Corbyn’s nice- guy image masks a dangerous zealot
WHEN Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader last September his supporters declared that his landslide victory would see a dramatic surge in his party’s popularity. According to their predictions, the electorate would soon warm to his brand of “straight talking, honest politics”.
How utterly deluded those claims look eight months later. Instead of moving towards the sunlit uplands, Corbyn’s party is drowning in the mire of public contempt and internal discord. Labour has retreated to the wild outer fringes of extremism. No longer an alternative government, it is now a far- Left pressure group headed by sectarian ideologues.
The advance that Corbyn promised has given way to accelerating meltdown. Even when faced with divided Tory ranks, Labour trails badly in most polls. In today’s local elections the party may well lose more than 100 seats, while in Scotland there could be a Labour wipeout.
Labour had no coherent message for these elections beyond puerile Left- wing chants about bashing the rich. The lack of any serious political engagement was reflected in the pathetic poster which Corbyn unveiled for the final days of the campaign. “Elections are about taking sides. Labour is on yours,” read its slogan, perfectly encapsulating the mood of playground tribalism that grips Corbyn’s leadership.
HE prattles about tolerance but presides over a culture of snarling hostility. He preaches unity but brings only discord. Nothing more graphically exposes the emptiness of his rhetoric about “a kinder, gentler politics” than the crisis over anti- Semitism that has engulfed his party.
Triggered by the revelation that Bradford Labour MP Naz Shah had called for the transportation of Israeli Jews to the USA, the row was further fuelled by a tirade of sickening comments from Corbyn ally Ken Livingstone, who, with almost lupine relish, linked Zionism to Nazism. Now it emerges that at least 50 Labour members have been suspended in the last two months for making anti- Semitic or racially charged comments.
Under Corbyn, Labour has truly become the nasty party. But that should be no surprise since he is a Marxist hardliner whose anti- Western views attract all sorts of cranks, radicals and bigots to his banner. The Labour Party used to try to keep out these unsavoury fanatics. Now Corbyn’s election has put them in charge. His communications chief Seamus Milne, for instance, is an infamous Stalinist who once said that the Soviet Union “encompassed genuine idealism” and that the foundation of Israel was “a crime”.
Corbyn’s own immersion in pro- Islamist, anti- Israel politics means that he still refuses to accept that his party even has a serious problem with antiSemitism. He becomes exasperated whenever he is asked about the issue, continually denying there is any crisis. Nor does he ever condemn antiSemitism outright. He always dilutes the impact of his censure by adding that he is opposed “to all forms of racism”.
The Labour leader’s tesque mishandling of grothis question explodes the myth, cultivated by his followers, that Corbyn is a nice guy.
Even some of his critics like to pretend that, despite all his failings, he is a lovable English eccentric who sticks to his principles, an image supposedly reinforced by his favourite hobby of studying manhole covers. “You’ll need to search long and hard to find a politician as decent as Jeremy Corbyn,” wrote one Left- wing commentator yesterday.
But this is self- delusion. There is nothing endearing or harmless about Corbyn. On the contrary he is a malevolent fool with a long track record of association to vicious causes and unsavoury individuals. This is a man who calls the anti- Semitic terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah his “friends” and calls the death of Bin Laden “a tragedy”. His link to violent Irish republicanism is just as notorious. In 1984, only a fortnight after the Brighton bombing, he invited representatives of Sinn Fein to Westminster, while in 1987, at a meeting of
SUCH patent unfitness for his role should not be ascribed to some form of kindness. Corbyn is a neurotic, thin- skinned zealot whose petulance shines through when he is confronted with tough questions. Everything is seen through the prism of his militant fundamentalism. He sanctimoniously says that, in the referendum campaign, he will not share a platform with David Cameron because “we’re not on the same side”.
Yet he was only too happy this week to address a May Day rally in London which featured a phalanx of communists carrying banners emblazoned with the image of Stalin. In 2002 Corbyn addressed an angry crowd burning Israeli flags and waving swastikas at a proPalestine gathering. To cheers from the mob he demanded a comprehensive boycott of Israel to ensure the Jewish homeland was cut off “from the rest of world” with “no recognition and no support”.
The idea of this figure as the prime minster of Britain is terrifying. Labour was once led by patriots such as Attlee and Callaghan. Under Corbyn it is a disgrace to British democracy.
‘ A man who called Hamas his friends’