Labour's disgrace; Blair's apology

The news from the Labour Party Conference has been dominated by the forcible ejection from the Conference Hall yesterday of an 82 year-old Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, Walter Wolfgang, who had heckled the Foreign Secretary's defence of the Iraq War. Today, Wolfgang returned to the Conference in triumph, and received an apology from the Prime Minister.

This episode is certainly disturbing, and merited an apology from Tony Blair. By good fortune, I have obtained the full text of the Prime Minister's statement, and reproduce it here:

The expulsion of Walter Wolfgang from the Conference ought never to have happened, and I sincerely regret it. After all, Mr Wolfgang ought never to have been in the Conference in the first place, let alone allowed back in today. That he has been a party member for almost half a century is a sobering reflection on the party I have led for 11 years, and I must take responsibility for this oversight. I apologise to Labour supporters for having allowed it to persist.

Mr Wolfgang, I should explain, has a characteristic not mentioned by his new-found admirers in the Conservative press. His peace campaigning has centred not only on Labour CND but also on an organisation called Labour Action for Peace (LAP). LAP for decades operated with a nominally non-Communist leadership but invariably took the Soviet side of every international dispute over foreign policy and nuclear arms. Its reliably pro-Soviet position dates back as far as the 1950s, when Frank Allaun, MP for Salford East from 1955-83, did his utmost to persuade the Labour Party to accept back into membership - and as a parliamentary candidate - the Communist fellow-traveller Konni Zilliacus, an outspoken supporter of the crushing of democracy in Czechoslovakia in 1948. I regret to say that Allaun's efforts were successful. My predecessor Clement Attlee knew the score with these people, and expelled Zilliacus along with other MPs, such as John Platts-Mills, whose support for the ideals of parliamentary democracy was very remote indeed. LAP has remained a forum for the most gullible shills for totalitarianism. Take Stan Newens, former MP for Harlow and then an MEP. He edited a pamphlet entitled Talking with Nicolae Ceausescu, in which it was seriously maintained that the mass murderer believed in "respect for the rights of all peoples to self-determination".

Walter Wolfgang's political activism has been in the same disreputable cause of apologetics for the totalitarian enemies of democratic socialism. Unlike the Conservative press, I do not consider allegiances such as these to be personal idiosyncrasies: they are a moral abomination. The party that I lead played a noble role in establishing the post-war institutions and alliances that preserved collective security and eventually liberated Eastern Europe from tyranny. I am proud of the tradition of militant anti-Communism that my party has, at its best, embodied. That position is a prerequisite for a democratic party of the Left, in the same way, and for the same reason, that militant anti-fascism is. Walter Wolfgang has dedicated his political life to another cause. His ejection from the Labour Conference yesterday was a belated recognition of the party's failure to eject him from membership at any time in the previous five decades. For that failure, I apologise once more.