Writers who publicly support Scottish independence and espouse left-wing causes are almost certain to be monitored by the security services, a senior academic has warned after newly declassified files disclosed that it had happened in the past.
Professor Gerard Carruthers, the chair of Scottish literature at the University of Glasgow, believes that authors who use their works to call for “sharp or even moderate political change” are likely to come to the attention of MI5.
He spoke out after The Times uncovered documents which show that JF Hendry, the Glasgow-born poet and editor who was once a United Nations translator, was watched by the British state for decades after their intelligence suggested he was “interested in the Scottish nationalist movement”.
Scottish PEN, the literary human rights group, said it would be “naive” to assume that its members were not being scrutinised over their political pronouncements.
While some files have been opened and placed in the National Archives at Kew, others, which would shed light on the scale and targets of state surveillance operations, remain off limits to the public.
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Carruthers, a world renowned expert on Robert Burns, said: “The extent to which British intelligence historically was observing Scottish nationalists, including writers and even the writers’ human rights organisation PEN International, remains to be clearly described.
“But any intelligence service worth its salt would, of course, be looking at writers who call for sharp or even moderate political change.
“No doubt the security services in recent decades, and today, monitor Scottish writers expressing discontent with the political status quo.”
His sentiments were backed by Ricky Monahan Brown, the author and president of Scottish PEN.
He said: “It would be naive in the extreme not to assume that writers advocating for freedom of expression and campaigning for peace — principles to which all members of the PEN International movement subscribe — would be subject to security service observation.
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“We must assume that today’s advocates for change are also subject to such monitoring.
“Such conduct by our governments cannot fail to have a chilling effect on political debate in Scotland and the United Kingdom.”
He added: “Surely, this must contribute to an environment in which a Scottish writer of world renown like James Kelman has encountered difficulties in securing publishers for his recent work in the UK.”
Kelman, whose work How Late It Was, How Late made him the first Scot to win the Booker Prize in 1994 and who describes himself as a “libertarian anarchist socialist”, has since become unable to secure a publishing deal in his home country. “I am the writer who doesn’t exist,” he told The Times in 2022.
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Kelman, whose works are now distributed by a small independent publisher in the United States, declined to comment on suggestions of state surveillance and sabotage. “Mr Kelman apologises for any inconvenience,” his agent said.
Two of Scottish PEN’s co-founders, Hugh MacDiarmid and Sir Compton Mackenzie, author of Whisky Galore, were monitored by MI5, official records show.
MacDiarmid, a communist and nationalist who is regarded as the greatest Scottish poet of the 20th century, was monitored between 1931 and 1943.
One report noted: “He is a fanatic only too ready to give his allegiance to any extremist cause.”
Another concluded: “The man is a menace.”
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Mackenzie, who served with British intelligence during the First World War but went on to become a founder member of the forerunner of the SNP, was prosecuted for quoting from secret documents and was tailed by intelligence officers.
The MI5 files on Hendry, who died in 1986, state they were handed intelligence in 1940 by the chief constable of Glasgow that the author was sympathetic to the Scottish nationalist cause and held radical views.
When interrogated, he admitted visiting the Soviet Union in 1932 as part of a student delegation and said he had briefly been a member of the Communist Party.
“He described his political views before the war as ‘left-wing would-be intellectual’,” one report said.
Hendry went on to enjoy a successful career and edited The Penguin Book of Scottish Short Stories, which remains in print, before taking a chair at Laurentian University in Canada.
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Mike Small, a journalist who edits the Bella Caledonia political website, said: “If, as these revelations show, the state has been monitoring writers then why would they stop doing so?
“This is not the actions of a functioning democracy.”
Willy Maley, a professor of English literature at the University of Glasgow, pointed out that one major figure was involved in the other side of intelligence gathering.
The late Dame Muriel Spark, one of Scotland’s greatest 20th-century authors, worked for the secret services, specialising in spreading anti-Nazi propaganda, during the Second World War.
Maley said: “The story of how she got this plum posting is as bizarre as any twist in her novels.
“She went to her local employment bureau, prepared to take anything. The recruiting administrator spotted that she was reading Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Elders and Betters.
“The two women talked about Ivy and, next thing, Spark was asked if she would like to do ‘secret work for the Foreign Office’.”
William Wolfe, who led the SNP between 1969 and 1979, disclosed that he was monitored by MI5 after Idi Amin, the Ugandan dictator, offered him weapons and money to start an armed insurrection against London rule.
In 2023, Campbell Martin, a former nationalist MSP, claimed British agents had infiltrated the Scottish government and were actively working to discredit it.