Mandelson Young Communist League in charge of UK

[The Idler]

Here is a critical look at the Young Communist League background of Peter Mandelson who is standing in for Gordon Brown (http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/08/the-genius-of-peter-mandelson.html).

[Demogorgon]

That's a load of shit, even by Hitchens' standards. Lord Mandelson, probably the most right wing of the New Labour cabal has taken Britain down the road of left radicalism? :lol:

[The Idler]

That's a load of shit, even by Hitchens' standards. Lord Mandelson, probably the most right wing of the New Labour cabal has taken Britain down the road of left radicalism? :lol:
I find the twin attempts to talk up the imaginary communist enemy within, but talk down Militant Labour (aka RSL) amusingly contradictory.

[Yehuda Stern]

There has been controversy regarding involvement of Labor politicians in left-wing groups before; here's an interesting article from the WSWS on such an incident involving Jack Straw (ex-YCL):

"UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw sent an extraordinary letter to the Independent newspaper on November 16. It was in reply to an article by Robert Fisk the previous Saturday. In a description of Yassir Arafat’s funeral, Fisk had disparagingly referred to Straw, who attended on behalf of the British government, as a former Trotskyist or “an old Trot.”

Straw responded to Fisk’s factually incorrect aside like a man accused of a heinous crime, stating that to call him a Trotskyist was “a malicious libel.” Far from being a former Trotskyist, Straw indicated that his political sympathies and training could be traced back to Stalinism...


Straw addressed the letter cynically to “Dear Comrade Editor,” before explaining, “I have been consistent in my opposition to Trotskyism and the false consciousness it engenders. I was first taught to spot a Trot at 50 yards in 1965 by Mr. Bert Ramelson, Yorkshire industrial organiser of the Communist Party.”...


Straw’s response is significant in two respects:
Firstly, it draws attention to the usually unacknowledged contribution made by Stalinism to the training of a significant layer of bureaucrats within the Labour Party in a ferocious brand of anti-communism masquerading as anti-Trotskyism.
Secondly, it indicates a fear and hatred that is usually unstated within the highest echelons of the Labour government of the threat posed by the socialist and internationalist programme of Trotskyism to themselves and the exploitative system they defend...


What remains of this work today? Straw is by no means the only member of Blair’s team that has a background in Stalinism and its periphery. John Reid, the health secretary, is a former member of the Communist Party, according to Derek Simpson, leader of the trade union Amicus, himself a former Communist. Kim Howells, MP for Neath in South Wales, is a former Communist Party member. He was responsible for helping end the 1984-1985 miners’ strike by organising a return to work in the South Wales coalfield that created a snowball effect in the rest of the country.
Perhaps the most high-profile is Peter Mandelson, now a European Union commissioner, and one of the architects of New Labour, who was a member of the Young Communist League. Mandelson worked as an adviser to Neil Kinnock, John Smith, who succeeded him as leader, and Tony Blair...

Straw sits at the top table of a government now seeking its third term in office and apparently without a serious political opponent in sight. But he knows that he is pursuing a foreign policy that makes him hated by the majority of the population. Sensing a threat from below, he turns to the lessons he learned 40 years ago from Ramelson in order to attack Trotskyism—because he recognises that it was then and remains today the tendency that expresses the objective interests of the vast majority of the population. It shows that the lessons he learned went very deep indeed, precisely because they became an essential part of not just his own persona but the social being of an entire bureaucracy—animated as it is by visceral hatred for, and fear of, the prospect of a politically independent movement of the working class."

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/nov2004/stra-n29.shtml

[The Idler]

There has been controversy regarding involvement of Labor politicians in left-wing groups before; here's an interesting article from the WSWS on such an incident involving Jack Straw (ex-YCL):

"UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw sent an extraordinary letter to the Independent newspaper on November 16....
Interesting but (former Trot himself) Hitchens did a follow-up (http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/08/musings-from-hadrians-wall.html) specifically lumping Trots with Stalinists which many left-wing Anti-Bolshevists would be inclined to agree with. He went on, however to try and lump New Labour, Social Democracy, Fabianism, Gorbachev and the kitchen sink in with Bolsheviks.

Fabianism, and its continental variations, was the first recognition that revolutionary method was not necessary, that patience and gradualism might well be more effective. The second such recognition, which originated in the 1920s and the failure of Western Europe to follow Russia, grew strong among the 'New Left ' of the 1950s and 1960s. This was the Gramscian idea that cultural revolution must come first, the rest afterward.

[Yehuda Stern]

Meh, should I just copy and paste the whole of Theirr Morals and Ours?