I Told You So about Iraq - why Hugo is wrong

The frightening advance of ISIS fighters in Iraq has brought back questions about the 2003 war and

Unfortunately it has also brought back people writing rubbish about Iraq in the Times – something that happened a lot in 2002 and 2003.

In the Times (17th June 2014)  Hugo Rifkind , who marched against the war back then, argues that the war's opponents should not  say “We told you so!". Actually he accuses people of ‘trilling’ this, so he is obviously annoyed about people who don’t write for the Times being right. Rifkind says he doesn’t “remember that they did” and that “I don't remember predictions of chaos, sectarianism and failure” and “I'm pretty certain that's not what we were marching about”.

Of course, people were marching against an invasion for a range of reasons. But they weren’t, on the whole, marching because they thought war would be orderly and successful. The anti-war case usually relies on the idea that war causes destruction, chaos and social conflict (mostly because it does).

The pro-war side had such a variety of bad arguments for the war – often relying on lies and rubbish pumped out by the Times – WMD ! Saddam in league with Obama ! Liberation ! –that people arguing against the war had to make many cases.

But the case about chaos and sectarianism was widely made. So for example

The Daily Mirror had a major article by Denis Healey in February 2003 arguing

“WAR ON IRAQ WILL BE TOTAL DISASTER”

If anything Healey overemphasised the possible chaos and sectarianism, but he was on the right lines, writing

“The most likely scenario is that there will be a civil war between the Kurds, the Shia and the Sunni Moslems and it will spread over into neighbouring countries like Saudi Arabia, a very close ally of the West, and Iran, Syria and even Jordan. The Jordanian government warned Tony Blair about this only last week”

I put this to Hugo and he said I was “cherry picking”. As if an article in the multi-million selling Daily Mirror by a former Foreign Secretary was obscure.

They were hardly alone – just search any newspaper database on the words “ Chaos” and “Iraq” in the months before the war , and you’ll find plenty of results.

Think also of the many references to an Iraq war becoming “Like the Vietnam war” : They weren't made because  the war’s opponents thought Iraq would be orderly, or a  “cakewalk”

It is also important to note that what went wrong with Iraq didn’t all happen during the invasion. It was the occupation that tore Iraq apart, as the occupiers systematically weakened the Iraq state and encouraged sectarianism. The disbanding of the army and banning Baathists from office was just part of this. The US and UK occupiers encouraged sectarianism to split the rebellious Iraqi’s who didn’t want them remaining in Iraq after Saddam’s fall . They weakened the state so that it would not present a possible threat to the occupiers (which is why the supposedly rebuilt Iraqi army only got tanks, armoured cars and an airforce very much later).

We saw this unfold in front of our eyes – the looting, the botched “reconstruction”. At any point even those who supported the war could have protested about this, and our governments could have changed their course. Indeed many British army officers in Iraq raised exactly these complaints. It wasn’t just about warning about chaos and sectarianism before the war, it was about acknowledging they were happening during the occupation, and trying to do something about it.

So I found Hugo’s ‘don’t say I told you so ‘attitude really mystifying.

Particularly where he writes “I remember a whole bunch of utter guff about Halliburton and oil”. The role of Halliburton, and Bechtel and Blackwater and all the contractors in the occupation was an important source of the chaos: By handing over Iraqi “reconstruction”, including water and electricity and gas and ‘security’ to Western contractors – and paying them with Iraqi oil money – the occupiers weakened the Iraq state, and helped spread the chaos. Especially as they botched the job. The lack of water and electricity and sewage and security all added to the chaos. This was hardly a secret. The US were advertising their wild plan to privatise Iraq before the war. Hugo didn’t understand it, perhaps. It’s odd when journalists proudly display their ignorance, when I thought finding stuff out was one of our key skills.

I think at one point I did grasp why Hugo can’t remember the predictions of chaos, even though I can.

He writes that “I remember fevered debate about whether we, the West, had the right to remake the world in our image.”

Now the “Noecons” were pretending they were going to make Iraq into a modern free market liberal democracy. And apparently Hugo and his circled believed they meant it. And had a “fevered debate” about whether this was a good idea.

But plenty of people sussed out, without the need for a "fevered debate",  that this was just window dressing on some crazy imperial adventure. When Dick Cheney and his pals made those kind of noises, we didn’t believe them. We thought that sinister Dr Strangelove types were more likely to do what the US had done in Vietnam or El Salvador or Nicaragua. That there would be death squads and chaos and shady types trying to get rich from blood. People thought George Bush was a cowboy, but apparently Hugo’s friends thought he really could deliver a functioning Iraq. They just worried if that was the right choice.

The problem is that Hugo tries to make his very odd circle of pals, the kind of people who took the Noecons seriously, and make them “we”, make them stand in for all the anti-War people. And they just didn’t.

It’s the same naivety that makes Hugo want to “rescue” liberal intervention from the “tragedy” of Iraq.

Euro Elections 2014 aren't just about the right: Italians vote for Greek Party, Spanish get Indignant and say "Yes We Can". Benny from Abba helps out.

British reporting of the Euro elections won’t help anyone make sense of what has happened in the EU. Great clouds of Farage gleefully fanned around by Fleet Street obscure the view . A deep commitment by the news papers not to report what happens in Southern Europe doesn’t help. The gains for the far right were truly worrying, but there were also gains by the left.

But it is easy to paint a fair picture in broad strokes. The details are different in each nation, depending how and how much the different parties have seized on the crisis. But the big picture looks like this.

The crisis has broken many people away from the main centre parties. Stagnant wages, social cuts, businesses going bust make people very unhappy. And that makes them unhappy with the mainstream parties – Conservative and Social Democrat – who were in power when the crisis hit. They blame the mainstream parties for creating the crisis, especially as many of the politicians personally enriched themselves in the process: During the boom, bankers were allowed to invest in risky, speculative and dangerous schemes – including completely fraudulent and artificial ones. Local politicians and their business friends enriched themselves – often corruptly – in these schemes. Few were prosecuted when they fell apart in the financial crisis, but jobs, social spending and small businesses did suffer in the slump.

Former Tory voters – both suburban middle class and working class Tories – are more likely to vote to the right of the mainstream. Former Socialist voters are more likely to break to the left. The right wing parties blame immigrants for the crisis, the left wing ones put blame on the banks. The proportion of people breaking from the mainstream parties is not fixed, and it is the job of active socialist campaigners to shift the balance in favour of the left wing break.

In Northern Europe the right wing parties did better, in Southern Europe the left made more breakthroughs: This reflects an economic as well as a geographic reality, and for this map, Ireland heads southward. This puts pressure on the EU in both cases, but for very different reasons. In Northern Europe, right wing parties like UKIP or the Front National blame the EU for immigration. In Southern Europe people blame the EU for forcing the banker’s agenda. This part of the picture is barely described on the UK TV news or on the British front pages. Words like “Troika” and “Debt” and “Restructuring” which are central to the Euro elections are absent from too much British reporting. The crisis was caused by the banks, but the solution has been to cut ordinary people’s living standards to bail the banks out, leaving the bankers rich and dominant. In Greece or Spain or Portugal, the EU is the instrument used to force people to pay the banker’s price: Southern Europeans hate  The “Troika” made up of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund which arranged the bail-out. This will sound odd in the UK, because the press haven’t really explained how the bailout works for Southern Europe. How can people in Southern Europe hate the bail outs ? The answer is, because they bailed out the bankers at the people’s cost: The bail outs were given so that EU countries could pay their debts to banks: In effect the bankers were bailed out. The “Troika “ did negotiate “haircuts”, where the bankers agreed to take less than the full debt (because without “haircuts”, the debts were unpayable and they would have faced default). But they negotiated far harsher social “haircuts”, enforcing cuts in social spending and austerity to fund the bailouts. The EU, as part of the Troika, are a mechanism to take money of ordinary Spanish or Portuguese or Greek pockets and pass them on to the banking system. The Troika is enforcing wage cuts, spending cuts and privatisation to bail out the banks.

Hence the growth of Left wing parties who are angry at the EU in Southern Europe. This includes results for  groups based on the traditional Communist left  or some variety of the “new left” or some combination of the both . Newer organisations included Syriza in Greece,  Podemos in Spain or O Bloco in Portugal. More traditional Communist Party-ish organisations like Izquierda Unida  (united Left) in Spain

Some standouts  of the Euro Elections

(1) If you want votes, get active in the streets – Syriza  and Podemos built whole new parties not just by issuing manifestos , but by a hard , broad struggle of demonstrations, strikes and meetings.Podemos were able to relate to the "Indignados" who occupied Spanish squares in a rebellion over the economic crisis. In the process Podemos helped make the Indignados much more a part of the left. In turn, this gave a new language to the left:- A party called "Yes We Can" formed out of the "Indignant" is quite clearly finding a new way of talking about social change.

(2) Italy was the worst “Southern European “ result for the left, with Beppo Grillo’s “Five Star” movement filling the space that the left took in neighbouring countries. Grillo’s party is a bit like if voters got so sick of politicians that they voted for a  ‘Topical Comedy Panel Show’ instead  : Sneery, but are they pretty  right wing (Jimmy Carr?) or sort of left-ish (Phil Jupitus?). Grillo is making friends with Farage, so it looks more Jimmy Carr.

(3) Even among bad results there are good moments – Italy elected Three  MEPs from a party called “Anther Europe With Alex Tsipras”. Tsipras is the leader of the Greek party Syriza – so this is the equivalent of British voters electing four French socialist radicals as the MEP’s for London or Manchester or Leeds or Bristol.

(4) Even in the EU “North” there were some good results . The Front National winning the French EU elections was a very bad problem: Marine Le Pen’s party are full fat fascism compared to the semi-skimmed right wing populism of UKIP. But even in France the left had some good results. Melenchon’s Left Front  had four seats. France’s “Green” party EELV, which is a left-ish leaning party took 6 seats.

(5) One of the more standout results from Northern Europe was the first Feminist Initiative MEP elected. Soraya Post is the first MEP ever elected under the “Feminist” banner. Her election slogan was “Out with Racists and in with Feminists”. In a charmingly Swedish touch, the Feminist Initiative has been built with the hard work of many members , aided by a donation of around £80k from Benny from Abba.

So beyond the headlines about extreme right success, there were also gains for the left : Gains made by new left wing groups who were able to use new language,  form  new alliances and find new ways of  relating to movements on the street.

Kellogg's Krave, the slimy dog fart taste of corporate sugar-pushers

Kellogg's were criticised in Channel 4's  Dispatches today  (June 2014) for using "Social Marketing" to target young kids with their sickly sugary cereal Krave . I caught them up to similar slimy behaviour in 2010 

First published :

Morning Star

February 19, 2010 Friday

Feature - Kellogg's: a taste of dog farts;

Solomon Hughes explains how the government's big anti-obesity drive is being undermined by the involvement of big business

BYLINE: Solomon Hughes

Kellogg's is a "partner" in a Department of Health anti-obesity drive. And it is just about to launch a campaign to persuade young people to chomp through Krave, one of the most calorific breakfast cereals available.

Kellogg's is part of the Department of Health's Change4Life campaign. The cereal firm funds a few breakfast and swimming clubs and puts out the odd advert telling people to "move more."

Of course people need to move a whole lot more to shake off the calories squeezed into the company's sugary products.

In return, Health Minister Alan Johnson puts out statements praising Kellogg's for helping to "tackle the growing problem of obesity."

Most importantly, Kellogg's wards off any difficult regulations. The government is not going insist that its anti-obesity partners cover foods with awkward "not good for you" labels or launch a public health campaign that embarrasses the food giants.

So Kellogg's puts out Change4Life messages about the need to "eat better." But this month sees the launch of its Krave advertising drive to persuade teens to eat worse.

Krave is aimed at 16 to 24-year-olds and is made of "crispy cereal shells with a chocolate hazelnut filling."

Kellogg's claims it is "unleashing a new breed of cereal" with these unhealthy little parcels stuffed with a Nutella-like paste.

But in fact Krave is already available in France under the brand name Tresor. It comes in at around 440 calories every hundred grams - more calorific even than existing Kellogg's morning monstrosities such as Coco Rocks. They are 29 per cent sugar, 16 per cent fat.

Kellogg's got a company called Landor to market Tresor in France. Landor's data sheet on Tresor shows what Kellogg's wants to do with its chocolate paste parcels in Britain.

Landor says: "Teenagers are progressively rejecting the cereals of their childhood and opting for the bread and a spread option like their parents."

Kellogg's doesn't think 16 to 24-year-olds should eat adult food. So it wants to launch a war on toast.

Perhaps it will advertise Krave with the slogan "Don't grow up, eat our gunk." Or "Be a baby forever with Krave."

Kellogg's also wants people to suck on their processed lumps all day, because "Tresor has become a favorite snack for teenagers and no longer just a breakfast cereal."

Kellogg's claims to be backing the Change4 Life campaign, which suggests we "try replacing the unhealthy snacks with ones you don't mind them eating - fruit, oatcakes, breadsticks and frozen fruity ice-cubes."

However, the snack it really wants you to eat is a mixture of cereal flours, sugar, plant oil and dyes.

In the mind of Kellogg's, young adults are in the front line of the war against bread.

"There's a huge opportunity to grow breakfast and cereal consumption in the adult market by retaining young adults," Kellogg's sales director Mike Taylor told the Grocer magazine.

"We've focused on creating a brand that genuinely answers the demand of this market."

To get young adults craving Krave, Kellogg's is going for super-trendy "social marketing." Instead of just advertising the stuff on telly, it wants to push Krave on Facebook, by email campaigns, on message boards and the like, in a somewhat desperate effort to catch "the yoof."

Krave will also be advertised at music festivals and universities, which all suggests something a bit cynical in the marketing.

In France Kellogg's targeted young adults with the harmless name Tresor - or treasure.

But why would British teens crave cereal and want to cram it in their mouth at odd times of day or at music festivals?

Maybe this shows I am being cynical rather than Kellogg's marketers, but I know Munchies wasn't available as a trademark. Perhaps they felt "stoned" or "muntered" might be a bit too obvious.

Some of Krave's appearances on "social media" have already backfired. Sometimes attempts to make products look trendy just makes them look lame.

Constant messages - or spam - about Krave on student web boards irritated their readers so much that actual students started posting anti-marketing messages, including: "Hey student chums! I just tried this new Krave cereal by Kellogg's! It tasted really bad and made me throw up in my mouth a little."

And "After trying Kellogg's Krave I had to bleach my tongue to get the taste out of it. Gross! Do not buy this cereal."

And the delightful "I had a spoonful of new Kellogg's Krave cereal and it tasted like a dog had farted directly into my mouth."

A more sober judgement by one young taster in the Grocer magazine, who was previewing the product for shopkeepers.

She noted that the cereal "goes a bit slimy when you add milk."

To which I can only add that government anti-obesity policy goes a bit slimy when you add corporations.

Harold Wilson backed weird smears, leaned on Press over 1968 protests

Feature - The art of deception;
The sinister pro-war tactics of Wilson's Labour government in 1968

(originally published
Morning Star
July 25, 2008 Friday)
Solomon Hughes

At the risk of boring readers into the ground, here is another look at how the government reacted to British anti-Vietnam war protests in 1968.
Another inch-thick dossier of papers from the Home Office fell through my letterbox, revealing more incredibly thick behaviour by the Establishment. The way they were then gives a warning about the way they are now.
In 1968, a Labour government that was much more left-wing than Brown's gang responded to protests with paranoia, dishonesty and wild talk of bomb plots.
Protests against the Vietnam war were bigger and more raucous than any London demos for over 30 years. They were part of an international wave of rebellion and so had bigger political ambitions than previous protests and were ambitions that rejuvenated the left.
But the protests still only involved tens of thousands of people and did not threaten the state. They still seemed to scare them to the edge of madness.
As I revealed last month, the Labour home secretary and defence minister actually discussed using troops to hold the demonstrators back. Thankfully, they decided against sending in the army, so they turned to their second defence - satire.
Sir Burke Trend co-ordinated the government's defence against the dangerous long-haired barbarians of the New Left. I know that his name sounds made up, but Sir Burke was real - he was cabinet secretary and an important Establishment figure.
He pulled together a joint committee of the prime minister, with the foreign, home, education and Scottish secretaries, on the "state of student unrest." Under Trend's guidance, Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan and all agreed that the Information Research Department (IRD), a propaganda unit close to MI6, should "put together and circulate among students material which would help put student organisations on their guard against the ill-disposed. This, I took it, would be circulated anonymously."
Another cabinet office note for a September 12 joint ministers' meeting says that the government wanted to "give fullest support to the NUS (National Union of Students) as an organisation," so "canalising the current mood of protest" away from the militants.
To this end, IRD officials were "preparing a fairly light-hearted, satirical leaflet for distribution by the National Union of Students in time for the opening of the new term, aimed particularly at the sceptical first-year student" to try to discredit the militants.
At one level, this was a classic propaganda operation. Lesson one of "information management" says get a third party to deliver your message. The cabinet committee minutes say: "It would be counterproductive for the government to be seen to be too closely involved in student affairs, and the means by which the government can influence student opinion are clearly limited."
However, it seems that somebody in the NUS was willing to act as the government's patsy and deliver their message. It is also clearly potty. Sir Burke's government satire committee against the reds sounds like a Monty Python sketch.
The government's propaganda campaign was ridiculous but also sinister. The Information Research Department was a nasty bunch. It also created dossiers warning vice-chancellors about dangerous "red" students.
They were happy to use the most alarming smears. One vicious dossier says that anti-war protesters "have been buying small arms" and making "Molotov cocktails."
The government's attempts to beat protests with spoofs and send-ups failed, but they did have other propaganda weapons. They leaned hard on the media.
Home secretary Callaghan called in chairman of the BBC governors Lord Hill before a demo to "put the view that, on these occasions, television cameras were not neutral and contributed to the atmosphere."
Callaghan told the BBC boss that "the police needed support in all these matters. They would feel particularly strongly if television cameras showed some momentary lapse of retaliation on the part of a police officer, but not the deliberate violence which provoked it."
Callaghan wanted the BBC to get behind the police's "momentary lapses" with truncheon and boot. Lord Hill jumped into line, declaring that he "accepted that the BBC had a duty to society as well as a duty to report the news and he entirely agreed with the home secretary's approach. He said that the matter could be confidently left to him to deal with."
Oily Lord Hill promised to do all this behind the scenes, saying "that it was nevertheless a delicate point to put over, any overt movement on his part would almost certainly get publicity and therefore be counterproductive. He mentioned that Mr John Crawley, the news and current affairs editor of the BBC, was entirely in his confidence on these matters and could be approached with absolute safety by the home secretary."
Callaghan also called in the 10 chairmen of the top newspapers for a meeting at which he insisted that "television and newspaper cameras were not neutral," reminding the Fleet Street bosses that "there was a feeling among the police that the published photographs tended to concentrate on some retaliation by a police officer, rather than on the blow by a demonstrator which provoked a police officer."
Where the BBC were oily, the newspapermen were loudly onside. One chairman asked if their staff could chase demonstrators and whether the courts were tough enough on protesters.
In 1968, a Labour government raised the threat of terrorism by protesters, secretly circulating stories that were the basis of lurid headlines like "Yard in terror bombs hunt."
They used these stories to push a willing media away from "neutral" reporting, encouraging them to get behind police "retaliation."
The lesson is that we should think twice when the government says: "Trust us" about security. Sometimes, when they feel threatened and when they get too carried away in their cabinet committees, they actually go a little bit mad.

Police Files named Angry Brigade suspect as Police Informant

Inside the Angry Brigade
Solomon Hughes
First Published -Morning Star
July 19, 2012 Thursday


In an era when mass protest and activism is again on the increase it's salutary to remember the police's habit of infiltrating rebellious groups. Papers I've received under the Freedom of Information Act show that one of the leading suspects named by police investigating the Angry Brigade - Britain's bomb-planting urban guerillas of the 1970s - was in fact a police informant. Gerry Osner was named as an Angry Brigade suspect in 1972, but police documents from 1968 say he was their informant inside the anti-Vietnam war movement. The Angry Brigade bombing campaign began in 1970. The "angries" planted bombs in what their communiques called "a planned series of attacks on capitalist and government property."
Between 1970 and 1972 their bomb targets included the homes of government ministers and Ford executives. Their communiques, with the help of a "John Bull" printing set, announced that "we have started to fight back and the war will be won by the organised working class, with bombs." They also claimed that "organised militant struggle and organised terrorism go side by side." The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a massive international rise in political and industrial struggle, including the anti-Vietnam protests and the 1968 French general strike. The Angry Brigade were part of a small but significant move towards terrorism on the fringes of this wave. Unlike the Italian Red Brigades or Germany's Baader-Meinhof group, the Angry Brigade didn't kill anyone. Its bombs were designed to destroy property and create spectacles, not to take lives. But they certainly played with bloodthirsty ideas - promising that "pig blood will flow in the streets" and claiming to be "the man or woman sitting next to you. They have guns in their pockets and anger in their minds." A concerted police operation led to the arrest and trial of people accused of the Angry Brigade attacks in 1971 and 1972. The police swoops gathered up both people found to be linked to the bombings and people who were innocent of any crime. Those arrested included Stuart Christie, who had been freed from a Spanish prison by an international campaign in 1967. Most of those arrested came from a "new left" background, but Christie was a Scottish anarchist. He travelled to Spain in 1964 to help his Spanish comrades in a plan to kill the country's dictator Francisco Franco. The attempt to assassinate the fascist leader failed and Christie was jailed for 20 years. After he was freed by the international campaign, Christie lived in London under fairly regular police surveillance. In December 1972, shortly after the trial of the Stoke Newington Eight led to some convictions and some acquittals, the police announced they were seeking "two people who we are most anxious to interview." Deputy assistant commissioner Ernest Bond said they were looking for "Gerry Osner and Miss Sarah Poulikakou" in connection with the bombings. Bond said they were "living abroad," adding that he had asked "Special Branch men in the Republic of Ireland" for help. Christie - who as the trial showed was not an Angry Brigade member, but did know many of those involved - told me he believed Osner was part of the Stoke Newington Eight Defence Campaign set up to aid the defendants, but was not likely to have taken part in Angry Brigade actions. But the document in a bundle of papers I received shows that Osner was an informant. The papers show that the authorities were genuinely very alarmed by the large, angry protests at the US embassy against the Vietnam war and the related growth of the new left. Panicked reactions included mobilising a "bomb squad" lest protesters use explosives and seriously considering, though ultimately rejecting, the mobilisation of troops to "contain" demonstrators. They also leaned on the BBC and newspaper editors to be less sympathetic to marchers. One paper from senior Home Office official F W Merifield refers to a Special Branch report. It says: "Such reports we have on extreme violence come from sources like Jeremy Osner, a student on whom a HOW is being submitted, and are not very credible. Nonetheless there is enough wild talk to give the police considerable cause for concern." "Jeremy" is almost certainly a mis-spelling of Gerry. His name is correctly cited when he was identified as among the 45 "leaders of the movement" in another Special Branch paper. An "HOW" is probably a Home Office Warrant allowing police to intercept Osner's post. It seems that Osner was an informant, albeit one not entirely trusted by the police. He was certainly involved in the 1968 demonstrations. Tariq Ali, one of the key organisers of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC), told me: "I remember Gerry Osner. A few of us always thought he was an agent provocateur. Soon after this was put to him he and his girlfriend disappeared." Osner retreated from VSC, which organised large, loud, angry and militant protests but always rejected wild calls for individual "terrorism." He resurfaced around those connected to the Angry Brigade in 1971. He and Poulikakou did indeed flee to Ireland. Poulikakou changed her name to Sue Richardson and went on to be involved in a variety of anarchist and community causes until her death in 2011. Osner's movements are unknown. There's a strong if circumstantial case to suggest Osner was acting as a police informant in Angry Brigade circles and that the police announcement that they were seeking his arrest was a way of preserving his cover. It also seems likely that Poulikakou was unaware of this, given her subsequent role as a well respected activist. The Osner papers show that the police wanted informants in both legal, non-violent and illegal, violent political movements. They did not seem to distinguish between the two. They also suggest - given Osner's role in VSC - that the police were pretty lax about informants becoming provocateurs. You can read more from Stuart Christie at www.christiebooks.comFollow Solomon Hughes on Twitter: @SolHughesWriter

Special Branch Police spying on Wapping strike against Murdoch

Undercover trade unionists - Special Branch just can't leave us alone;
The Freedom of Information Act has revealed the insidious nature of police surveillance, 25 years after the Wapping dispute, says Solomon Hughes

Solomon Hughes
First Published - Morning Star
March 11, 2011 Friday


This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Wapping dispute - a vicious battle launched by media baron Rupert Murdoch to derecognise the unions and shift his newspapers to his east London fortress.
Losing the battle for Wapping weakened the unions and strengthened Murdoch, and we are all paying the price now - in worse conditions at work and more lies in the press. It's harder for us to strike and easier for politicians to crawl to Murdoch.
Murdoch had a lot of help at Wapping, not least from the police. Papers released to me under the Freedom of Information Act show the "anti-terrorist" police of Special Branch mounted daily surveillance of picket lines at the Wapping plant in the 1986 dispute.
The 217 pages of documents show Special Branch subjected the dispute to intense scrutiny, clearly had informants close to the labour movement and kept files on trade union leaders. The papers reveal Special Branch officers spent time recording the speeches to strikers from John Prescott, and accused other Labour MPs of giving "valuable assistance" to "factions of the left," who wanted to fan the "sparks of violent anger" on the picket line.
Some Special Branch snitches were clearly fantasists - on May 3 1986 an "informant" reported that the "leader of engineers union heard to remark 'there is going to be 16,000 at Wapping tonight. They are going specially to do up the Special Patrol Group'." On the same day another "informant" note stated: "A large contingent from Glasgow will be marching from the embankment to Wapping at 19:00. Informant states that the object of the march is to take over the plant and set it on fire."
Special Branch noted tiny details of the dispute. For example, they recorded that May 3 1986 - the reception for a Printworkers March For Jobs - was low key and "generated little interest, with support for the participants being at a subdued rather than token level. No more than 80 persons attended the social arranged to greet them last evening." This detail shows undercover officers or their informers were in attendence at the event.
Special Branch mounted national surveillance of the dispute. The files contain notes from Swindon, south Wales and Kent Special Branch detailing the number of coaches - especially those containing miners - sent to Wapping demonstrations.
A Special Branch Threat Assessment reports a "behind closed doors" mass meeting of print union Sogat 82 members on May 21 1986 when the leadership of the union were "given a rough ride" for giving in to the courts.
The High Court seized the Sogat union's funds until it called off a boycott of News International.
Sogat leader Brenda Dean gave in and "purged" the union's "contempt" of the court. Special Branch were worried about the "increasing militancy of a large number of print workers directly involved in the current dispute." They said: "The emergence of a substantial group of militant print workers may now mean that there will be two chains of command at the Wapping site with the more reasonably minded printers continuing to follow the Dean approach to the dispute and the militants devising their own methods of protest and perhaps joining forces with the now established extremist elements."
This report shows that Special Branch had access to closed union meetings and a sophisticated understanding of the dispute. It also shows that the police worried about strikers' involvement with "extremist elements," including "anarchists."
There was also a great deal of correspondence about how "the SWP are using a council flat at XXXX as their headquarters for organising activities against News International." I am pleased to note that police surveillance included regular reading of "today's issue of the communist 'Morning Star'."
Special Branch only reduced its "daily coverage" of the picket line towards the end of the dispute. It produced written daily briefs on all aspects of the strike, negotiations, union meetings and demonstrations. Surveillance of the demonstrations and pickets was painstaking, including full lists of "banners taking part," and even a list of "chants heard during the evening marches" - including "TUC get off your knees, call a general strike," and "I'd rather be a picket than a scab."
Officers made notes on speeches to strikers given by John Prescott MP. Unsurprisingly Prescott, then Labour employment spokesman, "castigated government trade union legislation and said that everyone present must work and vote for the return of a Labour government at the next general election."
By March 17 Special Branch referred to an "increasingly held view that the cause is lost" for the Wapping strikers. They added "it is this sense of 'hopelessness' which drives many of the strikers present to vent their frustration against the police and the sparks of violent confrontation so generated are then fanned by factions of the left who may be relied upon to exploit such conflagrations for their cynical propaganda purposes in which they receive much able, and valuable, assistance from Members of Parliament and other prominent political figures of a similar persuasion, some of whom are known regularly to attend the Saturday pickets in the role of 'observers'." In a report of an earlier demo, Special Branch note Tony Benn talking about the "butchery practiced by the police."
The records show Special Branch kept its own files on trade union leaders. Each report has a list of those named in the surveillance in a table showing their "SB (r)" references - referring to the squad's records. There are long file descriptions of Ken Cameron of the Fire Brigades Union and Ben Rubner of the furniture makers' union, although the words have been "redacted."
These files are a reminder that the undercover cops recently found acting the clown inside protest movements will also be involved in any major industrial disputes. They do not, however, show that the police spies had any effect on the dispute. The Wapping strikers lost because of aggressive policing on the picket line and because of a shortage of solidarity from the TUC and Labour leadership, not because of what plainclothes policemen wrote in and their notebooks.

Adrian Mitchell and the Special Branch Poetry Critics

The poetry critics from Special Branch

Solomon Hughes

(Originally published - Morning Star - January 3rd 2009, following the death of Adrian Mitchell.)

The strongest  lost radical voice of 2009  belonged to the poet Adrian Mitchell, who died on the December 20.

His poem To Whom It May Concern remains one of the most powerful anti-war works of our times.

If we journalists had remembered it better, we would have uncovered more of the empty propaganda promoting the war on Iraq before the conflict started, rather than after the bombs have dropped.

Mitchell's words held as well for the newsroom in 2003 as in 1964. He wrote: "So chain my tongue with whisky/Stuff my nose with garlic/Coat my eyes with butter/Fill my ears with silver/Stick my legs in plaster/Tell me lies about Vietnam."

The whisky-chained tongues and silver-filled ears were sadly around for Iraq as well as Vietnam.

The murderous hokey-cokey of Mitchell's poem, where "You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out/You take the human being and you twist it all about" is also now being danced around the Gaza Strip.

I spoke briefly to Mitchell last year when I found that Special Branch had opened a file on the poet.

I got hold of a previously secret Special Branch report of a 1968 Youth CND demonstration against the Vietnam war.

Mitchell addressed the demo and the documents showed that Special Branch had added their notes of his address to their " Adrian Mitchell" file.

The cloth-eared Special Branch poetry critic was not a fan of Mitchell's oeuvre.

The undercover policeman wrote: "Adrian Mitchell recited one of his poems, the meaning of which was largely unintelligible."

Even today, some of what Special Branch wrote about Mitchell was "redacted" - it was blanked out and remains secret.

I spoke to Mitchell and he gave me what every journalist wants - a good quote.

He told me that he thought that the "intelligence" services had been interested in him ever since he went to a Communist Party wine and cheese event for peace at Oxford.

He told me: "I wasn't a Communist, but I like wine. And cheese. And peace." Mitchell also said that Special Branch were "very silly, but I hope they still have their notebooks open because I'm still doing this stuff."

Unfortunately, they can now close their notebooks as Mitchell he is unable to continue doing his radical stuff, but I remain very glad that he did.

I hope that another generation of poets is ready to dictate their work into Special Branch notebooks now Mitchell is unavailable to the Secret Police Poetry Appreciation Society.