Annie Macron

And after a few weeks, a couple of months, it's fine.

It's just the job, right?

It's weird how people can acclimatise themselves so quickly to a very strange world.

I.e.

investigating political activists, effectively.

So the whole raison d'etre of counter-subversion was the fact that there'd been this thing called the Cambridge spy ring in the 50s and 60s.

It was a huge scandal where the Soviets had actually

turned a number of very senior establishment figures to subvert the British state from within.

So we're talking about Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald McLean, people like that.

I think there were five of them in total.

And this rocked the British establishment back in the early 60s, particularly when Kim Philby escaped to Russia.

And they became incredibly paranoid about what they called reds under the bed and subversion.

So this ramped up the huge scale investigation into people who might potentially be subversive.

This meant that hundreds of thousands of British citizens were investigated for their affiliations to not just the Communist Party,

but also things like Trotskyist groups or other subversively deemed groups, WRP, International Socialists, Socialist Workers' Party, all the rest of it.

So this went on for about three decades, and we only began to shut it down in the 1990s.

And I'm so happy to say I was one of the people who wrote all the reports that said, this is crap, we need to shut it down.

They are not a threat, especially after the Soviet bloc fell apart.

The Berlin Wall came down in 1989.

So the whole justification for investigating any of these groups was completely blown out of the water anyway.