The following article is from reader Dr Michael Maguire.
Alexei Sayle is regularly on BBC Radio 4, with his current and innovative Alexei Sayle s Imaginary Sandwich Bar (Wednesdays at 6:30pm, and on the BBC Sounds app).
His lack of imaginary customers allows Alexei to muse on his political evolution as the son of parents who were both members of the British Communist Party.
He recalled in a programme last year that his teenage rebellion focused on his becoming a Maoist. This led to heated doctrinal arguments with his parents; and his father s rebuke that he shouldn t denounce his mother as a running dog supporter of the Moscow Deviationists (from the true Marxist-Leninist path to revolution).
He recalls that when his home got a telephone (land line) his parents warnings that this was undoubtedly being monitored by the police or the SS ; the Security Service (MI5), who unlike the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS/MI6), very much dislike this abbreviation because of its unfortunate historical connotations.
So his parents, when using the telephone, would resort to using camouflaged terminology when speaking to comrades, in the hope that this would confuse the monitors . Occupational paranoia?
Listening to this account of occupational paranoia , I recalled meeting British comrades who were convinced that not only was their telephone and post monitored, but that they were actually subject to periodic surveillance by the police, Special Branch, or even by the SS. Comrades, who didn't appreciate just how resource intensive such surveillance can be.
I personally know this from reading Jackie O'Malley's, my late wife's, court records, when she was convicted of renting flats and vehicles for the IRA Active Service Unit (ASU), sent to London in 1979 to rescue Brian Keenan from Brixton Prison.
The detailed Anti Terrorist Squad (ATS) monitoring reports reveals that on a Friday evening, the surveillance team outside her New Convent Garden Food For Britain (a Civil Service agency) office had to decide that if she was driving not to her London flat, but to her Guildford mother's home, to cease their tailing and simply contact the Surrey Police to request that a patrol car should periodically check if Jackie's car was parked outside her mother's house during the weekend.
An organisational decision made, because the ATS resources had been so stretched by the need to monitor not just the four man ASU, but also their suspected supporters; with some 50 raids subsequently undertaken on homes across England.
So, maybe Alexei Sayle's parents were right, however impossible it sounds.
Alexei Sayle and his comic revelations of state surveillance of subversives are closer to the truth than we think, by Dr Michael Maguire. Click link to see Canary article.
Jonathan Brind