Now crazy Corbyn has freedom of the press in his sights
THROUGHOUT its brutal history the Soviet bloc was the enemy of liberty. The regime’s very existence was built on the triumph of a totalitarian Leftwing ideology, enforced by ruthless state control, the suppression of free speech and the obliteration of democracy.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn now stands accused of collusion with this monstrous tyranny. In recent days there has been a flood of allegations about his past links to the Soviet-dominated government of Czechoslovakia in the 1980s.
Corbyn has denied claims that he was a Czech informant, describing them as nothing more than “lies and smears”.
Yet there can be no doubt about where his political sympathies lay. From his earliest days as a hardline socialist he was always a supporter of antiBritish, anti-Western causes.
I saw his extremism at first hand during almost 10 years as an activist in his own Islington North Labour Party. Never once did I hear him condemn the Soviet Union or the cruel abuses perpetrated in the name of Marxism. Instead all his anger was reserved for the supposed iniquities of Britain and the West. “Our task is not to reform capitalism but to overthrow it,” he declared at one meeting.
WHAT is so disturbing about Corbyn is that his views have never changed since they were first set in aspic in the 1960s. Neither the collapse of the Soviet Union nor his own unexpected rise to his party’s leadership have had any impact on his mentality. Down to his Lenin cap he remains the eternal, self-righteous rebel, always ready to man the barricades, always dreaming of the socialist revolution.
That reality has shone through two of his utterances this week. The first came in a typical diatribe against the City of London as he wailed against the “unfettered power of finance”, which according to him has exerted a “pernicious and undemocratic” influence on our economy. In words that would have pleased any Soviet ideologue during the Cold War he warned that a future Labour government would “take decisive action to make finance the servant of industry”.
But his doctrinaire analysis could not be more wrong. In our increasingly post-industrial age, finance is a key engine of British prosperity.
It should be celebrated rather than attacked. In the year to March 2016 the financial services sector contributed no less than £71.4billion in tax receipts to the Government, 11.5 per cent of the total of all revenue.
Professional and financial services made a colossal £245billion for the British economy in 2015, while the City of London, so despised by Corbyn, employs about 480,000 workers, more than one fifth of them from ethnic minorities.
The Labour leader is too blinded by his neurotic anticapitalism to recognise these facts. In the same vein his worship of socialist ideology means that he has no respect for the principles of free expression, as he demonstrated yesterday in a shrill demand for press censorship. If anything, his rant against newspapers was even more chilling than his attack on finance.
In a smug but aggressive appearance on Twitter, Corbyn condemned the press for publishing “entirely false” stories about his connection to the Czech regime, peppering his commentary with moans about “the powerful and corrupt”.
Then staring menacingly into the camera he pledged that
CORBYN wants to usher in a world of state regulation where papers and broadcasters just regurgitate official propaganda. In his Twitter appearance he talked about “protecting” the public but what he means is protecting his own dogma and shameful past.
A glimpse into his real attitude was provided last year when he purged from the frontbench Rotherham Labour MP Sarah Champion for her thought crime of writing a newspaper article which justifiably stated that “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls”. The truth about predatory sex gangs mattered less to Corbyn than his mythmaking about Islamophobia.
If he gets his way, there will be more cover-ups, less investigation. Tough press scrutiny will be replaced by institutionalised cheerleading. In its growing ascendancy within the Labour movement, the Corbynista vanguard Momentum has already shown its capacity for bullying and intolerance.
The absurdity of his bleats about newspapers is that we already have a pluralistic media in Britain. It is hardly as if Leftwing voices are silent in broadcasting or the press. Indeed the real problem is the prevalence of the fashionable, progressive orthodoxy across the airwaves and our civic life.
If Corbyn really wanted to challenge the newspapers over the Czech allegations, he could sue them. After all we have in Britain among the toughest libel laws in the world. But his only interest is in the victory of his extreme brand of socialism – and the silencing of its opponents.
‘His chilling rant against newspapers’