The biggest civil service union has demanded that the Cabinet Office discloses whether a list drawn up by Margaret Thatcher’s government of civil servants deemed to be “subversive” still exists.
The Public and Commercial Services union said it will write to the Cabinet Office to ask if any of its members have been caught up in the operation, which was led by the government and MI5.
A National Archives file released this week showed that the security services monitored 1,420 Whitehall staff, including 733 people who were identified as Trotskyists and a further 607 as communists.
Alongside PCS, Labour MP and shadow minister for the Cabinet Office Jon Trickett demanded transparency over whether civil servants are still spied on by the government.
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Although the list – drawn up during the Cold War – largely concentrated on left-wingers, there were also 45 people said to be fascists, and 35 down as Welsh or Scottish nationalists, “black or Asian racial extremists” or anarchists.
MI5 also held similar lists of suspect local councillors and active trade unionists.
Mark Serwotka, PCS general secretary, told the Guardian: “It is truly shocking that the government cannot confirm whether our members remain under surveillance to this day.”
He said the story revealed “the shocking depths the Thatcher government and subsequent Tory administrations went to suppress legitimate trade union activity by ruining the lives of thousands of workers”.
PCS will “be urgently writing to the Cabinet Office to seek information on whether a blacklist continues to operate” and will take up the cases of any members caught up in “this appalling form of state surveillance”, Serwotka added.
Trickett demanded to know how long the blacklist had been maintained.
“How many civil servants were denied career progression because of a paranoia that ran to the top of the Thatcher government? Former and current civil servants must be deeply unsettled,” he said.
“The Cabinet Office must provide immediate and full transparency on whether spying on civil servants, in any form, continues to this day.
“Our civil servants have a right to know whether they are being monitored for their political beliefs, which they have an inalienable right to hold.”
In 1985, MI5 reportedly identified 50,000 people across Britain who it described as “subversive”.
It prompted the revival of the 1970s Whitehall body known as the inter-departmental group on Subversion in Public Life (SPL), which brought together MI5, police and government departments.
It defined subversion as “activities which threaten the wellbeing of the state and are intended to undermine or overthrow parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means”.
The Cabinet Office originally told the Guardian it regarded the investigation as a historical matter on which it did not wish to comment. It later added that SPL was “no longer in operation and there is no other unit conducting similar work”.