Subversion
| Subversion link (Statecraft, Tradecraft) | |
|---|---|
| File:Spy-512.png | |
| Interests | Coup |
Subversion is a concept relating to "activities threatening the safety or well-being of the State and intended to undermine or overthrow Parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means."
MI5's primary concern
For much of the twentieth century, one of the primary concerns of Britain’s Security Service (MI5) was subversion – ‘activities threatening the safety or well-being of the State and intended to undermine or overthrow Parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means.’ The major targets of MI5’s counter-subversive operations until the 1970s were Communists and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which was subjected to sustained and extensive surveillance following its formation in 1920. The Trotskyist movement, which emerged in Britain during the early 1930s, was regarded by MI5 as being ‘too small and chaotic’ to be capable of posing any significant subversive threat to the British state.
The activities of Militant Tendency (MT), a Trotskyist organisation which came to prominence as a result of its infiltration of the Labour Party in the 1970s and 1980s, transformed intelligence officers’ perception of Trotskyists. By the early 1980s, Militant was believed to be capable of posing an equal, if not greater, subversive threat than the CPGB. By 1984, one Whitehall official declared in a memorandum sent to MI5 that ‘Militant seems to have replaced the Communist Party as the established focus for subversion within the country’.
Militant was considered to pose such a threat because a significant number of its members had managed to infiltrate the Labour Party; they aimed to transform it, from within, into a ‘revolutionary party.’ This became possible after the left-wing National Executive Committee of the Labour Party decided, in 1973, to abolish its List of Proscribed Organisations which had long been crucial in preventing elements of the far left gaining influence within the Party. MI5 subsequently began an extensive investigation of Militant’s activity, and in 1976 reported that Trotskyists had influence in over 70 Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs); in nine they posed a threat to the sitting Labour MP. This information was passed on to the Labour Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, who, according to MI5’s Director General Michael Hanley, ‘fully seized the importance of subversive penetration of the Labour Party’.[1]
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