From Mark Hollingsworth
As the journalist, along with Nick Fielding, who first reported David Shayler’s revelations about MI5 in the Mail on Sunday in 1997, I would like to set the record straight on your piece in Lobster 36 (‘Peter’s Friends’?)
I have remained close to David Shayler and Annie Machon, his girlfriend and also a former MI5 officer, since we first broke the story. Consequently, I can clarify the issue of whether David or Annie possessed or knew of ‘concrete evidence’ that senior Labour ministers had ‘worked for the Security Services’.
The reasons the Mail on Sunday did not publish this story is very simple: we knew it was completely untrue. The ‘friend’ of Shayler who briefed the Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph did not understand the issues or the facts. This person hopelessly confused our original story about MI5’s bugging of Mandelson and speculated wildly and ineptly. There was no evidence that Mandelson ‘worked for the spooks’.
For the historical record, the story was false. If there was any substance, I am sure you agree I would not have hesitated in publishing the story.
From Mick Jones
In Lobster 36, in his item on the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Giles Scott-Smith refers to Ruth Eisler (p. 12) in connection with setting-up the enterprise. Why use that name when writing about Ruth Fischer, the name she used in politics and her writings?
In fact, her name was originally Elfriede Eisler, then by marriage it became Friedlander, and later Golke, through a pro-forma marriage to a KPD official upon her rise to prominence in the Berlin KPD. From those days until his death in Cuba – which Fischer attributed to the NKVD – just as she had succeeded in getting him a US visa, she was the common law wife of Arkadi Maslow (another pseudonym), her political associate.
When the new German edition of Fischer’s book Stalin and German Communism appeared some years ago, a number of reviewers made the point that she still saw herself as a socialist or even a communist, even after her high-profile ‘anti-communist’ ventures.
Regarding Ignazio Silone, the Suddeutsche Zeitung (15 October 1998), citing an Italian periodical, reported that Silone was ‘between 1928 and 1930, not just a leader of the CP in Italy, but a reliable collaborator of the fascist secret police OVRA’. I have seen no reference to this in Britain.
Some of Laurens Otter’s comments on the Common Wealth Party in Feedback (Lobster 36) were rather confusing. The Common Wealth MP Ernest Millington was a Wing Commander, not a Commander. After its successes during the wartime electoral truce Common Wealth found itself by-passed in the huge 1945 Labour victory. Millington had been elected with Labour/Co-op backing, and was soon joined by party founder Richard Ackland in a by-election. But the party decided to dissolve into Labour in the summer of 1945, though ‘a minority, led by C. A. Smith, refused to accept this verdict and carried on.’ (Peggy Duff, Left, Left, Left, London 1971, p. 9) Both Ackland and Millington became part of the Keep Left (Bevanite) group, so I don’t see how Millington could be expelled from the Labour Party, or have joined the ILP in 1946.
From Scott Newton
A correction and further thoughts on Keynes
I’ve found a mistake in my piece on Keynes in Lobster 36. Near the end, when discussing the aftermath of the Savannah conference, I say that Keynes’s report on this for the Treasury and Cabinet was not quoted from at all by his biographer Moggridge. In fact Moggridge did quote briefly from the document – without making it clear to the reader what he was quoting from! When his text actually mentions the report he fails to discuss it at all. The general point, that
Keynes’s disillusionment has either been underplayed or obfuscated by historians, remains.
Another point that strikes me about all this concerns the Bank of England. The Bank strongly opposed currency liberalisation at the end of the war and crossed swords with Keynes on this and on the general issue of Bretton Woods more than once. It advocated bilateral payments arrangements and exchange controls on current as well as capital transactions and no premature commitment to the implementation of Article VII.
This is interesting in view of the assumption that the Bank has been a force for orthodox liberalism. What should we read into this? Not that the Bank was affected by wartime socialism, I think. Rather, my view is that historians like myself need to refine their interpretation of the Bank’s mission. This was above all the maintenance of sterling’s international role with all that followed. And the directors felt that in the context of the 1940s, at least up to 1947/8, their objective was best secured by bilateral arrangements and no convertibility so that the debts accumulated during the war (the sterling balances) could be paid off without provoking a run on the pound. The Bank wanted Labour to put debt repayment first, in front of reconstruction, for the stake of the pound sterling’s status. Keynes felt that the Bank had not learned from the disastrous return to gold in 1925, despite the superficial policy differences in the Bank’s position between then and the war. His exasperation was not unjustified – once more Threadneedle Street was giving priority to international ‘obligations’ over commitments to build a fairer society at home.
I reckon the Bank reverted to its liberal outlook of pre-war days in the late 40s – because by this time, given the 1949 sterling crisis and devaluation, currency liberalisation was seen as the only way of ensuring that the pound was internationally attractive to hold. This sentiment was the prelude to ROBOT, whose objective was to try and achieve equal status between sterling and the dollar. The question of what the Bank was to do once its mission was revealed as having failed, in the late 60s and early 70s, is another, interesting issue.