Lately there has been renewed interest in regard to the question of allegations that veteran public servant and economic adviser Dr William Sutch was a Soviet spy. Once highly respected, Sutch fell from grace during the closing years of the Cold War when the SIS claimed that he was passing information onto the Soviet Embassy. A recent book written by the SIS agent in charge of the surveillance at the time states that despite Sutch’s acquittal he was guilty, and was known to have passed information onto the Soviets detailing his assessment of fellow public servants and of politicians.

Regardless of the acquittal a shadow was cast over Sutch’s distinguished career, and he died shortly afterward.

In assessing Sutch as a patriot or a traitor what should be considered is his position regarding New Zealand’s sense of nationhood and place in the international economy that was shaping up in the post war world.

The UN had proved abortive as a world government, when the wartime Soviet ally refused to cede any of Russia’s sovereignty to an international body that would be controlled de facto by the USA. The scheme had been to create a UN World Government based on empowering the General Assembly as an international parliament. Here the votes of Third World states in particular could be bought off by the USA whose anti-colonial policy was as avid and subversive as any communist. Stalin instead insisted on authority being vested in the Security Council with members’ veto which essentially rendered the UN useless as a World Government. Secondly, the USSR refused to accept the so-called Baruch Plan for the internationalisation of atomic energy again under UN auspices, which as the Soviets pointed out, would also mean effectively giving the USA control over atomic energy under the façade of international, authority. The UN World Government plan was thereby scotched by the USSR, the wartime alliance against fascism was broken, and the era of the Cold War inaugurated.

This was also the time of other internationalist schemes such as the Bretton Woods agreement, the IMF and World Bank. Today all this is more familiarly called "globalisation" and the "New World Order." Whatever slogans and labels are used, the intention remains the same: the creation of a world system controlled behind the scenes by international capitalists such as the Rockefellers.

In 1972 Sutch published Take-over New Zealand, a survey of the economic history of NZ since the 1920s. Sutch warned of the effects of free trade economics, of globalisation, foreign take-overs and the subordination of New Zealand to international capital. He pointed out that NZ ceded its sovereignty when it joined the IMF in 1961, and warned of the consequences of abandoning import controls.

Clearly Sutch was a nationalist and a patriot. He referred to Coates as the ‘radical patriot’ and alluded positively to the establishment of the Reserve Bank as a means of creating New Zealand’s own credit, and the campaigns for this that had been initiated by Social Credit and which influenced Labour. He advocated State economic planning and investment. This was not a question of "Right" or "Left", and now both have acquiesced to globalisation. It was a pragmatic question as to whether New Zealand would remain a nation. He wrote:

Of course the questions raised by Sutch were not dealt with at the time, and now New Zealand is in the quagmire of a global economy, had divested itself of true nationhood, and it is difficult to imagine how any government of whatever hue would be able to bring NZ out of that quagmire.

As for Sutch’s alleged dealings with the Soviet Embassy, can it on hindsight really be said that the world is a more stable and secure and peaceful place since the demise of the USSR? What advantages have been wrought to the peoples of the former Soviet bloc via parliaments, oligarchs, globalisation, Coca-Cola and MacDonalds? More particularly, the demise of the USSR has enabled the USA to yob about the world on its globalist adventures like an adolescent suddenly let free from all restraints, threatening and bombing into submission any nation that seems reticent about joining what is today called the ‘new world order’.

My own opinion, regardless of whether Sutch can be called a Soviet spy, a "Leftist" or whatever, is that he was a patriot whose warnings should have been heeded. The attitude of ‘my country right or wrong’ is not patriotic if traitors govern the country itself. (K R Bolton).