THIS WEEK the long-delayed Undercover Policing Inquiry began. In 2011 activists and journalists exposed undercover officers who had spent years infiltrating left-wing groups.

The undercovers didn’t stop any crime, but behaved in disgusting ways: they tricked women into long-term relationships and even fathered children under their assumed identities before disappearing back into the police. Revulsion at the undercover officers’ behaviour led to the inquiry.

In 1968 the government were scared of rising protest movements. But the Police could not recruit informants among the new protesters, so the Home Office agreed that officers should live undercover with the activists instead. The sinister practice continued for the next forty years.

Undercover officers were authorised because of a fear of left-wing activists: in 1968 protest gripped the world, including a general strike in France and continuing Civil Rights and anti-war turmoil in the US.

Standard histories say that Harold Wilson’s Labour government weren’t very bothered by the New Left protestors who demonstrated against the Vietnam War, because British people are less excitable than Europeans or Americans.

But the launch of the undercover police shows that the government were deeply shaken by the New Left: protests against the Vietnam War were bigger and more raucous than any London demos for over 30 years. 1968 protests were smaller in Britain than in other nations, but the new militant, student-oriented activists scared the establishment.

In 2011 the Morning Star published a series of stories showing intense surveillance of left-wing and Trade Union activists by Special Branch, based on historic files I’d squeezed out of the police and government.

The police files are re-appearing as part of the Undercover Policing Inquiry, so I want to look at some of the files from other departments to give context.

The files show that Home Secretary Jim Callaghan and Defence Secretary Dennis Healy seriously considered — although ultimately rejected — using Troops on the streets to help the police contain the protestors. They rejected these public measures, turning instead to creepy secret plans, like the undercover officers. They also turned to secret propaganda.

Sir Burke Trend co-ordinated the government’s fight against the New Left. His name sounds made up, but Sir Trend was real: he was Cabinet Secretary and an important Establishment figure. He pulled together a joint committee of the Prime Minister, with the Foreign, Home, Education and Scottish Secretaries on the “State of Student Unrest.”

Under Trend’s guidance, Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan and all agreed that the “Information Research Department” (IRD), a propaganda unit close to MI6, should “put together and circulate among students material which would help put student organisations on their guard” against the left to be “circulated anonymously.”

A 1968 Cabinet Office note says IRD were “preparing a fairly light-hearted, satirical leaflet for distribution by the National Union of Students in time for the opening of the new term, aimed particularly at the sceptical first-year student to try and discredit militants.”

This was a classic propaganda operation, using a third party to deliver official messages. The Cabinet minutes say, “It would be counterproductive for the government to be seen to be too closely involved in student affairs and the means by which the government can influence student opinion are clearly limited.”

The absurd plan to try to undermine protest by secretly produced official government satire, delivered by some patsy in the National Union of Students shows the paranoia gripping Westminster.

But the government’s propaganda campaign was sinister as well as ridiculous. IRD also created dossiers warning Vice Chancellors about dangerous students, including alarming smears. One vicious dossier says anti-war protestors “have been buying small arms” and making “Molotov cocktails.”

The government’s attempts to beat protests with secret propaganda failed. So they leaned  hard on the media. Home Secretary Jim Callaghan called in the Chair of the BBC Governors, Lord Hill, before a demo to “put the view that on these occasions television cameras were not neutral and contributed to the atmosphere.”

Callaghan told the BBC boss that “the police needed support in all these matters. They would feel particularly strongly if television cameras showed some momentary lapse of retaliation on the part of a police officer, but not the deliberate violence which provoked it.”

Callaghan wanted the BBC to get behind Police “momentary lapses” with truncheon and boot. The Cabinet note records that Lord Hill agreed, declaring “he accepted that the BBC had a duty to society as well as a duty to report the news and he entirely agreed with the Home Secretary’s approach. He said that the matter could be confidently left to him to deal with.

Lord Hill promised to do this behind the scenes saying, “It was nevertheless a delicate point to put over, any overt movement on his part would almost certainly get publicity and therefore be counter- productive.”

Hill told Callaghan that “Mr John Crawley, the News and Current Affairs editor of the BBC was entirely in his confidence on these matter and could be approached with absolute safety by the Home Secretary.”

Callaghan also called in the ten chairman of the top newspapers for a meeting and insisted “television and newspaper cameras were not neutral,” reminding the Fleet Street bosses that “there was a feeling among the police that the published photographs tended to concentrate on some retaliation by a police officer, rather than on the blow by a demonstrator which provoked a police officer.”

The editors pledged their support. One newspaper chairman asked if their staff could chase demonstrators and whether the courts were tough enough on protestors.

In 1968 the Establishment were genuinely shaken by the rise of new protests. The Labour government tried to link protestors to terrorism, secretly circulating stories that were the basis of lurid headlines like “Yard in terror bombs hunt.”

The reaction looks paranoid, but isn’t entirely irrational: protesters and activists can and have changed society, so you can see why the guardians of the existing order tried stopping them. The methods the government used were dishonest and sometimes disgusting, which shows the existing order is rotten.

We now know the undercover officers that were launched in 1968 continued operating for over 40 years: I assume the secret propaganda, government-created smears and leaning on an (often willing) media we saw in 1968 also continued.