Labour’s U-turn as McDonnell says: It WAS the Kremlin
JEREMY Corbyn was left isolated by his closest ally last night over his refusal to blame Vladimir Putin for the Salisbury nerve agent attack.
In a sharp change of tack, John McDonnell said the poisoning of a former Russian double agent and his daughter was ‘highly likely’ to have been an attempted statesponsored execution.
The Shadow Chancellor said he supported Theresa May’s stance on Russian culpability ‘exactly’. And he insisted ‘all the evidence’ pointed to Putin, while claiming Mr Corbyn had been ‘misread’.
It put him at odds with the Labour leader, who last week suggested the Russian mafia could be to blame – and warned ministers not to ‘rush ahead of the evidence’. He also claimed he was the victim of a ‘ McCarthyite witch hunt’ for not backing the Government.
Divisions within the party have been exposed over the response to the attempted murders of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.
Dozens of Labour MPs – and leading front benchers – lined up to distance themselves from their leader over his refusal to criticise the Kremlin. Polls show the public overwhelmingly supports Mrs May’s response to the attempted assassination and regard Mr Corbyn as having mishandled the crisis.
Yesterday Mr McDonnell and shadow attorney general Shami Chakrabarti launched a concerted effort to dampen the row and harden Labour’s position. However, critics immediately accused him of ‘ pandering to public opinion’.
Tory MP Anna Soubry said: ‘He knows they know they got it wrong. They haven’t changed their views.’
Last night Mr McDonnell’s aides insisted he and Mr Corbyn remained the ‘ best of friends’. The Shadow Chancellor told ITV’s Peston on Sunday: ‘There’s a pattern of people being murdered here, therefore it leads you to the conclusion that Putin has questions to answer because this is highly likely this could have been a state execution.’
He added: ‘He is responsible whichever way you look at it, he is responsible and all the evidence points to him. We support exactly what the Prime Minister said and we condemn Russia for this, condemn them. I believe this is a pattern of behaviour we have seen.’
He claimed Mr Corbyn was making a ‘constructive critique’, adding: ‘I think others have misread that.’ Baroness Chakrabarti stressed that Russia was culpable and endorsed the Government’s reprisals against Moscow. She told the BBC’s Andrew Marr: ‘We must condemn Russian responsibility, whether it is negligent or whether it is even more serious.’
Mr Corbyn’s chief spin doctor Seumas Milne questioned the reliability of intelligence officials who briefed the Labour leader on the nerve agent outrage. But senior Labour backbencher Chris Leslie later said it was wrong to be ‘sowing seeds of doubt about our security services’.
HOW bewildering life must be these days for Labour supporters. On almost every major issue the shadow cabinet is so bitterly divided, it’s impossible to know what party policy actually is.
The latest confusion is over the nerve agent attack in Salisbury. Just a week ago – to the disgust of many decent party members – Jeremy Corbyn refused to back Theresa May in her condemnation of Russia, saying the Kremlin’s involvement had not been proved.
But yesterday Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell flatly contradicted his leader, telling ITV that ‘whichever way you look at it’ Vladimir Putin was responsible for the attack and Mrs May was right to say so.
(How excruciatingly hard it must have been for him to say: ‘We support exactly what the Prime Minister said.’)
Of course, the Mail isn’t naive enough to believe Mr McDonnell has had a sudden attack of patriotism. He and Mr Corbyn are both Marxists, who hate the capitalist West – and the Tories – as much as each other. But where Mr Corbyn is a deluded ideologue, his Shadow Chancellor is a hardheaded pragmatist, who would compromise any principle in the pursuit of power. The polls show Labour’s position on the Salisbury attack is deeply unpopular, so he performs a screeching U-turn.
Mr Corbyn claims to want ‘a new kind of politics’. Mr McDonnell clearly prefers oldfashioned cynicism. AS licence-fee payers, we already have to fund the hugely inflated salaries of top BBC presenters. Now, after an HMRC crackdown on their dubious contracts, it’s suggested we should also help clear their tax bills. Wouldn’t this be the final insult? Paying the right amount of tax is a personal responsibility. If these lavishly remunerated stars have underpaid and been found out by the taxman, they should make good the difference themselves – like anyone else would have to.