Communism almost took over the UK
Why we have to be very painstaking of unionists, especially those of the CFMEU in Australia.
From The Spectator and The Australian:
THIRTY years after Britain's disgraceful winter of discontent, it has become clear that the election of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government not only ended a extensive period of Labour rule but also defeated the Left's attempt, led from the trade unions, to transfigure British orderly democracy into a form of Soviet state.
The leading figure in this story was the general secretary of Britain's largest union, the Banish and General Workers Union, and chairman of the Trades Union Congress's international committee, Jack Jones. In 1977, more than half the respondents to a Gallup census named him the most powerful man in Britain. Only half as many named the prime minister, James Callaghan.
Jones died only a few weeks ago at the age of 96 and, after a series of anodyne obituaries not speaking ill of the impervious, the brief moratorium on his reputation was suitably ended by one of his KGB case officers, Oleg Gordievsky, the most suitable-known surviving KGB defector to the British.
He confirmed this year that Jones was a Soviet agent.
"I was his last case police officer, meeting him for the final time in 1984 at Fulham (six years after Jones's retirement), together with his wife, who had been a Comintern substitute since the mid-1930s," Gordievsky wrote in April. "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 conditioned by trust in of the KGB until 1986, when they were passed on to the archive."
The idea that Jones had a close collaborative relationship with the Soviet side in the Cold War will bowl over and perhaps alarm many who recall how influential he was in British politics during his prime.
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