Long Memories

Peter Frost writes:

"The African National Congress is a typical terrorist organisation. Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land," declared Maggie Thatcher in 1987.

Just two years after Maggie's far from prophetic prediction, a young David Cameron, then a rising star of the Conservative Party research department, accepted an all-expenses-paid trip to apartheid South Africa.

The trip was organised and funded by Strategy Network International (SNI), a firm that had been specially set up with the sole aim of lobbing against trade sanctions on the apartheid regime.

Boycotts of South African goods in Britain and across the world were hitting the apartheid economy hard. Now the worldwide campaign for international sanctions was gaining ground everywhere - except, that is, among the British Conservative Party.

No doubt the lobbyists and their political guests like young Cameron had the support of many large British companies and banks which were much more interested in their South African profits than the plight of exploited black workers. With the opposition to apartheid gaining ground, civil servants, political advisers and researchers were being told not to go on such trips.

Cameron arrogantly ignored such advice and set off on this sanction-busting junket, showing his support for the obscene racist regime and his utter contempt for those campaigning for a free and democratic South Africa.

None of us deeply involved in the anti-apartheid movement in Britain at the time will ever forget the young Tories with their T-shirts and badges demanding the noose for Mandela and his South African Communist Party and ANC comrades.

It wasn't just young Tories, of course. Outspoken MPs and ministers also expressed similar opinions branding the South African patriots and freedom fighters as terrorists and murderers. There is no doubt that the support for the apartheid state from Thatcher, Cameron and many other Tories helped the cruel system of white rule in South Africa to survive as long as it did. Their support also helped to keep Mandela and other activists behind bars inside the vile prisons of the apartheid state.

Thatcher supported the apartheid government when it was at its deadliest and most evil. Her oft-expressed view was that the apartheid regime was a bulwark against communism.

Remarks from the old white racist South African politicians at the time of Thatcher's death spell out just how important her support was. They show how influential those South Africans believe she was on the fate of the last bastion of white-minority rule in Africa.

The apartheid state was killing many of its dissident citizens in the late 1980s with state terrorism at home, as well as with illegal security force actions abroad. Both were legitimate tactics in Mrs T's book. She gave her tacit support to the postal bombings and cross-border raids on neighbouring states accused of harbouring guerrilla fighters, and so too did the young Cameron enjoying his lavish trip.

Now of course the Tories and their apologists in the right-wing media are trying to rewrite history. Suddenly Thatcher and Cameron are being portrayed as champions of black South Africans and opponents of apartheid. So has the Conservative Party really changed?

Of course not. Many of Cameron's fellow Tories who used to wear "Hang Nelson Mandela" badges at university are now sitting behind him in Parliament today. Others are sitting in the Lords or pontificating in the Telegraph or the Daily Mail.

Today Cameron might make speeches praising Mandela in his hospital bed. He may even try to tell us the he and his hero Thatcher hated apartheid and did what they could to end it. Like so much of what Cameron says - and indeed in her time Maggie once told us - it is just lies and hypocrisy.

Sorry Mr Prime Minister, it won't fool anybody. Some of us have long memories.