Peter Evans
Brighton, Sussex: The Book Guild, 2009, h/b, £16.99
Author Evans was a Times journalist in the 1960s and 1970s, for 17 years The Times’ Home Affairs correspondent when it still was the voice of the ‘British establishment’. Evans knew MI5 people and got material from them. He also got material from IRD (unidentified by Evans) but these IRD briefings were ‘too right-wing’ to be used. Then MI5 tried to recruit him as an informant and he declined the offer. By so doing he branded himself unreliable and MI5 began investigating him. Few of these events are dated and it is unclear to me in which decade some of this took place. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. So he retired and watched MI5 becoming a power in the land, using the post 9/11 ‘terrorist threat’ to enlarge budgets, staff and bureaucratic territory; and he watched NuLab attacking – or trying to reform, they would say – the British legal-judicial system, tantamount in Evans’ view to the British constitution. He tells us that Britain under NuLab is not Nazi Germany but…..
In this milieu Evans focuses on MI5. He is not a fan. He shows their expansion, their lack of accountability and their incompetence. He has a chapter, ‘The subverting of Britain’, in which he reminds us of Brigadier Kitson’s ideas, the talk of a coup in The Times in 1974, General Sir Walter Walker’s Civil Assistance and ‘the Wilson plots’. This isn’t done very well – not enough detail and no indication from Evans that this field has been ploughed already – but for a formerly mainstream journalist at an establishment broadsheet, he has taken on board quite a bit of the radical agenda of the past 20 years. And in the midst of this he drops some fragments of new information about the Cecil King ‘coup’ plot of 1968, implicating a senior Times person and showing that The Times was involved in promoting Lord Mountbatten around the time that Cecil King was machinating with MI5 people, Mountbatten and other members of ‘the establishment’ of the day. This section is allusive – perhaps deliberately so – but it does mean that the King ‘coup’ plot was more serious and more widely supported than we knew hitherto.
The critique of the totalitarian/centralist inclinations of NuLab is fine, and this material cannot be presented too frequently. But I think he has misunderstood the driving force behind it. NuLab didn’t start out wanting to be dictators. NuLab wanted to stay in office and believed that to do this it had to be in control of information (spin) to give it a chance against a hostile press, and in control of the public sector. Left to their own devices, NuLab believed, the bureaucrats would make a mess of things and embarrass them. NuLab further believed – following an American theory, so-called public choice – that all public sector bodies (but not politicians, apparently) were motivated chiefly by self-interest. This had the disastrous consequence of enabling NuLab to dismiss anything critical of their proposals said by the rest of the public sector as valueless because self-interested. Hence (partly) the tide of stupid legislation they have enacted, the endless reorganisations of health, school and legal services. But having created the management-by-targets culture, it had to get good results from the public sector (those who live by targets die by targets). Whatever it takes became their unspoken credo; be it encouraging blatant statistical fraud or the destruction of the so-called British constitution. (And what, thinks NuLab, are airy-fairy civil liberties? Who cares about a few climate change weirdoes getting their skulls cracked, when people are getting blown up by Islamist nutters?)