Alan Sugar, the multi-millionaire host of the British version of the Apprentice got himself into the news this week. He’s another one, who has joined the chorus of rich industrialists and Conservatives denouncing Corbyn as an anti-Semite. On Wednesday he put up on the Net a photoshopped picture of Corbyn riding in a limo with Adolf Hitler. Faced with a storm of criticism for this outrageous smear, Sugar took it down. But crucially, he didn’t apologise. Then yesterday he put up a nasty poem attacking Corbyn.
This little ditty was denounced by at least one female Corbynite as misogynist. And rightly so. In one of its stanzas, it describes Corbyn having sex with Diane Abbott, who ‘lies back and thinks of Russia’. Corbyn is supposed to have had an affair with Abbott. But as the female critic pointed out, it also shows the misogynist fixation with female sexuality, and discomfort at the fact that women are free to have sex with whomever they choose. In this instance, Sugar’s like the White supremacists of the Alt Right, who have a similar fixation with controlling women’s sexuality, as well as denying them the right to vote. There’s also a nasty undercurrent of racism in this as well. Most of the racist and sexist abuse sent to MPs is actually centred on Diane Abbott. She was one of the first Black MPs elected to parliament in the 1980s, and is notoriously concerned with combating racism. So much so, that the Scum quoted her in their infamous anti-Labour campaign during the 1987 election as saying that ‘All White people are racist’. I don’t know if she said it or not. If she didn’t, it wouldn’t be the first the Scum libelled someone. Not by a very long chalk.
As for thinking about Russia, this is just more of the Tory ‘Red Scare’ drivel that the party’s been running ever since the Zinoviev Letter in the 1920s. Labour is supposed to be full of Communists, ready to do Moscow’s bidding. Or, now that Communism’s fallen, Putin’s bidding. Sugar then goes on in the poem to rant about how Corbyn supports our enemies, listing them as the IRA, Hamas and Russia. All of which we’ve heard before, and despatched. He never supported the IRA, but recommended that the British government should talk to them. Which Margaret Thatcher was doing, all the time she was loudly denouncing the Labour party for daring to suggest that she should. Well, as someone once said, the Tory party is an organised hypocrisy. As for Hamas, I’ve seen allegations that they were either created, or helped into power, by the Israeli state, who thought that this would make it easier to control and disinherit the Palestinians. Corbyn isn’t an enemy of Israel, but he does want a just settlement for the Palestinians. Hence the outrage of the Israel lobby, who can’t bear anyone taking their side, even if they’re actually not opponents of Israel or anti-Semites.
He also claimed that Corbyn was the worse Labour leader ever. Well, I can remember the Tories making the same accusations, minus those of anti-Semitism, against Neil Kinnock in the 1987 election, and before that against Michael Foot and Harold Wilson in the 1970s. The CIA, MI5 and the Tories, including Maggie Thatcher, were convinced that Wilson was a KGB spy. He wasn’t, but they still smeared him.
As for Corbyn being extreme left, he stands for the renationalisation of the health service, a partial renationalisation of the electricity grid, and the renationalisation of the railways, as well as an end to the murderous benefit cuts. This is a return to something like the post-war social democratic consensus, and very far from the total nationalisation demanded by the genuine far left, like the Socialist Workers’ Party. Not that this bothers the Tories, who never let the truth get in the way of a good lie.
And I have always been uneasy about Sugar as a supporter of Labour. It never seemed quite genuine. There are, and always have been, businesspeople who supported the Labour party. But I don’t think Sugar was really one of them. I might be wrong, but I seem to remember Sugar appearing on Terry Wogan’s weekday talk show way back in the 1980s. He poured scorn on the idea that you needed an extensive education to become successful in business, and talked about how he’d begun his career aged fifteen selling things from the back of cars. Or something like that. I can remember my father looking at me, and remarking that he was the type who’d have children climbing up chimneys again.
Sugar left Labour three years ago, about the time Corbyn was elected leader, so he’s definitely no supporter of the current Labour leadership. It seems very much to me that he was one of the big businessmen Blair ingratiated himself with, and who were given seats in government in return for their support. Like David Sainsbury, who was another donor to New Labour, now departed. He’s basically another Tory, who was drawn to New Labour because Blair was continuing the Thatcherite programme of privatisation and benefit cuts, but was electorally more attractive than the Tory party itself under John Major.
His poem was basically another Tory screed of lies and hate, from someone, who only seems to have joined Labour out of political and commercial opportunism. There’s absolute no reason to take him, or his opinions seriously.
The brutal treatment inflicted by the two ‘Prefects of Discipline’ understandable left Mills with a hatred of the Catholic church. He isn’t alone there. The Irish comedian Dave Allen, and his countryman, the much-loved Radio 2 broadcaster and presenter Terry Wogan, also had no particular love of the church because of the similar sadistic discipline they’d also received as part of their Catholic education. And I’ve met many ordinary people since then, who have also fallen away from the church, and often against Christianity altogether, because of it. One of my uncles was brought up a Catholic, but never attended church. This was partly due to the brutality of the monks, who taught him at his school.
Mills also corrects the impression that Judge Dredd was immediately the favourite strip in the comic. The good lawman wasn’t, and it was months before he attained that position. And he also attacks Michael Moorcock for his comments criticising the early 2000AD in the pages of the Observer. Moorcock was horrified by Invasion, and its tale of resistance to the conquest of Britain by the Russians, hastily changed two weeks or so before publication to ‘the Volgans’. Moorcock had been the boy editor of Tarzan comic, and declared that in his day the creators had cared about comics, unlike now, when the creators of 2000AD didn’t. This annoyed Mills, and obviously still rankles, because he and the others were putting a lot of work in to it, and creating characters that children would like and want to read about. One of the recommendations he makes to prospective comics’ creators is that writers should spend four weeks crafting their character, writing and rewriting the initial scripts and outlines of the character in order to get them just right. And artists need two weeks creating and revising their portrayal of them. This was difficult then, as creators were not paid for what Mike McMahon called ‘staring out of the window time’, though Mills generally managed to find someway round that. It’s impossible now, with tight budget and time constraints.
I can see Moorcock’s point about the Invasion strip. It wasn’t Mills’ own idea, although he did it well. True to his beliefs, its hero was working class, a docker called Bill Savage. He didn’t initially want to work on it, and was only persuaded to by the then editor telling him he could have Maggie Thatcher shot on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral. But it is a right-wing, Tory fantasy. It appeared at the tale end of the ’70s, when MI5, the CIA and Maggie Thatcher had all been convinced that the Labour leader, Harold Wilson, was a KGB agent, and the trade unions and the Labour party riddled with Communists or fellow-travelers ready to do the bidding of Moscow. The strikes in the period led to various arch-Tories, like the editor of the Times, Peregrine Worsthorne, trying to organise a coup against the 1975 Labour administration. And ITV launched their own wretched SF series, in which a group of resistance fighters battle a future socialist dictatorship.
He also discusses the office hatred of the character Finn and the man it was based on. Finn was Cornish, driving a taxi round the streets of Plymouth by day. He was practising witch, and at night battled the forces of evil and against social injustice. The character was based on a man he knew, an ex-squaddie who was a witch. Mills has great affection for this man, who introduced him to modern witchcraft, and in whose company Mills joined in ceremonies at the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire. But the management didn’t like him, and had him sacked. There was a persistent dislike of the character, which seemed to come from its basis in witchcraft, and Mills himself was the subject of lurid stories about what he was supposed to get up to at these ceremonies. This ended with the strip’s abrupt cancellation, without proper explanation. Mills states that he is very distantly related to one of the women executed for witchcraft at Salem, and so is very definitely down on people, who despise and malign witches.
I’m not surprised by either the rumours and the hostility to the strip. This was the 1990s, the heyday of the Satanism scare, when across America, Britain and Europe there were stories of gangs of Satanists abusing animals. Children were being conceived by abused women, used as ‘brood mares’, to be later used as sacrifices to Satan. It was all rubbish, but repeated by a wide range of people from Fundamentalist Christians to secular feminist social workers. And it destroyed many lives. You may remember the Orkney scandal, where forty children were taken into care following allegations of abuse. The minister at the local kirk was supposed to be a Satanist, who had an inverted crucifix hanging from his ceiling. It was no such thing. It was, in fact, a model aeroplane.
Much of this dangerous bilge came from a group of rightwing evangelicals at the Express. I’m not surprised. I can remember the Sunday Express repeating some of this drivel, including the ludicrous claim that CND was Satanic because of its symbol. This was declared to be an old medieval witchcraft symbol, based on a broken cross. I mentioned this once to a very left-wing, religious friend, who had been a member of the nuclear disarmament group. He looked straight at me and said levelly, ‘No. It’s semaphore’. The scare pretty much disappeared in Britain after a regular psychiatrist issued a report stating very firmly that such groups didn’t exist. There are several excellent books written against the scare. The two I read are Jeffrey S. Victor’s Satanic Panic and Peter Hough’s Witchcraft: A Strange Conflict. Victor is an American sociologist, and he takes apart both the claims and gives the sociological reasons behind them. Hough is one-time collaborator of ufologist Jenny Randles, and his book comes at it from a sympathetic viewpoint to modern witches and the occult milieu. He talks about the political beliefs of modern occultists. These naturally range all over the political spectrum, but the majority are Lib Dems or supporters of the Green Party and keen on protecting the environment. And far from sacrificing babies or animals, those I knew were more likely to be peaceful veggies than evil monsters straight from the pages of Dennis Wheatley or Hammer Horror.
The 1990s were also a period of crisis for the comic, which went into a spiral of decline as their best talent was stolen by DC for their Vertigo adult imprint. There was a succession of editors, who, flailing around for some way to halt the decline, blamed the remaining creators. They were increasingly critical, and seemed to be encouraging the abuse letters being sent to them from what seemed to be a small minority of fans. There were also plans to interest TV and Hollywood in developing 2000AD characters in film. Mills and Wagner were horrified to find they were giving away the rights dirt cheap – in one case as low as pound. The comic was close to collapse, but was eventually saved by Rebellion and its current editor.
More Nazis and Holocaust deniers again, I’m afraid. But this is very relevant, as it compliments the other information I’ve found showing the profound links between Libertarianism and neo-Nazism.
In this half-hour segment from The Majority Report, Seder’s producer and occasional presenter, Michael Brooks, talks to Mark Ames, the senior editor of Pando Daily, about how he found out that the Koch Brother’s magazine, Reason, published pro-Apartheid and Holocaust Denial pieces in the 1970s. The Koch brothers are oil billionaires. They’re probably America’s richest men, with a net worth of $100 billion. And they’ve been involved in rightwing politics since the 1960s/70s. They were two of the founders of the Libertarian party in the 1970s, which campaigns for the absolute dismantlement of whatever remains of the American welfare state, massive privatization and the paring down of the federal government to the barest minimum. All in the interests of free trade, capitalism and property.
Ames states that he and his colleague, Yashler, started researching the Kochs after they were kicked out of Russia. They had been active there exposing the oligarchs and their murky involvement and connections to politics. This went too far for Putin and the Russian authorities, and they were expelled. Back in the Land of the Free, Ames and Yashler became interested in the Kochs and their political activities because they looked very much like same type of phenomenon: just another pair of oligarchs, meddling and perverting politics. But they found out that the pair were more seriously committed than most oligarchs.
They also found references to Koch’s having published Holocaust denial literature in the Libertarian party’s magazine, Reason. The Libertarians had tried to remove all records of it, and they had trouble hunting it down, but eventually they found it. It was from 1976, when the magazine published an entire edition devoted to denying the Holocaust. Ames mentions the names of some of the people published in that issue, and their connections to extreme right-wing and neo-Nazi movements. One of them was a British member of the National Front. The issue is now online, apparently, and he showed it to Deborah Lipstadt, the expert on Holocaust Denial. She said it was a list of nearly everyone involved in this pernicious attack on history.
He also found that at the same time, Reason was also publishing articles praising Apartheid in South Africa. When Ames published his articles on the promotion of Holocaust Denial and Apartheid, in both cases the magazine’s article came back to make a kind of non-denial that they had done so. They said that they had published the pieces denying the Holocaust as part of their commitment to academic freedom, but weren’t Holocaust deniers. They also claimed that they weren’t in favour of Apartheid, and had also published articles against it. In fact, the article they cited for this merely argued that South Africa, with its minimal labour legislation and regulation of industry, was a country enjoying a high level of freedom according to their Libertarian criteria. They also promoted tourist visits to the country. This was despite the fact that the Black population was very definitely unfree, forced into the Bantustans, where they suffered massive poverty and malnutrition, resulting in an appallingly high death rate.
The magazine’s and party’s attitudes only changed in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan. The Koch brothers want to push politics further to the right. They found that their ideas had now entered the mainstream with Reagan, with the exception of the racist and Nazi ideas. So they issued a statement complaining that these ideas were too popular, and dropped them so that they weren’t used to discredit the rest of their squalid programme.
Ames states that the Kochs published the Holocaust material as part of their ideological programme of rolling back Roosevelt’s New Deal. They want to destroy the minimal welfare legislation FDR introduced. However, it’s actually extremely popular because it has helped millions of Americans. To attack the New Deal, they therefore have to try and discredit FDR and present him as a monster. And that means attacking America’s entry in the Second World War. America did not enter the War to defend the Jews, but the Holocaust is clearly one of the strongest justifications for it. And so the Kochs and their collaborators wanted to discredit the Holocaust, just as they spread daft conspiracy theories claiming that FDR was somehow responsible for, or knew in advance, about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.
Ames also states that they have an inverted idea of freedom, in which FDR is a Communist monster, as is MLK, who they’ve tried smearing as an agent of Moscow. Brooks and Ames agree, however, that MLK did have extreme views regarding the nationalization of industry. He did, and it’s one of the things, along with his deep criticism of American capitalism and racism, that’s conveniently left out of the modern cult surrounding him. They’re too extreme for right, despite remaining highly pertinent to today’s political situation with the political power of the big corporations and resurgent racism. They’ve also twisted and perverted the idea of who’s elite. They’ve tried to make it mean a public bureaucrat. In fact, it means the rich and propertied. Thus they’ve tried to turn FDR into a monster of statist power, like Adolf Hitler and a determined foe of freedom, even if this is the reverse of what he did by benefiting the American people with his welfare programmes.
Ames states that what made the public of Holocaust denial literature in Reason possible was the disordered and confused state of American politics at the time. Many left-wing ideas were floating around and looked like being accepted. Americans wanted the end of the Cold War, and there was even a feeling that the CIA would be abolished. The Koch brothers caught the mood, and tried to exploit it by introducing Holocaust denial and Libertarianism as two more radical ideas that should now be considered freely along with the other, left-wing ideas. And the Kochs weren’t alone in publishing Holocaust denial material. A whole slew of other right-wing thinktanks also did so, including the Cato Institute.
And he also points out that before the Neo-Cons arose, many of whose members were Jewish, Jews were most often associated with the Left and socialism. One of the founders of the Neo-Con movement actually wrote a piece asking why Jews were so against capitalism. Ames states that this attitude survives today, and that he has been called a ‘cultural Marxist’, which he sees as another anti-Semitic code word for ‘Jew’.
This little bit is important, as it adds to the information I’ve found already showing how Libertarianism is morphing into outright Fascism. Reichwing Watch has put up a series of pieces, including testimony from former Libertarians, showing how the Libertarian organisations are full of real White supremacists and Nazis. This has gone so far that the Black Libertarian YouTuber, ‘That Guy T’, has made enthusiastic videos about the emergence of what he calls ‘Anarcho-Fascism’. In fact, Italian Fascism was an extreme right-wing revision of anarcho-syndicalism. The corporate state is what you get when former Syndicalists decide that they actually like the state and big business, and despise working class trade unions. The Spanish Fascists tried to get the Syndicalists to join them in the Spanish Civil War by stressing their common origins and rejection of parliamentary democracy. The syndicalists remained true to their principles, and told them where they could stick it.
The Libertarians have got inside the Republican Party, and they’re also over here, influencing the Tories and UKIP. And their British counterparts have been as every bit sympathetic to South American Fascists as they have been. Back in the 1990s the Freedom Association, or one of the Libertarian organisations in the Tory party, invited the head of one of Rios Montt’s death squads from El Salvador to their annual dinner as guest of honour. And one of the members of this British Libertarian outfit was the founder of the Guido Fawkes blog, now ranting about anti-Semitism in the Labour party. The accusation that Labour has a particular problem with Jews is a smear by the Blairites and the Israel lobby. In the case of Guido, it’s pure hypocrisy coming from someone, who was part of an organization that admired and lauded Fascist butchers and torturers. Just as the Libertarians and Monetarists in America, as Ames and Brooks comment, proudly embraced Chile and the other Fascists in South America.
The times’ long past when Libertarian ideas should have been expelled from the mainstream. They, and the people that make these claims, should be expelled from decent political debate and activism.
This shows that the Nazi element in Libertarianism isn’t a recent aberration. It’s always been there, as part of the Libertarians’ reactionary programme against welfare legislation, democracy and the state. The Libertarians have always tried to claim that they are just another form of anarchism, but one which rejects communal ownership of property in favour of capitalism. But as this shows, they’ve always had a Fascistic dimension.
As for all the right-wing ideologues, who immediately denounce anything vaguely left or progressive as ‘cultural Marxism’, without having any idea what that really means, Ames’ statement that the term is just another anti-Semitic code word throws it back in their face. Many of those, who use it try to smear socialism and the Left by claiming that Hitler’s Nazis were socialists. They weren’t. But if the term is seen as a form of anti-Semitic abuse, then it means that those, who use it to attack the left are also anti-Semitic, thus reversing the accusation and turning it back on them.
The Independent yesterday carried a bizarre story about the claim by an unnamed general that the armed forces would revolt if Jeremy Corbyn became Prime Minister. The article began
There would be very little support for a military coup if Jeremy Corbyn won the next election, a poll has found.
An unnamed British army general told the Sunday Times newspaper last month that the Labour leader could face a “munity” from senior military officers, “by whatever means possible, fair or foul”.
But a YouGov poll found that only nine per cent of the population would be sympathetic to a coup if Mr Corbyn became Prime Minister.
British Army ‘could stage mutiny under Corbyn’, says general
“The Army just wouldn’t stand for it. The general staff would not allow a prime minister to jeopardise the security of this country and I think people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul to prevent that. You can’t put a maverick in charge of a country’s security,” the general told the newspaper at the time.
Does anybody else find it more than a little strange that a military coup against a democratically-elected political leader can be even considered, here in the United Kingdom?
It is extremely bizarre, though it may not be quite so alarming as it first appears. Firstly, the general is talking about protests by military staff and mass resignations, with the possibility of a coup. The army has protested against decisions by politicians before. I was told by an ex-army friend at College that the army had organised a mass meal at Stonehenge in protest against cuts in military expenditure and mass redundancies by Thatcher’s government. This seems far more likely than any kind of coup, or even, it has to be said, of mass resignations by disgruntled military staff.
The mere talk about a coup does, however, bring back the days in the 1970s, when MI5 and the head of the CIA, James Jesus Angleton, were convinced that Harold Wilson was a Communist spy. Among the others so convinced was one Margaret Thatcher, then merely a Conservative MP. There were rumours of private armies being set up to counter the threat of a Soviet-backed take over by Wilson’s Red troops. As industrial discontent deepened, even the Times started mooting the idea of a coup and the replacement of Wilson’s administration by a caretaker government including more moderate members of the Labour party, like Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins.
It also reflects some of the hysteria amongst the Republicans in America, who are also talking about coups. The Young Turks in this video, posted on the 12th September this year, discuss a poll which showed that 43% of Republicans would support a military coup against a government. 41% of Americans generally would also support a coup against a government that was beginning to violate the constitution. Cenk Uyghur, the Turks’ main anchor, states that it’s only progressives that oppose a military dictatorship in America, and actually stand up for the values of the Constitution.
Now, an awful lot of Republicans really are convinced that Obama is closet Muslim-Communist-Nazi infiltrator, intent on setting up a ‘one world dictatorship’ and take their guns away.
Somehow, I don’t think that poll and the British general’s treasonous utterances are entirely coincidental. It looks the general has been infected by the same paranoia as the Republicans on the other side of the pond.
Or, more likely, he thinks the British public is.
It also looks to me very much that the Tories are running a Red Scare campaign against Corbyn. Remember Cameron’s foam-flecked rant denouncing Corbyn as anti-British, and their claims that he supports Islamist terrorism? The general’s comments seem to be another attempt to undermine Corbyn’s popularity by presenting him as a dangerous subversive, in league with Britain’s enemies. Cameron attempted to pass that off as reality by misquoting Corbyn as opposing the CIA assassination of bin Laden. Corbyn did oppose it, but not because he supported al-Qaeda, but simply because he wanted the terrorist brought to trial for his crimes.
The Tories are trying to smear Corbyn, and this bizarre remark by an unnamed general is part of it. It also reflects badly on the Times, which has a history of smearing left-wing politicians. Remember the allegation that Michael Foot was a KGB agent, codenamed ‘Boot’? That was also rubbish. So is this, but it does show a certain desperation by the Dirty Digger. In his career as a press baron, Murdoch has shown himself far more of a threat to British democracy, freedom of speech and open and responsible government than Corbyn ever has.
There’s been talk this week of Labour forming some kind of pact with the SNP. Some of this has come from the SNP themselves, who have been keen to show their voters that a vote for them will still leave Scotland with power in Westminster through a weakened Labour party forced into coalition with them. Sturgeon’s predecessor, Alex Salmond, was heard at one point making a joke that he was already writing Labour’s budget.
Much of this also comes from the Tories, who are trying to scare the electorate with the prospect of a Labour/SNP coalition raising taxes and breaking up the three-hundred year union between England, Wales and Scotland. This reached its most extreme point so far, when the Mail on Sunday quoted Theresa May as declaring that this was Britain’s greatest constitutional crisis since abdication.
Even the guests on Andrew Marr’s show this morning thought that this was going too far, and smacked of desperation by the Tories.
Mike over at Vox Political has this article on it, Mockery of May and the Mail: Worst crisis since when? Mike points out the irony of this headline. A coalition between the SNP and Labour, which Ed Miliband has said will not happen, is deemed by the Mail to be worse than the abdication of Edward VIII, a Nazi supporter. The same Daily Heil was that was run by a Nazi sympathiser with a hatred of Jews at the same time.
The twitterati have also found the Mail’s hysteria immensely funny, and have produced their own list of crises that are as bad or worse as the abdication. Like having to tell Jeremy Clarkson his dinner’s not ready. Or finding out that Button Moon wasn’t real. Even John Prescott cracked a joke at the paper’s expense, tweeting about how he had to eat fish and chips without vinegar.
Mike goes on to quote the Guardian’s Patrick Wintour, who said May was entitled to her opinion, but she was wrong to impugn the legitimacy of a free and fair election.
The cartoonist Gary Baker also stated that it was a good job May didn’t have real issues to deal with, like child abuse, otherwise her comments would seem puerile.
The Mail, of course, has a very long history of making hysterical claims about the effects of a Labour government. Remember how a decade ago there were reports of an asteroid out in space that was poised to smash into Earth, ending life as we know it? Private Eye spoofed the Mail by producing a mock Daily Mail headline declaring that due to the asteroid, house prices would plummet and Labour was to blame. Which pretty much describes the Mail’s fixation with mortgages, house prices and the Labour party.
Behind May’s comment there are some very sinister implications. By declaring a coalition between SNP and Labour a crisis of the same type as the abdication, as Patrick Wintour points out, she seems to imply that the results of an election between the two would be invalid. If that’s the case, then what is she implicitly suggesting? That the election result should be declared null and void? New elections held, until the ‘right’ party won, and the union was safe once again? Or perhaps she thinks that, in the event of such a coalition, Cameron, Farage and Clegg should seize power at the head of the army, and rule as a military junta? Thatcher was a big fan of General Pinochet after all, and Cameron strikes me as a man, who would just love to be Britain’s General Franco. And if the Scots ever voted overwhelmingly in favour of independence, would May then recommend that the army should be sent in to stop them seceding?
Now I don’t actually think the Tories believe any of this. It’s just rhetoric to scare the voters, just like all the scare stories in the past about Labour being really a front for the Communist party, ready to turn Britain into a Soviet satellite. Frederick Forsythe, one of Thatcher’s favourite novelists, wrote a book about that way back in the 1990s. Needless to say, Maggie liked it enormously, as it reinforced her own bonkers paranoid suspicions about the British Left.
The Soviet Union, alas for the Tories, has vanished along with the rest of the Communist bloc. And as most of the Russian oligarchs are now funding the Tories, they can’t run another Zinoviev letter scare, like they did with the Sun in 1987. So they’re reduced to running bizarre headlines like this in Daily Fail.
It’s ridiculous, but the superpatriots in the Tory party will believe it. Along with the Kippers. In a recent interview with the Scottish Herald, David Coburn, the controversial UKIP politico declared that living in Scotland was like Communist Czechoslovakia. Somehow, I can’t see anyone who really grew up in Communist Eastern Europe agreeing. Like the Czechs and Slovaks, who have come over here since their countries joined the EU.
The Conservative party is always keen to watch for and denounced supposed left-wing bias in the BBC. There is an entire website, Biased BBC, which is full of such accusations. The Conservatives have, however, used their influence when in power to censor and suppress any material of which they didn’t approve. I’ve already blogged about how Thames TV lost its broadcasting licence because of Thatcher’s disapproval of the World in Action documentary, ‘Death on the Rock’. Another documentary that incurred Thatcher’s displeasure was the Panorama edition, ‘Maggie’s Militant Tendency’. Mainstream political parties and organisations, such as Labour, are frequently targeted for infiltration by extremists, such as the various Communist sects. Called ‘revolutionary entryism’ by the extreme Left, the process is designed to allow the smaller, more extreme party to be able to take over its larger, more mainstream host. The extremists are thus able get into power, which they could not do on their own behalf. The nascent Communist party tried these tactics in Weimar Germany when the SPD split following the Council Revolution of 1919. The Communists tried to infiltrate the more extreme, break-away faction, the USPD, with the intention of breaking it up. This would remove the party as an alternative to the Communists. At the same time they hoped to radicalise the more extreme members of the USPD, and so get them to join the Communist party. It didn’t work, and the USPD eventually reunited with the parent party, the SPD, the German equivalent of the Labour party.
Similar tactics were tried in the ’70s and ’80s by other Marxist groups, which tried to get into the British Labour party. Harry Conroy records in his biography of Jim Callaghan (London: Haus Publishing Ltd 2006) hearing a conversation between a Maoist and another extremist about how they intended to infiltrate the Labour party. In the 1980s there was the controversy over the activities within Labour of the Militant Tendency, a radical group, which seemed intent on rigging elections and other activities in order to seize power within the party. Eventually they were expelled by the then leader, Neil Kinnock. This was, however, used by the Conservatives to show that Labour was full of splits, with a weak leadership, and that it had been infiltrated by ‘Reds’. Once Labour got in, these infiltrators would use their power to set up a Communist dictatorship. It was the classic ‘Red Scare’, and was run by the Sun. It also supplied the basis for one of Frederick Forsythe’s novels, in which MI% agents have to stop a Labour party infiltrated by Communists from gaining power and turning the country into a puppet of the Soviet Union. The plot appears to represent genuine fears on the part of the CIA and MI5. James Angleton, the head of the CIA, believed that Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent, a belief shared by his colleagues in MI5 and in the Conservative party. One of those who bought this rubbish was one Margaret Thatcher. Sadly, the Red scaremongering didn’t end with the suspicions about Wilson. In the 1990s the Times libelled Michael Foot by claiming that he was a Soviet agent codenamed ‘Agent Boot’. So much for the Times as a centre of journalistic excellence.
What was not widely known at the time was that the Conservatives were also afraid that they had similarly been infiltrated by the National Front and other Far-Right organisations. A 1983 report by the Young Conservatives concluded that ‘organised infiltration is a reality’. They identified the Fascist groups that had infiltrated the Party as WISE, Tory Action and the London Swinton Circle, as well as David Irving’s Focus Policy Group. A number of Conservative MPs, which belonged to some of these groups were also suspected of NF membership or sympathies. These included Harvey Proctor, Ronald Bell and Gerard Howarth, as well as George Kennedy Young, a former deputy head of MI6, who had almost taken over the Monday Club in the 1970s, and who was particularly active in Tory Action.
The Tory party was also faced with a series of public scandals where members of the party publicly declared their support for Racial Nationalism and the Far Right. I distinctly remember a report on the Six O’clock News about the leader of either one of the Young Conservative groups or Union of Conservative Students in Northern Ireland, Tinnies, who had publicly embraced the Front’s racism. Tinnies declared of himself and his followers that ‘we are not Fascists. We are Thatcherite achievers. But if Mrs Thatcher does not want us, we will go to the Far Right.’ I’ve heard since that it was because of Fascist infiltration and sympathies amongst the membership that the Tories wound up the Union of Conservative Students, and replaced it with Conservative Future.
Larry O’Hara, a historian of Fascist politics in this period and a staunch anti-Fascist, has argued that there was no organised infiltration of the Tory party in the 1980s. The NF members, who joined the Tories, according to O’Hara, did so due to disillusionment with the NF after its catastrophic performance in the 1979 bye-election. Moreover, according to O’Hara, the actual core membership of the BNP is small, perhaps only about 200 members. Most of its members leave after about two years as they are simply anti-White immigration and have no interest in Fascist ideology. Andrew Brons, then the chairman of the NF, and the leader of the ‘Strasserite’ faction in 1984 vehemently denied that the NF had any such policy. He stated ‘the idea that we, a radical, Racial Nationalist party, should seek to infiltrate the unsavoury corpse of the Conservative party is so ludicrous that is should not need to be denied.’ Nevertheless, at the time the idea that the Fascist fringe had infiltrated the Conservative party was all too credible. Mrs Thatcher’s model of a monetarist state was General Pinochet’s Chile, and she herself was friends with the Chilean dictator. The Fascist future depicted in Moore’s ‘V for Vendetta’ strip seemed all too likely to come true. The BBC’s long-running documentary series, Panorama, investigated the allegations that the Tories had indeed been infiltrated. The resulting programme, ‘Maggie’s Militant Tendency, was not, however, broadcast as Thatcher had it suppressed.
In fact long before the Thatcher administration the membership of the Conservative Party and various Fascist organisations had overlapped. In the immediate period after the First World War Right-wing Tories had formed militantly anti-Socialist, anti-Semitic groups such as the British Fascisti. The first editor of the BNP after it was formed from the merger of the White Defence League and National Labour Party in 1960 was Andrew Fountaine. Fountaine was a Norfolk landowner, who had fought for the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War. Fountaine had been adopted by the Tories in 1949 as their candidate for Chorley. He was later thrown out of the party after he made a speech at the Conservative Party Conference criticising it for allowing Jews to gain important public offices. he then stood as an Independent Conservative in the 1950 election, only losing it by 341 votes. In 1958 he formed his own National Front, which was dissolved at the foundation of the BNP. In the 1970s and 1980s the National Front had a deliberate policy of trying to recruit members of the Conservative party, as well as alienated Whites in inner city areas. David Irving’s Focus Policy Group had made repeated attempts to purchase the mailing list of Conservative activists.
Other links between the Conservatives and the Far Right was through the various anti-immigration groups, such as the Race Preservation Society. These brought together Fascist organisations such as the BNP and Northern League as well as members of the Tory party. They were backed by wealthy private individuals, which allowed them to publish a series of magazines and pamphlets. These included Sussex News, Midland News, the British Independent, New Nation and RPS News. It has been said, however, that the RPS was not a Fascist organisation, but a federation of racial populist, anti-immigrant groups. WISE, whose initials stood for Welsh, Irish, Scots, English, was another racist, anti-immigrant group also maintained contact with the both the Conservative Party and the Fascist fringe. In the 1970s following the immigration to Britain of Asian refugees from Idi Amin’s Uganda, a number of former Conservatives joined the NF, such as John Kingsley Read and Roy Painter. These embarked on a struggle for power within the NF, which culminated in Read replacing Tyndall as chairman in 1975. The Monday Club was another society in which the Conservatives mixed with members of the NF. At an anti-immigration rally in September 1972 held by the Monday Club, the NF provided the stewards and 400 members of the audience. After George Kennedy Young was defeated in his bid to become chairman, the NF was gradually excluded from the Club. The Club ultimately presented their books for examination by Lesley Wooler, of the Jewish 62 group, to make sure there were no more anti-Semites within it. Despite this, the Monday Club still retained a reputation for racism, especially after various anti-immigration rants by Norman Tebbit, one of the Club’s members and member of Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet. So embarrassing is the Club’s reputation that about a decade ago David Cameron officially announced that he was severing the link between the Tory party and the Club.
The Tory party has nevertheless had links and shared members with the extreme Right over the years. This eventually became so embarrassing for Thatcher that she had the Beeb’s investigation into it pulled from the airwaves. This demonstrates the Tory party’s own willingness to use censorship and manipulate the news when th threatens their hold in power. In this respect, they may act precisely like the Fascist organisations from which they are so keen to distance themselves.
Meanwhile, here’s Spitting Image’s satirical suggestion of where Maggie that the idea for her policies.
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It’s on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2DnW5uC1_A.
Sources
Larry O’Hara, ‘Notes from the Underground: British Fascism 1974-92 – Part 1, 1974-83, in Lobster 23: 15-20 (June 1992).
Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1987).
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