The BBC and Terrorism: A Historical Perspective
The BBC and Terrorism: A Historical Perspective
How the Cold War and Margaret Thatcher changed British broadcasting
“No, sir.” That was the terse reply one Sir Waldron Smithers received in the House of Commons in 1947. The Conservative MP and avid anti-communist had excited himself over the prospect of replicating the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the UK. Clement Attlee’s post-war government was having none of it.
Smithers, who was once described by fellow MP John Boyd-Carpenter as “an extreme Tory out of a vanished age”, was peeved. Not just because his quest for a British version of McCarthyism was hindered, but also because Attlee didn’t even waste his breath replying to him.
The Labour Prime Minister remained sitting on the green benches, leaving the task to his then Leader of the House of Commons Herbert Morrison.
“As the honourable Gentleman knows, I have been asked to reply,” he said from the dispatch box. “The answer is still ‘No, Sir’. It seems to me that the other political parties can take care of the Communists. We are not afraid of them, and I cannot understand why the hon. Gentleman is, and why he should exclude other subversive influences from consideration.”
But despite this public rebuff of Smithers, a secret section of the British state, the Cabinet Committee on Subversive Activities, had already been making moves against suspected communists and moving them into non-sensitive positions within the Civil Service.
The ‘purge procedure’ initiative, commonly known as ‘negative vetting’, was made public when Attlee addressed the Commons in March 1948. Winston Churchill had delivered his famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in Fulton, Missouri, almost exactly two years before the Labour leader’s more bureaucratic proclamation.
Attlee promised that there would be no witch hunt, but that communists and fascists would not be employed in Whitehall on matters of security.
“Why do we have to make the present announcement? It is because of the existence of people in this country who hold a different loyalty from that of the majority of the citizens of this country and from those who enter the Civil Service,” he told MPs.
If nothing else, the speech united some unlikely bedfellows. One of the main Civil Service unions, Oswald Mosley, an ex-MP and the founder of the British Union of Fascists, and the Communist Party of Great Britain all denounced the measures. The National Association of Women Civil Servants, however, went on-the-record to back Attlee’s ‘purge procedure’.
Attlee was also directly asked whether the negative vetting, which included a check on the files of MI5 and the Special Branch followed by a potential grilling from a departmental official, would apply to the BBC. The Prime Minister said it was a matter for the BBC’s Governors. That wouldn’t be the case for long.
The Cold War Begins
Hosted by Richard Dimbleby (father of David and Jonathan), the 1950 general election was the first to be televised on the BBC (the Coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 really popularised the format in 1953). The cameras caught the political drama as Attlee’s government was only able to secure a slim majority.
Labour had started to build their New Jerusalem, including the establishment of the National Health Service and the nationalisation of the railways and utilities. But economic scandals undermined Attlee’s hard work.
The UK faced a currency crisis in 1949 and its ‘groundnut scheme’, where the government would use British-held territories in East Africa to farm mass amounts of peanuts to produce 600,000 tons of oilseed per year, spectacularly failed.
Labour tried to secure a bigger majority in 1951, but the Liberal vote collapsed and the Tories were thrust into power. Churchill, the comeback king, was soon back in Number 10. Just three months before his election the war against Germany had officially ended. The Cold War, meanwhile, had just kicked off.
The German-born physicist Klaus Fuchs, who had fled the Nazis for the UK, becoming a citizen in 1942, was prosecuted in 1950 for sharing Manhattan Project secrets with the Soviets. Italian-born Bruno Pontecorvo, a colleague of Fuchs’, defected to the East in September that year, three months after the Korean War had broken out.
Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defected to the Soviet Union in May 1951, while Kim Philby, who wasn’t unmasked as a Soviet spy until 1963, resigned from MI6 in July 1951. That same month the British, Americans and Canadians held a second joint conference on security standards.
Churchill would subsequently approve ‘positive vetting’, a more stringent form of vetting, in January 1952. His Home Secretary, Maxwell Fyfe, would later update the parameters of MI5’s work in September.
Under his ‘Directive’, the Security Services would fall under the personal responsibility of the Home Secretary and be tasked with the defence of the realm from “external and internal dangers arising from attempts at espionage and sabotage, or from actions of persons and organisations whether directed from within or without the country, which may be judged to be subversive to the State”.
These would be the guiding principles of MI5, its charter, until the Security Service Act of 1989. They were only made public because of the Profumo Scandal of the early 1960s.
With that said, by late 1952 there were two important measures now in place – stringent vetting (there was some in the 1930s) and MI5’s task to counter subversion. According to Christopher Andrews’ authorised history of the Security Service, MI5 would vet 5,000 of the BBC’s 12,000 staff in 1952.
In a report provided to Churchill via The Home Office, it was estimated that no more than 1.5% of BBC staff were estimated to be suspected Communist Party members or fellow travellers (something George Orwell had infamously warned about in 1949).
The vetting went on into the coming decades, with some BBC Director Generals even calling for more screening from MI5. But it all came to a head in 1985, one of the most tumultuous years in modern British history. The miners’ strike ended, football hooliganism continued and unemployment was around 13%. There was also the issue of terrorism.
The TV Man’s Dilemma
With the end of ration book austerity, decolonisation and the early rise of globalisation, the 1960s and early 1970s ushered in a new phenomenon: international terrorism. Groups like West Germany's Baader–Meinhof Gang, the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Spain’s ETA emerged.
They used violence as a means to reach their political ends and, in doing so, provided a new test for journalists, especially highly-regulated broadcasters. How should they be described? Should their heinous acts be given any air time? And should they be interviewed?
For Margaret Thatcher, who was first elected Prime Minister in 1979, the answer was very clear: they should be starved of the “oxygen of publicity,” she declared to the American Bar Association in July 1985, a month after the hijacking of Trans World Airlines' flight 847.
The speech, in which Thatcher urged the media to adopt a voluntary anti-terrorist code, came five years after the launch of the first cable news channel, CNN, and just a month before BBC staff walked out of the broadcaster in a 24-hour strike.
ITV staff, known for the radical World in Action programme, showed their solidarity by staging their own walk-out. For the BBC, 7 August 1985 was the first time in 58 years that its news and current events programming didn’t air. That included the World Service.
The staff, supported by the National Union of Journalists, were furious that a documentary about ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland was banned. At the Edge of the Union, which would eventually make it to air, included an interview with IRA leader Martin McGuinness.
Part of the Real Lives series, it was directed by experienced documentary maker Paul Hamann and focused on two political leaders in Derry/Londonderry – one McGuiness, the other the loyalist Gregory Campbell.
The BBC’s Board of Governors, under pressure from Thatcher’s Home Secretary Leon Brittan, stepped in and stopped its release. But tensions between the BBC’s journalistic staff and the corporation were further inflamed when the BBC’s and MI5’s vetting regime was revealed.
Incidentally, another film had been barred earlier that year. Channel 4 had attempted to broadcast a 20/20 Vision programme exposing some of MI5’s activities. The Security Service had been spying on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the President of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill.
The most shocking revelation was that they were also monitoring The National Council for Civil Liberties. MI5 had no statutory basis for the actions and Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt, who would both serve in New Labour governments as secretaries of state, took the Security Service to the European Court of Human Rights for breach of privacy. The court ruled in their favour.
As for Thatcher, her skirmishes with the media over the reporting of terrorism and the secret world continued into the late 1980s until she lost her patience. The 1987 publication of Spycatcher, the autobiography of former MI5 Assistant Director Peter Wright, certainly didn’t help matters.
In October 1988 Douglas Hurd, who had succeeded Brittan as Home Secretary in September 1985, used the BBC Licence and Agreement to stop the corporation from broadcasting voices of ten Irish republican and Ulster loyalist paramilitary groups as well as Sinn Féin, the political wing of the IRA.
The Official Secrets Act of 1989 came next, putting the kibosh on efforts for more freedom of information (as expressed in the Commons in 1988). The legislation, an update on the original act of 1911, created an offence for the unlawful disclosure of information in six specific categories.
The law, still in force today, is so stringent that it is arguably a criminal offence to disclose illegal activities of the security services, as revealed by an extraordinary exchange between then Labour Shadow Home Secretary Roy Hattersley and Home Office Minister John Patten.
Hattersley: “If a member of the security services tells me that my telephone is being tapped without warrant and therefore illegally, or that my house has been burgled without warrant and therefore illegally, is it or is it not a criminal offence for me to make that information public?”
Patten: “It would be a criminal offence for the right hon. Gentleman to make that public, and quite rightly so because he has an avenue of redress. He can go to the tribunal set up under the Security Service Bill.”
Thatcher’s Revenge
As the Security Service Act 1989 put MI5 on a statutory basis for the first time, the BBC and the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), the then media regulator, were dealt with in 1990. Thatcher had been further enraged by the broadcast media over their treatment of the killing of three IRA members in Gibraltar in March 1988.
As part of Operation Flavius, members of the SAS regiment shot dead the apparent terrorists who were planning a car bomb attack. Thames Television’s This Week crew didn’t believe the official account of the killings and produced a documentary, Death on the Rock, contesting the government’s version of events.
The then Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe twice attempted to get the show banned, appealing directly to the IBA. Thatcher went on TV to complain about “trial by television”. The documentary would air on 28 April, just six weeks after the shootings.
A reaction came quickly. The Broadcasting Standards Council, chaired by William Rees-Mogg (father of Jacob), was established in May 1988. Hurd said the body would “strengthen standards” in the sector and “reinforce the work of the individual broadcasting regulatory bodies”.
But the Rees-Mogg appointment spoke for itself. As Vice-Chair of the BBC Board of Governors, he had described the Real Lives programme as “totally unacceptable” and sought to suppress it.
Later, the Broadcasting Act of 1990 was passed. The legislation helped deregulate the industry, pave the way for a fifth channel, Channel Five, and force the BBC to source at least 25% of its output from independent production houses.
Likewise, ITV franchisees could merge together and there was more competition for their businesses. London-focused Thames Television was usurped by Carlton Television in 1993. As for the future of the IBA, it didn’t have one under the new act. The Independent Television Commission was formed in 1991, being replaced by OfCom in 2003.
It was a brave new world for commercial TV in the UK, with an entrepreneurial zeal reshaping the industry. Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV had already launched in 1989, birthing Eurosport, Sky News, Sky Movies and Sky One. “We broadcast for everybody…I want to give everybody a good choice of programmes,” Murdoch stressed.
It is in this context which David Cameron entered the broadcasting sector in 1994. He became the Director of Corporate Affairs at Carlton Communications. Now, as Foreign Secretary, he’s having a row with the BBC about terrorism. How times don’t change.
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