The Green Ribbon

IRD, MI6 and the eurocommunists

The stream of revelations from the files of Britain's cold war propaganda unit, the Information Research Department (IRD), continues in the Observer today.

The paper reports on how the IRD worked with MI6 in the 1970s to undermine the Italian Communist Party, in spite of the Eurocommunist trend which saw the party taking a more independent line towards Moscow.

a longstanding agent handled by MI6’s Swiss station chief, Terry O’Bryan-Tear, recruited rightwing Swiss politician Franco Masoni to print anti-Communist material in the Gazzetta Ticinese. Masoni offered to circulate 60,000 copies across the Swiss border, giving IRD a covert media outlet in Italy. O’Bryan-Tear’s “agent” also agreed to print a booklet showing how Communists exploited the democratic process of Czechoslovakia to seize power in 1948.

I would guess this is the same person as Hubert O'Bryan Tear, who served in Berne from 1972 to 1977. If so, he had significant experience of covert operations, including some depressingly familiar trouble-spots. According to Stephen Dorril's history of MI6, he ran agents into Ukraine in the early 1950s, and worked with Saudi-backed royalists in Yemen in the mid-1960s.

Labour's Scottish gamble

Politico has an intriguing nugget on Scotland:

And while a serious revival in Scotland appears unlikely — one party official admitted only 15 seats north of the border are competitive for Labour, and that “we won’t win them all” — aides are bullish that Tory warnings about Starmer needing a backroom deal with the SNP to secure a parliamentary majority will not have the same potency in England that they have in the past.

“We have a simple message on that now,” the same Labour official said. “No. Deal. We don’t need one. We know the SNP wouldn’t vote down a Labour government, and so do they.”

This may well be the most expedient calculation for Labour given the past Conservative fear-mongering about a Labour-SNP coalition, and the possibility of winning a majority, either independently or with the Lib Dems.

If the SNP did end up holding the balance of power, however, it could unravel. Labour might instinctively prefer a minority government to coalition but it is the former which gives more room for maneuver to smaller parties. There is reason to think could use that freedom to bring down a Labour government.

For one thing, they have done it before, in 1979, and they might have serious reasons to do it again. If Labour does not expect to do well in Scotland, then the SNP is likely to retain a mandate for a new independence referendum. It will be under pressure from its own activists to use its parliamentary leverage to obtain one. If Labour is not prepared to concede at that point, the kind of day-to-day negotiation by which minority governments survive would become very difficult.

How a Labour government would deal with Northern Ireland

With a Labour government looking increasingly likely after last week's 'fiscal event', the policy announcements at this week's party conference have taken on a new significance.

Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Kyle didn't disappoint in that respect, stating that he would set out the criteria for a referendum on Irish Unity if Labour were to come to power. That drew sharp criticism from some unionists, who called for him to retain an element of ambiguity.

The Good Friday Agreement is notably vague, stating only that the Northern Ireland Secretary shall call a poll 'if at any time it appears likely to him that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom and form part of a united Ireland.'

The Belfast Newsletter argues that 'this gives wide discretion to the incumbent secretary of state. It is essential that this discretion is kept wide. Every other aspect of the process favours separatists.'

However, ambiguity has it risks for unionists as well as nationalists. For one thing, it leaves open the possibility that the tests have already been met. The Belfast Telegraph reports that former Northern Ireland Secretary Sean Woodward 'claimed there is a nationalist majority in the Stormont Assembly, a majority of Catholics in the population and opinion polls suggesting people want to have their say.' It is arguably the most British of constitutional criteria that favour nationalists most. At the last Westminster election they won nine seats to unionism's seven. With one seat going to Alliance this was a plurality rather than an absolute majority.

Nevertheless, the current ambiguity might give an incoming Secretary of State scope to call a referendum on their first day in office, as well as to delay one indefinitely. That is surely untenable.

Some party members would like Labour to go further and campaign for Irish unity. I don't believe I am alone, even among Labour supporters of Irish unity, in thinking this would be a step too far. There is dubious benefit in a British party being drawn into boosterism on an issue the Good Friday Agreement remits to the 'people of the island of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts respectively and without external impediment.' The turbulent relationship between unionism and the Conservative Party is sufficient illustration of the dangers.

The right role for Labour is to defend the Good Friday Agreement, and facilitate the dialogue it allows for.

For Northern Ireland's immediate future, Kyle's most important comment was that 'a Labour government would deliver rapid deals with the EU on the flow of goods, the sharing of data, and making it easier for agricultural products to move around the UK and the island of Ireland.' That implies a degree of UK-EU alignment that the current government would not countenance, bypassing the zero-sum impasse between unionism and nationalism over the Northern Ireland protocol, and potentially restoring devolution.

In the short term, the interesting question is whether this incentivises the Truss government to pre-empt Labour with their own solution.

MI5 and the far-right: then and now

ITV is running a new thriller next month based on the life of Matthew Collins, a former far-right activist who now works for the anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate. Today's Guardian interview with Collins reveals that he ran four spies inside the BNP's Belfast office, three of them English. There's also this nugget:

His work as an informant handler meant he frequently crossed paths with MI5 and counter-terrorism police, although he says the security services never tried to recruit him.

Yet he does allege that the security services continue to receive intelligence from senior figures within the far right.

“Some of the most senior people in the British far right are in the employment of the security services.”

In 2018, MI5 took over from the police as the lead agency targeting extreme rightwing terrorism, a development Collins says has led to a more aggressive stance.

“Since the move, even though they’re going in too hard too early, they’re getting results.”

Although the counter-extremism rubric is a new one, it is in some ways a revival of MI5's older responsibility for counter-subversion. In the 1930s, MI5's infiltration of of the British Union of Fascists was very effective, though of somewhat ambiguous significance. Their top agent-runner, Maxwell Knight, was a former fascist organiser who used many agents recruited on the right against the left.

Intelligence and the Arms to Africa Affair

The National Archives move towards a 20-year-rule mean that many records from the early New Labour years are now available. 

That includes episodes like the 1998 Arms to Africa Affair when a British mercenary outfit, Tim Spicer's Sandline International, sent arms to Sierra Leone in defiance of a UN arms embargo.

New Foreign Office Advisor called for trade border between Ireland and the EU

When Liz Truss's press secretary was asked for a list of the new Prime Minister's advisors earlier this month, journalists were told that 'you can refer to the Guido Fawkes website.'

So we must take take Guido as authoritative when it reports tonight that 'Victoria Hewson is leaving the IEA to join the Foreign Office as a SpAd, focusing on Northern Ireland.'

Troubles legacy bill criticised at London trauma event

The Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill came under strong criticism last night from a range of voices at a West London event on dealing with trauma from the conflict.

Former Irish army officer, Senator Tom Clonan, described the legislation, which received its second reading this week as ‘an act of collective self-harm.’

Among those attending the event was Andy Seaman, brother of Tony Harrison, a private in the Parachute Regiment, who was shot dead by the IRA while visiting his girlfriend in Belfast in 1991. He told the meeting that ‘the bill which they are introducing would, overnight, put an end to any inquiries, any kind of scrutiny, and any hope of justice, for families who have received no justice for decades. People who were guilty of committing the most heinous unimaginable crimes would be basically free to stroll off into the sunset.’

As part of the event, a trauma workshop was hosted by Psychotherapist Peter Finn. Asked if there was any role for an amnesty in a truth and reconciliation process, Mr Finn said that “there’s a lot to be thought about in terms of how it’s negotiated and how the families of the victims are brought into that conversation from the beginning, rather than being told at some point that this is the outcome of some conversations in which you were not involved.”

‘Personally, I would hesitate to voice an opinion about what the right thing is. I would want such an amnesty to be a product of some diligent work that’s done with integrity and rigour, and with humility and honesty, taking the initiative from the families and survivors.’

The event was presented by Troubles, Tragedy & Trauma, an organisation founded by Michael O'Hare, whose 12-year-old sister Majella was shot dead by a soldier in 1976. The group works aims to highlight legacy issues from the Northern Ireland conflict, encourage reconciliation and promote positive mental wellbeing for those affected by the Troubles.

Chinese influence claims draw in Baroness linked to Boris

Last month's MI5 action alert on Chinese influence seems to have prompted some follow-up in the press in recent days.

This week's (paywalled) Sunday Times had this: 

A Conservative peer’s wife attended a meeting of a branch of the Chinese intelligence and propaganda agency that MI5 has said covertly interferes in British politics.

Lady Bates, a Tory donor married to Lord Bates, met President Xi at a conference of the Chinese Overseas Friendship Association (Cofa). It is part of the United Front Work Department (UFWD), the state organisation responsible for intelligence and propaganda operations across the world, and is based at its Beijing headquarters.

The UFWD is the organisation that MI5 accused Christine Lee of working with to cultivate parliamentarians in its alert. Yet as with Lee, allegations linking Lady Bates to the Chinese state are not new.

Lee and Lady Bates were the focus of a July 2020 article in the Daily Mail, as part of a serialisation of Hidden Hand, a book on Chinese international influence by Clive Hamilton, an Australian academic, and Mareike Ohlberg, of the Atlanticist think-tank, the German Marshall Fund.

That piece noted that Lady Bates had already been embroiled in political controversy in Britain:

In 2014 Xuelin Bates was caught up in a property scandal involving Boris Johnson, then mayor of London, with whom she had developed a friendship. She suggested the Royal Albert Dock as a development site to a Chinese company, Advanced Business Park, described as China’s largest property investment in the UK.

It was claimed that Johnson gave preferment to ABP because of Bates’s donations to the Conservative Party — £162,000 between 2010 and 2012. Lady Bates said the money had not come from ABP but from her own pocket.

Criticisms of the deal at the time focused largely on procedural unfairness and potential corruption.   However, Hamilton and Ohlberg's claims about Bates add another dimension:

Between 2010 and 2014 she was vice president of the council of the Zhejiang Overseas Exchange Association. It later merged with the United Front Work Department, an agency of the CCP tasked with liaising with all forces outside the party, such as recognised religious organisations and other interest groups. It’s also tasked with guiding the 50-60 million people of Chinese heritage abroad.

In one of the clearest signs of the CCP’s faith in her, Li Xuelin was executive vice-president of the UK Chinese Association for the Promotion of National Reunification, the British chapter of the Beijing body which promotes the CCP’s position on Taiwan.

The US, which like many states has its own history of using front organisations, has designated the Association for the Promotion of National Reunification as an arm of the UFWD.

If Hamilton and Ohlberg's characterisation is correct, Lady Bates' Conservative donations, and her business dealings with Boris Johnson's London Mayoralty, came at a time when she was affiliated to the UFWD, the same organisation which MI5 now says is seeking to covertly interfere in UK politics.

It should be said that Lady Bates has strongly denied that characterisation:

A spokesperson for Lady Bates has previously said she rejects 'in the strongest possible terms any suggestion she has been an “influencer on behalf of China”'.

Last night her representatives said the Cofa meeting was a 'social' event and she did not liaise or have ongoing contact with the UFWD.

The existence of so much open-source material prior to MI5's intervention underlines that the kind of covert action of which Lee and Lady Bates have been accused is inherently noisier than the truly clandestine business of espionage. Even their political donations were, in themselves, matters of public record.

While MI5 reduced its focus on foreign governments in the 1990s and 2000s, it has long had sections focused on China, and one might assume that monitoring attempts to use friendship groups and ethnic associations as vectors of influence was part of their routine business, like monitoring the World Peace Council during the Cold War.

This brings us back to the question why the action alert against Christine Lee was issued when it was. The Telegraph claims that Lee was targeting 'a new generation of future British leaders'.

The decision surely also owed something to the wider climate of geopolitical tension that has replaced the economically driven détente of the Cameron era. Activity that might once have been accepted or tolerated, now no longer is. The risk is that when the mood shifts, people involved in what they regarded as legitimate civil activity may find themselves on the faultline.

Greater transparency about political donations may be one way to dissipate that risk. Timely action could head off the kind of moral panic which could otherwise see ethnic minorities becoming scapegoats for the political cupidity of the recent past.

Aquind decision highlights growing scrutiny of Russian donors

I noted earlier this week that the opposition was attempting to make an issue of Russian donations to the Conservative Party in Monday's parliamentary debate on foreign political interference.

Labour attempted this previously in the wake of the Skripal affair, but with the party's Atlanticist right in the ascendant, Boris Johnson weakened and a crisis in Ukraine, it may get more traction than it did four years ago.

Thursday's decision by business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng to reject the Aquind cross-channel electricity interconnector could be one sign of this.

Foreign influence debate strengthens case for donor transparency

Following last week's MI5 alert about an alleged Chinese interference operation at Westminster, Home Secretary Priti Patel made a statement to the Commons on Monday on foreign interference in British politics.

Patel told MPs that such alerts would be more common in future, and "we are developing new national security legislation to make it even harder for states to conduct malign activity. We are also taking further steps to protect the integrity of our democracy by tackling electoral fraud and preventing foreign interference in elections through the Elections Bill."

While even some Conservative MPs regard the electoral fraud measures as misconceived, the Elections Bill does include measures to restrict foreign campaign funding. However, several opposition MPs suggested these did not go far enough.