A poisoned legacy from which Labour has never quite recovered

7 November 2009

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

Even today we still do not possess anything like a clear picture of how far this penetration stretched. The lure of Moscow is recent. It remains quite staggering how many aspirant Labour politicians were either members of the communist party or, like the Justice Secretary Jack Straw, influenced by the CP at a time when it was controlled by Moscow. The former defence secretary John Reid, for example, was a CP member well into the 1970s, while Peter Mandelson was an influential Young Communist.

Indeed the New Labour government which has governed Britain since 1997 cannot be understood unless these communist influences are taken into account. Many of New Labour’s characteristics — its deep suspicion of outsiders, its structural hostility to democratic debate, its secrecy, its faith in bureaucracy, embedded preference for striking deals away from the public eye, its ruthless reliance on a small group of trusted activists — result from the early CP training of Reid, Mandelson and others.

So today’s revelations in the Spectator are not a recondite exercise in ancient history. They have a great to tell us about our very recent past and how Britain is still governed. Yet Soviet infiltration of the Labour movement remains a neuralgic subject on the left. One of Jack Jones’s brightest protégés was Gordon Brown. And when I approached Downing Street to ask the prime minister whether he would withdraw his outspoken praise for Jones in the light of the recently disclosed fact that he was a KGB asset and long-term traitor, the Prime Minister dithered and dawdled. At length Downing Street came back with a robust ‘no comment’.

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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.

Frank Leader

November 7th, 2009 9:53am Report this comment

The Milibands, David and Ed have a very communist background and upbringing. Perhaps the infiltration still continues.

Swiss Bob

April 30th, 2010 9:18am Report this comment

Next to Mossad the KGB is the most successful intelligence organisation in the World, they have been penetrating British society since since the 1930s and you wonder how many of the current Labour party are on the KGB payroll?

Jack Jones was a mentor of one Gordon Brown, given that Harold Wilson was bought and paid for by the KGB who would be surprised to find out Gordon Brown isn't just another in a long list of Labour party traitors.

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