Bronsed and Reidenned

Not too much effort would have needed to have gone into “exposing” the National Front activities of Andrew Brons. Yes, it was deep into his adult life. So was John Reid’s Communism, at the height of the Cold War, and when he was the Party’s enforcer at the Stirling University Union with its large cash turnover. Charles Clarke, Stephen Byers, Alan Milburn, Geoff Gallop, Alistair Darling, Patricia Hewitt, Harriet Harman, Tony McNulty and numerous others were rather older than 17, too.

It faintly baffles me that Brons was able to find employment as a lecturer, and to do so all the way up until he retired. But then, he was teaching Political Science, and presumably not publishing as a theoretician in that field. He just had to explain how d’Hondt worked, that sort of thing. He wasn’t writing books saying that the gulags didn’t exist, or, if they did, were perfectly justified under the circumstances. He would have been a professor in that case.

Nor was he living and working through the existence of Nazi Germany. Had he carried his Communist Party card right the way though Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the lot, then he might now be a Companion of Honour.