Lord Kinnock: Serious allegations in the European Parliament

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In 2006, London MEP Gerard Batten caused great controversy when he quoted highly placed intelligence sources that denounced Romano Prodi as a "KGB asset" during Strasbourg plenary. His sources included a former deputy head of KGB, as well the dissident and former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who was to pay for his dissidence with his life just a few months later.

Today, in the same chamber, Batten made another allegation citing highly placed sources, using still classified evidence from the archives of the Gorbachev Foundation.

Batten stated that former leader of the British Labour Party, and former EU Commissioner, Neil Kinnock approached the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during the 1980s to discuss a proposal to halt the Trident missile project.

He invited Lord Kinnock to account for himself, suggesting that if the allegation is true, then Lord Kinnock may be guilty of treason.

These allegations should be viewed in the context of the final years of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was weakening, and western military superiority helped lead to the dissolution of that polity, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Batten's allegations seem to suggest that Kinnock's actions could have actually jeopardised the eventual outcome that we are celebrating now, twenty years after the fall of the wall.

 

The full text of Gerard Batten's speech follows:

 

60 SECOND SPEECH TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

NEIL KINNOCK & THE SOVIET UNION

23RD November 2009

"Russian exile Pavel Stroilov recently published revelations about the collaboration between the British Labour Party and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Soviet archival documents state that in the 1980s Neil Kinnock, as leader of the opposition, approached Mikhail Gorbachev through secret envoys to see how the Kremlin would respond if a Labour Government stopped the implementation of the Trident nuclear missile programme.

If the report given to Mr Gorbachev is true, it means that Lord Kinnock approached one of Britain's enemies in order to seek approval regarding his party's defence policy, and had he been elected, Britain's defence policy.

If this report is true then Lord Kinnock would be guilty of treason.

The documents now available must be investigated at the highest possible level by the British authorities and Lord Kinnock given the opportunity to answer the Soviet evidence".