Tag Archives: Labour Party

Arts, Books, Britain, Government, History, NATO, Society

The Labour Party, Soviet intelligence and the Cold War

BRITAIN: LABOUR & THE COLD WAR

THE postwar government of Clement Atlee was instrumental in the founding and formation of NATO, which binds together the defence of North America and Europe. Attlee’s successors as leader of the Labour Party have not all been as staunch as he was in the national interest. Amid the Cold War tensions of the early 1980s, for example, Labour’s candidate as a potential prime minister was a man who had willingly taken money from the Kremlin. Michael Foot, a hero of the Labour left who served as party leader from 1980 to 1983, was paid the equivalent of £37,000 in today’s money from the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency, while he was a backbencher in the 1960s.

A new book, The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Mcintyre, recounts the remarkable public service of Oleg Gordievsky, a senior KGB officer who was a double agent for MI6. Gordievsky was recalled from the Soviet embassy in London when his cover was blown in 1985. In peril, and with the help of western intelligence, he escaped the Soviet Union. Macintyre’s book details evidence that Gordievsky gave to his British spymasters. It includes the revelation that Foot was paid as being a KGB contact.

The information has topicality as well as historical significance. Every British government since Attlee’s has treated the transatlantic alliance as the bedrock of defence policy. The current Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, claimed in 2014 that NATO had been “set up to promote a Cold War with the Soviet Union”. This is nonsense. NATO was created in 1949 as an alliance of free nations to deter Soviet expansionism and aggression.

Communism collapsed a generation ago having turned the former Soviet Union and its satellite states into lands of penury and oppression. And the current regime in the Kremlin likewise threatens western interests, alters internationally recognised borders by force and pursues lethal violence against its critics at home and abroad. In the nerve agent attack in Salisbury on Sergei and Yulia Skripal, which has left one British woman dead and three people seriously injured, the prime suspects were recently disclosed as officers of Russian military intelligence (the GRU).

Any government faced with an attack on British soil ought to be able to count on bipartisan support. Yet, affecting a façade of continued open-mindedness, Mr Corbyn at every stage cast doubt on Russian culpability for the crime, despite the circumstantial evidence that was overwhelming. It also emerged earlier this month that two Russian agents were expelled from the Netherlands this year for spying on a laboratory where samples of the poison used on the Skripals were being tested.

Michael Foot was on the left of the party and advocated an irresponsible policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain. Paradoxically, however, he has never been widely regarded as being sympathetic to communist autocracy. He denounced the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. When a British newspaper published Gordievsky’s claims in 1995 that the KGB held a file on him, Foot successfully sued for libel and was awarded substantial damages.

Inconsistencies do, however, remain. Whilst is known that Foot served as a confidential contact for the KGB, had Labour won the general election of 1983, Gordievsky would have been faced with the bewildering task of serving a prime minister who he knew to have taken money from Soviet intelligence. There is also the point of Gordievsky’s testimony which shows that Jack Jones, leader of the transport workers’ union in the 1970s, was regarded by the KGB as a disciplined agent, whom the spy agency had paid until 1968.

In explaining why he had not shared information about Britain’s nuclear deterrent with any but a few trusted cabinet colleagues, Atlee said bluntly: “I thought that some of them were not fit to be trusted with secrets of this kind.” His judgment of senior Labour figures was acute and accurate, and resonates today.

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Britain, Politics, Society

Tony Blair says Government does not fear Opposition

BRITAIN

Mr Blair insists that Labour has failed in its fundamental duty in being a competitive opposition.

Intro: Tony Blair demands that ‘urgency’ is now needed if Labour is to remain relevant in British politics. He attacks Jeremy Corbyn for being ‘no competition’ to the Government.

Former prime minister Tony Blair has warned the Government spends “zero” time worrying about the Labour Party as he blasted the current leadership for failing to provide a “competitive” opposition.

Mr Blair said Labour had failed in its “fundamental duty to the British people”, as he hit out at the “ultra-left” takeover of the party.

In an interview with Labour MPs Ruth Smeeth and Wes Streeting for Progress magazine, Mr Blair also dubbed Brexit “the defining moment in British history” as he appealed for Labour to take a more modern approach.

He said: “We (have) failed in what is our fundamental duty to the British people, that is to be a competitive opposition.

“Just ask yourself one simple question. In the Prime Minister’s office, in Tory high command, how much of their time do they spend worrying about the prospect of a Labour victory at the present time? I would guess zero.”

Mr Blair added: “We’ve got to make them wake up every morning and fear us.”

Mr Blair said a previous lurch to the left between 1979 and 1983 had “cratered the Labour party”.

He added: “I don’t want to depress you, but there is a big difference between the ’80s and now.

“In the 1980s, the ultra-left never took control. They tried but they failed.

“The moment when Denis Healey beat Tony Benn was the moment when the Labour Party was saved.”

The Labour leader between 1994 and 2007 warned the current party was putting its principles before power, arguing it had only won “when it has been at the cutting edge of modernity”.

Turning to Brexit, Mr Blair said it was not the answer to the cultural and economic problems of globalisation, warning political parties could “end up in an intellectual and political cul-de-sac”.

He added: “We have to say, the Government’s got a mandate to negotiate Brexit, but we’re going to hold them to account that it’s not going to damage jobs, that it’s not going to damage the economy.”

Asked for his final word for those looking to keep Labour relevant, Mr Blair replied: “Urgency. Because politics moves faster today and Brexit …it’s the defining moment in British history.”

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Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

How is it ‘socialism’ to say that market failure beckons on a grand scale?

CONSERVATIVE PARTY ETHOS?

Thatcher’s revolution of the 1980s led to politicians of all persuasions putting their faith in a new economic paradigm – a guarantee of prosperity for the majority, which has lasted decades. Today, however, following the ‘Great Contraction’ of 2008-2009, political parties can no longer offer that guarantee with the same level of confidence. Whilst economic growth in Britain has returned following three years of stagnation it is forecast that real wages will not increase until 2015 and will not return to their pre-crash levels until 2023. A fractious and defective energy market, in which just six companies control 98 per cent of supply, has left more than 4.5 million in ‘fuel poverty’. Extortionate rents within the inner cities have forced millions to rely on housing benefit. By any measure, this must amount to market failure on a grand scale.

The crisis in living standards is a challenge for all political parties but no more so than for the Conservatives, the natural defenders of capitalism. After Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, pledged to freeze energy prices until 2017 – and to build 200,000 homes a year by 2020 – the Conservative Party had a chance to offer its own solutions. Alas, as we witnessed from the conference in Manchester, it retreated to its comfort zone. Aided by an ever more right-wing press, speaker after speaker derided Mr Miliband as a ‘socialist’ and ‘Marxist’, as if concern at deteriorating wages were comparable to a belief in world revolution.

The Conservative Party conference failed to recognise that when Margaret Thatcher assailed her left-wing opponents in the 1980s, she did so in the confidence that her free-market policies retained popular support. David Cameron does not enjoy that luxury: polls show that some two-thirds of voters support a 50p top rate of income tax, a mansion tax, stronger workers’ rights, a living wage that is more consummate with actual day living, and the renationalisation of the railways and the privatised utilities. If Mr Miliband is a socialist, so must the public be if these polls are anything to go by.

George Osborne rebuked the Labour leader for suggesting that ‘the cost of living was somehow detached from the performance of the economy’. But this was a remark that betrayed Mr Osborne’s failure to appreciate that the crisis is not merely cyclical (a problem most certainly exasperated through his austerity programme), but structural. It was in 2003, way before the crash, that wages for 11 million earners started to stagnate.

Other than a pledge to freeze fuel duty until 2015, what else did the Tories have to say on the question of living standards? The most important announcements were the earlier than intended introduction of the Help to Buy scheme and Mr Osborne’s commitment to achieve a Budget Surplus by the end of the next parliament, both of which risk further depressing incomes. By inflating demand without addressing the fundamental problem of supply, Help to Buy will make housing less affordable, while the Chancellor’s promise of a balanced Budget is likely to be met by imposing even greater cuts to benefits and services for the poorest in our society. Osborne’s ideological fixation with the public finances, particularly in relation to interest payments on the government’s debt, ignores the greater crisis in people’s finances.

On the fringes of the party, though, there was some positive thinking. The Conservative campaign group Renewal, which aims to broaden the party’s appeal among northern, working-class and ethnic minority voters, published a strategy for the building of a million new homes over the course of the next parliament, a significant increase in the minimum wage, a ‘cost of living test’ for all Acts of Parliament, and for action to be taken against ‘rip-off companies’. Yet, there is little sign that the Conservative leadership is prepared to embrace the kind of reformist, centrist agenda that secured the re-election of Angela Merkel in Germany.

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