Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Emperor Jones

When the decline of Britain comes to be properly recorded by some future Edward Gibbon, the name of Jack Jones will feature prominently. He has just died at the age of 96, In his heyday in the 1960s and 1970s he was General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union with its 2 million members, and a representative, almost a caricature, of intransigence, selfishness and militancy in the name of the workers. How he loved class warfare! And how he laid down the law to Prime Ministers Wilson and Heath, both of them apparently defenseless to deal with so rigid, so Stalinist, a figure. He obliged them to agree to a social contract in spite of the contradiction in it, namely that money was evil but it still had to be taken from everyone else and given to workers. He was one of the master-minds of the British economic disaster of those decades. Paul Johnson nicknamed him “Emperor Jones.”

A man in this mold, it always seemed to me, had to be a Communist, and more than that, a Soviet agent. Always drably dressed, sporting a proletarian cloth cap, he spoke in a voice loaded with both monotony and menace. This presentational style of being a Puritan revolutionary was surely imitated from those he admired in the Kremlin. Other trade-union leaders accused him of being a Soviet agent, but this he always liked to deny. Truth-telling has never been in the playbook of such types.

One clue was that he had volunteered for the Spanish civil war, and risen out there to be a commissar in the British Battalion, responsible for “political and moral education and vigilance.” That word “vigilance” conceals the fact that as commissar he had the power to send men to the firing squad. You didn’t get a job like that unless you were a loyal Muscovite Communist.

The obituaries, of course, fawn over him. To the Guardian, Jones had “unflinching integrity” — that’s a perfect specimen of the kind of euphemism Leftists come up with for a hard-line Communist. The BBC, now guaranteed to be off-beam, rather comically suggested he enjoyed “vigorous contests” with management. The Times spoke of his “left-wing affiliations” — another polished euphemism — but conceded that he was “a good hater.” Even the Daily Telegraph found him “dedicated to the Socialist ideal of Each for All and All for Each.”

At which point Oleg Gordievsky has lost patience. Famously, he was the KGB colonel and resident in London who defected. Since then, he’s been reminding the country how dangerous the Soviets and their agents were. Now he has written a letter to the Daily Telegraph to state that he had been the case officer for Jones and his wife, also a Comintern agent since the 1930s, and he had given Jones “a small amount of cash.” (So much for the Puritan revolutionary.) Gordievsky also read the volumes of his files, now in the KGB archive. We have to be grateful that Jones did not have the chance to practice in Britain the role of commissar he’d learnt in Spain.

04/28 10:01 AMShare