Tom Bower - Dangerous Hero

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Tom Bower 2019

Cover image © Getty Images

Tom Bower asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008299613

Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008299590

Version: 2019-11-11

To Veronica

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface to the Paperback

Preface

Islington, Late 1996

1 Rebel With a Cause

2 The First Rung

3 The Deadly Duo

4 The Other Comrade

5 Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad

6 The Harmless Extremist

7 Circle of Fear

8 Lame Ducks

9 Party Games

10 The Takeover

11 The Purge

12 The Jew-Haters

13 Stuck in the Bunker

14 Squashing the Opposition

15 The Coming of St Jeremy

16 Game-Changer

17 Resurrection

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

Index

About the Author

About the Publisher

Sceptics scoffed at the title of this book, but the turbulence in the Labour Party since its publication in February 2019 has justified the sobriquet attached to Jeremy Corbyn. Contrary to the vote-winning image of an honourable campaigner for a gloriously benevolent society, Corbyn’s life, as revealed here, is a catalogue of duplicity and dogma. Similarly, John McDonnell’s career as a virulent Trotskyist poses a warning to Britain’s honest electors. Over the past months, both men have sought to airbrush their lifelong alliance with tyranny from the public record. This book tears away the disguises they have adopted. Electors should judge them on their footprint. Thirty years after Eastern Europe was liberated from oppression, Britain now stands on the edge of succumbing to a group of Stalinist sympathisers.

Ostensibly, the 2019 election is about Brexit. But in reality, it is a contest between capitalism and communism. A careless vote risks allowing a government led by Marxists to take control of the country by default. And once Corbyn and his trusted associates are in Downing Street there will be little reprieve. The locks will be turned. No Marxist government in history has ever relinquished power democratically.

As students of Lenin, Corbyn and McDonnell entered the general election determined to ignore the fundamental disagreements with many party supporters to promote their lifelong passion to transform Britain into a Marxist state. Echoing Hugo Chávez, their Venezuelan hero, Corbyn and McDonnell offer the most deprived of Britain’s electorate a bonanza of riches, confiscated from the middle classes. (Britain’s seriously rich long ago relocated their wealth abroad, far from Corbyn’s grasp.) Corbyn’s political manifesto promises that equality of opportunity will be replaced by equality of poverty. His election will hasten the exodus of the country’s wealth creators to more welcoming nations. The aftermath of destroying capitalism is visible in Venezuela – hyperinflation and crippling shortages.

Even worse, contrary to Corbyn’s promises Britain will no longer be a fundamentally decent and tolerant society. Ever since the original publication of this book, the evidence that Labour under Corbyn’s leadership is anti-Semitic has been irrefutable. As successive Labour MPs resigned in disgust over Corbyn’s tolerance of their persecutors in their constituencies and in Westminster, Corbyn has shown no shame. With horror, mournful MPs have witnessed the triumph of their persecutors. Chris Williamson, suspended from the party as a suspected anti-Semite, was never expelled. To his victims’ distress, many traditional Labour MPs meekly collaborated with Corbyn rather than revolt against his racism. Self-interest suffocated the principles so loudly proclaimed by those social democrats – formerly the bedrock of the Labour Party. Lenin called them his ‘useful idiots’.

Rarely has every individual’s vote been more important than in the 2019 general election. The reason is described in this biography of a man who, despite his veneer of virtuousness, is, I believe, a dangerous hero.

The genesis of this book started exactly fifty years ago.

At the end of January 1969, a group of Marxist and Trotskyist students at the London School of Economics led a stormy protest against the school’s director, an authoritarian from Southern Rhodesia. He had ordered the staff to close a series of gates inside the building in Aldwych to prevent a students’ meeting in the school’s Old Theatre. In the mêlée, at about 5 p.m., a caretaker guarding the gates died from a heart attack and the students instantly started a month-long occupation, igniting similar sit-ins across Britain’s universities.

Throughout that first night of occupation, hundreds of LSE students crowded into the Old Theatre to debate the prospects of a Marxist revolution in Britain. Led by American graduates from Berkeley, California, where the student revolt against the Vietnam War had started five years before, and with speeches from French and German students, battle-scarred from 1968 street fights in Paris and Berlin, LSE’s Marxists and Trotskyists (there were many) told us we were the vanguard of a worldwide revolution – which would begin with the students, and the workers would follow. We believed it.

Aged twenty-three and from a conservative background, I had completed my law degree at the LSE (the country’s best law faculty at the time), and while studying for the Bar exams was employed on legal research projects at the college. Long before that dramatic night I had concluded that English law protected property rights at the expense of the rights of individuals and real democracy. Surrounded by articulate Marxists studying sociology and government, and going to lectures by Ralph Miliband and other Marxist teachers, I became attracted to their analysis of society. In that era, for anyone interested in politics that was not surprising.

In the wake of the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa in 1960 (I had marched in protest through London with my school friends against apartheid during the early years of that decade) and the anti-Vietnam protests outside the American embassy in Grosvenor Square in 1968 (along with others, I escaped with just some nasty blows from the police), I shared the horror at the dishonesty and disarray of Harold Wilson’s Labour government. Added to that, for family reasons I was influenced by events in Germany. In particular I became fascinated by Rudi Dutschke, an erudite Marxist who spoke in graphic terms in Berlin about ‘the long march through the institutions of power’ to remove the Nazis and their capitalist supporters from ruling post-war Germany. In April 1968 an attempted assassination of Dutschke illustrated the raw battle for power between good and evil raging across Europe and America. (I would meet Dutschke later in Oxford.)