Daniel Hannan:
The Labour leader seems happy to side with any cause provided it is hostile to Western interests
This ought to be the end for Jeremy Corbyn. The revelation that he was in contact with an alleged enemy spy during the Cold War would, in normal times, disqualify him from holding any public office, let alone aspiring to lead the nation.
But these are not normal times. I have a horrible suspicion that many on the Left will stick their fingers in their ears and dismiss the exposure as a fabrication. Jezza has admitted to bits of the story, but that hasn’t put his supporters off. The internet is humming with their bizarre denials. Anything that appears in The Sun is by definition untrue, they say. If he did meet a Czechoslovakian spy, albeit one he thought was a diplomat, it was to help de-escalate the Cold War or something. And anyway, what about Theresa May meeting the king of Saudi Arabia, eh, eh? What about that?
So far, this sophistry has come mainly from Momentum thickos. But mainstream Labour MPs – those who sided with the democracies against the Marxist dictatorships when it counted – are conspicuously silent.
That’s the worst aspect of Corbynism: the way it has tainted so many public-spirited Labour moderates.
It goes without saying that Corbyn is entitled to the presumption of innocence. He has strenuously denied claims that he acted as a paid agent and, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, I believe him.
Frankly, I find it hard to imagine the well-meaning old boob committing treason – which is what asking for money from a hostile government would have constituted.
Even so, it seems clear that he was too close to an unfriendly power. The original accusation was that Corbyn had passed information to a Czechoslovakian spy. His spokesman denied the charge in very careful language: “Jeremy neither had nor offered any privileged information to this or any other diplomat.”
Of course he had no “privileged” information. Who would have given him any? The man was a known communist sympathiser, for heaven’s sake.
But the fact remains that he met a Warsaw Pact diplomat at a time when all such invitations were tinged with espionage; that he failed to report the meeting to the authorities; that he gave that diplomat useful information; and that they continued to meet. At the very least, Corbyn’s behaviour was unpatriotic.
The idea that conniving with a communist autocracy is comparable to Conservatives having dealings with Saudi Arabia is too fatuous for words. Politicians occasionally need to talk to unsavoury regimes. But no Tory, to my knowledge, has ever held up the desert theocracy as a model to follow.
Corbyn, by contrast, plainly wanted to copy aspects of the Eastern bloc. Listen to why he saw the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as a mistake: “It did irreparable damage to the leadership of the Soviet Union through its cost and loss of life. It was a disaster and a contributory factor – not the only one – to the break-up of the Soviet Union”.
As a young man, Corbyn went on holiday in the German Democratic Republic – another tyranny whose downfall he regretted. The newsletter he edited for hard-Left MPs responded to the peaceful democratisation of East Germany with an article headlined: “No cheers here for a united capitalist Germany.”
How could a self-proclaimed human rights champion have found things to admire in police states like Czechoslovakia and the GDR, which imprisoned and tortured dissidents? The answer seems to be that Corbyn’s dislike of the West trumped everything else. As he wrote in 2005, “Nato, the father of the Cold War in the Forties, should have shut up shop in 1990”.
Hostility to Western interests is the one constant in Jezza’s outlook. It prompts him to side with any cause, however hideous, provided it is sufficiently anti-British.
Over the years, he has formed effective alliances with such monsters as Slobodan Milošević, Vladimir Putin, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, the IRA, the Iranian ayatollahs, Hamas, Hizbollah and even a gang of Somali pirates (because Nato was attacking them).
No foe was too repulsive. Argentina’s general Galtieri ran a fascist dictatorship of the kind that Corbo would normally loathe, but he couldn’t bring himself to back the liberation of the Falkland Islands. Indeed, asked whether there was a single conflict where he would have supported Britain, the Labour leader eventually came up with the Second World War. And, in fairness, he probably would – after June 22 1941.
Pundits assure us that these revelations will make no difference because young people, the beneficiaries of Nato’s victory, see it as ancient history.
But Corbyn’s opinions are not ancient history. He has not recanted or disowned them. On the contrary, hostility to Western values and interests continues to define his politics. He broadly took the Russian side in the Ukraine conflict, for example, and argues that Putin is right to oppose Nato expansion, based as it is on “the arrogance of the United States”.
As a bare minimum, we should expect our leaders to champion their own country. But Corbyn still sees every ill in the world, from so-called Islamic State to the IRA, as essentially our fault. That is what makes him unfit to lead us.
Unless, of course, we no longer believe in the moral superiority of democratic open societies. In which case, God forgive us, we deserve what is coming.
Many on the Left will stick their fingers in their ears and dismiss the exposure as a fabrication