This letter in yesterday's Telegraph shocked me, though I should not have been surprised. Angels comes from a long line of conservative trade unionists and supporters of the co-operative movement. There was nothing specifically Labour about either of them at first, and Labour was supposed to be politically representative of the trade union movement as a whole, until the Communist Party of Great Britain set out to infiltrate the Labour Movement and any organisation that might be a feeder to it. My father was one of the last of a trade union membership that was, quite simply, driven out by the communists and crypto communists and their front men and organisations, and their championing of unskilled mass labour.
"SIR - Simon Heffer (Comment, April 25 ) writes that my information that Jack Jones was a Soviet agent “may or may not be true”.
I was his last case officer, meeting him for the final time in 1984 at Fulham, together with his wife, who had been a Comintern agent since the mid-1930s. I handed out to him a small amount of cash. From 1981, I had had the pleasure of reading volumes of his files, which were kept in the British department of the KGB until 1985, when they were passed on to the archive.
Oleg Gordievsky
London SW1"
[At the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth in October 2003, aged 90, Jack Jones received a special award in recognition of his service to the movement. Look at Wiki for Gordievsky]
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5 comments:
Many of the present government are 'ex'-communists. They're all vermin.
I looked at Wiki. Gordievsky was a KGB officer who became a double agent. That is what I remembered.
Are you saying that therefore anything he says is to be disbelieved?
Personally I don't have any problem accepting that Jones was a communist agent. That he was given some sort of award by This Great Movement Of Ours surely doesn't enter into it. Many union types, and many politicians, of that era were more or less openly communist and/or Soviet sympathisers. I really don't follow why you're shocked.
No, 9.24, it is only too horridly credible. And I find being the agent of a foreign power, and answering to their requirements when holding a position of trust in our country very shocking. Intellectual analysis and open campaigning on the basis of it is one thing. Being paid to subvert democratic choices and decisions taken by our countrymen and women by the Soviet Union of all states, and throughout its cruel repressions of the people in eastern Europe, is obscene. Awarding behaviour like that speaks to what New Labour is.
They made Hobsbawm a CH. Fine reward, eh?
Jones had a pernicious effect on my father's life and the lives of so many others like him. Hobsbawm and his kind, though not paid agents of the Soviet Union, had a pernicious effect on the lives of people like me. We went to university and found it widely peopled by the Hobsbawms, Millibands etc., and their circles and pupils. They were not infiltrators but open propagandists for their beliefs and intellectual stances.
Jones was paid by another country to organise the diversion of working people's organisations and the power they gained from combination to the ends of Soviet interest.
I didn't like the marxists and communists - apart from being largely unintelligible to someone from another tradition of thinking they were arrogant and dismissive of English political pragmatism and co-operation. They sought divisiveness, confrontation, and its resolution in their favour as if it were the only way to think and act.
Jones was worse.
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