Pages

Friday 21 January 2011

Sex, spies and the SWP

These two letters in today's Guardian made me chuckle:

• So, police officers are "banned from having sexual relationships with their targets". MI5 seems to have had a slightly different approach. In Spycatcher, Peter Wright stated that officers could not be infiltrated into organisations like the Socialist Workers party (SWP) "since many of them lived promiscuous lives, and there were some sacrifices even an MI5 officer would not make".
- Ian Birchall

• The late Tony Cliff, leading light of the SWP, had a clear position on undercover police infiltration. He used to say: "It's inevitable that some of you will come across people you suspect of being police informers. Don't let them know you suspect. They are always the best organisers, the best paper sellers, and the first ones to turn up to a paper sale outside the factory at 6.30am in the pouring rain."
- Philip Foxe

3 comments:

  1. Love it.

    Clearly the thing to do to prevent infiltration is to force all new members to have sex with the exisiting members in order to join!

    I see no downside to this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jim, sounds like one or two of the smaller factions we know about.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Don't believe it the SWP are rddled with spies from top top to bottom. What else could explain their actiosn of the last 40 years!

    ReplyDelete