When Labour SPIED on Mick Lynch's trade union

Help Declassified expose the powerful by joining us: https://www.declassifieduk.org/join/ Harold Wilson, one of Britain’s most left-wing prime ministers, was delighted by MI5’s surveillance of a seafarers’ strike in the 1960s. MI5 spies were regularly summoned to 10 Downing Street for clandestine meetings with the Labour prime minister to share material on striking seamen, hitherto top secret files from 1966 reveal. The full extent of his close relationship with senior MI5 officers is contained in scores of documents declassified at the National Archives in Kew. They also show how MI5 blacklisted a Labour MP who Wilson agreed should not be appointed Solicitor General despite being a distinguished human rights lawyer posing no danger to national security. The files shed particular light on Wilson’s hostility towards a strike by the National Union of Seamen (NUS, now part of the RMT), whose members demanded a 40-hour week. It emerges that the Security Service ran informants inside the NUS and conducted phone taps on its members. There is no evidence of any objection from Wilson who – despite his left-wing credentials – harboured deep suspicion of the Communist Party (CP). In one previously highly classified file, many of which are partly redacted, MI5 chief Sir Martin Furnival-Jones described how “the prime minister spoke to me in warm terms of the quality and value” of the agency’s intelligence. In almost daily reports from June 1966 – at the height of the protracted strike – Richard Thistlethwaite, MI5’s go-between with Downing Street, exaggerated the role of communists. Read the full story by Richard Norton-Taylor https://www.declassifieduk.org/labour-leader-praised-mi5-for-spying-on-trade-union/