CORBYN’S BLOODY SECRET SATURDAY REPORT
REVEALED: Days after a prison guard was executed by the IRA in 2012, Corbyn chaired an ultra Left-wing conference that voted to free murderous Irish terrorists. Then after he became Labour leader, key records of the event vanished from the web. And this i
ON NOVEMBER 1, 2012, at 7.30am, David Black was driving to work as usual along the M1 motorway in County Armagh. The father of two was due to retire in six months after almost 30 years in the Northern Ireland Prison Service.
Even though it was more than 14 years since the Good Friday Agreement brought a formal end to ‘the Troubles’, Mr Black’s job remained a hazardous one. The Provisional IRA leadership had agreed to abide by the ceasefire but several hardline Republican paramilitaries rejected peace. Splinter groups such as the Continuity IRA and Real IRA vowed to carry on the war. They have done so to this day.
Mr Black worked at Maghaberry topsecurity jail, which held 41 dissident Republican prisoners. Some were connected to notorious outrages in a conflict that had claimed more than 3,500 lives. Three were serving time for gathering information on prison officers that could be used in attempted assassinations.
Mr Black had reached the junction with the M12 motorway when a Toyota with a Dublin number plate drew alongside his Audi. Someone in the Toyota opened fire with an automatic weapon and he was hit numerous times. His car crashed off the motorway and he died at the scene.
David Black was the first prison officer to be murdered by Republican terrorists for 23 years. When the news reached Maghaberry, dissident Republican prisoners ostentatiously smoked cigars to celebrate.
The killing was greeted with condemnation across the mainstream political spectrum. Prime Minister David Cameron said: ‘These killers will not succeed in denying the people of Northern Ireland the peaceful, shared future they so desperately want.’
STORMONT First Minister Peter Robinson, of the Democratic Unionist Party, and his deputy Martin McGuinness, of Sinn Fein, said in a joint statement: ‘There can be no justification for this brutal attack.’
But this revulsion was not shared by every British political group outside dissident Republicanism.
A Mail investigation has uncovered damning evidence that, just nine days after the killing, the current leadership of the Labour Party showed ‘solidarity’ with the paramilitary group behind the killing.
Less than three years before Jeremy Corbyn became party leader, he chaired a debate of hard-Left activists that voted in favour of the release of dissident Republican prisoners opposed to the Northern Ireland peace process. Among those prisoners was Old Bailey bomber Marian Price, who the previous year had been charged in connection with the 2009 murder of two British soldiers.
The debate took place at the annual conference of the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) at the Conway Hall in Bloomsbury, Central London. The LRC is an umbrella organisation of farLeft groups, founded and led by the now Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell.
We found that records of that now hugely embarrassing event have mysteriously vanished from the LRC’s official web pages. Video footage and photographs have also been taken down from the internet. But much of the deleted material has been retrieved by the Mail — and now the shameful truth of what happened that day can be revealed.
Formed in 1900, the original LRC was the forerunner of the Labour Party. It was relaunched in 2004 by members of the hard-Left ‘Campaign’ group of MPs, which included McDonnell and Corbyn, as a vehicle to challenge the prevailing Blairite agenda. Mr McDonnell had been chairman since its relaunch (and is now honorary president).
Analysis by the Daily Mail shows that in 2012 the LRC listed 35 organisations as official affiliates, including Permanent Revolution and the pro-Stalin New Communist Party, which supports the North Korean dictatorship. All would be represented at the LRC’s annual conference.
Mr McDonnell would deliver a keynote speech in the morning, Mr Corbyn would preside over one of the afternoon segments. A delegate who has since fallen out of love with the LRC told the Mail: ‘This was like the alternative party conference, the real hard-Left Labour conference.’
But these were tough times for the hard-Left. LRC conference attendance numbers were down by more than 10 per cent on 2011.
No one in the hall, least of all the man himself, could have imagined that in less than three years Mr Corbyn would be leader of the entire Labour Party and, as he now says, ready to become the next prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
But on November 10, 2012, Mr Corbyn was still unconstrained by any need, still less desire, to appeal to a mainstream electorate.
Instead, he surrounded himself with fellow revolutionary dreamers: Marxists, communists, Maoists and the ‘Tankies’ who had supported the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. There was no need for him to fudge, dissemble or, as in the
case of Brexit, refuse to show his ideological hand.
You will struggle to find any official LRC account of events at the Conway Hall that afternoon.
Such records were once in the public domain — but since Mr Corbyn surprised the world and himself by becoming Labour leader, most of the archive material has vanished from the internet. The Mail has, however, spoken to several of the 160 delegates who were in the Conway Hall that day.
We can also turn to the official LRC timetable and conference report — retrieved by the Mail from a deleted web page — as well as an eyewitness account that was published in the Weekly Worker, a far-Left newsletter.
The author was one Andy Gunton, a member of a group called Labour Party Marxists.
Mr Gunton reported that ‘Comrade McDonnell’ had moved the LRC’s national committee statement and outlined its work over the previous year.
The man who could be our next Chancellor of the Exchequer ‘finished by calling for an “international struggle against capitalism”.’
The afternoon saw Mr Corbyn replace his comrade in the chair. His sessions would be devoted to ‘international’ topics. In the LRC’s world-view, that included all of the island of Ireland.
The conference timetable shows Mr Corbyn was in the chair when the conference engaged in its most controversial debate; one that today represents an enormous political embarrassment to the Labour Party and, given the resumption of the dissident IRA bombing campaign, a major concern to national security.
‘Motion 4’ was titled ‘Release All International Prisoners of War’. It was put forward by one Gerry Downing. He did so on behalf of the Irish Republican Prisoners Support Group, one of the LRC’s affiliated organisations.
A Trotskyite bus driver from North London, Mr Downing is a former friend of Mr McDonnell. He was expelled from the Labour Party in March 2016, when he wrote in a blog that the 9/11 attackers ‘must never be condemned’. More recently he was expelled from a Labour Party splinter group for alleged anti-Semitism.
Mr Downing’s motion named and called for the release of three leading dissident Republicans who, he said, were ‘interned without charge’. In fact, two of them had had their parole licences revoked for posing a threat to public safety, and the other was starting a 20year prison sentence for a terror attack. They were held at HMP Maghaberry, where Mr Black had worked until his murder.
Foremost among them was Marian Price. In 1973, along with her sister Dolours, Price had been part of the IRA active service unit that attacked the Old Bailey and other London targets with car bombs, injuring 200 and causing one death. For that, she received two life terms.
She was freed after only seven years because she suffered from severe anorexia nervosa, caused by the hunger strikes she undertook to successfully force her transfer to an Ulster jail.
In 2011, Price had her release licence revoked and was returned to prison because then Northern Ireland Secretary Owen Pat er son considered her an increased risk to public safety through her links to dissident paramilitary activity.
AT THE same time, she was charged — and would eventually be convicted — in connection with the 2009 murder of two British soldiers gunned down as they waited for a pizza delivery at the gates of their base in County Antrim. Price had supplied the phone used by the terrorists to claim responsibility for the killings.
Today, 46 years after the Old Bailey attack, she is at the centre of a new furore.
A recently published book concludes that she was the executioner of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten who was abducted in front of her children, shot and buried in an unmarked grave by the IRA in December 1972. Mrs McConville’s body was not recovered for 30 years. A lawyer acting for Price has said she vehemently denies the allegation.
The two other leading dissident Republicans being held at Maghaberry and named in Motion 4 were double police killer Martin Corey and Gerry McGeough, the IRA’s main weapons buyer in the 1980s.
Corey had been released on parole in 1992. In 2010, his licence was revoked and he was returned to jail during an upsurge in dissident Republican terrorist activity.
The revocation, by then Labour Northern Ireland Secretary Shaun Woodward, was made on the grounds of ‘closed material’. Corey was considered a risk to public safety. It was said he had been one of the leaders of the Continuity IRA since 2008.
In 1977, the SAS raided a South Armagh farm belonging to William ‘Slab’ Murphy, said to be the IRA’s chief of staff. Murphy would be linked to the bombings that killed Lord Mountbatten and 18 paratroopers at Warrenpoint.
One of the ‘farm workers’ arrested during the raid was Gerry McGeough.
Trained to be a teacher,
McGeough was in fact the IRA’s arms-buying supremo. As such, he had much blood on his hands. He was jailed in the U.S. for trying to buy Stinger surface-to-air missiles and also spent time in a German prison for IRArelated activities.
McGeough opposed the peace process. In 1999, he told Sinn Fein’s annual conference he had not spent ‘very good years’ of his life buying arms ‘simply so we could hand them over to the very enemy we were trying to use them against’.
In 2011 he was convicted of the 1981 attempted murder of an off-duty member of the Ulster Defence Regiment. He was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment.
Motion 4 demanded ‘the release of all antiimperialist political prisoners internationally’ and that all ‘Irish Republican political prisoners’ should have their political status restored. It also accused prison staff of carrying out ‘brutal’ assaults on the jailed terrorists. The motion contained no condemnation of paramilitary assassinations.
Releasing dissident Republican terrorists or referring to them as POws in the shadow of Mr Black’s murder did not sit well with everyone in the hall. Some felt Mr Corbyn should not have allowed the motion to be debated in the first place. LRC chairman Mr McDonnell also bore a good deal of responsibility. Mr Black had been a prison officer at the Maze during the 1981 hunger strikes. Mr McDonnell has or had a list of the names of the IRA men who died there on the wall of his constituency office. It was presented to him by Gerry kelly, a member of Marian Price’s Old Bailey bombing team. Now Mr Black was dead — and Mr McDonnell’s organisation was voting to support his killers.
It is worth reproducing part of Andy Gunton’s article about that 2012 meeting:
‘There was greater controversy with Motion 4, from the Irish Republican Prisoners Support Group,’ he reported. ‘It called for the release of political prisoners, highlighting Palestinians in Israel and Naxalites (revolutionary Maoist communists) in India.
‘However, it was the paragraphs dealing with Irish Republican prisoners that split the meeting.
‘Opposing Motion 4, a comrade from Socialist Appeal warned that, should we pass the motion, we would have to call for the release of those who murdered prison officer David Black, shot while driving to work... nevertheless, the motion was passed, by a show of hands, by a margin of 52 to 35.’
The Mail spoke to Mr Downing this week. He was unapologetic and remembered the debate well.
‘It was controversial, we’ll put it that way,’ he said at his home in London.
Chortling at the memory, he went on: ‘But I did say (during the debate) that if you want to know my personal views I can confirm your worst fears. I do actually support the dissident IRA! That raised a titter.’
Referring to the David Black killing, he said: ‘If you defend prisoners’ rights, then you defend them in all circumstances, you don’t make exceptions because there’s been a murder.’
There is no publicly available record of how individual delegates voted on the motion, nor is it clear whether the chair was allowed to vote. But Mr Downing said he was ‘fairly sure’ Mr Corbyn had supported his motion.
MR DOwNING said that while he supports the aims of the dissident IRA, he opposes violence. He said Marian Price ‘might well have been’ involved in violent attacks, ‘but that wasn’t the issue at the time. The issue was opposition to Britain’s occupation of the six north-eastern counties of Ireland.’
Two days after the LRC gave its backing to dissident Republican paramilitaries, a new group calling itself ‘the IRA’ claimed responsibility for Mr Black’s murder.
The organisation was believed to have been formed during the summer of 2012, from an amalgamation of previously disparate organisations. In a statement, the group said it had killed him ‘to protect and defend’ republican prisoners.
The excuse sounded very like the rationale of Motion 4.
But who would protect and defend the victims of Marian Price and her comrades-in-arms?
In 2013, Gerry McGeough was released under the Good Friday Agreement, having served only two years of his 20-year sentence.
In March the same year, the mother of Sapper Mark Quinsey, 23, one of the two soldiers gunned down as they collected a pizza in 2009, was found dead at her home in Birmingham. It was less than a fortnight after the fourth anniversary of her son’s murder.
Later in 2013, Marian Price admitted she had provided the phone that the killers of Sappers Quinsey and Patrick Azimkar used to claim responsibility for the murders.
So what of the records of the 2012 LRC conference?
Last year, a slick new website called labourrep.com was launched to promote the LRC and update members on events.
But the old version of the site remains live, with material dating as far back as 2008. Curiously, however, content related to the 2012 LRC conference has vanished.
It is not possible to determine whether it has been deliberately deleted, and it may have been erased due to a technical glitch.
But the evidence collated by the Daily Mail suggests it has been selectively removed while other less controversial content remains.
Our researcher was able to find an original copy of the 2012 conference report using specialist web tools. It confirms that Mr Corbyn chaired the Motion 4 debate.
TROTSkyIST Gerry Downing laughed when he was told that details of the LRC conference had vanished from the website. ‘well, I suppose they are protective of Jeremy,’ he said.
Another delegate, who was present and has since turned away from the Corbynistas because of anti-Semitism, agreed.
He said: ‘This event [in 2012] is now a political embarrassment. I am not surprised if there has been an airbrushing of history.’
Last night kyle Black, son of the murdered prison officer, told the Mail: ‘It is deeply concerning that someone who aspires to be Prime Minister of the Uk has openly shown solidarity with terrorist organisations that continue to inflict murder and mayhem upon Northern Ireland today.
‘(It) also shows the hypocrisy of the Labour Party leadership, that says it is fighting to defend workers’ rights. A total of 32 prison officers have been murdered by terrorists in Northern Ireland — two in the past six years, including my dad.
‘To be targeted and murdered simply for doing their job. what greater violation of a worker’s rights can there be?’
The father of Sapper Quinsey also launched an emotional attack on Corbyn and McDonnell after learning of the 2012 conference.
Retired postman Bill Quinsey, 70, said: ‘They are just as bad as the killers. They should be locked up with them. In my eyes Corbyn and McDonnell are traitors to this country, not future leaders.’
This week, the Mail asked Mr Corbyn and Mr McDonnell how they had voted on Motion 4, what consideration they had given to the then recent murder of Prison Officer Black, and what they knew of the subsequent disappearance from the official internet site of reports or records of the debate.
In response, a Labour Party spokesman first gave this terse statement on their behalf: ‘Jeremy and John have always supported peace and justice and condemned terrorism, and are not responsible for the views of individuals who have participated in LRC events.’
when pressed last night, a spokesman said of Motion 4: ‘Mr Corbyn didn’t vote for it.’ It was still unclear whether he voted at all or, as chairman of the debate, abstained.
The LRC’s 2019 conference takes place today. Mr McDonnell is to be the star speaker. Delegates will then vote on a resolution to reject the internationally accepted definition of anti-Semitism, recently adopted by the Labour Party.
Among those who have said they will attend is Gerry Downing, the man who moved the 2012 motion to free Marian Price and her friends.