We have had enough of Corbyn’s useful idiocy
Labour leader seems to be indulged beyond all logic, but his disloyal rhetoric has surely had its time
Was last Wednesday the day Jeremy Corbyn definitively assured the British public that they could never allow him to be PM? His refusal to concede that Russia was behind the attempted murder of a former spy and his daughter in Salisbury, and that Britain was somehow to blame for having cut the Foreign Office budget, wrecks his already depleted credibility. It has divided his party and shadow cabinet, and exposed his ignorance and enslavement to the doctrinaire Marxism – indeed, Stalinism – of his associates, notably his comms director Seumas Milne, an occasional apologist for Vladimir Putin who believes Stalin should be given a better press.
All the more remarkable, Mr Corbyn and his Morning Star- toting chums still appear to imagine Russia as a bulwark against Western imperialism. To rational beings, it is a kleptocracy of a billionaire elite whose policies resemble National Socialism – with some of whom, disgracefully, using London as a main money-laundry. To admit that completely would destroy the romanticism of the Corbynistas’ hammer-and-sickle political fantasies.
Mr Corbyn’s intellect is weak, and he finds fact troublesome: hence his refusal to acknowledge, for example, the destruction of the Venezuelan economy, and therefore of Venezuelan society, by his hero Hugo Chávez. Mr Corbyn is keen to inflict such policies on this country. Even he, however, should be able to grasp that Novichok, the nerve agent used in the Salisbury attack, was developed in the Soviet Union, and experimentation on it continued after the fall of Gorbachev.
Vil Sultanovich Mirzayonov, a scientist on the project now living in New Jersey, has written that the skills and specific equipment to recreate Novichok exist nowhere else but in Russia. Putin’s contemptuous disregard last week for international opinion hardly constituted a denial.
Mr Corbyn seems incapable of grasping this reality, trapped as he is in the mindset of a polytechnic student union revolutionary from the Seventies. Those who criticise the company Mr Corbyn keeps, or the causes he espouses, crash into the brick wall of public infatuation with him. After registering Labour’s largest vote share since 1997, a reluctance to challenge Mr Corbyn’s values set in.
With almost 62 per cent of those under 40 voting for him, a sense developed that to attack him was to attack the young and divide generations. However, if he is beyond realising his mistakes some of his supporters are not, for there is a chance some may grow up. So, it is worth reminding them – and ourselves – that the Labour leader’s poisonous defence of those who seek to harm Britain and flout its values is not new.
His attitude towards the country of which he hopes to be prime minister was best expressed in his relentless support for the IRA when they were murdering innocent civilians all over the United Kingdom. He was general secretary of London Labour Briefing, which in 1984 disassociated itself from an article that criticised the recent Brighton bombing, calling the piece a “serious political misjudgment”.
The man he appointed shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, who among other things has quoted demands for Tory MP Esther McVey to be “lynched”, was an even more passionate republican.
Mr Corbyn’s association with terrorists extends far beyond Ireland, calling Hamas and Hizbollah his “friends”: Hamas is committed to the destruction of Israel, a view apparently shared by some who have found a warm welcome in Mr Corbyn’s party, where anti-semitism is now as routine as bullying and factionalism.
That raises his failings as a party leader, though that is merely private grief; his inability take a position in the EU referendum campaign; his managerial incompetence in handling colleagues; his utter incoherence of policy, especially on the economy; the blind eye turned to complaints by female colleagues about how his cronies and supporters treat them.
But his biggest failing of all is as a potential prime minister. Last week’s debacle over Russia gave further proof of the old allegation that Mr Corbyn is deficient in patriotism and in brains. It seems he can ignore no opportunity to try to place his country in the wrong, even when doing so strikes the rest of the world as absurd.
And the disclosure by police that another of Putin’s enemies was murdered in London last Monday shows just how useful an idiot like Mr Corbyn is to the Kremlin. If a Tory leader were to have such atrocious judgment; such a toxic choice of friends and causes, their career would be finished.
Why do people keep giving Mr Corbyn the benefit of the doubt?
He has, I think, entertained us long enough.