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FORMER prime minister Harold Wilson praised Britain’s intelligence surveillance of a seafarers’ strike in the 1960s, according to Declassified UK.
The Labour leader also backed MI5’s blacklisting of a human rights lawyer from being appointed solicitor general over his marriage to an Italian anti-fascist activist, secret files obtained by the publication revealed yesterday.
MI5 spies were regularly summoned to 10 Downing Street for clandestine meetings with Mr Wilson to share material on striking seamen.
The files show Mr Wilson’s hostility towards a strike by the National Union of Seamen (NUS), now part of RMT, whose members demanded a 40-hour week.
It reveals that the Security Service ran informants inside the NUS and conducted phone taps on its members.
In almost daily reports during the height of the strike in June 1966, Richard Thistlethwaite, MI5’s go-between with Downing Street, exaggerated the role of communists.
He commented that Mr Wilson “was clear that the Communist Party was again in the centre of the picture and that we should therefore be in a position to obtain more information.”
More details of the report can be found on declassifieduk.org.
