Different faces of treason

Without claiming any legal rigour, I define treason as joining forces with another country, especially but not necessarily hostile, against one’s own.

If you accept this definition of treason, then you have to agree that Messrs Foot, Blair, Major, Clegg and Corbyn have committed it, albeit in different ways. But then there are many ways of betraying one’s country, just as there are many ways of serving it.

New revelations have come to light about the KGB career of Michael Foot, former leader of the Labour Party who at the peak of his association with the Soviets contested the 1983 general election.

Apparently, had Labour won, MI6 was prepared to brief the Queen that someone committed to undermining her realm was about to govern it.

To grasp the full perfidy of the KGB, ponder the fact that they set out to cast aspersion on my person by giving Foot the code name ‘Agent Boot’. That showed a great deal of prescience on their part, for at the time he first became a traitor I was still a child.

It also showed stupidity: if there’s one thing a spy’s moniker shouldn’t do, it’s telegraph the spy’s identity. Calling Foot ‘Boot’ is like naming John Major ‘Agent Minor’ or Theresa May ‘Agent April’.

As far as agents of influence go, Foot came cheap: apparently he went for only about £40,000 in today’s money, probably a couple of grand at the time. Still, I wonder why the Soviets felt they had to pay anything at all.

A fire-eating leftist may preach all sorts of ideas, but they’d all be underpinned by his undying hatred of the West. And Britain then was – arguably still is – a Western country.

A leftist devotes his life to knocking out the cornerstone of liberty without which the edifice of our civilisation will come down. And the USSR pursued exactly the same goal.

In economics, someone like Foot will agitate against free enterprise and for nationalisation; in politics, for rampant statism and against democracy; in social life, for destroying the upper classes and making as many citizens as possible dependent on the state; in education, for egalitarianism, which is putting equality before quality; in medicine, ditto.

More to the point, if his own country doesn’t share his hostility to things Western, a leftist is ready to join forces with a foreign power that does. His loyalty is owed to his ideology first and to his country a distant second, if at all.

A proletarian has no motherland, taught the spiritual father of socialism, and the Labour Party has learned the lesson well. To emphasise their true allegiance, all delegates to their conferences, and not just the hard left ones, sing such communist songs as the Internationale and Bandiera Rossa while waving the red flag.

Hence, if it was agents of influence the KGB was after, they didn’t have to part with their hard-earned roubles: Foot was doing their bidding anyway, gratis, of his own volition.

That insultingly small amount must have bought the Soviets’ ability to direct Agent Boot towards the areas of immediate interest, but I bet even that much control could have been achieved simply by an impassioned appeal to his ideological purity.

It’s hardly worth mentioning that Foot was an ardent supporter of the CND, a Soviet front organisation run by the same people who ran Agent Boot.

The nuclear disarmament promoted by that treasonous setup was to be strictly unilateral: the West was supposed to disarm unconditionally because it had nothing to fear from that champion of peace, the Soviet Union.

Jump a few decades forward, and Labour is being led by Jeremy Corbyn who provides a valuable insight into British socialism and, indirectly, another proof of my heartfelt belief that Western leftists are driven mostly by hatred of all things Western and not by any urgent concern for the working classes.

Corbyn too was in the CND, as were Blair and Clegg. But unlike Foot, he’s not limited in his sympathies to communism. Any enemy of Britain, regardless of ideology, is Jeremy’s friend.

Interestingly, though in the good leftist tradition he personally opposes Britain’s membership in the EU (because it’s insufficiently socialist to his taste), he’s committing his party to defending it simply because that strengthens the  political maelstrom threatening to tear the country apart.

Corbyn is also a champion of a KGB-run Russia and her Botox-pumped leader. This even though Russia has renounced communism and pretends to uphold conservative values, by claiming allegiance to Christianity (its KGB denomination), prosecuting or else roughing up homosexuals and encouraging such capitalist activities as looting the country and turning the whole world into a laundromat for the loot.

But Corbyn’s closest friends are those Middle Easterners who hate the West even more fervently than Putin does: assorted terrorist organisations that actually murder Westerners in large numbers, including Britons. In his eyes, their cause is just, especially since they hate Jews even more than he does.

However, the old socialist weapons haven’t been decommissioned either.

Corbyn advocates and, if ever elected, threatens to implement every policy guaranteed to destroy Britain: wholesale nationalisation, run-away taxation and public spending, destruction of the few remaining grammar schools, unrestrained immigration (especially of Muslims with hatred in their eyes) – you name it.

Messrs Blair and Clegg also like, and already were in a position to put forth, many of such policies, but hey, we’re a democracy, and so they’re free to support any political cause. That by itself doesn’t make them traitors – provided they don’t collude with Britain’s foes to advance their ends.

Alas, they’re doing just that, in company with another former political leader John Major. As I write, the glorious trio is touring Europe trying to drum up support for derailing Brexit, and on this issue at least the EU is definitely a foe of Britain.

In other words, they’re colluding with foreign governments to override the democratically expressed will of their own people that their own government is supposed to uphold.

When other countries do that, they become enemies – or let’s charitably call them adversaries – of our government. When British politicians use those countries against their own, they become traitors, unless I’m missing something.

Or perhaps not, if one appreciates the wisdom of the Elizabethan writer John Harrington, who wrote: “Truth doth never prosper. What’s the reason? For if it to prosper none dare call it treason.”