Brian Walden

In the Spring 1987 issue of the Washington-based journal the Public Interest, subtitled 'Britain on the Brink', Walden wrote:

The Anglo-American relationship and the future of NATO depend upon the result of the next British general election. This is not a battle between Republicans and Democrats, with a different emphasis here and a slight change of direction there. American political parties are broadly in agreement upon the economic system and about defense [sic] policy. In Britain today, the political struggle is about the very nature of society itself.

The value of the Social Democrats is that if no single party has a majority in the next House of Commons, they can be relied upon to prevent Britain from being unilaterally disarmed. Almost certainly the Liberal party will follow this lead, if not from conviction, then as a matter of electoral expediency.

Walden's views are interesting not only because in the 1980s he was close to the powerful on both sides of the Atlantic. Before he became a fellow Birmingham MP with Roy Jenkins, Walden had been very active in the Campaign for Democratic Socialism, the anti-unilateralist Gaitskellite vehicle run by Bill Rodgers. Until his retirement from Parliament in 1977, Walden had been part of that pro-nuclear, pro-NATO, pro-American wing of the party which found its voice within the Labour movement through Socialist Commentary and, more widely, through Encounter magazine, one of the wide range of Central Intelligence Agency-funded activities fronted by the Congress for Cultural Freedom from the early days of the Cold War. [1]