The Plot Against Harold Wilson

[Damien Lloyd]

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?doci...0495&hl=en

Harold Wilson's belief that he was the victim of a secret service plot to discredit him is well documented. But revelations in this BBC drama documentary The Plot Against Harold Wilson, suggest the Labour prime minister was also convinced he was the target of plans to stage a military coup - and that the Royal Family backed it.

[Paul Rigby]

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?doci...0495&hl=en

Harold Wilson's belief that he was the victim of a secret service plot to discredit him is well documented. But revelations in this BBC drama documentary The Plot Against Harold Wilson, suggest the Labour prime minister was also convinced he was the target of plans to stage a military coup - and that the Royal Family backed it.

Is there any equivalent for the Evatt/Petrov/Spry affair in Oz? Evatt, too, was dismissed by the spook propaganda circus as a conspiracy-obsessed nut.

[Magda Hassan]

http://home.alphalink.com.au/~loge27/c_w...ission.htm
http://www.historycooperative.org/procee...maher.html

Is this useful to you Paul?

Evatt was a very bright man. Brighter than most. If he was dismissed by the spook propaganda circus as a conspiracy-obsessed nut it was because they were conspiring against him and others.

[David Guyatt]

Wilson was almost certainly right in his belief.

There was a planned military coup d'etat to be headed by Mountbatten and "managed" by Sir David Stirling, founder of the SAS. At least this is what I remember was the case. People like the extra nasty Brian Crozier (Bilderberg's in-house spook), the revengeful Peter Wright (Box) and the ever so cunning George Kennedy Young (SIS) were just three of those involved. The Army Operation "Clockwork Orange" run from the Army barracks in Lisburn in Ulster was involved according to Clockwork Orange "whistleblower" Colin Wallace (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Wallace). I also think the CIA had a heavy guiding hand involved as well. It wasn't so much that Wilson was a communist (complete bollocks imo) but he was on the Labour left - and in charge - and those two facts alone were enough to overthrow him.

The most accomplished book on the subject (imo) is Robin Ramsay's and Steve Dorrill's SMEAR!: WILSON AND THE SECRET STATE.

**

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/tm_objectid..._page.html

WHO WAS PLOTTING AN ARMY COUP TO GET RID OF HAROLD WILSON?

16/03/2006


babara.castle.harold.wilson
THIRTY years on, Paul Routledge says it's time to name bigwigs who planned to overthrow an elected PM.

IT was an announcement that shocked the nation. Thirty years ago today, Harold Wilson told Britain that he was stepping down as Prime Minster with three years still left to run.

No adequate reason was given for his decision and speculation and rumour spread like wildfire.

But somewhere in a safe, deep in the heart of Whitehall, lies a damning and very secret report that may yet reveal the great unsolved secret of the Harold Wilson years - did the security services plot a coup against the Labour Prime Minister?

And just how close did the tanks come to Number Ten?

Wilson firmly believed that he was the target of a dirty tricks campaign run by officers and ex-officers of MI5, MI6 and even the British army to bring down his government.

"A couple of thousand men in the Horse Guards Parade could do a lot of trouble before troops came - if they came," Wilson confided to his political secretary Marcia Williams.

Now new evidence has come to light that confirms Harold Wilson's worst anxieties. And that top secret Whitehall report on the spooks' plot could soon be forced into the open. When Jim Callaghan took over from Wilson as Prime Minister he ordered Lord Hunt, a former Cabinet Secretary, to investigate the alleged MI5 plot. The Hunt Report, kept under wraps for three decades, is believed to name names.

The smear campaign against Wilson began in the late 1940's when, as President of the Board of Trade, he negotiated vital food deals with Soviet Russia.

As a minister in Attlee's postwar government, as a backbench MP, as Labour leader after Hugh Gaitskell and as Prime Minister four times in the 1960's and 1970's, Wilson was the target of elements in the security services seeking his downfall.

In the view of hard-right MI5 mavericks like "Spycatcher" Peter Wright, who later confessed his role in the plot, Socialists were the same as Communists - intent on delivering the UK to the Kremlin.

Wright confessed: "We discussed how to get rid of him." Brian Crozier, another ex-spook, admits that "top members" of the Army were involved in the takeover talks.

Former arms minister Lord Chalfont agrees that a coup would have involved "very senior people." To bolster their sordid case for ousting a democratically-elected government, MI6 invented a Russian lover for Wilson, and passed a "compromising" photograph of the pair in Moscow to MI5 - who fed it straight to the media. It was also claimed that Wilson had taken bribes, and supplied classified information to Soviet "moles". A Soviet defector fingered the Prime Minister as a KGB agent, and claimed there was a Communist cell in Downing Street.

None of these preposterous stories were true, but they were also handed on to the CIA, whose leading operative James Jesus Angleton used them to discredit the Labour leader within the American administration. Wilson was thus suspected of playing into the hands of Communism when he began withdrawing British troops from Suez, even though it was in the nation's best economic interests.

The conspirators reached a lunatic height in 1967, when the Queen's uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, was sounded out as the possible leader of a military coup.

He was reluctant to get involved, but that didn't stop the plotters trying again in the 1970's, after Wilson had been returned to power in the general election called by Tory premier Ted Heath in the teeth of a national pit strike.

By then General Sir Walter Walker even prepared a speech for the Queen to read when a Mountbatten-led national government seized power.

The campaign against Wilson did not end in the early 1970's. It continued through his second and third governments.

Wilson called the then heads of MI5 and MI6 to account, and set in train the events that culminated in the Hunt Report. This investigation implicated Peter Wright and his friends, and George Kennedy Young, one-time head of MI6.

Now historian Stephen Dorril, co-author of Smear! Wilson And The Secret State, has asked Downing Street to produce the report.

Having just written a short biography of Harold Wilson myself for a new series on Prime Ministers of the Twentieth Century, I am convinced that the Labour leader's suspicions about subversive spooks were both genuine and justifiable.

I do not believe that their treachery was the sole cause of his thunderbolt resignation. Wilson had told his wife, his closest political friends and the Queen that he intended to resign around his 60th birthday - which fell on March 11, 1976.

He was exhausted by years of running the country and holding the warring Labour party together - and Alzheimer's disease was setting in.

But I also believe that the spooks' subversive campaign waged against his leadership contributed powerfully to his weary frame of mind.

He knew his enemies would never cease their dirty tricks while he was in Number 10, and they would stop at nothing. It is perfectly possible - indeed, probable - that by standing down he averted the coup against democracy that he so feared.

With his wily genius gone, Labour stumbled on to defeat in 1979, and the conspirators got through the ballot box what they had plotted to gain by treachery - a right-wing Tory government.

Wilson's successors in Downing Street owe it to the nation to publish the Hunt Report in full.

Only then can the ghosts of 30 years ago be laid to rest.

[Paul Rigby]

http://home.alphalink.com.au/~loge27/c_w...ission.htm
http://www.historycooperative.org/procee...maher.html

Is this useful to you Paul?

Evatt was a very bright man. Brighter than most. If he was dismissed by the spook propaganda circus as a conspiracy-obsessed nut it was because they were conspiring against him and others.

Thanks, Magda. I've read Robert Manne's book, The Petrov Affair (1987), and a very substantial bucket of whitewash it is, too.

Must mention in passing that Petrov was identified as a Beria man by ASIO (see the thread on Evica's fascinating book for the primary purpose of Operation Splinter Factor); and thus a prime target for bringing down.

Bialoguski, cultivator-in-chief of Petrov, reads at times like a Stephen Ward figure. Was Ward's actual role rather different to the one publicly portrayed? Just a thought for future reference.

Paul

[Paul Rigby]

Harold Wilson: The Russophile at Number 10

Neil Clark is a journalist, writer and broadcaster. His Award winning Blog can be found at http://www.neilclark66.blogspot.com

Published time: October 24, 2014 14:51

http://rt.com/op-edge/198964-harold-wils...-politics/

Imagine a British Prime Minister who was a Russophile, not a Russophobe, and defied US pressure to send UK troops to war. A British Prime Minister who worked for better relations with the East, visited Moscow, and was on good terms with Kremlin leaders.

Well, it might sound unlikely today, but forty years ago we had such a Prime Minister. In October 1974, Harold Wilson was puffing away merrily on his pipe celebrating his fourth election victory out of five.

Looking back at the Wilson era is instructive as it shows us how much British politics has changed for the worse since the 1970s.

Harold Wilson WAS A mainstream Labour Party Politician of His time yet anyone espousing the Sensible Pro-Mixed economy Policies he put forward in the 1960s and 70s Today Would be denounced as A "Stalinist." Ironically, at the time, the Ultra-left Accused Wilson- a man who extended nationalization and whose government increased the top rate of income tax to 83% - of being too right-wing!

On Foreign policy too, Wilson's Diplomatic, non-hawkish Approach Would be denounced as Being akin to "appeasement", and he'd be Compared to Neville Chamberlain. Wilson always tried to Understand the Russian perspective: Today anyone even the slightest Expressing Support / defense for the Russian Position on Ukraine for instance is routinely Labeled A "Putin apologist" or "Kremlin stooge" , etc by neocon / faux left Gatekeepers WHO hate Russia and its leader with an intensity that is bordering on the pathological. In Britain, as in America, over the last thirty odd years, the neocon lunatics have taken over the asylum.

Back in the 1960s and 70s, politics in Britain was in a far healthier state than it is today, as the success of Harold Wilson shows. A wider range of views were allowed to be expressed openly in public life, and our democracy was all the better for it.

Unlike today, there was genuine freedom of speech. Obnoxious "Witch-finders" Were not hounding pundits and commentators WHO HAD the "wrong" Views on Foreign policy 24/7: it WAS an ERA When the Reports of the great Anti-War journalist John Pilger Appeared on the Front Pages of our national newspapers.

Wilson was not the only leading politician of this period to be a Russophile. As I Noted in an earlier piece OpEdge there Were Politicians WHO Were sympathetic to the Moscow perspective from Across the Spectrum. You might have expected socialist politicians to be well-disposed towards a country called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but the flag-bearer of the true blue Conservative right, Enoch Powell, was a Russophile too. Powell became a supporter of unilateral nuclear disarmament and warned that it was US imperialism, not Russia, which posed the greatest threat to the peace of the world. Today's Conservatives by contrast, have, by and large, become lackeys for that same US imperialism- as have leading Labour Party and Liberal Democrat figures.

Harold Wilson first went to Moscow to try and develop UK / Soviet trade when he was a minister in Clement Attlee's Labour government which had come to power in 1945. Although no communist, he saw, correctly, the great benefits to Britain of good trade links with the Soviet Union and with Other Countries in the Communist bloc. "The healthy development of Trade Between Eastern and Western Europe is an essential Part of the Program for European Recovery. Politics do not enter into it, " Wilson said. What a contrast to our Russophobic leaders today who are enthusiastically imposing sanctions on Russia which are clearly not in Britain's best economic interests.

Wilson, when in opposition, continued to make the case for greater east-west trade and even became a consultant to companies who were doing business in the Soviet Union.

When he became Prime Minister in 1964, and again in 1974, he Consistently Policies Pursued of détente- and "Peaceful Coexistence" with the Soviet Union, as well as resisting US pressure to send British troops to the Vietnam War.

His biographer Philip Ziegler Records That Wilson WAS "ecstatic" over the warm welcome he Received on one visit to Moscow in 1975. Wilson wrote: "They Laid out by themselves in an unparalleled way by all the standard Tests." Soviet Prime MINISTER Aleksey Kosygin said That the meeting with Wilson WAS "truly Historic and ... ..a Major factor in the History of Anglo-Soviet Relations."

That year, 1975, saw the Helsinki Accords, which marked the high point of the era of détente. In this period in Britain, the hawks who wanted to wreck détente were treated with the contempt they deserved.

This was reflected not just in British politics, where hawks were marginalized figures, but in popular culture too.

The most popular British comedy double act of the Wilson era was Morecambe and Wise. In their 1965 film The Intelligence Men "Eric and Ernie" help Military Intelligence Foil A Sinister Plot by A Group Called "Schlecht" Whose AIM is to sabotage A Forthcoming visit to Britain by A Russian Trade Delegation. There's a plot to assassinate the lead ballerina in Swan Lake which our heroes manage to thwart.

It's interesting that in 1965, the baddies were an international gang of criminals trying to wreck British-Russian relations. Today, it's members of our governing circles who are doing that.

The marginalized Russophobe fanatics of yesteryear, who wanted to provoke a disastrous confrontation with the Soviet Union, are now in positions of power and influence. They're in government and they're writing newspaper columns. And it's those sensible voices who want friendly relations, and a genuinely constructive partnership with Russia as Harold Wilson did, who are marginalized.

Woe betides anyone WHO Tries to set up A "Friends of Russia" Group in Parliament. The Conservative Friends of Russia group was subject to a nasty campaign of attacks by neocons and the faux-left and was eventually disbanded. We can have Parliamentary Friends of Israel, But not it Seems "Friends of Russia." Harold Wilson, WHO WAS A both Zionist and A Russophile, Would be turning in His Grave.

But Although the agents of "Schlecht" have taken over, there are good Reasons for Believing That Their days are numbered.

For A start, Russophobia, as I Highlighted here , has No widespread Support Among the British Public, is despite the Relentless Anti-Russian, Anti-Putin propaganda.

People remember how President Putin and Russia opposed plans for war on a secular government in Syria last summer, and realize that if the neocon warmongers had got their way and President Assad been forcibly toppled, ISIS would probably now be in control of the entire country. The Campaign of lies and misinformation designed to Get people to Believe That there has Been A Russian "Invasion" of Ukraine has backfired Also, with much of the "Official Narrative" unraveling. In any case, there is little, or no, public appetite for a war to be fought over Ukraine, as much as that might please the Russophobic neocon fanatics who can not seem to get enough of bloodshed- even after Iraq and Libya.

Economic factors too need to be taken into consideration. As Liam Hannigan points out in His New Spectator article Sanctions on Russia have hit Western European Economies hard. Not Only That, there's the looming Financial Collapse of Ukraine to Take into Account too. "Kiev is in A Deep Financial hole and fast heading Towards Financial meltdown. Unless an extremely large bailout is delivered soon, there will be a default, sending shockwaves through the global economy. That's A Risk nobody wants to Take - Least not in Washington, London or Berlin, " Halligan writes. In July, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond Warned That Would Sanctions on Russia hit the UK economy, Saying "you can not make an omelet without breaking eggs."

Inevitably, British businesses which are losing out due to the sanctions, will be trying, with justification, to lobby the government to change course, and the neocon Russophobes who want to extend sanctions will find they have some powerful enemies.

Also, there's the success of Been Politicians and parties WHO have dared to Take A different line on Russia, Which we saw again in this year's European Elections .

Certainly moving away from the phony elite consensus on Russia and Ukraine has not done Nigel Farage and his UKIP party's electoral fortunes much harm, nor has it dented the popularity of Respect Leader George Galloway, who now has a staggering 225,000 followers on Twitter.

It's clear that Russophobia is a complete dead end for Britain. While some commentators Obsessed Media May want hostilities to continue, fewer and fewer Thankfully people are reading Their "Why Putin is the New Hitler" / "Russia Poses A Threat to the World" columns and Leader articles. We do not have to read their tripe any more as we have the internet, and other sources of news and comment.

Harold Wilson showed that British Prime Ministers do not have to follow Russophobia. If Britain did not have A Trade War with the Soviet Union in the middle of the old "Cold War," then why do we have Sanctions on Russia Today? The reason for that is that our politics have been hijacked by a group of people who are following an anti-Russian agenda that's been set in Washington and which is not in Britain's national interest.

It's time for a new, genuine reset in British / Russian relations and for the Russophobic hawks to once again be treated as the fanatics and extremists they always were.

Let's get back to the 60s and 70s, the era which Harold Wilson dominated. It's not only the music which was much better then, but the foreign policy too.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

[Magda Hassan]

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

:oldier:: ::face.palm::

[David Guyatt]

I remember the Wilson years well - and I do happen to think that his government was the last time democracy was remotely representative in the UK. Once he was toppled things changed and we became a meek and compliant US corporate-military outpost.

Wilson was overthrown by a CIA directed coup that led to his sudden resignation - otherwise a puppet government led by Lord Louis Mountbatten was planned to take power, as I recall.

There was an excellent tv drama series called A Very British Coup broadcast by Channel 4 in the 1980's on this.

There was also a very good docudrama on TV about this back in 2006 called The Plot Against Harold Wilson by the BBC (that will never happen again now the Beeb is so neutered).

Btw, in the RT report there is some very strange capitalisation going on? Can't really complain as this is something I do too, but this is exceptional - even by my standards...

[Magda Hassan]

Btw, in the RT report there is some very strange capitalisation going on? Can't really complain as this is something I do too, but this is exceptional - even by my standards...

Ahhh! Maybe that's why they said this:

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Maybe it wasn't the content of the article but the editing. Which they should have done but obviously haven't.

[Magda Hassan]

http://home.alphalink.com.au/~loge27/c_w...ission.htm
http://www.historycooperative.org/procee...maher.html

Is this useful to you Paul?

Evatt was a very bright man. Brighter than most. If he was dismissed by the spook propaganda circus as a conspiracy-obsessed nut it was because they were conspiring against him and others.

Thanks, Magda. I've read Robert Manne's book, The Petrov Affair (1987), and a very substantial bucket of whitewash it is, too.

Must mention in passing that Petrov was identified as a Beria man by ASIO (see the thread on Evica's fascinating book for the primary purpose of Operation Splinter Factor); and thus a prime target for bringing down.

Bialoguski, cultivator-in-chief of Petrov, reads at times like a Stephen Ward figure. Was Ward's actual role rather different to the one publicly portrayed? Just a thought for future reference.

Paul

Sorry Paul. I missed this at the time. My links seem to no longer be active any more also. Robert Mann when he wrote in the 1980's was a very right wing ideologue and was editor of the 'intellectual' hard right wing journal 'Quadrant'. He is now slightly to the left of Genghis Khan as he regards indigenous people and refugees as human being and as deserving of human rights and a true history. Naturally for such heresy he had to resign his editorship at Quadrant. But I'm pretty sure he is quite unreconstructed when it come to matters Soviet. Tantalising what you say about the Operation Splinter Evica thread. Do you have a handy link for that? I think Ward was a much more interesting and multidimensional character than Bialoguski who just seems another garden variety anti-Bolshevik Russophobe to me.

David there seem distinct echoes of the Whitlam drama with Harold Wilson. In Whitlam's case many of the Shakley lot but other also. I need to read up more on the whole Wilson government.