19.01.1995

Labour’s communist moles?

COMRADES, it appears that we have got it all wrong. The Labour Party is not a bourgeois workers’ party, which is led by the worst sort of reactionaries imaginable. No. All this time Labour has been plotting with the ex-Soviet Union, to undermine the capitalist state and usher in socialism. Well, some of them. OK, only five, but you have to start somewhere.

Five Labour MPs - Joan Lestor, Frank Allaun, Stan Newens, Joan Maynard, Jo Richardson (deceased) - have been ‘fingered’ by obnoxious young-fogey Rupert Allason, Tory MP for Torbay and supposed ‘spy expert’. He bases his information on ‘cold war’ warrior Brian Crozier’s book Free Agent (who in turn has been chatting to KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky). Allason claims that the ‘Labour Five’ were “agents of influence” who were prepared to put down parliamentary questions at the behest of the KGB (of course it is only a coincidence that this follows so soon after the ‘cash-for-questions’ scandal).

Naturally, this motley-minded bunch of peaceniks, left Labourites and ex-‘official communists’ are outraged by this attack on their patriotic credentials. Joan Lestor, never exactly known for her espousal of revolutionary communism, is now taking legal advice and Frank Allaun protested that, “As far as I know, I have not talked to a KGB man in my life” (The Guardian January 12).

A triumphalist McCarthyite tendency is emerging, which is determined to continue the Cold War by other means (ie, retroactively), and this tendency is characterised by irrationality. Anybody can be targeted and labelled a red, no matter how farcical the claim.

It is not entirely surprising that the Labour Party is edging into the target-sights of that element within MI5, and the top echelons of the civil service and the military, which has a venomous class hatred for the bourgeois workers’ party. Yet we all know that at the end of the day the Labour Party is quite happy to take over the reins of state, which means climbing into bed with the secret services.

Communists will one day publish all the secrets of the bourgeois state, as did the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution. You can guarantee that they will make fascinating reading.

Frank Vincent