by Shadwellarmy
At that time the Labour Party of Great was almost entirely funded and supported by the trade union movement, which was also closely involved in the pre-selection of Labour candidates in parliamentary elections, a case of “he who pays the piper”.
1931 c resized unemployed march.jpg
The trade union movement in turn received “sponsorship” funding to a great degree from the USSR through proxy communist organisations and trade missions whose ultimate aim was the creation of a soviet socialist state in Great Britain. This was not unique to the UK as similar communist front organisations were set up throughout Europe for the same express purpose of spreading the communist revolution abroad.
It will be recalled that the British trade union movement as well as the communist party of Great Britain fully supported the Bolsheviks during the Polish-Bolshevik War of the 1920s by refusing to handle any cargos likely to be used by the “Polish white-guards” against Bolshevik Russia.
The animosity between the Labour party and the communists during the 1920s was the result of "Zinoviev letter" published by the Daily Mail newspaper just before the 1924 General Election which purported to show the communists and Labour party plotting to take power, this is supposed to have scared the wider public into voting Conservative thus ousting the Labour Party out of government. However the "Zinoviev letter" was found to be a fake. As recently as 1999 the Chief Historian of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Gill Bennett concluded "it is impossible to say who wrote the Zinoviev Letter" though her best guess was that it was commissioned by White Russian intelligence circles from forgers in Berlin or the Baltic states, most likely in Riga.”.
It was also a common practice of the “Red” press to vociferously oppose something as a public diversion for the communists supporting that which it seemed to publically oppose—a standard black propaganda tactic. This was apparent IMO after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement of August 1939, which the socialist-left seemed, outwardly, stunned to learn and was very vocal against the agreement in the “Red” press. However, and curiously, the Polish-British Common Defence Pact specifically excluded acting on aggression by the USSR so when the Red Army invaded Poland on 17 September 1939 Britain did not declare war on Stalin’s Soviet Union as it had done two weeks earlier on Hitler’s Germany. How much influence communist “moles” in the British establishment had over government policy remains a matter of conjecture.
But one must ask if it were true “that many British politicians considered Stalin a bigger threat than the little Austrian with the moustache” then why would the threat of the Soviets as an aggressor against Poland not also have been considered and therefore included in the Polish-British Common Defence Pact given centuries of turbulent history between Poland and Russia?
I think it would be fair to say that as many British politicians and sections of the "establishment" elite supported Hitler's Germany as did support Stalin's Soviet Russia.
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- Larry C
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