AHC: British McCarthyism

"There was little change during the next hundred years, except that blacklisting became increasingly secretive, mainly becuase employers did not want to provoke strikes over the issue by a stronger trade union movement which was growing in power. Ironically, it was this very secrecy which may have prevented a public outbreak of McCarthyism in Britain during the Cold War. The climate was certainly ripe for a witch-hunt. There was a rash of spies. Some, like Professor Alan Nunn May, Dr Klaus Fuchs and Bruno Pontecorvo, were convicted. Others, like Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, defected to the Soviet Union. There was even an English version of Senator Joseph McCarthy in Sir Waldron Smithers, the organ-playing right-wing Tory MP. Every year from 1947 onwards Smithers would rise in the Commons to ask the Prime Minister of the day to set up a Committee On Un- British Activities' along the lines of the American model. Clement Attlee and later Winston Churchill always greeted this request with a brisk 'No, sir' at Question Time. The way Ministers and senior civil servants dealt with Smithers's demands provides an insight into why McCarthyism did not break out in Britain. The lack of a strong select committee system in Westminster made it very difficult for Smithers to operate. While he was isolated in Parliament as an eccentric reactionary, the US political system has powerful Congressional Committees which McCarthy was able to exploit for his campaign. However, Britian was not entirely immune. In May 1947 Clement Attlee set up a Cabinet committee on 'Subversive Activities', the forerunner of the introduction of positive vetting and the 'loyalty programme' of civil servants in 1948. One of the most disturbing effects was the reaction of private employers and local authoriries. Many tried to take advantage of the Cold War atmosphere. In 1949 the John Lewis Group planned to set up political tests as a condition of employment at a time when their workers were demanding higher wages, and only backed down after angry criticism from all political parties and trades unions. But in the following year some local authorities began dismissing political extremists form teaching posts. One Scottish teracher was refused a job because she had a communist husband--even though the school was short of staff. Some, like London County Council, dropped this policy after protests. But others, like Middlesex County Council, contimued the ban for several years..." Mark Hollingsworth and Richard Norton-Taylor, *Blacklist: The Inside Story of Political Vetting,* p. 10. (Lodon: Hogarth Press 1988)

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldron_Smithers "During the Cold War, while MP for Orpington, Smithers in 1947 pressed for a House of Commons Select Committee on un-British Activities to be created to conduct anti-communist investigations, to mirror the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee.[3][4] In 1952, fearing possible sabotage, he wrote to Winston Churchill asking for an enquiry into communist influence at the BBC. "We have traitors in our midst", he wrote, "and although I should deplore suppression of free speech they should be treated as traitors". The letter was not released until January 2016.[4]"

Can anyone see a scenario where Smithers is more than an eccentric and British internal anti-Communism goes much further than the limited steps it took in OTL?
 
Labour didn't much like the communists either. Despite the fact that there were some communists in the party. Not all of them marched to Moscow's tune.

Yeah, but British McCarthyism won't attack socialists. If it exists, it'll only attack people like Stafford Cripps and won't get as far as American McCarthyism.
 
I was working on a timeline which involves Kim Philby becoming the leader of the Conservative party.
In OTL he did some reporting with the Nationalists in Spain and managed to become well liked by them through his positive reporting of them and even got an award from Franco.

"Before then," he later wrote, "there had been a lot of criticism of British journalists from Franco officers who seemed to think that the British in general must be a lot of Communists because so many were fighting with the International Brigades. After I had been wounded and decorated by Franco himself, I became known as 'the English-decorated-by-Franco' and all sorts of doors opened to me."


ITTL theres no WWII so he stays out of MI6 and is directed by his handlers to ingratiate himself into the British Conservative scene.


I suppose this might be more plausible than Harold Wilson being a KGB mole and getting discovered triggering a scare.
 
Soviet forces and WAllied forces skirmish in May of 1945. Stalin acts more aggressively then OTL and the US response is seen to be uncertain and equivocates and then Stalin sensing weakness announces that his forces will be annexing Poland and the parts of Germany his troops occupy. Cold War right after WW2 with Churchill as PM.
 
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