalitarianism. In The Labour Party in Perspective (1937), he wrote:

It is inevitable that all dictatorships, whether of the left or the right, should be police-ridden states, with the invariable accompaniments of espionage, dilation, and terrorism. The insistence on the maintenance of democracy by the Labour Party against those who advocate dictatorships, whether on the Berlin or Moscow model, is found upon a deep conviction that any divergence from it involves loss of liberty. Liberty once surrendered is very hard to recapture.³¹

Joining in on the anti-Soviet shift within Labour was Ernest Bevin, who, in no uncertain terms, linked domestic communist agitation with the Soviet Union. Frustrated over continued CPGB attempts to infiltrate the TGWU and communists’ efforts to force damaging strike actions, Bevin confronted the Soviet ambassador at a public reception in 1937. ‘I have built up the Transport Union’, he boasted, and then warned: ‘and if you try to break it I’ll fight you – and fight you to the death’.³² Less than two years later, with the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939, the tide fully turned against pro-Sovietism in Labour. Directly after the end of the Second World War, Attlee, Morrison and Bevin – by then in the new anti-Soviet majority – did their very best to kill this sentiment within the party once and for all.

Not surprisingly, animosity towards communism in the Labour Party escalated with the Soviet–Nazi agreement. It remained high even after the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany brought Churchill and Stalin into a willing partnership against the forces of fascism. Throughout the war Attlee and Morrison, although bitter rivals for party leadership, worked together against the CPGB. In 1941, Morrison banned the publishing of the Daily Worker.³³ He declared ‘wicked and poisonous minds’ were behind the CPGB and if the general public were privy to the knowledge he held as home secretary, they would never even think of voting for a candidate with such an association.³⁴ Joining in, Attlee called communists ‘fools’ who had ‘surrendered their minds long ago’ and maintained the CPGB worked as an untrustworthy puppet of the Soviet Union.³⁵ In 1943, the Labour Party National Executive rejected the CPGB’s application for affiliation, insisting that communists were out of harmony with British objectives and were tied too closely to the foreign policy aims of the Soviet Union. In a ballot preceding this announcement at the forty-second annual convention the delegates – through a card vote – voted 1,951,000 to 712,000 against allowing affiliation.³⁶ During a speech at the convention, Morrison lambasted the CPGB and its leader, Harry Pollitt. Morrison said, ‘The communists still believe in revolution by violence. They still believe that bloodshed is necessary.’ He continued, ‘The trouble with communists is that they have dual-purpose minds. They tell you one thing and mean another.’³⁷ Alongside his deputy, Attlee also held strong reservations about close or formal ties with the CPGB. These reservations appeared to arise now from not just an ideological basis but also a practical standpoint. Returning from the 1945 Potsdam conference, Attlee concluded ‘there was no possibility of real Anglo-Soviet co-operation’.³⁸ He realised the future of both his party and the nation resided in fostering stronger ties with the US than with potential postwar collaboration with Stalin. Speaking specifically on the CPGB, he claimed it disregarded values required for a civil society. Three years after the 1943 conference – and a year after taking power – the party conference voted against affiliation with the CPGB again, this time in an overwhelming six to one majority.³⁹ Furthermore, the conference passed by a vote of 2,413,000 to 667,000 to bar any political organisation not already affiliated with the party ineligible from ever receiving it. In a crowning speech before the vote, Herbert Morrison hinted that the financing of CPGB came from foreign sources and that many domestic communists were likely involved in espionage against the crown and empire. Morrison demanded the CPGB ‘liquate itself’ for the good of the nation.⁴⁰

Although already firmly established, the anti-communist opinions of these party leaders increased as they entered into decision-making roles in the new government. Even more left-leaning members of Labour exhibited paranoia towards communist encroachment after entering government as well. Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan voiced the fear that the CPGB might gain control of hotels in London by blackmailing their managers, then forge them into centres for espionage.⁴¹ In 1946 Harold Laski called the CPGB an authoritarian movement which sought to subvert all freedoms. He labelled its leaders disciplined conspirators seeking to destroy the Labour Party.⁴² Contesting a 1948 parliamentary byelection for Labour, Harold Nicolson announced he would not abide any communist support: ‘I do not want their beastly votes. I want British votes, not Russian votes.’⁴³ Minister of Food John Strachey blamed ‘communist sabotage’ when an ill-thought-through agricultural project in Africa failed to produce results.⁴⁴ In May 1950, as minister of war, in the most literal sense of the meaning, Strachey turned into a red-hunter. During a trip into the Malayan jungle, Strachey, with a rifle in hand, joined a Gurkha patrol as they pursued communist guerrillas.⁴⁵ While Attlee, Morrison and Bevin’s attitudes towards communism remained consistent from the interwar period, Cold War realities indeed changed many in the party.

Factors contributing to this hardening against communism were internal battles with more left-wing members of the Labour Party; increased espionage activity sanctioned by the Soviet Union; external pressure from the US to heighten security procedures, especially concerning atomic energy; and early briefings from the British intelligence community. This last contributing element cannot be overstated. Prior to the Second World War, the Labour Party was wary and mistrustful of the intelligence services.⁴⁶ This enmity came from a long history of animosity dating back to the 1920s that included these agencies spying on prominent Labour leaders and a standing suspicion that MI5 was behind the forging of the Zinoviev Letter.⁴⁷ The Second World War brought a thawing of tensions between Labour and the security services, since Attlee in the post of deputy prime minister and Morrison as home secretary worked regularly with members of MI6 and MI5. In power, Labour’s leadership frequently utilised MI5’s resources for domestic surveillance and gathering lists of communists they wished to be investigated. On several instances, party members in government were more zealous in rooting out communists than the security services and Special Branch whose job it was to find these supposed security risks and potential traitors.

‘Lost sheep’ and crypto-communists

One of the earliest concerns of the new prime minister was the clandestine penetration of communists into the nation’s parliament. Although in 1945 two communist MPs, Willie Gallacher and Phil Piratin, sat in the House of Commons, Attlee worried that many in his party held secret allegiances of similar kinds. Termed ‘crypto-communists’, these individuals supported the aims of the CPGB and were potential security risks because of their sympathies for the Soviet Union. Attlee considered this type of ‘hidden’ communist as a unique threat, stating, ‘We have, therefore, to look at this attacking from within, and it is the duty of any government to take action. In addition to all these classes of professed fascists and communists, there are also the crypto-communists.’⁴⁸ Opponents, such as Attlee, of these crypto-communists viewed them as much more dangerous than their exposed confederates. These ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’ could damage the government by asking embarrassing questions of ministers. Such parliamentary questions promoted the Soviet Union as the true version of a socialist state and argued for the UK’s alignment with the Eastern bloc instead of the ‘aggressive superpower’ the US.⁴⁹ These crypto-communists in parliament were only suspected in the Labour Party. Famed writer George Orwell described and denounced these types of Labour MPs in 1947: ‘There is, for instance, a whole group of MPs in the British parliament … who are commonly nicknamed “the cryptos”. They have undoubtedly done a great deal of mischief, especially in confusing public opinion about the nature of the puppet regimes in eastern Europe.’⁵⁰ By not identifying themselves as communists, statements by these Labour members of the Commons reached a larger audience and initially could not be dismissed as pure communist propaganda. For evidence of these crypto-communists, Attlee turned to the once Labour-despised intelligence community for assistance. He specifically sought the help of Guy Liddell, the deputy chief of MI5 and head of counterespionage. In a meeting between the two on 19 November 1946, Attlee, ‘huddled up and looking exhausted’, expressed to the intelligence officer that he considered himself personally responsible to the nation and the government to see that secret communists ‘did not get into positions where they might constitute a danger to the state’.⁵¹

The day prior to his meeting with Liddell, a rebellion within his party gave Attlee a more urgent motive for hunting hidden communists inside parliament. In October, the prime minister had received a letter signed by twenty-one Labour MPs who urged Attlee to reconsider aligning with the US against the Soviet Union. What resulted from this letter was a proposed King’s Speech amendment written by Richard Crossman. The motion, supported by seventy-two Labour members of parliament, sought ‘a democratic and constructive alternative to the otherwise inevitable conflict between American capitalism and Soviet communism’.⁵² If the motion was carried in the Commons, it effectively meant the immediate resignation of the government, since such an amendment constituted a censure motion. Therefore, this rebellion of the left-wing of the party did not only stand as a symbolic gesture. With veiled attacks against Attlee and Bevin, Crossman, arguing for his amendment, lambasted what he termed the ideology of anti-communism. He stated, ‘anti-communism is as destructive of true democracy and of socialism as is communism, and one of the jobs of a Labour government … is to fight the battle not only against the communist ideology, but against the anti-communist ideology’.⁵³ When the vote came on the passage of the amendment, it was overwhelmingly rejected by a tally of 353 to 0. Ultimately, not a single member of the house voted against the government, but what distressed Attlee was the 100 abstentions on the government’s side of the aisle. Included in this total were five parliamentary private secretaries. Many in the Labour Party did not only see these abstainers as rebels – which is what the mainstream British press dubbed them – but also as something far worse. Attlee called Crossman part of the ‘lunatic fringe’.⁵⁴ Tom O’Brien, Labour MP for West Nottingham and member of the general council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), speaking of these fellow party members, said:

They stand condemned as moral assassins … They behave, I am sorry to say, like a contemptible coterie of Comintern lickspittles and degrade democratic politics beyond measure. Some of the signatories of the amendment are political softies who do not realise that they are playing the game of the ‘Harry Pollittbureau’.⁵⁵

Evident in O’Brien’s rhetoric was his feelings that many Labour MPs were unwitting dupes of Harry Pollitt, general secretary of the CPGB. But in the subtext, he implied that some of these ‘assassins’ were playing the ‘game’ of the communists. O’Brien was not the only party leader with such suspicions. General Secretary of the Labour Party Morgan Phillips collected and held files on pro-Soviet MPs that he termed ‘Lost Sheep(s)’. A stalwart anti-communist, Phillips maintained, ‘In Britain the Communist Party is more a conspiracy than a party.’⁵⁶ In his estimation, these ‘Lost Sheep’ were individuals who used their position and prestige to support communistic policies rather than those of traditional Labour.⁵⁷ During a Commons speech in October 1946, Attlee lambasted one such MP, John Platts-Mills, by declaring that Platts-Mills’s speech, which had been critical of the government’s foreign policy the previous day, ‘was in fact not much more than a reproduction of the ordinary propaganda stuff of the Communist Party’.⁵⁸ Not content in shaming these ‘Lost Sheep’, Attlee sought to expel them from the ranks of the Labour Party and ultimately from the halls of government.

One day prior to his 19 November discussion with Attlee, Liddell held another mystifying meeting – this time with Secretary of State for War Frederick Bellenger. It involved a request from the prime minister for information on the wartime activities of a Labour MP named Geoffrey Bing.⁵⁹ Bellenger produced for Liddell a message from Attlee suggesting that Bing had given away military secrets to communists and inquired if Bing held current membership in the Communist Party. The note from the prime minister troubled the deputy director general of MI5 since it directly involved a minister in this type of delicate inquiry. In previous private meetings, Attlee stated to Liddell that ‘he wanted to deal with matters of this kind personally’. Liddell voiced his concerns to Bellenger that the security service’s ‘aim and object was to remain entirely non-party in all these matters and to avoid any suggestion that the department was a Gestapo’.⁶⁰ It is unclear if he expressed this distress to Attlee. However, on the same day as his meeting with the prime minister, Liddell provided Bellenger with information about Bing’s communist activities and the recommendation that he be considered a security risk; Bellenger ‘seemed quite satisfied with this assurance’. The whole affair of Bing bothered Liddell. In his official report he wrote:

It had always been the policy of our office to keep entirely clear of politics, and this particular case seemed to be a border-line one. We might be open to the criticism that we were using our records for the purpose of conducting a heresy hunt within the Labour Party, although it seemed to me in this instance that we were covered by the fact that BING, until a few days ago, had been one of the whips, and in that sense a person who was given certain access to government information.⁶¹

Adding credence to Liddell’s fears that the security service was involved in a witch hunt for the Labour Party was the fact that Bing, a member of the Labourite rebels opposing Attlee’s foreign policy, had just resigned his position of whip on 2 November, embarrassing the party. A year later in the Commons he was highly critical of Bellenger’s position on vetting for the Army Educational Service.⁶² Bing accused Bellenger of wishing to remove communists from Army Education Corps.⁶³ Regardless of Liddell’s reservations, MI5 would keep a very close tab on Bing for years to come. He was considered by the agency as one of its most vicious domestic opponents. In 1947, famed spymaster Maxwell Knight reported that Bing’s proposed amendment for a Northern Ireland bill that suspended the Ulster Special Powers Act was nothing more than a ‘communist tactic’.⁶⁴ During the spring of that year, Knight and other MI5 officers anticipated and feared that ‘crypto-communist members of parliament, backed by the two official communist members, were seeking an opportunity for launching an attack on MI5’.⁶⁵ A top-secret internal report stated, ‘The principal instigator of the attack will be Geoffrey BING.’⁶⁶ The attack never occurred, but this did little to allay the concerns that secret communists in the House of Commons were the enemy not only of the current Labour government but the security service as well.

In May 1947, per the agreement made in their meeting in November, Liddell delivered to Attlee the names of John Platts-Mills, Lester Hutchinson, Leah Manning and Elizabeth Braddock as probable crypto-communists in the House of Commons. Liddell wrote:

I thereupon gave him the names of PLATTS-MILLS, HUTCHINSON, MANNING and Mrs. BRADDOCK. He was not surprised to hear about HUTCHINSON, and had already taken for granted that PLATTS-MILLS was a C.P. member. He was, however, considerably shaken to hear of Leah MANNING and Mrs. BRADDOCK. He then volunteered the information to me that he thought DODDS was C.P. member; that SWINGLER probably was, and that D.N. PRITT almost certainly was.⁶⁷

Volunteering names to the list created by Liddell, Attlee included Norman Dodds, Stephen Swingler and Denis Pritt.⁶⁸ However, these were not the only Labour MPs to be targeted or classified as crypto-communists. In an internal MI5 report, Charles Smith and Donald Bruce were also named as such.⁶⁹ Morgan Phillips’s list of ‘Lost Sheep’ held numerous other names, including Konni Zilliacus and Leslie Solley.⁷⁰ In what was an embarrassing moment for Guy Liddell, Herbert Morrison sought to compile his own personal list of crypto-communists from information held by MI5. In February 1949, Morrison asked Liddell for a list of ‘fellow travellers’ so he could personally ‘smoke them out’ of the Labour Party. Liddell ‘dodged’ the request and by doing so did not relay the information that Attlee already had such a list but had for whatever reason decided not to tell Morrison about its existence.⁷¹

Although Attlee estimated he did not have enough evidence on or provocation by these crypto-communists and ‘Lost Sheep’ to expel them from the Labour Party, this promptly changed. The next year Attlee and his Labour government found themselves – as they did during the King’s Speech amendment of the previous year – tested by members of the far-left in the party. In 1948, thirty-seven Labour MPs sent Pietro Nenni, leader of the Italian Socialist Party, a telegram supporting his efforts in the forthcoming Italian General Election.⁷² Nenni was in an alliance with the Italian communists, a coalition that was deemed unacceptable by the Labour Party leadership. The policy of Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) was to withhold support from any socialists in Europe who opened the door to communist infiltration. Also, the NEC had earlier sent a message of good wishes to the Socialist Unity Party, a splinter group refusing to ally with the communists. Dubbed the ‘Nenni Telegram affair’, the matter sent shockwaves through the halls of Westminster.

Labour MPs whose names were listed on the telegram denied either signing such a document or lent their support under the pretext of misunderstanding its final content. Conservatives in the Commons called for a subcommittee to investigate the charges of adding names of MPs to the telegram without their prior consent. Alongside Waldron Smithers, both Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill agreed that hearings were needed to sort out the situation. Herbert Morrison refused partisan calls for parliamentary hearings, arguing that only Labour MPs were involved in the telegram so it should be a party matter, but assured Smithers, and the rest of the Commons, it would be ‘dealt with effectively’.⁷³ In the mind of the prime minister the matter was quite clear. Attlee labelled the signers of the telegram ‘active instigators’ who knew exactly what they were doing. ‘They wanted to sabotage the foreign policy of the government they were returned to support’, he argued during a May Day rally in Plymouth. ‘They wanted to see Italy go the way of Romania and Czechoslovakia.’⁷⁴ Even the left-leaning Tribune called the telegram ‘an act of sabotage’ which only assisted the communists. In a front-page story on the matter, the magazine stated that the correct place for a number of Labour MPs – who preferred a ‘Communist victory in Europe’ – was in the CPGB, which had ‘also dedicated itself to the aim of destroying the Labour government and disrupting the labour movement’.⁷⁵ Prior to Attlee’s blanket denunciation of the signers, the NEC did conduct hearings into the issue. They were tantamount to an ideological purge, which resulted in the expelling of the central author of the controversial document, John Platts-Mills, from the Labour Party on 28 April 1948. Other expulsions were threatened, though never materialised. Attlee and the NEC hoped that the example they made with Platts-Mills would halt other left-wing rebels from refusing the party line. They were not successful.

A letter published in the 30 October 1948 edition of New Statesman and Nation made this obvious to the party leadership. Written by Konni Zilliacus and entitled ‘The Labour Party’s Dilemma’, it stated that the British Labour Party could not be both against communists in Europe and for the workers of the continent. Zilliacus specified: ‘To be anti-communist on the continent therefore … means coming down on the side of the capitalists against the workers. Up to now the leadership of the Labour party has resolved the dilemma by sacrificing the workers of Europe to its anti-communist fanaticism’.⁷⁶ From his election to parliament in 1945, Zilliacus was a vocal critic of his party’s foreign policy and a constant thorn in the side of the Labour government. Hatred towards Zilliacus ran deep in the party. Replying to a letter from Zilliacus denouncing Labour’s foreign policy, Attlee personally admonished him for his ‘astonishing lack of understanding of the facts’.⁷⁷ Hugh Gaitskell classified him as a member of the ‘lunatic fringe’ and a ‘pseudo-communist’.⁷⁸ Herbert Morrison labelled him ‘a man who seemingly finds it much easier to consider that the Russians and Yugoslavs can be right than to admit that the British are ever right’.⁷⁹

In response to the letter, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton wrote to Morgan Phillips, ‘I feel we cannot, much longer, avoid dealing with the author, as we did with Platts-Mills.’ In his typed note to the general secretary, Dalton scrawled: ‘Have we got a dossier on him?’⁸⁰ Collected in Phillips’s ‘Lost Sheep’ file, the party did; a ‘private and confidential’ report on Zilliacus gave the following assessment:

Over the last three years, Zilliacus’ speeches and writings have for the most part taken the form of violent attacks on the Labour government’s foreign policy. He is recognised in Cominform literature as the leading British exponent of ‘left-wing social democracy’, i.e. those socialists whose substantial agreement with Cominform policies must ultimately lead them into complete agreement with the communists.⁸¹

While Labour leaders were seeking to force Zilliacus out, other party members were contemplating something a bit more extreme for another ‘Lost Sheep’. In April 1949, Christopher Mayhew, undersecretary of state at the FO, pushed for Leslie Solley’s prosecution. Mayhew called Solley ‘a particularly unpleasant fellow travelling Labour MP’.⁸² The attempted charge came from Solley allegedly working as an intermediary between the Romanian government and a British newspaper. To the dismay of Mayhew and Bevin, the FO legal advisors assessed the evidence against Solley as not sufficient for a legal case.

The 1949 House of Commons vote to join NATO was the next catalyst which brought the removal of three additional ‘Lost Sheep’ from the Labour Party, including Zilliacus – who was already on thin ice with Transport House. Only six Labour MPs voted against signing the NATO treaty; of these, three were shortly removed from the party ranks. Konni Zilliacus, Leslie Solley and Lester Hutchinson, all considered pro-Soviet in their politics and who consistently opposed the Atlanticist foreign policy of Attlee and Bevin, were expelled. Joining Platts-Mills and Denis Pritt, who was removed from the party in 1940 for his support of the Soviet Union during the Winter War, these five MPs formed the Labour Independent Group.⁸³ Without sheltering and support from the official Labour Party, all of these MPs lost their seats in the 1950 General Election. Zilliacus reapplied to join the Labour Party in 1951, but before his readmission in 1952, Herbert Morrison, then foreign secretary, ordered MI5 to provide him with a report on Zilliacus’s activities and communism connections.⁸⁴ In addition to those who were officially expelled, a large number of others whose names appeared on lists as suspected communists found themselves out of the Commons as well. These included Leah Manning, Stephen Swingler and Donald Bruce. Alongside these so-called crypto-communists, the two ‘official’ members of the Communist Party – Willie Gallacher and Phil Piratin – were not returned to their seats. Reflecting on their defeats in a speech after the election, Morrison crowed over their 1950 campaign losses:

The fellow-travellers, and the plain honest-to-goodness mugs, also badly failed. Their leaders were trounced at the polls even where they had previously deluded the local electorate into putting them into the House of Commons on false pretences. The voters woke up and the whole gang of them went out with a bump. The Communist party and their friends, and all the fellow-travellers and the innocents who have lapped up the communist doctrine and communist propaganda, should stop and consider the meaning of this dramatic event.⁸⁵

After the 1951 General Election, with Labour out of power, Attlee’s goal to purge the House of Commons of pro-Soviet and communist MPs lost official governmental support. The communists in the Labour Party issue turned to a strictly in-house affair. With the battle for control of the party waging between the Gaitskellites and the Bevanites, accusations of communist infiltration rotated from the House of Commons to the rank-and-file members of Labour. Although no attempts were made to smear Aneurin Bevan as an out-and-out communist or fellow traveller, questions were raised about his supporters in the party and his judgement when it came to dealing with the ‘red menace’. In a series of articles commissioned for the Daily Herald, Labour MP Elizabeth ‘Bessie’ Braddock wrote of the ‘The Great Communist Plot’ and how the CPGB was actively influencing constituency Labour Parties (CLPs). ‘I am astonished at the number of leading Labour people who still treat this menace with indifference’, Braddock admonished. ‘The communist who works inside the Labour party is a factor with whom we now have to reckon.’⁸⁶ Joining her in voicing concern was Hugh Gaitskell, former chancellor of the exchequer and future Labour Party leader. During a speech at Stalybridge, after the 1952 Labour Party conference, Gaitskell agreed with Braddock and stated that the CPGB had adopted the new tactic of ordering its members and supporters to infiltrate Labour. Reflecting on the annual conference, Gaitskell recounted being told ‘that about one-sixth of the constituency party delegates appeared to be communists or communist inspired’. ‘This figure may well be too high’, he admitted, ‘but if it should be one in ten or even one in twenty, it is a most shocking state of affairs into which the National Executive should look at once.’⁸⁷ The issue did turn more openly bipartisan in 1953 when Conservative MP Tufton Beamish published an open letter to Herbert Morrison urging him to purge the communistic Bevanites from the Labour Party for the national good.⁸⁸

The party leadership concerns over communism infiltration declined – except for baseless accusations of one lone Labour MP – and did not arise again until the 1960s. In fact, during the late 1950s, the attention of the Labour general secretary turned from rooting out communists within the Labour ranks towards silencing a McCarthyite inside his own party. By 1958, Morgan Phillips’s ‘Lost Sheep’ file stopped centring on supposed crypto-communists and instead was filled with reports and complaints about John McGovern, a troublesome Labour MP and paranoid anti-communist from Scotland. Alongside being absent for numerous votes (he missed ten three-line whips during the 1957–8 session) and having subpar attendance in the Commons, McGovern worried Transport House because of his wild accusations levelled at the ranks of the PLP.⁸⁹ He had earlier caused consternation for the NEC during the 1955 General Election, after which he was blamed for the defeat of a Liverpool city councillor then running as a Labour candidate in the Scotstoun constituency. During the campaign, McGovern accused the candidate of having close connections to the ‘revolutionary’ Communist Party.⁹⁰ By 1958, McGovern, actively neglecting his parliamentary duties, travelled extensively, promoting the virtues of the Moral Rearmament Movement throughout Europe and the US. When questioned about his absence due to these activities, McGovern stated, ‘it was his destiny to spread the beliefs of Moral Rearmament’.⁹¹ During these speaking engagements, he labelled the Labour Party as a home for both active communists and would-be traitors. In April 1959, at a speech given in Los Angeles, McGovern remarked that of the 286 members of the PLP, twenty-six were ‘either undercover communists or fellow-travellers’ and that seventy-five members, ‘if democracy were losing the struggle tomorrow, would throw off their democratic mask and join the communist world’.⁹² At a press conference in Berlin weeks later, he ominously stated, ‘There are dark forces in the party I represent’, and recalculated his figures by charging that twenty-six Labour MPs were outright communists and seventy others were fellow travellers.⁹³ With the party no longer in government, accusations of crypto-communists inside the PLP were considered a potential election issue that could prohibit a Labour return to power. They created the impression that a vote for Labour could potentially bring secret communists into the British government. Morgan Phillips responded by asking publicly for McGovern to name names and questioned why he had not reported such allegations formally at past meetings of the PLP. Phillips accused him of having no evidence to back up such charges and told him to withdraw them at once.⁹⁴ McGovern refused, writing to Phillips that ‘I have never made false statements even about my political enemies, I shall never withdraw this statement … The weakness of your letter is that it shows no desire to effect a cure but rather to continue the cancer.’⁹⁵ Given McGovern’s advanced age (seventy-two) and his declaration that he would not stand at the next general election, Phillips and the party allowed the matter to rest. No formal action was taken. Ultimately, McGovern left Labour, claiming it was too sympathetic to communism; during the 1964 General Election, he threw his support behind the Conservatives.⁹⁶

The later episode of McGovern notwithstanding, was this early fear of crypto-communists during the Attlee government justified? The prime minister’s apprehensions were not as far-fetched as they sounded. During the autumn of 1948 MI5 discreetly informed the prime minister that Wilfred Vernon (then a sitting Labour MP) had willingly passed secrets to the Soviets in the late 1930s.⁹⁷ Even the members of the CPGB appraised the two MPs of their party elected in 1945 as a low estimation of their real strength in the House of Commons. Douglas Hyde, a former editor for the Daily Worker, wrote in his autobiography:

On the morning that the election results began to come through we [the CPGB] got a series of surprises. The first was the sweeping Labour gains, second was the communist defeats, third was the realisation that among the Labour men returned were a number of our own party members who had slipped in almost unnoticed as it were … By the time the list was complete we knew that we had a least eight or nine ‘cryptos’ in the House of Commons in addition to our two publicly-acknowledged MPs.⁹⁸

If these numbers were either inflated or conservative, the fact remained the same: the Labour government’s alarm over hidden communists inside the House of Commons brought forth tangible actions against such a fear. These crypto-communists and ‘Lost Sheep’ were effectively viewed as fifth columnists attempting to subvert the Western alliance that Attlee and Bevin sought to forge. Through aiding the Crossman rebellion, the sending of the Nenni telegram and refusing to vote for NATO, they displayed their ‘true colours’. Attlee expressed this sentiment seamlessly in a speech denouncing them to a meeting of the TUC in 1946. ‘We cannot afford to run risks’, he argued. Warning further, he said: ‘There is a small but vociferous section in this country that seek on every occasion to attack the policy of this government and which seems resolved to declare that, whatever is done, Britain is wrong.’⁹⁹ By utilising the service of MI5 to inform on, survey and uncover these risks and through the party apparatus of Labour, Attlee sought to purge certain members of the House of Commons for holding and displaying communist sympathies.

The purge: negative and positive vetting

Vetting is generally defined as investigating someone thoroughly, especially in order to ensure that they are suitable for a job requiring secrecy, loyalty or trustworthiness. The British government utilised two systems of vetting during the early Cold War period. These processes were ‘positive’ – vetting which was overt such as interviewing subjects and having them fill out questionnaires – and ‘negative’, which was done in secret or unbeknownst to the individual being examined. Although procedures were in place prior to 1945, a series of public scandals pushed the narrative that these were not effective and needed to be overhauled. The Igor Gouzenko defection, the discovery of the spying activities of Klaus Fuchs and the disappearance of two highly placed civil servants, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, forced the government to admit that a problem existed in defending the secrets of the realm. The Maclean and Burgess defections, though still undiscovered, were reported at the time to have caused ‘disturbance in the public mind at home’ and would probably ‘have embarrassing results on our relations with the United States’.¹⁰⁰ If self-motivation of the British state to revise security measures was not enough, added pressure to increase vetting came from the US. The singular goal, often stated but at other times cloaked in more diplomatic wording, for increased vetting directly after the Second World War was to stymie – if not eliminate entirely – disloyal communists who were subject to disclose information to the Soviet Union. The factors contributing to this set goal cannot all be chalked up to hysteria. To the chagrin of the British government, there were numerous Soviet moles and security risks employed in the civil service and other sections of the nation’s governmental infrastructure.

During the Second World War, under the premiership of Winston Churchill, communist infiltration and concerns that current vetting practices for sensitive positions were inadequate were apparent in the halls of government. In 1943, a national organiser of the Communist Party, Douglas Frank Springhall, stood trial and was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. Springhall obtained classified information for the Soviets from a clerk in the air ministry and a staff officer in Special Operations Executive (SOE); both of these sources of Springhall had communist affiliations. A month after Springhall’s conviction, Duff Cooper, then chairman of the cabinet committee on security, relayed to Churchill that even though the CPGB denied knowledge of Springhall’s activities, ‘in fact the party machine is regularly used for espionage and that this had continued since the conviction of Springhall’.¹⁰¹ Cooper went further in his warning, arguing that ‘it may fairly be stated that any member of the Communist Party should be regarded as a potential agent’. Home Secretary Herbert Morrison agreed with Cooper’s assessment. Morrison wrote to the prime minister, ‘There is a special danger in employing on secret work persons who are members or adherents of the Communist Party.’ In his assessment, ‘experience has shown that people who are otherwise reliable and honourable are untrustworthy when there is a conflict between their obligations to the [Communist] party and their duty as public servants or as loyal citizens’.¹⁰² Labour and Conservative members of Churchill’s National government agreed that domestic communists and the Soviet Union both posed threats to the UK’s internal security – even while both of these ‘threats’ were officially allied with the UK against the Axis powers.

In the discussions on how to officially deal with this danger, changes to the governmental vetting were suggested. MI5 reported that the ‘case of Springhall gives an excellent opportunity for formulating and implementing a uniform policy’ concerning vetting communists. David Clarke, head of the department responsible for monitoring the CPGB, reported that the spy ring orchestrated by Springhall revealed the dangers of employing such individuals, and ‘in the future there can be no good reason for underestimating those risks’.¹⁰³ With the haphazard procedures then in place, in certain instances initial vetting was not conducted until after employment had already begun or, even worse, did not occur at all. Since there was no general policy concerning employing communists by the British government, positive vetting could not be widely used and attempts to control communist individuals already employed had their limitations. Clarke identified fifty-seven communists who had access to classified information. Such a situation had occurred since none of the various departments in which these communists were employed had coherent vetting protocols.¹⁰⁴ The recommendation of MI5 was for the implementation of a universal vetting system for all security-related departments and a transfer of communists presently working in these areas to other posts. Morrison’s solution to the problem was a drastic public relations effort. He pushed for openly charging the CPGB of disloyalty against the crown through its organising espionage for a foreign state. The prime minister, alongside Chancellor of the Exchequer John Anderson, strongly disagreed with this latter tactic and dismissed the notion of issuing such a statement.¹⁰⁵

Deciding against implementing any new forms of vetting, Churchill instead set up a secret tribunal – termed the Inter-Departmental Security Committee or simply ‘The Panel’ – to determine on a case-by-case basis the communists in government. The Panel consisted of members of the Security Executive, a ministerial body whose duties were ‘to consider questions relating to defence against the “fifth column” and initiate action’. Instituted in May 1940, the Security Executive had no executive powers. Its mandate stated that direct ‘action will not be taken’ but only ‘through the appropriate departments’.¹⁰⁶ Churchill also applied this limited directive to The Panel in its role in determining threats of communists in government. When deemed necessary, its function was to hold hearings on individuals MI5 suspected of spying or engaging in other subversive activities, then give a recommendation to the head of the department in which the communist being examined worked. In the opinion of MI5, instituting another ministerial advisory committee was not a ‘satisfactory method’ of tackling the issue at hand.¹⁰⁷ Churchill’s answer to the Springhall affair did not change the vetting procedures in any way, nor did it prohibit communists from entering sensitive departments in the future. In 1955 a Privy Counsellors’ investigation created to review governmental vetting agreed with this assessment, stating:

Our present system really only began in 1948. Before then there was nothing like a systematic system for checking by departments against the Security Service records of the names of the staff employed by them on secret work … Secondly, before 1948, when a communist was discovered, all a department could do was to transfer him to non-secret or less secret work, if it could do this without rousing the man’s suspicions. They could do nothing openly because there was no mandate to treat communists as unfit to be employed on secret work.¹⁰⁸

The Panel that Churchill created did not officially meet until 1944. In the view of MI5, it was ‘unworkable’ and did nothing to strengthen vetting procedures, since it only reviewed cases of individuals already employed and under suspicion.¹⁰⁹ Within a year, a far more damaging espionage case of Alan Nunn May placed severe pressure on the government to revise and restructure its vetting procedures towards communists. Musing on this newer episode, Roger Hollis wrote, ‘as this case must surely make it abundantly manifest to the government something will have to be done about communists in government departments and in other secret employment’.¹¹⁰ Whereas Churchill, in Hollis’s opinion, did not find significant evidence to change government vetting in regards to communist infiltration, the postwar Labour government agreed with Hollis’s assessment for several diplomatic and political reasons.

In 1945, the defection of a cypher clerk working at the Soviet embassy in Canada named Igor Gouzenko brought revelations that the Soviet military intelligence (GRU) was operating a major spy ring. One of the participants named by Gouzenko was Alan Nunn May, a British citizen and nuclear scientist. Nunn May had been sent to Canada in 1943 to work on Anglo-Canadian research for the atomic bomb.¹¹¹ Gouzenko labelled Nunn May as a source of passing highly sensitive intelligence to the Soviet Union. MI5 responded by placing Nunn May under surveillance and monitoring his phone calls. Eventually, he simply confessed having given samples of uranium and reports on atomic research to an unnamed individual, but refused to label his actions as treasonous.¹¹² The discovery of Nunn May’s espionage activities was a lot more upsetting than those of Springhall for two key reasons. First, the passing on of atomic secrets by Nunn May to the Soviet Union caused grave concerns for the overall security of the UK. Seeing the devastation wrought by the atomic bombings on Japan forced the British government to realise that a hostile country – such as the Soviet Union – with such weaponry was an existential threat. No longer could the UK count on the ocean surrounding it to safeguard it from total destruction. The second reason was the negative response towards the British from the only atomic-wielding nation in existence – the US. The exposure by Gouzenko of Nunn May made many in the US question the security apparatus of their British allies. Although British manpower and knowledge contributed to the invention of the atomic bomb, the US still held strict control over the nuclear technology needed to manufacture them. Sharing this vital information was a top priority of the FO and British military. The exposure of Nunn May put in question future exchanges of atomic secrets to the UK from the US. The British ambassador to the US, Roger Makins, expressed this frustration in a top-secret telegram, stating: ‘In regards to the Canadian espionage case … the question of security of the US information has once more been brought prominently to the fore … I need not emphasize the effect which all this is likely to have on the question of the exchange of information with ourselves.’ Summing up the British government’s position even more bluntly, he ended his top-secret message with: ‘US reluctance to give us what we want is bound to be greatly increased.’¹¹³ As Makin predicted, the Gouzenko affair strengthened the resolve of the Truman administration to protect the American atomic monopoly. US politicians estimated safeguards were necessary to halt the spread of sensitive information to foreign powers – even established allies such as the UK. On 1 August 1946, three months after Nunn May’s sentencing to ten years in prison for violating the Official Secrets Act 1911, Harry Truman signed into law the McMahon Act (officially entitled the Atomic Energy Act of 1946). A key proviso in the new law prohibited the sharing of atomic secrets with any foreign nation – this greatly distressed Attlee. Earlier in the year, when speaking with Averell Harriman, the US ambassador, he conveyed the opinion that until nuclear energy came under the control of the United Nations (UN), the US should simply give the UK atomic bombs, or at the very least provide the data needed for the production of atomic energy.¹¹⁴ The McMahon Act and the Americans’ perception that the security procedures of their ‘British cousins’ were inadequate gave Attlee no alternative but to order the building of an independent British atomic weapons programme.

With the defection of Nunn May and his arrest, the game effectively changed in how communist subversion was viewed in the postwar period. A report sent from MI5 to the air ministry describes the transformation of the ‘red menace’:

The main risk to be feared from the Communist Party in the pre-war period was on unrest in the industrial sphere and in the armed forces of the Crown, leading possibly to political strikes and even to revolutionary outbreaks. The higher social status of the present membership has brought a new danger to the fore as the scientists and professional workers, who are now in the party ranks, have access to far more secret information than had the pre-war membership. The danger of leakage of information to the Soviet Union is thus very much greater than it was previously.¹¹⁵

As a covert member of the Communist Party, Nunn May completely met the above threat assessment and thus gave the British government a substantial reason to start profiling such individuals as security risks.¹¹⁶ A Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) report dated 18 November 1946 added further credence to increasing the vetting of communists.¹¹⁷ Entitled ‘Spread of Communism Throughout the World and the Extent of Its Direction from Moscow’, it estimated that to would-be communist spies it mattered little if Russia was an ally with the UK, as was the case during the Springhall affair, or an enemy. The report argued that communists disregarded this differentiation since their allegiance was only to the party and the foreign power the party served.

In early January 1947, Attlee formed the Cabinet Committee on Subversive Activities (GEN 183).¹¹⁸ The main purpose of this committee was to review vetting procedures in government and industries dealing with secretive information. Ostensibly it was formed to keep any kind of destabilising human elements outside of government, including fascists. Its targets quickly became only suspected communists and the CPGB members. A report by the working party of the main committee (GEN 168) stated that after reviewing ‘the various organizations or groups which might provide the breeding grounds of subversive activities either now or in the future, we are satisfied that, of those, the communists’ organization is the only one to which serious attention needs to be given’.¹¹⁹ On 11 February, during the first meeting of GEN 168, it was agreed that, since they did not constitute a risk, ‘the activities of movements of the extreme right could be left out of the account’.¹²⁰ Although future vetting forms and government pronouncements would include the dual threats of fascists and communists, it was evident from the start that unofficially to Whitehall and Downing Street the communists constituted the only viable danger. The main reason for focusing on communist subversion came from the belief of many in government that the Soviet Union was engaging in a ‘campaign against this country’.¹²¹ A memo from the FO to MI5 the previous year already expressed this mindset. Harold Caccia, future permanent undersecretary of state, wrote, ‘Another question that occurs to me is the lessons to be learnt about the steps which Russians are likely to take to penetrate our own governmental organizations.’¹²²

Throughout Whitehall, the need for heightened security measures was readily apparent by 1947. The current vetting procedures were solely reliant on the records of the security service. MI5 typically only had records on applicants if they held public membership in the CPGB or were a known fellow traveller. Such was the case for John Strachey, who was a communist sympathiser in the 1930s.¹²³ The red-baiting likes of Waldron Smithers and Lord Beaverbrook were not the only ones who were apprehensive of this particular cabinet member; MI5 kept tabs on Strachey until 1950. This method of surveillance only identified known communists and ‘Russian sympathisers’. It left undetected covert members of the CPGB – like Alan Nunn May – and so-called drawing-room communists. This posed a major problem to the members of the working committee of GEN 183. They ascertained that the CPGB actively discouraged some potential members from joining, since it believed that certain individuals, with a hidden allegiance, could infiltrate sensitive positions in government departments. Another concern GEN 183 faced was that, with CPGB membership not illegal, prohibiting persons of that legitimate political party from government service remained a questionable issue. These dual threats of known CPGB members and their covert allies were considered a serious risk, thus an overhaul of the entire vetting process was endorsed:

The range of information which would be of interest to the communist organization is wide. First and foremost come military secrets, including scientific development such as atomic research, radar, etc. and industrial intelligence bearing on our war potential. But this does not by any means exhaust the vulnerable area: information may be sought about government policy or intentions in almost any field, either by the Russian government or by the Communist Party at home, and the leakage of economic or purely industrial information may be no less serious. If effective counter-measures are to be taken, they must, therefore, cover a wide field.¹²⁴

In determining how to deal with known communists, it was decided that individuals who adhere to a Marxist-Leninist ideology held divided loyalties – which might in certain scenarios turn to active disloyalty. Civil servants needed undivided allegiance to the state, so barring known communists from government service appeared necessary. Although not all communists could be considered disloyal or Soviet agents, ‘there is no way of separating the sheep from the goats, at least until the damage has been done or suspicion is aroused’. Because of logistical restraints, it was calculated that ‘to debar communist[s] from all employment’ was impractical, though not immoral.¹²⁵ The governmental branches in which they were to be excluded were: the Cabinet Office, service departments, the Ministry of Defence, the FO, the Home Office, departments of scientific and industrial research, and the Control Office.

Negative vetting – meaning investigations of individuals who were in such governmental fields or potential prospects had their backgrounds screened – was the recommendation of the full subversive activities committee to the prime minister. Minister of Defence A.V. Alexander had reservations on procedure practicalities that GEN 168 endorsed, but he expressed to Attlee ‘on security grounds it is arguable that we ought to go further’.¹²⁶ The prime minister’s response had little equivocal terminology attached to it. He wrote back to Alexander, ‘I agree. We cannot afford to take risks here, and the general public will support us.’ Emphasising the red threat, but also politically covering himself, he ended the letter with, ‘Action should be taken in regard to fascists as well as communists although the former are feeble.’¹²⁷ The instituting of Attlee’s ‘purge procedures’ were purely an anti-communist response, even though few individuals in government wished to describe it as such, in fear of negative connotations this would invoke with the general public.

On 15 March 1948, in the House of Commons, Attlee publicly announced the introduction of governmental vetting. In his opening statement he defended this action by stating Communist Party membership or associating with it calls into question the loyalty of individuals to the UK. Therefore, communists were banned from governmental positions whose nature was ‘vital to the security of the state’. When questioned on how far the purge would extend, Attlee replied it would ‘extend everywhere where important secret matters have to be covered’.¹²⁸ Communist MP William Gallacher sarcastically mocked Attlee during the announcement. In an ironic gesture, Gallacher started singing ‘The Red Flag’, which caused an uproar in the Commons.¹²⁹ One of the bitterest indictments of the new security procedures came from a member of Attlee’s own party. John Platts-Mills, the ‘Lost Sheep’ who a month later would be expelled from the Labour Party, asked: ‘In view of the prime minister’s beginning of a purge of communists, is there any reason why he should not go on to Jews and socialists?’ Attlee matter-of-factly responded, ‘because Jews and socialists have a loyalty to this country’. Then he added, ‘that is not so with many communists, and some fellow travellers’.¹³⁰

The divided response to Attlee’s announcement brought about a parliamentary debate on what many press headlines were already terming the ‘Communist Purge’. Notwithstanding the criticism from the two CPGB members, in the Commons, pushback against the purge announcement came mostly from within the Labour Party. Standing in opposition to the new measures, Labour MP Harold Davies stated, ‘We are being driven hysterically to believe that Britain is in danger from communists and fellow travellers.’ Davies added, ‘I will fight to the last against this. This is demand for unnatural power, a witch hunting campaign, a claim for power which will rot the socialist party.’¹³¹ Davies proposed a motion backed by forty-one additional Labour MPs that condemned Attlee’s statement and argued, ‘it constitutes a departure from the principles of democracy and civil liberty’.¹³² Unlike with Labour, broad support for Attlee’s announcement came from the Conservative Party in Westminster. However, some Conservative MPs did attempt to use the occasion to jab at Labour. Charles Mott-Radclyffe, the Conservative MP representing Windsor, while strongly supportive of the purge, attempted to use the debate over it as a platform to accuse John Strachey, then minister of food, of being ‘tempted to embrace the hammer and sickle’.¹³³

Even though deeply involved with drafting the framework for the procedures, the security service had a negative reaction to Attlee’s announcement of them. ‘None of us liked it’, Liddell stated in his diary, ‘as it created the impression that [MI5] had been bungling for years and that the Labour government were now going to see our activities were supervised.’ After listening to Attlee’s words, Liddell wrote that it gave the direct impression that the security service was effectively now the ‘whipping boy’ for the previous failures. ‘The whole tone of the speech gives the impression that appalling stupiditys [sic] have been committed by the security authorities in the past.’¹³⁴

As with the Labour Party, the various trade unions who represented civil servants reacted in a mixed way to the recent security measures. Speaking in support of the new vetting procedures, Independent MP and parliamentary secretary for the Civil Service Clerical Association (CSCA) William Brown stated, ‘The communist objective, the communist method, and the communist morality make them dangerous to any existing society, and that society is entitled to take measures for its own defence.’¹³⁵ Brown attested during the Commons debate that the CSCA, a union representing civil servants, would support the anti-communist measures as well. This proved not to be the case. CSCA General Secretary L.C. White declared that Attlee’s new policy was a serious and dangerous step which would lead government employees to lie and cover up their political affiliations. Backing the prime minister’s decision was the National Association of Women Civil Servants (NAWCS). Its general secretary expressed concerns over interference with the freedom of the individual, arguing it was potentially dangerous but agreeing that considering the dangers of the present day, ‘full measures’ must be taken. Resistance in the overall trade union movement remained minimal. A conference of the TUC, which included leaders representing nearly 200 trade unions, rejected a motion calling for the repeal of the government’s security measures by a card vote of 134,640 to 73,819.¹³⁶ However, a later vote at the TUC annual meeting in September on a motion criticising the fact that union officers were prohibited from representing accused civil servants was much closer.¹³⁷ The consensus of both the Labour Party and the trade unions was a shaky and qualified yes to Attlee’s new security procedures. Yet public talk of witch hunts and the possibility of an emerging police state worried many. Cognisant of such concerns and nervous about the reputation of the security service, Liddell pointed out to Attlee ‘that in the minds of the press and the public we [MI5] appear as a bunch of irresponsible autocrats who, without authority, were empowered to victimise civil servants’. The prime minister showed no sympathy over the agency’s image, saying such a matter ‘was to some extent unavoidable’.¹³⁸ Nevertheless, when government actions were taken in the future, none were so publicised.

Once established, the purge procedures functioned through questioning workers regarding communist affiliations and confronting them with accusations. The information gathered for the formal employee interview came mostly from the security service, although the suspect would not be privy to the evidence assembled against them; MI5 worried that sources could be compromised otherwise.¹³⁹ Then a determination was made if the individual needed transferring to another governmental department or dismissed outright from their position. While the suspect had the right to appeal this decision, they were not allowed to have representation present from their civil service union. Concerns from MI5 about the procedures increased shortly after they were instituted. The massive pool of civil servants needing vetting totalled 300,000, with an additional 50,000 being added annually.¹⁴⁰ The sheer logistics of reviewing numerous files and searching for potential suspects strained the resources of MI5.¹⁴¹ The vetting of so many individuals stretched the agency to its ‘utmost limit’. In June, Roger Hollis lamented that it was placing an ‘intolerable burden upon the Security Service’.¹⁴² Hollis, MI5’s chief representative on the Committee on Positive Vetting, begged for the number of people requiring vetting to be kept as low as possible.¹⁴³ Thus the major contributing factor of limiting the purge to only sections of the civil service was not a political decision but more a practical one.¹⁴⁴ Simply put, MI5 did not have the resources to monitor communists throughout the entire civil service. Also, this now routine vetting forced limited resources away from investigating espionage cases that MI5’s leadership deemed far more threatening.

Adding to the security service’s consternation was the scope of the vetting; the purge ‘seems to be extending itself outside the prime minister’s ruling’.¹⁴⁵ Overzealous department heads were taking the initiative in hunting for communists without MI5’s involvement. This eagerness extended to members of Attlee’s own cabinet. When speaking to Solly Zuckerman – prominent scientist and later chief scientific advisor to Harold Wilson – Herbert Morrison bluntly asked him if ‘you [are] by not any chance fooling around with these communists?’ In a later meeting with Liddell to discuss Zuckerman’s possible CPGB membership, Morrison ‘was seriously perturbed’ when Liddell stated there was not sufficient evidence to purge Zuckerman from his current position.¹⁴⁶ In Whitehall, as MI5 feared, a ‘purge atmosphere’ took hold in certain departments. Such concerns were at the highest levels of the agency; as early as February 1949, Director General of MI5 Percy Sillitoe confessed to his deputy ‘that he was concerned about the purge’ which ‘might be going too far’.¹⁴⁷ A geographical region not affected by the purge was Northern Ireland. Inspector-General of the Royal Ulster Constabulary Richard Pim relayed to MI5 that since ‘very few civil servants were members of the Communist Party’, the new vetting procedures had not been extended there.¹⁴⁸

Not surprisingly, alongside MI5 officers, the CPGB leadership held grave concerns over the new purge atmosphere. They adopted a bunker mentality and prepared for the worst. The party began destroying its records, registration forms and membership lists with names of party members working in the civil service, the General Post Office (GPO) and government factories.¹⁴⁹ Although seemingly a paranoid response, this practice was in retrospect a wise decision. A solution introduced by Sillitoe to elevate the massive workload of the security service was the concept of vetting ‘from the outside’. Sillitoe boasted that MI5 held ‘an almost full list of the membership (numbering 40,000)’ of the CPGB, including details of ‘age, sex and employment’ in addition to ‘a virtually complete list … about 3,500’ of members in the Communist Youth League (CYL). With this wealth of information, it could quickly cross-check these lists for potential suspects in the civil service.¹⁵⁰ In response to the new government vetting process the CPGB carried out its own ‘strict review of membership’ to identify informers. It worked from the assumption that all telephone lines at CPGB locations were tapped by MI5, so all calls likely to reveal names and addresses of party members were ordered to be made from outside telephones. The general mood was one of ‘depression and of [the] feeling that the party had lost the initiative’.¹⁵¹

Ann George, private secretary to Education Minister George Tomlinson, became the first person officially purged under the new procedures. In April, the permanent secretary of her department gave Tomlinson a letter stating she had twenty-four hours to answer formally whether she was a communist. She refused to either admit to or deny the charge.¹⁵² The episode reminded many Britons of the American experience of HUAC and the dreaded term ‘witch hunt’. The case of E.J. Hick, a clerical officer who had worked in the air ministry since 1939, also generated negative press attention for the vetting process. Congruent with his post in the ministry, he held the position of president of the CSCA – the trade union of civil servants that denounced the new vetting procedures. Even though Hick’s CPGB membership was commonly known for numerous years, he was forced on leave from his job in June. In September, the purge removed Dr Cabot Seton Bull, a leading atomic research scientist working at Harwell Laboratory (known officially as the Atomic Energy Research Establishment), from his position. Bull had already resigned his CPGB party membership before entering government work. In a move that did little to aid Bull’s case, CPGB General Secretary Harry Pollitt claimed he did not know anything about Bull.¹⁵³ To many Britons, this blanket denial was just a form of communists protecting one of their most valuable agents. The purge moved to the FO in January 1949, when a clerical officer employed in the archive department was suspended from her job for her CPGB membership.¹⁵⁴

In October, the New York Times reported that a London-based comedienne found the ‘Communist Purge’ no laughing matter.¹⁵⁵ Beryl Lund, a member of the left-wing Unity Theatre in north London, who also worked as a junior clerical post in the Ministry of Supply, was removed from her post after she was accused of associating with communists. The move seemed suspicious to some, since the play Lund was currently acting in at the Unity Theatre criticised the purge. The production, entitled ‘What’s Left?’, which ran over 100 performances during the summer of 1948, mirrored the concern of many of the populace about the perceived red-baiting and the strict anti-communist stance of the Labour government. Cynics viewed the decision to ‘purge’ her as being politically motivated. Afterwards, Lund stated she found it difficult to appeal against her suspension when she knew neither the charges against her nor the evidence supporting them. Ultimately, after being placed in a ‘dead-end job’, she migrated to Italy. Even with the publicising of these high-profile cases, for sheer numbers the purge was disappointing to the likes of rabid right-wing anti-communists such as Waldron Smithers. When questioned by Smithers in January 1949, Attlee conceded that only seventeen cases had gone to the appeals tribunal. Six other cases were considered proven since the suspects elected not to appeal and ten more were currently under review.¹⁵⁶ From the political left and right anxieties over the purging placed the new vetting procedures under the piercing spotlight of public scrutiny that the government neither appreciated nor expected.

In addition to the civil service, the need to ‘purge’ communists from particular industrial sectors was agreed upon as well. By 1949, MI5 had ‘for some time been anxious’ about the security risks that private firms engaging with classified information created. Herbert Morrison agreed with this assessment, arguing that the ‘present methods of excluding untrustworthy persons from secret government work were not sufficient’.¹⁵⁷ Defence Minister A.V. Alexander concurred, arguing that communists employed in the private sector were ‘as dangerous as the employment of persons of doubtful loyalty in government departments’, since contractors had access to government secrets. Despite these urgings to expand the purge, apprehension remained after the negative reaction that accompanied the announcement of civil service vetting. Warnings about how to proceed were numerous. Norman Brook counselled Attlee that this expansion of the purging procedures brought ‘substantial risks of a political outcry’ and recommended to the prime minister ‘to move rather cautiously and not to give the Security Service a free rein in hounding out suspects’.¹⁵⁸ A GEN 168 committee meeting report mirrored this unease. ‘There must be no question of a witch-hunt which could be represented as a move to “purge” all communists from work on government contracts.’¹⁵⁹ While the need to conceal the purge’s expansion was duly noted and generally accepted, the existing situation was estimated as grossly insufficient and thus needed changing, despite the political risks. As the process stood, MI5’s only course of action when presented with a security risk in the private sector was to attempt to convince the firm employing the suspect to move them to a less sensitive position which did not involve governmental secrets.¹⁶⁰ A new measure needed enacting since this was not always possible. In 1949, the cabinet agreed that the minister of supply and the Admiralty – the ministries most private firms contracted by the government reported to – now had the right to ‘require’ firms to ‘exclude undesirable persons’ from secret governmental work.¹⁶¹ Unlike with the announced civil service vetting protocols, there was no appeal process for individuals targeted for dismissal. It was likely this, combined with the dread of the probable political fallout of increasing the purge from civil servants to private governmental contractors, that kept Attlee from publicly announcing this expansion of security vetting. Currently the number of employees removed through this ‘industrial purge’ is still undisclosed by the British government.

Despite criticism from various corners – trade unions, MI5, Labour Party members and the public at large – the need to introduce even more vetting became apparent in the latter half of 1949. To Western cold warriors, the communist threat exponentially grew that year with the news of the Soviet Union obtaining the atomic bomb and the success of the Chinese Communist Revolution. Remarking on the latter, Liddell called the revelation that an ‘existential threat’ to the UK now controlled the destructive power of the atom ‘the event of the year’.¹⁶² In terms of the timing, both British and American experts wrongly estimated that the Soviet Union was at least two more years away from gaining nuclear capability. A likely reason to many in London and Washington for this rapid technological advancement by the Soviet Union was the discovery of communist agents who had previously worked on or close to the Manhattan project. A German-born naturalised British citizen named Klaus Fuchs soon made headlines in just such a case. A theoretical physicist stationed at Los Alamos Laboratory during the Second World War, Fuchs fell under suspicion of the FBI and MI5 in September 1949. Through information from a top-secret counterintelligence project, codenamed Venona, it came to light that he passed atomic secrets to the Soviets. After tracking and watching Fuchs during November and December, MI5 picked him up for questioning and obtained a confession from him in January 1950. With his arrest came alarmed calls from both sides of the Atlantic to tighten security and vetting procedures. Evidence suggested that the security service had ignored earlier warning signs regarding Fuchs’s loyalty. MI5 files showed that on two occasions during the 1930s sources identified him as a communist – but both were disregarded.¹⁶³ The political ramifications were terrible; the arrest of Fuchs showed that a lapse of British security aided the Soviet atomic bomb programme.

The susceptibility of communists to Soviet recruitment was now a foregone conclusion. Future British Ambassador to the Soviet Union Geoffrey Harrison, then stationed in Moscow as counsellor, warned MI5, stating ‘Russia’s two weapons [are] the Red Army and communism, but for the time being … she preferred to use the latter’.¹⁶⁴ In the security service’s opinion, the Soviet Union was effectually waging war against the British state through fifth columnists, only until it saw fit to send in the Red Army. US intelligence agents and Washington policymakers agreed with this assessment. They went ‘so far to suggest that American secrets should not be developed in Britain, as she might well be overrun before the Americans could come to her assistance’.¹⁶⁵ Liddell noted if war with the Soviets did come, ‘the Americans are taking the somewhat irritating attitude that we [the UK] may well be blotted out in the first few hours’.¹⁶⁶

Despite the potential public outcry, stricter measures were needed to halt the flow of sensitive information into the eager hands of the Soviet intelligence services. In April 1950, GEN 183 established the Committee for Positive Vetting. Chaired by John Winnifrith, its purpose was to initiate a system where individuals were asked either through forms or personal interviews if they were currently or previously connected to communist organisations. This did not alter the basic policy of removing communists from their positions, which went untouched from its enactment in 1948; what expanded were the methods for detecting suspects.¹⁶⁷ Contrasted with negative vetting, where doubt was usually established before an investigation was officially sanctioned, with positive vetting everyone in a department or section was forced to undergo the process – even, ironically, Winnifrith himself.¹⁶⁸ Cabinet Secretary Norman Brook described the process of positive vetting to Attlee as ‘primarily a change of attitudes and methods’ in checking the reliability of individuals. While the purge procedures instituted a sweep through the files of Special Branch and MI5 for damaging information on employees, positive vetting involved active investigations of all individuals in a targeted governmental department. This method mirrored those practised by the US government, which pressured the British to adopt a similar security formula.

In fact, US pressure was the strongest force pushing the UK to adopt stricter vetting procedures, especially in the field of atomic power after the discovery of Fuchs.¹⁶⁹ Exacerbating the American calls was the news in September 1950 of the defection of Bruno Pontecorvo, a colleague of Fuchs, and later the next year of the unexplained disappearances of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.¹⁷⁰ From 1950 to 1951 this external pressure was omnipresent during the deliberations in Whitehall over positive vetting. In June 1951, after strong urgings from Washington, representatives from the US, the UK and Canada held a tripartite conference on atomic energy security. The summit’s main focus was to set stronger safeguards on nuclear secrets held by the three nations. Since the British government sought assistance from the Americans in the field of nuclear technology, it sought to placate them as much as possible. The report on the conference recommendations passed on to GEN 183 from Winnifrith’s committee stressed the importance of complying with American wishes in terms of security. It stressed that vetting needed to specifically target communists to satisfy their ally:

We want the American atomic secrets and we won’t get them unless they modify the McMahon Act. Officials have already offered the procedure now proposed and nothing short of that offer and the direct question to the candidate about communist associations is from the Americans’ point of view a sine qua non [essential condition] will secure their co-operation. It is fair to add that, even if we confirm the offer, there is no guarantee that the McMahon Act will be modified and that we will get their atomic secrets.¹⁷¹

In October 1950 Winnifrith’s committee recommended the new procedure to the full cabinet, arguing it reinforced ‘the duty of the public service to take all reasonable steps to check the reliability of persons holding vital posts’. However, it stated the process would not be infallible; since ‘these enquiries may reveal open association with communism, they will fail to detect the really dangerous crypto-communists’.¹⁷² The security service shared this opinion. MI5 agreed in principle that communists in many areas of government needed exposing and removal. Yet its major concern rested again in the logistical strain the proposed positive vetting procedures would impose on the agency. MI5 feared that it left few resources for the ‘hunt’ of secret communists and deep-cover Soviet agents that vetting processes were unlikely to uncover. To alleviate this burden, a GEN 183 meeting chaired by Attlee agreed that departments could seek the assistance of ‘local police’ in investigating and vetting if MI5 did not have the resources needed to ‘reach a certain conclusion’ on an individual.¹⁷³

Alongside the strain on the already overworked security service, another stumbling block to positive vetting came in the form of the aforementioned fear of the people’s reaction. A constant worry that kept arising when reviewing the recommendations made at the tripartite conference was that the British populace would not accept them. The recommendations were for instituting the methods used in the US, which already had negative connotations after the execution of the Rosenbergs. If announced publicly, the government would undoubtedly face criticism. Since communism was legal and ‘there are many people who still believe – or say they believe – that adherence to the communist creed is not incompatible with the loyalty to their own country’, the measures would be viewed as an ‘un-British inquisition’ against specific individuals for holding private beliefs.¹⁷⁴ The solution to this dilemma agreed upon by GEN 183 and Attlee was the same as in regards to the industrial purge. The British government did not announce the new measures.

The defeat of Labour in the 1951 General Election left it for Winston Churchill’s Conservative government to implement positive vetting. The transition of power did little initially to undermine the vetting process. By 1955, the total number of civil servants known or suspected to be communists and assessed by MI5 as security risks totalled 3,400 – with a third of those working as postal employees.¹⁷⁵ The number of dismissals from government positions of the purge procedures in 1948 until the mid-1950s was 124,¹⁷⁶ though some have suspected the number of communists purged was substantially higher.¹⁷⁷ In comparison 2,700 were discharged under similar procedures in the US between 1947 and 1956.¹⁷⁸

The singular target of the vetting procedures installed in the UK during the early Cold War period was communists. Early in the process the British government attempted to claim these measures were put in place to halt all subversives from having access to secret information and policymaking political posts. However, in private discussions, it was revealed that it considered the only viable threat as coming from those individuals who were associated with communist ideology. In pinpointing reasons for dismissing, transferring or refusing posts in government, the main consideration that effected the decision was if a person held affiliations with communism. Even though thousands of Britons were members of the CPGB, and while communists served in the House of Commons, the British policy towards individuals with this political viewpoint was that all were potential traitors and fifth columnists lying in wait. The key considerations restraining the vetting process and the purge had more to do with matters of public support and logistics than with concern for the working rights of accused communists. In the eyes of the British establishment, these ‘would-be traitors’ had already chosen the wrong side in an ideological war.

Restrictions of visas for communists and fellow travellers

In 1952, Attorney General James P. McGranery gave notice to the press that he was revoking Charlie Chaplin’s right to re-entry to the US.¹⁷⁹ McGranery ordered the Immigration and Naturalization Service to determine whether the famous actor should be refused travel rights in the US for being subversive. Called to testify in front of HUAC during its investigation regarding Hollywood, in 1947 Chaplin had emphatically denied being a communist and holding any such affiliations with the Communist Party. McGranery’s order caused an uproar across the UK since Chaplin was a British subject. Alongside concerns centred on Chaplin’s case, the Internal Security Act of 1950 (commonly known as the McCarran Act) was denounced throughout the British Isles.¹⁸⁰ The law authorised US consular officers to bar foreigners from entering the US on the mere suspicion that they may be sympathetic towards the communist cause. Despite the adverse reaction to these American measures from inside the UK, comparable methods were carried out in the UK as well. Less famous but similar incidences to that of Chaplin occurred in the UK. In 1954, the UK refused to extend a work permit for an American psychologist employed at the University of Birmingham. The reason British authorities gave was that in the US he was wanted for questioning on his alleged membership in the Communist Party.¹⁸¹ Although pressure from the US contributed to this case, it is only one example of communist political affiliations being used to determine if individuals were allowed entry into the UK. Although this particular case occurred under a Conservative government, the precedent for such measures began under Labour. In the early Cold War period, like the US, the Attlee government also barred entry to communists and suspected fellow travellers, but in a more ad-hoc fashion. Unlike in the US, no new laws were passed to codify these restrictions on communists. The reason for this difference was not that the British government worried less about communists but that it held no such need for new legislation to bar undesirables. In the UK, the Aliens Restriction Act of 1914, enacted during the First World War but extended in 1919, gave complete power over foreigners’ rights to visit and be admitted to the home secretary.

Curiously, as in the realm of vetting, members of the Labour government were more passionate in seeing the deportations of suspected communist agitators than was the security service. In 1947, Attlee personally sought the deportation of Frank Piazza, a waiter who was dismissed from service for a dispute over whose responsibility it was to carry dirty dishes back to the kitchen. Piazza’s firing caused around 700 of the catering-staff employed at the Savoy Hotel, where he had worked, to go on strike. The timing of the strike happened to coincide with the wedding of the future Queen Elizabeth. Attlee viewed this as not a simple coincidence but more a communist plot to disrupt the royal nuptials. Since Piazza was an Italian emigrant, Attlee asked the deputy director of MI5 why he had not already been deported as an ‘undesirable alien’. Guy Liddell had to remind the prime minister that it was not the policy of the Home Office to halt the naturalisation process for members of the Communist Party.¹⁸²

An underlining security concern, which held a foreign policy dimension for the British government, was the efforts and underlying objectives of the World Peace Council (WPC) and its affiliated front organisations. Founded indirectly by the Soviet Union, in 1950 the WPC was the centrepiece of a Soviet-sponsored attempt to generate a worldwide ‘peace movement’ whose dual missions were for ‘building up the image of the USSR as the champion for peace while subverting the military preparedness of the NATO through manipulation of the latent desire for peace among these populations’.¹⁸³ Alongside the WPC, the government classified numerous other ‘peace’ groups as thinly veiled communist fronts. Concerned that the messages of these organisations could potentially resonate in a large segment of the British population, Attlee sought ways to hinder the peace movement in any possible way, short of banning their functions and declaring them illegal. To stymie involvement and partition in the peace campaign, the government used the informal measure of denying entry visas to foreign attendees and guests of the WPC and other associated organisations. The WPC announced its intention to hold in Sheffield the second annual World Peace Festival in 1950. In response to this announcement, the cabinet agreed with the suggestion of Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin to ‘do everything possible to cripple the conference’. Giving a widely publicised speech on the upcoming festival at the Foreign Press Association on 1 November, Attlee articulated the government’s position in the strongest of terms:

Of course the communists say that this conference is not organized by them. Communist activities generally are camouflaged in this country, they usually get a few respectable but misguided people to provide the sheep’s clothing … We shall not deny admission to people who in good faith may wish to attend this conference, but we are not willing to throw wide our doors to those who seek to come here to subvert our institutions, to seduce our fellow-citizens from their natural allegiance and their daily duties and to make propaganda for those who call us cannibals and warmongers.¹⁸⁴

Asked why he did not simply ban the upcoming WPC event, Attlee maintained that the government did not have the legal right to do so. When a question on this topic was raised in the Commons, Home Secretary James Chuter Ede agreed with Attlee’s legal assessment. The law as it stood did not allow the banning of such an organised event. However, when the international delegates arrived in Dover, forty of the sixty-five delegates and their staff were turned back and refused entry into the UK based on the fact they might be ‘detrimental to internal security’.¹⁸⁵ British authorities also denied visas to all the members of the committee running the conference. However, in a Machiavellian move the government allowed a small number of festival delegates entry so it would not appear its decisions were politically motivated.¹⁸⁶ Effectively the Attlee government banned the meeting through the roundabout but already established process of visa control. With little recourse, the planned Sheffield Festival was moved to Warsaw. Reacting to this, the British Peace Committee organised a thousand-person protest in Trafalgar Square.¹⁸⁷ In the House of Commons, questions were raised about the issue concerning human rights, yet the press and the general public showed little interest in the entire situation.

Official Committee on Communism (Home) and the IRD

The negative response to the purge procedures did not dampen the anti-communist spirit in the Labour government. The year 1951 saw the establishment of a new committee to coordinate government efforts to ‘combat communist activities in the United Kingdom’.¹⁸⁸ Sparking its formation was fear that domestic communists would attempt to halt British economic recovery and even damage the rearmament efforts which followed the start of the Korean War in June 1950.¹⁸⁹ Entitled the Official Committee on Communism (Home) and more commonly known as the Brook Committee, its objectives, as listed in its founding guidelines, were:

To focus all available intelligence about communist activities in the United Kingdom, and to recommend to ministers what action can properly be taken to counter such activities.

---

To give any necessary guidance on administrative and policy questions to the briefing group of Information Officers handling anti-communist information material for use in the United Kingdom.

To co-ordinate any anti-communist activities in this country which may be approved by ministers (apart from normal information activities undertaken by the group mentioned in paragraph (b) above).¹⁹⁰

The committee was a mirror image of two other committees established in 1949, the Official Committee on Communism (Overseas) and the Ministerial Committee on Communism, both established to organise anti-communist activities overseas by the Labour government in December 1949. Initially, ministers rejected the establishment of a solely domestic anti-communist committee, ‘on the ground that so long as the British Communist Party remains a legal political organization the government cannot undertake officially an action to discredit it’.¹⁹¹ By the end of 1950, with the increase of international tensions, the Ministerial Committee changed its mind on the need for, and also on the legality of, such a committee for safeguarding the home front from the communist threat. The memorandum defending the creation of the Brook Committee stated:

Communism is a world-wide force directed from the centre in the interests of Russian imperialism and we cannot treat communism in the United Kingdom as a democratic political issue detached from the main Soviet threat to our existence. It is part and parcel of that threat, and there are a number of manifestations of communist activity in the United Kingdom which are in the nature of a conspiracy organized against our national survival … It is because the activities of communism in this field have not only been intensified in recent months but have shown signs of achieving some success, and because in the present situation the consequences of their achieving even greater success would be so grave, that we bring this subject again to the attention of the ministers.¹⁹²

The Brook Committee’s initial targets of investigation for communist infiltration were ‘four particularly important’ subsections of the population – the armed forces, industrial workers, education and scientists. Despite the initial reluctance to set up the committee, it proved quite popular around the halls of government. Prior to the committee’s first meeting, Norman Brook had already received a request by the air ministry to investigate a Soviet radio monitoring station in Middlesex that ‘represents an unacceptable risk to the security of our air defence arrangements’.¹⁹³ Brook was also offered assistance from the FO with regards to anti-communist propaganda and activities that might prove ‘applicable in the home field’, alongside ‘suggestions about the official machinery that may be required at home’.¹⁹⁴

The committee worked closely with an entity set inside the FO with the unassuming name of the Information Research Department. Sanctioned by Ernest Bevin and created and headed by Labour MP and FO undersecretary Christopher Mayhew in 1948, the IRD’s purpose was to conduct an ‘ideological offensive against Stalinism’.¹⁹⁵ A protégé of Bevin, Mayhew was a driving force of Labourite anti-communism. Elected to parliament in 1945, he lost his seat in the 1950 General Election. With the death of Bevin in 1951, Mayhew won the byelection to fill his seat. In a message supporting Mayhew, Attlee praised his selection and maintained that Mayhew would uphold the assertion that the ‘Labour government’s determined policy of co-operation in defence of liberty and the raising of general world standards is the only effective answer to communism’.¹⁹⁶ Indeed, Mayhew was the epitome of the cold warrior archetype, something that did not go unnoticed by his fellow party members. During a meeting of the PLP, a left-wing MP attacked Mayhew for ‘seeing reds under the bed’.¹⁹⁷ Initially, the IRD focused on exporting anti-communist propaganda to foreign audiences. By the 1950s, it sought to manipulate public opinion inside the UK as well. As Mayhew describes, ‘At home, our service was offered to, and accepted by, large numbers of selected MPs, journalists, trade union leaders and others.’¹⁹⁸ After the creation of the Brook Committee, both organs sought to synergise and coordinate their efforts in propaganda efforts in the UK. While the IRD and the Brook Committee worked to influence the worldviews of Britons, both sought to hide this mission from the general public. As pointed out previously, after the ill-fated reception of the negative vetting protocols, government officials feared a backlash if new anti-communist measures were brought to light. This was the case with regards to the Brook Committee, whose mere existence was highly classified. The committee remained ‘top secret’ even after the downgrading of the Overseas Committee to ‘secret’.

Fielding a staff of experts on the Soviet Union and Marxist-Leninist ideology, the IRD compiled large numbers of facts and figures on the negative components of communism and human rights violations of the Soviet Union. Historian Robert Conquest found employment early in his career as one such staffer.¹⁹⁹ In one of its earliest domestic endeavours, the IRD, through the contribution of Conquest and others, produced a series of ‘Speaker’s Notes’ that were offered to ‘anti-Stalinist’ MPs and government ministers. These contained facts and talking points which were anti-communist in nature or countered general communist arguments.²⁰⁰ In addition to this inter-government information initiative, the IRD reached out to the leadership of the country’s trade unions. Its members kept frequent contact with Herbert Tracey, the TUC publicity director. Via Tracey, Christopher Mayhew arranged ‘for the dissemination inside the Labour movement at home of anti-communist propaganda, which we are producing for overseas consumption’.²⁰¹ Historian Andrew Defty attests that the FO had few reservations about directing anti-communist propaganda inside the UK. Defty wrote that in the postwar period ‘there was a growing concern in Whitehall about the depth of pro-Soviet sentiment in Britain’, thus justifying IRD conducting internal operations.²⁰² In September 1951 the IRD expanded their domestic activities, opening an official ‘home desk’ to focus solely on shifting public opinion in the UK.

One curious anecdote involving the IRD is the reception and retention of what is now generally termed ‘Orwell’s List’. In 1949, Eric Blair, commonly known by his pen name George Orwell, forwarded a list of thirty-eight writers whom he classified as crypto-communists to a friend, Celia Kirwin, working at the IRD.²⁰³ Initially, Kirwin, the assistant of Robert Conquest, visited Orwell while he lay ill in a sanatorium in Gloucestershire. During their discussion, she asked him for possible contacts among Orwell’s circle that might prove useful for the IRD. Instead, he later wrote back to Kirwin offering to provide a list of names of individuals whom the department should avoid. Orwell stated these individuals were untrustworthy and should not be employed by the government and were especially not fit for working with the IRD. Subsequently, in another project, the IRD funded and promoted foreign-language editions of Orwell’s Animal Farm. Domestically, the IRD created their own publishing house entitled Ampersand – which over the span of three decades published twenty books. The department also dealt with more established publishers to reach larger audiences.²⁰⁴

Contacts between the IRD and the Brook Committee were quite frequent. Members in both sought to find new ways to spread the anti-communist message throughout the UK. In a curious proposal, they sought to use satire as a tool to disseminate their political message. During a 1952 meeting of the committee, J.W. Nichollis of the FO recommended approaching either popular comedian Jimmy Edwards or someone similar with ‘a view of introducing anti-communist themes into their programmes on the BBC’. Although the idea garnered serious consideration inside the committee, it rejected it since ‘there was a danger that the use of the BBC for this purpose might eventually be traced back to the committee’.²⁰⁵ However, one proposal that was enacted was the dissemination of anti-communist literature and pamphlets inside the various trade unions.

Although the committee frequently met during the first two years of its existence, by late 1952, after the Conservatives took power, it began to lose steam, and many in Whitehall questioned its actual relevance. During this time, its own chairman, Norman Brook, wrote that while the committee ‘has reviewed a fairly wide field of possible anti-communist activities in the United Kingdom the positive results of all this have not been spectacular’.²⁰⁶ While it would only meet twice in 1953, the Brook Committee did escape the fate of the Ministerial Committee on Communism, which the new Conservative government disbanded after coming to power. When the Brook Committee convened again on 1 December 1954 it focused on communist involvement in the London dock strikes. After discussing the strike and the security service’s assessment of it, the overall consensus of the committee was that although communists were actively involved in the industrial action, they played no role in its instigation and ‘the fact that the communists took part in the dock strike made very little difference’. Regarding future activities of the committee, Brook suggested since ‘there seemed to be no increase in the communist menace’, he saw no reason to continue regular meetings ‘except when they were required for a particular purpose’.²⁰⁷ In 1960 the minister of defence and the chiefs of staff viewed the Brook Committee as having lost its usefulness. They relayed to Brook that there was little reason for them to be represented on the committee and only wished to attend if ‘communist attempts to penetrate the armed forces’ were on the agenda.²⁰⁸

The Official Committee on Communism (Home) continued until the late 1960s, yet it had not conducted a meeting since 1962. In 1969, it was formally reconstituted as the Official Committee on Subversion at Home.²⁰⁹ The height of the Brook Committee’s influence lasted only two years, from 1951 to 1952. Afterwards, though it continued to send out frequent reports on communist activities in the UK, it did not pursue anti-communist actions and was effectively overshadowed by the domestic activities of the IRD. As solely a propaganda instrument, the IRD’s more defined goal led to it achieving not only more tangible results but also a more lasting impact on the anti-communist agenda in the UK. After Labour was voted out of power in 1951, the IRD continued its activities under the successive Conservative governments. With the change of government, John Peck, a former wartime private secretary to Churchill, took over the reins of the IRD. The IRD’s operations did not halt until 1977 when Harold Wilson ordered it dismantled – even then, it still had over 100 journalists on nearly every national newspaper using its material, knowingly or not.²¹⁰ Ever the cold warrior Mayhew unsuccessfully lobbied Margaret Thatcher to restart the department in 1980. He called the Wilson government’s ‘suppression’ of the department ‘an outrage’ and ‘part of Labour’s softness towards communists, which has done so much damage to the country’.²¹¹

However, the closing of the IRD did not mark the end of government-sponsored propaganda. In 2007, as a response to the ‘war on terror’ and during Gordon Brown’s premiership, the Home Office christened a new department entitled the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU). Its founding goal was to shift the beliefs of young British Muslims to a more pro-Western – and thus acceptable – mindset.²¹² Brown called the battle against Islamic extremism ‘the same cultural war that had to be fought against communism from the 1940s and 50s onwards’. He made the comparison after reading Who Paid the Piper? (1999) by Frances Saunders.²¹³ The book documented how the CIA used covert methods to promote anti-communism through cultural and literary means. Observers have noted the RICU has since functioned as a new IRD.²¹⁴

Conclusion

After taking power in 1945, the Labour government systematically put in place measures to combat and curb communist influence. It sought to purge and prohibit communists from government jobs; halt their inclusion inside the democratic process; limit their ability to travel; wiretap and put under surveillance many of its own citizenry; question the patriotism and loyalty of all individuals with communist affiliations; and sought to secretly indoctrinate the British population into holding a more anti-communist viewpoint. If examining these activities solely on their own qualities, they form a narrative that describes a national government at war with a specific political ideology and willing to use a variety of measures to either disrupt or eradicate its influence inside the nation. However, when compared to the US governmental responses to communism during the same period, the British narrative is drowned out by the vastness and excesses of the American reaction. During the American red scare, the US government banned the Communist Party, jailed individuals for subversive activities, investigated the entertainment industry and purged public educators. No such ‘witch hunts’ occurred in the UK. No new laws or regulations were passed against the Communist Party and, to the lament of Waldron Smithers, neither did parliament set up a committee on un-British activities. If Attlee and his government sought to fight communism just as did their US counterparts, why did these events not occur in the UK? The answer filters down to worries over public opinion and that no additional legislative measures were necessary in the British form of government.

The legality of the CPGB made it difficult to enact direct procedures against it in the eyes of the average citizen. Established in 1920 and having representation in parliament gave the party credibility that worked against the government’s attempts to marginalise and suppress it. As shown by the discussions inside the cabinet, and various correspondences between departments, this legitimacy did lessen the drive of the government to seek ways to attack and hinder this political party or harass its members. Another factor which prohibited Labour was the overwhelming negative impression Britons held of the American red scare.

A less opportunistic motive shaped the anti-communist activities of Whitehall and Westminster. When Smithers requested that Morrison set up a parliamentary un-British activities committee, Morrison responded with a one-word answer: ‘no’. Shortly afterwards the Labour government covertly established the ‘top-secret’ Brook Committee that not only investigated communists but also actively worked against them. In 1948, when Attlee arrived in the House of Commons, he came to announce the new purge procedures, not to call for a parliamentary vote to establish them. Thus the purge became a reality without any statutory authority.²¹⁵ Subsequently, Attlee and Churchill expanded the protocols through executive orders to include private corporations and introduced positive vetting upon governmental departments without any public proclamation. With regards to restricting certain communists and fellow travellers’ entry into the UK, again the process did not need legislative oversight but only the order of the home secretary for any individual to be barred. When Ernest Bevin ordered the creation of the IRD and Christopher Mayhew directed it to indoctrinate the British public against communism, again they needed only the permission of the sitting prime minister – Clement Attlee. The absence of new anti-communist laws and statutes by the British government during this period should not be misconstrued as a sign of tolerance towards communism.

Notes

1. 1.  Ernest Bevin to Clement Attlee, 9 January 1947, TNA FO 800/476.

2. 2.  Chicago Daily Tribune, 15 May 1953, p. 5.

3. 3.  Francis Beckett wrote: ‘Morrison had been in the forefront of the battle to keep communists out of the Labour Party, becoming known as Labour’s witchfinder-general.’ F. Beckett, Clem Attlee (London, 1997), p. 303.

4. 4.  J. Hinton, ‘Self-help and socialism: The squatters’ movement of 1946’, History Workshop, 25 (1988): 100–26, at p. 101.

5. 5.  Hartley Shawcross to Clement Attlee, 16 September 1946, TNA PREM 8/227.

6. 6.  Beckett, Attlee, p. 256.

7. 7.  The Times, 16 September 1946, p. 5; The Times, 5 October 1946, p. 2.

8. 8.  C. Barnett, The Lost Victory (London, 1995), p. 212.

9. 9.  Let Us Face the Future by Labour Party Executive Committee.

10. 10.  T. Burridge, Clement Attlee (London, 1985), p. 200.

11. 11.  K. Laybourn, The Rise of Socialism in Britain (Stroud, 1997), p. 141.

12. 12.  Toye, Labour Party and Planning, p. 5.

13. 13.  J. Wood, ‘A “third way”? The Labour left, democratic socialism and the Cold War’, in Labour’s Promised Land?, ed. J. Fyrth (London, 1995), 73–87, at p. 75.

14. 14.  K. Laybourn and D. Murphy, Under the Red Flag (Stroud, 1999), p. 122.

15. 15.  P. Taylor, Britain and the Cold War (London, 1990), p. 63.

16. 16.  P Corthorn, In the Shadow of the Dictators (London, 2006), pp. 213–14; P. Corthorn, ‘Labour, the left, and the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s’, The Historical Journal, 48.1 (2005): 179–207, at p. 183.

17. 17.  D. Lomas, Intelligence, Security and the Attlee Governments, 1945–51: An Uneasy Relationship? (Manchester, 2016), p. 46.

18. 18.  Haseler, Tragedy of Labour, p. 25.

19. 19.  A. Thrope, ‘ “The only effective bulwark against reaction and revolution”: Labour and the frustration of the extreme left’, in The Failure of Political Extremism in Inter-war Britain, ed. A. Thorpe (Exeter, 1988), 11–28, at pp. 27–8.

20. 20.  J. Swift, Labour in Crisis (New York, 2001), p. 87.

21. 21.  Toye, Labour Party and the Planned, p. 57; B. Donoughue and G. Jones, Herbert Morrison (London, 1973), pp. 112–13.

22. 22.  H. Harmer, The Longman Companion to the Labour Party, 1900–1998 (London, 1999), p. 165.

23. 23.  Ernest Bevin to G.D.H. Cole, 27 January 1937, Papers of Ernest Bevin, MSS.126/EB/X/44, Modern Records Centre (henceforth MRC), Warwick University.

24. 24.  B. Jones, The Russia Complex (Manchester, 1977), p. 23.

25. 25.  Corthorn, ‘Labour, the left, and the Stalinist purges’, p. 180.

26. 26.  Jones, Russia Complex, p. 24.

27. 27.  Both men later went on to author world-renowned novels denouncing the Soviet experiment: Orwell with Animal Farm and Koestler with Darkness at Noon. Western anti-communists used the two books extensively as propaganda tools during the ensuing Cold War.

28. 28.  Corthorn, ‘Labour, the left, and the Stalinist purges’, p. 206.

29. 29.  Corthorn, ‘Labour, the left, and the Stalinist purges’, p. 187.

30. 30.  Daily Herald, 6 July 1936, p. 10.

31. 31.  C. Attlee, The Labour Party in Perspective (London, 1937), pp. 150–1.

32. 32.  Quoted in F. William, Ernest Bevin (London, 1952), p. 203.

33. 33.  War Cabinet conclusions, 21 July 1941, TNA CAB 65/19/8.

34. 34.  Derby Daily Telegraph, 16 June 1943, p. 8.

35. 35.  Daily Mirror, 15 January 1940, p. 3; Daily Herald, 21 February 1940, p. 6.

36. 36.  Birmingham Daily Gazette, 17 June 1943, p. 1.

37. 37.  New York Times, 17 June 1943, p. 3.

38. 38.  K. Harris, Attlee (London, 1982), p. 267.

39. 39.  Labour Party Annual Report 1946, p. 174.

40. 40.  Birmingham Daily Gazette, 13 June 1946, p. 2.

41. 41.  Cabinet minutes of Norman Brook, 17 November 1947, TNA CAB 195/5/66.

42. 42.  Harold Laski, The Secret Battalion (London, 1946).

43. 43.  Nicolson, Diaries and Letters, p. 130.

44. 44.  Liddell diary, 21 January 1946.

45. 45.  Gloucester Citizen, 31 May 1950, p. 12.

46. 46.  R. Aldrich, ‘Secret intelligence for a post-war world: Reshaping the British intelligence community, 1944–51’, in British Intelligence Strategy and the Cold War, 1945–51, ed. R. Aldrich (London, 1992), 14–49, at p. 33.

47. 47.  C. Attlee, As It Happened (London, 1954), p. 64.

48. 48.  Hansard, HC, vol. 448, c. 3420 (25 March 1948).

49. 49.  D. Lilleker, Against the Cold War (London, 2004), p. 87.

50. 50.  G. Orwell, ‘Burnham’s view of the contemporary world struggle’, New Leader, 29 March 1947 in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. S. Orwell and I. Angus (London, 1970), 313–25, at p. 32.

51. 51.  Liddell diary, 19 November 1949.

52. 52.  Hansard, HC, vol. 430, c. 526 (18 November 1946).

53. 53.  Hansard, HC, vol. 430, c. 526 (18 November 1946).

54. 54.  Jones, Russia Complex, p. 121.

55. 55.  Scotsman, 18 November 1946, p. 5.

56. 56.  Daily Herald, 28 June 1947, p. 1.

57. 57.  C. Andrew, The Defence of the Realm (London, 2009), p. 411.

58. 58.  Hansard, HC, vol. 427, c. 1675 (23 October 1946).

59. 59.  MI5 report on Bing, 19 November 1946, TNA KV 2/3812.

60. 60.  Liddell diary, 18 November 1946.

61. 61.  MI5 report on Bing, 19 November 1946, TNA KV 2/381.

62. 62.  MI5 report on Bing, 28 February 1947, TNA KV 2/3812.

63. 63.  Hansard, HC, vol. 433, c. 1645 (21 February 1947).

64. 64.  Maxwell Knight to Dick White, 9 May 1947, TNA KV 2/3812.

65. 65.  ‘Attack on M.I.5.’ sent to Dick White, 6 March 1947, TNA KV 2/3812; Maxwell Knight to Dick White, 28 March 1947, TNA KV 2/3812.

66. 66.  ‘Attack on M.I.5.’ sent to Dick White, 6 March 1947, TNA KV 2/3812.

67. 67.  Note by Guy Liddell, 21 May 1947, TNA KV 2/3812.

68. 68.  Pritt was already on the radar of MI5 as a potential communist subvert and it held extensive files on him dating back to 1932. See TNA KV 2/1062; KV 2/1063; KV 2/1064.

69. 69.  ‘Attack on M.I.5.’ sent to Dick White, 6 March 1947, TNA KV 2/3812.

70. 70.  ‘Lost Sheep’ file, box 4, Papers of Morgan Phillip, Labour Party Archive (henceforth (LPA), People’s History Museum, Manchester.

71. 71.  Liddell diary, 21 February 1946.

72. 72.  Daily Herald, 17 April 1948, p. 1.

73. 73.  Daily Worker, 20 April 1948, p. 1.

74. 74.  Western Morning News, 3 May 1948, p. 2.

75. 75.  Tribune, 23 April 1948, p. 2.

76. 76.  The New Statesman and Nation, 30 October 1948, p. 372.

77. 77.  Clement Attlee to Konni Zilliacus, 17 February 1946, MS Attlee dep. 31, Papers of Clement Attlee, Bodleian Library University of Oxford (henceforth MS Attlee).

78. 78.  The Diary of Hugh Gaitskell, ed. P. Williams (London, 1983), p. 453.

79. 79.  H. Morrison, An Autobiography (London, 1960), p. 322.

80. 80.  Hugh Dalton to Morgan Phillips, 1 November 1948, LPA, General Secretary’s Papers (henceforth GS), ‘Lost Sheep’ file.

81. 81.  ‘Mr. K Zilliaous. M.P.’, LPA/GS, ‘Lost Sheep’ file.

82. 82.  Christopher Mayhew to Ernest Bevin, 19 April 1949, Mayhew 4/1/2, Papers of Christopher Mayhew, King’s College London (henceforth Mayhew).

83. 83.  Belfast Newsletter, 21 June 1949, p. 5.

84. 84.  Liddell diary, 27 March 1951.

85. 85.  Speech by Morrison, issued by the Labour Party, 24 March 1950, LPA/LID/Anti-communist Propaganda 1949.

86. 86.  Daily Herald, 28 August 1952, p. 4.

87. 87.  Daily Mirror, 6 October 1952, p. 1.

88. 88.  ‘The Trojan Horse: An Open Letter from Mr. Tufton Beamish to Mr. Herbert Morrison’, pamphlet by Tufton Beamish, 1953.

89. 89.  Herbert Bowden to John McGovern, 15 May 1958, LPA/GS, ‘Lost Sheep’ file; Morgan Phillips to E. Alcock, 9 March 1959, LPA/GS, ‘Lost Sheep’ file.

90. 90.  The Times, 25 June 1955, p. 11.

91. 91.  Report signed by W.S. Marshall, 15 June 1958, LPA/GS, ‘Lost Sheep’ file.

92. 92.  Salisbury Times, 17 April 1959, p. 3.

93. 93.  Canberra Times, 30 May 1959, p. 3.

94. 94.  Morgan Phillips to John McGovern, 29 May 1959, LPA/GS, ‘Lost Sheep’ file.

95. 95.  The Times, 15 June 1959, p. 6; McGovern to Phillips, 11 June 1959, LPA/GS, ‘Lost Sheep’ file.

96. 96.  P. Corthorn, ‘Cold War politics in Britain and the contested legacy of the Spanish Civil War’, European History Quarterly, 44 (2014): 678–702, at p. 684.

97. 97.  D. Lomas, ‘Labour ministers, intelligence and domestic anti-communism, 1945–1951’, Journal of Intelligence History, 12 (2013): 113–33, at p. 118.

98. 98.  Hyde, I Believed, p. 212.

99. 99.  Derby Daily Telegraph, 24 October 1946, p. 12.

100. 100.  Memo by William Strang, 10 July 1951 in Annex A Report of Security Conference of Privy Counsellors, 30 November 1955, TNA CAB 134/1325.

101. 101.  Duff Cooper to Winston Churchill, 31 October 1943, TNA KV 4/251.

102. 102.  Herbert Morrison to Winston Churchill, 9 November 1943, TNA KV 4/251.

103. 103.  ‘Communists engaged on secret work’, by David Clarke, 21 October 1943, TNA KV 4/251.

104. 104.  C. Andrew, The Defence of the Realm (London, 2009), p. 279.

105. 105.  John Anderson to Herbert Morrison, 12 November 1943, TNA KV 4/251; Winston Churchill to Morrison, 13 November 1943, TNA KV 4/251.

106. 106.  Neville Chamberlin, ‘Home Defence (Security) Executive’, 27 May 1940, TNA CAB 66/8/2.

107. 107.  David Petrie to Alexander Maxwell, 29 December 1943, TNA KV 4/251.

108. 108.  Security Conference of Privy Counsellors ‘Personnel Security Arrangements in the Civil Service’, 6 December 1955, TNA CAB 134/1325.

109. 109.  Roger Hollis to D.B., 17 April 1947, TNA KV 4/251. In the same memo, Hollis stated that The Panel was effectively dead and that its chairman, Herbert Creedy, destroyed his papers regarding it.

110. 110.  R.H. Hollis to D.G., 1 October 1945, TNA KV 4/251.

111. 111.  Statement of Alan Nunn May, 15 February 1946, TNA KV 2/2212/4.

112. 112.  Statement of Alan Nunn May, 20 February 1946, TNA KV 2/2212/3.

113. 113.  JSM Washington to Cabinet Office, 21 February 1946, TNA CAB 126/303.

114. 114.  A. Goldberg, ‘The atomic origins of the British nuclear deterrent’, International Affairs, 20 (1964): 409–29, at p. 413.

115. 115.  Noel Stephen Paynter to John Oliver Archer, 21 March 1946, TNA KV 4/251.

116. 116.  Security service file, ‘Alan Nunn May’, undated, TNA KV 2/2209.

117. 117.  ‘Spread of communism throughout the world and the extent of its direction from Moscow’, JIC report, 18 November 1946, TNA CAB 81/134.

118. 118.  Minutes of ‘Ad hoc ministerial meeting’, 6 January 1947, TNA CAB 130/16.

119. 119.  Ministerial Committee on Subversive Activities, ‘The employment of civil servants’, 1 May 1947, TNA CAB 130/17.

120. 120.  Minutes of Working Party of Subversive Movements, 11 February 1947, TNA CAB 130/17.

121. 121.  Working Party on Subversive Movements, ‘The nature and purpose of Soviet policy’, 25 March 1947, TNA CAB 130/17.

122. 122.  Harold Caccia to Roger Hollis, 11 May 1946, TNA KV 4/251.

123. 123.  P. Corthorn, In the Shadow of the Dictators (London, 2006), p. 64.

124. 124.  Ministerial Committee on Subversive Activities, ‘The employment of civil servants’, 1 May 1947, TNA CAB 130/17.

125. 125.  Ministerial Committee on Subversive Activities, ‘The employment of civil servants’, 1 May 1947, TNA CAB 130/17.

126. 126.  A.V. Alexander to Clement Attlee, 20 December 1947, TNA PREM 8/946.

127. 127.  Clement Attlee to A.V. Alexander, 21 December 1947, TNA PREM 8/496.

128. 128.  Hansard, HC, vol. 448, cc. 1704–5 (15 March 1948).

129. 129.  Western Morning News, 16 March 1948, p. 3.

130. 130.  Hansard, HC, vol. 448, c. 1705 (15 March 1948).

131. 131.  Lincolnshire Echo, 25 March 1948, p. 1.

132. 132.  Aberdeen Press and Journal, 18 March 1948, p. 1.

133. 133.  Hansard, HC, vol. 448, c. 3396 (25 March 1948).

134. 134.  Liddell diary, 22 March 1948.

135. 135.  Hansard, HC, vol. 448, c. 3407 (25 March 1948).

136. 136.  Falkirk Herald, 31 March 1948, p. 7.

137. 137.  The tally of the card vote defeating the motion was 3,841,000 to 3,461,000.

138. 138.  Quoted from MI5 archives in Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. 384.

139. 139.  Liddell diary, 19 March 1948.

140. 140.  M. Jago, Clement Attlee (London, 2017), p. 300.

141. 141.  Liddell diary, 7 April 1948; R. Aldrich, GCHQ (London, 2010), p. 368.

142. 142.  C. Andrew, The Defence of the Realm (London, 2009), p. 385.

143. 143.  C. Pincher, Treachery Betrayals, Blunders and Cover-Ups (London, 2011), p. 368.

144. 144.  R. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand (London, 2001), p. 118.

145. 145.  Liddell diary, 12 May 1948.

146. 146.  Liddell diary, 2 December 1948.

147. 147.  Liddell diary, 22 February 1949.

148. 148.  Liddell diary, 30 July 1948.

149. 149.  Liddell diary, 16 April 1948.

150. 150.  Minutes of Cabinet Committee on Subversive Activities meeting, 5 April 1950, TNA CAB 130/20.

151. 151.  Liddell diary, 16 April 1948.

152. 152.  New York Times, 24 April 1948, p. 7.

153. 153.  New York Times, 7 September 1948, p. 10.

154. 154.  Christopher Mayhew to Clement Attlee, 4 April 1949, Mayhew 4/1/2.

155. 155.  New York Times, 6 October 1948, p. 4.

156. 156.  Hansard, HC, vol. 460, cc. 556–7 (24 January 1949).

157. 157.  Minutes of Cabinet Committee on Subversive Activities meeting, 30 March 1949, TNA CAB 130/20.

158. 158.  Norman Brook to Clement Attlee, 7 December 1949, TNA PREM 8/946.

159. 159.  Minutes of Cabinet Committee on Subversive Activities meeting, 9 March 1949, TNA CAB 130/20.

160. 160.  C. Andrew, The Defence of the Realm (London, 2009), p. 385.

161. 161.  Minutes of Cabinet Committee on Subversive Activities meeting, 30 March 1949, TNA CAB 130/20.

162. 162.  Jago, Attlee, p. 301.

163. 163.  T. Bower, The Perfect English Spy (London, 1995), p. 93.

164. 164.  Liddell diary, 25 November 1949, TNA KV 4/471.

165. 165.  Liddell speculated that ‘if war was coming in the next five years it was more likely to occur through subversion and infiltration’. Liddell diary, 24 October 1947.

166. 166.  Liddell diary, 24 September 1948.

167. 167.  Security Conference of Privy Counsellors, ‘Personnel Security Arrangements in the Civil Service’, 6 December 1955, TNA CAB 134/1325.

168. 168.  Peter Hennessy interview with Winnifrith, 31 July 1982.

169. 169.  C. Andrew, The Defence of the Realm (London, 2009), p. 393.

170. 170.  S. Turchetti, The Pontecorvo Affair (Chicago, IL, 2012), pp. 138–9.

171. 171.  Committee on Positive Vetting, ‘Atomic Energy Security’, 15 August 1951, TNA CAB 130/20.

172. 172.  Committee on Positive Vetting report, 27 October 1950, TNA CAB 130/20.

173. 173.  Minutes of Committee on Positive Vetting meeting, 13 November 1950, TNA CAB 130/20.

174. 174.  Committee on Positive Vetting report, ‘Atomic energy security’, 15 August 1951, TNA CAB 130/20.

175. 175.  Security Conference of Privy Counsellors, ‘The role of the security service in personnel security’, 7 December 1955, TNA CAB 134/1325.

176. 176.  Aldrich, Hidden Hand, p. 427.

177. 177.  K. Ewing, J. Mahoney and A. Moretta, MI5, Cold War, and the Rule of Law (Oxford, 2020), p. 259. The book estimated it could be as high as 11,447.

178. 178.  D. Caute, The Great Fear (New York, 1978), p. 275.

179. 179.  New York Times, 20 September 1952, p. 1.

180. 180.  Londonderry Sentinel, 8 November 1952, p. 2.

181. 181.  G. Goodman, ‘ “Who is anti-American?” The British left and the United States, 1945–1956’ (unpublished University College London PhD thesis, 1996), p. 251.

182. 182.  Liddell diary, 18 November 1947.

183. 183.  W. Ullrich, ‘Preventing “peace”: The British government and the second world peace congress’, Cold War History, 11 (2011): 341–62, at p. 344.

184. 184.  Belfast Newsletter, 2 November 1950, p. 5.

185. 185.  Dundee Courier, 11 November 1950, p. 3.

186. 186.  Ullrich, ‘Preventing peace’, p. 355.

187. 187.  Western Daily Press, 20 November 1950, p. 1.

188. 188.  Memorandum by Pierson Dixon, 23 June 1951, TNA CAB 134/2.

189. 189.  Lomas, Uneasy Relationship, p. 186.

190. 190.  Official Committee on Communism (Home), Constitution and Terms of Reference of the Committee by Norman Brook, 7 June 1951, TNA CAB 21/4371.

191. 191.  ‘Communism in the United Kingdom’ by the Official Committee on Communism (Home), 16 December 1950, TNA, CAB 134/2.

192. 192.  ‘Communism in the United Kingdom’ by the Official Committee on Communism (Home), 16 December 1950, TNA, CAB 134/2.

193. 193.  Arthur Sanders to Norman Brook, 30 May 1951, TNA CAB 21/4371.

194. 194.  Pierson Dixon to Norman Brook, 5 May 1951, TNA CAB 21/4371.

195. 195.  C. Mayhew, Time to Explain (London, 1987), p. 108.

196. 196.  Clement Attlee to Christopher Mayhew, 14 June 1951, MS Attlee 121.

197. 197.  Christopher Mayhew to the editor of The Times, 20 February 1976, Mayhew 4/1/2.

198. 198.  Mayhew, Time to Explain, pp. 111–12.

199. 199.  For an example of Conquest’s work for the IRD, see ‘Communist trials: The technique of confession’, in TNA FO 1110/335.

200. 200.  Christopher Mayhew to C.P.A. Warner, 21 January 1949, Mayhew 4/1/1; Wilford, ‘Secret Cold War’, p. 360.

201. 201.  Quoted in H. Wilford, ‘The Information Research Department: Britain’s secret Cold War weapon revealed’, Review of International Studies, 24 (1998): 353–69, at p. 363.

202. 202.  A. Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945–53 (London, 2004), p. 249.

203. 203.  For a copy of the list, see George Orwell to Celia Kirwan, 6 April 1949, TNA FO 1110/191.

204. 204.  Aldrich, Hidden Hand, p. 459.

205. 205.  Official Committee on Communism (Home) minutes, 24 March 1952, TNA CAB 134/737.

206. 206.  ‘Possible anti-communist activities at home: View of the chiefs of staff’, 14 October 1952, TNA 134/737.

207. 207.  Official Committee on Communism (Home) minutes, 1 December 1954, TNA CAB 134/739.

208. 208.  N.K. Reeve to D.R.J. Stephen, 11 March 1960, TNA CAB 21/4371.

209. 209.  David Heaton to Burke Trend, 2 January 1969, TNA CAB 165/432.

210. 210.  ‘Rear window Cold War: The British ministry of propaganda’, Independent, 26 February 1995.

211. 211.  Christopher Wilson to Margaret Thatcher, 8 February 1980, Mayhew 4/1/2.

212. 212.  ‘UK government running “covert” propaganda campaign to stop Muslims joining Isis’, Independent, 2 May 2016.

213. 213.  K. Payne, ‘Winning the battle of ideas: Propaganda, ideology, and terror’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 32 (2009): 109–28, at pp. 109, 117.

214. 214.  A. Kundnani, The Muslims Are Coming! (New York, 2014), p. 164.

215. 215.  K. Ewing, J. Mahoney and A. Moretta, MI5, Cold War, and the Rule of Law (Oxford, 2020), p. 231.