Rainbow Programme

From Metapedia

The Rainbow Programme was a loose Marxist collective of the 1970s with anarchist tendencies. It would be unremarkable were it not for the accidental role played by three of its members, Rod Burton, Jane Tucker and Freddy Marks in the behind-the-scenes drama that led to Harold Wilson's sudden resignation in 1976.

In December 1975, the three slipped through the then lax security surround 10 Downing Street, intending nothing more than a publicity-seeking prank. Stumbling across Detective Superintendent Sooty, who had broken in the same night, they immediately ran away, and it is unlikely that they knew discovered anything of Sooty's mission to retrieve incriminating communications from No.10 with the Soviet high command. However, all three were killed by a police vehicle during a demonstration in Grosvenor Square in June 1976, shortly after Wilson's resignation, and the cloud of suspicion never left Sooty. A trial in 1983 led to his acquittal, however.

The organisation carried on into the 1980s under the leadership of Geoffrey Bungle, even putting up a parliamentary candidate in Margaret Thatcher's constituency of Dulwich in 1983. It was merged into the Socialist Workers Party in 1986.