Young Labour’s sick ‘Kalashnikov’ slogan
THE sale of T-shirts bearing the Labour Party logo and showing Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell brandishing a Kalashnikov assault rifle was branded ‘tasteless’ last night.
The mocked-up image featuring the weapon popular with terrorists and the slogan ‘Arm John McDonnell Now!’ were worn by activists at a Young Labour rally attended by Jeremy Corbyn last week.
The T-shirts display Labour’s official red rose logo above the words ‘Labour Party Young Guerrillas’ and appear to be based on Mr McDonnell’s controversial comments on Irish terrorism.
In 2003 during an event to remember the death of a hunger striker, he called for former IRA members to be ‘honoured’. He later apologised for the remark. Mr McDonnell is close to Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams.
The T-shirts are available on the Redbubble website for £14. A wider range of terrorist-style gun-toting ‘John McDonnell’ clothes, including sleeveless shirts, is available on a US website. The items also bear the Labour logo and Labour Party Young Guerrillas brand.
Labour Party Young Guerrillas has a Facebook site featuring photographs of terrorists stretching back decades, with Labour politicians and slogans superimposed on them.
One shows MP Hilary Benn, a leading critic of Mr Corbyn, and Lord Falconer, a close ally of Tony Blair, tied up and being led away to execution. A caption refers to the ‘disgusting betrayal of the Rightists’.
Other posters show guerrillas marching on the House of Commons and Mr McDonnell as a Chinese Red Army revolutionary.
A rally of Maoist guerrillas is shown with a slogan on the banners changed to Momentum, the controversial Left-wing group behind Mr Corbyn’s Labour leadership campaign.
Last night, a spokesman for Mr McDonnell said he had ‘nothing to do with these T-shirts. He does not approve of violence or glamorising it’.
A Labour spokesman said the T-shirts were ‘nothing to do with the party’.