I think "Communist" is essentially a code word for "Labor Union"

[Jan Klimkowski]

Some excellent posts in this thread.

Magda - you have probably seen Adam Curtis' excellent documentary, The League of Gentleman, in the fine series, Pandora's Box.

Alan Budd, an Economics Professor, frequent advisor to the British government, member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, and "consultant" for numerous banks, was interviewed for the film, which was about Thatcher's monetarism. Aka shock therapy.

In 1991, Budd said the following (referring to the "monetarist" policy of Thatcher's government which created 3 million unemployed in Britain and attempted, with considerable success, to break the unions):

The nightmare I sometimes have about this whole experience runs as follows: I was involved in making a number of proposals which were partly at least adopted by the government and put in play by the government. My worry is as follows; that there may have been people making the actual policy decisions, or people behind them, or people behind them, who never believed for a moment that this was the correct way to bring down inflation. They did however see that this would be a very good way to raise unemployment. And raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes; if you like, that what was engineered there - in Marxist terms - was a crisis of capitalism which recreated the reserve army of labour and has allowed the Capitalist to make high profits ever since.

As if waking up and realizing he was talking to a camera, Budd then added:

Now... I'm not saying I believe that story but [that]... I worry whether that was... really what was going on.

Between 1991 and 1997, Budd was Chief Economic Advisor to the British Treasury and Conservative government....