From The Spectator and The Australian:
THIRTY years after Britain's notorious winter of discontent, it has become clear that the election of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government not only ended a long period of Labour rule but also defeated the Left's attempt, led from the trade unions, to transfigure British parliamentary democracy into a form of Soviet state.
The leading figure in this story was the general secretary of Britain's largest union, the Transport 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 poll 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 dead, the brief moratorium on his reputation was suitably ended by one of his KGB case officers, Oleg Gordievsky, the best-known surviving KGB defector to the British.
He confirmed this year that Jones was a Soviet agent.
"I was his last case 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 agent 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 department 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 surprise and perhaps alarm many who recall how influential he was in British politics during his prime.
The Callaghan government came to depend on him to help keep it in office and arrange the incomes policy it thought would save its political bacon.
Following Jones's death, it is now also possible to examine assertions about him by another Eastern bloc secret intelligence service defector to the West, Josef Frolik, who served Czech intelligence under diplomatic cover in London from 1964 to 1966, defecting to the US in 1969. Living safely under a number of aliases, he is believed to have died in the US in 1989.
In 1975 Leo Cooper published his memoir, The Frolik Defection, in London. In a chapter titled Trade Union Brethren, Frolik named leading British trade unionists he knew to be deeply involved with the Soviet-led spy circle in London.
When Cooper worried about the legal consequences of such exposure, Frolik agreed to withhold the names and replace them with dashes. He confided the names to my good friend, Josef Josten, head of the Free Czech Information Service, on condition that they not be revealed during their lifetimes. Jones was the last of them to die, so Frolik's names now can be published.
Jones was a costly contact. Frolik writes that his expenses in connection with Jones began to mount and, when he reported to Prague, he was given the brisk order, "Drop the Jones project. He's a horse of friends!" Horse was the accepted code for agent and this was the signal that Jones was already being handled by KGB lieutenant-colonel Nikolai Berdenikov, who operated under diplomatic cover as Soviet labour attache.
Jones was not alone among trade union leaders in his pro-Soviet sympathies during the period of overweening trade union power in the 1960s and 70s. Others named by Frolik include Ted Hill of the Boilermakers Union, Ernie Roberts and Hugh Scanlon of the Engineering Union, second in power only to Jones's Transport and General Workers Union, and Richard Briginshaw, leader of the largest printing union.
Without testimony from the British security services and thus far unpublished KGB files, we can't claim that more than a couple of these gentlemen were in receipt of cash from Soviet or other Eastern bloc security services for passing information.
However, there is plenty of evidence that they were strongly pro-Soviet in their sympathies, even more so in private.
Most of them were frequently honoured guests in Eastern bloc countries. They kept close and heavy-drinking company, and spoke freely and confidentially with friends whom they must have known were Soviet bloc intelligence agents whose purpose was to acquire information about Britain's political and industrial classes.
As Frolik advised in his book: "Under no circumstances accept money from any representative of an eastern embassy or official organisation! Everything must be accounted for (by our accountants) and they tolerate no gifts or money, unless they serve the purpose of obtaining information. There are no such things as gifts, retainers and consultancies in the Czech service or in that of any other eastern intelligence department - there are only bribes!"
Long believed to be a staunch supporter of Labour's anti-communist establishment from Clement Attlee to Hugh Gaitskell, Hill was in fact a member of the Communist Party, as was his wife.
However, his membership was kept secret, not an unusual arrangement on the pro-Soviet Left.
It was a common practice after Lenin advised it when asked by suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst how she and her friends could work for the revolution in Britain. "Support the Labour Party as the rope supports the hanged man," he told her.
When Frolik sought permission to recruit Hill, he was told: "Hands off! That particular mare is being run from another stable close by." This was Berdenikov's stable.
Frolik was similarly warned off Briginshaw, Roberts and Scanlon, soon to become general secretary of the Engineering Union. It is worth noting that in 1977 Scanlon was prevented from becoming chairman of British Shipbuilding when MI5 advised that he should not see documents marked confidential or above.
As for Briginshaw, "the Russians had taken him over; he was too important for the Czechs". The ability to shut down Britain's newspapers was a vital facility.
The kindest construction that can be put on the conduct of these trade unionists is that they believed the Soviet countries to be true workers' states and world leaders of the working-class movement; and that it was in the best interest of British workers to shift Britain from alignment with the US and the West to a closer relationship with the Soviet Union. There is no shortage of statements byJones, for example, on the record to thiseffect.
During the 70s, the official Western policy of detente towards the Soviet Union provided an ideal backcloth for the conduct of fraternal relations between Trades Union Congress leaders and the totalitarians of the Soviet "workers' states".
During 1975 and 1976, for example, two members of the Soviet Communist Party Politburo were honoured at TUC headquarters. After leading a TUC delegation to East Germany (the German Democratic Republic) in 1976, Jones said the GDR was a "workers' state and the trade unions were not therefore in opposition, the only help (the GDR) had received from outside being from the Soviet Union in preserving the freedom of the country".
At the 1970 Labour Party annual conference, Jones said: "We have got to start to build genuine democracy in Britain in place of the sham democracy which exists ... maybe we shall eventually get round to the idea of shop stewards in the streets.
"For too long the idea has been about that an MP was just a representative and not a delegate. We must determine to build a people's democracy."
Ernest Bevin, the no-nonsense foreign secretary of the Attlee government, had introduced a ban on communists holding office in the Transport and General Workers Union. Jones removed it.
By 1977, there were 13 Communist Party members on the union's national executive, which had the power to initiate and vote on resolutions at Labour Party conferences. Jones built a powerful network of regional and local officials in his own image that could continue operation after his retirement in 1978. This was to prove disastrous to the Callaghan government in 1979.
These are only a few examples of Jones's activities. There are many similar items concerning Scanlon and other pro-Soviet TUC leaders.
All point to a belief in the ultimate establishment of a Soviet workers' state in Britain, replacing parliamentary democracy.
I can still recall the knock-down argument at a Labour Party conference between Jones and Ian Mikardo, representing the union and parliamentary wings of the pro-Soviet Left respectively, as to whether the coming far-left government of their desire would be run by the TUC or the parliamentary Labour Party. They infuriated each other and left the meeting without shaking hands or resolving the argument.
The revolution was not in question; its proponents were arguing over who should control post-revolutionary power.
How, then, could Callaghan come to depend so utterly on Jones and his colleagues to sustain his government? Labour PM Harold Wilson's attempt to reform the unions was defeated by union pressure and by Callaghan's opposition in 1969.
The full story of what happened to the labour movement in the next 10 years, reinforced by Frolik's and Gordievsky's revelations, shows the danger faced by parliamentary democracy after the failure of Wilson's reform effort.
Perhaps Wilson saw it, encouraging his departure in 1976. Despite frequent warnings, Callaghan, who had defeated Wilson's reforms, would not. His blindness may have been induced by his overwhelming loyalty to the trade union movement to which he believed he owed his political career. Or he may have considered the TUC leadership's pro-Sovietism as useful to him in his bipolar detente diplomacy.
Accustomed to the rarefied atmosphere of government and reliant on his concordat with Jones, Callaghan took little or no notice of the replacement of official Labour candidates by hard Left people chosen by the unions. He intervened personally in the ousting of Reg Prentice, the most prominent victim, only to delay Prentice's resignation out of fear of a run on the pound.
By 1979, the candidates' list was dominated by the hard (not Trotskyite) Left in winnable constituencies. Had Labour won that year's general election, the new parliamentary Labour Party would have ditched Callaghan and adopted the extreme policies passed at Labour conferences but kept out of the 1979 manifesto by Callaghan.
In January this year, on the anniversary of the winter of discontent, two of his closest aides admitted to me that the union officials behind the destructive action were politically motivated, which they and Callaghan had not expected. Now they agreed that those of uswho sounded the alarm at the time had been right.
As for the argument between Jones and Mikardo, neither won in the end. The victor in 1979 was Thatcher, the only national political leader who understood all this and was determined to defeat it. That's how close Britain came to losing its parliamentary democracy in 1979.
The Spectator
Douglas Eden is associate fellow of the Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of London.
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