Beneath your city

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Member are to take all posubli mensates. compation witn rosen of telecummugenion used, with a gus to ensuring the secrecy of ABC campaigners rally outside top secret communications headquarters in Cheltenham ing facilities, particularly local , implies, might enable 'demoauthority staff and assets. for ¡cracy' to be defended.

ERNIE STUBBINS Panther at £1.95.

Recently making a welcome reappearance in the bookshops is Peter Laurie's Beneath the City Streets.

This is one of the essential books for socialists seeking to build up a picture of štate preparations against the working class.

The publication of this revised edition is one result of the ABC trial.

If they had been convicted for the systematic use of public information, it is doubtful, to say the least, that Laurie's book would ever have been reprinted.

The book is a classic of "counter-government research' lauria a former writer for New Scientist and the Sunday Times among other jobs, has devoted a great deal of time and energy to seeking out and collating as much information as possible on the government's preparations for war and/or In this task he has achieved an impressive body of work, even if Socialist Press readers will be less interested in his political conclusions.

The best known, or best rememberea, sections OT Laurie's first edition are the attempts to identify and locate the components of the British government's system of citadels and the hardened channels of communication between them:

Many of his starting points were provided by official publications released in the short lived phase of euphoria at the end of the Second World War.

These made it possible to recognise the importance of the systems of deep tunnels under London.

From this point on, Laurie's investigations rival the best detective stories.

Official reports and -- •FU... DI records are sifted for smallest clues.

Rumours are checked and traced.

Where nothing seems to provide a clue, he tried even wild guesses, which sometimes throw up new links in the chain.

He puts together an impressive picture of a system designed and built to protect tens of thousands of members of the ruling class and the state httreaurrarv anainet nuclear JULICOR Although it is possible to quarrel with details of these sections, overall Laurie is at his most convincing here.

Such a , system has been established, and . apparently without democratic approval.

The very existence of such a system leads us to question the commonly held notion of nuclear war as destrictive of all human life on the planet. CHAIRMAN IRAN AA A Thatcher Laurie sets out to the probable effects of nuclear attack by the USSR on Britain, using as much information as is available on the effects of blast, radiation and post attack disruption, combined with public estimates of the weapon stocks of the nuclear powers.

His conclusion is that life in Britain would be far from extinct after nuclear attack.

Indeed, casualties might not exceed 20 million.

In cunh ronditione a wall LUIT prepared ruling class could expect, with military support, to reestablish its control in a fairly short time span.

Although in the early sections Laurie clearly recognises that these state preparations are made as much with internal as external enemies in mind las witness the protracted death agony of even the tinpot Enmaza ronimo in Miraranual ac the book procedes he seems more and more concerned with war, and less and less with revolution.

In fact, most of the components of the home defence systems other than the exotic hardware, are much more likely to be used in civil than military emergencies.' One of the most important, but least well. known of these systems is the network of regional and local controls which can be brought into play by various emergency powers of Striking feature The most striking feature of this network is its use of existWHO LEONARD HOOPER! stri it.

WHAT IS LIC TARI emergency purposes.

Emergency powers in fact fall to the chief officers of local I-ll - L _ II: authorities, and democratically elected councillors could find themselves. imprisoned, or even executed, by their erstwhile employees!

Clearly this system is aimed much more at the maintenance of civil power than resistance to invasion or attack.

Laurie's political conclusion is that 'democracy' falls before the conspiratorial preparations of the military and bureaucratic elites which proliferate in the context of threatened nuclear war.

Clear information, he TOD IS A IN TOMORROW Malap-Torremolinos. 25 October 1973 ded by United Kingdom 1974 Secrecy Tdecommunications Our view would be different. We do not regard military and east-inal tennical secret preparatruns wy the state as an unfortunate but curable ailment of a democratic society.

We recognise these symptoms as essential parts of the society in which we live, and its world context.

Democratic freedoms The democratic freedoms which Laurie seeks to defend have all been wrung from the ruling classes in the past.

The economic crisis is ending the scope tor that kind of liberalism, and key elements in the ruling class clearly understand this.

Their only hope for survival rests on the defeat of the working class, in the capitalist states as much as in the deformed unrhare' ctatac Laurie's position eventually lines the workers' interests up with those of the ruling class in seeking war with the Soviet Union-while of course the real enemy is the capitalists at home.

Revolutionaries however can make use of Laurie's researches in propaganda for an independent proletarian policy-fighting to abolish the power of the ruling class. in the capitalist countries, while defending the nationalised property relations in the aerormea workers states, dad. and struggling for the political overthrow of the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy.

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reviews "Beneath the City Streets" by Peter Laurie, published by

OAKLEY MILITARY TEL IGEN

TERMS Interational Telecommunication Convention

AB Gove PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report, NHC