Show caption The government was most concerned about Militant Tendency members working in the civil service. Photograph: Associated Newspapers/REX National Archives ‘Subversive’ civil servants secretly blacklisted under Thatcher Whitehall and MI5 identified 1,420 individuals to be kept under observation and away from certain roles Ian Cobain Tue 24 Jul 2018 22.17 BST Share on Facebook

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Margaret Thatcher’s government drew up a secret blacklist of its own civil servants thought to be “subversives” in order to keep them under observation and block their promotion, papers released at the National Archives disclose.

Whitehall departments worked with MI5 to identify 1,420 civil servants to be closely watched and, where possible, kept away from computers and revenue collection roles.

The majority, 733 people, were identified as Trotskyists, and a further 607 as communists. Forty-five were said to be fascists, and 35 Welsh or Scottish nationalists, “black or Asian racial extremists” or anarchists.

MI5 also compiled lists of suspect local councillors and active trade unionists deemed to be of similar concern.

The agency warned that because central government did not directly employ health workers, it was unable to compile a list of “subversives” in the NHS “without alerting those concerned, with a high risk of public exposure of our investigation”.

The government overcame similar problems in the surveillance of teachers by arranging for school inspectors to report directly to MI5.

The Cabinet Office told the Guardian that it regarded it as a historical matter. After initially refusing to confirm or deny whether such blacklist operations still existed, a spokesperson later said: “The inter-departmental group on Subversion in Public Life (SPL) is no longer in operation and there is no other unit conducting similar work.”

MI5 assessed in 1985 that there were probably 50,000 people across Britain whom it would describe as subversive. The papers released at the National Archives at Kew show that the blacklist was drawn up early that year, following a crippling strike the previous year of Department of Health and Social Services computer operators in Newcastle. The seven-month dispute had disrupted pension and child benefit payments to millions of people.

Sir Kenneth Stowe, the permanent secretary at the Department of Health, alerted the cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, that three key organisers of the strike appeared to be members of the Trotskyist Militant Tendency movement. Armstrong and other senior civil servants then decided to revive the SPL, a 1970s Whitehall body.

The nationwide miners’ strike was nine months old by this time, and ministers and officials were increasingly anxious that industrial unrest could threaten the stability of the government.

At a meeting with the head of MI5, Sir John Jones, and two senior MI5 officers, Royd Barker and Stella Rimington – who went on to lead the organisation – Armstrong was told the agency was “very ready” to assist.

The SPL was quickly established, with representatives from MI5, Scotland Yard’s Special Branch and each of the major government departments. It had four staff members – including Barker and Rimington – and produced annual reports. A group of civil service permanent secretaries, known as the subversion (home) committee, was also established to oversee the SPL.

It defined subversion as “activities which threaten the wellbeing of the state and are intended to undermine or overthrow parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means”.

By matching staff records against MI5 files, the SPL came to the conclusion that there were 1,420 “subversives” in the civil service, including 52 in Customs and Excise, 169 at the Inland Revenue and 111 at the Ministry of Defence, many of them at the Royal Naval dockyards at Rosyth. The largest number, however, 360, were said to be at the Department of Health.

The SPL was clearly most concerned with members of Militant Tendency, reporting that it was “the largest and most threatening Trotskyist group in Britain”, and that its membership had quadrupled over six years to 6,300. “Its greatest strengths have been the dedication of its members and its strong internal discipline,” it said.

The SPL also reported in 1985 that 284 members of Militant were civil servants. Three years later, the figure had grown to around 450.

Most “subversives” were found to be working in junior clerical positions. The SPL recommended in its initial report that they should, where possible, “be identified and distanced from such work”.

It added that mounting a purge of suspect individuals would not be possible, but “it might sometimes be possible covertly to move individuals to posts where they would have less potential for disruption.

“At the higher levels, where problems of postability can arise, one or two departments do have covert systems to enable them, if necessary, to take these problems into account before promotions are decided. We consider that this action is right.”

Senior civil servants were informed that they should consult MI5 before moving “subversives” to any new post. “It would need to be a covert process, because any systematic barring of known subversives from certain work would be contentious,” they were told.

Armstrong recorded that he was most concerned about computer operators, revenue collectors and people who had contact with the public.

The need for the utmost secrecy is stressed repeatedly throughout the files that have been made available at Kew. One SPL chair, John Chilcot, wrote in June 1988: “It is right on balance to continue with this exercise, despite its acute sensitivity and the high risk of embarrassment in the event of any leak.”

The papers also show that MI5 mounted an operation to identify “subversives” teaching at eight schools in inner London. The Office for Standards in Education said school inspectors had not reported directly to MI5 since it took over the work of HM Inspectors in 1992.

Some pages within the files passed to the National Archives have been withheld by the Cabinet Office under the section of the Public Records Acts that covers national security concerns.

The files show that Thatcher was not shown the annual SPL reports. She and her home secretaries, Leon Brittan and Douglas Hurd, were shown the group’s recommendations and the appendices that detailed the number of “subversives” within each department.

Thatcher informed Armstrong in December 1985 that she believed managers should be “very ready to sack subversive troublemakers if they showed any cause under the civil service rules”. She was also “somewhat disquieted” to learn that there were a handful of “subversives” above the rank of higher executive officer.

Armstrong informed senior civil servants early the following the year that Thatcher had “expressed approval for vigorous management action against subversive troublemakers where their conduct justifies it”. It is unclear from the files released whether any civil servants lost their jobs as a result.

Rimington went on to become MI5’s director general. She did not respond to a request for a comment. In her 2001 memoir, Open Secret, she describes how she was appointed as assistant director of one of the agency’s counter-subversion sections in 1983. “We worked to the principle that the activities of organisations or individuals with subversive intent was of concern to us; the right to set up and join pressure groups and to protest was not.

“We gave a great deal of careful thought to this distinction, and to establishing what we should and should not investigate and report on.