A poisoned legacy from which Labour has never quite recovered

04 November 2009

Judging only by its electoral performance, the Communist Party of Great Britain was a near-total failure in the 20th century.

Judging only by its electoral performance, the Communist Party of Great Britain was a near-total failure in the 20th century. It only secured a tiny number of MPs at Westminster, while the party membership peaked at just over 60,000 at the height of Soviet popularity during the second world war. But this public lack of success was misleading. The communists exercised considerable secret influence in universities, publishing houses, journalism and even the civil service for decades after 1945.

Its greatest power, however, lay inside the Labour party and the trade unions. It was perhaps especially strong in the National Union of Mineworkers and the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. This strength survived long after the catastrophic Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. We know that the Transport and General Workers Union leader Jack Jones — who received effusive praise from prime minister Gordon Brown when he died in April this year — was a paid agent for the USSR, and in receipt of cash handouts from his Soviet handler Oleg Gordievsky as late as the 1980s.

The merit of Anatoly Chernyaev’s diaries is that they show just how cheerful and trusting was the relationship between Labour politicians and trade union officials and Soviet Communists. Reports of the Labour party General Secretary Ron Hayward confiding in the Soviets his plans to capture the party machinery by developing a cadre of young activists may sound quaint today. Not so in 1974, when the Cold War was at its height. There was a whiff of social disintegration in the air and the nuclear-armed USSR posed an existential threat.

These diaries indicate that, by the 1970s, an alternative government was in place, handpicked by Moscow to take over the apparatus of the British state once the Cold War was lost. There would be a Soviet-style power split: real power would rest in the chairmanship and the bureaucracy, with the politicians simply the front men. Some of the Labour men the Soviets were grooming were paid agents, others fellow travellers. Yet even front-rank politicians were pathetically anxious to reach some kind of understanding with the Soviet regime.

1 | 2 Next page

More articles from: Peter Oborne | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (2)

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Post comment

MikeF

November 5th, 2009 5:52pm Report this comment

The neo-Stalinism of much of the Labour Party back in the 70s and 80s was fairly overt and it is not really surprising to find confirmation that there were formal links to Moscow. A couple of points come to mind. One is that the 'Broad Left' that controlled the National Union of Students for a good while in those days was a quite open alliance between the Communist Party and the Labour Party, so there was at least one instance where cooperation between the two was absolutely transparent. The other, though, is that at the same time the Labour Party Young Socialists - effectively its youth section - was a fiefdom of the Militant Tendency, which was an avowedly Trotskyist organisation. You would have thought that an organisation with so many Moscow-line communists in it would have made a point of stamping out a 'Trotskyite-Fascist' deviation - as they would have thought it - in their midst.

I wonder why they didn't. Perhaps they thought it was not worth the effort. Perhaps they tolerated a voluble Trotskyite organisation as a distraction from their own activities. Perhaps even - the thought has just occurred to me - Militant itself was a Soviet 'front' organisation allowed to operate in apparent opposition to Moscow for precisely the reason I suggested in my previous sentence. Now if it turns out that the leading UK Trotskyite organisation of the time was really a stooge of the Soviets then that really would be something.