PETER HITCHENS: New Labour’s secret IRA fan? He is not as rare as you’d think…
PETER HITCHENS: New Labour’s secret IRA fan? He is not as rare as you’d think…
A prominent New Labour journalist, Roy Greenslade, has finally admitted he is a lifelong supporter of IRA violence. You should care, even though you may think Mr Greenslade is obscure and unimportant.
For it is yet another of those lightning-flashes which reveal something I have been trying to tell you for years and which you do not want to believe.
New Labour, whose ideas have now captured the Tory Party too, is a revolutionary party, rooted in Marxism and loathing of Britain as it used to be.
A prominent New Labour journalist, Roy Greenslade, has finally admitted he is a lifelong supporter of IRA violence. You should care, even though you may think Mr Greenslade is obscure and unimportant
I’ll be back to that. But first, Mr Greenslade. He is a close friend of Alastair Campbell, the ruthless bullying commissar, elected to nothing by anybody, who was given unheard-of ministerial powers when New Labour entered Downing Street. This was the first vital step of Blair’s constitutional revolution. But Mr Campbell doesn’t like talking about his old pal Roy.
They were mates when they both worked for the lying monster and thief Robert Maxwell at the Daily Mirror. But in the early years of Blair’s government, Mr Greenslade patrolled the media on behalf of his friend, using the Left-wing Guardian as a platform from which to attack journalists and newspapers – including The Mail on Sunday – which criticised the Blair/Campbell government.
In a giveaway to anyone not besotted with the idiotic but widespread idea that the Blair creature is a conservative, Mr Greenslade once proclaimed himself to be ‘like many former Marxists, an unashamed admirer of Tony Blair’.
Why would that be? Because trained revolutionaries could see, as the public could not, what Blair was really up to. Long after it could do Blair no harm with voters, he admitted to having been a Trotskyist at Oxford, though he did not say which organisation he belonged to.
He is a close friend of Alastair Campbell, the ruthless bullying commissar, elected to nothing by anybody, who was given unheard-of ministerial powers when New Labour entered Downing Street. This was the first vital step of Blair’s constitutional revolution. But Mr Campbell doesn’t like talking about his old pal Roy
An astonishing number of Blair’s senior Ministers are known to have been ‘former’ Marxists, from the Communist Party or its offshoots – from the Militant Tendency or from a body called the International Marxist Group (IMG).
I am pretty sure several others had similar pasts, of which we know nothing.
I remember the IMG well. In my student Leftist years, I recall being disgusted to hear IMG members shouting ‘Victory to the IRA!’ on demonstrations. I was a revolutionary in those days, but even so I balked at supporting murderers and gangsters such as the Provisional IRA were and still are.
The IMG also encouraged its members in a tactic called ‘entryism’ – joining the Labour Party so as to infiltrate it and take it over. This was quite easy in the 1970s when Labour’s old membership was dying on its feet and many London local Labour parties were there for the taking.
Support for the IRA in such places was strong and shameless, and I got myself shouted down more than once for speaking against it in the then Hampstead Labour Party.
If you think such ideas vanished from the minds of those involved, or were confined to a few Corbynites, you are very much mistaken.
The IMG entryists did not stop being ultra-radicals as they slithered upwards in their nice careers and in the Labour machine – they just got smoother and slicker about how they went about it.
Mr Greenslade is actually more honest than the others, but that’s not a compliment to him.
The aftermath of an IRA bomb in 1996 in London is seen above. In my student Leftist years, I recall being disgusted to hear IMG members shouting ‘Victory to the IRA!’ on demonstrations
Bel’s right: the deaths don’t add up
My congratulations to my colleague Bel Mooney, who writes for our sister paper the Daily Mail.
A fortnight ago, Bel wrote movingly about the strange events which followed her 99-year-old father’s death. Ted Mooney plainly did not die of Covid but the official record says he did. Bel says: ‘I believe the way Covid deaths have been counted is a national scandal.’
This is more or less what the distinguished pathologist Dr John Lee has been saying for months.
And dozens wrote in to tell Bel of similar cases. I believe many people have been angered or puzzled by similar mistaken registrations, but few have the standing and access to the media which Bel has, so nothing has been done. Now it must be.
I learned long ago, when I first challenged crime figures that looked hopelessly optimistic to me, that official statistics are not always truthful – especially when they are politically important. After a lot of abuse, I turned out to be right. The crime figures were being fiddled – downwards.
Are Covid statistics being massaged? I do not know, but I do know there should be a tough independent inquiry. If you want to report a case of what you suspect is a wrongly recorded Covid death of a close relative, please email femailreaders@dailymail.co.uk.
Rosamund makes a marvellous monster
Want to know what happens in a world where people believe there is no ultimate justice so they can do what they like? A savage, brilliant new film will explain it to you.
Rosamund Pike, a beautiful and intelligent actress, is marvellous in the very dark comedy I Care A Lot. She does care, too, but not necessarily about anyone else.
Her character, loosely based on a real monster who preyed on the old and defenceless in Nevada, sees herself as a wolf among lambs and is afraid of nothing because she is sure that death is the end of all things. Practical atheism at work.
Rosamund Pike, a beautiful and intelligent actress, is marvellous in the very dark comedy I Care A Lot
Dial 999 – someone’s stolen our police force!
What better symbol of modern Britain could there be than the news that closed police stations are now ending up as marijuana farms?
For decades, Left-wing governments of both parties have preferred not to protect the people of this country from crime. They began dismantling proper police foot patrolling – which would still work if we had it now – in the 1960s.
They never announced the change, or put it in a manifesto, or debated it in Parliament. They carried on pretending they cared about us. But in fact they’d adopted the ultra-Leftist belief that crime is not caused by human wickedness, but is a disease caused by social conditions. So anything that still upheld the old ideas of deterrence and punishment had to go.
Actual drug taking, the root of so much modern crime, was all but encouraged by soppy indulgence, with senior police officers leading calls for users to be spared the penalties set out in law.
In a way it is worse than that. Having given up enforcing laws we like, the police increasingly prefer to boss us about, telling us what we should think, and (while unbothered by burglars or muggers) plainly having huge fun self-righteously handcuffing and fining law-abiding men and women for supposed offences against the Covid decrees.
I shudder to think how this will affect future relations between police and public, but we barely see them anyway.
This closure of police stations is nothing new. The other day I looked up an article I wrote almost 20 years ago, in April 2001. I noted then: ‘In the past ten years, England and Wales have lost 630 police stations.’ You could write about it as much as you liked, and many have, but it alters nothing. They keep on closing them.
The police are not ours any more. They are a state militia who don’t need us or much like us, and they really don’t want to hear from us. So why should they be easy to find? The only way to make sure they come out is to defend your own home.
If we ever do get a proper government in this country again, it could do worse than dissolve the police and start all over again.
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