A diary has been found in the US National Security Archive which reveals details of the relationship between the British Labour Party and the Soviet Union. It was kept by one Anatoly Chernyaev, the man who pandered between the Kremlin and the Labour leaders (particularly Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock). If anyone should know, he should. And it’s quite likely he’s telling the truth, though with such people there can be no certainty, of course.

The diary is making some headlines in Britain, notably in The Spectator, which has made it this week’s cover story, and the Daily Mail.

Among its ‘revelations’ is a story that the Labour leaders tried to get the Soviets to help them beat the ‘common enemy Margaret Thatcher’. The Soviets apparently agreed to help these treacherous men, and maybe they did something or other, but whether they did or not, Mrs Thatcher remained triumphantly in Downing Street throughout the 1980s, to be replaced by another Conservative leader, John Major, in 1990.

The Mail, realizing perhaps that this isn’t much of a revelation, and that as news it is rather stale, does its best to work up something juicier:

More worrying, perhaps, is the fact that the document shows in stark detail how the political ideology of so many of those who govern today was shaped by the unspeakable communist creed of the Soviet Union. The unpalatable truth is that many ministers in Government today rose through the ranks of a British socialist movement that was heavily influenced – and even controlled – by the Kremlin in Moscow. … In Britain, those on the Left who know about the depth of the Soviet influence over this country in the latter half of the 20th century, have maintained an embarrassed silence about this shameful episode in British political history. Above all, the intimate co-operation between Moscow and the trades unions which nearly brought the country to its knees in the Sixties and Seventies has been an utterly taboo subject. … This diary reveals that the cosy relationship between the Kremlin and Labour was far more widespread than previously thought – and had been going on for years. …’

Actually, it was pretty well known that the particular trade union leaders mentioned by the Mail were sponsored by the Soviets. The subject, far from being ‘utterly taboo’ was discussed at length and often in Conservative circles, especially when Prime Minister Thatcher tamed the trade unions good and proper. As for the ‘intimacy’ between the Labour Party rats and the Soviet top brass, such details as the diary records – and only the details are news really, the general picture being well known to anyone who took an interest in such things back then – show the rats in a rather pathetic light. It seems that they had to beg for a few minutes with Brezhnev, and later with ‘the senile’ Chernenko, so they could tell the newspapers back home that they were received by the Man. Hardly a ‘cosy’ relationship!

The Mail tries harder yet:

It is not just the Left’s close connection with the Soviet Union, but the lasting influence of that connection that should concern us all.

By which it means that Gordon Brown, who is still in power though not for much longer, was originally given his safe seat by the decision of two senior trade union officials who were themselves sponsored by the USSR. Thus, urges the Mail, ‘the control the Soviets had over Labour, its leadership and aspiring politicians, is still having a profound impact on Britain.’

Even this, we surmise, will not greatly scandalize or even startle most British readers.

We find one comment interesting. It’s made by Peter Oborne in his Spectator column on the subject. He says that ‘these communist influences’ account for many of the ‘characteristics’ of Tony Blair’s New Labour. The characteristics he notes are:

‘Its deep suspicion of outsiders, its structural hostility to democratic debate, its secrecy, its faith in bureaucracy, embedded preference for striking deals away from the public eye, its ruthless reliance on a small group of trusted activists .’

Why this list strikes us as worth noting is that it applies equally to Obama’s Democratic Party. And the influences are of the same sort, and from the same poison well: not the Kremlin, which was only a conduit, but the Communist creed itself.

The left passionately desires to reduce the First World to the level of the Third World and destroy the nation state. That is the ideal in the minds of Obama and his henchmen, and it explains his foreign policy.

It is the ideal of the British Labour Party. Throughout their long years in power, that socialist cabal worked to achieve the destruction of Britain, and they have succeeded to such a degree that the damage is probably irreversible. They’ve done it by admitting Third World immigrants in massive numbers.

Melanie Phillips writes:

So now the cat is well and truly out of the bag. For years, as the number of immigrants to Britain shot up apparently uncontrollably, the question was how exactly this had happened.

Was it through a fit of absent-mindedness or gross incompetence? Or was it not inadvertent at all, but deliberate?

The latter explanation seemed just too outrageous. After all, a deliberate policy of mass immigration would have amounted to nothing less than an attempt to change the very make-up of this country without telling the electorate.

There could not have been a more grave abuse of the entire democratic process. Now, however, we learn that this is exactly what did happen. The Labour government has been engaged upon a deliberate and secret policy of national cultural sabotage.

This astonishing revelation surfaced quite casually last weekend in a newspaper article by one Andrew Neather. He turns out to have been a speech writer for Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.

And it was he who wrote a landmark speech in September 2000 by the then immigration minister, Barbara Roche, that called for a loosening of immigration controls. But the true scope and purpose of this new policy was actively concealed.

In its 1997 election manifesto, Labour promised ‘firm control over immigration’ and in 2005 it promised a ‘crackdown on abuse’. In 2001, its manifesto merely said that the immigration rules needed to reflect changes to the economy to meet skills shortages.

But all this concealed a monumental shift of policy. For Neather wrote that until ‘at least February last year’, when a new points-based system was introduced to limit foreign workers in response to increasing uproar, the purpose of the policy Roche ushered in was to open up the UK to mass immigration.

This has been achieved. Some 2.3million migrants have been added to the population since 2001. Since 1997, the number of work permits has quadrupled to 120,000 a year.

Unless policies change, over the next 25 years some seven million more will be added to Britain’s population, a rate of growth three times as fast as took place in the Eighties.

Such an increase is simply unsustainable. Britain is already one of the most overcrowded countries in Europe. But now look at the real reason why this policy was introduced, and in secret. The Government’s ‘driving political purpose’, wrote Neather, was ‘to make the UK truly multicultural’.

It was therefore a politically motivated attempt by ministers to transform the fundamental make-up and identity of this country. It was done to destroy the right of the British people to live in a society defined by a common history, religion, law, language and traditions.

It was done to destroy for ever what it means to be culturally British and to put another ‘multicultural’ identity in its place. And it was done without telling or asking the British people whether they wanted their country and their culture to be transformed in this way.

Spitefully, one motivation by Labour ministers was ‘to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.

Even Neather found that particular element of gratuitous Left-wing bullying to be ‘a manoeuvre too far’.

Yet apart from this, Neather sees nothing wrong in the policy he has described. Indeed, the reason for his astonishing candour is he thinks it’s something to boast about. Mass immigration, he wrote, had provided the ‘foreign nannies, cleaners and gardeners’ without whom London could hardly function.

What elitist arrogance! As if most people employ nannies, cleaners and gardeners. And what ignorance. The argument that Britain is better off with this level of immigration has been conclusively shown to be economically illiterate.

Neather gave the impression that most immigrants are Eastern Europeans. But these form fewer than a quarter of all immigrants. [Most are Muslim – JB]

And the fact is that, despite his blithe assertions to the contrary, schools in areas of very high immigration find it desperately difficult to cope with so many children who don’t even have basic English. Other services, such as health or housing, are similarly being overwhelmed by the sheer weight of numbers.

But the most shattering revelation was that this policy of mass immigration was not introduced to produce nannies or cleaners for the likes of Neather. It was to destroy Britain’s identity and transform it into a multicultural society where British attributes would have no greater status than any other country’s.

A measure of immigration is indeed good for a country. But this policy was not to enhance British culture and society by broadening the mix. It was to destroy its defining character altogether. …

They were, he wrote, reluctant to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all to Labour’s core white working class vote. So they deliberately kept it secret.

They knew that if they told the truth about what they were doing, voters would rise up in protest. So they kept it out of their election manifestos. …

For years [Britons] have watched as their country’s landscape has been transformed out of all recognition — and that politicians from all mainstream parties have told them first that it isn’t happening and second, that they are racist bigots to object even if it is.

Now the political picture has been transformed overnight by the unguarded candour of Andrew Neather’s eye-opening superciliousness. For now we know that Labour politicians actually caused this to happen – and did so out of total contempt for their own core voters. …

Now they’re pretending that the government of Scotland was not informed of Tony Blair’s ‘prisoner transfer agreement’ with Qaddafi; that the Scottish administration was ‘furious’ when they found out about it ‘from prison service officials’, and would never have let al-Megrahi go had it not been for the compassionate ‘instincts’ of their Justice Secretary when the news of the bomber’s fatal illness came to him.  But reading between the lines one can see clearly enough that the Scots were pressured by Blair and Brown and only needed an excuse  to release al-Megrahi – the only Libyan prisoner in Britain.

Alan Cochrane writes in the Telegraph:

It increasingly appears as if Prime Minister Brown and Foreign Secretary David Miliband are content to allow the SNP [Scottish National Party] administration to take the flak over this issue [the release of the Lockerbie bomber] as part of a greater game to help secure British and American access to the Libyan oil and gas fields. Miliband has attacked this suggestion as a “slur”, but aren’t his words just so much hot air? Saif Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator’s son, has said that a trade agreement with Britain was part of the deal done to secure Megrahi’s release, and this newspaper reveals today that relations between Saif and Lord Mandelson are much closer than the Business Secretary has admitted.

To the rest of the world, the British Government is shrugging its shoulders and confessing its horror at the scenes at Tripoli airport – which we’re told that Gordon Brown tried to forestall. But as to whether Megrahi should have been released in the first place, there was not a word from Brown, or any other Government minister.

We’re told that they didn’t want to be seen to be influencing the decision of a devolved administration. But Labour ministers in London argue with the Nationalists in Edinburgh on an almost daily basis, over matters as mundane as the council tax and who’s to pay for a new Forth Road Bridge. Why not on such an important issue as the release of the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing?

What is perhaps not widely understood is that the process behind Megrahi’s release began not with Alex Salmond’s devolved SNP administration in Edinburgh, but with the Labour government in London – or, more specifically, with Tony Blair. It was the then prime minister who brokered a secret prisoner transfer agreement with Gaddafi, as part of a general thawing of relations between the West and this former rogue state. It was linked to suggestions that massive new British, American and European investment in Libya’s vast oil and gas fields would be forthcoming if only the Libyans would mend their ways. The small matter of the Lockerbie bomber was a fly in the ointment.

Blair didn’t inform the authorities in Edinburgh of his deal, even though they were responsible for Megrahi’s conviction and incarceration. [?] Salmond and the independent Scottish law officers only found out about it when they were tipped off by senior prison service officials.[?]  Downing Street then compounded the original error by trying to pretend that the deal done with Gaddafi did not concern Megrahi, even though he was the only Libyan held in any British jail.

Eventually, after furious protests from the Scots, Jack Straw, the justice secretary, was forced to issue a statement conceding that any decision on the Lockerbie bomber’s future was indeed a matter for Scottish ministers. But the damage, in terms of relations between the two administrations, had been done. [?] Although the formalities over a prisoner transfer for Megrahi continued, the Scottish authorities, still smarting over Blair’s behaviour, were now firmly against such a move [?] – until it became known that Megrahi was suffering from terminal cancer, and a release on compassionate grounds became an option. Those close to MacAskill reported that he was looking favourably on such a move; given that his instincts [!] on the matter were well known in Downing Street and the Foreign Office [!?], they sat tight, said nothing [?] and waited for the release to take place.