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Now.
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I was looking for fun ways to
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Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal.
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In the last episode we looked at the Conservative government humiliation in 1982 when they were forced to cancel the Hard Rock civil defence exercise. Had it gone ahead, it would have involved all the local councils across the country. They would have been presented with a nuclear attack scenario and then they would test their civil defence planning by seeing how their staff would respond to the disaster. But as we know, lots of local councils in Britain in the early 80s had declared themselves nuclear free zones and this meant they refused to participate because they wanted nothing to do with nuclear weapons or nuclear war planning. Central government in London shrugged and told the rebels, we don't care about your left wing ideology, just do your job. But they refused and the damage had been done. Hard Rock was cancelled, the government had been humiliated and cnd, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, who had led the protest against civil defence planning. They claimed this as a victory and we saw in the last episode that after Hard Rock, central government quickly changed the rules to make sure that the rebels could never again refused to do a civil defence exercise. A change in the Civil Defence Regulations closed that loophole. Job done. But what about cnd? It had come as a deeply unpleasant surprise to see that CND had led such a tough campaign against the government and had secured a triumph which made front pages across Britain. But there was no change in the law that the government could introduce which would curb cnd. Everyone has the right to protest, to campaign, to ask difficult questions, to be a pain in the neck, if you like. So there was no way in a democracy to silence cnd. But you might be able to kick back against them, disparage them, insult them, humiliate them. And was Michael Heseltine, the new defence secretary in 1983, who was nicknamed Tarzan? Was he the man to do it? Previously, there'd been no need to worry about cnd, because the group, once mighty, had withered into irrelevance. The organization was formed in 1958 and they had instantly been a big deal, holding huge rallies in Trafalgar Square and conducting their famous marches from Aldermaston, where Britain's nukes were assembled. But CND's popularity and relevance was tied quite naturally to nuclear tension and fear. And when those things eased, as they did in the 1970s, in the era of detente, so CND's influence declined. The membership of the organisation, who had once packed Trafalgar Square and lined the roads to Aldermaston had fallen by 1971 to only 2,047 members. In a nutshell, CND thrives when we're scared, and we all managed to relax a bit. In the 1970s, at least, we managed to relax about nuclear war. It's no criticism of cnd. It's simply natural that it needs a high level of nuclear fear in society if it wants to be strong and relevant. And that is surely why, after the Cold War, they branched out into various other campaigns, like protesting the war in Iraq, for example. So CND became something of a joke in the 1970s. Detente had sapped their power and influence. And if you were asked in that era to picture one of their members, you might have imagined some joyless communist in a duffel coat tramping to older master in the rain. But this all changed in the early 80s, when nuclear fear returned and CND roared back into life. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan On Christmas Day 79 ended the era of detente. And then the new year of 1980 just began piling more and more grim nuclear news onto the public. This was the year the infamous Protect and Survive booklet was made available in Britain that happened in May. In June, it was announced that American cruise missiles would be stationed in Britain at Greenham Common and Molesworth. Next month, July was the announcement that the British government would buy the American Trident missile system. And then, of course, later in the year, Ronald Reagan won the election in America. All these events were perfect for bringing back nuclear tension and therefore bringing back C and D. But that wasn't all. In October 1980, the Labour Party, at its annual conference in Blackpool, adopted the policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. The same goal, of course, which CND had been pushing for since its formation. The Labour leader at the time, James Callaghan, resigned. He, as a former Prime Minister, had been a supporter of Britain having nuclear weapons. And so he stood down and was replaced by Michael Foot, who was a strong supporter of CND and a passionate advocate of unilateral nuclear disarmament. So C and D were becoming relevant again and were now nicely in step with the Labour Party, which gave them, of course, further clout. We're not just a protest group, we're not students in difficult courts. We are now side by side with a prospective government in Westminster. And as for their membership numbers, CND, whose membership had fallen to just over 2,071, had surged to 50,000 by 1982. They were back and they were irritating the Conservative government something awful, which is great, because that's their job. They're a pressure group. They're supposed to make a noise and be a bloody nuisance and niggle and nag at those in power. And surging from 2,000 members to 50,000 in just 10 years, acquiring clout again, grabbing headlines again, filling up Hyde park and Trafalgar Square again, and now having the same policy as the Opposition, having allies and supporters in Westminster itself. Well, this worried the Conservative government, especially with the general election on the horizon for 1983. As if to emphasise how bold and strong was anti nuclear feeling in Britain, this general election year of 83 began with 44 women at Greenham Common breaching the fence and dancing on top of the nuclear silos. The news went around the world. These women, they made tricky opponents. Surely the Americans could just shoot intruders on the base. Yes, but consider the no doubt negative publicity in a country already strong in anti nuclear feeling, if they were to gun down some dancing woman. There was a similar weariness in New York during the Operation Alert protest in the 50s. We've covered that in the podcast. Look for the episode called Operation Alert and the Angry Mothers, in that case, women who wanted to protest against the nationwide civil defense drill, refused to participate, refused to take shelter when the siren sounded. And instead they sat calmly in city parks in their nice dresses with their babies beside them, knowing that police would be reluctant to grab young mothers and throw them into vans. But with an election approaching, something had to be done to try and slap down cnd. They were just getting too big, too loud, too damaging to the government. So Margaret Thatcher appointed a new Secretary of Defence that same month. The young, energetic and handsome. So the papers said, Michael Heseltine, nicknamed Tarzan. And one of the tasks in his new job was to tackle the threat from CND. So in March 83, Tarzan formed a group called Defence Secretariat 19. DS19. And its role was to take on CND by gathering information and gossip and dirt and research, anything they could lay their hands on, really, and use it to fight back against what they considered to be CND propaganda. They would use any material they had to brief politicians and journalists and opinion formers, use it to make headlines, use it to shape public opinion against cnd. But there were people in government who were a bit queasy about the existence of DS19, because the group was made up of civil servants, not Conservative Party workers or staffers or politicians, but civil servants. And those guys are supposed to be neutral. They're there to do the work of government, not the work of political parties. And here was Heseltine getting them into a little group whose purpose was to knock down cnd. A political task, surely. Get your own party guys to work on if you must, but you shouldn't be using the supposedly neutral civil service. So there were some who saw DS19 as a bit questionable from the outset. I turn here to the book the Silent Conspiracy Inside the Intelligence services in the 1990s, and it mentions DS19 saying the group made contact with MI5 and trying to get useful information on C and D. A whistleblower, Cathy Masseter, later told Channel 4 that her bosses made it known that they'd look favourably on any application she might make for a phone tap on any particular C and D member who could be considered a subversive, for example, if they had one who was also a member of the Communist Party. The target for the eventual phone operation was John Cox, the CND vice president. But Masseter later said there was nothing about this chap which could be labelled as subversive. We knew from our coverage of the Communist Party that he was not getting up to anything in cnd. Nonetheless, she was instructed to go ahead with the telephone operation. Another quote from the book, whilst acknowledging that technically, CND was an internal political matter, which in itself did not warrant MI5's attention. Senior Whitehall officials concerned with security defended the targeting of CND on the basis that some members of the organisation were simply tools of Moscow. Ah, that old chestnut that CND is controlled by Moscow. This was a favourite of CND opponents. And we hear the insulting threads in the rally where scuffles break out and we hear someone shout, get back to bloody Russia. That was always an insult on hand to be lobbed against any left winger. The book European Peace Movements says The Heseltine and DS9 made their first attack on CND in April 1983. And it was this line that they used, trying to link CND with the Soviet Union. And in this instance, cnd, to be fair, did make it easy for them because they had unwisely, I think, voted in favor of sending two delegates to Prague to attend a conference organized by the World Peace Council. The problem was that the World Peace Council was organized by the Soviet Union. So this just played right into Heseltine's hands. Here we have CND sending its people across the Iron Curtain to a conference organized by Moscow. Then in May, DS19 tries to go further with their attempt to link CND to the Russians. They released details on individuals within cnd, trying to show that a number of them were on the extreme left of the spectrum or even shock horror. Members of the Communist Party. Heseltine said this showed that the real purpose of CND is the advance of the socialist and Communist cause. But this move backfired. Firstly, it seemed quite ugly and reeked of the McCarthy era. But, and this is actually quite funny, people were actually surprised at how few Communists were on the list. Out of the CND executive, of 24, only three were named as Communists. And the reaction in the media seemed to be, huh? Is that all? And the Times revealed that Heseltine's list actually had some errors. For example, two people named as Communists were not actually members of the CND Council. So the attack fell rather flat. And in the same paper, the Times, that day, there was an article about former Prime Minister Edward Heath, who was defending cnd, saying he didn't think their members were motivated by Communism, but by simple anxiety. So we had a former Conservative Prime Minister rubbishing the notion that C and D were full of commies. But then this was Edward Heath, the man who was ousted by Margaret Thatcher and who hated her so much that for the long remainder of his political career, he was known as the Incredible sulk. So perhaps journalists knew that they could go to Ted Heath for any topic and he'd gladly give them a quote as long as it meant taking a swing at Maggie's government. But nonetheless, it did put a bit of a dent in DS19's efforts because he was the Defence Secretary, saying they're all a bunch of commies. And on the very same day, in the very same newspaper, a former Conservative prime minister was rubbishing that very notion. But Tarzan had other tactics up his sleeve. He also used the media to try and steal CND's limelight, trying to starve them of the publicity, which any protest group of course requires. For example, he went to the Berlin Wall on Good Friday of 1983, knowing that that would grab attention and also knowing that it would upstage cnd, who had organized a huge Easter protest of people standing in a chain with their hands linked at Greenham Common. So whilst CND activists were holding hands, an act which could easily be made to play into their image of being a bunch of hippies and idealistic sorts with their heads in the clouds. Whilst they were holding hands, big Tarzan was standing at the Berlin Wall looking all serious and statesmanlike and he was able to make CND on this occasion seem irresponsible because he said of their hand holding protest, you do so in freedom and freedom is your right and I am charged with its defense.
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So he was playing the responsible adult whilst the idealistic kids of CND stood around holding hands. That was the perception, of course. He was pushing and his boss Maggie Thatcher joined in, mocking them for holding hands in Berkshire instead of Berlin, where the real action was again easy in some lights to portray them as childlike and idealistic and not grounded in reality. Holding hands in Berkshire whilst your opponent stands grim faced at the Berlin Wall. Other attacks on CND followed, including the near constant and always unevidenced claim that they were funded by Moscow and a distressing allegation that their general secretary, the Catholic priest Bruce Kent, was an IRA supporter and had organized an IRA march. But even without these attacks, even without a campaign from the government to discredit cnd, it was always going to be hard for them to stay constantly credible and steadily popular. The book which I mentioned before, European Peace Movements and the Future of the Western alliance, has a chapter in cnd, and it says that one of the group's ongoing problems from a media perspective was trying to stay in the limelight, trying to stay relevant, trying to stay in the headlines without eventually seeming negative or irresponsible. The nature of their role, as I mentioned earlier, meant that they were only relevant and in the headlines when we are anxious and when nuclear tensions are high. So if CND are linked in that way to nuclear tension and fear, people will inevitably start to weary of them. It's just human nature, isn't it? Oh God, CND again. Talking about death and incineration again. And as well as always having a negative message. It was quite easy to paint them as irresponsible because after all, they were advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament, a position which it was ridiculously easy to mock. At the height of the Cold War, C and D were always surging in popularity and attention at times of high nuclear fear and anxiety, and yet the solution they were putting forward was let's lay down our weapons. So of course it was easy to argue against that. Multilateral disarmament, fine, there could have been a case for that, but unilateral? We just lay there, our nukes, but the Soviets don't. Is that what you're telling me? Very easy to portray that as plain irresponsible or at best, ridiculously idealistic. And then to make things even worse, the headlines which were coming out of the women's peace camp at Greenham Common began to change in tone. Where there had been initial admiration and curiosity about the women protesters, stories became increasingly concerned with dirt and squalor and portraying the woman as noisy nuisances, irresponsible woman who should be at home with the children, that kind of thing. I suppose the Greenham Common woman fell victim to the same thing which afflicted the straight CND stories. Oh God, it's them again. Always shouting about war and Death. The Greenham woman had been a novelty at first, a tremendous, unsettling story. But after a while, it was easy for those who chose to do so to portray them as tiresome, noisy, attention seekers. I want to add, I've got great admiration for the women at Greenham Common. I'm just saying this is the way some media chose to portray them and it was often easy for them to do so. And then the anti nuclear woman at Greenham came face to face with their nemesis, with Michael Heseltine, with tetchy Tarzan himself. In February 83, he was invited to speak to local Conservatives at Newbury Town Hall, Newbury being the town which hosted the Greenham Common base. And so, of course, hundreds of the women protesters were there to meet him. They were there to protest, obviously. And as the book European Peace Movement suggested, the headlines which had changed in tone were mainly about the noise, the threat, the chaos, the alleged violence of these women. Because it was such a large group of protesters and because a prominent Cabinet minister was visiting, quite naturally, a lot of police were on hand. And yes, there was some pushing and shoving and in the melee, Michael Heseltine fell to the ground. Now, the papers the next morning went crazy over this and they had some very colourful headlines, all showing the woman in a very bad light. Peace with a punch, Greenham woman tackle Tarzan, said the Western Daily Press. Now, there was no evidence of anyone, let alone any woman, punching or tackling Michael Heseltine. He was surrounded by a ton of police, for a start, but the headlines just kept coming. The Western Daily Press said he was punched and jostled to the ground by jeering women. A clearly shaken Mr. Heseltine, his suit dirtied, had to be dragged by police into Newbury Town Hall. The story also referred to a screaming mob of more than 200 women. The Northern Echo newspaper said, nuke girls rough up Heseltown. The Telegraph said, peace camp woman mob Heseltine and claim he was dragged to the ground in a tussle with the woman. The Daily Post said, gauntlet of hate Heseltine hauled to the ground in anti nuclear fury. Now, the woman denied any violence. They were peace campaigners, of course, and they were very aware that they were being watched by the police and by the media. So they denied any violence and they quite simply asked for anyone with evidence of violence to show it and they would then investigate it. The police themselves said there was certainly a lot of pushing and jostling when Heseltine arrived. I would not describe it as peaceful, said an officer, but he added that to his knowledge, no one other than the police made any physical contact with Michael Heseltine. As for Big Tarzan himself, he later said, I felt a few pushes and shoves, but I really don't know if anyone struck me. I certainly wasn't hurt. So there we are, Michael Heseltine himself saying, I certainly wasn't hurt. But the newspaper headline saying, greenham woman tackle Tarzan. A screaming mauve nuke. Gerald's rough up Heseltine. Heseltine himself, quote, I certainly wasn't hurt. So in this case, we see the police and Michael Heseltine himself knocking aside the negative headlines. I certainly wasn't hurt. But the papers, of course, scented blood. They scented a good story. The idea of a mob of unwashed screaming women grabbing at the Defence Secretary, well, that was just irresistible, I suppose, for some headlines. And so they went with it. So we can see CND and the whole anti nuclear cause being attacked on several fronts, because when it's not the government and DS19 and the defense Secretary himself attacking them, the newspapers take up the charge, whether it's justified or not. So DS19 certainly had a good go at attacking CND, although, as we said earlier in the pod, they didn't exactly make it easy for themselves by sending some of their guys off to Prague, off to meet with a group run by Moscow. That made them easy pickings for attacks, of course, from the media and from DS19. But DS19 didn't last for very long. It was closed down after the 1983 Conservative election victory, and it was closed down because the public had made their choice and they had chosen to stick with the nukes. Of course, Labour and the Conservatives both had manifestos with a range of policies in them. The general election wasn't a nuclear weapons referendum. But the fact remains that one party was in favor of unilateral nuclear disarmament and one was opposed to it. And it was the latter who triumphed. If the British people had wanted unilateral nuclear disarmament, then there was a party right there offering it. And so we must remember the words of the politician Gerald Kaufman, Labour politician at the time, who described their 1983 manifesto as the longest suicide note in history. So I hope you've enjoyed our quick look at Techie Tarzan and DS19, how they tried to attack and discredit CND. So thank you for listening and let me thank my newest patron, Ross C Brown, who joined yesterday. Thank you, Ross. If you join us at Patreon, you get ad free access to all the podcasts. You get bonus episodes and you get access to archive material which I've uploaded to my Patreon page. Thank you Ross for joining and thank you for listening.
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Welcome back to two Judgy Girls. I'm Mary from the Bay. And I'm Courtney from la. TJG is the podcast where we spill all the tea on your favorite reality TV shows, celebrity gossip and everything in between. We're here to bring you our unfiltered opinions, hilarious commentary and plenty of laughs along the way. We're two SDSU Delta Gamma sisters with a microphone and a whole lot of opinions. Each week we dive headfirst into the wild world of reality television. From Bravo to all the trash TV you could want. We break down the drama, dissect the latest scandals and share our thoughts on everything from the jaw dropping moments to the embarrassing antics. But that's not all. We're not here to just gossip. We're here to connect with you, the jurors, and share our love of all things pop culture. Whether we're dishing on the latest celebrity breakups, discussing our favorite guilty pleasure movies, or sharing embarrassing stories from our own lives, we promise to keep it real, keep it fun, and keep you coming back for more. Come judge with us.
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