'I doubt if the scheme could have gone ahead without this support.'

You should have read the Yahoo politics sites at the time. Very few Americans knew or cared about the fact that they had an ally in Britain.

They didn't give a fig or a fuck, and our presence certainly didn't affect their plans. I think its post Falklands thinking, when in that conflict, we were so dependent on the Yanks intelligence services that makes it unlikely we will act in the same way that we did over Vietnam. We simply don't have a defence policy independent of the USA, and the Euro countries who think otherwise are being at best dishonest with thenmselves and enjoying a comfortable delusion.

I think also the great days of the left wing of the Labour Party occurred at a time when it was possible to have rose tinted view of the Soviet bloc. Many left wingers in England (my own parents included); even after Hungary got clobbered round about 1956, then the Czechs in 1969 and even after the Vietnamese boat people incident - refused point blank to think the worst of Russia. Since the fall of that regime, we have learned that the threat was every bit as real as the rightwingers said, and their intentions completely imperialistic.

If you want to go pretending its 1945, and we don't know anything about the nature of how the world turns and how in particular the world turns on the unprotected - fair enough.