The Green Ribbon Books

Public Servant, Secret Agent: The Elusive Life and Violent Death of Airey Neave

Paul Routledge
2002
Fourth Estate

As the title of this biography implies, Airey Neave's spent much of his life at the interface between two worlds, those of politics and intelligence. His career went through several intriguing phases. each of which sheds light on the history of Britain's secret state.

A visit to Germany as a 17-year-old Etonian in 1933 gave Neave an early hatred for fascism. In the 1930s, when many of his colleagues at Oxford were turning to socialism and even communism, he began a lifelong interest in the Territorial Army.

By 1940, he was a young army lieutenant, fighting in the bloody, and ultimately doomed, defence of Calais. His capture by the German paved the way for the defining period of his life.

The Wilson Plot: The Astounding Truth about the Spycatchers who dabbled in Treason

David Leigh
Heinemann
1988

One of Britain's top investigative journalists describes how elements of MI5 and the CIA turned on the British Prime Minister.

The story has its roots its in the cold war paranoia engendered by the Cambridge spy ring, a brilliant Soviet coup that penetrated right to the heart of western intelligence. When KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn claimed that Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell had been murdered by the KGB to make way for Harold Wilson, senior counterintelligence officers such as James Angleton of the CIA and Peter Wright of MI5 were prepared to believe him.

This helped pave the way for a covert campaign against Wilson that would climax during his second government in the mid-1970s. Although, this campaign would be revealed in Wright's book Spycatcher, Leigh argues that Wright concealed his own role. Leigh had access to a number of Wright's unpublished manuscripts, a source he prefers to the ghostwritten Spycatcher.

The Nationalists of Northern Ireland 1918-1973

Enda Staunton
The Columba Press
2001

A huge number of books have been written about the Northern Ireland troubles. There are far fewer covering the first half century of the northern state's existence.

Of those few, Enda Staunton's study of the political history of northern nationalists is among the most important.

Staunton begins with the 1918 election in which Sinn Fein swept the board throughout Ireland including much of the North. In the Belfast constituency of the Falls, however, Eamonn De Valera was to be defeated by Home Ruler Joe Devlin.

This event underlined the internal differences within nationalism, both between North and South, and within the North Itself.

Devlin would later describe the creation of a separate northern Parliament as 'the greatest and last of all calamities.'

Nationalism, Devolution and the Challenge to the United Kingdom State

Arthur Aughey
Pluto Press
2001

An analysis of the growing nationalist challenge to the British state in the wake of devolution.

Aughey, Professor of Politics at the University of Ulster, takes a staunchly unionist standpoint, arguing that 'constitutional change intimates another chapter in history and not the end of the story.'

Useful as a counterpoint to the nationalist analysis of writers like Tom Nairn, and as a survey of the literature on the subject.

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Renovation or Revolution? New Territorial Politics in Ireland and the United Kingdom

Edited by John Coakley, Bridget Laffan & Jennifer Todd

UCD Press

2005

 

(Review originally published in the Irish World)

With the pace of British-Irish co-operation in the peace process picking up in recent weeks, it perhaps an appropriate time to review this recent volume of essays, which looks at the changing relationships within and between Britain and Ireland as a result of devolution and the Good Friday Agreement.

There has long been a school of thought arguing that the dynamic of those changes will eventually result in the break-up of the UK, of whom the foremost representative is Scottish nationalist philosopher Tom Nairn.

That view is subjected to a robust challenge here by the University of Ulster’s Arthur Aughey, perhaps the leading academic exponent of the alternative thesis, that recent reforms reflect the continued vitality of the British state.

Smear: Wilson and the Secret State

by Robin Ramsay and Stephen Dorril
Harper Collins
1992

A remarkable biography which adds up to a secret history of postwar Britain.

This book shows how Wilson's 1950s contacts with Soviet Union, while authorised by Winston Churchill, made him vulnerable to right-wing smears in his later career.

Wilson's ascent to the Labour leadership following the death of Hugh Gaitskell, doyenne of the CIA-backed Labour right, saw him labelled as a Soviet spy by defector Anatoly Golitsyn and right-wing counter-intelligence officers James Angleton of the CIA and Arthur Martin and Peter Wright of MI5.

The allegation would become a weapon in the political struggle over Wilson's attempts to modernise Britain at the expense of the City of London and the wider establishment.

Ramsay and Dorril details the coup plots against both Wilson Governments, and the internal rivalries within and between MI5 and MI6, whose competing agendas in Northern Ireland would become bound up with the campaign against Wilson in the crucial year of 1974.

Their portrait of US influence on the centre-left from the Gaitskell era to the fore-runners of the SDP is strikingly relevant to the New Labour era.

Meticulously footnoted with an extensive bibliography, this is one of the best books ever written about the intelligence world.

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The Enchanted Glass: Britain And Its Monarchy

Tom Nairn
Radius, 1988

An incisive critique of the Monarchy and its role in sustaining the British establishment. Nairn sees the monarchy as the lynchpin of an oligarchy in which Westminster, Whitehall and the City of London all seek to contain popular democratic/nationalist demands in order to maintain a residual sense of global greatness.

Some of Nairn's targets; Trident - 'the Royal bomb', the 'pseudo-feudal socialism' of much of the Labour Party, appear even more well taken twenty years on.

Indeed, it has become ever more apparent that New Labour's early constitutional reforms were ultimately an attempt to shore up the system Nairn describes rather than challenge it. This book is arguably even more timely now than when it was written.

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The English Levellers

The English Levellers
Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought
Edited by Andrew Sharp
Cambridge University Press
Cambridge 1998

A selection of key texts from the Levellers, the radical democratic movement which emerged on the Parliamentary side of the English Civil War in the late 1640s.

Includes the Levellers revolutionary blueprint for an English constitution, the Agreement of the People, and a report of the Putney debates, a classic confrontation  between the rights of the majority and the rights of the propertied few, as well as writings by key Leveller thinkers such as John Lilburne, William Walwyn, and Richard Overton.

The volume also includes a useful introduction, bibliography, chronological table and biographical notes.

An Online version of the texts is available at constitution.org

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