MI5 Monitored 'Father of the NHS' Nye Bevan for Soviet Sympathies

Newly declassified files reveal that Aneurin 'Nye' Bevan, the celebrated Labour politician and architect of the National Health Service (NHS), was monitored by Britain's domestic security service, MI5, for over two decades on suspicion of having Soviet sympathies. The surveillance continued even while Bevan served as a Cabinet minister.

Bevan first came to MI5's attention in the 1930s as a prominent left-wing backbencher, amid concerns about his associations with known communists. A particular point of concern for the security service was a 1934 rally in Montreal where Bevan reportedly spoke of overthrowing the Nazi regime and establishing a "united Europe under Soviet rule."

In 1943, Roger Hollis, who would later become Director-General of MI5, stated that the service only monitored Members of Parliament when there was a strong belief that their actions were driven by "subversive motives." Despite this, MI5 maintained surveillance on Bevan for years. One report from 1954 detailed a lunch meeting between Bevan and the Soviet ambassador at the Polish embassy in London, noting that the encounter "went off very badly" due to difficulties in understanding Bevan's Welsh accent.

Some within MI5 questioned the necessity of monitoring Bevan, with one agent noting in 1943 that he "makes exactly the same remarks in the Houses of Parliament pretty frequently." Bevan himself reportedly complained in 1956, "They were not spying on Hitler, they were spying on me."

The surveillance files also inadvertently revealed that one of the reports on Bevan was addressed to Captain A. F. Blunt, who was later unmasked as a Soviet spy known as Anthony Blunt.

While Bevan was never accused of being a spy, the files also detail cases of other individuals within the Labour Party who were involved in espionage. Morpeth MP William Owen, for example, was revealed to have sold defense secrets to Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia for financial gain. He was nicknamed 'Dedek' by his handlers and reportedly passed "secret" documents, including details about the British Army on the Rhine, from the defense select committee. Owen was regarded by 1969 as the Czechoslovak intelligence service's "most valuable agent in the UK." He was arrested in 1970 and faced trial, admitting to accepting money but denying providing anything of significant value. Although acquitted of breaching the Official Secrets Act, he lost his parliamentary seat after failing to pay taxes on the funds received from his handlers.

Further revelations indicate that the Labour Party in the 1960s was perceived by its leadership as being heavily infiltrated by communists. Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell expressed fears that a significant number of MPs were secretly aligned with the Communist Party of Great Britain. Gaitskell authorized Gordon Walker, his shadow home secretary, to discreetly request MI5's assistance in identifying and removing these individuals from the party.

A meeting between Walker and MI5's deputy director general Graham Mitchell in September 1961, as documented in the files, revealed that Labour leadership "wanted to purge the Parliamentary party of some of its communists." Walker provided MI5 with a list of 25 MPs suspected of communist ties, though Mitchell reportedly showed little enthusiasm for the project.

The files also named British composer Sir Michael Tippett, known for his pacifism and anti-war compositions, as having been monitored by MI5 as a suspected Trotskyist revolutionary. In 1934, MI5 intercepted a letter from Tippett to a Communist Party organizer discussing his involvement in a communist "cell." Despite this, the files suggest he was not a convincing revolutionary figure. His radical past, however, led to him being blocked from a Foreign Office-sponsored lectureship in Germany in 1959. MI5 eventually cleared him in the 1960s.