British Youth Council
The British Youth Council is part of Mezzanine2.
According to Robin Ramsay:
- by the end of his final year at Oxford University, in 1976, Mandelson had become Chair of British Youth Council. The British Youth Council began as the British section of the World Assembly of Youth, which was set up and financed by MI6 and then taken over by the CIA in the 1950s, created to combat the Soviet Union's youth fronts. By Mandelson's time in the mid1970s under a Labour government be it noted the British Youth Council was said to be financed by the Foreign Office, though that may be a euphemism for MI6, the British secret intelligence service.
- In 1977 Mandelson and one Charles Clarke, another familiar name, then head of the British National Union of Students, put together a delegation from the UK to attend the 1978 World Festival of Youth. The World Festival of Youth meetings were great cold war jamborees at which the opposing blocs put forward propaganda at the Third World. Charles Clarke, head of the NUS in 1977, and chosen to fly the flag for Britain in Cuba, became Neil Kinnock's chief gatekeeper.
- Peter Mandelson, we were told in 1995 by Donald McIntyre in the Independent, is 'a pillar of the two bluechip foreign affairs thinktanks, Ditchley Park and Chatham House'. [1]
People
PR and Lobbying agencies
Notes
- ^ The influence of intelligence services on the British left A talk given by Robin Ramsay to Labour Party branches in late 1996, Lobster.
