The Cecil King coup plot

The Cecil King coup plot as precursor to Gordon Brown’s ‘government of all the talents’

Students of parapolitics are divided as to the seriousness of the Cecil King coup plot of 1968 to establish what he called a ‘businessman’s government’, a permanent coalition government dominated by the right of the Labour Party but with unelected businessmen and security ‘experts’ also in its ranks. Such a government was also the stated intention of several coup plots in Italy, including the notorious Valerio Borghese plot of 1970, and King shared with Borghese significant links to the CIA.(1) In the British version, several of King’s co-conspirators seemed to have been media people initially opposed to the preeminent position of the BBC, at a time when the BBC was often accused of left-wing bias. The coup plot came to nothing when the Wilson government’s own scientific advisor, Sir Solly Zuckerman, was invited to join the group and managed to persuade a non-too-bright Lord Mountbatten that to participate in such a plot was ‘bloody treason’.(2) At the very least, King anticipated the role of Rupert Murdoch in being a right-wing media tycoon who linked his political hostility to the unions and left with a commercial hostility to the position of the BBC.(3)

King may well have been a maverick figure whose significance to the wider plots against Wilson became peripheral as actual private armies and groups such as Forum World Features and the Institute for the Study of Conflict became prominent.(4) In particular, Wilson plotters would have taken King less and less seriously the more that the plots were concentrated in Northern Ireland and that resources hitherto channelled into coup plots went to Aims of Industry, the Economic League and other anti-union initiatives.(5) But the kind of government King envisaged was the kind of government we now have in place, in Britain, without a shot being fired or a tank rolling down Whitehall.

To put it another way, Thatcherism may well have been the historically necessary mechanism by which post-war social democracy was destroyed in Britain and replaced by the coercive state, but it could not establish the consensus for such a state.(6) For that one needed a Labour Party led by right-wing renegades whose background in Stalinism would empower them to reconcile the working class to the inevitability of such a state. This much was grasped by King and, later, by Rupert Murdoch, when he started supporting the Labour Party, beginning with the Davos meeting of 1993. But the bourgeoisie will also never entirely trust a party whose origins lie in the labour movement unless its rank and file are neutralised, its parliamentary party marginalised (along with parliament itself) and the executive is staffed by unelected businessmen and security specialists. King called this a ‘businessman’s government’ and Gordon Brown calls it ‘a government of all the talents’. King’s significance in history is that he predicted the kind of government that a declining British capitalism would need to facilitate hegemony under the long-term conditions of the coercive state.

Coercive State?

In the introduction, above, I refer to the transition from post-war social democracy to the conditions of a coercive state as a historical process with underlying (as well as contingent) causes. In this, I’m thinking of Gramsci’s observation, in The Prison Notebooks, about the distinction to be drawn between structural and contingent history.(7) I’m also thinking of what Marx said, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, about people making history but not under circumstances of their own choosing. Contingently, the rise of the coercive state involved subjective responses by the bourgeoisie and their representatives to the rise of open class warfare in the 1960s and 1970s. The various Wilson plots formed a very important part of this contingent process. Structurally, however, it was all about capitalism’s need to maintain conditions for capital accumulation after it could no longer afford the concessions made to the working class after World War II.(8) It was this that precipitated the resurgence of open class warfare in the 1970s to which the coercive state can be seen as a response.

The first signals of such a state in mainland Britain can be seen with Callaghan’s establishment of his 1976 economic seminar to accommodate the demands of the IMF (in which experts outnumbered politicians two to one) and changes to the conspiracy laws in 1977. The latter criminalised much trade union activity and other expressions of dissent and led to the show trial of Des Warren and the Shrewsbury Three and to the Persons Unknown trial.(9) The coercive state can be seen to be properly consolidated with the defeat of the miners and wider labour movement in 1985. This was the darkest hour of post-war British history.

In my PhD thesis I map the establishment of this new state form through three key film and television narratives which are Defence of the Realm, Edge of Darkness and the TV dramatisation of Robert McCrum’s underrated novel In The Secret State. In most of these narratives, the development of coercive trends in the British state is closely aligned to the development of the nuclear industry, at the expense of miners’ jobs. This is both an expression of US strategic involvement in British politics (around the cruise missile issue) and Mrs Thatcher’s desire to smash the trade unions.(10) In particular, I make the point that Troy Kennedy-Martin wrote Edge of Darkness after Rob Green started investigating the murder of his aunt, anti-nuclear activist Hilda Murrell, (11) who had incurred the unwelcome attention of Zeus Security and Sapphire Investigations (both subcontractors of MI5 and the nuclear police employing right-wing extremists and violent criminals).

In my PhD thesis I also summarise the two key features of the coercive state, thus:

• The rise of the state executive at the expense of parliamentary democracy and debate.This began with the economic seminar established by Callaghan but rapidly accelerated under Thatcher. Landmark developments include the decision, made at Cabinet committee level, to replace Polaris with Trident and scrap the GLC and metropolitan councils without first consulting Parliament, and the establishment of the Cabinet Office crisis committee COBRA during the Falklands War of 1982. This process has further accelerated under New Labour and, in particular, with Gordon Brown’s ‘government of all the talents’ – an anti-democratic expression of executive rule with which Cecil King’s ‘businessman’s government’ has actually arrived.
• The transformation of the law into a resource of those in power.As previously stated, this began with changes to the conspiracy laws in 1977 – a process that continued with the Employment Act of 1982. Again, the process accelerated under New Labour, with the independence of the judiciary from the state executive being almost entirely eroded. The criminalisation of foreigners and of dissent increased, beginning with the Asylum Act of 1993 and Intelligence and Security Act of 1994, after which rival law enforcement agencies began competing with the police.(12) Although MI5 made much of its anti-fascist credentials in the first two years following the Intelligence and Security Act of 1994, in an apparent crackdown on Combat 18, it quickly shifted its resources to the rebranding of animal rights activists as terrorists. This criminalisation served corporate interests but with an eye to how many such activists were also involved in Anti-Fascist Action, environmental direct action initiatives and other components of what later became the global anti-capitalist movement.(13)

The coercive state and terrorism: from Northern Ireland to the war on terror.

Historically, terrorism flourishes when mass-based working-class struggle is defeated, marginalised or criminalised and always, in the words of Karl Marx, serves ‘to perfect the state machinery as an engine of class despotism’.(14)In the early 1970s, the defeat and fragmentation of the New Left led to the proliferation of groups like the Italian Red Brigades and German Red Army faction. There was even as a resurgence of open class warfare (certainly in Britain) which transformed Trotskyist groups like the SLL, WRP and SWP into household names. The terrorists, whether manipulated by the state or not, quickly served to justify state repression and the criminalisation of the left, for all that – to their credit – most of these European groups did not engage in mass terror against the general public.(15)

The situation in Northern Ireland was different, but not completely different. The Provisional IRA were (and remain) a green fascist terrorist organisation with a petty bourgeois politics and political leadership whose occasional pretensions to social radicalism are a sham.(16)However, they became a significant force because the failure of the civil rights movement to root itself in the Northern Ireland Labour Party and labour movement reflected a wider defeat of the left during the same historic period, after Paris in 1968.(17)Also, while Harold Wilson’s deployment of troops in 1969 was both justified and necessary, the election of Edward Heath saw the local Unionist establishment placated with the implementation of various measures under Stormont’s Special Powers Act,(18) including arbitrary internment without trial and a curfew on the Falls Road. At its simplest, without the Special Powers Act there would have been no Bloody Sunday. As I’ve explained elsewhere, the genesis of the Provisional IRA lies in the attempts by Fianna Fail (and possibly the CIA) to create right-wing death squads to neutralise the then Official IRA leadership.(19) However, the PIRA were transformed into a significant force by an inept state repression for which the British security forces and government ultimately picked up the tab.

The idea that repressive strategies first developed in Northern Ireland would later be used against the labour movement of Britain, was a well worn theme of left discourse in the 1970s, both in dramatic fiction and in left propaganda. One sees it in the canon of John Gould’s dramas for the BBC, during this period, such as The Donati Conspiracy and State of Emergency, and in Robert McCrum’s 1981 novel In The Secret State, dramatised in 1986. One sees it in Alex Mitchell’s Newsline pamphlet, The State within the State, published for the WRP’s election campaign of 1979.

There are two problems with this line of argument. Firstly, the character of state repression that typified the Troubles in Northern Ireland prior to 1975 bore no resemblance to any tendencies that were already evident in the British state of the same period. Rather, they were a product of the peculiar conditions by which the Northern Ireland state had come into existence and the peculiarities of the Northern Ireland crisis that had arisen from the failure of the civil rights movement.(20)

In May of 1921, Northern Ireland Unionists had armed themselves to resist the genocide and ethnic cleansing that was taking place in the rest of Ireland and defend their right to be British within the United Kingdom.(21) They accepted the leadership of a Unionist bourgeoisie who were simultaneously mindful of the impact of the Russian revolution on working-class struggle, as particularly expressed in the 1919 engineering strike and 1920 election victories of the Labour Party in Belfast. By arming a section of the Loyalist working class through the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC), against the siege imposed on Northern Ireland by nationalism and republicanism, the Unionist bourgeoisie bound the working class to it in a manner unique in Western Europe. Bourgeois hegemony thereafter hinged on this derogation of repressive power, in defence of the union, and on the permanent existence of extraordinary measures such as internment without trial, which most democracies would only experience in wartime. It also enabled the bourgeoisie, with some success, to cast any form of social radicalism as a Trojan Horse of republicanism.(22) This was the kind of bourgeois strategy against which the civil rights movement foundered, the moment it failed to root itself in the NILP and clearly distance itself from republican goals. But the situation was amplified by the failure of the British Labour Party to organise in Northern Ireland and, indeed, the failure to suspend Brookeborough’s government in the 1940s, the moment that it resisted the introduction of the Beveridge Plan and one person one vote throughout the rest of the UK. While Wilson quite rightly scrapped the USC in 1970 (in accordance with the Hunt Commission’s recommendations), he should have also introduced direct rule immediately and scrapped the Special Powers Act. Henry McDonald and others accredit his failure to do so to Labour’s intrinsic historical belief in a United Ireland by consent.(23)

The other problem with the argument that Northern Ireland constituted a ‘testing ground’ for repressive strategies later used against the British working class, is that it conforms to the nationalist myth of Northern Ireland as a British colony. It implies that IRA terrorists are authentic freedom fighters and in some ways allies of a British working class that they were actually trying to kill in large numbers during this same period. It implies that Loyalists are the stooges of imperialism, and hopelessly reactionary; that democracies do not have the right to fight terrorism, and so forth. This may have been the view of Ken Loach in making Hidden Agenda in 1990 but it doesn’t bear up to empirical scrutiny.

Information Policy

That said, it remains a Marxist maxim that hegemony and state power perfects themselves in relation to any threat posed to it and that any such perfection will be generalised – particularly in terms of a serious threat posed to the rule of capital. This may not always be a conscious consequence of state policy, although, rather significantly, many of the intelligence plots against Wilson became concentrated in Northern Ireland through the activities of Army Information Policy in Lisburn.(24) At its simplest, Loyalists could be brought on side, in the plots against Wilson, if they could be convinced that the left really did have links to the IRA and that Labour had an agenda to abandon Northern Ireland. In 1973-75 this kind of black propaganda led to some of the worst sectarian outrages, on the Loyalist side, of the Troubles. Certainly, the activities of the Protestant Action Force and Shankill butchers would not be matched until the demise of the Combined Loyalist Military Command (in the early 1990s) led to the rise of Billy Wright, Johnny Adair and open fascists of that ilk.(25)

With the demise of Sunningdale and scrapping of the Special Powers Act, indigenously generated repressive strategies in Northern Ireland came to an end. So too, did Protestant privilege by way of the Fair Employment Act of 1976. Measures for defeating terrorism were generated by the British authorities and some of these measures were subsequently reproduced in attacks on the labour movement elsewhere in the UK. Other measures were correct – such as treating perpetrators of mass terror as criminals to be processed through the courts rather than using extraordinary measures like internment. On the other hand, even this prefigured the criminalisation of other forms of dissent throughout the UK, once the conspiracy laws were changed in 1977. Changes to the social security laws after the 1974 UWC strike prevented striking workers throughout the UK from claiming benefit. The state particularly distilled lessons from its use of the media in Northern Ireland, after the UWC strike, in its psychological warfare offensive against the National Union of Miners from 1984.(26)

Into the ‘war on terror’

Much of what can be said about the relationship between repressive strategies in Northern Ireland and the transition to the coercive state elsewhere in the UK, can be repeated in spades as regards the so-called ‘war on terror’. Support for Islamic fundamentalism was initially as marginal among British Muslims as that for IRA terrorism among Northern Ireland Catholics before 1972. This remained the case so long as working-class politics in Britain remained strong and secular; socialist organisations led the battle against racism and fascism – as in the example of the mass-based Anti-Nazi League and Asian Youth Movement. Problems began when left sects like the SWP cynically transformed the ANL into a pacifist recruitment conduit and abandoned Asian communities to attack by the National Front, e.g. at Brick Lane. It was amplified by the political defeat of the working class by the coercive state and the consequent proliferation of ethnic identity politics as an expression of alienation and primitive rebellion.(27) The problem with Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses was not – as identity-besotted liberals writing in The Guardian suggest – that it gave Britain’s Muslims a focus for their identity. Rather The Satanic Verses was published after the political defeat of the working class and the left, by the coercive state, at a time when Asian communities were looking to their own self-styled leaders for ways of dealing with racism and fascism. Almost inevitably, these were not working class or socialist but organised around the mosque. The war in Iraq has served as a further catalyst to this process.

As with the Northern Ireland example, the ‘war on terror’ has not created the coercive state but functioned as a catalyst in its further refinement at the expense of democracy. The Thatcher and Major administrations introduced a whole raft of racist immigration controls culminating in the Asylum Act, in 1993. This was long before most people had heard of al-Qaeda. The Intelligence and Security Act the next year allowed for the criminalisation of various forms of dissent, conspicuously beginning with that of animal rights activists. And while the right of the government to defeat terrorism is every bit as legitimate as with the IRA, the illegal war in Iraq and Orwellian ‘war on terror’ to which this has given rise has functioned as a catalyst to every negative trend in state policy since 1985. It has accelerated the transformation of the law into a resource of those in power and the criminalisation of all dissent. It has acted as a further catalyst to the erosion of parliamentary democracy in favour of executive government, in which unelected specialists sit alongside politicians and COBRA meets more often than the Cabinet. But the impact of this new state form is disproportionately visited upon different members of an increasingly fragmented working class and wider society. For example, a BNP councillor can get two years for bomb-making in Manchester while Muslims with a few dodgy contacts can get life imprisonment for paint-balling in the Lake District.

Finally, in relation to state repression, there is one respect in which the current government (subservient as it is to Washington, by whose intervention it was largely created) is grossly inferior to both the Heath and Wilson administration’s. Having initially given in to Prime Minister Brian Faulkner on the introduction of Internment in August 1970, the Wilson government had the good sense to get rid of it in February 1975. Although the internment of Iraqis and Palestinians during Desert Storm in 1990 provided chilling examples of how it might be done, internment has not been introduced in Britain itself (although prolonged detention and house arrest has.)(28) What happens instead is that terrorist suspects, often held on evidence as flimsy as in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, are shipped to privately run detention centres in foreign countries where they are routinely tortured and abused to provide a source of defective intelligence further servicing neo-con policy agendas. And this is a godsend to al-Qaeda who are themselves a godsend in the further perfection of the coercive state.

Permanent executive government by coalition: the real significance of Northern Ireland for a ‘government of all the talents’

The above being said, the real significance of British policy initiatives (and particularly of US policy initiatives) in Northern Ireland for the subsequent perfection of the coercive state has little to do with prolonged detention, criminalisation or the mechanics of law enforcement. After all, Northern Ireland now has one of the ‘softest’ law and order regimes in the UK and the most lenient sentencing of real criminals. Most Loyalists, at least, bemoan the demise of the RUC while pointing to the ‘hypocrisy’ of John Stephens in implementing a shoot to kill policy against Muslim terrorists in London while attacking the RUC over a similar policy in Northern Ireland in the 1980s.

The real parallel, however, is in the way that a permanent coalition of orange and green parties, all supportive of capitalism and the free market, are guaranteed positions in government by drawing on a religious basis of electoral support. Thereafter, to paraphrase the old anarchist joke, whoever you vote for, the government always gets in. This in the sense that a pro-capitalist executive is always elected and is collectively responsible for axing manufacturing jobs, closing hospitals, attacking the health service, for privatisations and for the abysmal underfunding of Northern Ireland education. Moreover, while the Good Friday Agreement at least (by consulting the Northern Ireland electorate) opened up the opportunity of creating a cross-community working-class party for socialism, the St. Andrews Agreement (based on covert connections initiated by Jonathan Powell at the behest of Washington) deliberately closed it down. Ironically, the same strategy in Iraq, trying to cobble together a coalition of ethnically or religiously-based groups in order to exclude the secular left from government, has fuelled a sectarianism that never hitherto existed and will probably result in the physical destruction of the country

If the left have been slow to make the connection between the establishment of permanent coalition government in Northern Ireland and that in Britain, then this is largely because the left still misunderstands the nature of the Northern Ireland state and political situation. Most leftists, for example, still think of Northern Ireland as a British colony, a United Ireland as both inevitable and desirable, and that the state is still run largely in the interests of Unionists. In fact, the sectarian measures that certainly existed at the time of civil rights agitations were themselves removed (e.g. through the Fair Employment Act) at exactly the same time that the nature of state repressive strategy in Northern Ireland completely changed. Moreover, while Edward Heath foolishly allowed the introduction of internment in 1970, his government was involved in secret diplomacy with the IRA from 1972, with Gerry Adams and others staying at Paul Channon’s house in London during the cease-fire of that year.(29)

Duped by Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher may have duped Jim Molyneux and other Unionists that she was their friend with her ‘British as Finchley’ remark, but she was nonetheless involved in secret diplomacy with the Provos at a time when they were cynically ordering their cadres in the H-Blocks to starve themselves to death. Although Thatcher could not formally abandon Unionism as a strategy in Northern Ireland until after she had defeated the miners, she did so with the Anglo-Irish Agreement of November 1985. From this point onwards, the only kind of government that successive Thatcherite administrations were interested in, in Northern Ireland, were permanent coalitions of orange and green parties that drew on religious support but enforced the rule of capital.(30)It is hard to say whether Sinn Fein were always seen as an integral part of this process by British administrations, but secret diplomacy resumed through MI6 in 1989 and this time proved more durable. It led to the Downing Street Declaration of 1992 and the deliberate scuppering of the Combined Loyalist Military Command who wanted to close down sectarian killings and take out the IRA leadership.(31) At every turn, despite the myth that the political right are the natural allies of Unionism in Britain, it was a Tory administration that made the concessions to the IRA but did so behind the backs of Northern Ireland’s population and the wider British public.

If the British government was initially ambivalent as to whether Sinn Fein would form part of a bourgeois administration in Northern Ireland, then this didn’t apply to John Hume – the initial architect of permanent coalition government in Northern Ireland. Described by some as ‘a priest without a collar’, Hume had studied at the Roman Catholic Seminary in Dublin where he had established links with many future political leaders in the Republic.(32) He had none of the socialist principles of Gerry Fitt, the man whom Hume would replace as SDLP leader after a disgusting policy of back-stabbing and intrigue. While Fitt was always interested in reaching out to the Loyalist working-class and unequivocal in his condemnation of terrorism, Hume was the man for backroom deals with people of influence in Dublin and Washington. In fact, if one sees Hume’s succession to Fitt as an American-backed coup d’etat within the SDLP that transformed it into a completely bourgeois party, then this almost looks like a dry run for what happened in the Labour Party itself in 1994.

While John Dunbar scoured minutes of US National Security Council meeting (particularly its Situation Group) for references to Hume’s meetings with CIA and similar agencies,(33) the same records confirmed to Tom Easton the existence of the British American Project.(34) Of Tony Blair’s closest entourage, Jonathan Powell (who had been a British diplomat in Washington and whose brother had been Thatcher’s foreign policy advisor) had nurtured a close relationship with Sydney Blumenthal in the Clinton White House, before becoming Blair’s Chief of Staff at Number 10. This Washington connection was central to the secret channel of communication with Sinn Fein, via corrupt Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern; and also to the direct link which Powell established between the DUP and Sinn Fein (with Bertie Ahern’s knowledge) behind the back of David Trimble. When Ahern was forced to resign over his corrupt financial dealings on 2 April 2008, Powell was to the fore in arguing that the Northern Ireland Peace process couldn’t have been achieved without ‘great men like Bertie Ahern, Ian Paisley, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness’. Apparently he lives in a parallel universe as well.

Stabbing Trimble in the back

As recent BBC TV programmes (e.g. by Peter Taylor) and the publication of Jonathan Powell’s memoirs have suggested, secret diplomacy with the IRA is nothing new in Northern Ireland but took a very different – and nefarious – turn around 2002. This was also around the time that the Americans needed more British soldiers for Afghanistan and Iraq. It amounted to the British government, at Washington’s behest, deliberately stabbing David Trimble in the back, while opening up a secret channel between Ian Paisley’s DUP and the IRA to ensure that the government that emerged from the St. Andrews Agreement was a DUP and Sinn Fein government, as several Sinn Fein mouthpieces in the Irish Republic had long advocated.(35) The reasoning was that as Paisley was to the right of Trimble, he would never be challenged from the extreme right for going into government with Sinn Fein and the resulting government would be more stable.

The result was that it became ten times more difficult to build any kind of left-wing or working-class party to challenge the permanent coalition of reactionaries in Stormont, when Paisley and McGuiness (‘the Chuckle brothers’) carved up Northern Ireland politics between them. Paisley, however, was forced to resign over the corrupt nature of his son’s involvement in a business deal involving a visitor’s centre at The Giant’s Causeway. There was also evidence of continued IRA criminality, including murder, and justified Loyalist opposition to the devolution of police powers while the IRA army council still exists. What there isn’t, under the arrangement that Jonathan Powell and the Americans created in Northern Ireland, is a window of opportunity to establish what Northern Ireland really needs – namely a Labour Party.

It could be said that, historically, the Labour Party in Britain failed to adequately support the NILP because of naïve notions of an Ireland united by consent. By contrast, New Labour cynically opposes any working-class initiative in Northern Ireland for fear of an active labour movement reconstituting itself anywhere in the UK.

Besides, what would their masters and betters in Washington say?

Roger Cottrell joined the Army Intelligence Corps as a teenager, was a provincial general and crime reporter in the 1980s and a member of the Workers Revolutionary Party central committee. Later he attended the Irish National Film School in Dublin and did a PhD in English at Queens University, Belfast. He manages Blind Samurai Comics, a graphic novel publishing house in Malvern, and co-edits the science fiction magazine, Dark Side of the Sun.

Notes

1. Willan, P.. The Puppet Masters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy (London: Constable,1991) pp. 90-118.
2. Dorril, S. and Ramsay, R., Smear: Wilson and the Secret State (London: Harper-Collins, 1992), pp. 173-182. See also King, C., Diaries 1965-70 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972) and King, C., Strictly Personal (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969).
3. Murdoch supported Thatcher under conditions of open class warfare in exchange for the monopolies commission allowing his purchase of the London Times and with an eye to the threatened privatisation of the BBC. However, he retained an eye to Labour’s future leadership with the British American Project from 1983 and in 1993 at Davos (with the printing unions crushed) indicated he might support Labour in the future. This led to the courtship of Murdoch by Blair, the hijacking of the Labour Party in 1995 and its subsequent fawning over Murdoch even as it has cut the BBC’s budget in real terms.
4. Dorril and Ramsay (see note 2) pp. 264-269. Also Penrose, B., and Courtier, R., The Pencourt File, (London: Secker and Warburg, 1978)
5. Dorril and Ramsay (see note 2).
6. Hall, S. and Jacques, M., The Politics of Thatcherism, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983)
7. Gramsci, A, Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1972)
8. Ticktin, H., in The International, Number 10, (Newcastle: WRP/Index, 1992)
9. Hain, P., Political Trials in Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) Also Hillyard, P., and Percy-Smith, J., The Coercive State (London: Fontana, 1988)
10. Lavender, A., ‘Edge of Darkness’ in Braun [ed.] British Television Drama in the 1980s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
11. Kennedy-Martin, T., Edge of Darkness (London: Faber and Faber, 1990)
12. Reiner, R., The Politics of the Police (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
13. O’Hara, L., Turning Up the Heat: MI5 After the Cold War (London: Phoenix Press, 1994)
14. Marx, K., The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Moscow: Progress, no date)
15. I subscribe to the view that the Red Brigades were completely manipulated by the state after Morretti replaced the first generation of Red Brigade leaders.
16. Clarke, L., Broadening the Barricades: The H-Blocks and the Rise of Sinn Fein (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1989). Also Patterson, H., The Politics of Illusion (London: Radius-Hutchinson, 1989)
17. Patterson (see note 16)
18. Bolton, D., The UVF, 1966-1973 (Dublin: Torc Books, 1974)
19. Dillon, M. The Dirty War (London: Hutchinson, 1989) Also Taylor, P.. States of Terror (London: BBC, 1991)
20. Hillyard, P., ‘Law and Order’ in Darby, J. [ed.] Northern Ireland: The Background to the Conflict (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1981)
21. Cusack, J. and McDonald, H., The UVF, (Dublin: Poolbeg, 2000)
22. Following the physical ejection of elected Labour councillors, Beattie, Boyd and Midgeley from the Ulster Hall in 1920 by a mob, it was Edward Carson himself who tried to incur a fictional link between Republicanism and Bolshevism. He famously proclaimed that ‘these so called friends of labour care no more about the working man than the man in the moon’. Although Carson claimed to have refounded the UVF in 1920 to reign in sectarian elements like the Ulster ex-Serviceman’s Association and BPA (and this may even have been true up to a point) he was clearly more concerned about the development of working class politics. See Farrell, M. (1975) Northern Ireland: The Orange State (London: Pluto, 1975) and Farrell, M., Arming the Protestants (London: Pluto, 1975)
23. Patterson, H. (see note 16)
24. Foot, P. Who Framed Colin Wallace? (London: Macmillan, 1989)
25. Cusack and McDonald (see note 21)
26. Curtis, L. Ireland: The Propaganda War (London: Pluto Press, 1984) Hillyard, P. in Fine and Millar [eds.] Policing the Miners’ Strike (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1984)
27. Pearson, G. (1976) ‘Paki Bashing in East Lancashire: a Case Study in its Historical Context’ in Mungham and Pearson [eds] Working Class Youth Culture (London: Routledge, Keegan and Paul, 1976)
28. The account of the detention of Iraqis and Palestinians during Desert Storm that I have used for this essay is taken from Dorril, S. The Silent Conspiracy (London: Mandarin, 1993)
29. Liam Clarke (see note 16)
30. All subsequent administrations, including those of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, have been Thatcherite.
31. Cusack and McDonald, The UVF, (Dublin: Poolbeg, 2000)
32. White, B., John Hume: Statesman of the Troubles (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1984)
33. Ulster, October, 1986 The title of the article was ‘John Hume: CIA agent’.
34. In Lobster 33.
35. David Trimble savaged the Jonathan Powell memoir in a review in The Guardian <http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2270901,00.html>