Some of you will remember, perhaps even with fondness, the minor aristocrat and Old Salopian journalist: The Hon. Paul Foot. The Hon. Paul Foot was a very active member of the extreme and vicious sect, the Socialist Workers Party.
The British Left has little time for neo Nazis: even posh ones. However, it retains considerable affection for members of revolutionary Communist parties, despite their desire to impose a nightmarish totalitarian regime on this country. I suppose it helps that the far Left attracts so many well brought up chaps, who can be trusted to use the right cutlery at dinner, whereas most neo Nazis these days are lower middle class, or yobbos of some sort.
Perhaps this explains the space given to Paul Foot, to peddle his stupid conspiracy theories about the Lockerbie Bombing. He was doing so, until a few months before his heart exploded in Stanstead Airport. Here he is in the Guardian:
[T]he Lockerbie bombing was carried out not by Libyans at all but by terrorists based in Syria and hired by Iran to avenge the shooting down in the summer of 1988 of an Iranian civil airliner by a US warship. This was the line followed by both British and US police and intelligence investigators after Lockerbie. Through favoured newspapers like the Sunday Times, the investigators named the suspects – some of whom had been found with home-made bombs similar to the one used at Lockerbie.
This line of inquiry persisted until April 1989, when a phone call from President Bush senior to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warned her not to proceed with it. A year later, British and US armed forces prepared for an attack on Saddam Hussein’s occupying forces in Kuwait. Their coalition desperately needed troops from an Arab country. These were supplied by Syria, which promptly dropped out of the frame of Lockerbie suspects. Libya, not Syria or Iran, mysteriously became the suspect country, and in 1991 the US drew up an indictment against two Libyan suspects. The indictment was based on the “evidence” of a Libyan “defector”, handsomely paid by the CIA. His story was such a fantastic farrago of lies and fantasies that it was thrown out by the Scottish judges…
As you might expect, this turns out to be just so much dead Trot bollocks:
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi ordered the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, a former Libyan cabinet minister was quoted as saying by a Swedish newspaper on Wednesday.
Former Justice Minister Mustafa Mohamed Abud Al Jeleil, reported to have resigned this week over the violence used by the government against protesters, told the tabloid Expressen he had evidence Gaddafi ordered the bombing that killed 270 people.
A sensible rule of thumb: if a Socialist Workers Party activist believes something to be true, it won’t be.
UPDATE
DaveM reminds us of the similar Stalinist bollocks from George Galloway.