When students turn to terror, the Anthony Glees report into extremism on British University campuses

Strange to see Anthony Glees at it again. Having had three speakers pull out of the event on Monday, it seems that he used the opportunity to attack one speaker who did attend, Alasdair Smith, vice-chancellor of Sussex University. Faced with a barrage from Glees, Smith replied, 'I am being restrained with my language and I am not going to suggest that boil his head or any other part of his anatomy, but I can only describe [the list in the Glees report] as a ragbag list. Some names of terrorists associated with universities go back decades.' In particular, Smith objected to the inclusion of Sussex University on his list of institutions where extremism was a problem. 'He said that one of the extremist students attributed to his own university had in fact attended a local further education college. He added "We may have fallen on hard times, but we haven't become a further education college".' Quotes from this weeks Times Higher.

Coverage of Glees' conference today at RUSI has so far focused on the speakers who pulled out: including participants from the National Union of Students and the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS), as well as one of the two PhD students who were booked to speak. Glees, incidentally, was the only tenured academic invited.

Meanwhile, anyone who has been following my accounts of Glees' post-mortem attack on the reputation of the celebrated seventeenth century historian Christopher Hill may be interested in this quote from Glees' 1987 book, Secrets of the Service.

Here is Glees on the decision of MI5 not to vet Hill for a wartime job on an administrative committee of the Foreign Office 'It was undoubtedly very curious that a Communist should have been employed to give highly secret advice to the government upon Anglo-Soviet policy and to help formulate the policy' (p. 280). This 'Anglo-Soviet policy' seems to have amounted to a discussion of what to do about the lack of Russian language teachers in British schools. Glees writes that the only possible explanation for the lack of vetting was 'treachery' within MI5 (p. 282).

Let me quote again Glees' account of his 1985 meeting with Hill, described in an interview with journalists 16 years later: 'Mr Glees said he had given his word he would not "unmask" Mr Hill while he lived.'

I repeat the point I made before: when Glees claimed that Hill's work for MI5 was made possible by treachery, what else was he doing than unmasking Hill? And if Glees did declare to the world that Hill was a traitor in 1987, then how could he claim honestly to have been breaking the story for the first time in 2003?

I have used this page before to complain that on Monday Anthony Glees will be speaking at a conference, which on the face of it seems to have no purpose other than to publicise his recent report on campus extremism. As for the report, I have argued before that it offers a misleading description of the higher education sector. I make no criticism of the conference organisers for inviting him: my criticism is of Glees.

Over the past few months, the Times Higher Education Supplement has run pieces questioning Glees' use of documentary and interview sources. What I had forgotten until this weekend was that I played a small part in the reception of one of these previous efforts.

Back in the mid-1980s, Glees was working through the Foreign Office files at the Public Record Office and discovered a series of documents which included the name "Christopher Hill". Glees decided that the famous Marxist historian must have joined the Foreign Office during the 1939-45 war, for some sinister reason, motivated by his Communist beliefs. The story was then published in Glees' 1987 book, Secrets of the Service.

Six years later, the historian John Saville published a spirited vindication of his old friend Hill. Saville's reply appears as appendix to his 1993 book on the Foreign Policy of the 1945 Labour government. Saville claimed to have found a catalogue of errors in Glees' account. Glees had quoted selectively, Saville claimed, he had not even made the effort of consulting more than a small number of the files relating to Hill's wartime record. He accused Glees of hinting that Hill was a Soviet spy. He went further, and suggested that Glees only held back from the full accusation because Glees was worried of risking an action for libel.

Saville of course had played a founding part in the left-wing but anti-Stalinist British New Left. He may have felt bonds of loyalty to Hill, but he had no such loyalty to the Communist tradition that Glees was also in part criticising.

After Hill's death in 2003, the story was revived. On 6 March 2003 Anthony Glees was reported in the Guardian as claiming that Hill had been a foreign agent. '"I was writing a book about how good MI5 was at combating communist subversion," Mr Glees explained yesterday, "and did a trawl of documents from the Foreign Office. I came across a number of things I thought were decidedly dodgy which carried his signature."'

Glees did not mention that such claims were already in the public domain but in fact claimed something like the opposite: 'Mr Glees requested an interview with Mr Hill. "His first question was, 'you are not going to expose me as a mole, are you?' It was not a threat but a plea." Mr Glees said he had given his word he would not "unmask" Mr Hill while he lived.'

I do not know why Glees waited so long to revive and extend the story. But referring back to Saville's 1993 point: in British law, of course, it is impossible to libel the dead.

On 10 March 2003, the Guardian published two responses to Glees' revived claims, the first from John Saville, who wrote: 'I found the report on Christopher Hill quite extraordinary. I knew Christopher well. There was never any suggestion that he concealed his membership of the Communist party either before the second world war or after it. I was present when he came to talk to the communist group at the London School of Economics, either in 1937 or 1938; and after the war he was a leading figure in the communist historians' group until his resignation from the party in 1957.' Saville did not mention, although perhaps he should, that he had clashed with Glees before: the story was not substantially new.

In a second letter, published on the same day, I wrote: 'The smears against Christopher Hill are neither original nor true. They do serve, however, to obscure a more interesting story. His 1940 book on the English revolution was regarded as suspect within his own party and the Communist International. Variously threatened, Hill and his fellow historians held their nerve, and eventually won the argument. This tradition of independence helps to explain why the Communist party distrusted the predominance of historians within campaigns such as CND and the new left.' The text of both letters is here. The last sentence of mine was mangled by the editors: the original had stated rather that the independence of the Communist historians' in 1940 paved their way for their later involvement in campaigns outside and to some extent against the Communist Party, in CND and the New Left.

It is a point I make at greater length here, here, and here.

The point of the story, however, is not me but Glees. And it is not his 1987 book, but what Glees claimed in 2003, that he had not reported the story before, and that he had refrained from publishing previously to protect Hill. I will quote the sentence again: 'Mr Glees said he had given his word he would not "unmask" Mr Hill while he lived.'

Can anyone suggest a reading in which Glees' claim is substantially true?

An interesting response from Stephen Dorril, author of MI6, 'I had a go at Glees at a Conference at Scarborough last year when he did a session on his book on the Stasi. He wasn't expecting to be attacked and though he would be applauded for his efforts but we had a real ding-dong and he didn't like to see himself being undermined in front of other academics. Fortunately, there were some researchers there who knew the subject and backed me up. His material just doesn't hang together or ring true. Its old Cold War agent of influence by association stuff. It is odd how he is taken seriously in some quarters and manages to run a department on intelligence. He runs round with a little cabal of right-wingers in the intelligence study field who think the intelligence services do a marvelous job.'

Anyone who has been following the recent coverage of Glees' career in the Times Higher will know that similar accusations have been following Glees' academic work for years.

One of the most interesting things for me about the Glees and RUSI story, which I reported yesterday, is the involvement also of the Community Security Trust, the organisation charged with protecting the Jewish community in Britain from anti-Semitism. Mike Whine of the CST and a speaker from the Union of Jewish Students will both appearing at the RUSI event. At first sight the alliance between the CST and Glees may appear surprising: Glees and his allies have no sympathy for the liberal, freethinking values of the historic Jewish community.

There are indeed some odd passages in the Glees report itself, including this statement on the UJS's support for a ban on Hizb-ut-Tahrir. "The decision to ban the groups received a mixed reception from student leaders. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, but probably unwisely (as we suggest below), the Union of Jewish Students supported it." Whatever was "below" has been cut from the final draft. Given that Glees calls for a ban on HUT, what could be unwise about other groups arguing the same? There is something which has been cut from the report and which raises my suspicions.

The CST's involvement appears even in odder in light of a point I've made before, that many young British Jews are moving to the left, identifying with campaigns like Stop the War or even the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. It's interesting to note that the CST has come under sustained attack in recent months from a well-established figure in mainstream Jewish politics, Tony Lerman, who has criticised the CST for exaggerating the extent of anti-Semitism in Britain and suggested that it has an institutional stake in making Jewish people scared.

The BBC ran a long story on Lerman here. Lerman, meanwhile, has been condemned by Melanie Phillips here: a sure sign, I think, that the CST is wrong (Glees with them) and Lerman right.

I've written before about the problems of the report on extremism on campus authored by Anthony Glees. It's not exactly surprising then to see that the Royal United Services Institute, a military think-tank based in Whitehall, have invited many of Glees' allies to speak with him at a conference on 23 January. Glees and Pope will open and close the event. Simon Festing will speak, a former environmental militant who now runs the Research Defence Society monitoring animal rights extremism.

Most alarming of all, however is Michael Murtagh, billed as 'Deputy Head, WMD Controls Policy Section, Counter Proliferation Department, Foreign and Commonwealth Office.' He's the really scary one. Why is someone who's job is to prevent stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction speaking on "Vetting foreign students"?

The Times Higher reports that Anthony Glees' widely-publicised study into extremism on British campuses has begun to rile vice chancellors, who have been angered to see their own universities named, on the basis of less than a minimum of research. There is a scandal here. It has nothing to do with extremism, but with the lazy journalism that enabled the Guardian, for example to place Glees' report on their front page, and with the attitude of the government, whose ministers have gone out of the way to praise this document. Glees named roughly 30 universities as hot-beds of terror, and did so on the basis of just 9 cited interviews:

1. A member of Special Branch
2. An elected student sabbatical at Brunel University
3. A member of the Socialist Society (i.e. the Socialist Party, formerly known as Militant) at Brunel University
4. The head of security at a UK university (probably Brunel)
5. The managing director of resources at a UK university (probably Brunel)
6. A member of the Community Security Trust
7. A former member of the BNP
8. Andi Ali (a PhD student at Newcastle University who is writing a dissertation on the BNP)
9. A member of the Union of Jewish Students (he may be the same person as 6)

Glees' work is replete with the sort of errors that should make a postgraduate student blush. To take one example: of extremism in the 1960s, he writes, 'the Baader-Meinhof Gang gained close to five million sympathisers, chiefly in West German universities'. There are only two million students in the combined German university system today. More typical are the reports, here, here, and here, numbering Baader-Meinhof's support not in the high millions but in the low hundreds.

Faced with inflation of this kind, it is no surprise to find sentences later hinting at the risk of 'hundreds of thousands of possible extremists'. Both claims are risible. What is a 'possible' extremist, anyway?

Glees and his MA-student co-author claim to have 'define[d] terrorism, and its precondition subversion with care'. It is a shame that the same care was not taken with their full report, which attaches the term 'terrorist' to three Muslim organisations in particular, and then uses their claimed presence on campus as evidence of 'Islamist' threats at around 20 British universities. The organisations signalled out in this fashion are Hibz-ut-Tahrir, Al Muhajiroun and the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK.

A reader who stopped at the first half of the long document would miss out the further sections, in which this argument is developed through a series of odd statements and wild contradictions. Hibz-ut-Tahrir, we are told, were responsible for the assassination of the Egyptian President Sadat. The Egyptian government in fact blamed the killings on Khalid al-Islambuli a member of an unrelated, Egyptian organization Islamic Jihad. Perhaps the authors of the report are privy to information the prosecutors lacked?

The 'terrorist' organization Al Muhajiroun is described elsewhere in Glees' report as 'a laughing stock'. As for the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK we learn in the same document that it is 'not a terrorist organization, nor does it advocate violence against the state'. Why then is its presence on campuses used as evidence of terrorist cells? When lives are at stake, such routine carelessness helps no-one.

The report speaks in the confident tone you would expect of a serious study based on a range of interviews conducted among a representative
sample of universities and a diverse group of employees; in almost every case, the fieldwork seems faulty - institutions with acknowledged problems do not makes Glees' list, others with ten years of quiet behind them have been named publicly as being at risk.

Glees suggests that large numbers of plain-clothes police should now be stationed on campus; second, he argues for the abolition of clearing, and its replacement with a new system where universities would interview potential students about their involvement in terrorist activities; third, he calls for a ban on all faith societies: is Glees really suggesting that every Christian Union should be disbanded, or that Muslim groups only should be closed down?

Even this wish-list, chilling as it may seem, is only a summary of a longer list of demands. Glees would like to see a culture shift away from free speech, more security cameras, "proper screening to exclude dangerous students", "direct links between university registrars and immigration officers at ports of entry", and perhaps nastiest of all: in future, government policy should be changed to prevent large numbers of black students at university: "Ensure that the ethnic composition of any single university reflects, broadly, the ethnic mix of the UK as a whole."

The black and minority ethnic population of Britain stands at around 8 percent. Because this population is over-concentrated in one city (London) and in particular age groups, some universities have a majority of black students. For metropolitan universities with a black student population of 50 or 60 percent what does Glees propose: the physical removal of all those students who take the university above this 8 percent limit? And what if students like their courses, and are unwilling to go? The proposal, like the rest of his report, deserves to be treated with contempt.