'Communist sympathiser' and former CND treasurer now EU Foreign Minister

[Magda Hassan]

The following article looks like a bit of a hit piece but there is some interesting points with in it though I am sure I read them differently to how the authors intend it.

Personally, I suspect that Ashton joined the CND on a similar basis as did Bliar. If she were a genuine member and a genuine 'communist sympathizer' I really doubt she would have slipped un-noticed through the net to be where she is now.

EU's new 'Foreign Minister' Cathy Ashton was Treasurer of CND


By Ian Gallagher and Daniel Boffey
Last updated at 12:49 AM on 22nd November 2009
Partially obscured behind a group of fellow CND activists, an unremarkable looking woman in a crumpled anorak stands on the steps of 10 Downing Street.
It is April 1982, and Cathy Ashton – CND’s influential national treasurer and a suspected Communist sympathiser – is demanding that Margaret Thatcher turn back the naval Task Force heading for the Falklands amid fears that it was armed with nuclear weapons.

Fast-forward 27 years and Cathy, in appearance at least, cuts no less an anonymous figure. Yet in political terms she has risen astonishingly.



Protestors: Cathy Ashton, circled, at No10 in 1982, with Bruce Kent and Joan Ruddock, centre

Cathy Ashton, or Baroness Ashton as she is today, has left the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament far behind and is now the European Union’s grandiosely titled High

Representative for Foreign Affairs, serving 490million citizens.
She will receive an annual salary of £239,000 as well as a raft of allowances and perks that will net her an estimated £4million in six years. No wonder she is said to be ‘thrilled to bits’.

But if the pamphlets CND churned out during her time with the organisation are anything to go by, she did not always embrace all things European. One leaflet, entitled No To The Market, declared: ‘The trouble with the Common Market is that it brings closer together the well-armed Nato countries and thus worsens the divisions of Europe.’

CND, which Miss Ashton joined in 1977, had long been viewed with deep suspicion by the security services, which carried out surveillance of its members. At the time, MI5 designated CND as ‘subversive’ largely on the basis that John Cox, its chairman from 1971 to 1977, was a Communist Party member.

It was suggested, too, that both Miss Ashton and Joan Ruddock – now a Labour MP and who appears in the Downing Street picture alongside Bruce Kent, who went on to become the CND chairman – were both communist sympathisers.

The security services are said to have put Miss Ashton under surveillance and kept a file on her. Certainly she was regularly mixing with those the spooks of the
day would have considered undesirables.

High Office: Baroness Ashton with European leaders last week

Documents seen by The Mail on Sunday suggest that from 1977 to 1979, when she was a paid CND ‘organiser’, she represented the campaign at Communist Party meetings. She attended one, for instance, in Oldham, Lancashire, on September 17, 1977.

At this time, CND was committed to the ‘unilateral abandonment of nuclear weapons, nuclear bases and nuclear alliances’ by the UK. That meant giving up nuclear submarines and forcing the US to withdraw cruise missiles from bases such as RAF Greenham Common, Berkshire.

This would have been a huge propaganda coup for the Soviet Union, and arguably could have propped up the old-style Communist rulers in the Kremlin for a few, or many, more years.

Most crucially of all, Miss Ashton and her comrades wanted Britain to leave Nato, the alliance with the US set up to counter the threat of a Soviet-led attack by the massed forces of the Warsaw Pact nations.

In December 1983, she chaired a fringe meeting organised by the publication Marxism Today and three years earlier was part of a delegation that went to the Netherlands to meet a communist-controlled group called Stop The Neutron Bomb, which campaigned against American nuclear weapons.

Other records detail the contact that Miss Ashton and fellow CND members had with the French Communist Party.

And the minutes of a meeting of the CND Council attended by Miss Ashton on July 7, 1979, at a school in Camden, North London, state: ‘There was a request that CND should protest to the Government about the recent speech by the Queen at Aldermaston, in which she lent political support to the supporters of nuclear weapons. It was agreed that this should be done.’

By the time of the Downing Street delegation in 1982, Miss Ashton had risen to national treasurer, second only in importance to the chairman.

A friend from those days, Alasdair Beal, who was general secretary of the London branch of CND, said: ‘She was a staunch supporter of the campaign. She started off as a full-time staff member and then ceased to be paid when she became treasurer, which was a voluntary post.

‘When she was on the staff, Cathy did not tend to take part in direct action. The staff couldn’t do the organising if they ended up in jail.

‘The three or four staff campaigned, organised events, served the membership and produced the campaign journal. The first 100,000-strong demonstration around 1979 was organised by the staff and I think Cathy was one of them. After that, the campaign took off.’

Mr Beal, 55, a civil engineer who lives in Leeds, said it was wrong to suggest that before getting the job as Europe’s foreign policy chief, Baroness Ashton had never won power through a vote. ‘She was elected to her roles as CND treasurer and later the vice-chair,’ he said.

As CND treasurer, Miss Ashton was embroiled in controversial claims that the organisation was funded by the Communist Party. In her report to CND’s annual conference in 1982, she argued for audited accounts to counter ‘smears’ against it – though she added that even that would not provide conclusive proof of where CND’s cash came from.

She said: ‘CND has suffered many smears this year, which have pointed to where our funding comes from.’

She referred to the famous challenge by Bruce Kent to pay £100 to anyone who could prove CND was bankrolled by communists.

She added: ‘There have been many open invitations issued by Bruce Kent for independent persons to look at our accounts and £100 offered for proof (there obviously have been no takers).

‘It should be pointed out that an audit will not provide the ultimate answer to the smear as it cannot tell whether an individual is giving money from sources that we would not wish to have finances from.’

In the event, the conference voted to keep the identities of its donors secret.

And at a meeting in February 1982, Miss Ashton proposed tactics later employed by the Labour Party under Tony Blair during the period she was made a life peer.

The minutes state: ‘Cathy Ashton reported that we need to expand our list of “rich and famous” people and organisations who can be approached for donations.’

A spokesman for Baroness Ashton said last night: ‘She has never been a member of the Communist Party.’

He declined to answer questions about her CND past.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...r-CND.html