Corbyn heckled by supporters as his day of reckoning looms
The Labour leader has been accused of targeting safe seats to get his vote share above Ed Miliband’s
JEREMY CORBYN was heckled by his own supporters yesterday after he criticised Theresa May’s plans for a crackdown on jihadists.
The Labour leader faced fresh accusations of being soft on terror after he and Sir Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, said Mrs May was wrong to suggest that human rights laws should be repealed if they stood in the way of shackling terrorist suspects.
Mr Corbyn spent yesterday making a 500-mile dash through marginal Conservative seats in what aides have described as his “West Coast Main Line strategy”, having spent much of the campaign preaching to the converted at rallies in safe Labour seats.
He began the day with an appearance on BBC Breakfast, where he said: “We won’t defeat terrorism by ripping up our basic rights and our democracy.
“We defeat terrorism by our communities, by our vigilance and by police action to isolate and detain those who wish us harm.
“Obviously if somebody is a foreign national resident in Britain who is committing crimes, then clearly the law is there to take its course now.
“The issue is police numbers and police security.”
Sir Keir told the BBC: “There is nothing in the Human Rights Act that gets in the way of effectively tackling terrorism I can say that with this authority: I was director of public prosecutions for five years.
“I worked very closely with the security and intelligence services and we prosecuted very, very serious criminals and the Human Rights Act did not get in the way of what we were doing.”
Sir Keir became the latest Labour front-bencher to get his facts wrong when he tried to defend Mr Corbyn’s record on terror by suggesting the Labour leader had backed the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. He was left red-faced when he was told Mr Corbyn had been absent for the vote.
After addressing a rally in an Snpheld constituency in Glasgow, Mr Corbyn headed for Runcorn in Cheshire, where one of his own supporters, Tony Gobin, shouted: “What about terrorists?” as he listed the best policies in the Labour manifesto for the crowd.
Others shouted more aggressive comments. Mr Gobin, 54, from Runcorn, a safe Labour seat with a majority of more than 20,000, said he would still back Mr Corbyn today but complained that the party leaders have not explained how they would deal with terrorism in enough detail.
Mr Corbyn travelled on to Tory-held Colwyn Bay, in Wales, where he told supporters that 2017 would be “the year [the Conservatives] regret”.
He told a train guard later in the day that newspapers and the Tory party have “underestimated” Labour.
Mr Corbyn journeyed on to London and the Conservative seats of Watford and Harrow East before ending the day in Islington South, held by his shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry, and next door to his own constituency.
He told supporters that they have a choice at the polls, to vote for his government offering hope and change, or Mrs May’s, whose “arid road” only offers more of the same.
According to the list of seats visited by Mr Corbyn over the course of the campaign, the Labour leader spent time in just three delicately balanced Labour marginals and the rest of the time split between safe Labour areas and Conservative seats.
It has led to claims that the Labour leader could be planning to bank votes in areas that the party already holds in an attempt to boost his share of the vote compared with Ed Miliband, the former leader.