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GKY Peter Cadogan What follows is an edited version of some moments in the political career of an important player in the shadowy world of para-politics until hi= s death in 1990. In itself it is only a fragment, containing the views of Peter Cadogan, a longtime English Dissident, himself active in variou= s people power projects over the years.1 As a fragment, it has its limi= ts and (tantalisingly) the height of GKYs formal poli tical influence - his failed attempt to take over the Tory Monday Club in the early 1970s -= is absent as the diary entries only start in 1974. What the document does give, though, is a hint of the ferment and excitement amongst the ruling class around 1974, when in some circles a coup was discussed, and a demonstration of the close affinity between the state's security apparatus and the commerci al ruling class. There is one point on which it is possible to take issue slightly with Peter Cadogan that is worthy of remark - the assertion that there are people trying to hunt the wizard= of GKYand place him at the centre of a far Right conspiracy. In fact he was onl y too happy to write his own obituary for Lobster. The extent= to which GKY was (or was not) a totalitarian is something which readers = can delve into elsewhere.2 However, Peter Cadogan is right when he observes that GKY was "...incorrigibly interesting". - Larry O'Hara GKY and me personally got to know GKY in 1968 when, after reading his Finance and World Power', I wrote to him. We had many working lunches over the next 16 years. The argument of that book and the central tenet of his political thought, was that the Establishment (wrongly) preferred escalating debt to investment in the economy and improvements in productivity. In 1970 I became the general secretary of the South Place Ethical Society at the Conway Hall, Red Lion square (a centre of English dissent since 1793). GKY was very interested and gave a series of lectures there throughout the 1970s. eorge K. Young (1911-90) was a man born out of his time and he raged against it. He would have been happier as a zealous Scottish Covenanter in the 17th century or like his fellow Scot, Livingstone, building the empire in the bush, singlehanded. He was a journalist, a soldier, a senior civil servant, a master-spy, a writer, a historian, a political conspirator, a restless critic of weakness in high places, a ruthless man and a caring man at the same time. He believed in ideas, values and loyalty and lived by them. He never suffered fools gladly. He had a brilliant intellect. He also had a blind spot. When he retired from Government service in 1961 he was a Deputy Head of MI6. Within a year he had his first book out - Masters of In-decision - a withering attack on the system he had serv= ed for so long, but written as much in sorrow as in anger. He saw absolutely no alter-native to Conser-vatism and it therefore followed that the Conservative cause had to be redeemed from within. He saw himself as an arch-redeemer, a crusader more than a reformer. He is dead. These lines are not written to hunt the wizard (there seems to be no shortage of volunteers in that direction) but to try to tell the truth about him, or at least that part of it that I saw for myself, knowing him personally and enjoying his t rust, over the years 1968 to 1984. Being exceptionally well-informed (he kept his hotline to Intelligence long after his retirement) he had an angle on everything and everybody. He was, therefore, incorrigibly interesting, regardless of whether he was right or wrong, progressive or reactio nary. His interests centered on foreign policy, defence and internal security. His book Who is my Liege? (197= 2) was a textbook of Thatcherism par excellence but with values closer to chivalry than Bentham: The collection and dispensing of revenue, the running of courts of law, the equipment, direction and planning of the armed forces - these three functions of central government are the only ones for which a permanent corps of specialist officials is essen tial. So the Conservative intention of hiving-off functions of state which they consider are the responsibility of the private sector must be extended to being a broad avenue of no-return... Unlike Mrs Thatcher though he insisted on the moral under-pinning. Just as Mrs. Thatcher denied society so he affirmed it. But that was the G.K.Young enigma - that h= e belived in truth, integrity, loyalty, action and he knew they came from people, but wh en it came to the crunch he chose authority: The loyaltie= s of the people are there: they only await a new focus. No subsitute of function, interest or contrived comm-unication can meet their need: the restoration of emotional unity requires a new sense of communal action and since our whole body of ideas is involved, it is from above that new initiatives must come. And who is to do it? Since Labours identity tags are tied to universalis= t ideas which have brought betrayal, and in our time treason bears a Left-Wing label, only a Conservative Government can play this role. So that is it. He felt he had no option but to make sense of the Conservative Party. One gets the impression that he was feared, disliked, derided and misunderstood by the common run of Tories; but he had hot lines to the top. To him, that was what counte d. He had no sense of a new morality and politics coming up from below. There were always two George Youngs - the man of moral passion and the authoritarian. And the second had the edge over the first. It just never occurred to him that people-power might be a possible option. The Journal From1974 I kept a journal, what follows is taken almost verbatim from that journal. 25th July 1974. George K Young had lunch with me today in the Library at Conway Hall. He tells me the Conservative Party has collapsed in Scotland and Tories in general hardly know what they stand for because they dont know what Heath stands for. He is working on something I think he called plan B. Like me he expects the collapse of central government, but we are working in utterly different ways from opposite ends of the political spectrum. He, in company with about a dozen others, has drawn up a plan (and had it bound!) and discussed it with the Head of the Secret Service and a top man in the Special Branch. It involves, or is intended to involve Lord Lieutenants, Chief Constables and their kind. He is looking for some kind of base in the Royal Society of St. George and the Ratepayers Association to which, he says, some thirteen million people have paid their 25p. Gerald Howarth, ex-Society of Individualists, is much involved. He thinks the outcome of the present crisis will be violent but we di dnt discuss it in detail. In my view the violence has only to be marginal or we lose the day and end up with another authoritarian regime. He takes the regional case but makes less of it than I do. He uses a military formula for working things out: Objec ts, Factors, Courses, Plan. He saw Enoch Powell last week for about an hour and a half but doesnt think much of him. He ratted on his own party people and constituents in the middle of an election build-up. He is making the mistake of getting directly involved in Ulster politics (i n looking for a constituency there), fatal in Georges view - and generally seems to have lost out. I asked him about the Far Right. The Monday Club, he says, is virtually in a state of self-destruction. What he said about Jonathan Guinness turned out to be about right. But the Monday Club in the Midlands has developed a life of its own and could be of consequence. Of the National Front it seems that there is a chap called Roy3 who is a self-made millionaire and who reckons to get rid of both John Tyndall and Martin Webster within two years. George doubts if he will make it. It will take a good organiser to beat Web ster to the draw! He is very frank with me and I am equally straight with him. It is a strange relationship. He mentioned, in some context or other, that he had previously been much involved in planning the overthrow or the bolstering of Governments (presum-ably in the Mid dle East) so that his present activity was not all that different! 29th July 1974. Todays Times carries quite a long report on the emergency organisation that GKY described to me last week, but his name is kept out of it. Now the climate will really begin to change... When the politicians see others getting ready to do their job becaus e they have failed, there will be some very interesting sequels from all directions! 5th December 1974. We had the working lunch for ten people today (at the Hall). My guests were GKY, Michael Barnes, Alex Cox and Marion Boyars. James had three guests including Tony Wilson of British Oxygen. Tomoko Sato acted as co-host with me. The discussion was good but didnt seem to get very far; but all felt it was worthwhile. At the very end George staggered them (except me as privy to the news) by revealing that it was he who had drawn up the plan that General Walker is now acting on. He told us that cadres had been recruited, how an alternative communication system existed, how contacts ranged from the Palace down! Shock all round the table! In 1975 it seemed that some kind of change was imperative. This was the year in which Thatcherism was invented and Mrs. Thatcher ousted Ted Heath. She had been holding her Sunday evening discussions with her friends in her house in Chelsea. General Walker , Sterling and George K Young were making their extraordinary para-military plans to meet the contingency of a total political breakdown. 15th July 1976 Today I had lunch with GKY at St.Stephens Club near St.James Park. He told me that when he first had the idea that is UNISON he saw General Templar about it. Templar was interested but too old and sick to act and he suggested General Walker. George then s aw General Walker and he, having read Georges draft, agree= d to take on the job. The form the thing now takes is that of an instant communications network capable of acting at the highest level if the established machinery of government and comm-unications breaks down. Key contacts to be with Lord Lieutenants, G.O.C.s [heads of armed services], Police, key M.P.s and key people in a list of associations. At the top is Lord X ( I was told his name but it did not mean anything to me and I forgot it), but he too is a sick man. The key man in the Commons is Sir Frederick Bennet and with hi m are some twenty other M.P.s. The communications network will function through the ham radio system and another special system of communications has been established with some help from the Home Office. UNISON will go public later this year. There used to be, he said, an emergency system in this country based on the counties (presumably a reference to the Regional Seats of Government set up in the 20s after the experience of the General Strike and reactivated in the 50s in the face of the pos sibility of nuclear war) but Heath dismantled it as a reflection on his capacity to govern and Wilson, with five Communists in his Cabinet, was in no position to revive it - Geo= rge is a little free with the use of the word Communist. He sees a Genera= l Election producing a minority Thatcher Government and no progress. When it breaks down or threatens to do so, there will be a need for a new initiative. He had set up a group of about a hundred Tory M.P.s who are alerted to the possibili ty and will take suitable action. What action is yet to be determined. 26th March 1981. A two hour lunch with GKY at the Caledonian Club in Halkin Street. He tells me that the emergency organisation UNISON was formed in 1967 and Tory Action subsequently. He has been the Secretary and the moving force in Tory Action since his 70th birthday. H e sees Peter Walker as a tory with a future and writes Carrington and Prior off. 10th August 1982 Another lunch with GKY at the Caledonian Club. He told me a bit more about himself. In 1941 he was an Army Captain in Kenya and when the British Forces cleared the Italians out of the Horn of Africa he was asked to take on the Intelligence job at Addis Ab baba. He carried on in Intelligence after the war, with MI6, and did a tour of SE Asia in 1959. He told me that the Head of the CIA in Saigon, Richardson, urged no direct US intervention in Vietnam. He was over-ruled from Washington where Helms was the boss. He also said that the CIA was firmly against the form taken by the Bay of Pigs invasion. They wanted an operation that would start and build up a complex of guerrilla groups, but the Pentagon prevailed and made it a full frontal thing leading to disaster. H e thinks that the CIA has had a bad press. Before 1955 the Foreign Office had no proper means of studying Soviet power centers. Violet Connolly was their authority on the SU but the emphasis of specialists was on things like Soviet grain production etc. He successfully urged that what No.10 needed was a special advisory group following closely what was happening in and around the Kremlin - and which General or 'top person' was on the up or down. The need for this became apparent with Stalin's death. Nobody in the FO had ever heard of Malenkov! So mething had to be done. At Georges instigation a special group was set up headed by Malcolm McIntosh with Nove and Schapiro (of LSE). The group is still functioning today and McIntosh is still there. The House of Lords has a special all-party defence group which has produced a paper on special operations and other matters (edited by George) that will be considered at a meeting on October 27th by the PM. A good deal turns on that meeting. It seems that many politicians, officials and officers have no idea of the importance of 'special operations' and psychological warfare and both have been greatly neglected in recent years. George thinks that Carver is a dead loss because he can't see this point eithe r. George K. Youngs last book Subversion and the British Riposte appeared in 1984, some three years after it had been written. I was not a little shocked by it. It opens: If leading spokesmen of the Western world are to be believed we face in the 80s, a threat of subversion as great as that of nuclear destruction. It is a favourite theme of the Prime Minister. The fact is that for year= s he had tried, not without some limited success, to sell this belief to leading spokesmen, Mrs. Thatcher in particular. GKY, now aged 74, (to the best of my knowledge we had no subsequent contact) fell silent. So many things he g ot right, but his essential thesis involved a fundamental misreading of his times. Over 16 years I had seen him change. His original critique of the Establishment was brilliant; but his gathering obsession with an ill-defined internal menace had always seemed to me to be absurd. Who were the people who were going to bring the system to its knees? They didnt exist. How does one explain George K. Young? He was a man of ideas and vast experience on the Right. In the view of the Left this was impossible - the Right had interests, it did not and could not have ideas. Churchill had opened up a breach but it closed again. George K. Young and Sir Keith Joseph did it once more, but all it yielded was self-limiting Thatcherism and a misreading of subversion. GKY had no home intellectually and politically, nowhere to go. He had to invent homes like Tory Action, UNISON and various ad hoc associations or move into the Monday Club or the Society of Individualists and SPES. It didnt work. He met very few people of his own demanding kind. It drove him downwards into conspiracy, even into inventing conspiracy by others, as in his last book. Today it might be differen t; there are Conservatives about like Norman Stone (who looks, talks and sounds like GKY) and Edward Pearce. They were not about in the 1960s. It is a pity that in the end he willed himself to self-destruction and we parted company although never explicit ly or formally so. He was a good man fallen among autocrats... Introduced and edited by Larry O'Hara, an independent researcher into the far Right. Larry O'Hara has been the subject of vicious and unfounded attacks in the pages of the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight after criticising their research and their links to the British 'secret state'. For any readers who want to read in more detail how GKY interacted with Cadogan's own political project the full text is available; 6 pages at 8p/page inc. postage. 1. Peter Cadogan's latest project is outlined in a pamphlet "Values & Vision - Human Ecology and Community Politics"; Telephone 071 328 3709. 2. The obituary of himself is in Lobster 19, May 1990, p. 15-19. Dorril & Ramsay 'Smear' discusses: - GKY in Tory Party, Ch XXXII. - GKY & Unison, Ch XXXIX. Searchlight, June 1987, p. 10-11 repeats the standard information about GKY. Searchlight 187, Jan. 1991 p. 3 elaborates further, alleging he used the Searchlight 187, Jan. 1991 p. 3 elaborates further, alleging he used the mysterious (and quite possibly fictional) paramilitary Column 88 "as a smokescreen... for more criminal plans." David Leigh 'The Wilson Plot" (Heinemann, London, 1988) also reviews Young's career & views - p. 13-16, 57, 158-9, 213-4, 217, 221-3, 225. 3. Roy Painter was a colourful Tory who defected to the NF and went on to help form the shortlived 'National Party' in 1975. He is now back in the Tory Party. A vivid picture of him is in Martin Walker's 'The NF' (Fonatana, 1977).