At the height of the US Red Scare, Joseph McCarthy directed his attacks towards the United Kingdom. Tapping into deep-seated Anglophobia in the American collective psyche, McCarthy infused it with his own brand of anti-communism. He declared a personal war on the United Kingdom seeking to disrupt Anglo-American relations. McCarthy's "paranoid style" and anti-British sentiment manifested from a longer tradition of Midwestern resentment. Although the British government regarded his efforts as a significant threat to the "special relationship", it refused to directly denounce or engage with the Wisconsin senator. This paper examines this little-known episode of the McCarthy era.*I am grateful and indebted to Paul Corthorn and Richard Toye for the insightful comments and the constructive feedback which they provided during the early stages of this article. Also I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful assitance.

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The Cold War produced in many countries a form of political repression and societal paranoia which often infected governmental and civic institutions. In the West, the driving catalyst for the phenomenon was anti-communism. While much has been written on the post-war American red scare commonly known as McCarthyism, the domestic British response to the ‘red menace’ during the early Cold War has until now received little attention. 'Anti-Communism in Britain During the Early Cold War' is the first book to examine how British Cold War anti-communism transpired and manifested as McCarthyism raged across the Atlantic.  Drawing from a wealth of archival material, this book demonstrates that while policymakers and politicians in Britain sought to differentiate their anti-communist initiatives from the ‘witch hunt hysteria’ occurring in the United States, they were often keen to conduct – albeit less publicly – their own hunts as well. Through analysing how domestic anti-communism exhibited itself in state policies, political rhetoric, party politics and the trade union movement, it argues that an overreaction to the communist threat occurred. In striking detail, this book describes a nation at war with a specific political ideology and its willingness to use a variety of measures to disrupt or eradicate its influence.

Contemporaneously to the American McCarthyite response towards communism during the early cold war there existed a similar reaction in the United Kingdom. Like its counterpart in the United States, British McCarthyism not only attacked internal 'reds' but also non-communist elements within the nation's borders. The phenomenon denounced and accused governmental and societal institutions and individuals for tolerating and even abetting the communist conspiracy then supposedly threatening the survival of the realm. Led by former Foreign Office mandarin Robert Vansittart and championed by the Conservative member of parliament Waldron Smithers, this British McCarthyism targeted the Church of England, the BCC and most notably the governing Labour party. The article explores how this politicised form of British anti-communism functioned and transpired. IIn many countries, the Cold War produced a form of political repression and societal paranoia that denounced governmental and civic institutions. A famous case occurred in 1950, when a right-wing politician dramatically publicised to his colleagues and the world that communism had infiltrated the government on several levels and was a dire threat to the security of his nation. Holding a list of names of likely traitors, he demanded a full investigation and a purging of these and other 'reds' from public service as well as parts of civil society including the arts and education. He declared that a communist fifth column existed inside the country and that, to all intents and purposes '[w]e on our part must realise that we are at war -the greatest war in history'. These accusations made international headlines, with newspaper articles about them appearing across the Atlantic and even making front-page news as far away as Australia. He was labelled a demagogue by many of his fellow countrymen, and soon afterwards, in a wave of public uproar, an attempt to censure him almost succeeded. Though these events are eerily redolent of the rise of Joseph McCarthy to the forefront of American politics, the setting for this drama was not the halls of Congress in Washington DC, but the chamber of the House