British security services monitoring left wing and Scottish nationalist writers and activists
We are nearing the end of the SpyCops inquiry in London, an extraordinary (partial) exposure of the actions of the British state over the past fifty years. Bella readers are likely to be aware of all of this but if you’re catching up here’s the skinny…
Formed in 1968 the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) targeted political activists to gain information on activities such as anti-war demonstrations, social justice campaigns, the animal rights movement, and environmental justice. Police spies befriended and betrayed a vast number of organisations. One method the SDS used for gaining acceptance and access was to develop intimate and long-term relationships with unknowing activists. Those lives infiltrated were often men, but mostly women. Many of these women, who are now campaigning for justice, had never been convicted of crime and still haven’t.
[or, go to SPYCOPS “the one-stop spycops shop where we set out the key issues at the heart of the undercover political policing scandal that first hit the news in 2011.”]
Three main issues that arise out of the inquiry are:
a) that policing in Britain has been for a very long-time highly politicised and directed overwhelmingly at the left and progressive forces in Britain. Even when the threat of violence has been (and is) overwhelmingly from the far-right, the police poured huge resources into investigating and infiltrating the left.
b) the police have acted with complete impunity, outwith the rule of law and with total disregard for any moral values
c) the police’s actions as agent provocateurs frequently put the public in jeopardy and caused danger despite the fact that they were infiltrating peaceful protests and activists.
The context to this extraordinary waste of resources and this massive politicization of policing is twofold: first the anarchist groups of the 1960s and 1970s (such as the Angry Brigade) and the shock they caused the British Establishment, and second the end of the Cold War and the diversion of resources and secret services inwards, towards what would become known under Thatchers as The Enemy Within. This process began under Thatcher but as you can see from below was accelerated again in the mid 1990s under John Major.
It’s in this context that the newly opened MI5 files reveal a number of previously unknown (though always suspected) facts about MI5 monitoring and infiltration of Scottish (and Welsh) nationalist movements. It’s worth considering what this means about then, and now.
First up we had the revelation that John Findlay Hendry, the poet, author and editor, was monitored by the British security services over his left-wing and Scottish nationalist sympathies. James Findlay Hendry (12 September 1912 – 17 December 1986) was a Scottish poet known also as an editor and writer. He was born in Glasgow, and read Modern Languages at the University of Glasgow. He was a founding member of the New Apocalyptics – a poetry group in the UK in the 1940s, taking their name from the anthology The New Apocalypse (1939), which was edited by J. F. Hendry and Henry Treece. There followed the further anthologies The White Horseman (1941) and The Crown and Sickle (1944).
Others closely associated were the Scottish poets G. S. Fraser and Norman MacCaig. There was quite an overlap with the Scottish Renaissance group of writers, sometimes mentioned in this connection including Ruthven Todd, Tom Scott, Hamish Henderson, Maurice Lindsay, Edwin Morgan, Burns Singer, and William Montgomerie. This grouping was fairly represented in Modern Scottish Poetry (1946).
I’ve uploaded a photo of the document but I’ll transcribe it for accessibility and visibility purposes. This is from 1958.
James Findlay HENDRY
In 1934 and 1936 HENDRY came to notice on account of his connection with the Scottish Defence Force (which we understand was a militant Scottish nationalist organisation modelled on the I.R.A). In 1940 we had information (C.C. Glasgow) that he was interested in the Scottish Nationalist Movement. HENDRY was interviewed by the Security Services in November 1951, This interview produced more detailed information about his earlier activities. He stated, among other things, that he had visited the Soviet Union in 1932 with a party of students and businessmen. He described his political views before the war as “leftwing would be intellectual” and admitted in 1942 or 1943 while in the army he joined the Communist Party and received a party card. He did not renew this card and was not pressed to do so. In the interview he denied having written the anonymous intelligence report to CAIRNCROSS from Holland in 1938.
[John Caircross was the Scottish ‘5th Man’ in the Cambridge spy ring]
HENDRY stated that he and CAIRNCROSS had been together at Glasgow University and had become friends when both were studying for the Foreign Office examination. HENDRY failed the examination but kept in touch with CAIRNCROSS by letter afterwards. They met again at a party in 1939.
HENDRY worked in the Inland Revenue Department between 1930 and 1938 after which he worked as a freelance journalist. He has apparently been married twice, first to an American woman of Italian extraction and later to a woman of Yugoslavian origin.
British Paranoia and the Auld Alliance
But this isn’t just some arcane Cold War story, it’s been suggested that the monitoring of writers goes up to the present day. The Times contacted me for comment about the idea that “it has been suggested that late figures such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Alasdair Gray and contemporary writers such as Jim Kelman and Irvine Welsh are likely to have been monitored by the authorities.”
If JF Hendry, then why not? If Spycops then, of course. The point is that the British State, any state, accrues power and retains powers. The effect of the Cold War was not to stand-down the intelligence services it was to red-direct them inwards. The ‘threat’ that was previously thought to be the Soviet Union and ‘Communism’ was now re-directed to Maggie’s Enemy Within. There was no thought, and it would be against the motivation of the state, to stand-down or diminish their own powers of surveillance and control.
Further release from the National Archives [https://cdn.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/release-2025-01/kv4-480.pdf] show other examples of how the British state were concerned with “Communist interest in Scottish and Welsh nationalism”.
This is from 17 May 1968. It’s listed as “Copy of letter re French/Wels/Scottish Nats”.
Again, I’ve transcribed it for accessibility and visibility purposes. This is from Sir Burke Trend G.C.B, C.V.O, Cabinet Office:
Thank you for your letter of 8th May concerning the possibility of French Government interest in the Scottish and Welsh nationalist movements.
2. With [redacted] we are continuing our inquiries into the possible links between Scottish and Welsh extremist elements and the French Government. Meanwhile our attention has been drawn to a recent interview by Julian CAYO-EVANS to a Canadian journalist in London which was subsequently published in the Toronto “Globe and Mail” and the “Gazette”. In this interview CAYO-EVANS, who is the self-styled leader of the Free Wales Army (F.W.A) claimed that links exist between the F.W.A and the Quebec separatists and that the latter gave training in weapons and explosives to a member of the F.W.A, OWEN WILLIAMS, who recently failed to surrender to his bail on a charge of being in illegal possession of explosives in Caernarvonshire. CAYO-EVANS is given to exaggeration in the interests of publicity and we are inclined to treat his claim with reserve.
3. We have no evidence that any German political party has affiliations with Scottish or Welsh nationalist bodies.
4. It is public knowledge that the Communist Party Scottish and Welsh District Secretaries are members of the Political Committee.
..,
Another entry dated as 24 April 1968 states:
Our enquiries into the Welsh and Scottish Nationalist movements have shown no contact between them and the French Government. The only French contacts are with the Separatist Movement in Brittany and these are conducted under the aegis of the Celtic Youth Congress. This Congress was established in October 1965 and its aims are to promote co-operation and the exchange of ideas between Celtic National movements in all spheres of activity. In June 1967 it claimed to have a membership of about 200 in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Brittany and the Isle of Man, though these figures are thought to be exaggerated. The bulk of the membership is thought to be in Wales. In view of the separatist character of the Breton Movement it is unlikely that its contacts with comparable organisations in the UK would be used by the French government.
2. The foregoing argument applies equally to the Nationalist Movement in Scotland, where again the only French contact we have been able to establish is through the Celtic Youth Congress or its parent body the Celtic League. It is nevertheless worth bearing in mind that there is a centuries old tradition of cultural contact between the Scots and French, and that an approach by the French government might receive a reader response there than in Wales.
3. The promotion of Bert PEARCE, the Welsh District Secretary of the Communist Party to the Party’s Political Committee on which the Scottish Secretary also sits is in line with other indications of Communist interest in Scottish and Welsh nationalism. Presumably this would have little appeal to the French Government.
[ends]
A few things emerge from these extraordinary releases. First, the idea that the Celtic Youth Congress with “a membership of about 200 in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Brittany and the Isle of Man” was a threat to the British state in 1967 is just hilarious. But it speaks to the extraordinary levels of paranoia that were being expressed in that era [recommended reading Smear! Wilson and the Secret State].
This political culture of paranoia would be a combination of British post-war decline (Suez had been in 1956)
This would be a convergence of a very active republican and nationalist movement in Ireland; the odd breakthrough of the SNP in Scotland [in 1967 Winnie Ewing took 46% of the vote in a constituency which they had not even contested at the 1966 general election held the previous year, and gained the seat from the Labour Party with a swing of nearly 38%.]; the rise of union power and militancy, that would run straight through the 1970s; and the emergence of urban guerilla movements like the Angry Brigade [see Gordon Carr, John Barker, Stuart Christie, The Angry Brigade: A History of Britain’s First Urban Guerilla Group, 1975 (reissued 2005) and Granny Made me an Anarchist: General Franco, The Angry Brigade and Me, Stuart Christie, Scribner, 2004].
See The Power of Self-Organisation: Stuart Christie and anarchy in the UK and beyond by Duncan Campbell.
What these extracts tell us is that it is not primarily the rise of nationalist movements that concerns the security services, but the idea of a Left Nationalism, and the fear of connections between nationalist movements and the (still at that time) force of the Communist Party. This was at a time just before the collapse of credibility of the Soviet Union as an alternative, and before the unions were smashed as a political force under Thatcher.
Then and Now
But does the release about JF Hendry suggest that the British security services would be interested in radical writers today? Of course it does, though more particularly we can look to the revelations of the Spy Cops inquiry for first-hand evidence of terrible abuses of power by the secret police.
I’d love to hear a phone-tap of Alasdair Gray in conversation and what the confused spook might have reported.
There is a problem however with leaning too heavily on revelations about the security services. Just as when we ascribe ‘interference’ in elections to Russia, or algorithms, of Cambridge Analytica, or Elon Musk, or whatever. It is not that they don’t happen and that they are not serious or important, or illegal and undemocratic, of course they are. But there is a tendency to explain the social phenomenon of Brexit, or Trump or the indyref as being solely because of this external force, rather than face up to the political drivers at play, whether they be the weakness of the political case being made, reactionary social forces, or the failure of leadership to make the case for whatever is at stake.
We have well-documented evidence of the British state working to undermine and infiltrate peaceful protest movements throughout the UK up until the 1990s. For personal testimony see our own writer Donna McLean’s book, Small Time Girl.
The idea that this is over isn’t credible. This tells us a story about Britain as a profoundly undemocratic corrupt entity, paranoid over decades and willing to sacrifice civil liberties to defend its own secrets and power. That state now has powers of surveillance and repression unimagined by the writers and poets of the 1950s and 60s and powered by technologies of surveillance that are dystopian in nature. What has been released is just a fragment of the evidence about what has been done.
This union is unofficially over & Scottish independence is inevitable, but that won’t stop the desperation of little Engerlend & its subservient lapdogs trying desperately to delay & prevent it from happening.
Yes, although many of the recent revelations are new to me, they do largely confirm long-held suspicions and accusations voiced by activists, while the vast scale of British political policing and its seemingly endless resources were known to academics (how useful it would be to quantify this).
One goal of the clandestine campaign seems to have been to sow distrust and degrade solidarity in such movements, who it seems were often caught between the extremes of being driven underground (by, for example, MI5 vetting and political blacklisting) and welcoming allcomers to open groups.
Now, if these practices were continuing very recently, the implication is that should Scotland become Independent in the next few years, a very large number of people becoming Scottish citizens would have a lifetime (or ‘unbound’) pledge to official British secrecy, which I think would have to be handled in an open, formal, negotiated way. I don’t see a healthy Scottish society emerging if these secrets were suppressed, but they constitute a mighty incentive for the British imperial state to block Scottish Independence at all costs. Probably better if all the parliaments made some joint declaration on how they propose to handle these official secrets concerning the political policing of our own citizens.
There is a further possibility that the rump UK state would continue to clandestinely employ people in an Independent Scotland. This is why we need to have a very clear approach to treason laws (not ‘off with their heads’ but periods of amnesty, full disclosure, possible expulsions, service to the public — and planet 🙂 — not the monarch etc).
Treason laws bring the subject back to what powers British imperial policing was/is conducted under, which will essentially be the royal prerogative (and these spycops may have been awarded accordingly). And because it is imperial policing, we should have a territorially-expanded inquiry that takes into account all current and recent British overseas jurisdictions.
While Scottish creatives may have been under surveillance, it is more than possible that some were also working for the British political police (or indeed the CIA or whoever: some local agents in Northern Ireland apparently worked for the police, MI5 and the army, so the concept of asset-sharing or -passing should be considered).
Therefore, it is possible that another source of revelations would be declassified files in a foreign state, perhaps one that doesn’t care much what the British authorities want to keep hidden, or whose representatives weigh causing embarrassment more advantageous than maintaining leverage.
So, how much has British political policing cost? And who approved its budgets? Might be a line of inquiry that leads to other revelations. And what foreign agencies did it work and share information with? How was this information used in ways that impacted on individuals and groups without their awareness worldwide? What happens to official secrets on Scottish Independence (or Welsh, or Irish reunification, or decolonisation of overseas territories)? What laws were political police officers allowed (even encouraged) to break and who (ultimately) gave that authority? Who is/was ultimately responsible for British political policing in the last century? And when will the appropriate records be released to the public?
Irvine Welsh is on gmail, and uses all the social media, so they don’t need to surveil him, just buy the data.