Denouncing a traitor

Have the BBC covered the revelations in The Mail that

"Jack Jones, the firebrand union leader... was this week exposed as a KGB agent"?

" 'My contact was not a cultured or even an intelligent man,' he told the Mail yesterday.

'He was a dogmatic Communist who felt he had a sacred duty to help Soviet Russia. He had worked for the KGB for years without many in government suspecting a thing.'

So who was this shadowy figure? He was, in fact, Jack Jones, the firebrand union leader who was this week exposed as a KGB agent.

During Labour Governments in the Sixties and Seventies, the former Liverpool docker rose to lead the huge Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU) and, significantly, became head of the Trades' Union Congress' International Committee, allowing him to travel freely behind the Iron Curtain.

In those days, when union leaders enjoyed beer-and-sandwich meetings at No 10, Jones had only to snap his fingers and the Government clicked its heels.

After all, Comrade Jack had the ability to call his two million members on strike and bring the country to a halt. He was once named in a public vote as the most powerful man in Britain.

Nicknamed 'the Emperor' by other union bosses, he reputedly held more sway over Labour Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan than even the favourites in their own Cabinets.

And, perhaps with an eye to the future, one of his proteges was Gordon Brown, then an upandcoming socialist sponsored as a Westminster MP by Jones's TGWU.

Little wonder that when Jack Jones died at 96 earlier this year, The Guardian wrote: 'His power and influence was immense. He never shifted from his commitment to socialist ideals . . . but always with an unflinching integrity.'

Gordon Brown described him as the 'world's greatest trade union leader'."

Is anyone surprised that a leading Trade Unionist of the 1960s and 1970s was a traitor to the UK? Is anyone surprised that Gordon Brown lauded this traitor? Is anyone surprised that the BBC don't think the story is newsworthy?