Done Deal.
“This Jeremy Corbyn, he’s mad isn’t he, with his railing against austerity and being against the Iraq war – which we definitely should have done – and being against bombing Syria and opposing benefit caps and warning against the dangers of immigration controls and wanting to scrap Trident and wanting to provide free education for young British people and challenging sexism and thinking half of MPs should be women and that the Cabinet should be elected and believing in renationalising energy companies and rail so that they can be correctly regulated in harmony with the ecology, and wanting to bring in rent controls in London and build 240,000 more homes each year and reduce the deficit with a progressive tax and reintroduce 50% higher rate tax for high earning people and disagree with the monarchy but saying he won’t fight it.
What an absolute lunatic.”
- Brand X
Jeremy Corbyn (above), a left winger, wants to be the leader of the UK Labour Party.
Can anyone remember Corbyn telling is that 9/11 was an inside job or that ISIS is run by MI6 and its friends?
Is he a fake?
His constituency is linked to widespread child abuse.
In 1986, the UK Member of Parliament Geoffrey Dickens reported allegations of 'child brothels' on a council estate in the London Borough of Islington.
He said that he had received a letter and a tape recording from a resident of the Elthorne Estate claiming that adults on the estate were organising ‘wide-scale’ child abuse involving 40 children, some as young as seven.
Dickens was attacked by the MP for Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn.
In 1986, the UK Member of Parliament Geoffrey Dickens reported allegations of 'child brothels' on a council estate in the London Borough of Islington.
He said that he had received a letter and a tape recording from a resident of the Elthorne Estate claiming that adults on the estate were organising ‘wide-scale’ child abuse involving 40 children, some as young as seven.
Dickens was attacked by the MP for Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn.
Corbyn said Dickens was "getting cheap publicity at the expense of innocent children".
Dickens then said that he had more evidence and was more certain than ever about the truth of his allegations.
Jason Swift
In 1985, 14-year-old Jason Swift was killed by a child-abuse gang.
Jason is believed to have lived in Islington council's Conewood Street children's home.
In 1985, 14-year-old Jason Swift was killed by a child-abuse gang.
Jason is believed to have lived in Islington council's Conewood Street children's home.
(Jersey child abuse link to Islington, London)
Sidney Cooke, Leslie Bailey, Robert Oliver, and Lennie Smith, were imprisoned in 1989 for the manslaughter of Jason Swift.
Cooke and his gang had sexually tortured and prostituted a number of boys.
The gang is believed to have killed at least nine children.[2]
Cooke was sent to prison.
In 1998, Cooke was let out of prison eight years early.
There have been allegations that very powerful people have been involved in a child-abuse ring connected to Islington children's homes.
Sidney Cooke, Leslie Bailey, Robert Oliver, and Lennie Smith, were imprisoned in 1989 for the manslaughter of Jason Swift.
Cooke and his gang had sexually tortured and prostituted a number of boys.
The gang is believed to have killed at least nine children.[2]
Cooke was sent to prison.
In 1998, Cooke was let out of prison eight years early.
There have been allegations that very powerful people have been involved in a child-abuse ring connected to Islington children's homes.
In 1982 Margaret Hodge (nee Oppenheimer) became Islington council leader.
She became a close friend of Tony Blair, who lived in Islington, a few doors away from Hodge.
In February 1990 Liz Davies and David Cofie, senior social workers, discovered evidence of sex abuse of children and reported it to a residents' meeting attended by Mrs Hodge.
In May 1990 Mr Cofie and Ms Davies were told by Lyn Cusack, assistant director of social services, to stop interviewing children about the abuse claims.
On 1 May 1997 Tony Blair moved from Islington to Downing Street.
In June 2003 Mrs Hodge was made minister for Children.
CORBYN AND CHILD ABUSE
In 1992, Corbyn was given clear information about child abuse rings operating in his borough but he reportedly took no action.
In 1992, social workers gave Jeremy Corbyn information about the organised child abuse in his Islington constituency, in London.
Employees of Islington Council came to Corby's constituency office with reports of child sexual abuse, and child trafficking, both linked to Islington Council's children's homes.
In 1985, 14-year-old Jason Swift was killed by a child-abuse gang. Jason is believed to have lived in Islington council's Conewood Street children's home. A close male relative of Baby P reportedly recruited boys from children's homes in Islington for the child-abuse ring. Islington children were reportedly sent to Jersey, the island linked to child abuse.
The social workers also reported to Corbyn on a child brothel called 'The Hot House'.
The social workers also reported that Islington children were being trafficked abroad and that some had apparently been murdered.
Liz DaviesLiz Davies, one of the five social workers who acted as whistleblowers, says: "We had been seeing so, so many 12 to 15-year-olds who were being sexually exploited that we could hardly believe it...
"We discovered that they were being driven around the country in vans.
"I'd personally identified at least 61 potential abuse victims in our small patch of Islington."
Liz davies says: "We were in his office for more than an hour. We shared all of our concerns, including our fears that local children had been murdered by abusers."
Corbyn said he would talk to Virginia Bottomley, the Health Secretary.
dailymail
Demetrious Panton (above), a survivor of abuse, told Corbyn in August 1992 that "very bad things had happened" to him when he'd been living at an Islington care home several years earlier.
Liz Davies and a colleague informed Margaret Hodge (Margaret Oppenheimer), the then leader of Islington Council, about the child sexual abuse.
Hodge ignored their concerns.
Hodge later became one of Tony Blair's government ministers.
Blair lived in islington.
HodgeIn Islington, child abuse rings were operating within all 12 of the borough's children’s homes.
The Labour-run council employed known paedophiles, shredded key documents and dismissed media reports of the child abuse as 'gutter journalism'.
The Labour-run council sacked whistleblowers.
Liz Davies and other whistleblowers received death threats.
Almost 30 council employees accused of child sex crimes were allowed to take early retirement.
They were not subjected to formal investigations or referred to the police.
dailymail
Jeremy Corbyn and Gerry Adams. What do they have in common?Liz Davies and her colleagues expected Corbyn to take action.
Corbyn never wrote to Davies, or telephoned, to acknowledge their meeting.
Corbyn never thanked her for blowing the whistle.
"After that meeting, we never heard another thing," says Davies. "There was no letter. No phone call. I never, ever saw him speak about it.
"In fact, whenever I saw Jeremy afterwards ... I’d always go up to him and say: 'This scandal is still going on, Jeremy.' He'd be very polite, but he never seemed to do anything."
23 years later, Liz Davies has yet to see Corbyn criticise the local politicians, council workers and political allies who allowed the child abuse to happen.
dailymail
Corbyn, second from right.Labour MP John Mann published an open letter accusing Corbyn of 'doing nothing' to prevent the abuse.
Mann wrote: "Your inaction in the 1980s and 1990s says a lot."
In 1986, Corbyn attacked the Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens for drawing public attention to 'a child brothel on Islington's Elthorne housing estate'.
According to Corbyn's supporters: "Jeremy Corbyn called for an independent inquiry into child abuse in Islington at the time, and has taken this strong line ever since."
Did Corbyn call for an inquiry into the Islington scandal in the early Nineties?
Did he take a strong line over reports of child abuse in his borough?
Liz Davies can't remember Corbyn calling for an independent inquiry.
The Mail has been unable to find newspaper cuttings, recorded public statements, or extracts from Hansard, in which Corbyn calls for an independent inquiry.
A spokesman for Corbyn has been unable to identify when or where or when Corbyn might have made such a call for an inquiry, or where a record of it might now be.
dailymail
...
Does MI5 recruit at Adams Grammar School?
Eileen Fairweather was the journalist who, in October 1992, first broke news of the Islington scandal.
She also held a meeting with Corbyn at the time, and provided detailed evidence of the child abuse.
She says that Corbyn never wrote, or called, after the meeting, to thank her.
She says Corbyn took no action.
In August 1992, Demetrious Panton, a survivor of abuse, spoke to Corbyn.
Panton says that Corbyn has been silent on the scandal.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.
Jeremy Corbyn with his former agent Derek Sawyer.
WHISTLEBLOWER ON SATANIC ABUSE; MELANIE SHAW
Whistleblower Melanie Shaw.
In October 1987, children were removed from their families in Nottingham, in England.
In February 1989, a Broxtowe family was charged with multigenerational child sexual abuse and neglect.
There were allegations of Satanic Ritual Abuse.
The following video starts at 1 minute 25 seconds.
..
Melanie is 'being got at' by the police.
..
In the increasingly corrupt UK, the police, local government officials and Members of Parliament are often involved in child abuse rings.
The UK Column knows five women who, having reported paedophile activity, were harassed by the police and Local Authorities, and later 'sectioned' in psychiatric units.
Melanie Shaw would appear to be another such example.
Melanie Shaw, Beechwood Child Abuse Witness, Held ... - UK Column
As a child, Melanie was sexually abused at Nottingham's Beechwood Children’s Home.
On Friday, 11th July 2014, the UK Column reported that Melanie Shaw, a key whistleblowing witness and victim of child abuse, was missing.
Nottinghamshire Chief Constable Chris Eyre
On Monday, 14th July 2014, the UK Column received a call from a friend of Melanie who said that Melanie was being held in Peterborough prison after being picked up by Nottinghamshire police.
Melanie originally approached the UK Column because she wanted to report the rapes, sexual and physical abuse, and psychological intimidation that she and some 100 other young children suffered at Nottingham Beechwood childrens home.
Melanie strongly suspected that the police, Local Authorities and Members of Parliament, were already attempting to cover-up the Beechwood abuse.
Mickey Summers accused Nottingham City and Nottinghamshire County Councils of destroying records 'proving he suffered sexual abuse in local care homes in the 1960s.' child abuse in Nottinghamshire / nottinghampost.com / Protesters demand justice.
It seems pretty clear that we can no longer trust many of our Members of Parliament, many of our police, and many of our social workers.
Sir Jimmy Savile, supplier of children to the elite.
Nottingham is a centre for Satanic Ritual Abuse, an activity used by the security services when they brainwash children to turn them into sex slaves for the elite.
The 1989 case in Nottingham involved 'sex parties' with children under the age of seven.
27 young children were put into care and several adults were jailed.
The children recalled Satanic rituals.
Ritual Abuse - WikiSpooks / Satanic abuse no myth, say experts - The Independent
SRA by ex-FBI
'CHILD SEX' USED TO CONTROL THE WORLD
JASON OWEN; A CHILD ABUSE RING.
The following video starts at 1 minute 25 seconds.
..
Melanie is 'being got at' by the police.
..
In the increasingly corrupt UK, the police, local government officials and Members of Parliament are often involved in child abuse rings.
The UK Column knows five women who, having reported paedophile activity, were harassed by the police and Local Authorities, and later 'sectioned' in psychiatric units.
Melanie Shaw would appear to be another such example.
Melanie Shaw, Beechwood Child Abuse Witness, Held ... - UK Column
As a child, Melanie was sexually abused at Nottingham's Beechwood Children’s Home.
On Friday, 11th July 2014, the UK Column reported that Melanie Shaw, a key whistleblowing witness and victim of child abuse, was missing.
Nottinghamshire Chief Constable Chris Eyre
On Monday, 14th July 2014, the UK Column received a call from a friend of Melanie who said that Melanie was being held in Peterborough prison after being picked up by Nottinghamshire police.
Melanie originally approached the UK Column because she wanted to report the rapes, sexual and physical abuse, and psychological intimidation that she and some 100 other young children suffered at Nottingham Beechwood childrens home.
Melanie strongly suspected that the police, Local Authorities and Members of Parliament, were already attempting to cover-up the Beechwood abuse.Mickey Summers accused Nottingham City and Nottinghamshire County Councils of destroying records 'proving he suffered sexual abuse in local care homes in the 1960s.' child abuse in Nottinghamshire / nottinghampost.com / Protesters demand justice.
It seems pretty clear that we can no longer trust many of our Members of Parliament, many of our police, and many of our social workers.Sir Jimmy Savile, supplier of children to the elite.
On Monday, 14th July 2014, the UK Column received a call from a friend of Melanie who said that Melanie was being held in Peterborough prison after being picked up by Nottinghamshire police.
Melanie originally approached the UK Column because she wanted to report the rapes, sexual and physical abuse, and psychological intimidation that she and some 100 other young children suffered at Nottingham Beechwood childrens home.
Melanie strongly suspected that the police, Local Authorities and Members of Parliament, were already attempting to cover-up the Beechwood abuse.
Mickey Summers accused Nottingham City and Nottinghamshire County Councils of destroying records 'proving he suffered sexual abuse in local care homes in the 1960s.' child abuse in Nottinghamshire / nottinghampost.com / Protesters demand justice.It seems pretty clear that we can no longer trust many of our Members of Parliament, many of our police, and many of our social workers.
Sir Jimmy Savile, supplier of children to the elite.
Nottingham is a centre for Satanic Ritual Abuse, an activity used by the security services when they brainwash children to turn them into sex slaves for the elite.
Ritual Abuse - WikiSpooks / Satanic abuse no myth, say experts - The Independent
The 1989 case in Nottingham involved 'sex parties' with children under the age of seven.
27 young children were put into care and several adults were jailed.
The children recalled Satanic rituals.
SRA by ex-FBI
JASON OWEN; A CHILD ABUSE RING.
"Is there a connection between Rupert Murdoch and the House of Rothschild...?
Interestingly enough, in the history of South Africa, there was a White man of the Jewish religion by the name of Barney Barnato...."
"...who, when the rich Whites decided that he wasn't operating in a certain sort of 'professional' way, all of a sudden, his boat to England, he went overboard.
Rupert Murdoch, the way that he got his start in America was that another White Man of the Jewish religion, Robert Maxwell - who was deep in debt & mystery - went overboard, on his way to.... Somewhere. And Murdoch gathered up his assets."
"Murdoch has unlimited finance - he bought the [LA] Dodgers, didn't he?
He bought Football off of NBC, or whatever.
Murdoch has more money than he has assets - Murdoch's unlimited financing comes from his relationship with De Beers Diamond Mines of Australia, his predominant financier.
That's the connection."
- Bro. Steve Cokely
THE CIA AND NEW LABOUR
The Labour leader Harold Wilson made the following comment about Denis Healey in his memoirs:
"He is a strange person. When he was at Oxford he was a communist. Then friends took him in hand, sent him to the Rand Corporation of America, where he was brainwashed and came back very right wing."
Harold Wilson,
Memoirs: The Making of a Prime Minister, 1916-64 (1986)
MI5 officer Cathy Massiter was instructed to carry out the phone-tapping operation by Tony Crasweller, who also supervised the agency's F4 and F6 sections, which ran agents inside political parties and organisations. At the same time, CND member Stanley Bonnett, a former editor of the CND magazine Sanity, was recruited as an informant by Special Branch, on the instructions of MI5. Bonnett gave the intelligence services minutes of meetings and lists of CND activists throughout the country - lists which the officers told him "would be used for political purposes."
Cathy Massiter gathered material on any left-wing affiliations of CND's leaders. A report was then passed to civil servant John Ledlie, who was seconded to DS19, and he passed it on to Michael Heseltine and Sir Peter Blaker MP, Heseltine's lieutenant in the propaganda campaign. Blaker, in turn, passed the information on to the local Conservative Association of Ray Whitney, former head of the Information Research Department.
As the general election campaign was getting under way, the Blaker/Whitney letter was circulated to prospective Tory candidates. The Daily Mail ran an article entitled CND Is Branded a Tool of the Kremlin, which drew from MI5 smears of the organisation and included allegations attributed to Stanley Bennett. In the same period, the private anti-Communist propaganda group Common Cause, which monitors subversion in industry and the unions, published a pamphlet, The Communist Influence on CND, which had been written under the direction of Charles Elwell, head of MI5's F Branch. Elwell was also responsible for targeting the National Council of Civil Liberties (NCCL) as a subversive group.
"Officers of MI5 have no prerogative to justify any of their actions." - LORD DENNING
MI5 officer Cathy Massiter, who quit the service in disgust over its illegal activities against the left.
THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST LABOUR
On leaving MI5, Charles Elwell went to work for Brian Crozier as an editor and researcher on an anti-Communist news sheet, Background Briefing on Subversion, later known as British Briefing. Echoing MI5's line of action, British Briefing's technique against left-wing Labour MPs was to establish "Communist" guilt by association. Its tone was best expressed with this editorial: "The march of Communism through the trade unions, the Labour Party, local government, religion, education, charity, and the media under the leadership of Communists who may or may not be members of the Communist Party, is what BB is all out. BB seeks to provide those who have the means to expose a Communist threat with clear evidence of its existence."
Among the Labour politicians targeted by British Briefing were Neil Kinnock, shadow health secretary Robin Cook, spokesman for social services Michael Meacher and spokesmen for local government David Blunkett (an ironic list of names considering those MPs' right-wing credentials today). The Labour MP Chris Mullin was singled out for his "perpetual vendetta against British security arrangements", while Derbyshire MP Harry Barnes was labelled as "quite a vigorous Stalinist underminer of British parliamentary democracy". Other organisations were tarred with the Communist brush, notably the charity Shelter (for its "Communist affiliations"), the Institute for Race Relations ("effectively controlled by revolutionary socialists") and the World Council of Churches.
The newsletter was printed by the anti-Communist Industrial Research and Information Service (IRIS), whose parent body had been Common Cause. Copies were circulated to "political leaders, MPs, journalists and others", who were requested to treat it as confidential. British Briefing was funded to the tune of £270,000 over a three year period by Crozier's friend Rupert Murdoch.
The 61 was active in attacking the Labour Party in the run-up to the 1981 general election, with Douglas Eden writing a series of articles for the Daily Telegraph alleging Communist penetration of Labour. Tony Kerpel, a Tory councillor in Camden, designed for the Coalition for Peace Through Security a poster of Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich in 1918 with his piece of paper signed by Hitler, alongside a picture of Labour leader Michael Foot with a piece of paper. The captions under the pictures read: "1938, Neville Chamberlain" and "1981, Michael Foot" with the wording at the foot of the poster stating: "Don't let appeasement cause another World War". The poster was published by Norris McWhirter's Freedom Association.
On February 26th 1985, Crozier met again with Thatcher, when the prime minister asked him to help with a propaganda campaign against the municipal councils, including the Greater London Council (GLC); Crozier suggested a full counter- subversion programme. Also present was the CIA's William Casey, who proposed a "suitably substantial budget" for this rapid expansion of Crozier's UK operations.
Crozier planned action on several fronts, which he called: "penetration, legislation, influence and publicity". An organisation called Campaign Against Council Corruption (CAMACC) was set up, whose director Tony Kerpel was later appointed to the post of special adviser to Kenneth Baker, secretary of state for the environment. In Parliament, CAMACC's main activist was The 61's Edward Leigh MP. CAMACC briefed various peers and drafted speeches for them in relevant debates in the House of Lords. Letters and news coverage were secured in national papers and the councils were branded in much of the British public's imagination as "loony lefties" who were misusing public funds.
With Thatcher's approval, Brian Crozier liaised with Keith Joseph in "certain psychological actions" in the election year of 1987. One move was to brief the television presenter David Frost for a proposed interview with Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Frost met with Crozier at the Connaught Hotel on 6th January, where Crozier supplied a detailed background paper on Kinnock's "views, activities and personal relations in politics". The interview took place on May 24th during the election campaign and Crozier reported that a number of his points were raised by Frost; the interview "made a considerable impact" against Labour.
The 61 produced a booklet The Vision of St. Kinnock, which satirised and slandered the Labour leader. It was distributed to hundreds of Conservative candidates who made "good use" of it in their speeches or election pamphlets. The 61 also supplied to the Liberal Party details of a list of 130 supposedly "hard Left Labour MPs". Liberal leader David Steel published the list under the title Labour's 101 Damnations. For months in the run-up to the election, The 61 continued to provide propaganda material to politically compliant columnists in the national media, including Woodrow Wyatt of the News of the World and The Times, Frank Chapple of the Daily Mail, Bernard Levin and Lord Chalfont.
On 12th June 1987, Margaret Thatcher won her third consecutive term as Prime Minister.
HOW THE CIA TOOK THE TEETH OUT OF BRITISH SOCIALISM
The CIA works systematically to ensure that the socialist parties of all Western countries toe a line compatible with U.S. interests. In Britain in the 1950s, the CIA's manipulation of the right wing of the Labour Party swung the party away from its pledge to nationalisation (enshrined in the celebrated Clause IV), away from nuclear disarmament and back towards a commitment to NATO. This decisive intervention by the Agency could be said to have changed the course of modern British history….
Following the end of World War II, the Labour Party was elected on a platform of extensive domestic social reform, and of peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union in Europe. Fearful of the spread of Communist influence, the right wing of the party, under the new Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, organised themselves around the journal Socialist Commentary, which became their most important mouthpiece. Throughout the post-war period, Labour's Gaitskellite right wing worked closely with MI5, Special Branch and a variety of CIA front organisations to advance its cause and keep the left at bay. Channelled with massive CIA funds, the right grew in confidence and influence, and vigorously campaigned against left-wingers like Aneurin Bevan, whom they denounced as "dangerous extremists".
Socialist Commentary set out to alert the British labour movement to the "growing dangers of international Communism". It was supported by David Williams, the London correspondent of the New Leader, an American anti-Communist publication backed by the CIA. Williams made it his business to join the British Labour Party and to take an active part in the Fabian Society.
In America, the New Leader provided a focus for weekly meetings of professional anti-Communists in the unions, universities and government service. It had a large staff and a world-wide network of overseas correspondents. New Leader began openly to advocate the infiltration of foreign socialist parties. In 1949, it carried a piece by CIA chief Allen Dulles advocating "a commission of internal security to examine subversive activities in the US and to use the institutions of democracy to destroy them"; this was rather like the head of MI5 writing for The Guardian.
In 1954, Denis Healey MP became the New Leader's London Correspondent.
CIA covert financing of the international student movement also began about this time. The student movement was diverging into two factions: those on the left, who supported the Soviet-funded World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) constituted the most organised section and there was no home for right-wingers and social democratic organisations. To aid the right, MI6 and the CIA helped organise and fund the World Assembly of Youth (WAY).
WAY's initial membership was quite broad and included a number of left-wing socialists with no alignment to Moscow. However it was not long before the right asserted itself in the organisation, turning the student movement into an acceptable stamping ground for those wanting to make their name in preparation for parliamentary politics. Labour backbencher and Sunday Mirror columnist Woodrow Wyatt (who had received many IRD funds in the past) described WAY as "an organisation which does extremely valuable propaganda for the free world, without looking like a propaganda organisation" .
WAY was in contact with major establishment figures: a Friends of WAY Society included Conservative prime minister Sir Anthony Eden, ex-Labour prime minister Clement Atlee, Viscount Chandos (ex-colonial secretary) and Lord Mountbatten's wife Edwina. CIA officer Joseph Burkholder-Smith revealed that 10 (the CIA division which handled front groups) was in liaison with MI6 on all its world-wide front operations, in WAY in particular, and that the CIA were manipulating WAY student leaders.
WAY worked through the Colonial Office to extend its influence in Africa, setting up National Committees in Kenya, Mauritius, Sierra Leone, Seychelles and Uganda. The Colonial Office brought WAY events to the attention of the African colonial governments, arranged for WAY film shows and helped pay the travel expenses of the generally poor African delegates.
During the 1950s, WAY's European Youth Campaign received over £1,300,000 of CIA money, the largest proportion of which went to the British affiliate.
Meanwhile, in June 1950, the New Leader's Melvin Lasky helped set up the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a body whose declared purpose was "to defend freedom and democracy against the new tyranny sweeping the world" - namely Communism. Given massive CIA funding, the CCF launched political seminars, conferences, newspapers, periodicals, news services and a wide range of political and cultural activities throughout Western Europe. The CCF was one of the CIA's conduits for funding Brian Crozier's Forum World Features.
CCF also organised world-wide student exchanges and conferences in support of the new anti-Communist youth organisations which were promoted by the CIA.
In 1953, the CCF launched Encounter, a joint Anglo-American monthly journal involving MI6 agent C.M. Woodhouse, a covert action veteran who had been involved in Operation Ajax in Iran (a joint CIA/MI6 plot to overthrow the elected government of Mohammed Mossadeq). The magazine exchanged facilities with Socialist Commentary and used many of the same staff and writers. Encounter became one of the most influential liberal journals in the West.
As the CCF network grew, it embraced many prominent figures in the Labour Party - among them Anthony Crosland, who began attending CCF seminars along with Hugh Gaitskell, Denis Healey, Rita Hinden, Daniel Bell and a bevy of American and European politicians and academics.
Crosland's book The Future of Socialism was a major new political thesis which had been influenced by CCF conferences, in which he argued that growing affluence had radically transformed the working class in Europe and thus Marx's theory of class struggle was no longer relevant. The book was immediately adopted as the gospel of Labour's new leadership under Hugh Gaitskell.
During the 1950s, Gaitskell and his friends in the Socialist Commentary group adopted the argument forcibly put in the New Leader that a strong united Europe was essential to prevent the West from Russian attack.
They received support from a New York-based group called the American Committee on United Europe, whose leadership included General Donovan, wartime head of the OSS (the fore-runner of the CIA), George Marshall, the U.S. Secretary of State, and Allen Dulles of the CIA.
This high-powered CIA-funded pressure group financed the so-called European Movement, headed by a friend of Hugh Gaitskell's, Joseph Retinger, who promoted select gatherings of European and American politicians, businessmen, aristocrats, top civil servants and military leaders. Founder members of the movement were Hugh Gaitskell and Denis Healey, along with such diverse characters as the president of Unilever and Sir Robert Boothby.
There were also U.S. labour attachés based in the London American embassy. One of them, Philip Kaiser, described his years in London in his memoirs: "The labour attaché is expected to develop contacts with key leaders in the trade union movement and to influence their thinking and decisions in directions compatible with American goals...."
The CIA ran the anti-Communist international trade union movement, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), and its various spin-off groups, such as the trade secretariats. The TUC itself helped fund the ICFTU through its affiliation fees. By the mid 1950s, nearly a quarter of the TUC's annual budget was going to the ICFTU.
No-one has yet assembled the full data of trade union officials and Labour politicians who took advantage of the education programmes and freebie trips run by American intelligence for sympathetic people in the labour movement, but it probably runs into thousands. In other words, much of the international political landscape of the post-war era in Britain consisted of U.S.-funded or directed political propaganda/psychological warfare projects. And this was on top of the formal military-diplomatic-financial influences of NATO, the IMF, World Bank, GATT, the UN, etc.
By the late 1950s, Anthony Crosland was acknowledged as the Labour Party's chief theoretician and his role in the CCF was expanded to "encourage sympathetic people" to participate in CCF-sponsored seminars, congresses and private gatherings all around the world. Hugh Gaitskell and other Labour politicians travelled to CCF functions in Europe, New Delhi, Rhodes, Australia and Japan, where they lectured on the theme that traditional socialism was irrelevant in a modern capitalist society. They spent years working to remodel European socialism in the image of the American Democratic Party, and this was backed up by the fullest publicity in Encounter, Socialist Commentary, Preuves, Der Monat and other CCF journals.
The day after Labour's defeat in the 1959 general election, Roy Jenkins, Anthony Crosland and Douglas Jay were among a small group who met with Gaitskell to propose that Labour drop its old commitment to traditional socialism, particularly Clause IV which pledged "common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange".
In February 1960, William Rogers, general secretary of the Fabian Society, set up a steering committee with Crosland, Roy Jenkins, Patrick Gordon Walker, Jay and some sympathetic journalists. This group started to work on a manifesto to be released in the event of Gaitskell's defeat in the defence debate at the party conference that year.
Gaitskell was indeed defeated and CND won its campaign of committing the Labour Party to a neutralist programme. With widespread press coverage, Rogers and his friends immediately released 25,000 copies of their manifesto, which appealed to Labour Party members to rally behind Gaitskell and "fight and fight and fight again". The group set up the Campaign for Democratic Socialism (CDS)and with large sums of CIA money channelled through the CCF, they were able to take a permanent office and appoint paid staff. Given the full support, resources and unlimited financial backing of the CIA, the CDS had great advantages over their opponents in the party, who had to rely entirely on unpaid volunteer workers. At the CDS's disposal were field workers in the constituencies and unions, whom it supported with travelling expenses, literature and organisational support, as well as supplying tens of thousands of free copies of the manifesto, pamphlets and other CDS publications, plus a regular bulletin, Campaign, which was circulated free of charge to a large mailing list. All of this was produced without a single subscription-paying member.
CDS achieved its objectives: the trade unions cracked under the pressure and the Labour Party returned to its support for NATO at the party conference in 1961. The Campaign for Democratic Socialism - with its CIA backing - was the most effective pressure group the Labour Party had ever seen. Its influence was out of all proportion to its original support among party members and its financial backers could justly claim to have changed the course of British politics.
George Thomson - a pillar of the CDS, who later resigned from Labour's front bench with Roy Jenkins to form the more right-wing Social Democratic Party (SDP) - said of Rita Hinden: "In the 50s, her ideas were greeted with outraged cries of "Revisionism!" But by the mid 60s, the revisionism of Social Commentary had become the orthodoxy of the Labour Movement".
The Labour Party apparatus remained firmly in Gaitskellian hands over the following decades, particularly the International Department of which Denis Healey had been head until he won his seat as an MP. In 1963, The Labour Party's Organisation Subcommittee was chaired by George Brown, one of the CIA's sources in the Labour Party.
In 1965, Healey's old post was taken over by J. Gwyn Morgan, who had been elected President of the National Union of Students on an anti-Communist ticket. Morgan became General Secretary of the International Student Conference, in charge of finance, in which capacity he negotiated with the CIA's foundations which supplied the bulk of the organisation's funds, and supervised expenditure of the several million dollars devoted to world-wide propaganda.
Morgan visited over 80 different countries in five years and got to know personally many heads of government and leaders of the world's principal social democratic parties. In 1965, he became head of Labour's Overseas Department and two years later he became Assistant General Secretary of the Labour Party.
Around this time, a group of Labour leaders, including Hugh Gaitskell and George Brown, made a direct approach to MI5 for records of tapped telephone conversations of Labour left-wingers, bank-account records of payments from Soviet organisations, or names of East European contacts which could be used to smear their left-wing opponents in the party. Informal flows of information between MI5 and Labour's right-wing became more common, and over the years MI5 recruited freely in Labour's headquarters and among the parliamentary party.
The Labour Party, moulded by American and British intelligence in the Gaitskell image, with its policies firmly rooted in Crosland's manifestos, became the programme of the next Labour government under Harold Wilson.
Michael Stewart, foreign secretary in the Wilson government during the escalation of U.S. military action in Vietnam, and Sam Watson, the powerful Durham miners' leader and ally of Gaitskell, were among those who have since been identified as CIA "agents of influence."
Charles Clarke, who was Neil Kinnock's closest political adviser throughout his years as labour leader, had a background as chair of the World Youth Council, which had well-documented CIA links.
The CIA was also involved in ensuring Labour's commitment to Britain's entry into the Common Market through the afore-mentioned European Movement, the elite international pressure group secretly funded by the CIA, which took most of the credit for the founding of the Common Market. The European Movement wanted a United States of Europe and the rearmament of Germany, which the U.S. government saw as a key to winning the Cold War with Russia.
The European Youth Campaign (EYC) was set up as the most active component of the European Movement in 1951. In one year alone it organised 1,899 sessions and conferences, 900 cinema shows, distributed 1.8 million brochures, staged 21 exhibitions and secured 2,400 minutes of radio time for the cause of European unity. The secretary of the British section of EYC was Maurice Foley, later a Labour MP and minister. Virtually every penny he, and the campaign's other organisers spent, came from the CIA. In eight years, £1.34 million of covert funds were passed on to the EYC by the CIA's American Committee on a United Europe.
SPLITTING THE LABOUR PARTY
American intelligence played a major hand in the formation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). The inspirers of the SDP were Labour's Douglas Eden (who had previously worked for Brian Crozier's Shield as a researcher) and Stephen Haseler (who taught politics at the City of London). Both met with Crozier at his office while he was running the ISC and afterwards. The three agreed with the creation of a new political party in Britain, with the objective of attracting Labour's right-wing, thereby isolating the left and "cutting it down to size".
Eden and Haseler founded the Social Democratic Alliance (SDA), which had some 700 members, mostly municipal councillors, all over the United Kingdom. Crozier gave financial assistance to the SDA and arranged with Eden and Haseler to approach Roy Jenkins to lead their proposed new party. At the end of February 1981, four Labour right-wingers - Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and William Rodgers -announced the creation of a Council for Social Democracy and left the Labour Party to form the SDP. Crozier lays the blame for the failure of the SDP to fully achieve his aims on Roy Jenkins' policy of aiming not so much to split Labour as to attract moderate anti-Thatcher MPs from the Conservative Party. In any case, the SDP experiment could be regarded as succeeding in the CIA's designs because it divided the anti-Tory vote at the following elections and contributed to the Conservatives' retention of power.
EXPOSURE
In 1967, investigations in the U.S. revealed that the CIA had manipulated the National Student Association since the early 1950s, with the active connivance of the Association's elected officers, and that CIA money had been channelled through a group of dummy foundations, such as the Fund for Youth and Student Affairs, which supplied most of the budget of the International Student Conference, which in turn was found to have been set up by British and American intelligence to counteract Communism.
Michael Josselson of the Congress for Cultural Freedom admitted that he had been channelling CIA money into the CCF ever since its foundation - at the rate of about $1 million a year - to support some twenty journals and a world-wide programme of political and cultural activities. After these disclosures, the CCF changed its name to the International Association for Cultural Freedom. Michael Josellson resigned but was retained as a consultant and the Ford Foundation agreed to pick up the bills.
The exposure of CIA financial aid to WAY headquarters led to the organisation becoming discredited and the British National Committee was disaffiliated in 1977. The revelation of its network of front organisations persuaded the CIA that its future lay in more discrete operations with better cover. Lots of covert psychological warfare and propaganda think tanks began to appear on the scene; Brian Crozier's Institute for the Study of Conflict was a pioneer in this field.
THE CIA AND NEW LABOUR
CIA-backed fronts such as the Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding (LCTU) continued to attract right-wing trade union and Labour Party figures well into the 1980s. LCTU was formed "in order to develop a better understanding of the objectives and democratic values of the Western Alliance in the ranks of socialist and trade union movements in Europe and their counterparts in the United States"; it distributes a news service amongst the trade union movement and provides regular seminars and conferences for senior trade unionists and politicians. Speakers at LCTU's conferences have included Dr John Reid MP (later to become Tony Blair's armed forces minister) Peter Mandelson MP, and George Robertson MP (Blair's defence secretary).
Another example of infiltration into the Labour Party was the case of MI6 officer Margaret "Meta" Ramsay. She had attended Glasgow University and had been elected President of the Scottish Union of Students. In 1962, she became associate secretary of the CIA-front the International Student Conference at Leiden, Holland. From 1965 to 1967, Ramsay was secretary of the Fund for International Student Co-operation, which was later identified as another recipient of CIA funds. She became an active member of the Labour Party, attending conferences where party officials were "unaware" of her intelligence connections. In late 1981, she was even on the short-list to become the new chief of MI6. (In the event, Sir Colin McColl, who was due to retire as chief in September 1992, was asked by John Major to stay on for another two years). In August 1992, Margaret Ramsay was appointed to the position of foreign policy adviser to Labour leader John Smith, who was a friend of hers since university days. As well as raising a few eyebrows, this appointment begs the question: What was the leader of the Labour Party doing employing a known high-ranking MI6 agent in such a senior position?
With friends like these, the opportunities that the intelligence services have had for manipulating Labour politicians have plainly been many and varied.
Today, Tony Blair maintains the CIA's designs for the Labour party, with a commitment to the largest military budget in Europe and an unswerving allegiance to NATO. The assortment of transatlantic study trips, scholarships, trade union "fellowships" at Harvard and seminars paid for by U.S. agencies and the CIA continue to mould and influence Labour Party policies. For example, both Gordon Brown and John Monks (an important Blair ally as head of the TUC) were welcomed by the secretive Bilderberg Group (one of the key organisations of the European-American elite.) Brown and his economic adviser Edward Balls were both at Harvard. David Miliband, Blair's head of policy, was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 1986, Tony Blair went on one of the myriad of U.S.-sponsored trips to America that are available for promising MPs and came back a supporter of the nuclear deterrent. In 1993, he went to a meeting of the Bilderberg Group.
Jonathan Powell, Blair's foreign policy advisor, used to work in the British embassy in Washington and is suspected by some of having been the liaison officer between British intelligence and the CIA. In 1976, Peter Mandelson was Chair of the British Youth Council, which began as the British section of the World Assembly of Youth, which as we have seen, was set up and financed by the CIA. By Mandelson's time in the mid-1970s, the British Youth Council was said to be financed by the Foreign Office, though this was thought to be a euphemism for MI6.
A variety of senior Labour politicians - Peter Mandelson, George Robertson, Mo Mowlam, Chris Smith, Elizabeth Symons, George Robertson and Blair's chief of staff Jonathan Powell, were members of the British-American Project for the Successor Generation (BAP), a little-known but highly influential transatlantic network of "chosen" politicians, journalists and academics. The fingerprints of British and American intelligence are everywhere to be found amongst the network of BAP members; regular attenders at BAP meetings are defence and security specialists, NATO advisers, Defence Ministry think-tank people and counter-insurgency experts. Also included is Jonathan Powell, the career diplomat who now runs Tony Blair's No. 10 office as chief of staff.
Powell is the youngest of the Powell brothers, of whom Charles, the eldest, was Margaret Thatcher's foreign policy specialist. At BAP conferences, subjects discussed include such titles as 'Sharing the Defense Burden' and 'The Welfare State on Trial'.
The first recorded mention of the need for a "successor generation" came in 1983 when President Reagan spoke to a select group, including Rupert Murdoch, Sir James Goldsmith and senior CIA officers, in the White House. Reagan told them: "Last June, I spoke to the British Parliament, proposing that we - the democracies of the world - work together to build the infrastructure of democracy. This will take time, money and efforts by both government and the private sector. We need particularly to cement relations among the various sectors of our societies in the United States and Europe. A special concern will be the successor generations, as these younger people are the ones who will have to work together in the future on defense and security issues."
BAP is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts of Philadelphia, which was established in 1985 by the billionaire J. Howard Pew, a devoted supporter of the Republican Party and other right-wing groups. These include the far-right Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a foundation which was set up by former CIA head William Casey to sponsor books "widely regarded as influencing Reagan Administration economic and social thinking." One such book was Losing Ground by Charles Murray, the extreme-right inventor of the term "underclass" and advocate of the abolition of welfare.
In the records of the foundation of its "successor generation", BAP describes regular meetings of "24 Americans and 24 Britons aged between 28 and 40 who, by virtue of their present accomplishments, had given indication that, in the succeeding generation, they would be leaders in their country and perhaps internationally."
In its 1997 newsletter, BAP warmly welcomed the elevation of its members to the Blair Cabinet: "Congratulations from all of us!"
All of Blair's new political appointees at the Ministry of Defence, including Defence Secretary George Robertson, have been members or associated with the Atlantic Council and its labour movement wing, the Trades Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding (TUCETU), which formed from the afore-mentioned Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding (LCTU), organisations that are backed by the CIA.
TUCETU's membership has included Doug Mc Avoy (general secretary of the National Union of Teachers), Lord Richard (Labour leader in the House of Lords), Lord (John) Gilbert (Tony Blair's defence procurement minister), right-wing trade union leaders such as Bill Jordan (head of the International Confederation of Free Trade Union, the CIA's chief labour movement operation), Lord (Eric) Hammond and Lord (Frank) Chapple, and former Portuguese president Mario Soares (recently revealed to have been a CIA asset).
TUCETU also incorporates Peace Through NATO, the group central to Michael Heseltine's covert MoD campaign against CND in the 1980s. It receives over £100,000 a year from the Foreign Office, as well as payments from CIA-backed trusts. TUCETU chair Alan Lee Williams was a Labour defence minister under Callaghan, who defected to the SDP. He now describes himself as a "defence consultant".
CONCLUSION
This is just some of the complicated network of British and U.S. intelligence's efforts to infiltrate and manipulate the right-wing of the trade union movement and the Labour Party in recent decades, and there are grave lessons here for the left.
Under the pretence of a media with freedom of expression, the intelligence services have spoon-fed the British public a carefully-controlled political diet of "news" which controls their attitudes and responses to strikes, protests, wars and general elections, while the broad domestic and foreign policies of the Labour Party that the CIA helped establish (pro-NATO, pro-free market economy, anti-socialist etc.) have remained in place to this day.
Robin Ramsey of Lobster magazine, which has uncovered much of Blair's clandestine transatlantic intelligence connections, describes New Labour as just the latest manifestation of the party's social democratic tendency, which has existed since the Cold War, running from Hugh Gaitskell through Roy Jenkins and the SDP and which should more properly be called the American Tendency:
"The people round Blair are all linked to the United States…. And here is the source of the tension between so-called Old and New Labour. For who are the Labour Party's traditional constituencies? British domestic manufacturing and British public sector workers. Old Labour is the domestic economy; New Labour is the overseas British economy; in other words, the multinationals, the City of London, and the Foreign Office which represents their interests."
It would be foolish to underestimate the influence of the intelligence services on Britain's political map. We know that the intelligence services never stand idly by and watch events happen. Brian Crozier is but one CIA operative in Britain whose activities have come to light. During the mid-1970s, renegade CIA agent Philip Agee revealed a list of ten CIA officers working in London; MI6 later confirmed to a group of MPs that this was correct. We have seen CIA operatives attain senior positions of influence under successive Labour governments. How deeper does the infiltration of the Labour Party go than has so far come to light, and to what extent are the intelligence services able to manipulate the party's policies?
The whole purpose of trade unions is to be independent workers' organisations standing up for the interests of their membership. The Labour Party itself was originally founded to represent the interests of the working class against the exploitation of capitalism. We have seen a concerted, massively-funded and far-reaching campaign by the intelligence services and other state agencies to covertly manoeuvre the labour and trade union movements in this country to total compliance with the interests of the ruling class. This is not merely undemocratic; it is the mark of totalitarianism.
"Like the United States, Britain has become a single-ideology state with two principal, almost identical factions, so that the result of any election has a minimal effect on the economy and social policy." - JOHN PILGER
"It is not surprising that more and more people are coming to the conclusion that the ballot box is no longer an instrument that will secure political solutions…. They can see that the parliamentary democracy we boast of is becoming a sham." - TONY BENN
