Unfit for office

The Labour Party used to be led by upstanding patriots. No more. Here, a senior Tory says Corbyn has now gone beyond party politics to become...

THROUGHOUT his time as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn has been embroiled in controversy. Behind his rhetoric about a ‘ kinder, gentler politics’ there lurks a veteran hard- Left politician, characterised by radical dogmatism and worrying links with those hostile to the West.

But even for this ideologue, an appalling new low has been reached as a result of the Daily Mail’s revelations about Corbyn’s attendance in 2014 — only a year before he became party leader — at a wreath-laying ceremony in Tunisia appearing to commemorate a group of terrorists from the Black September organisation, which perpetrated the infamous massacre of 11 Israelis at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

Through both his attendance at the event and his offensive dissembling this week about his role, Corbyn has exposed himself as unfit for senior public office, never mind his position as the official Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition.

Labour in the past has always had its sincere policy differences with the Conservatives, but its leading figures have belonged to the democratic, patriotic mainstream.

Clement Attlee was an army major in World War I, Denis Healey a beach master at the Anzio landings in World War II. Tony Benn served as an RAF officer, and Jim Callaghan in the Royal Navy. But Corbyn is divorced from this tradition.

The exposure of his Tunisian escapade in 2014 is just the latest in an unedifying pattern, but the incident is beyond the pale. The 1972 Munich attack was one of the darkest episodes in modern history.

It is deeply worrying to know that a man at the top level of public life in Britain felt, only four years ago, that he should attend such an event.

What is almost as reprehensible is the attempt by Corbyn and his team to mislead the British public, once the investigation was published. At first his office engaged in the simple tactic of denial.

Debacle

According to this narrative, the story was a ‘ smear’, ‘ fake news’ and a ‘ hoax’. But the weight of evidence made this impossible to sustain. Not only were there photographs of Corbyn holding a wreath near the memorial to the terrorists, but he had also boasted about his attendance at the event in his column in the Morning Star, a communist newspaper.

Confronted with this material, Corbyn resorted in interviews yesterday to more prevarication, arguing that he was present at the commemoration but ‘I don’t think I was actually involved in it’. Such a form of words would be laughable were it not so serious.

The Tunisian debacle may be appalling but it is no longer shocking. As MP for Islington North since 1983, Corbyn has behaved like this throughout his Parliamentary career.

When he was an obscure backbencher and serial far-Left rebel, his conduct was not so important. But now he is Opposition leader, exposure of his past is vital.

This is a man whose leadership, in less than three years, has not put an end to the vile anti- Semitism flourishing in his party, not least because of his own hostility to Israel.

Corbyn has regularly shown contempt for the state of Israel, not just its government and its policies, including in 2010 when he used the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Day to host a meeting in Westminster at which nauseating comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany were loudly voiced — something the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) describes as clearly anti-Semitic.

In 2010 he told a crowd of protesters outside the Israeli Embassy that the position of Gaza was similar to the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad during the Russian resistance to Nazism in World War II. In 2013, he compared Israel’s actions in the West Bank to the Nazi occupation of Europe.

In the same disreputable vein, in 2012 he used Facebook to express his support for a work in East London by the graffiti artist Mear One, who had painted a clearly antiSemitic mural of Jewish plutocrats exploiting the poor.

Corbyn told the artist he was ‘in good company’, a remark for which he later apologised. But precious few other apologies have been forthcoming from Corbyn, not even over his description of the anti-Semitic terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah as ‘friends’ at an event in Westminster in 2009.

Much to the fury of respected MPs such as the veteran Margaret Hodge, who lost several members of her family in the Holocaust, Corbyn’s team has refused to write the globally accepted definition of anti-Semitism drawn up by the IHRA into Labour’s rulebook. It is an unbelievable situation in a party that has long fought to promote anti-racism and social justice. Indeed, Corbyn likes to portray himself as a passionate warrior against discrimination, but his deeds hardly match his words. He has been painfully slow to speak out against the antiSemitic abuse meted out to some of his own Labour MPs, such as Luciana Berger, by hard-Left activists.

Foreboding

Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, called on the party to tackle anti-Semitism head-on or enter ‘a vortex of eternal shame and embarrassment’ that would make Labour unfit for government. He was rewarded with a barrage of coordinated Twitter abuse from Corbyn supporters using the hashtag #ResignTomWatson.

Margaret Hodge has said Labour has made the party ‘a hostile environment for Jews’. She has also endured online abuse and calls for deselection. Another Labour MP, Ian Austin, said that under Corbyn’s leadership the party had become ‘a sewer’.

The chairman of the Jewish Leadership Council went so far as to say: ‘ I’m terribly disappointed we have reached the point where the Jewish community is being singled out by the Labour leadership and treated in a way no other minority would be.’

These are all people with a long history and standing within the Labour Party. Their claims and concerns cannot just be dismissed as smears.

This is an issue beyond normal party politics. I remember the Labour Party of old and it saddens me to see it in this state. Thanks to Corbyn’s leadership, decent, moderate Labour activists and MPs are in despair at what is happening at the top of their party.

Yet only Labour can sort out this problem. How much longer will the party put up with a leader who obfuscates his past and equivocates about antiSemitism, who lambasted the BBC for ‘bias’ for saying Israel has the right to exist, and who will not even defend his own MPs and members from racist abuse?

At a crucial time for Britain’s future, this cannot continue. I feel only foreboding.

For the sake of democracy and decency in public life, members of the Labour Party must ask, is this man fit to lead them?