Who's The Stalinist?

Is Gordon Brown a Stalinist? No, but his archenemy Charles Clarke was. However, Clarke's chum Alan Milburn wasn't. He was a Trotskyist.

Is the past tense appropriate in the last three sentences, or should it be the present tense? After all, they are both utterly unrepentant, like so many Blairites and other neocons with such backgrounds. They still don't accept that they were doing anything wrong at the time. Why not?