Eric Hobsbawm

Peter Hitchens writes:

I did laugh on Monday morning to see in The Guardian (I read it, so you don't have to) that this unashamed old Communist, hilariously a 'Companion of Honour' after all those years working for that filthy cause, has been refused permission to see his MI5 file.

I rather enjoy his books, oddly enough. He's without doubt a distinguished historian. But if he had spent his life apologising for the Third Reich rather than for the USSR, I somehow doubt if he'd have become a CH. Are the two causes, the two regimes, the two sets of death camps, the two pyramids of skulls, so distinct and different that an apologist for one gets honoured, and the apologist for the other gets ostracised? David Irving's not in the Hobsbawm class as a historian, but if he had been, would he have become a CH? Of course not. And rightly not. So are there double standards here? I rather think so. I don't think either of them should be honoured. But I digress.

I could have told him he was wasting his time with the request for the file. Some years ago I too tried to see my MI5 record, having become curious about how closely I was watched during my days as a full-time Trotskyist nearly 40 years ago. I had a pretty good idea who the watchers were (nice chaps, all of them, doing a fine job) and didn't at all resent their activities. All kinds of people hung around student revolutionary gatherings in those days. Watch them, and you might pick up lots of interesting things. I remember one very gaunt Irish character who gave off a whiff of genuine, terrible danger, and I hope my MI5 watchers spotted him.

The Home Office had said, back in 2002, that such files could be opened if there were no security implications. But my efforts produced nothing except a blank refusal on the only piece of MI5 headed paper I have ever seen - rather stylish, as I recall, with a little motto in Latin. I pursued this to the Information Tribunal, who, after a bizarre hearing which is still recorded somewhere on the web, told me I had come to the wrong tribunal and suggested I try again with another one. No thanks. I knew the answer would be the same.

And by then I knew why. For I had looked up the press cuttings and found that in September 1997 the future Lord Mandelson, then 'Minister without Portfolio' had publicly demanded that files on people such as himself should be destroyed. The then Mr Mandelson had been annoyed by alleged disclosures from his own file, themselves following claims by the ex-MI5 officer David Shayler (yes, I know about poor Mr Shayler's later years, but can we pass over that in polite silence?) that dossiers were held on several ministers.

Soon afterwards, The Guardian's very reliable security correspondent, Richard Norton-Taylor, recorded that this destruction had begun. My guess is that my file (and Professor Hobsbawm's) went into the incinerator in a general cull of all Cold War records on the Left, Communists and Trots alike. All very 1984, isn't it? I suspect a lot of Labour MPs and ministers were relieved, as there probably is no other proof of what they were up to in those years. And I don't think most of them have changed their ideas all that much since then, only their methods of achieving their aims.

There was then a curious Parliamentary debate about it, on 25th February 1998, involving the Tory MP Julian Lewis and the then Home Secretary Jack Straw (who had also been outed by Mr Shayler as having an MI5 file). You can look it up in Hansard, and I urge you to do so. It is one of the oddest exchanges ever to take place in the House of Commons, and very unusual, if not unprecedented, for a Cabinet Minister to respond to such a debate. Mr Lewis deserves some credit for spotting this and persisting with it.

Personally, I think Mr Lewis is on to something quite big. The wiping out of such files was part of the transformation of MI5 from a plodding, conservative organisation with an old-fashioned idea of subversion into the PC, New Labour outfit it is now. I rather wonder if it has opened a new file on me?

There are a couple of other points I'd like to make here. The Labour Peer Lord Lipsey is backing Professor Hobsbawm in his quest. Well, good luck to him. But he goes further than that. Lord Lipsey, who was a special adviser to Anthony Crosland and James Callaghan in the last old Labour government, also says:"In my years in government in the 1970s, I found the security services only too eager to collect information about Communists - by then a party which represented no threat to anyone - while they ignored Trotskyist sects who were a potential threat to national security."

I wouldn't want this to pass uncontradicted. Why on earth would such an apparently sensible person say anything so silly? The British Communist Party (CPGB) in the 1970s was, as it always had been, electorally insignificant. But it still possessed a large, well-run industrial organisation which had a great deal of influence in and through the trade unions. Through them, I personally believe it stirred up a lot of the industrial trouble which helped to destabilise the country during that period. I still hope that someone will one day get into the Soviet archives on this.

Even more important was its indirect political influence, through the TUC and the union seats on Labour Party policy-making bodies, on Labour policy and on the constitutional revolution which transformed Labour in the early 1980s. Anyone who thinks that there was no major Communist influence here should look up accounts of the TUC conference in September 1980, where the platform (with a couple of honourable exceptions) were wretchedly unwilling to support the Polish shipyard workers of Gdansk against Communist tyranny. One day, perhaps, the level of Communist penetration of the Labour movement, secret membership and the rest will come out. It hasn't yet. I personally know enough about it to be sure that there is a lot that's yet to emerge, but my information takes the form of small glimpses, bits of private gossip and reminiscences. But to say that the CP was no threat in the 1970s is ridiculous. I can also vouch for the keen interest shown by the security organs in Trotskyists in that period. Lord Lipsey may contact me for details.

But he won't...