UK Dockers' leader passed strike tactics to MI5 agents during national stoppage

UK Dockers' leader passed strike tactics to MI5 agents during national stoppage
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/jan/01/politics.freedomofinformation...
Monday 1 January 2001 11.38 GMTLast modified on Wednesday 20 July 2016 05.33 BST

A former president of the Transport and General Workers' Union has admitted knowingly passing information on strike tactics to the security services, after MI5 reports on a national docks stoppage in 1970 released today detailed his views and attitudes.
Brian Nicholson, a London dockers' leader at the time who became a close ally of Neil Kinnock in the late 1980s, told the Guardian: "They used to play games with me and I used to play games with them. What I told them was not significant, unless to tell them things to let the other side know."

Mr Nicholson said MI5 agents "flitted around the docks posing as leftwing activists and do-gooders" during the industrial upheavals of the early 1970s, although others were associated with rightwing groups such as Catholic Action and Moral Rearmament.

"But I realised who they were," said Mr Nicholson, who had a leftwing profile and now runs a retired dockers' club in east London. "The establishment panicked easy in those days and they were on to me daily. People were paranoid at the time about leftwing takeovers. But I was never a communist - I'm a Catholic and a churchgoer."

Mr Nicholson features prominently in a string of MI5 reports to the newly elected prime minister, Edward Heath, about a two week national strike over pay by 50,000 dockers in July 1970, which led the government to declare a state of emergency and put troops on standby. The reports by MI5's director general, Sir Martin Furnival-Jones, which are stamped "top secret", are contained in Heath's personal file on the strike and are the first such accounts from the domestic spying service on trade unions in the postwar period to be released. They have been released to the public record office under the 30 year rule.

Focused mainly on the role of communists and their allies in the strike - which was led by the then TGWU general secretary, Jack Jones - the reports reveal the extent of MI5's undercover penetration and surveillance of the left at the time and contain a relatively sophisticated analysis of the private differences among the dockers' leaders.

Their release comes at a time when Stella Rimington, who headed MI5 in the early 1990s, is about to publish her memoirs in the teeth of fierce resistance in Whitehall.

Dame Stella worked for MI5's political subversion department, F branch, in the early 1970s, when its role was massively expanded in response to increasing industrial militancy on the left. She later headed MI5's "counter-subversion" operations against the 1984-85 miners' strike.

The 1970 docks strike was the first of a series of increasingly effective stoppages during the Heath administration, which culminated in the miners' strike of 1974, the three-day week and the Tories' electoral defeat.

The MI5 briefings on the July docks walkout - passed to the prime minister every couple of days and based on agents' reports, phone tapping and bugging - include accounts of private meetings between Communist party officials and dockers' shop stewards and even internal discussions about the editorial line of the Morning Star, described as "the subject of much anxious consideration".

Several parts of the reports have been blacked out, including phrases around the name of Brian Nicholson, whose views and dilemmas are described in detail, even though he was only one of several rank-and-file leaders in the London docks.

The deletions will have been made either because the words refer to "material given in confidence" or because of issues of "personal sensitivity".