Mike Hughes
ISBN: 0 948994 06 1. Available on PC disc for £4.99, and as a hard copy plus disk for £19.99 from: 1 in 12 Publications, 21-23 Albion St, Bradford, BD1 2LY. Web: http://merlin.legend.org.uk/~brs/catalogue/cat97.html
Available for download at: http://merlin.legend.org.uk/~brs/catalogue/ftpindex.html
This book/disk is actually two things which do not connect up too well. The bit that matters is a synthesis of most of the available public information on the Economic League, from its origins in 1919 through to its recent demise – about half of the book’s 194 pages. The other half is a digest of research into the British right-wing which Hughes, like a few others on the British Left began in the mid 1980s; and a rather perfunctory account of the covert operations against the Wilson government and the rise of Thatcherism.
The Right is another country
Left pioneers like Mike Hughes who wandered into the strange country of the British Right were wrestling with the discovery that ideas we had all assumed to be dead and buried had risen up to assault us. And when they looked for published information on the antecedents of this group of people and organisations, they found almost nothing there – just Labour Research (God bless ’em) and a few books and pamphlets in libraries
What has happened is clearly enough. Hughes began researching the Economic League and, en route, accumulated a lot of information, not about the League, but about the wider British Right. In that situation you have two good alternatives: a book about the League, or a book about the Right with a chapter about the League. Unfortunately Hughes has written a book about the Right which is built round the framework of the League’s history: and it does not work.
For most of the period between 1920 and 1950 very little is known about the League. It is just hints and nudges; odd glimpses. There just is not enough material about the League before the war on which to hang all the other material on the wider Right which he has accumulated. For example, the section sub-headed ‘The Anti-Fascist Activities of the Economic League’ actually contains not a word about the advertised subject; and there is a section on the thirties’ group the Focus (adapted from Hughes’ essay in Lobster 25) which has no bearing whatsoever on the League. On the other hand, most of the related areas of interest which are included, especially the history of the anti-socialist organisations and campaigns between the wars, are skipped over too quickly. You can hear him thinking, ‘Can’t go into too much detail here because I’m really writing a book about the League’.
In chapter eight, on the Wilson years, the League gets only four substantial mentions, in total about one of the chapter’s 18 pages: first in the context of the 1968 forgery of a League leaflet; second in a half page summary of a short pamphlet by Labour Research into the League in 1968; thirdly in a comment that ‘This change of emphasis [the expansion of F branch] in MI5 must have cemented its relationship with the Economic league’, in which the assertion ‘must have’ hardly compensates for the lack of evidence; and fourthly in the comments, discussed below, about Thatcher and Joseph.
This Wilson chapter, a short rehash of some of the extant information on the plotting and paranoia of the period, contains many omissions – and some surprising errors: Unison came before Walter Walker’s Civil Assistance, not after it; Aims of Industry’s Michael Ivens was not a member of the Unison committee to my knowledge (p. 105) – it would be sensational if he had been.
In chapter nine, ‘Spies at work’, after ten pages on the League’s activities in the 1960s and 70s, we get four pages on MI5 tagged on, a quick skim across Massiter, Bettaney, Charles Elwell – and thence into British Briefing, David Hart etc. (And Colin Wallace was not ‘a former officer in Army Intelligence’; and has not, to my knowledge, suggested that the League had office space in MI5 headquarters [p. 122]. But since this, like most of the assertions in these later chapters, is not sourced there is no way to check.)
Diehards 1920-79?
And this is a history built on a theory. In the early post-World War One years, there emerged a nationalistic section of the Tory Party called the Diehards. Hughes purports to trace them all the way from 1920 to Mrs Thatcher’s triumph in 1979. At least that is how it looks most of the time, although sometimes it’s Diehards, with the capital ‘D’ and sometimes diehards without. Occasionally another grouping, the ‘Radical Right’, (sometimes the radical right, without the capital letters) emerges in his text. These appear to be the same people. Take this section on page 108:
‘The unexpected breakthrough for the long-beleaguered diehards came with the recruitment of Keith Joseph to their cause. Immediately after the Conservatives’ first electoral defeat of 1974 Joseph, a senior shadow cabinet minister, had broken ranks and started to openly criticise the social democratic consensus. Over the following year Joseph and Margaret Thatcher, a junior shadow cabinet colleague, became increasingly vocal supporters of the Economic League’s old fashioned and radical brand of unrepentant laissez faire capitalism….. For the radical right it was instant rehabilitation. Their supposedly obsolete economic theories were once again at the top of the political agenda…’
This paragraph contains three errors. First, it simply is false – or meaningless – to refer to a section of the Tory Right in 1974 as Diehards (or diehards). Not only are there virtually no personnel connections between the group in the 1920s and the Tory Right of the 1970s, to my knowledge none of the participants in the 1970s have ever used that expression. Some of the Tory Right in the seventies were nationalists, but that is almost all the two groups had in common.
Secondly, I just do not think that the Economic League and what is commonly understood to be meant by the Radical Right had much in common. The Economic League – as Hughes’ own research shows – were essentially (their definition) an anti-subversion organisation, a private sector, political warfare outfit, engaged in full-time struggle with the British Left. The Radical Right, fluid though such a term is, surely referred to the IEA, Adam Smith Institute et al – the followers of Hayek, described by Cockett in his Thinking the Unthinkable, reviewed in this issue. (In the two best accounts of the rise of Thatcherism, Cockett and John Ranelagh’s Thatcher’s People, the League is mentioned just once, in Cockett – and in the context of 1919.)
Finally, to say that the League’s supposedly obsolete economic theories were once again at the top of the political agenda…’, if it means anything specific, is simply false. If the League can be said to have had any specific economic ideas left by 1974 – and the League’s ideology is the one area Hughes virtually ignores – they were closer to an employer organisation-dominated corporatism than the economic liberalism which was the dominant strain of thought in the Radical Right of the sixties and seventies. Hughes himself writes on page 56 that the League are ‘latter day corporatists’. Corporatists, Joseph, Lawson, Howe, Ridley and Thatcher were not.
In short, a good, large pamphlet on the League has been embroidered with – or buried in – a short, partial, history of the Tory Right since World War 1. For the League material it is well worth buying; this is the best extant account of the League. But the rest of it, especially Hughes’ theory about the continuity within the Tory Right from 1920 to 1975, should be read critically