British government history of secret anti-communist surveillance

Britain had a secret ban on communists in government service from the 1920s to the 1940s and ran an extensive programme of covert surveillance of civil-service workers suspected of being communists, according to new research published in the journal American Historical Review. The research, by Dr Jennifer Luff from Durham University's Department of History , has found evidence of a wide-spread policy of surveillance and action against suspected communist workers in government dockyards, ordnance factories, and other industrial sites. Thousands of workers monitored The findings have been drawn from government documents released to the UK National Archives and show that surveillance tactics such as mail interception and tailing were used to monitor industrial workers. Thousands of workers were affected, as the government employed about 125,000 industrial workers in the interwar years. Many were denied employment, or removed, from the Civil Service as a result of the surveillance and their future employment may also have been inhibited. Dr Jennifer Luff, Associate Professor of Modern American History, Durham University explains: "The scale of the surveillance programme undertaken by the British government was truly remarkable. At one point, MI5 were checking over 25,000 names a month and yet the British public knew nothing about this.