Alexei Sayle and his comic revelations of state surveillance of subversives are closer to the truth than we think

The following article is from reader Dr Michael Maguire.

Older readers may recall that Alexei Sayle was one of the ‘alternative comedians’ that appeared on TV programmes such as The Young Ones many years ago.

But today, 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).

Alexei Sayle: a radical Maoist?

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.

So, he recalled in a programme last year that his ‘teenage rebellion’ focused on his becoming a ‘Maoist during the Chinese Cultural Revolution’. 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).

In a recent broadcast, he recalls that when his home got a telephone (land line) his parental 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, as it requires no less that ten persons working in shifts to effectively provide 24-hour close surveillance.

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.

Alexei Sayle: his parents were probably right

The ‘low level’ and minimal resource monitoring of potential ‘subversives’ can also be potentially undertaken during elections by monitoring the votes cast for those deemed to be ‘subversive’ candidates; a thought that occurred to myself, when I was employed as a Hackney Council town planner, to act as a polling clerk. This involved ticking the electoral register and writing the voters’ registration number on the counterfoil of the ballot paper.

So, as the ballot papers and their counterfoils have to be legally kept for at least a year, in case of any legal challenges by dissatisfied candidates, it would be potentially possible to identify those voting for a ‘subversive candidate’, particularly if it was a relatively small number. Of course, this would involve violating the ‘sanctity’ of the democratic electoral process of the ‘secret vote’.

‘Unthinkable’, of course, in a country which provides funding and the deployment of its Foreign Office staff to monitor the electoral process in countries with a ‘lesser democratic history’.

Alas no, according to Gordon Winter, a South African BOSS agent stationed in Britain to monitor the Anti Apartheid movement. For he recalled in his memoirs how ‘friendly’ Special Branch officers had enabled his inspection of the ballot papers cast for a very active opponent of the South African regime.

So, maybe Alexei Sayle’s parents were right – however impossible it sounds.

Featured image via the Canary