The New Cold War, Indeed

It is great fun to read the comments below boilerplate neocon articles by the usual suspects who had thought that their variously right-wing readers would be on-side in the case of The Guardian versus the spooks.

Instead, what do they find?

People who find it hilarious that these massively expensive and self-important organisations could ever have allowed this to happen to them, just as they routinely leave their laptops in taxis and what have you.

People who remember that those agencies lied this country into a war not very long ago, as an expression of their overriding allegiance to foreign powers, at least one of which is not a British ally in any sense.

Libertarians who hate, or who think that they hate, any State action, including this, and who are in favour of bringing down or abolishing any and everything so long as that resulted in a tax cut. People like that tend not to like the perceived background of intelligence agents, either. Although there is a case to be made that half the trouble with them these days is that they no longer do come from that background.

And traditional Tories who object - call them old-fashioned, if you will - to the mass surveillance of Her Majesty's subjects in the United Kingdom by a foreign state, although at the British taxpayer's expense.

Speaking of foreign states, America and Israel spring obviously to mind. But the Gulf monarchies are at least as important in all of this. MI6 has had our Middle East policy shadowing that of Saudi Arabia ever since this Government came to power, a fact which cries out for further investigation.

It took the steadfastness of the Labour Party to defeat them over Syria, demonstrating that only a Labour Government could hold them in check. Thank goodness that there is soon going to be one for a very long time.

(The last Conservative Government was also far too close to Riyadh, with Jonathan Aitken, a man who was then up to his eyeballs in espionage, made Minister of Defence Procurement by John Major on the specific orders of the King of Saudi Arabia. How about that for national sovereignty, or for a League of Democracies, or for holding the line against Wahhabism?)

Unlike America or Israel, not that it would matter to the principle of national sovereignty, by no stretch of the imagination is the constitutionally Wahhabi absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia a democracy. Nor is the constitutionally Wahhabi absolute monarchy of Qatar.

Indeed, only Bahrain can make any such claim, and we are supposed to hate the Bahrainis these days. But, again, even if Bahrain were Switzerland in the sun, she would still be a different country, just as Switzerland is a different country.

Then there is Pakistan. No one can blame Pakistan for playing both sides of the street. What else could she possibly have been expected to do? But that is what she is doing. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, simply is the other side of the street.

If, that is, there is really a street at all. Put together this combination of buffoonery and treachery, and something starts to sink in.

If they are this bad, able to be run rings around by newspapers using FedEx, while effectively functioning as information-gathering servants of the people who fund and even direct what is supposed to be the enemy, then how come we are all still here, or at any rate all still here and not living under Sharia Law or whatever?

Throughout the Cold War, those same agencies, which failed to foresee the end of the Cold War just as they failed to foresee the Arab Spring, were riddled from top to bottom with Soviet and Soviet-allied agents. The Communist Party was strong within the then-mighty trade unions, although much of it was far less pro-Soviet than much of British intelligence was.

At least one Conservative Minister was on the Czechoslovak payroll (Labour and the Conservatives stand at one each when it comes to Eastern Bloc agents who actually served in Government), and there were probably aristocratic fellow-travellers at every level of that party's life. Certainly, that seems to have been regarded as one of those in-jokes for distinguishing the U from the non-U.

Professing oneself a Communist was always perfectly acceptable at the very swankiest dinner parties. Whereas, of a man who attended such soirées, it was Never Done to ask his specific political opinions in the formal context of his seeking advancement within the Conservative Party or its various satellites. There were probably scores of them, mostly or all on the MI5 or MI6 books, and far more than on the Labour side. But they were certainly there on the Labour side, too.

Yet nothing ever came of any of it. In reality, the Soviet Union had neither the means nor the will to invade Western Europe. The Soviet Union could not get bread from one town to the next, never mind launch that kind of military operation.

The threat was not real. If it had been real, then it could have had Britain, not least, and indeed more than anything, because of the incompetence or, far more commonly, the active collusion of the people who were supposed to be preventing that from happening.

But it hardly mattered, except as a moral principle which of course matters for its own sake. The threat was not real. As the proto-libertarians and the traditional Tories of the day comprehensively pointed out, decade in and decade out.

It was the Labour Right that was the most hawkish section of Cold War British politics until Thatcher, whose hawkishness and that of her entourage bespoke, like so much else about them, their lack of roots in, understanding of, or feeling for Toryism and its many overlapping milieux.

They overthrew and supplanted those milieux in and around Parliament and the media. But not in the country, as the reaction to The Guardian demonstrates.

We are now going through it all again.

If the threat were real, then it would have overwhelmed us by now, either because those charged to stop it were incapable of doing so, or because they were hopelessly compromised by their own open, public, and entirely official relationship with it. Manifestly, the threat is not real.

At the keyboards of Tory Britain, they know a Naked Emperor when they see one. They are not afraid to call him what he is.