As to the Cambridge spies, Mr Kim Philby and his fellows might care more about haircut rather than defects implanted in the body of British civil society. This is also what the BCP (British Communist Party) means to quite a few its members. Before Philby escaped to Moscow in the 1960s, he was definitely nothing more than a spy working for the KGB, but never a Marxist fighting against 'the evil of Capitalism'.

FEI JI TOU? Fortunately...

BTW, I saw the book this week at the London Review Bookshop near the British Museum. £19.00...

The hair style of those posh tuffs is quite an issue of personal taste, but the judgement of their political devotion must be made upon facts rather than imaginaion - if someone just makes a little effort to do a quick search in Guardian, as below, let alone some serious library research, s/he will get some understandings of the historical background.

And I saw the real pics of these guys and felt they deserve better presentation in the TV drama - their hair style was quite English if you please.

Copied from Guaridan:

They were both traitors and idealists

Attacks on the BBC's Cambridge Spies series misunderstand history

Francis Beckett
Thursday May 8, 2003
The Guardian

It's not surprising that the onslaught against the BBC over tomorrow's television programme, Cambridge Spies, was led by Oleg Gordievsky. He complains that they are represented as idealists when they were really "traitors".
Can an idealist not be a traitor? Gordievsky was a traitor. We call him a defector, but that's just politeness. Like Kim Philby and his friends, Gordievsky used his position in the security services of his own country - the USSR - to spy for his country's enemies. Ah but, I hear you cry, that's different. Gordievsky's country was run by scoundrels. There are more important things than patriotism. You have to understand why he betrayed his country.

And that's true. We need to look, not just at Gordievsky's treachery, but at the reasons for it, before we judge him. We need to understand the social and political context of treachery. Simply to portray him as evil is simplistic, dangerous and wrong. So with the Cambridge spies, and anyone else we might want to accuse of treason.

The Cambridge spies became communists in the 1930s in an atmosphere described by an anonymous parody of Sir Walter Scott: "Lives there a man with soul so dead/ Who was not, in the thirties, red?" There was mass unemployment, great hardship, a huge imbalance of wealth and poverty, and the British political system seemed to offer no means of redressing these evils.

Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald responded to his 1929 election victory with the words: "Did Labour people ever live in such an inspiring moment as this?" It was rather like Tony Blair's famous: "It is wonderful, is it not?" and it meant just as little. Within months, the leader of the leftwing Independent Labour party, Jimmy Maxton, was asking: "Has any human being benefited from the fact that there has been a Labour government in office?"

I t failed to tackle unemployment because the only solution offered was the Keynesian one of public works, which it feared would be thought too socialistic. It increased the hardship of the unemployed. By the time of the 1931 crisis, most people thought there was little difference between Labour and the Conservatives, and MacDonald seemed to prove them right by handing in the resignation of his Labour government and at once becoming prime minister in a national government effectively run by the Conservatives.

For those who wanted Labour to speak for the underdog, it was proof that the parliamentary system could never deliver change. Democracy was a fraud on the poorest in the land. Within two years Maxton and his friends were out of the Labour party. Others who had hoped for a change in the balance of wealth and poverty splintered off in all directions. Many joined the Communist party, which enjoyed a resurgence. As the 1930s progressed, they could see an even more compelling reason for being communists: no mainstream political party was prepared to side with the democratic forces in the Spanish civil war, though it was well known that Nazi Germany and fascist Italy were supporting General Franco.

Many people in the 1930s thought the hope for the future lay in Moscow. Some, like communist leader Harry Pollitt, visited Moscow regularly for inspiration and an ideological makeover. Others took their battered idealism to Moscow permanently, living with the expatriate community in a rundown hotel and working for the Communist International. And a few stayed in Britain and helped the cause along by spying.

So desperate were the times that some even threw in their lot with Oswald Mosley's fascist thugs. My own father, a leftwing Labour MP until 1931, did this. This was a far more desperate measure than becoming a communist, for at least the communists had a programme for social change. All fascists had was a mystical belief in the power of a great leader to make things better. Yet even my poor, deluded fascist father started with a muddled idealism.

Gordievsky accuses the BBC of portraying the English upper-class of the 1930s as "indolent, stupid and viciously anti-semitic, lording it over the poor". That is exactly how Blunt and his friends saw them, and not without cause. Flaunting wealth in the face of poverty was a popular pastime.

When the Labour party ceases to speak for the underdog, when Labour leaders fawn over the wealthy and seem to have forgotten who Labour was created for, then democratic British politics offers no way of creating a fairer society. That was the atmosphere that created the Cambridge spies. Those, like me, who have left the Labour party, will become neither fascists, nor spies, nor (mostly) communists. But we are part of the same phenomenon that created the Cambridge spies.

· Francis Beckett is the author of The Rebel Who Lost His Cause (Allison and Busby)

Whatever, whether or not in the 1930s the elected Labour was deserved to be a party speaking for the underclass of Britian, as to my understanding, has been answered through a general voting. Mr. McDonald did have won the suffrage, did not he? Being an idealist or not, the Cambridge Five ring of spies might not be able to justify their treason crime. Whileas Mr. Hitler was also an idealist, at least in term of his concern of building up an 'eternal German state' for the so-called Aryan ethnic. However, certainly his holocaust crime can not be excused in any civilized society under whatever backgound, simply for the reason of his 'pure' ideology? It is quite interesting that Facists in the 1920s in Italy, as well as Nazists in the 1930s in Germany, both shared same or similiar opinion with contemporary Communists (the BCP members, and Communists in Far East), either as to the 'notorious elected slaughters of working class', or 'bulding up a heaven on the earth'. What Mr. Beckett argues for sounds reasonable to me, but unfortunately his logic is too weak... Why those exposed members of the Soviet espionage ring would rather escape to Russia, companied for the rest of their years, with a brand of shame of 'fugitive of treason', when they claimed that what they were betraying was nothing but an rotten leftist party? Some answer might be found in the book co-authored by a British journalist and a former KGB officer (well, he escaped from Moscow to London after the Cold War...).

Sword and the Shield, The: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (Hodder & Stoughton General, Paperback - 1 January, 1986), by Christopher M. Andrew, Vasili Mitrokhin (latter author is the KGB fugitive officer). Seems from the point of view of the Soviet intelligence organ, Mr. Kim Philby and his spy peers were spies, but not 'great Communist comrades', although Mr. Philby was branded as a 'Soviet Hero' in Moscow anyway.

Another relative material is the famous book: Spy Catcher (Penguin USA Hardcover - 1 July, 1987), by Peter Wright.

Both books can be found at Amazon.co.uk. FYI.