Evil at the heart of the Labour Party
ONE of the great strengths of our country is our political stability. I have travelled widely enough to know how it is admired and envied. From our island fortress we have watched other nations, some close by in Europe, plunge into extremism, chaos, crisis and even war as extremes were adopted and fought over. When in 1962 I was dispatched to Paris for Reuters, that great country was poised for revolution, coup d’état, even civil war.
The extreme Right sought to assassinate Charles de Gaulle. The massive Communist Party marched the streets to brawl with them. Law and order hung by a thread. Spain and Portugal were dictatorships, Italy in permanent chaos. Our continent, our times, just 17 years after Hitler’s war. Never mind the USSR and the Third World.
But here Macmillan’s Conservatives and Gaitskell’s Labour called each other Honourable Gentlemen – and behaved like it. The Tories contemptuously threw Mosley and his Fascists in the clink (during the war) and Bevin, Bevan and Morrison, though devoted Labour, would not touch the British Communist Party with a bargepole. We disagreed passionately according to viewpoint but stuck to the civilities, to the constitution and thus to moderation. I have the horrible suspicion things are changing – and much for the worse.
The threat does not come from the Right. Nigel Farage is a one-policy diversion and without him Ukip has virtually vaporised. It will come back only if the Tories take leave of their senses. But a very violent, hatefilled fifth column that is communist in all but name is emerging from the hard-Left. I refer to Momentum, the hard squad of the bumbling fool Jeremy Corbyn. He is merely the frontman – all extreme movements need a front-man at first. Remember donkey-jacketed Michael Foot and the near takeover of Labour by Militant Tendency? Today the new pro-communist, zero-tolerance Momentum does not need the words “near takeover”. It has done it. It now owns the Labour Party. Four lifelong Labour devotees are facing Momentum-organised deselection in their constituencies – for the crime of voting on a matter of conscience against the Labour whip. In his long life on the back benches Corbyn did this 428 times – but the Labour leadership never tried to destroy him.
How strange that nearly 30 years after the collapse in final failure of communism in its global homeland of the USSR, the angry, extremist creed is back, as wrong and as ruthless as ever. And it seems to have captured the tiny brains of several million youngsters – too young to have ever witnessed the real thing with its relentless crushing of all human freedoms.
If this country is to be saved from Momentum, that salvation will come from the bedrock of the real working people of Britain who, in war and hardship, never let us down. It will come, if at all, when they rise with their votes, to say: “This is our party and we want it back.”