Plots and Paranoia by Bernard Porter

Author:Bernard Porter [Porter, Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Great Britain
ISBN: 9781317356363
Google: bTh-CwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-01-29T01:26:31+00:00

Chapter 8

Dangers ahead (1920–40)

For most people the formal end of the Great War in 1920 (when the Versailles treaty came into force) was an unalloyed relief. For the men who ran Britain’s counter-subversive agencies, however, it was not. This was because it only marked the end of the war with the Germans, who had not been their main antagonists for some time now. Since the middle of 1917, at the latest, most of their energies had been directed not against Germany, but against Russian Bolshevik subversion. And 1920 did not mark the end of the war against that.

If anything it made fighting it more difficult. The British domestic secret service owed nearly everything to the war. Before, both MI5 and the Special Branch had been insignificant and relatively innocuous. The war had metamorphosed them into a full-blown ‘political police’. It had done that by persuading people of the reality and seriousness of the German – not the Russian – subversive threat. That was the problem. With Germany defeated, and consequently the subversive threat from that direction defeated too, it removed the public justification for MI5 and the Special Branch in their present forms. It also removed the factor which had suspended people’s prejudices against ‘political policing’ generally while the war was on. Now there was nothing to stop those prejudices returning. Bolshevism ought to have the effect of stopping them, but was not so widely perceived as a threat as Germany had been. The domestic secret service was vulnerable, therefore; from which it followed that Britain’s security was vulnerable too.

This was a huge worry. It meant that, after 1920, Britain’s domestic secret service had in effect two struggles on its hands. The first was against its real enemies, as it saw them: political criminals and subversives, mostly communist, who endangered the security of the British state. The second was against the obstruction and apathy of some of its political masters: usually Labour, who could be expected to be unhelpful, but also occasionally Conservatives and coalitionists, who should have known better. Sometimes the two struggles could become confused; for if ministers were very obstructive, it was always possible that it was because they were covert enemies. That suspicion had far-reaching implications, as we shall see later on.

The period began badly, with two domestic intelligence set-backs, both of which could be – not necessarily fairly – attributed to obstruction and apathy. The first and most disastrous was in Ireland. The weakness of British intelligence there had been clear since the Easter Rising of 1916. That had taken the British authorities very largely by surprise, because its leaders had been careful to keep the secret of it to a very small circle of conspirators indeed. Even Eoin MacNeill, the Chief of Staff of the Irish Volunteers, was kept out of it, with the result that the day before the rising he assumed it had been called off, and told his men to go home and put their guns away.1 That was a mistake, but the general principle was a sound one.

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