CND and Tony Blair

[Dom Tuk]

In his younger days, when he was just starting into politics or soon after, was Tony Blair ever involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Did he take part in any of its activities in his student heydays.

[kempie]

He was a CND supporter when he stood as Labour candidate during the 1982 Beaconsfield by-election and it is alleged that he was working for MI5 reporting on CND members and Trotskyites within the Labour Party...

[Loosehead]

Most of the Labour front bench, including TB where members of CND. Have they all changed their minds?

[kempie]

I found this, an article from 1999...

Blair... has a Cold War past he'd prefer to forget. A member of the parliamentary section of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, or CND, he allowed his membership to lapse in the late 1980s -- that is to say, when the deployment by Reagan and Margaret Thatcher of cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe already had done its work in contributing to the collapse of the Soviet Union... Blair later attempted to obscure or, some mean critics would say, rewrite history. When challenged in the early 1990s, Blair first denied he was a CND member but then conceded he had been a member of an affiliated group in parliament, one that advocated "unilateral abandonment by Britain of nuclear weapons" and wanted U.S. forces to be denied the use of British bases.