By a West Midlands Labour Party member
Would a Corbyn government face a military coup? Senior sections of the Army and Security Services have been hinting darkly that it would.
An un-named ‘senior military figure’ said back in 2015, with much publicity by the Tory media, that: “Feelings are running very high within the armed forces. You would see a major break in convention with senior Generals directly challenging Corbyn over vital important policy decisions…” More recently, Sir Richard Dearlove, former Head of MI6, publicly called Corbyn a “danger to this nation”.
All this hyperbole is of course just another layer of scare-mongering to add to the litany of other ‘crimes’ that Corbyn is supposedly guilty of, to terrorise workers into not voting for him. It’s all hypocrisy too – the worst cuts the military have faced since the end of the Cold War have been carried out by the Tories, not Labour. And as for the threat of a “major break in convention”, that’s nothing new, the forces of the State have been at it all the time, especially when Labour is in power.
We will need to be on our toes, as the military and Security Services have been known to sabotage governments in the past, and not even left-wing ones. When the Liberals attempted to give Ireland partial independence just before World War I, the Ulster Unionists rebelled, arming the Ulster Volunteers to thwart the Asquith government’s plans. Asquith readied British troops to put down the revolt, but British Army officers threatened to resign en-masse in the ‘Curragh Mutiny’– Asquith had to back down (the same officers had no qualms in fighting the Republicans a few years later, of course).
A similar situation arose again in 1965, when the white-supremacist government of Rhodesia declared independence after threats by Harold Wilson’s Labour government to dismantle their apartheid regime, saying he would send in British troops to impose it. Once again, according to the then Defence Secretary Dennis Healy, they faced “mutinous mutterings” from senior military figures, and had to back down and impose economic sanctions instead.
Wilson kept Britain out of the Vietnam War
It is also now known that plots were hatched by MI5 and the CIA to oust Harold Wilson in the 1970s, with dark claims that he was a ‘Soviet Agent’. All nonsense, and had more to do with the fury of the USA that their pet ally had not done their bidding, with Wilson wisely keeping the UK out of the Vietnam War.
The plots and mutinies against Labour governments have continued, albeit on a much smaller and less known scale.
During my time working for Civil Contingencies in central government, I was often seconded to the Army as a ‘Subject Matter Expert’ during major crises. During 2002, I was surprised to see young Army officers sporting ‘Countryside Alliance’ badges on their uniforms while on duty – it being totally against regulations to wear ‘political’ motives of any sort. The Countryside Alliance had sprung up out of nowhere to oppose the Labour government’s ban on fox hunting.
On talking to one young Captain, he explained he had never been on a fox hunt in his life, but in Offices’ Messes up and down the country, the more senior Commanding Officers were making it clear – given their links to the landed gentry, ‘old boy’ networks etc – they wanted support for the Countryside Alliance’s protests. The Captain said if you wanted to further your career in the Army, it wasn’t wise to upset the top brass. The Countryside Alliance were holding some mass demonstrations at the time, which clearly needed major organisation – the Captain explained that young Army officers, with a nod and wink from their Commanders, were the organisational core behind these mobilisations.
‘Green Goddesses’ toppling over
A further episode I witnessed was during the 2002-2003 firefighters strike, again during the time of the Blair Labour government. I was seconded to the ‘Joint Operational Control Centre’ (JOCC) in the West Midlands. The JOCCs – in each region of the country – were made up of Fire Service management, the Police, government ‘Subject Matter Experts’ like me, and of course the Army, who were operating the ‘Green Goddesses’ to provide fire cover when the firefighters were on strike. It was interesting to see how the various ‘handmaidens of the State’ reacted at a crucial point in this class struggle.
The Green Goddesses, designed in the 1950s to be easily operable by the members of the public in the aftermath of a nuclear attack, were hopeless. With a top speed of 40 mph when fully laden, they had two saddle tanks, one on each side, to hold the water. No matter how many times we explained to the squaddies not to just use up one tank when fighting a fire, they always did. So we had several Green Goddesses toppling over on corners on return from a fire, as the driver forgot that his vehicle was now totally unbalanced. Then there was much embarrassment in Coventry, when the media snapped 10 squaddies attempting to push-start a broken-down Green Goddess.
The bad publicity stung the Blair government, and they prepared an order for the JOCCs that the ‘Red Fire Appliances’ – the real fire engines – currently sitting behind FBU picket lines should be seized. Orders from on high are all very well, but who was going to punch their way through the FBU picket line to grab them?
FBU picket lines were not breached
In our JOCC, West Midlands police had already said from the start that they would play no role in the dispute as they had to work with the firefighters on a day-to-day basis and would not antagonise that relationship. So they were not even participating in the ‘policing’ of the dispute, or even attending the JOCC. Fire Service management, the majority of them on the picket lines themselves back in the national strike of 1977 when they were young firefighters, refused to have anything to do with it – they said they had an unofficial agreement with the striking firefighters that the RFAs would be kept to operational readiness and would be released in a major or catastrophic incident.
This left the Army – but even as the command to seize the RFAs was winding its way down the command structure, they had already prepared an ambush. Before the order could become official, the Brigadier in charge of operations in Wales gave an early morning media interview – it was supposedly to update the media on operational issues – but then added that he had heard speculation about the RFAs being seized, and said the Army would have nothing to do with that issue, as it was not within the Army’s operational remit. The order was dead in the water, with much Westminster spinning that it was never a serious proposal, just an option being considered (yeah, right).
Of course, this was not just benevolence of behalf of senior Army officers, suddenly sympathetic towards striking workers. They had noted the widespread fraternisation between the firefighters and the rank and file troops. The firefighters had respect and sympathy for the ordinary troops, as the ones in our region had been on active service in Bosnia, then immediately went into the Iraq War, and were now meant to be on furlough but instead were fighting fires with antiquated equipment. In turn, the soldiers respected the firefighters who, although on strike, would turn up at fires to give advice to help ensure the soldiers’ safety – this was particularly evident when we had the largest fire of the dispute, a complex and extremely dangerous 25-pump call-out to a blazing derelict factory in West Bromwich.
Different sections of state apparatus
The point is that these sections of the State machine all reacted in different ways, responding to different societal pressures. They are not some uniform automaton, all acting as one at the push of the ruling classes’ button. Indeed, if we look at any revolution in history, the turning point is when sections of the State begin to act independently, whether merely sitting on their hands or actively going over to the side of the people.
That aside, Corbyn will certainly face plots and mutinies by the forces of the State – Wilson and Blair did, so Corbyn certainly will. But we must not be intimidated – the State is now far weaker than in Wilson’s or even the Blair era.
During the 1980s, the Labour MP Chris Mullin wrote A Very British Coup, a novel outlining how the security services and military, in connivance with big business and the Tory media, brought down a Corbyn-esque style government. It was a depressing read.
Thatcherism was in the ascendancy in 1980s
The 1980s were different times of course. Still gripped by the Cold War, the security services were rigidly controlled by a virulent anti-communist, right-wing Oxbridge upper-class clique that could even view the likes of Harold Wilson with suspicion. Ideologically, Thatcherism was in the ascendency and the labour movement had suffered a series of serious defeats at her hands. The masses’ only access to a daily media was firmly in the hands of reaction, and the mass-circulation newspapers pumped out reactionary propaganda, to the extent that the Sun could boast “It was us wot won it”, following the defeat of the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock in the 1987 General Election.
But all those forces Mullin outlined in the 1980s are now much weaker than ever before. While that mysterious ‘senior military figure’ complained that Corbyn would “emasculate” the armed forces, that has already happened courtesy of the Tories. The David Cameron government’s Defence Review, launched alongside the austerity programme, saw the military hit with an 8 per cent cut – the Army is now down to 70,000 personnel. This is superficial, but I compared the size of the Army to Labour Party membership for 1968 and today. In 1968, when the security services were plotting against Wilson, there was one British soldier for every two Labour Party members. Today, there are over seven Labour Party members for every one British soldier. OK, so they still have the machine guns, but you get the point.
Army strength at an all-time low
Actually, it is worse than that for the Army. They have ’70,000 troops’ on paper, but not in reality. I recently spoke to an ‘early retirement’ (read cuts) Regimental Sergeant Major. He explained that to make the Defence Review cuts, the Army let the older – and more experienced – soldiers go. In the main they were the backbone of the training regime in the Army, passing on their skills learnt from past combat to the next generation of soldiers. In theory, soldiers should not be deployed into a potential combat situation until fully trained – the RSM estimated that today only 34,000 troops could be classed as ‘combat ready’ for deployment, such was the gaping hole in the training programme. Or, if you like, over 14 Labour Party members for every one soldier.
Meanwhile, the trade unions have reached into the darkest recesses of the security services. Thatcher famously banned trade unions from the hub of British intelligence gathering, GCHQ, saying they were a national security threat. This was overturned by the Blair government in 1997, and the trade unions are now firmly ensconced in GCHQ.
Growth of trade unions within the state machine
In the 2000s, MI6 fought for and won the right to belong to a trade union (the First Division Association), followed shortly after by MI5. Indeed, amongst the other ‘armed bodies of men’, the FBU and the Prison Officers Association are recognised as amongst the most militant in the trade union movement, while the Police Federation often display healthy signs of stroppiness.
We are not naive enough to argue that now they are trade unionists they have become the good guys overnight, but it does demonstrate they are no longer in the hands of ferociously right-wing Cold War warriors, as in the past. When a workforce begins to form trade unions, it is a sure sign of disquiet and discontent. It also demonstrates that the security services, just like anyone else, are not immune from the pressures of society. In addition, it at least gives the labour movement a small conduit into these dark corners for campaigns and appeals (should a Labour government be attacked) which were previously impenetrable.
The growth of trade unionism in the State machine demonstrates the anger of these institutions at the continued cuts to their service. During my time with them, I didn’t hear fretting about future Labour policies, but continual grumbling about Tory budget cuts, restructuring, redundancies and the growing incursion of private sector practices. As the left-wing economist Paul Mason commented: “The police, armed forces and intelligence services stand to be better funded and staffed under a Labour government than the present one” (Guardian, 16.10.17).
Two thirds of people do NOT use a newspaper for their news
The State’s auxiliary, the Tory press, are also weakened. Thanks to the digital revolution, they are not the only source of ‘news’ anymore, and their influence has dramatically collapsed: 65 per cent of the UK population do not read newspapers, but self-select their news online.
So too big business – a usual ally to undemocratic coups if it is in their financial interest – are in turmoil globally. The position of the private sector doing their bit to bring down Corbyn is an unknown at present. On the one hand, they may baulk at a Corbyn-led government’s taxation and employment policies, but on the other they do hanker – after years of Tory Brexit chaos and austerity – for a period of stability and State-funded investment into the crumbling infrastructure. However, at the same time big business is now dangerously mobile so ‘flight’ rather than fight will be an immediate problem for a Labour government: some corporations may use Corbyn as the peg to hang their excuses on, when in reality they had been planning to switch to low-wage economies such as in Eastern Europe or the Far East all along.
But do not pull the duvet back over your head and sleep soundly. The attacks on a Corbyn government will begin from day one. Globalisation has seen the defenders of capital split between the neo-liberals who’s loyalty is to profit only, and the old bourgeoisie who still want profits but still hold up the smoke-screen of ‘one nationism’; this is mirrored on the political plain in the ideological split in the US Republican Party and the British Conservative Party, where Trump and Johnson are (just about) in the ascendency.
However, the neo-liberals have not yet captured the full force of the State machine. This has been graphically demonstrated in the US, where the security services and military continually clash with the erratic policy decisions of Trump, not least the latest one on the Kurds. In the UK, as already outlined, the State has not been enamoured by the Tories austerity programme: it is one of the reasons Johnson has completed a massive Tory U-turn to discover the Magic Money Tree they derided Labour for the in the last election, and has promised to pour money into the police and Defence.
Fake news spreads quicker than real news
Instead, the neo-liberals have built up an auxiliary force around the Alt Right that pervades social media platforms to peddle fake news and selective propaganda. The key protagonists are the US Alt Right, the Far Right and the ‘Information Offensive’ emanating out of Russia, as well as China and Israel. They will all be gunning for Corbyn. They understand the power of fake news and propaganda in this digital age. The renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology carried out research over 2006-2017, and found that fake news was 70 per cent more likely to be shared on Twitter than true stories, and that fake news spread SIX times faster than true stories.
The aim of fake news is to destabilise, as well described by NATO’s principal spokesperson, Oana Lungescu. Although attacking Russia, her analysis could sum up what we will face. She said: “It is a way, not to convince people, but to confuse them, not to provide an alternative viewpoint, but to divide public opinion and to ultimately undermine our ability to understand what is going on” (Resilience magazine, Spring 2017).
Equally, the Alt Right only need small forces to cast a big shadow and skew reality. A case in point was a national online debate in Sweden in 2017 on immigration. There were around half a million contributions and overwhelmingly anti-immigrant. However, the Swedish fact-checker group Viralgranskaren examined the contributions and found that a staggering 366,291 comments could be attributed to only 183 contributors. The founder of the fact-checker group, Jack Verner, said: “That means 2,000 comments per person, and gives a very different picture of how widespread the opinions of their side really are… The aim of propaganda is to respond to light so as to make the shadow it casts as large as possible” (Eskilstuna Kuriren, 20.02.17).
These dark forces will be at work immediately, to create an atmosphere of crisis, whipped up further by the Tory media. The ‘coup’ will be attempted in Parliament, with all the usual suspects within our own Labour Parliamentary Party ranks ready to plunge the knife into Corbyn’s – and the Party Manifesto’s – back, ably assisted by the bilge-ring of the ‘GNUs’ (Government of National Unity) from the refugees from the Tory Party and the happy-clappy Lib Dems.
Fuel depots ‘under seige’
In these days of ‘Just In Time Production’ and monopolisation – for example, the major supermarket chains control nearly 40 per cent of all food distribution in the UK – it is very easy to engineer a crisis. A case in point was the ‘Fuel Crisis’ of 2000, again under the Blair-led Labour government. There wasn’t actually a shortage of fuel, had the public acted calmly. But the Tories whipped up the panic – the Conservative Party got the ball rolling by calling for a ‘day of protest’ on 29 July 2000, which was followed by their tame press taking up the cudgels. ‘Farmers for Action’, joined by independent lorry drivers then began to ‘blockade’ the oil depots – or so the media and Tories hysterically reported. Petrol stations then began to run out of fuel as people began to panic buy. In turn, the ‘crisis’ had been engineered by the oil companies in the first place, furious at Blair’s hikes in fuel duties. They suddenly developed a massive health and safety consciousness, and companies like BP refused to let their tanker-lorries out of the depot unless there was a heavy police escort.
There was never any real danger. I remember an Assistant Chief Constable in Staffordshire reporting that he had despatched several TSGs (Tactical Support Groups – ie wagons full of riot cops) at enormous overtime expenditure, to relieve the local depot, apparently under siege. On arrival he found four farmers sitting in deckchairs, drinking cocoa from their flasks and eating ham sandwiches. Despite his appeals to the oil company about this obvious lack of a ‘real and present danger’, the oil company would have none of it, and still refused to release their tankers.
2000 ‘fuel crisis’ was manufactured by the bosses
The 2000 ‘Fuel Crisis’ was less of an industrial dispute, and more akin to the ‘lorry drivers strike’ in Chile in 1973, engineered by the bosses to create crisis and pave the way for the brutal military coup against the democratically elected Allende government.
So it is going to be a bare-knuckle fight when Corbyn becomes Prime Minister. There’s three steps Labour should take to mitigate the obvious threats. Firstly, through the selection process, we must make sure we have a Parliamentary Labour Party who are nailed to the Manifesto, with no place, as our old song goes, for cowards that flinch or traitors that sneer.
Secondly, Labour will need to beef up its rebuttal unit – and utilise the social media networks of its half a million members – to make sure every lie is immediately shot down, and the truth is immediately out there for the 65 per cent on the population that doesn’t read the Sun or Daily Mail.
Thirdly, there must be full trade union rights for members of the armed forces. Yes, this will make the Daily Mail’s head explode, but it is an easy policy to defend – if MI6 and MI5 can have trade union rights, why not the ‘Poor Bloody Infantry’? No, it will not transform the average service man or woman into a Bolshevik overnight, but it will be another barrier we can lay down to prevent those still prevalent in the Officer class prone to ‘extra-Parliamentary action’. There should be three tiers of union too, similar to the Civil Service (FDA, Prospect, PCS) so that the lowly foot soldier does not find himself in the same union meeting with his CO.
Labour movement will react with fury
One of the criticisms of Chris Mullin’s book was that one of the key actors who should have had a major part – the labour movement – was no-where to be seen. Well it was just a novel. That will not be the case in reality. The labour movement will react with fury if their democratically elected government with its popular social reform is interfered with. We will need to have our trigger-fingers at the ready in an instant to counter any nonsense on social media platforms, and be just as agile to turn the social media war into physical protests and actions.
In conclusion, don’t be intimidated or cowed by any dark mutterings of coups and military action – the State forces are much weaker than ever before. But keep that pitchfork by your bedside just in case.
November 5, 2019
