GCHQ and the unions
A battle that shaped British politics
A march for trade union rights at GCHQ in Cheltenham in 1992 (cc3.2, johnragla).
This month marks 40 years since Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher banned trade unions at GCHQ, Britain’s SIGINT agency. The Trades Union Congress (TUC) is marking the anniversary with a march through Cheltenham, where GCHQ is based, on 27 January.
The issue of labour representation at GCHQ had been a concern for successive governments for decades before Thatcher’s decision. In the mid-1950s, the involvement of communist activists in the Electrical Trades Union (ETU) attracted the attention of the CIA, and British officials began to fear that the ETU’s role at GCHQ represented a security risk.1 Unlike Thatcher three decades later, they were wary of overt intervention. Instead, they brought to bear a range of covert capabilities.
According to Christopher Andrew, Whitehall used MI5 material against the communists in a number of unions in this period. The most successful of these campaigns was within the ETU.2 Selected trade union leaders, including the TUC general secretary, Sir Vincent Tewson, were briefed on the basis of MI5 information.3
The campaign reached the public via the British state’s covert propaganda arm, the Information Research Department (IRD). In 1956, an IRD front publisher produced The Peril in Our Midst by the Labour politician and journalist Woodrow Wyatt, which claimed that Communist leaders in the ETU were subordinating their union to the Soviet line.4 Wyatt also presented two BBC Panorama documentaries exposing communist ballot-rigging in ETU elections.5
The communists became more vulnerable when the Soviet invasion of Hungary prompted a wave of resignations from the party. Among the departing activists were Les Cannon and Frank Chapple who would become leading anti-communists on the ETU executive.6
When the union’s communist General Secretary Frank Haxell was re-elected in 1959, MI5 bugging at the Communist Party’s King Street headquarters reportedly revealed that the true winner had been the opposing candidate, Jock Byrne.7
ETU president and Haxell ally Frank Foulkes was challenged in a BBC interview arranged through the Labour MP and IRD founder Christopher Mayhew.8 The climax of the struggle came in a 1961 court case brought by Cannon and Chapple which declared Byrne the winner of the election.9
By 1965, Communists had been banned outright from the ETU.10 The following year, Byrne was succeeded as General Secretary by Frank Chapple. Under his leadership, which lasted until 1984, the ETU and its successors would become bastions of the ‘old Labour right’ tradition of trade union anti-communism.
At the time, the change in the ETU leadership was presented as the victory of a handful of activists. Labour politician Arthur Bottomley wrote in 1963 that ‘the ETU was cleaned up, not as a result of outside protest and agitation, (although this undoubtedly played a part), but by the slogging, painstaking and dedicated efforts of a group of socialist trade unionists.’11
Ironically, Bottomley’s claim came in a book, The Use and Abuse of Trade Unions, that was itself published by the IRD, who own role remained carefully hidden along with that of MI5.12
It is difficult to discount the significance of MI5 intervention given the service’s own estimate of its intelligence dominance over the Communist Party. Director General Roger Hollis told the Home Secretary around this time that ‘on the subversive side I thought we had the British Communist Party pretty well buttoned up.’13
Some believe that MI5 could have adminstered a coup de grace if it wished. It had ‘good coverage’ of the secret Soviet funding of the party.14 Writer Robin Ramsay argues:
Had the existence of the ‘Moscow gold’ been revealed in 1957 or 8, coming after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the CPGB would have been terminally damaged. But for MI5 the ‘communist threat’ - and the link to the Soviet Union - was simply too useful a stick with which to beat the wider labour movement and Labour movement to be surrendered.15
It’s not difficult to see an intelligence rationale for holding fire, given the possibilities that the Communist Party might have offered for the more difficult tasks of Soviet counter-espionage.
Nevertheless, there is a deep tension between the breadth of MI5’s Cold War counter-subversion operations and its effective penetration of the party whose threat justified them.
It is tempting to see the impact of this over-heated counter-subversion in the subsequent evolution of the ETU. If it had been a tool of the Communist Party in the 1950s, its successor, the EETPU, was close to being a plaything of the Conservatives by the mid-1980s.
Frank Chapple was ennobled by Mrs Thatcher in 1985.16 Under his successor, Eric Hammond, the EETPU broke with other unions to play a key role in the success of Rupert Murdoch’s Wapping printing plant.17 The key intermediary was Woodrow Wyatt, by then a Conservative peer and star columnist on the News of the World.18 In 1988, the EETPU was expelled from the TUC for engaging in no-strike deals.19
The EETPU’s reputation for moderation did not help it at GCHQ. The scene for confrontation at the sigint agency was set in 1979-81 as a direct consequence of the Cold War. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and other crises put increasing pressure on sigint staff, leading to a wave of strikes which threatened GCHQ’s crucial relationship with the US National Security Agency.20
By the time the trade union ban came in 1984, the Thatcher government was embroiled in wider labour struggles with the miners and printworkers.21 Despite her regard for the EETPU, the Prime Minister was not moved by an uncharacteristic strike threat from Eric Hammond.22
The defeats of the labour movement in the 1980s ultimately weakened the trade union right as well as left. By this time, the rising generation in centre-left politics was less connected to the unions. In the US, AFL-CIO activists were replaced by business friendly New Democrats.23 In the UK, the New Labour brand reflected similar aspirations, albeit in ways constrained by the institutional culture of the Labour Party.
That residual strength was enough to restore union recognition when a Labour government came to power in 1997, despite continuing NSA concerns about the potential for strikes.24
Trade unions still faced wider headwinds, however, to which Eric Hammond responded by pioneering a wave of mergers.25 Ironically, the ETU’s ultimate descendant, Unite, would be seen as a bastion of the Labour left by the 2010s.
That political shift was perhaps easier because of the post-1980s diminution of the unions’ importance in the eyes of the rest of the political class. That disinterest could yet be reversed in the 2020s as revived great power competition provokes new fears of subversion.
If so, the history of GCHQ and the ETU offers a clear lesson on the need for trade unions to guard their independence - from their own government as well as others.
Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence, John Murray Publishers, London, 2001, p.546.
Christopher Andrew, Defence of the Realm, The Authorized History of MI5, Allen Lane, 2009, p.409.
Aldrich, The Hidden Hand, p.546.
Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Britain's Secret Propaganda War 1948-1977, Sutton Publishing, 1998, p.111.
Andrew, p.409.
Andrew, p.409.
Andrew, p.409.
Andrew, p.410.
Andrew, p.410.
Aldrich, The Hidden Hand, p.547.
Cited in Lashmar and Oliver, p.112.
Lashmar and Oliver, p.112.
Cited in Andrew, p.410.
Andrew, p.403.
Robin Ramsay, The Clandestine Caucus: Anti-socialist campaigns and operations in the British Labour movement since 1945, Lobster, 1996, (updated 2023), p.71.
Geoffrey Goodman, Lord Chapple, The Guardian, 22 October 2004.
Geoffrey Goodman, Eric Hammond, The Guardian, 3 June 2009.
Geraldine Bedell, To Move and to Shake, Independent, 24 November 1996.
Goodman, Eric Hammond, op. cit.
Richard J. Aldrich, GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain's Most Secret Intelligence Agency, HarperPress, 2010, pp.420-1.
Aldrich, GCHQ, p.417. The 1983 printworkers dispute in Warrington would be prove to be a dress rehearsal for later events at Wapping.
Goodman, Eric Hammond, op. cit.
Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement, Harvard University Press, 2011, pp.215-217.
Barrie Clement, Sweet revenge for the man who defied union ban at GCHQ, Independent, 13 May 1997.
Goodman, Eric Hammond, op. cit.