MP Ben Bradley pays up

Angry Andy wrote:What a feeble reply.
Didge still trying to defend a proven liar and libeller.
Thats what we have come to expect from Newsfix's Conservative spokesman.
He invented a lie and posted it.
It was libellous and has paid a lot of money out.
That will learn him.

Angry Andy wrote:He knew it was a lie and so do Conservative central office.
They realised  it woyldnt stand up it a libel case and would be hugely costly and would also lose him his job.
If you think it wasnt a lie, why dont you put up your real name and post it on social media or on a phone inor in the Sun or Mail.
But I dont think you can afford the costs. You might beed a lian from the millionaire ex membet here Stormee.

Didge wrote:

Angry Andy wrote:What a feeble reply.
Didge still trying to defend a proven liar and libeller.
Thats what we have come to expect from Newsfix's Conservative spokesman.
He invented a lie and posted it.
It was libellous and has paid a lot of money out.
That will learn him.

How is what he said a lie?

didge, he admitted himself that he was lying and was wrong to do so.




This Tory MP was a pussy

gelico wrote:

Didge wrote:


How is what he said a lie?

didge, he admitted himself that he was lying and was wrong to do so.  





This Tory MP was a pussy

by his own admission, he is also a liar

you didn't pay attention to what andy was saying

Angry Andy wrote:Do you have problems  reading?
Bradley  has ADMITTED he lied.  The tweet ws a LIE.
He lied to the public, Corbyn snd the HoC.
A sacking offence.
Are you having difficulty with the concept ?

"I fully accept that my statement was wholly untrue and false. I accept that I caused distress and upset to Jeremy Corbyn by my untrue and false allegations, suggesting he had betrayed his country by collaborating with foreign spies.

"I am very sorry for publishing this untrue and false statement and I have no hesitation in offering my unreserved and unconditional apology to Jeremy Corbyn for the distress I have caused him."
If it looks like a lie, sounds like a lie and reads like a lie, it is probably a lie.
Only a dolt would think otherwise.
A dolt like Didge.

Angry Andy wrote:Didge huff because he CANNOT admit to being wrong and HATES losing arguments.

Oh dear, epic fail.

Angry Andy wrote:Bradley. "I lied. I am sorry".

Didge "No you didn't, because I am God."

sassy wrote:

Angry Andy wrote:Do you have problems  reading?
Bradley  has ADMITTED he lied.  The tweet ws a LIE.
He lied to the public, Corbyn snd the HoC.
A sacking offence.
Are you having difficulty with the concept ?

"I fully accept that my statement was wholly untrue and false. I accept that I caused distress and upset to Jeremy Corbyn by my untrue and false allegations, suggesting he had betrayed his country by collaborating with foreign spies.

"I am very sorry for publishing this untrue and false statement and I have no hesitation in offering my unreserved and unconditional apology to Jeremy Corbyn for the distress I have caused him."
If it looks like a lie, sounds like a lie and reads like a lie, it is probably a lie.
Only a dolt would think otherwise.
A dolt like Didge.

I think 'dolt' is being very kind.   A very desperate purveyer of lies and innuendo that have been proven to be false and have also PUT UP LABOUR'S POLLING PERCENT lol.


No evidence Corbyn was a communist spy, say intelligence experts

Researchers say archives suggest claims made against Labour leader are unfounded

Communist-era files from the intelligence agency of Czechoslovakia provide no evidence that Jeremy Corbyn was ever a spy or agent of influence, experts and academic researchers who have reviewed the papers said on Tuesday.

Radek Schovánek, an analyst with the defence ministry of the Czech Republic – which emerged, along with Slovakia, from the peaceful breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1993 – has spent 25 years researching documents filed by the now-defunct spy service. He told the Guardian the suspicions against Corbyn were unfounded, and the claims of Ján Sarkocy, a former intelligence officer expelled from Britain in 1989, to have signed the Labour leader up were false.

Schovánek also poured scorn on Sarkocy’s boast that he used 10 to 15 other Labour politicians in the 1980s as sources, including the current shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, and Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London.

Corbyn, speaking at a conference on Tuesday, dismissed as nonsense the allegation he had passed on information to Czechoslovakia during the cold war.

The story originated with The Sun, which on Thursday splashed with “Corbyn and the Commie Spy”. The Telegraph, the Daily Mail and Times have since kept the ball rolling.

In a video released on Tuesday evening, Corbyn went on the attack, saying the claims were “lies and smears”.

“In the last few days, The Sun, The Mail, The Telegraph and The Express have all gone a little bit James Bond.

“They’ve found a former Czechoslovakian spy whose claims are increasingly wild and entirely false,” he said.

Sarkocy met with Corbyn in the 1980s in the House of Commons. In recent days, Sarkocy has claimed Corbyn was a paid informant of the StB, the Czechoslovakian security service. He also alleges other senior Labour figures were paid between £1,000 and £15,000 for information.

Schovánek said Sarkocy’s assertions were at odds with the security files, which represented the definitive record on agents and contacts, and made no reference to Corbyn as a recruited agent, or to McDonnell or Livingstone.

Asked if he was calling the ex-intelligence officer, now living near the Slovakian capital Bratislava, a liar, Schovánek said: “When you compare the documents which he had written and signed himself with what he is saying today, based on that he is a liar. He signed a list of documents in the UK which said Corbyn was an intelligence contact, not an agent.”

The term “intelligence contact” in reality meant little, Schovánek said. Czechoslovakian intelligence officers could have many such contacts, who provided little, if any information.

Schovánek, 54, who secretly smuggled banned books from the west into Czechoslovakia during the cold war, said he felt compelled to speak out on Corbyn’s behalf, despite strongly disagreeing with the Labour leader’s leftwing politics. “I personally don’t like Corbyn. I’m Roman Catholic and conservative, but I think we have to defend people against a lie,” he said.

Daniela Richterová, a politics and international studies researcher at the University of Warwick, said the files showed the Labour leader was never a “witting source”. “We know how the process of arranging a collaboration works,” she said. There was “no evidence” Corbyn was recruited during four meetings with Sarcozy, she added.

Richterová said foreign agents working for the StB received their own dedicated file. The material on Corbyn, by contrast, was a “sub-file”. It had a different classification from that of a “knowing collaborator”.

For recruited agents, Prague’s intelligence services would include how a contact was recruited, handled and developed as a spy. None of this is described in the Corbyn records. The archive indicates that when meeting Corbyn, Sarkocy – who posed as a diplomat – was instructed “not to raise suspicion” and to keep his true identity secret.

Corbyn first appeared in state security records in August 1977, after he toured Czechoslovakia on a motorbike holiday. Fellow MP Diane Abbott, who accompanied him on a similar holiday to East Germany, was not with him on that trip.

Labour party members active in the 1980s who knew Corbyn at the time said his political leanings were not towards the Soviet Union.

This is backed up by Darren G Lilleker, associate professor at Bournemouth University and author of the 2004 book Against The Cold War: The History and Political Traditions of Pro-Sovietism in the British Labour Party, 1945-1989.

Lilleker said Corbyn was not among those Labour MPs who were sympathetic to the Soviet Union. “He was against both sides, the US and the Soviet Union, seeing them both as a danger to world peace.”

Corbyn was only one of four MPs to sign a parliamentary early day motion in December 1989 congratulating striking workers in Czechoslovakia “against the corruption and mismanagement of the Stalinist bureaucracy”.

Labour activists also remember Corbyn’s sympathies as lying with dissident movements, partly through his involvement in peace movements.

Jan Kavan, former Czech foreign minister and deputy prime minister, who had been a student leader during the Prague Spring and leading dissident in exile in the UK from 1969 to 1989 , regards Corbyn as a friend, and the two spoke at length when the Labour leader visited Prague in December 2016 to address European socialists.

Kavan said of the allegations: “You have to take it not just with a pinch of salt, but a wagonload of salt.” He added: “It is a classic smear campaign. It is clearly designed to weaken Jeremy Corbyn’s position.”

Richterová said the Corbyn records were in contrast to the files on British MPs from an earlier generation, whom Czechoslovakian intelligence actually recruited. In the 1950s and 1960s, the StB succeeded in co-opting two Labour MPs – John Stonehouse and William Owen – and one Tory MP, Raymond Mawby. The relationship lasted a decade, and in Owen’s case, for nearly 15 years.

All three MPs were fully recruited StB agents, with their file category marked up as “Agent” or “A”. Their files comprise thousands of pages of documents. These feature strategies for recruitment and development, minutes of meetings with agents, assessments of their performance, and tasking plans, Richterová said, plus details of communications and counter-surveillance.

To begin with, Mawby and Owen believed they were passing information to Prague’s foreign affairs ministry. Gradually, however, they were made explicitly aware that they were indeed collaborating with communist intelligence, Richterová said. Prague paid Owen about £5,000. His nickname inside the StB was “Greedy Bastard”.

Running high-profile British agents was a complicated and often frustrating endeavour, she added. Stonehouse turned out to be evasive and overly cautious, Owen not well-suited to be a spy, and Mawby notoriously unreliable. Remarkably, the files reveal that MI5 were aware of Stonehouse and Mawby’s repeated contacts with Czechoslovakian “diplomats”.

Richard Gott, then literary editor of the Guardian, resigned from the paper in 1994 after allegations that he was among “agents of influence” recruited by the KGB. He denied the accusations, though admitting he failed to inform editors of trips to Austria, Greece and Cyprus paid for by the Soviet Union. He described his resignation as “a debt of honour to my paper, not an admission of guilt”.

Meanwhile, Conservative MPs have called on Corbyn to release his Stasi file, compiled by the east German secret police. The Stasi Records Agency in Germany on Tuesday said they had found no documents on Corbyn. This included all files that can’t be released publicly for privacy protection reasons, case worker Matthias Dziomba said.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/feb/20/no-evidence-corbyn-was-spy-for-czechoslovakia-say-intelligence-experts

Angry Andy wrote:Will a mod please put Didge out of his misery until he tskes his meds.
Just tell him he is wrong.
If ANYONE doesnt accept that Bradley lied, even though he has very publicly admitted doing so, then they have a problem and 'issues'.

gelico wrote:

sassy wrote:


I think 'dolt' is being very kind.   A very desperate purveyer of lies and innuendo that have been proven to be false and have also PUT UP LABOUR'S POLLING PERCENT lol.


No evidence Corbyn was a communist spy, say intelligence experts

Researchers say archives suggest claims made against Labour leader are unfounded

Communist-era files from the intelligence agency of Czechoslovakia provide no evidence that Jeremy Corbyn was ever a spy or agent of influence, experts and academic researchers who have reviewed the papers said on Tuesday.

Radek Schovánek, an analyst with the defence ministry of the Czech Republic – which emerged, along with Slovakia, from the peaceful breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1993 – has spent 25 years researching documents filed by the now-defunct spy service. He told the Guardian the suspicions against Corbyn were unfounded, and the claims of Ján Sarkocy, a former intelligence officer expelled from Britain in 1989, to have signed the Labour leader up were false.

Schovánek also poured scorn on Sarkocy’s boast that he used 10 to 15 other Labour politicians in the 1980s as sources, including the current shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, and Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London.

Corbyn, speaking at a conference on Tuesday, dismissed as nonsense the allegation he had passed on information to Czechoslovakia during the cold war.

The story originated with The Sun, which on Thursday splashed with “Corbyn and the Commie Spy”. The Telegraph, the Daily Mail and Times have since kept the ball rolling.

In a video released on Tuesday evening, Corbyn went on the attack, saying the claims were “lies and smears”.

“In the last few days, The Sun, The Mail, The Telegraph and The Express have all gone a little bit James Bond.

“They’ve found a former Czechoslovakian spy whose claims are increasingly wild and entirely false,” he said.

Sarkocy met with Corbyn in the 1980s in the House of Commons. In recent days, Sarkocy has claimed Corbyn was a paid informant of the StB, the Czechoslovakian security service. He also alleges other senior Labour figures were paid between £1,000 and £15,000 for information.

Schovánek said Sarkocy’s assertions were at odds with the security files, which represented the definitive record on agents and contacts, and made no reference to Corbyn as a recruited agent, or to McDonnell or Livingstone.

Asked if he was calling the ex-intelligence officer, now living near the Slovakian capital Bratislava, a liar, Schovánek said: “When you compare the documents which he had written and signed himself with what he is saying today, based on that he is a liar. He signed a list of documents in the UK which said Corbyn was an intelligence contact, not an agent.”

The term “intelligence contact” in reality meant little, Schovánek said. Czechoslovakian intelligence officers could have many such contacts, who provided little, if any information.

Schovánek, 54, who secretly smuggled banned books from the west into Czechoslovakia during the cold war, said he felt compelled to speak out on Corbyn’s behalf, despite strongly disagreeing with the Labour leader’s leftwing politics. “I personally don’t like Corbyn. I’m Roman Catholic and conservative, but I think we have to defend people against a lie,” he said.

Daniela Richterová, a politics and international studies researcher at the University of Warwick, said the files showed the Labour leader was never a “witting source”. “We know how the process of arranging a collaboration works,” she said. There was “no evidence” Corbyn was recruited during four meetings with Sarcozy, she added.

Richterová said foreign agents working for the StB received their own dedicated file. The material on Corbyn, by contrast, was a “sub-file”. It had a different classification from that of a “knowing collaborator”.

For recruited agents, Prague’s intelligence services would include how a contact was recruited, handled and developed as a spy. None of this is described in the Corbyn records. The archive indicates that when meeting Corbyn, Sarkocy – who posed as a diplomat – was instructed “not to raise suspicion” and to keep his true identity secret.

Corbyn first appeared in state security records in August 1977, after he toured Czechoslovakia on a motorbike holiday. Fellow MP Diane Abbott, who accompanied him on a similar holiday to East Germany, was not with him on that trip.

Labour party members active in the 1980s who knew Corbyn at the time said his political leanings were not towards the Soviet Union.

This is backed up by Darren G Lilleker, associate professor at Bournemouth University and author of the 2004 book Against The Cold War: The History and Political Traditions of Pro-Sovietism in the British Labour Party, 1945-1989.

Lilleker said Corbyn was not among those Labour MPs who were sympathetic to the Soviet Union. “He was against both sides, the US and the Soviet Union, seeing them both as a danger to world peace.”

Corbyn was only one of four MPs to sign a parliamentary early day motion in December 1989 congratulating striking workers in Czechoslovakia “against the corruption and mismanagement of the Stalinist bureaucracy”.

Labour activists also remember Corbyn’s sympathies as lying with dissident movements, partly through his involvement in peace movements.

Jan Kavan, former Czech foreign minister and deputy prime minister, who had been a student leader during the Prague Spring and leading dissident in exile in the UK from 1969 to 1989 , regards Corbyn as a friend, and the two spoke at length when the Labour leader visited Prague in December 2016 to address European socialists.

Kavan said of the allegations: “You have to take it not just with a pinch of salt, but a wagonload of salt.” He added: “It is a classic smear campaign. It is clearly designed to weaken Jeremy Corbyn’s position.”

Richterová said the Corbyn records were in contrast to the files on British MPs from an earlier generation, whom Czechoslovakian intelligence actually recruited. In the 1950s and 1960s, the StB succeeded in co-opting two Labour MPs – John Stonehouse and William Owen – and one Tory MP, Raymond Mawby. The relationship lasted a decade, and in Owen’s case, for nearly 15 years.

All three MPs were fully recruited StB agents, with their file category marked up as “Agent” or “A”. Their files comprise thousands of pages of documents. These feature strategies for recruitment and development, minutes of meetings with agents, assessments of their performance, and tasking plans, Richterová said, plus details of communications and counter-surveillance.

To begin with, Mawby and Owen believed they were passing information to Prague’s foreign affairs ministry. Gradually, however, they were made explicitly aware that they were indeed collaborating with communist intelligence, Richterová said. Prague paid Owen about £5,000. His nickname inside the StB was “Greedy Bastard”.

Running high-profile British agents was a complicated and often frustrating endeavour, she added. Stonehouse turned out to be evasive and overly cautious, Owen not well-suited to be a spy, and Mawby notoriously unreliable. Remarkably, the files reveal that MI5 were aware of Stonehouse and Mawby’s repeated contacts with Czechoslovakian “diplomats”.

Richard Gott, then literary editor of the Guardian, resigned from the paper in 1994 after allegations that he was among “agents of influence” recruited by the KGB. He denied the accusations, though admitting he failed to inform editors of trips to Austria, Greece and Cyprus paid for by the Soviet Union. He described his resignation as “a debt of honour to my paper, not an admission of guilt”.

Meanwhile, Conservative MPs have called on Corbyn to release his Stasi file, compiled by the east German secret police. The Stasi Records Agency in Germany on Tuesday said they had found no documents on Corbyn. This included all files that can’t be released publicly for privacy protection reasons, case worker Matthias Dziomba said.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/feb/20/no-evidence-corbyn-was-spy-for-czechoslovakia-say-intelligence-experts

thank you sassy

I sometimes feel like groaning when I see your mile long posts but I actually read that all the way through

Seems clear enough

Ben Bradley was lying and then had to admit that

politics is becoming even more dirty than of yore, don't you think?

Angry Andy wrote:How can people believe you Didge?

You claim Bradley isnt  a liar. He admits he is.

You say the Czechs  has damning files.

The Czechs  themselves they do not exist.

You claim you have knowledge of them. Perhaps you are a spy and have access to Eastern European government  files

Does ANYONE believe a word you print?

“I think that the Labour left during the Cold War were extremely unhelpful to this country. We believed that we should see off Communism, we believed we should see off tyranny… I certainly think the Labour left were the Soviet Union’s useful idiots during that period…

“Jeremy Corbyn and others were very useful to the Soviet Union during the Cold War because they undermined the arguments of the West… I think in the broadest sense he was undermining the security of our country by siding with the Soviet Union in that argument and I think that was very damaging to the country. Luckily it was our side of the argument not Jeremy Corbyn’s that won the day. I think he certainly undermined the security of the United Kingdom by their one-sided disarmament and their very clear preference for a Soviet style communism during that period – fortunately we beat them then and we have to beat them now.”

gelico wrote:Didge, Ben Bradshaw made the claim was that Corbyn sold British Intelligence secrets to spies.  He then said he was wrong and that it was false and apologised for it.

There are no files on corbyn which there would be if he was ever an active agent.  he was in one of the many thousands of subfiles which merely implied contact (useful or not).  If Corbyn ever did pass on information it would have been unwittingly if at all.

Even your own source Jan Sarkocy said in the interview that he was a ''source of information''.  He refused to say he was ever an active agent.

Didge wrote:

gelico wrote:Didge, Ben Bradshaw made the claim was that Corbyn sold British Intelligence secrets to spies.  He then said he was wrong and that it was false and apologised for it.

There are no files on corbyn which there would be if he was ever an active agent.  he was in one of the many thousands of subfiles which merely implied contact (useful or not).  If Corbyn ever did pass on information it would have been unwittingly if at all.

Even your own source Jan Sarkocy said in the interview that he was a ''source of information''.  He refused to say he was ever an active agent.

Do you need to go to specsavers?

gelico wrote:

Didge wrote:


Do you need to go to specsavers?

Clearly not didge, I am talking about the specific claim made of corbyn ''selling'' secrets.  no evidence at all that he was any kind of paid agent hence the retraction.  i already said he was one of many thousands of mere 'contacts' and your screenshot document proves that.  he is named on there as contact, nothing more.  anyone in politics is going to have contacts.  they may or may not be useful at some time - that's how politics works.

Didge wrote:

gelico wrote:


Clearly not didge, I am talking about the specific claim made of corbyn ''selling'' secrets.  no evidence at all that he was any kind of paid agent hence the retraction.  i already said he was one of many thousands of mere 'contacts' and your screenshot document proves that.  he is named on there as contact, nothing more.  anyone in politics is going to have contacts.  they may or may not be useful at some time - that's how politics works.

Well we have no idea whether he did or not and stating he was a good source, suggest, its a possibility.

Exactly, didge. Which is why Ben Bradshaw had to retract his statement claiming that he definitely did. That was the whole point of Andy's post in the first place. It took you a while but you got there in the end. Well done you.


The fact is at the time and still today, he was a supporter of the Soviet Union and was anti-western

gelico wrote:

Didge wrote:


Well we have no idea whether he did or not and stating he was a good source, suggest, its a possibility.

Exactly, didge.  Which is why Ben Bradshaw had to retract his statement claiming that he definitely did.  That was the whole point of Andy's post in the first place.   It took you a while but you got there in the end.  Well done you.


The fact is at the time and still today, he was a supporter of the Soviet Union and was anti-western

Yes, indeed.  Personally, I can't stand the bloke and think he's dangerous in the extreme but I was talking only about the specifics of this particular issue which Andy was posting about.

gelico wrote:
@ didge

where are the labour party going wrong?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O-wWZBqGaY

Raggamuffin wrote:Hmmm, that was quite a full-on apology. Of course this chap has no idea what Corbyn has or hasn't done, but you can be sure that someone will keep digging.

Angry Andy wrote:It is the duty of the press, the media and select committees to investigate and produce FACTS.
Not to conjure up sordid lies and untruths in seedy bars where brown envelopes  are handed over.
Unfortunately,  most of Britains press seems to have an agenda to smear Corbyn at the behest of their billionaire tax exiled owners.
To date, despite hundreds or even thousands of hours of investigative journalism, we have only seen a barrage of deflection, spin and outright lies, which has already cost Bradley a tidy few bob. Barely a single shred of evidential fact,  damning or otherwise.