Corbyn howled down for questioning Russia role in nerve agent attack
With a British citizen fighting for his life in hospital after an attack with a nerve agent suspected to have been carried out by Russia, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, was under pressure on Thursday to confront Moscow.
Senior Labour politicians, including the party’s defence spokeswoman, Nia Griffiths, broke ranks with Mr Corbyn to declare Russian “unequivocally responsible” for the March 4 incident in which Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia where found comatose on a bench in the English city of Salisbury.
“We are fully supportive of the government’s actions, because clearly we accept that the prime minister has said that Russia is responsible,” Mrs Griffiths said.
Prime Minister Theresa May said the pair were attacked with Novichok, a military grade nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Speaking in the House of Commons, Mr Corbyn struck the wrong tone by closely questioning why the government had not handed over the material to Russia for examination as it had requested.
His spokesman compounded anger at Labour’s leadership by querying intelligence findings issued by the British state over decades, including the data that led to Britain’s involvement in the 2003 Iraq war.
Mr Corbyn’s response to the crisis appeared to have shattered a truce reached with centrist MPs since the party’s support was revived in last year’s general election.
The Russian angle is a weak spot for the 68-year-old Labour veteran who was recently accused by a Conservative MP of passing secrets to Czech agents he met in the 1980s. The accusation was withdrawn.
Yvette Cooper, beaten to the Labour leadership by Mr Corbyn in 2015, demanded unequivocal condemnation, while former Labour minister Pat McFadden, sacked from Mr Corbyn’s shadow cabinet in 2016, said defending Britain when threatened was an “essential component of political leadership”.
About 20 Labour backbenchers signed a motion stating the Commons “unequivocally accepts the Russian state’s culpability”.
In the media, the right-wing Daily Telegraph attacked what it called Mr Corbyn’s “craven posturing”.
The centre-left-leaning Guardian sounded notes of dismay. “May made to look like a political colossus as Corbyn refuses to believe in Russian involvement,” read the headline for its parliamentary sketch.
“He sounded too keen to find another explanation,” said its editorial.
Mr Corbyn’s spokesman Seumas Milne is a pro-Russian writer. It was he who doubted the findings of Britain’s intelligence services. “There is a history between weapons of mass destruction and intelligence which is problematic, to put it mildly,” he said.
Mr Milne’s appointment in 2015 raised eyebrows at Westminster given opinion articles he had written in The Guardian, in which he said: “Putin has now become a cartoon villain, and Russia the target of almost uniformly belligerent propaganda across the western media”.
Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott backed Mr Corbyn.
“If we are to persuade any other nation to take significant measures alongside us, they may ask for a higher burden of proof,” she said.