Subversion
 Subversion  (Statecraft, Tradecraft)   | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Interest of | • Bill Fairclough • House Un-American Activities Committee • Shield |
| Interests | Coup |
Subversion is a concept relating to "activities threatening the safety or well-being of the State and intended to undermine or overthrow Parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means."
MI5's primary concern
For much of the twentieth century, one of the primary concerns of Britain’s Security Service (MI5) was subversion – ‘activities threatening the safety or well-being of the State and intended to undermine or overthrow Parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means.’ The major targets of MI5’s counter-subversive operations until the 1970s were Communists and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which was subjected to sustained and extensive surveillance following its formation in 1920. The Trotskyist movement, which emerged in Britain during the early 1930s, was regarded by MI5 as being ‘too small and chaotic’ to be capable of posing any significant subversive threat to the British state.
The activities of Militant Tendency (MT), a Trotskyist organisation which came to prominence as a result of its infiltration of the Labour Party in the 1970s and 1980s, transformed intelligence officers’ perception of Trotskyists. By the early 1980s, Militant was believed to be capable of posing an equal, if not greater, subversive threat than the CPGB. By 1984, one Whitehall official declared in a memorandum sent to MI5 that ‘Militant seems to have replaced the Communist Party as the established focus for subversion within the country’.
Militant was considered to pose such a threat because a significant number of its members had managed to infiltrate the Labour Party; they aimed to transform it, from within, into a ‘revolutionary party.’ This became possible after the left-wing National Executive Committee of the Labour Party decided, in 1973, to abolish its List of Proscribed Organisations which had long been crucial in preventing elements of the far left gaining influence within the Party. MI5 subsequently began an extensive investigation of Militant’s activity, and in 1976 reported that Trotskyists had influence in over 70 Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs); in nine they posed a threat to the sitting Labour MP. This information was passed on to the Labour Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, who, according to MI5’s Director General Michael Hanley, ‘fully seized the importance of subversive penetration of the Labour Party’.[1]
Videos
| Is Woke-ism Being Weaponized to Destroy Free & Open Source Software? (15:56) ~ The Lunduke Journal, 2025-03-13 |
Examples
| Page name | Description |
|---|---|
| COINTELPRO | Series of covert and illegal projects aimed at subversion of 1960s left wing movements |
| Clockwork Orange | UK deep state campaign carried out to discredit the government of Harold Wilson |
| Operation Demagnetize | "The institutional hardening of Gladio", an expansion of Gladio in the late 1940s, early 1950s. |
| Patriot Act | A legislative coup d'état |
Related Quotations
| Page | Quote | Author | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brian Crozier | “The ultimate sophistication of subversion is to take over the government, not by unlawful but by lawful means.” | Brian Crozier | |
| Stella Rimington | “Well all I can say is that Communist and Trotskyist organisations, by their philosophy, their published aims, would have fallen within the definition of subversion.” | Stella Rimington | |
| Helmut Schmidt | “Participants at Le Cercle meetings report that a major issue has been how to bring about the demise of West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's government. This issue dominated the last biannual meeting of Le Cercle that was hosted by the Hanns Seidel Foundation, the official think tank of opposition leader Franz Josef Strauss's Christian Social Union, in Munich last May. Le Cercle's participants have been able to carry out an inside-outside job to destroy the Schmidt coalition government since then. While Strauss's CSU carried out a heavy-handed wrecking job that included an implicit alliance with the Strasserite fascist Green Party, sources report that Helmut Sonnenfeldt and Henry Kissinger took the inside track since the ouster of Secretary of State Alexander Haig, threatening, cajoling, and misleading Schmidt into his disastrous pragmatic political course.” | Helmut Schmidt Scott Thompson | 1982 |
| Boris Tadić | “In Serbia, for example, we used the Club de Madrid to get the former Spanish MOD, Narcis Serra, to act as mentor to the then MOD Boris Tadic. I brought Tadic to London via the Atlantic Treaty Association (of which IfS is now the UK Rep) to expand his horizons and link him to MPs. He eventually became President.” | Chris Donnelly Boris Tadić | 15 October 2018 |
