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Labour spied on Mick Lynch's union in 1960s, MI5 files reveal

Declassified UK
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Help Declassified expose the powerful by joining us: https://www.declassifieduk.org/join/ Harold Wilson, one of Britain’s most left-wing prime ministers, was delighted by MI5’s surveillance of a seafarers’ strike in the 1960s. MI5 spies were regularly summoned to 10 Downing Street for clandestine meetings with the Labour prime minister to share material on striking seamen, hitherto top secret files from 1966 reveal. The files shed particular light on Wilson’s hostility towards a strike by the National Union of Seamen (NUS, now part of Mick Lynch's RMT), whose members demanded a 40-hour week. They also show how MI5 blacklisted …...more
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Labour spied on Mick Lynch's union in 1960s, MI5 files reveal
Help Declassified expose the powerful by joining us: https://www.declassifieduk.org/join/ Harold Wilson, one of Britain’s most left-wing prime ministers, was delighted by MI5’s surveillance of a seafarers’ strike in the 1960s. MI5 spies were regularly summoned to 10 Downing Street for clandestine meetings with the Labour prime minister to share material on striking seamen, hitherto top secret files from 1966 reveal. The files shed particular light on Wilson’s hostility towards a strike by the National Union of Seamen (NUS, now part of Mick Lynch's RMT), whose members demanded a 40-hour week. They also show how MI5 blacklisted a Labour MP who Wilson agreed should not be appointed Solicitor General despite being a distinguished human rights lawyer posing no danger to national security. It emerges that the Security Service ran informants inside the NUS and conducted phone taps on its members. There is no evidence of any objection from Wilson who – despite his left-wing credentials – harboured deep suspicion of the Communist Party. In one previously highly classified file, many of which are partly redacted, MI5 chief Sir Martin Furnival-Jones described how “the prime minister spoke to me in warm terms of the quality and value” of the agency’s intelligence. In almost daily reports from June 1966 – at the height of the protracted strike – Richard Thistlethwaite, MI5’s go-between with Downing Street, exaggerated the role of communists. Read the full story by Richard Norton-Taylor https://www.declassifieduk.org/labour...

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Declassified UK

103K subscribers