>Why he would want to
>>identify with the bankers and politicians is anybody's guess. I suppose it
>>is the sign of the utter degeneration of Stalinism that such a thing can
>>take place. He belongs to one of the outgrowths of the once militant
>>British Communist Party, which evolved into right-wing Eurocommunism. His
>>sect emerges out of the right wing of the Eurocommunist CP. If I had a
>>choice, I'd prefer to have portraits of Joseph Stalin on the wall than the
>>Tony Blair portraits these birds presumably have hung up.
I don't share Louis' hostility to Chris, but it is worth pointing out that the Communist Party of Great Britain has provided the cadre for most of the reactionary trends predominant in Britain today.
Not only is the disgraced Blair faction's hatchet man Peter Mandelson a one-time YCP activist, (sent to police a delegation to a world youth congress to stamp out Trotskyist influence in the seventies), but also his persecutor, Charlie Whelan, apparatchik of Chancellor Brown's faction, was a CP member and union bureaucrat. Just as Mandelson was architect of the shift of New Labour to the right, so was Whelan with Ed Balls architect of the Chancellor's tight budget policies. Blair's chief advisor Geoff Mulgan was a contributor to the Communist Party Journal Marxism Today, and front man of its think-tank front Demos, before taking a job in the Prime Minister's 'Social Exclusion Unit' where he has been preparing workfare schemes for young people.
In the north of England, too, the former members of the CP have put their witch-hunting abilities to a new and sinister use, collaborating with various Christian Newsletters in the pursuit of imaginary Satanic Abuse Cults. The triumvirate of longstanding CP hack Bea Campbell, Liverpool social policies expert and former Euro-Communist Gideon Ben- Tovim (his daughter Ruth rebelled and became a Maoist) and fellow traveller Ray Wyre, sex-offenders 'expert', are architects of a vicious social services policy. All over the country these dangerous lunatics have spread panics about sex offenders leading to hundred of children being seized from their homes without any evidence. Almost every single one of these mass arrests has resulted in no charges being laid, but scores of children torn from their homes and subjected to gruesome intimate examinations.
Before we get to misty-eyed about the 'militant' CPGB and its love of Stalin, just remember where these ghouls learnt the habit of Place Intrigue and the power of the dawn raid. -- Jim heartfield