Jeremy Corbyn’s pro-IRA protest
JeReMY Corbyn was accused of ‘appalling’ conduct yesterday after it emerged he had been arrested in 1986 for joining a pro-IRA protest.
The Labour leader had attended a picket outside the old Bailey to ‘show solidarity’ with accused terrorists, including the Brighton bomber.
The protest opposed the ‘show trial’ of men including Patrick Magee, who was later convicted of murdering five people at the 1984 Tory Party conference.
It was organised by activists from the Troops out Movement, which was linked to the IRA’s political wing Sinn Fein.
Lord Tebbit, whose wife was paralysed in the Brighton attack, said: ‘This just emphasises the total unfitness of Mr Corbyn. Labour is no longer led by men of the calibre of Attlee and Bevin, it is led by IRA terrorist sympathisers and Marxists. I have total contempt for all supporters of the IRA.’
Mark Tipper, whose brother died in the 1982 Hyde Park bombing, said: ‘How can a man who is running for prime minister befriend the IRA? It’s quite appalling. It makes me feel sick in the stomach that this man could actually win the general election. It will make voters wonder where his true allegiance lies.’
Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon accused Mr Corbyn of displaying ‘quite open support for the IRA’ – saying his election next month would be ‘too great a risk for this country’. It was known that, weeks after the Brighton bombing, Mr Corbyn invited Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein members to the Commons.
Now a Sunday Times investigation has found that on June 9, 1986, Mr Corbyn joined the picket to ‘show solidarity with the Irish Republican prisoners put on trial by the British state’. All 16 demon- strators, including the MP, were arrested for obstruction after refusing to move from outside the court. They were held for five hours then released on bail, but do not appear to have been charged.
Files in the Troops out archive include a letter from Mr Corbyn on House of Commons-headed notepaper to activist Sal Jenkinson, who helped organise the protest. It said: ‘Thanks for your help, hope you get out as I did!’
A spokesman said Mr Corbyn had been lobbying for a fair trial and the Labour leader ‘worked tirelessly’ to bring peace in Northern Ireland through dialogue.
Sir Michael was forced to defend himself after emily Thornberry brought up his participation in a trip to see Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2007.
The shadow foreign secretary told him: ‘I’m not going to judge you on going to a reception with Assad and I don’t think people should judge Jeremy by trying to talk to people who may be open to a settlement in Northern Ireland.’
‘Wonder where his true allegiance lies’
THE man who would be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland — Jeremy Corbyn — has found it necessary to insist that he is ‘not a pacifist’.
This declaration is designed to counter the charge that if he became PM, he would never order our armed forces to defend British territory against military aggression by others.
That charge is understandable. Not only is the Labour Leader a dedicated opponent of the British nuclear deterrent, but he was (and remains) against the sending of a naval task force to liberate the Falkland Islanders from an invading Argentine junta.
But I for one believe Corbyn when he says he is no pacifist. Because he was fully behind the IRA’s campaign of bombing to drive British troops — and indeed Britain as a state — out of Northern Ireland.
We were usefully reminded of the extent of that support by a report in yesterday’s Sunday Times. It revealed that in 1986, Corbyn (already a Labour MP) had joined a picket outside the Old Bailey to oppose what they denounced as a ‘show trial’ of a group that included Patrick Magee — the man subsequently convicted of murdering five people in the bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the 1984 Conservative Party conference.
Corbyn was arrested for his part in this picket of the law courts, which had been ‘ to show solidarity with the Irish Republican prisoners put on trial by the British state’.
As I say, this is merely a reminder of the truth about Corbyn’s role in a conflict which cost thousands of lives. Today, he insists his close connections with the Irish Republican movement were simply part of an attempt to ‘ bring about peace’ — and that later official talks by the British Government with the likes of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were merely a continuation of his efforts.
Bloodbath
This, however, is a contemptible distortion of the facts. Whereas the British Government sought to gain agreement between the two warring communities (Protestant and Catholic) on a peace deal, Corbyn’s aim was to enable Sinn Fein/IRA to win that dirty war.
This, for example, is why in 1993 Corbyn stood for a minute’s silence at a Republican meeting in London to honour eight IRA gunmen who had been shot dead in an attack on Loughgall Police Station in County Armagh.
He declared then: ‘ I’m happy to commemorate all those who died fighting for an independent Ireland.’
It needs pointing out that the British Government was far from wanting to remain in Northern Ireland against the wishes of the majority there. In 1990, the then Conservative Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Brooke, stated: ‘It is not the aspiration to a sovereign, united Ireland against which we set our face, but its violent expression.’
It was this ‘ violent expression’ — involving not just bombings but extortion and torture — with which Corbyn associated. He did not believe the people of Northern Ireland should have control over their own destiny, but that they should be compelled by force to switch their nationality.
In fact, if he had got his way and the British Army had been forced out by the IRA’s campaign of terrorism, there would have been some sort of bloodbath in Northern Ireland, with countless more murdered on both sides of the sectarian divide. It was that which British governments down the years had been trying to prevent.
Gloated
There is nothing remotely wrong in wanting to see a united Ireland. It would be fine by me — if it could be achieved by consent in a referendum. But the Irish Government rightly loathed and pursued the IRA because Dublin knew carnage would result from incorporating the North against the will of its inhabitants, most of whom were and are against unification.
It is, in this context, significant that Corbyn voted in Parliament against the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement — the first step in what became known as ‘ the peace process’.
He preferred Sinn Fein/IRA’s adamantine refusal to settle for anything less than complete victory for their campaign.
In fact, it was the IRA which eventually surrendered arms ( along with the Protestant paramilitary gangs), having been thoroughly demoralised by the success of British military intelligence in penetrating its ranks. Thus it was the British Army — the very organisation that Corbyn regarded as illegitimate there — which was primarily responsible for bringing about the conditions for peace.
By the way, the British Prime Minister who signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement was Margaret Thatcher — whose murder was the prime objective of the Brighton bomber supported by Corbyn in his picket of the Old Bailey in 1986.
For many, this will all seem a long time ago. Can’t bygones be bygones? But if a man is asking to be taken seriously as a possible Prime Minister, it is entirely legitimate to look at his political career as a whole and not just what he says during a general election campaign.
So it’s worth going back to 1984, in the wake of that attempt to slaughter the entire British Cabinet as they slept in their beds. There you will find Jeremy Corbyn — then, as now, the MP for Islington North — presiding as general secretary of the editorial board of the hard-Left political magazine London Labour Briefing. And you will discover that under comrade Corbyn’s general secretaryship, this publication gloated that the Brighton bombing demonstrated ‘the British only sit up and take notice of Ireland when they are bombed into it’.
And the same edition of London Labour Briefing — for which Corbyn had written the front-page story — contained a reader’s letter which hailed the ‘audacity’ of the IRA’s Brighton bombing and said: ‘What do you call four dead Tories? A start.’
So far as I know, Corbyn has never distanced himself from what was published under his aegis in that newsletter. Now it is far too late. Just as it is too late to pretend that he didn’t call emissaries of the Middle Eastern terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah ‘our friends’.
The truth is that while Jeremy Corbyn has never supported the use of military force by this country, he is much less censorious — indeed, not censorious at all — when radical paramilitary groups threaten the West. He knows which side he’s on. And it’s not ours.
This doesn’t mean he may not have been right on occasion, like the proverbial stopped clock.
Many, for example, may have agreed with his opposition to last year’s parliamentary backing for the use of RAF jets in the bombing of Islamic State in its Syrian redoubt. Corbyn, as leader of the Labour Party, told the BBC’s Andrew Marr why he opposed it: ‘You don’t bring about peace by bombing.’
Yet the same Jeremy Corbyn had been proud to speak at a commemoration for dead IRA terrorists, at which the event’s official programme had pronounced: ‘Force of arms is the only method capable of bringing about a free and united Socialist Ireland.’
Pathetic
That last phrase is telling. It was the fact that the IRA saw itself as aligned with sundry Marxist ‘freedom fighters’ across the globe which will have attracted Jeremy Corbyn. It is not exactly violence that Corbyn detests, but arms in the wrong hands. As long as it’s radical Left groups, he has no problem with it.
Nato, however — now that’s different. It was almost pathetic to see Labour’s would- be foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, forced by Andrew Marr on his show yesterday to watch five-year-old footage of Corbyn declaring, of the Western alliance which kept the peace in Europe during the Cold War: ‘We on the radical Left see Nato as a major problem and we must campaign against it’.
President Putin, a man whose nostalgia for the days of the Soviet Empire has sent Russian troops annexing chunks of neighbouring Ukraine, must regard Jeremy Corbyn as a useful idiot.
Alas for Putin, Corbyn will not become PM. But it remains remarkable that a man with such a long history of support for anti-British terrorism should even be considered for the job. Pr i n te d