INDEX	October 10, 2020
What MI5 really does
Once archivist Helen Lindsay thought her father might really be a spy. After all as she trawled through MI5's records at the National Archive Centre, she found a vast amount of information about him. But eventually she figured it out. He was no spy. What MI5 was doing was the minor censorship of the ability of people to function. Video also includes former defence secretary Michael Portillo pointing out that this was the period when MI5 was failing to catch Kim Philby.
Helen Lindsay on BBC Radio 4's Saturday Live with former Defence Secretary Michael Portillo. She tells how she discovered a large amount of paperwork in the national archives, revealing that MI5 spied on her father and other members of the Communist Party in Essex. She believes that there was no intention to find out what they were doing but simply to make it clear MI5 was watching. I knew some of the Essex communists in the 1970s because I lived in Waltham Forest, historically part of Essex. The local communists were still connected even though Waltham Forest had been London since the 1960s. Among other things the communists ran the trades council and as a reporter on the local paper I got to talk to them quite a lot. They were very friendly, very elderly and completely harmless. They posed absolutely no threat to society, though they would probably have liked to think they did. The fact that they were harmless would have emerged very soon after MI5 started listening to their phone calls and intercepting their mail. The only reason why MI5 kept on doing it is that someone inside the organisation had an important job and did not want to lose out in the constant turf war that goes on in the organisation, by shedding some responsibility. Stop bugging the communists and you might be moved to a smaller office or lose the right to have carpet on your floor. MI5 was that kind of organisation. It probably still is.
See programme on BBC web site See also Annie Machon: Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers.
INDEX Jonathan Brind		October 10, 2020