The Mister Men

I remember when Tony Benn launched his attempt to become the deputy Labour party leader in 1981 ....

A Shared Vision In The Distance?

.... in order to create a left wing ticket with Labour Party leader Michael Foot (a man he allegedly didn't actually get on with).

 

 The Bennites were proposing:

• State control of 100 key companies.
• An Alternative Economic Strategy based on a siege economy with import controls. Leaving the Common Market.
• Leaving NATO.
• And unilateral nuclear disarmament at the height of the Cold War.

..... Effectively divorcing the UK from all its Western allies politically and economically. 

 

While this was going on, there were 'dark rumours' from the TUC and others, that the intelligence service MI6, and The Army, aka The Establishment, were preparing a putsch or coup, if the pair ever looked like getting into power. This plot was of course never proved to be anything more serious than a few old buffers muttering over their port, in the men's clubs of London, while writing to the Times or Telegraph newspapers.

Nowadays, you would think that this sort of nonsense was long forgotten. But not so.

The hard left, led by Len McClusky of the Unite Union, has stated that the security services (read MI6 or MI5), 'may' have been trying to stop Jeremy Corbyn from becoming Prime Minister, as opposed to the electorate, who also decided to stop Mr Corbyn.

McClusky stated that he wouldn't be surprised if there were not 'Dark Forces at play.' He was backing up a statement by Corbyn's adviser Andrew Murray, who said that 'a deep state' had worked against Mr Corbyn.

Now if all this doesn't give you a reminder of the X files, then you must have missed the 1990's ....
But this doesn't mean that there wasn't a little bit of juice in the claims about Michael Foot and Tony Benn. Foot and Benn came from the far left of the party, and many thought that they and their policies would have fit in quite well into the Communist Party.

The rumours that MI6 had a file on both Foot, Benn and others on the left-wing are probably correct (as like Mr Corbyn, they had associated with persons of interest to the security of the UK). It was claimed that certain state secrets were being withheld from Mr Foots view, in his role as a Privy Councillor. So the rumours of a potential coup if he ever won an election had some fertile ground to grow in.

As it was, the British public (this was pre SNP in Scotland), once again showed the far left that Britain just isn't ready to accept that form of government, and he was trounced by Mrs Thatcher in 1983, after his parties electoral manifesto was described as 'the longest political suicide note in history'. He was replaced as leader, and died in 2010 aged 96, with the usual UK politicians farewells as 'a man of principle' etc etc, rather than a man whose views were too far left for the UK.

Now the reason why I am writing about this at all, is that a book came out in 2018 entitled 'The Spy and the Traitor,' about the life of Oleg Gordievsky who defected to the West after spying on the KGB for the British. He defected to the UK in 1982, and allegedly named Mr Foot as a paid for KGB informant to his security service handlers who were debriefing him. Gordievsky claimed that Mr Foot had been getting money from the KGB in the 1940's, and was later used by them to spread 'disinformation' in the West. 

Now he was not alone in the 1930's and 1940's in sympathising with Stalin's USSR, and I don't know how much, if any, of the claims against Mr Foot were true, but he won damages against a national newspaper, but which didn't stop the allegations being repeated as late as 2010. But there were a lot of other so called 'intellectuals' such as the Cambridge Five (plus American Michael Straight,Peter Ashby, Brian Symon and Leonard Henry (Leo) Long) in the UK, who performed great service to the USSR during the 1940's, and many carried right on acting for them right through to the 1980's.

Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, two of the named Cambridge group, had confessed to British intelligence, but these confessions remained a secret from the UK public for many years (until 1979 for Anthony Blunt, and as late as 1990 for John Cairncross). Why? Who knows, but both were largely allowed to live their lives unhindered, despite their allegiances being exposed by the security services, and certainly never went to prison. Blunt even had a Knighthood, which was only stripped in 1979.

But then for some reason in the UK, we have always been slow to expose and denounce them for being what they were .... traitors.