By Michael Faulkner - 30, January 2011
At his second appearance at the Chilcot enquiry into the
Iraq war on January 21st, Tony Blair once again defended his
decision to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with George W. Bush. Not to have done
so, he said, would have damaged Britain’s ‘special’ relationship with the
United States. He as good as admitted that for him this commitment took
precedence over any question of legality raised by the failure to secure a second
U.N. resolution to legitimize the invasion. Although Blair pursued the Atlanticist
policy more enthusiastically than any of his predecessors, New Labour’s
subservience to the government of the U.S. was no new departure. It goes back
at least to the early 1950s.
Conspiracy theories are often no more than the concoctions
of cranks. But that is not to say that there are no conspiracies. Things are
not always as they appear to be. For example, in Britain we are encouraged to
believe that the police forces are to be trusted and that they operate
transparently within the law. In recent weeks ample evidence has emerged to
show that such beliefs are naïve: peaceful protest and environmental movements
have been infiltrated by police spies who act as agents provocateur. The Metropolitan
Police has almost certainly colluded with powerful corporate interests to
withhold information from victims of illegal mobile phone hacking by tabloid
journalists. The ramifications of the latter case go to the very top of
government.
The rightward trajectory of the Labour Party over several
decades, culminating the abandonment by New Labour of the last vestiges of the
party’s social democratic heritage, has been dealt with in earlier Letters from
the UK. Explaining this rightward passage does not require resort to
conspiracies or conspirators. The shift to the right was accomplished by
leaders who, for the most part, believed that what they were doing was in the
best interests of the party and the country. But an important element in the
story was missed, although the facts at the heart of it have been known for
more than forty years. The triumph of a right-wing leadership in the Labour
Party in the early 1960s was made possible by a well-organized and financed CIA
conspiracy.
From the late 1940s, with the onset of the cold war, the
U.S. vigorously pursued the crusade against what was described as the
‘international communist conspiracy’ to subvert and destroy the ‘free world’.
In some respects this resembled the Third Reich’s crusade against ‘bolshevism’
in defence of ‘western civilization’, and it is not particularly surprising
that in pursuit of the anti-communist campaign the US sometimes engaged the
services of former Nazis who had
valuable experience in these activities. But the defence of the free world
required a far-reaching global vision. During the second world war Allen W
Dulles, head of the Office for Strategic Services had run a network of
effective agents many of whom were to become engaged with the OSS’s successor
organization, the Central Intelligence Agency. Dulles set about organizing a
range of spying activities to combat the Soviet influence over the
international communist movement – a movement regarded by Dulles as a
conspiracy. Important targets of CIA operations were the left-wing parties in
Western Europe, including particularly the British Labour Party.
In 1945 the newly elected Labour government embarked upon a
programme of wide-ranging social reform which involved the establishment of a
national health service and the nationalization of many of Britain’s biggest
industries. Despite divisions between left and right in the Labour Party and
government there was a general commitment to the establishment of a ‘mixed
economy’ in which the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy would remain under
state control and a progressive taxation system would ensure a fairer
distribution of wealth. In the years 1945 – 1951, the left wing of the
party, although not in control of policy making, remained a strong influence.
After its defeat in 1951, Labour was out of office for the next thirteen years.
It was during these years that the CIA devoted its attention
to destroying the influence of the left in the Labour Party and ensuring that
its leadership became firmly committed to an Atlanticist policy. Interesting to
note is that from the late 1940s through the 1950s there was a ceaseless flow
of anti-communist propaganda circulating in Western Europe. Whatever the
intention of their authors and however valid their critique of the Stalinist
system in the Soviet Union, books such as Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, and
compendiums such as The God that Failed, played an essential part in the
campaign to present all forms of socialism and state control of the economy as
the harbingers of totalitarian tyranny – the slippery slope of what Hayek
called ‘The Road to Serfdom’. The CIA, with limitless funds and a well-trained
army of skilled agents began the task of breaking the influence of the left and
the power of the trade union movement in Britain. It was taken for granted that
the Communist Party – never very influential in Britain despite its base
in some trade unions – was little more than an agent of Soviet Russia.
The real target of CIA operations was the non-communist left in the Labour
Party and the wider labour movement. It was against such people that the term
‘fellow traveler’ was leveled. Those labeled fellow travelers were said to be
either secret communists or ‘useful idiots’ – unwitting tools of
communism.
It is of interest that some of the most influential
ideologues in harness to this CIA conspiracy were themselves former leftists.
Probably the main inspiration for the1950s anti-communist crusade was James
Burnham, (author of The Managerial Revolution and The Coming Defeat of
Communism), former right-hand man to Leon Trotsky, transformed into a
passionate ‘free market’ conservative and enemy of all forms of socialism.
Likewise, Jay Lovestone a former member of the US Communist Party, who became a
secret spy for the US government, and former Trotskyist Irving Kristol. But
most influential of all was another ex-Trotskyist from New York City College
– Melvin Lasky.
The CIA conspiracy in Britain followed on the founding in
1950 of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded with unlimited funds that
year in West Berlin. In 1953 the English language monthly magazine Encounter
was launched under the editorship of Irving Kristol. It was aimed at the
right-wing of social-democracy and immediately recruited to the ranks of its
regular contributors some prominent Labourites, most notably Anthony Crosland.
He was one of the party’s leading intellectuals and the author of the
influential ‘The Future of Socialism’, which argued that in a reformed
capitalism which had achieved full employment, there was no need for
traditional policies such as public ownership. The leader of the party, Hugh
Gaitskell was an early enthusiastic supporter of Encounter. Another publishing
enterprise secretly funded by the CIA was Socialist Commentary, which became
the mouthpiece of the right wing of the party. Former communist party member
Denis Healy, by now firmly on the right of the Labour Party, wrote about 80
articles for Socialist Commentary and its US counterpart, New Leader (also
funded by the CIA) before he became Defence Minister in Harold Wilson’s
government in 1964. Crosland, as a member of the International Council of the
Congress for Cultural Freedom, worked for many years to re-model the Labour
Party on the lines of the U.S. Democratic Party. Others associated with the CIA
inspired and funded enterprises were Douglas Jay, Patrick Gordon Walker and Roy
Jenklins – all to play important roles in eliminating the influence of
the left in the party and making it more like the Democratic Party. In 1960, at
the time of the defence debate in the party which resulted in the decision to
abandon nuclear weapons, a policy championed
by the left, the right launched the campaign group ‘Victory for Sanity’ to oppose the ‘Victory for Socialism’
group on the left. Its CIA –funded campaign, which far outspent the
meagre resources available to the rank-and-file of the party, backed
Gaitskell’s call to ‘fight, fight and fight again’ to reverse the policy. It succeeded
the following year in doing so. With the left seriously weakened, the Labour
Party’s commitment to NATO was restored.
It is interesting to note that Melvin Lasky and his fellow
CIA conspirators did not object to their protégés continuing to call themselves
socialists. Crosland and his colleagues called their enterprise the Campaign
for Democratic Socialism. The word could mean whatever they chose it to mean
– but it would have nothing in common with the socialism which inspired
– and continues to inspire – the left.
The CIA enterprise was blown apart in 1967 when the U.S.
magazine Ramparts revealed that 90% of the funding for the Council for Cultural
Freedom had come from the CIA. The editors and contributors to the magazine
Encounter, were in the pay of the CIA. There followed further exposure in the
New York Times. Ex-CIA officer, Richard Bessell, who organized the Bay of Pigs
invasion, revealed that ‘The technique is essentially that of penetration. In
some countries the CIA representative has served as a close counselor of the
chief of state.’
It is true that many of those involved apparently had no
idea about the company they had been keeping for so long. Decent, but somewhat
naïve liberals such as Encounter editor Stephen Spender, were shocked. Perhaps
their fat pay cheques may explain their gullibility. They had been only too
keen to dismiss many on the left as ‘fellow travelers.’ Michael Foot, himself
so smeared, was led to ask, ‘who were they traveling with?’
They were, of course, fellow travelers of the right. The
CIA’s endeavours paid off. The word ‘socialism’ and almost everything it stands
for, was expunged from the lexicon of New Labour politics. It remains to be
seen whether, faced with the tasks ahead, the Labour Party will be able to
shake off this malign encumbrance.