Scottish Communists

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/85336

From day one, a vengeful Establishment mobilised the police and secret service in an attempt to strangle the people's paper which so noisily challenged capitalist greed and injustices.

Daily Worker staff suffered imprisonment, harassment, blacklisting and spying on their private lives.

This was their punishment for pursuing a socialist vision of a more decent society for all and a better and peaceful world.

Plans to imprison the entire Daily Worker journalistic staff in internment camps on the Isle of Man were recently revealed in the officially approved MI5 history The Defence Of The Realm.

The journalists were to be rounded up along with over 1,000 prominent communists and activists in the event of "war with the Soviet bloc" during the 1950s.

In the first two years of its existence, Daily Worker managers and proprietors suffered prison sentences ranging from five months to three years' penal servitude in a series of trials for contempt, incitement to mutiny and libelling the police.

But the Daily Worker did not die. It went on from strength to strength, confounding its enemies through all the huge upheavals of history.

The Morning Star, along with the entire labour movement, came under a renewed onslaught of spying, sabotage and attacks under the regime of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

Full evidence of this remains under lock and key at the headquarters of Britain's secret service.

However the powers that be have allowed us a small insight into the years of discrimination suffered by the paper's staff. They have released under the 50-year rule a small selection of personal security files - albeit still censored and containing mysterious blank pages.

Daily Worker news editor Frank Gullett, who was also the first news editor of the Morning Star, was subjected to intensive surveillance by secret service agents trying to prove that he was a spy.

The agents trailed him round the clock. They bugged his phone, opened his mail and pried into his private life, writing insulting comments about him as though he were a character in a soap opera.

An intensive year-long MI5 operation ended in 1951 with the conclusion that he was simply collecting information for articles in the Daily Worker. But the evil-minded spooks still did not give up.

An MI5 memo insisted that despite the lack of evidence, Gullett "is undoubtedly a security menace and would appear to come into the category of those who in the event of an emergency should be locked up."

Gullett was a skilled journalist and a lovable rogue who was my first boss when I started as a reporter at the Morning Star in 1966, but this same shameful MI5 memo insults his memory by describing him as "an inveterate exaggerator, a practised liar and of a boastful character."

The secret service launched another big operation against Gullett in 1953, with B Russell Jones of section B2A suggesting that a US serviceman should be deployed to lure the Daily Worker journalist into illegal spying activity against US bases in Britain.

Russell Jones added: "Gullett is very much a thorn in our side and it would give rise to much satisfaction if our coat trailing could lead to a prosecution."

The spooks' efforts failed miserably once again and Gullett's case was removed from the "active list" in 1954.

However JC Robertson of section D1 added that an "F4 agent" should still continue to spy on the Daily Worker journalist, adding: "Even if we cannot continue to investigate him fully, his case should not be lost sight of..."

A file has also been released on another of my predecessors as parliamentary correspondent and news editor, Malcolm MacEwen.

A typical MI5 report dated July 12 1950 states that "Malcolm MacEwen is still most unpopular with the editorial staff," noting that he "drives the staff too hard" and "his attitude is that of a middle-class bourgeois."

MacEwen was among a sizeable group of journalists who left the Daily Worker following the Soviet military intervention in Hungary. He left in November 1956. Significantly, his file contains an official notification to the Home Office dated February 13 1957 stating that MacEwen should be taken off the "category A detention list" following his departure from the Daily Worker.