Wilson had 'Doomsday plan' for withdrawal from Northern Ireland

[emad]

Times
By Fran Yeoman


HAROLD WILSON, when Prime Minister, initiated contingency planning for a “Doomsday scenario” in Northern Ireland, involving a British withdrawal, after the Province’s first power-sharing Executive collapsed in May 1974.

In a top-secret memo to Robert Armstrong, his principal private secretary, released by the National Archives today, Wilson suggested that dominion status for Ulster was a realistic prospect.

“It is one possible scenario, and I have a feeling that parliamentary and other pressures may drive us to pretty early consideration of it,” Wilson wrote on May 30, 1974.

It was two days after a strike organised by the loyalist Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) had brought down the Executive led by Brian Faulkner, and Wilson was extremely pessimistic about the prospects for a successful renewal of power-sharing.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,175-1421959,00.html

WISLON was an old crook. Political cartoonist Cummings once published this ditty on the loony PM:
"All things bright and beautiful
All creatures great and small
Smart old Harold Wilson
Double-crossed them all"..........

[bemildred]

1. All politicians are crooks, or almost all anyway. nt

[emad]

2. The recent Saville enquiry into Northern Ireland murders found

that UK army colluded with paramilitaries on both sides of the religious divide in Belfast during the cold war....and heard evidence that said that ALL UK Prime Ministers since Harold Wilson have hired personal hit squads to eliminate their opponents/detractors.....

[bemildred]

3. Exactly, and it's good that this information is being exposed.

Perhaps it will give them pause in the future.

[fedsron2us]

4. Wilson may have been a crook

but at least he was not dumb enough to get Britain involved in Vietnam.
It is a shame Blair did not follow his example over Iraq.

As for his failures in Ulster, let us just say Wilson was not the first or the last British premier to fail in Northern Ireland. His 1974 Labour administration had a tiny majority in the House of Commons and was never going to be able to tackle the problems of the province particularly as the small number of Ulster Unionist MPs had a decisive influence on key votes in the UK parliament.

[bin.dare]

5. 1970's smear campaign against Wilson (continues today)

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php4?article_id=3637

In the 1970s the British intelligence services conducted the most extraordinary campaign of dirty tricks to smear Harold Wilson's Labour government. Wilson's 1974 government was far from left wing.
But the security services were panicking over the scale of the working class revolt which swept Britain in the early 70s. They went for anyone who they didn't see as fully signed up to the ruling class project.

A British MI5 intelligence operation known as Clockwork Orange, led by army information officer Colin Wallace, conducted a dirty tricks operation to smear the Republican movement in Northern Ireland, and then the Labour government itself.
Incredibly they believed not only that Harold Wilson and many Labour ministers were Soviet agents, but also that Tory leader Edward Heath was one too. Wallace's "black propaganda" team forged a variety of Labour Party leaflets. These included a fake copy of a leaflet for a commemoration of Bloody Sunday, when British Paras murdered 14 unarmed civilians.

Five senior Labour figures were added to the list of sponsors for the Bloody Sunday event. These were Merlyn Rees, Stan Orme, Tony Benn, Paul Rose and David Owen. Rees was a right winger in the Labour Party, as was David Owen who would later go on to found the right wing breakaway, the SDP.

They also forged a document supposedly sent to Merlyn Rees by the US Congress thanking him for his "generous donation on behalf of the Labour Party for the Occupied Six Counties of Ireland". And they wrote a fake pamphlet titled Economics: Master or Servant of Mankind, which called for revolution.

...

a gang of ultra-right fanatics in MI5 had plotted against Wilson's government in 1974 and 1975. He admitted MI5 had carried out burglaries of the homes of Wilson's Downing Street staff and bugged 10 Downing Street itself.
On a Panorama TV programme he confessed, "Eight or nine officers were involved. Their intention was to confront the prime minister with his MI5 file and tell him 'that we wanted him to resign. That there would be no publicity if he just quietly went'."

After he resigned Wilson himself complained of the activities of MI5 and MI6 in undermining his government. The plot had also included forged documents that supposedly exposed a "secret" Swiss bank account belonging to then deputy leader of the Labour Party Edward Short.
In July 1974 details of the bank account were sent out to MPs and newspapers (including Socialist Worker) which supposedly showed that Short had received several thousand pounds from a mysterious source.

The smear stuck to Short. But a police report several months later confirmed that the bank account did not exist and that the document was a forgery. In the 1980s Rupert Murdoch's Sunday Times ran an entirely false story about former Labour leader Michael Foot.
Posters appeared around the country saying, "Michael Foot is a Russian spy." The newspaper got the story from Oleg Gordiyevsky, a deserter from the KGB who was living in Britain, protected by MI6.

Gordiyevsky claimed Foot was a paid informer working for Russian diplomats. The story was completely made up, and when Foot took the paper to court he won £30,000 in damages.