War and Propaganda
Secret History: When the UK Government Expected Revolution
Abstract
Can we Trust Our Leaders? Shameful History
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.George Santayana
Original articles lightly edited. Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 26 September 2006, Friday, 2 October 2009
When the UK Government Expected Revolution
In 1919, Britain’s Cabinet Ministers had presided over the senseless slaughter in Flanders, and had seen the three great empires of central and eastern Europe dissolve in revolution. Was the British Empire to be the next to fall? After the revolution in Russia, and the collapse of the European empires in WWI, the British Cabinet thought there might be a revolution in the UK, and they prepared for it by sending troops out on to the streets.
Their fears were fed by strikes in the police force, mutinies in units at the rear of the demobilization queue, and a rising tide of violence in Ireland, where a genuine situation of revolution existed. But the evidence shows working-class organizations never planned for, or even wanted, the overthrow of society. With wages being slashed drastically—the lower-paid mine laborers faced a cut of nearly 50 per cent to £1 18s ll½d a week—and a steep rise in unemployment past the million mark, demonstrations and unrest were inevitable. And nothing more sinister. One of the “extremists”, Willie Gallacher, who became an MP, bitterly remarked many years later:
We were carrying on a strike when we ought to have been making a revolution.
But Britain’s Cabinet, conditioned by its war mentality, reached for its guns. In January 1919, while the economy was still booming, they moved troops, machine-guns and even tanks into Glasgow. Winston Churchill regarded this as a merely tentative measure. He told the Cabinet:
By going gently at first we should get the support we wanted from the nation, and then troops could be used more effectively.
By August 1919, Ministers had ordered a massive concentration of force in Liverpool. Three battalions, some 2600 troops, composed what The Morning Post called “the occupying military force”. The battleship HMS Valiant and two destroyers were deployed in the Mersey, with steam up. Tanks patrolled the streets. Under The Defence of the Realm Act, the notorious “Dora”, the state already possessed wide emergency powers, but more were called for. In October 1919, the Home Secretary publicly appealed for all loyal persons to form Citizen Guards “in face of the menace with which we are confronted today”. A Cabinet Strike Committee was set up, and divided the country into a dozen regions, each with its Commissioner and staff.
The government’s state of mind was reflected in a private letter from the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey, who wrote, after listening to Britain’s Ministers:
I felt I had been in Bedlam. Red revolution and blood and war at home and abroad!
The very detailed Cabinet minutes taken by Thomas Jones, the Deputy Secretary, give us a hair-raising glimpse into the minds of the frightened men who presided over Britain’s Empire at the end of the First World War. He noted on 2 February, 1919, how the Prime Minister…
…then turned to Trenchard [head of the RAF] asking “How many airmen are there available for the revolution?” Trenchard replied that there were 30,000 mechanics and 2000 pilots, but only 100 machines. The pilots had no weapons for ground fighting. The PM presumed they could use machine-guns and drop bombs.
The discussion continued for hours. Walter Long, First Lord of the Admiralty, chipped in:
The peaceable manpower of the country is without arms. I have not a pistol less than 200 years old. A Bill is needed for licensing persons to bear arms.
Lloyd George cross-questioned senior officers on the relative value of using firearms and hand-grenades against the mob. How could the Crown forces be supplemented by volunteers? During the discussion Bonar Law so often referred to the stockbrokers as a loyal and fighting class one felt potential battalions of stockbrokers were to be found in every town. Sir Robert Horne wanted secret lists of reliable men drawn up by the Chief Constables, but noted “Eric Geddes suggested having the Mayors up, but in view of the number of Labour Mayors, and the difficulty of keeping the matter secret, there was opposition to the suggestion”.
Nobody seems to have considered inviting the leaders of the working class to Downing Street and asking what their intentions were. As in the days of Castlereagh, the government’s main source of information was the police—a special “Directorate of Intelligence” of 150 officers, headed by the famous “spy-catcher” Sir Basil Thomson, being removed from the jurisdiction of Scotland Yard to despatch directly to the Cabinet Fortnightly Reports on Revolutionary Organizations in the United Kingdom and Morale Abroad. One for 2 December, 1918 reported:
During the past fortnight the idea of direct action by the workers has certainly gained ground, particularly in London. Among the advanced people there appears to be a quiet certainty that revolution is coming.
All the Ministers seemed to have shared the mistaken assumption that the workers were being dragged into revolution by lying propaganda in the Labour Press, though the papers were violently anti-strike, let alone anti-revolution, and even the Herald was studiously moderate. The government indulged in elaborate propaganda of its own. Millions of leaflets, embodying an appeal by the Prime Minister to the nation, were printed and lodged in bank-vaults in each of the twelve security districts, ready for immediate issue. Tom Jones noted on 2 February, 1919:
Discussion moved on to the publicity arrangements, and Lloyd-Graeme got authority to spend money (£1000) on sending men to Scotland to work up government case in local papers from inside, eg, Edinburgh Evening News, Glasgow Bulletin, etc.
How much money was actually spent on newspapers and journalists is not clear from the documents, but the same discussion gave a hint of how the press was influenced:
Sir P Lloyd-Graeme… pointed out that the art of propaganda was to conceal it. Last strike the government was sending out matter to 900 newspapers via the Coalition and Unionist organizations, etc, and the local political organizations were paid, and the public suspected little or nothing.
The nervous men gathered for long hours around the Cabinet table tended to infect each other with their own fears and produce a highest common denominator of alarmism. Austen Chamberlain said on 2 February, 1920, that their security arrangements involved “really the defence of the foundations of civilisation”, and on 4 April, 1921, Ministers in some desperation debated how to bring back troops from abroad to protect “civilisation” at home. Worthington-Evans, the War Secretary, said:
We need 18 battalions to hold London. We had three battalions at Malta, two of which we could bring back home. There were four battalions in Silesia. They could be brought back to the Rhine at once.
Lord Curzon, in charge of foreign policy, objected that to pull out from Silesia would bring “a possibly serious disaster”. Chamberlain snapped back:
We are in front of a situation here which may require all our forces. I am all for holding the British coal fields rather than the Silesian ones.
Lord Birkenhead, the Lord Chancellor, summed up:
We should decide without delay around which force loyalists can gather. We ought not to be shot without a fight anyway.
Ministers were not alone in their terror of being shot. They reflected the prevailing mood in the clubs and drawing rooms of the West End, in the City business-houses, and in the Law Courts. In April 1921, the Recorder of London, Sir Forrest Fulton, declined to send a convicted man to prison because he had served in the Air Force:
I am influenced by the fact that we are living in a very perilous time and that your services may, for all I know, within the next few days be again required by His Majesty.
Various categories of reservists were called up, and a citizen defence force of 70,000 was recruited. This consisted mainly of the ex-Serviceman type who constituted the Black and Tans in Ireland, but it included, by a supreme irony, a number of striking miners who needed the money.
Britain’s threatened class-war dissolved in bathos and anti-climax. Even when the terrifying monster of the General Strike finally appeared on the scene in 1926, it revealed itself as a typically British creature, moderate, dogged rather than audacious—a timid apparition. The story might have been different if the nervousness of Ministers had led to a clash between troops and workers on a Peterloo scale. The Civil War of the 1640s was brought about not by set purpose on the part of king or Parliament, but by brinkmanship and miscalculation.
in The Observer supplement, 1972.
There ought to be lessons here for the present neurotic government of Britain in the supposed war on terror, but, like the previous Labour government, they are incapable of learning it, being the very image of the post WWI Liberal government—completely out of touch!
