PIES AGAINST LABOUR IF London,

growth industry.

And like all such industries, it is no doubt receiving generous financial assistance from the Tory government.

If any worker is shocked about recent activities, they know little of the history of the Tories or the employers.

For Heath's predecessors have always been dab hands at sending spies, informers and agents provocateur into the labour movement.

It has been in times of acute social crisis, like today, that the employers have invariably resorted to the use of spies and informers.

Such a period was that following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Faced with a severe financial crisis, heavy unemployment and considerable disruption of all those industries which had been geared to war production, the government of Liverpool and Castlereagh, began to build up systematic network informers in all the areas working-class unrest.

Like today, this was a period in which the capitalist press, led, as you might have guessed, by "The Times' but ably assisted by the 'Courier', tried to whip up the fear of revolution amongst the middle classes and consistently called for the firmest measures put down all meeting ot eorko ers and reformers.

SUPPORT The fear of revolution was well founded. As the working-class movement gained in strength and confidence, so the demand for a reformed Parliament, based on universal suffrage, won wider and wider support.

Large sections of the middle class, once the champions of reform, now joined the forces of reaction.

'The spirit of Jacobinism' said Robert Southey, 'which influenced men in my sphere of life four and tweet year me, (myself men among others) has disappeared from that class and sunk into the rabble, who would have torn me to pieces for holding these opinions then and would tear me to pieces for renouncing them now.' It was Lord Sidmouth who led the Tory pack against the working-class movement. He was in continual contact with the local magistracy, receiving reports on the activities of trade unionists. collecting lists of names of prominent speakers at the many rallies and demonstrations which were held.

Local squires and landowners were encouraged to issue demands for a restoration of order and the banning of meetings, if bloodshed and revolution were to be avoided.

Those familiar with the ways of today's ruling class and its servile press will not be surorised to learn that when Sidmouth established secret Lords and Commons commitLets to investigate the unrest in February 1817, they rapidly uncovered' a series plots designed to: • Seize the bank of England and the Tower. • Cause the army to mutiny. • Effect a violent Jacobin Top: a propaganda drawing or in 1817 which was instigated by Olive Castlereagh, who built up a ne journalist William Cobbett. Oliver provide a radical 'cover'. revolution in London.

These 'revelations' provided a ready excuse for the four Draconian Acts which siamouth now rushed through parliament. The first suspended habeous corpus which denied the right to a trial; the second gave the Regent increased security protection; the third savagely increased the penalties for inciting unrest amongst the army; the fourth placed even tighter restrictions on meetings. Now they were made almost illegal.

A NARK It was in this atmosphere that spying came into its own. Most of the informers employed by the Tory government were ex-radicals or convicts on whom Sidmouth could readily put pressure. Such a one was 'William Oliver' (real name William Richards) the most infamous of all the spies. For decades afterwards, 'to turn Oliver' meant to become a nark in the working-class movement.

Oliver had been released leaders of the pentriage Mising, a police spy. Above left: Viscount ork of Informers. Right: radical ung his portrait in his room to from a debtor's prison early in 1817 and soon began to worm his way into the London radical movement. In order to impress those whose confidence he was trying to win, Oliver placed a full-length bronze figure of Napoleon on his mantlepiece and hung portraits of the leading radicals-Burdett, Cobbett, Horne Tooke and Fox-in his room.

commenced a tour of the Midlands and North in April 1817. Within three weeks he had established contact with every leading radical in these key centres.

Everywhere his line was the same. He promised that London was ready' and encouraged the local leaders to prepare for an immediate rising.

During April, for example, he attended . delegate meeting in Wakefield, represented by leaders from Birmingham, Sheffield, Huddersfield, Barnsley and Leeds. London was awaiting the signal from the North, said Sidmouth's agent.

Secretly, he reported to his Tory master that the movement was 'weak and impractical and that if it could be delayed it would blow itself One can easily imagine the confusion which Oliver and his friends spread among a movement operating under conditions of illegality. An old member of the London Corresponding Society recalled the effect which spies had during the French wars of the 1790s:

'If a citizen made a motion which seemed anyway spirited he was set down as a spy sent amongst them by government. If a citizen sat in a corner and said nothing, he was watching their proceedings that he might the better report it . . . citizens hardly knew how to act.' It was for this reason that the London Corresponding Society had included in its rules the warning that 'A noisy disposition is seldom a sign of courage, and extreme zeal is often a cloak of treachery'. wait, 300 workers began a march from Pentridge, near Derby, on Nottingham, on the night of June 8.

They were rounded up without difficulty at Eastwood a few miles from the city. Thirty-five were tried and five were hanged, the rest being transported. Oliver's masters had certainly got their money's worth.

Sidmouth and Castlereagh never intended to stop a rising. They wanted to encourage one under conditions where workers could be taught a savage lesson. In the words of Lord Liverpool: 'One can never feel that the King is secure upon his throne unless he has dared to spill traitor's blood.' But the Oliver affair did not end here. Less than a week after the Pentridge rising, the leading Whig paper, the 'Leeds Mercury', exposed Oliver the Spy. Many sections of the middie class were shocked. As a result juries started to acquit several radicals on trial at the time including Dr Watson, who had been accused of treason.

But the main consequence