Home SECURITY & DEFENCE Nuclear disarmament: CND, KGB… and Britain’s Labour Party

Nuclear disarmament: CND, KGB… and Britain’s Labour Party

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UK Labour Party Shadow Minister for Peace and Disarmament, Fabian Hamilton, has been caught on film telling a political rally that “Russian hackers can already hack into the software” controlling Trident, Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, adding: “I’d be quite happy about that.”

His remarks were made at a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) rally in September 2019.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace suggested Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer should sack Hamilton, saying “It is one thing to disagree with the UK’s possession of nuclear weapons, but to take the side of a man who has deployed chemical weapons and who is responsible for bombing civilians in Ukraine is treasonous.”

A supporter of Great Britain’s unilateral disarmament, Hamilton, whose ministerial role was created in 2016 by Jeremy Corbyn, appeared alongside the former Labour leader at a Labour Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament rally in March 2021.

CND and the KGB

The CND itself has long been considered to have been a KGB operation from day one. Its leadership has always displayed strong anti-west sentiments, whilst generally avoiding any criticism of the Soviet Union:

  • Joan Ruddock, CND Chairman: “the threat comes from the United States having made Europe the front line in its conflict with the Soviet Union” (Morning Star, September 7, 1984).
  • [John Cox, CND Vice-President: “I believe that our work in destroying the ‘big lie’ about the Soviet threat is one of the most important things we do” (Communist Focus, no.14, December 1983).]
  • Sally Davison, former CND National Organiser, in response to a Moscow Radio interviewer asking her why the official Soviet Peace Committee was supporting the Soviet Government: “Well, obviously, because the Soviet Government is in favour of peace, and this makes a big difference” (Moscow Radio, June 7, 1982).
  • Dan Smith, CND Vice-Chairman: “We need to put effort into attacking Britain’s propensity for war. Britain is the most warring state of the last two centuries” (Confidential CND memorandum, June 1983).
  • Bruce Kent, CND General Secretary: “I personally believe that the culpability of the arms race is actually on the West” (US National Catholic Register, January 13, 1985).
  • [John Cox, CND Vice-President: “The consistent stand of CND for unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from NATO has been won by working as Communists in a principled non-sectarian way” (Morning Star, January 8, 1985).]
  • Gary Lefley, later CND General Secretary: “the Soviet Union has never welshed on any treaty obligation in its 65-year history. No, rather it is our membership of NATO which involves us in plans to initiate global war” (Straight Left, May 1982).

Former deputy head of KGB in London, Oleg Gordievsky, in 2018 wrote of another former Labour leader and CND supporter, Michael Foot, “A leading supporter of CND, he also passed on what he knew about debates over nuclear weapons. The KGB gave him drafts of articles encouraging British disarmament which he could then edit and publish, unattributed to their real source, in Tribune.”

Another former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, although for some time he denied it, was also a member of Labour CND.

While national CND was committed to “the unilateral abandonment by Britain of nuclear weapons, nuclear bases and nuclear alliances”, its parliamentary branch pressed for only the first two of these three aims. So Mr Blair – and the other 132 Labour MPs then in Parliamentary CND – would have had us unconditionally abandoning our nuclear deterrent and throwing out NATO’s cruise missiles, though hoping to remain in the alliance. All this was just a year before the Zero Option deal on intermediate-range nuclear forces which traded cruise for hundreds of Soviet SS-20s. The deal would have been impossible if we had listened to Mr Blair.

Rt Hon Dr Julian Lewis MP, Daily Telegraph – 23 Sept 1994.

Corbyn on the Salisbury poisonings

Corbyn himself has attracted almost as much condemnation for his apparent sympathies towards the Putin regime, as he has for his apparent sympathies for Marxist terrorist groups around the world.

Corbyn Marxist

In March 2018 he appeared to sow doubt on Russia’s involvement in the Salisbury poisonings: “To rush way ahead of the evidence being gathered by the police, in a fevered parliamentary atmosphere, serves neither justice nor our national security,” he wrote in the Guardian, after then Prime Minister Theresa May identified Russia as the source of the poison used in the attempted murders of Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

He continued, possibly in an attempt to divert attain away from the Kremlin, “Either this was a crime authored by the Russian state; or that state has allowed these deadly toxins to slip out of the control it has an obligation to exercise. If the latter, a connection to Russian mafia-like groups that have been allowed to gain a toehold in Britain cannot be excluded.”

Main image: Garry Knight from London, England (via Wikipedia)


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