Soviet Grip on Britain's Labor Party Revealed in Diary, Found in US National Security Archive Options

[kulthur]

Check it out: "don't join the Party - succeed in the Establishment, and you will be more help." At this rate, TFP is going to be accepted as Reality before to much longer...


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12...l#ixzz0W5Oyg8P9

[NG874]

Great article! It is amazing on how the British Labour Party and portions of the British trade union movement (i.e. Arthur Scargill) were sympathetic to or outright agents of influence for the Soviets, their allies, and even some hostile Middle Eastern regimes, such as Libya and Afghanistan under the old communist puppets, the PDPA. Truthfully, if you would like to read a good historical fiction piece about the results of a far left Labour Party takeover of the UK during the Cold War, please read the book by reporter Robert Moss, The Collapse of Democracy.

Below is an article by Julian Lewis, a British Conservative, on Labour (now Respect Party) MP George Galloway. You may know him as a pro-Saddam Hussein, pro-Islamist politican in Great Britain who also has a taste for left wing totalitarian leaders. See article below:

The Times

January 26, 1994, Wednesday

'Rather hard' on George Galloway

SECTION: Features

LENGTH: 308 words



From Dr Julian Lewis
Sir, During the run-up to the last general election, I compiled and published details of the political track records of Labour MPs, including George Galloway. In early day motions in the House of Commons he had, inter alia:

Condemned the SAS shooting of IRA bombers on Gibraltar as ''tantamount to capital punishment without trial'' and ''an act of terrorism'' (early day motion 799, March 1988).



Reaffirmed support for the then Soviet-backed Marxist regime in Angola (edm 1323, July 1988).
Congratulated Cuba on the 30th anniversary of Castro's Communist revolution and on its ''great achievements'' in health, education, welfare and ''cultural and artistic liberation'' (edm 242, January 1989).

Applauded the efforts of the people of the then Marxist Nicaragua ''to achieve self-determination, peace and prosperity'' (edm 261, January 1989).

Criticised the refusal to allow the vice-president of the then Communist regime in Afghanistan, installed following the Soviet invasion, to visit Britain, whereas ''terrorist and rebel elements have been officially invited to the United Kingdom'' (edm 448, February 1989).

Supported the withdrawal of American servicemen from South Korea because they ''constitute a threat'' to Communist North Korea (edm 908, May 1989).

Supported the Communist Morning Star ''in its campaign to raise Pounds 150,000 to enable it to survive'' (edm 179, February 1990).

It therefore seems rather hard on Mr Galloway to be ''severely reprimanded'' by the Labour whips for praising Saddam Hussein (report, January 21) when he has been allowed to propagate equally obnoxious causes, so often and for so long, with complete impunity.

Yours faithfully,

JULIAN LEWIS

(Deputy Director),

Conservative Research Department,

32 Smith Square, Westminster, SW1.

January 21.

Also see this Guardian article on the Soviet attempts to woo and work up relationships with Conservative politicians in the Thatcher era. Remember, since the mid 1980s, there was an increase in trade with the Soviet bloc, China, and the USSR under Thatcher. The Conservative Party was of course pro-business and large corporate interests tended to historically favor a rapprochment with the Soviets and other likeminded rulers. See below:

The Guardian (London)

February 6, 1992

THATCHERITE FOOTPRINTS IN THE ARCHIVES;
Jonathan Steele delves into Moscow's documents and finds evidence that contacts with the British political establishment were not confined to Labour

BYLINE: JONATHAN STEELE

SECTION: FOREIGN; Pg. 9

LENGTH: 1957 words

"FANTASY, fantasy", said the man in charge of access to the Communist Party's archives, as he ploughed through Tim Sebastian's Sunday Times piece on Neil Kinnock's so-called "Kremlin connection".
Vladimir Chernous was more amused than alarmed.

It was not just that there is no figure of Christ (as the Sunday Times report stated) among the frescoes in the splendid reading room in the old central committee complex where Mr Chernous showed me the same files Mr Sebastian used.

Nor that the ornate, high-ceilinged room was the Russian-Asiatic Bank before the revolution - and not the Tsarist Stock Exchange (as the Sunday Times report stated). Moscow guidebooks point out that the stock exchange, soon to be revived, was 100 yards further down the street.



Nor that allowance was not made by the Sunday Times for the possibility that Soviet diplomatic dispatches to Moscow might have been hardened up to please bosses back home.
It was the Sunday Times's selection of material, and the lack of any political context, that tickled Mr Chernous. He kept repeating the word "tendentsiozny". How come Mr Sebastian had overlooked the contacts which the Russians had with the Conservatives and Liberals? In his piece, Mr Sebastian wrote that there were "no listed meetings with the Conservative Party" in the 100 files shown to him.

In fact, the volume of notes which included the Kinnock promise of a concrete dialogue with the Russians (the headline pitch in the Sunday Times), contains an astonishing report of a conversation with Sir Alfred Sherman, who headed the Thatcherite Centre for Policy Studies.

The thoughts of Sir Alfred recorded in the Communist Party files are described as "notes of conversation with organiser and until recently active participant in the brains trust of Conservative Party 'Centre for Political Research' Alfred Sherman".

The file says that Sir Alfred criticised the government for "going on spending money on the parasitic state sector and branches of the economy which have outlived their time". The government should be more decisive in "cutting funds to the civil service, the bloated and inefficient educational system, and the collapsing National Health Service", he told the Russians, according to the file.

The senior Tory adviser is quoted saying that he favoured cuts in pensions and unemployment benefits. Asked whether this would not provoke a social explosion, Sir Alfred, according to the file, replied: "The unemployed and the lumpen never have been a revolutionary force. If the unemployed get lower benefits, they will be quicker to start looking for work, and they won't turn to political trouble-making. As for the lumpen, coloured people and the Irish, let's face it, the only way to hold them in check is to have enough well armed and properly trained police."

Sir Alfred had just resigned as head of the think tank. He divulged his thoughts while sitting in the Reform Club on January 5, 1984, with Arkady Maslennikov, the London correspondent of the Communist Party newspaper, Pravda, whose senior correspondents were invariably party members. Like any experienced official, Sir Alfred must have known his remarks would go back to Moscow. The report, marked secret, makes clear this was the case. The type-sheet in the files says three copies were distributed, the first to the international department of the central committee, the next to the second European department of the foreign ministry. Only the third copy, interestingly, was sent to Pravda.

The early part of the 1980s saw the height of the row within Nato over the US deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe. Governments and parties throughout western Europe were split on the issue and it was only natural that Moscow would want to know the strength of feeling in each of them. The "Sebastian files" are full of accounts of Soviet efforts to gauge the mood.

In the case of Labour, the main question was how committed the party was to unilateral nuclear disarmament. With the Liberals and Conservatives, the Russians wanted to know whether there was any hope of a British policy independent of Washington.

The volume of files contains another secret document (almost without exception they are classified as such) in which L. A. Parshin, the counsellor at the Soviet embassy, reported chatting to David Steel at a Soviet reception.

"D. Steel critically distanced himself from statements by the US deputy secretary of state, L. Eagleburger, about an alleged lack of solidarity by west European countries. The USA, he said, cannot automatically rely on western European solidarity," the document reports the former Liberal Party leader as saying.

Other files in the volume contain frequent discussions on whether Lord Carrington, and later Sir Geoffrey Howe, could as foreign secretaries steer Mrs Thatcher towards a more independent British role. In the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981, whether Western governments and parties would have contact with Moscow at all was a hot issue.

In his Reform Club chat, Sir Alfred Sherman, who is recorded as having met Mr Maslennikov at the Pravda man's request "to discuss policy of Thatcher government", is said to have told the Russians that the Thatcher government "has no foreign policy. It only reacts to events."

Another file records that the Soviet ambassador, Viktor Popov, invited two Tory backbenchers - Sir Anthony Kershaw and Robert Harvey - to the Soviet embassy in London on June 6, 1984. Sir Anthony was chairman of the Commons all-party parliamentary committee on foreign affairs.

Mr Popov reported to Moscow that Sir Anthony believed Britain could play a more decisive role in solving East-West problems. The two Conservative politicians wanted to see more co-operation with the Soviet Union. They told him they saw no chance of any change in US policy before the November 1984 elections, "and expressed the view that Great Britain within Nato conducts a foreign policy which is autonomous and independent of the United States". But they pointed out that, unlike US congressional committees, they had "no levers" over the government.

Later in 1984, the Commons committee invited Mikhail Gorbachev, then head of the Supreme Soviet's foreign affairs committee, to London. But long before then, Neil Kinnock had identified him as a key figure.

At a meeting with Mr Popov at Mr Kinnock's office in Westminster (incidentally, only one of the six meetings with Mr Kinnock took place at the Soviet embassy) back in December 1983, the new Labour leader had asked to meet Mr Gorbachev when he went to Moscow the following year.

Although the committee's invitation clearly had Whitehall's blessing, Mrs Thatcher was apparently still hedging her bets. The "Sebastian file" contains an hilariously dead-pan report from Mr Popov about a meeting with a senior Foreign Office official, Michael Jenkins. The official informed the Soviet ambassador "in a preliminary way" that the government wanted to invite Geidar Aliyev, a politburo member who was also a deputy prime minister, to Britain. The issue was which minister should invite him.

(At 61, Mr Aliyev was one of the younger politburo members but no serious Sovietologist ever considered this Azerbaijani with close connections to the late Leonid Brezhnev as a possible successor to the old men still running the Kremlin. He was sacked by Mr Gorbachev in October 1987.)

The Foreign Office man suggested Norman Tebbitt as Minister of Trade of Industry, "although this would not mean his talks would be confined to economic matters".

"In view of his [Mr Aliyev's] high position in the Soviet leadership, it was envisaged that he would be received at the highest level for discussions on international relations in general. I asked my interlocutor if the government meant talks with the Prime Minister. M. Jenkins repeated his formulation, but left me to understand that they were talking about a meeting with the Prime Minister," Mr Popov recorded in a dispatch to Moscow.

The files contain nothing that would have been new to any diplomat who read the British press. Mr Kinnock criticised the Soviet Union for breaking off the Geneva arms control talks and planning to deploy extra tactical nuclear weapons in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. He wrote to the Soviet embassy, deploring Moscow's decision to boycott the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

The former Prime Minister, James Callaghan, told L. A. Parshin, the Soviet counsellor, in the corridors of the Labour Party's Blackpool conference that he opposed the non-nuclear defence policy which the party had just adopted. It was vital to "think through very carefully all the possible consequences of implementing this policy", he warned the Russians. If Britain rejected US bases, the Americans would put more in West Germany and could bring about a Franco-German military rapprochement.

The Sebastian article conveyed an image of the privileges enjoyed during the party's heyday by the communists in their luxurious headquarters, and contained an implication that communist hardliners may manage to close the archives.

The sprawling central committee building is, in fact, a mixture of the old and new. Rem Usikov, the director of the newly-formed Centre for the Preservation of Contemporary Documentation, which controls the files of the central committee's once crucial general department, is the same man who was in charge of them before. He has the same team of archivists and officials.

He welcomes the new openness. "Three years ago no foreigner had access to the files," he says. "When access was expanded, it was foreign researchers much more than our own people who showed interest." Mr Usikov opposes any blanket prohibition based on time, such as the British 30-year rule.

The Yeltsin government still has to work out rules for access and de-classifying material. Mr Usikov rejects fears that the archives will be closed. "Every document must work. That's our motto. The experience of the past must help society. Otherwise you might as well destroy the documents, if they are not going to be seen."

The centre's main problems are technical and financial. The storage conditions are too cold now that people are expected to have access to the stacks, and the centre lacks the staff to go through the files.

I was shown one set of rooms where the floor was entirely covered with mountains of papers, notebooks and files retrieved from officials' desks after the Russian government seized and sealed the building following the August coup. Mr Usikov is convinced none of the original archives, at least up to 1981, were lost or stolen in the coup.

Meanwhile, the new Russian government has taken over the central committee complex. Yegor Gaidar, Mr Yeltsin's economic overlord, sits in the grand suite once occupied by Georgi Razumovsky, the central committee secretary in charge of personnel. Sergei Shakhrai, the deputy prime minister and state counsellor for legal affairs, has taken over the old party control commission for his staff.

There are twice as many black official Volgas parked in Staraya Ploshchad, the street outside the building, as there were in the party's days. The special food shop and dining privileges for top echelons remain in use.

For mid-level officials, the pay is as low as it was when they were in the party. "Between 700 and 800 roubles a month," says Mr Usikov, and a promised rise has failed to come.

At the current exchange rate, you could hardly buy a month's worth of the Sunday Times with that.

[eskie]

Check it out: "don't join the Party - succeed in the Establishment, and you will be more help." At this rate, TFP is going to be accepted as Reality before to much longer...http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12...l#ixzz0W5Oyg8P9

Issued a postage stamp with Pollitt's image on it, and named a battleship after him.