Still Stalinists

George Galloway had David Aaronovitch bang to rights on Question Time. The old Stalin-worshipper has never said that that position had been wrong at the time, any more than his friends such as Michael Gove have ever said that their very active adoration of apartheid South Africa and of Pinochet’s Chile had been wrong at the time.

Three toxic streams flow into the current Political Class. Stream One is that of John Reid, Peter Mandelson, Ralph Miliband, and the Communist Party of Great Britain, in those days the paid agency of an enemy power, though not a militarily expansionist one, but, far more insidiously and far more successfully, an ideologically expansionist one. That of my distant cousin Alistair Darling, Bob Ainsworth, Geoff Gallop (Tony Blair’s mentor at Oxford), and the International Marxist Group.

That of Charles Clarke, Jack Straw, and the nominally Labour but entirely pro-Soviet faction that then controlled the National Union of Students. That of Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers, and Trotskyism; Milburn’s only ever job outside politics was running a Trotskyist bookshop called Days of Hope, known to its clientele as “Haze of Dope”. That of the most powerful man in the voluntary sector, an old university friend of Tony Blair’s, the recently knighted Sir Stephen Bubb, who was one of the surcharged and disqualified Lambeth councillors.

And so on, and on, and on. Including the assembled New Labourites who sang, not The Red Flag, but The Internationale, at the funerals of Donald Dewar and Robin Cook.

Like the American neoconservatives, they remain Marxist in their dialectical materialism, only changing the ending so that the bourgeoisie wins. They remain Leninist in their vanguard elitism, and in their identification of religious and other “Useful Idiots”. They remain Stalinist in their belief that a transcontinental superstate should establish the dictatorship of the victorious class and then export that dictatorship around the world, including by force of arms, while vanguard elites owe their patriotic allegiance to that superstate instead of to their own respective countries. And they remain Trotskyist in their entryism, and in their belief in the permanent revolution.

They have followed a section of academic Marxism away from economic and towards moral, social, cultural and constitutional means, but to the same ends as ever: the withering away of the family, of private property, and ultimately therefore of the State, since none of those three can exist without the other two.

They have very cleverly described themselves as “Social Democrats” in the knowledge that, while almost all Britons on hearing or reading that term think of it as referring to the non-Marxist and anti-Marxist tradition within the British Labour Movement, it was also the name of the party of the Russian Revolution, to the Bolshevik majority within which looked back the Communist Party, the International Marxist Group, the Labour pro-Soviet faction, and the Trotskyists, partially overlapping as those, and many more besides, often were.

So it is arguable that they have not lied directly. But it is indisputable that they have used a term in such a way as to assume its meaning within the tiny Leninist subculture, rather than its meaning in ordinary usage even among the politically well-informed. In so doing, they have monstrously deceived the electorate.

At the same time, they have demonstrated their direct dependence on the American neoconservatives, among whom the name “Social Democrats, USA” is used by the successors of Max Shachtman, the true, Trotskyist founder of neoconservatism. Those Trotskyist successors openly aspire to take over the Democratic Party, but they also enjoyed considerable control over the foreign policy of the Reagan Administration and almost total control of foreign policy under George W Bush.

Stream Two is that of the old cheerleaders for the Boer Republic set up as an explicit act of anti-British revenge in a former Dominion of the Crown, as well as the old defenders of Pinochet’s Chile and of other Nazi-harbouring pioneers of monetarism in Latin America. In those circles, it was also normal to demand the dismantlement of the public services, the legalisation of all drugs, the abolition of any minimum age of consent, and so on. Again, these views have never been recanted; indeed, they have largely come to pass.

And Stream Three is the self-styled Social Democratic Party, the SDP. The creation of that party was premature. Those who had determined upon that creation ought to have waited until the new Electoral College had given the Deputy Leadership to Tony Benn, casting their own votes in the MPs’ section to that end. Benn as Deputy Leader would have made it unanswerable that the Labour Party they had joined no longer existed.

A new party would have taken with it half or more of Labour MPs, most Labour peers, huge numbers of councillors, great tracts of the activist base, and a good many unions. At least one, and possibly both, of the former Labour Prime Ministers then alive would have joined it. Victory in 1983 would have been quite plausible, and victory in 1987 would have been practically certain. There would have been no need, if there ever really was, for the Alliance with the Liberals. A rapidly Benn-led Labour rump would not have been “split”. It would simply have been replaced.

But instead, although (for want of a better term) the Labour Right’s internal differences over incomes policy and over devolution were, up to a point, carried over into the SDP, its diversity over Europe hardly was. Almost all Keynesian, pro-Commonwealth defenders of national sovereignty remained in the Labour Party, as did almost all of the right-wing Labour MPs who were not easily young enough to start again, or who had any real roots in local government or the unions, or who could not have been certain of making at least as much money if they had lost their seats as if they had kept them.

The new party’s character was thus fixed from the start: a very readily identifiable post-War type that was still relatively young in 1981, had few or no roots in wider civil society, and was on the up economically. The 1980s were to be those people’s decade.

Apparently unable to see that the trade unions were where the need for a broad-based, sane opposition to Thatcherism was greatest, the SDP was hysterically hostile to them, and instead made itself dependent on a single donor, later made a Minister by Tony Blair without the rate for the job.

It had betrayed Gaitskellism over Europe, betrayed Christian Socialism (and, as is not generally understood, Gaitskellism) over nuclear weapons, adopted the decadent social libertinism of Roy Jenkins, adopted the comprehensive schools mania of Shirley Williams, and carried over her sense of guilt at not having resigned over past Labour attempts to control immigration.

Faced with Bennism and Trotskyism on one side, and with the forces around Margaret Thatcher on the other, it advocated exactly the wrong thing, “more, not less, radical change in our society”. Alliance with the Liberal Party committed the SDP to constitutional agenda scarcely distinguishable from those of Tony Benn, many of which have now been enacted and most of which are now the policy of all three parties, as can also be said of social policies that were then peculiar to Ken Livingstone and the “Loony Left”.

Benn and Livingstone were both vilified for cavorting with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, yet it is now no more possible to cast a meaningful vote against that than to do so against either Benn’s signature policy of abolishing the House of Lords or Livingstone’s signature policy of redefining marriage to include same-sex couples.

The SDP was always at least sympathetic towards the second and third of those, if not to all three. So it certainly contributed to creating the present consensus that defines itself as “the centre ground”. But not remotely in the way that most people imagine.

These streams are by no means entirely distinct. For example, the upper classes were the only section of society in which, right up to the fall of the Soviet Union and even beyond, it was perfectly respectable to profess oneself a Communist. It was just dismissed, in an attitude unknown to the rest of Britain at the time, as an amusing little eccentricity such as any proper toff is obliged to have. Not everyone might have known that the then Sir Anthony Blunt was a KGB agent, but everyone, including Her Majesty His Employer, knew that he was a Communist, and snobbish as only Marxists ever quite are.

Then as now, and really at every point in between, anyone who was sufficiently grand could secure advancement in the Conservative Party, and it was considered vulgar to enquire as to specific political opinions, then as now, and really at every point in between.

Who would look for them in the Conservative Party? Yet the utterly posh world of MI6 and the upper echelons of MI5 was absolutely riddled with them right up until the bitter end, to the point that it had become a standing joke even among the general public. Everyone knew that the KGB’s main recruitment ground was not the patriotic, socially conservative trade union movement or anything like that, but Oxbridge in general and Cambridge in particular, and only the public school rather than the grammar school circles even there.

The perfectly preposterous idea that Harold Wilson, of all people, and for heaven’s sake even Ted Short and George Thomas in the more recent versions, were somehow Soviet sleeper agents continues to serve what has always been its purpose, that of pure distraction from what ought to be the blindingly obvious.

In 1981, Michael Foot refused to endorse Peter Tatchell as a candidate for the House of Commons; in 2010, David Cameron offered Tatchell a seat in the House of Lords. The only British Minister ever known to have been an agent of the Soviet Bloc (specifically, of Czechoslovakia) was John Stonehouse, the Labour MP most closely associated with the proto-Thatcherite Institute of Economic Affairs in the days when it was still trying to persuade both main parties, and later the only MP ever to have sat in the English separatist interest, before, having left Parliament, he joined the SDP. In Stonehouse, the three toxic streams met. He cannot have been the only one.

He was not. And he is not. Chris Huhne had very close ties to the International Marxist Group while at Oxford. Sue Slipman, one of David Owen’s closest allies, had been a Communist Party member of sufficient prominence to be made President of the National Union of Students, a position by then openly in that party’s gift, only a very few years before joining the SDP that she told to “retain the classless opportunities provided by Thatcherism”, to “civilise the Thatcherite project”, and to “be a friendly critic of Thatcherism”.

One could go on.