Britain’s Watergate? : The “Military Coup” Plot to bring down the Government

Originally posted by MrInquisitive
reply to post by mirageman

 

This reminds me of the attempted coup by American captains of industry, including Prescott Bush, to overthrow FDR during The Depression. However, the general who was asked to lead it, General Shmedley Butler, was a an actual patriot and believed in the Constitution, so he told FDR about it (even though he didn't care for FDR). The perpetrators were never held to account because it would look too untoward, and because FDR then used the information as a form of blackmail so that he could coerce these businessmen into helping in the coming war effort as well as to keep them at bay with respect to his other economic policies. This is a VERY poorly documented part of American history.

There is a great documentary on this somewhere. I was totally unaware of this until a BBC radio 4 broadcast on the hidden history. I think it seems like to political elites and business elites, fascism is an easy system to establish.

The Whitehouse coup

Of all countries in the world, Britain is by far the least likely ever to succumb to tyranny and totalitarianism.

reply to post by Astyanax


El Oh El.

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Originally posted by crazyewok
No I agree the current lot we have now are a bad lot and need removeing. But again the only reason they are in power is because idoits keep voteing for them, ether because daddy and grandady always did or because some celebrity told them too

The smart one like us are left out of the loop and cant change anything because the stupid and lazy ones dont get off there arses.

No one voted for a two party coallition. The current government have no mandate as far as I am concerned, because those who voted for the Liberal Democrats, did not vote for a bunch of old Etonians and Bullingdon Club members, and because those who voted Conservative, did not vote for a bunch of backstabbing power hungry bastards, who would go back on thier every election campaign promise by getting into bed with the political equivalent of SATAN.
The combination of total morons at the top was not chosen by anyone. The people voted for a repeat of the election, to determine the thing once and for all, not some terrible compromise which benifits no body.

This is why I believe any goverment needs checks and balances. If it goes too extrem or too corrupt we have a clean out. And I think that should be put into law. We need some constitution that outlines specific rules our goverment needs to follow and our army and security services sworn in to protect that constitution not the goverment or Monarch.

I do not want to be dragged into a extremist country be it Fascist or Communist that resemble NAZI or soviet styles of goverment because No GCSE lazy racist ignorant bob down the road was told too by Jedward on the TV.

I agree that there must be a method by which failed governments can be removed from office, but only on the say so of a significant majority of people in the country. And I agree that we ought to avoid the fascist element taking control. However, just because one has only achieved GCSE grades, is neither necessarily thier fault, nor an indicator of thier level of intellect and comprehension of the real world. Expressing otherwise cheapens your position somewhat. Not a dig, I am just letting you know how that came across.

This is among the most interesting and well presented OPs as I have seem on this site, thanks and congratulations.

Originally posted by neformore
Ladies and gentlemen, please be upstanding for the British Establishment.

Its still there, it always has been and it probably always will be.

Most recent examples would be the London riots. They stopped when the Establishment had enough.

Nah, they stopped when it started raining

It's why we'd never have a revolution in this country - too cold & wet!

(and beside, the final of Z Factor on Ice is on TV tonight ...... )

reply to post by mirageman


Fantastic thread - there was a documentary about this ish a few years ago I think.

Heath was the big traitor.

I was a child in the 70s and I remember, choppers , flares and space hoppers - long hot summers [ ugh ?]
lots of freedom and feelng safe, secure and happy. Holidays camping in Spain on the Costa Brava or France. Easters in Cornwall with lots of daffodils and sandy beaches, cliff walks and cheese and tomato sandwiches, soggy with salad cream [ just as I liked them ]

The silver jubilee in 1977 and all the street parties, garden fetes, jumble sales, church halls, guide camps....

Oh I wish I felt so free and happy and secure in 2013.

I miss the 1970s.

I was also a teenager in the 70's, and can remember seeing tanks outside Heathrow airport on the news.

Makes you wonder if it was really the IRA who blew up Mountbatten in 1979?

reply to post by Greenman1


I saw tanks on the streets of Heathrow in the early 00s - Blair deployed them. It was weird.

One of the most interesting threads I've seen in my 9 years visiting this site

I was born in 1974 and was blissfully unaware of all this intrigue. Although, I do remember watching Blue Peter and the power going out due to the strikes.

It shows the quality of the post when it has 112 flags in less than a day.

I think the 70s and 80s were pretty crazy times to be growing up in, I'm quite thankfull for that.

On the other hand, I did have flairs and a mad Starsky cardigan.

There was a lot more that could be added to the OP but you have to stop somewhere...

For instance some of those alleged to be behind the plot(s) - Mountbatten, Neave and McWhirter were all murdered by terrorists. As Greenman1 says ...it makes you wonder.

Lord Lucan disappeared late in 1974 and there are a number of threads to take you off at a tangent on him.

The intelligence agencies had been suspect for years Philby, McLean and Burgess were the enemy within and part of the establishment themselves. Yet the "boys" were convinced a man who wanted liberty, opportunity and equality for all, especially in things like education and politics ("Socialism" as Wilson saw it) was a communist spy????? It was more to do with the fear of losing the invisible control on the nation that these people already had to the classes below.

To balance things out though Mountbatten is also said to have thought a coup was unthinkable despite the thought of being a "Lord and Master" of Britain perhaps appealing to his vanity. Harold Wilson was also supposedly the one Prime Minister whose company the Queen enjoyed most. But Her Majesty has never let the confidentiality of her meetings with Prime Ministers and her feelings towards them be known.

Of course the one thing that seems obvious but I didn't address in the OP is that things didn't just stop when Wilson resigned. Because old style "British Socialism" ended in 1976 and has never returned to Britain. At least not in government anyway. The ghosts of the past are still haunting us today.


Just to lighten up as well - yes I was a 70s kid and our generation should look back and smile as well at those lost days of our childhood. I hated flares, tank tops, never owned a chopper bike and preferred the late 70s new wave sound of the Police, the Cars. Blondie etc. But now I do think Slade and ELO were very under rated.

Oh and Knobby - Starsky and Hutch was the one TV show I was allowed to stay up late to watch. One of my favourite shows of the time.

reply to post by mirageman


Ross McWhirter...there's a blast from the past, no pun intended.

I looked his wiki page up a while ago, I was too young at the time to comprehend why the IRA wanted to assasinate him. To me at the time, he just presented the Record Breakers on TV. I didn't realise that he was hardcore right wing.

reply to post by mirageman


Things never change, they are destroying the social reform's and using the credit crunch as an excuse but this idea of a military takeover would genuinely have destroyed them as it would have turned into a civil war, the british are too slow by far to anger but when we get moving it is equally hard to stop us.

Mirageman.

I grew up reading James Bond, and later the more serious British spy novels. The link to Lord Lucan might give an insight into why he could have gone on the run after some of the other players met a sticky end?

I got my mother to knit me a Starsky cardigan, and my first wife made me get rid of it later.

reply to post by mirageman


I always enjoy reading your posts. S&F
Always very detailed.




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Interestingly, about the same period in time in Australia we had a fairly left leaning government led by a man by the name Gough Whitlam. Whitlam stated that he intended not to renew leases the U.S had on military bases in places like Pine Gap. A lot of things happened at this time, and quite a few people believe there was a CIA engineered coup which disposed of the government of Whitlam.

Whitlam was fired by Sir John Kerr, representative of the Queen in Oz and one of the only people with the constitutional authority to remove a government in power. To this day there is an undercurrent of bitterness in Australian politics, and if one reads a little history, it's not hard to imagine this being real.

While there were no troops in the street, and life seemed to go on as before for many, there are still a significant amount of people who believe there was a coup de'tat in Australia. We've never again had such a left wing government again, and the American bases remain.

So perhaps not in Britain, but quite possibly in Australia.

Excellent thread. I had a question, though: what handheld surface-to-air missiles have a range of over 50 miles?

reply to post by JiggyPotamus

This type of behavior is not something that any western country is immune to. This is why it is imperative that the citizenry be armed.

Transatlantic obsession alert.

Quite obviously, the British citizenry did not need to be armed in order to avert any threat of a military coup in the 1970s. It was averted in a far more civilised (and British) way; people simply refused to take the idea seriously.

Britain had its people's revolution in 1642, and confirmed it with another one, nearly bloodless, in 1688. There have forever been attempts by the conservative establishment to usurp the de facto sovereignty of Parliament, from George III's frequent changes of Prime Minister and Cabinet to various futile moves by British aristocrats and other senior establishment figures who, in the lead-up to the Second World War, rather sympathised with the Germans and Hitler. Both George VI and Edward VIII were thought to have Nazi sympathies; this may have been one of the reasons why the latter was pressured to abdicate. None of this makes a whit of difference.

The people of Britain have retained their sovereignty (notionally invested in their monarch) for over four hundred years. In all that time, they have only ever needed to use arms agains foreign threats.

Excellent thread OP!

Good research and a very informative thread!
Thank you!

Originally posted by StalkerSolent
Excellent thread. I had a question, though: what handheld surface-to-air missiles have a range of over 50 miles?

That would have been the Hyper Blowpipe or a Super Strela.

Totally missed that when reading it through and the point is lost now. But the argument given was that a SAM7 or Blowpipe type weapon could be used anywhere in a 50 mile radius of Heathrow to knockout an aircraft as it wouldn't need to be sitting on the tarmac to be a target.

But I hold my hands up if there is an error, so well spotted.