One advantage of growing old

There is only one advantage as far as I can tell and it is this: if you live long enough you find out that you were right all those years ago.  Ah, but, I have just remembered a second advantage of being old, happily some of your memory goes and so you forget how many things you got wrong!  Still, never mind that, just please a cantankerous old man by letting him crow over a past triumph. 

Years ago in the '60s,'70s and '80s I used to fulminate about the Russian infiltration in the Labour party and its various Left-wing off-shoots like the unions and CND, etc.  I was firmly sat upon by my Left-wing friends (yes, I had a few!) and also by my non-political friends who thought I was exaggerating.  Last week The Spectator published the diaries of Anatoly Chernyaev who for years was the Kremlin's main contact man in the west and in which he detailed his relationships with a variety of Labour party officials.  Jack Jones, for example, the General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), whose power in the nation was enormous, was a KGB agent in the pay of the Soviets for years.  His unelected 'consigliore' in the TGWU was Alec Kitson, another Soviet toady, and between the pair of them they controlled, via the TGWU block vote, dozens of safe Labour seats.  Thus, if you failed to dance to their communist tune your chances of being selected as a candidate were nil.  Gordon Brown, himself, gained his safe Scottish seat only on the nod from the TGWU which may be the reason why his eulogy to Jones after his death was so fulsome - and which he refuses to withdraw now that Jones's treason is public knowledge.  Others who were similarly rewarded by the TGWU communist cabal were Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair, Margaret Beckett, Harriet Harman, John Reid - and the list goes on.

Another key figure in steering the Labour party to Moscow's line was the disgusting traitor, Ron Hayward, its General Secretary from '72 to '82.  Gerald Kaufman in the early '80s was a leading player in Labour politics and he was dumbfounded by the policies espoused in the election manifesto of 1983 under Michael Foot which he described as the longest suicide note in history.  He writes:

The remarkable revelations published in the Chernyaev diaries make this attempted political suicide easier to understand.  It is clear that key elements in the Labour party structure were determined to ingratiate themselves with Moscow - regardless of any adverse electoral impact in Britain.  They show, vividly, how Labour was being poisoned by key officials who were laying the groundwork, apparently deliberately, for the debacle of 1983.

Hayward, as General Secretary of the Labour party considered himself to be the true leader of the party not Harold Wilson who was merely the parliamentary leader.  He held secret meetings inside the Russian embassy.  Chernyaev's diaries describe how Hayward boasted that he "prepares young people , puts them in the right places, helps them become prominent."

See?  I was right all along.  And don't bother asking me what I was wrong about - I can't remember!

Comments

[North Northwester]

And now the poison's inside the Labour party and everywhere taints and leads its supporters, Lenin's heirs own the academy; the schools; broadcasting; much of the Civil Service; the Bench; medicine... and so it goes. A long war, and rarely a merry one, I think.

[David Duff]

Yes, some colonic irrigation called for, I think!

[dearieme]

Not too late to hang some of the buggers.

[David Duff]

See, that's another advantage of growing old, you become more kindly and charitable, as you can see from 'DM's' comment above in which he gently refrains from adding hanging and drawing to the deserved punishment of these traitors.