The late great Desmond Greaves, a card-holding Communist ,used defend Fianna Fail from the charge that it was just another capitalist gang. Under de Valera he said it fulfilled the role that the Labour Party played in Britain. Beyond that he said Fianna Fail was anti-Imperialist.
He knew that the British Labour Party contained many anti-Imperialists, some of them members of the Connolly Association or its good friends such as Fenner Brockway(1888-1988).
But a Labour Party whose first Cabinet Minister, Arthur Henderson, approved of the execution of James Connolly in 1916, and a Dominions Secretary ,J.H. Thomas so hostile to Ireland and to de Valera personally in the 1930s, that both Thomas and Dev featured in a British comic song – “The Day That Chelsea Went And Won The Cup” (available on line) has never been anti-Imperialist in body and soul.
Following the Second World War it was a Labour Government that sent troops to Greece in support of Fascists who had collanorated with the Nazis. amd to Malaya where they established concentration camps, used Agent Orange on vegetation, people, birds and animals and committed murderous atrocities.Some British “anti-terrorists” .had themselves photographed flaunting the severed heads of their victims. General Frank Kitson, whose anti-insurgency baptism had been in Palestine, tutored by ex-Black and Tans, found his vocationin Malaya under a British Labour Government. The 1965 Holocaust in Indonesia in 1965 was sponsored by a Labour Government led by Harold Wison, Foreign Secretary was the lacklustre Michael Stewart and the Defence Secretary, who expressed himself pleased by the affair, was probably the most impressive politician in Britain, Denis Healey. Certainly Wilson, Stewart and Healey were prime movers in the Indonesian murders. Were they the only Labour Ministers or MPs in the know?
Wilson was instrumental in the takeover by British Secret Agents of the direction of the IRISH TIMES, masterminded by Sir Andrew Gilchrist, the grisly eminence behind the Indonesian murders, and was in Office (if not in power) when British security personnel murdered over thirty men, women and children, and maimed hundreds more in Dublin and Monaghan in 1974. The Defence Secretary was Roy Mason, who possibly had an agenda of his own. Mason later served as Northern Ireland Secretary, antagonising all Nationalist opinion, however mild.
And it was a Labour Government which launched the unprovoked murderous war on Iraq in 2003, from which Tony Blair emerged with diminished respect and a fat fortune.
A subject perhaps, for a Bloated BLOG?
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