It is a unique association which we value, but the idea that it would become an effective economic or political, let alone military, block has never materialised.Our relationship with the United States is close, friendly and natural, but it is not unique. And superficially, some of the institutions associated with Western economic “corporatism” also resembled their statist counterparts in the East. If nothing else, the bureaucracies which grew up, whether corporate or state, tended to look similar: unfit men sitting in box-like offices with filing cabinets, typewriters and wilting potted plants. In these respects, John Kenneth Galbraith was half right to talk about the “convergence” of the two systems.Or maybe one-eighth right The West had democracy The East did not The West had the rule of law The East did not. Current talk of a “Third Way” between capitalism and socialism today is otiose for the simple reason that the West has been going down that road since 1945. There was none of the helter-skelter disarmament that had characterised the post-1918 period. Indeed, part of the point of the Cold War was precisely that large defence budgets could be justified, and large defence industries kept in business.Secondly, both West and East used redistributive policies to make their societies more equal.

(This is a point on which I think I can agree with a Marxist historian such as Eric Hobsbawm.)Both the West and the East used rather similar methods after the Second World War to achieve social stability. In some western European states the percentage ended up even higher. An economy in which the state spends (or, to be more accurate, redistributes) more than half of GNP is a very different system from one in which the figure is less than 10 per cent, as it was before the First World War, or below 20 per cent, as it was before the Second.The fact is that, despite the rhetoric of Thatcherism, her government achieved only a relatively small reduction in the size of the state; public spending as a percentage of GNP fell from 53.7 per cent in 1982 to 44.5 in 1990, still more than double the amount in 1938.This gives us an important insight into the nature of the Cold War. The CND members who would have let the Soviets deploy their SS-20s with impunity. The silly sods who went on Intourist holidays and returned singing the praises of Soviet health care.Yet we ageing Cold Warriors need to offer more than nostalgia and recrimination if the young generation is to understand the war that we fought. And here I wish to depart from the propaganda script of the Eighties. At the time, many of us maintained that the Cold War was a two-cornered ideological fight between capitalism and Communism, between the free market and the planned economy.

This was a half-truth.The reality was, and remains, that after 1945 the Western system was never a purely capitalist system. As a percentage of gross national product, government spending in Britain rose from 38 per cent in 1950 to 51 per cent in 1985. The crumbling housing once you had walked a couple of miles east of Alexanderplatz. And, perhaps worst of all, the awful reluctance of people to talk to you in public.To know Eastern Europe was to loathe Communism and to cheer Ronald Reagan every time he denounced it. Yet how easily dupes in the Western “peace movement” were manipulated by the KGB. I once spent a very odd couple of days in Vienna reporting on a conference run by “Generals for Peace” (a fishy name in itself) which was so manifestly a Soviet set-up that I was the only Western journalist who bothered to turn up.The end of the Soviet system was, I continue to believe, the best thing that has happened in my lifetime.

The sole regrets I have are: (a) that without that system as a ghastly warning, we now take too much about our own system for granted; and (b) that too many people who were at best neutral in the Cold War – and there were plenty at last week’s Blackpool Conference – have been able to get away with it. How vividly I recall the smell of lignite, the all-but deserted roads, the nasty grey plastic shoes, the eerie lack of graffiti.What made these trivial differences seem sinister were the real, substantive differences. The party-controlled newspapers, with their unreadably dull reports of Erich Honecker’s latest visit to Karl-Marx-Stadt to present plastic decorations to Young Pioneers who had over-fulfilled their quotas The lousy food. Again, it is strange to realise that those pieces I bashed out about short-range nuclear forces, or life (the lack of it) in East Berlin are now as much period pieces as Le Carre novels – although a lot less readable.