Corbyn the coppers’ friend? Don’t insult our intelligence

THAT didn’t last long, did it? After the statutory round of stage-managed defiance, ritual handwringing and a couple of choruses of Don’t Look Back In Anger, it was everybody back on the battle bus.

I suppose it was always too much to expect that the temporary armistice in the wake of the London Bridge attack might be followed by a period of decorum. And so it proved. With the bodies still warm, the politicians were quickly at each other’s throats again.

OK, so there’s a General Election on Thursday. But the Christmas Day football match between British and German troops during World War I lasted longer than the brief hiatus in mud- slinging in the aftermath of Saturday’s atrocity.

Democracy must go on, we won’t be cowed and all that. But was it really necessary for Theresa May to use yesterday’s post-COBRA press conference to rubbish Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership credentials, so soon after seven people had been slaughtered and dozens more wounded by Islamist terrorists?

She already had the conch. Surely all she had to do was look and sound Prime Ministerial, to rise above the tawdry political fray. There was no need yet again to contrast her own personal qualifications with those of Corbyn, who is about as strong and stable as a self-assembly MFI sideboard.

Is there any sentient being in Britain, over the age of 21 and outside the ranks of Momentum, who seriously believes that Corbyn is a fit and proper person to entrust with our national security — let alone management of the economy or leading the Brexit talks?

For anybody still to be convinced, the Labour leader’s performance since Saturday night should have erased any lingering doubts.

He couldn’t be bothered to respect the short suspension of campaigning before trying to score cheap political points.

Even as many of the victims were still fighting for their lives in intensive care, Corbyn — the man who blamed the Manchester massacre on Britain’s foreign policy — couldn’t resist trying to link the London Bridge atrocity to ‘Tory cuts’ in police budgets.

He went so far as to suggest the Prime Minister should resign immediately. So, to be fair, Mrs May was within her rights to use her press conference to remind voters that, whatever they’re claiming now, two years ago Labour’s front bench was prepared to countenance a 10 per cent reduction in spending on the police.

FOR

Corbyn to pose as a champion of the police is not only preposterous, it’s an insult to the intelligence of anyone whose memory goes back further than the last five minutes.

Those of us who have lived in North London since the Seventies are only too well aware of Corbyn’s character and political record.

He’s got plenty of previous. Hornsey Labour Party, which he chaired, featured a poster of pigs in police helmets at its headquarters.

In the Eighties, he backed the Brixton rioters and supported Barmy Bernie Grant, Labour leader of loony Left Haringey Council, who said the coppers ‘got a good hiding’ during the murderous mob violence at Broadwater Farm in Tottenham, which claimed the life of PC Keith Blakelock.

You don’t need me to remind you that when the IRA was murdering policemen and soldiers in Northern Ireland, Corbyn was one of their loudest cheerleaders.

He still can’t bring himself to condemn the IRA. Corbyn’s never met a terrorist he doesn’t like. Even if you overlook his support for Hamas and Hezbollah — simply different heads of the Islamist hydra which spawned the deranged London Bridge and Manchester murderers — he has voted against every single anti-terrorism measure which has come before Parliament during his time as an MP.

Yet he has the nerve to link the London Bridge outrage not simply to the Islamist nutters who carried it out, but to blame the ‘Tory cuts’. It is a fact that police spending has gone down in some areas, but money for anti-terrorism operations hasn’t just been increased, it’s been ring-fenced.

And the only reason that the Conservatives have had to reduce expenditure across the public services is because the last Labour government effectively bankrupted Britain. Remember the amusing note they left behind at the Treasury in 2010? ‘There’s no money left.’ Ha, bloody ha. Perhaps the most damning indictment of the dangers of putting Corbyn in charge of anything more lethal than a dodgy falafel stall on Camden Market is his visceral opposition to any kind of shoot-to-kill policy by the police. He made his position abundantly clear in the wake of the attacks in Paris and Brussels.

Yet now, after London Bridge, with an election pending, he’s trying to pretend he’s changed his mind. How stupid does he think we are? There’s about as much chance of Corbyn approving a shoot-to-kill policy as ordering a nuclear strike on Islington North.

As I wrote in yesterday’s Mail, if Corbyn was Prime Minister, the brave firearms officers who took out the London Bridge terrorists on Saturday night would probably be facing murder charges.

It’s tempting for some who don’t know any better to see him as a cuddly grandfather figure, a sort of grown-up Wolfie Smith — a bus pass revolutionary, idealistic but harmless. Nothing could be further from the truth.

He remains one seriously dangerous bastard — especially when it comes to national security. It’s not just Corbyn, either. His crypto- Communist Svengali John McDonnell has built his career on undermining the forces of law and order.

As recently as 2015, McDonnell was reported to have signed a letter calling for armed police units, the anti-terror squad and MI5 to be abolished.

HE

DENIED it, but he was present at the meeting which drew it up — organised by an outfit called The Socialist Network as part of their ‘Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory’.

There’s even a picture of McDonnell holding the letter. Not quite Thumbs Up, Three Sombreros, but definitely bang to rights.

If Corbyn and McDonnell represent Labour’s militant present, then Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan, mayors of Manchester and London respectively, are supposed to be the party’s sunlit ‘moderate’ future.

Yet both these smarmy opportunists have dubious records on confronting Islamist extremism, and it was Burnham, when in the Shadow Cabinet, who said he could live with a 10 per cent cut in police budgets.

Citizen Khan was on parade outside Borough Market yesterday, alongside Met Commissioner Dick of Dock Green.

It was supposed to be a solemn occasion, honouring the victims and giving an update on the progress of the investigation.

But after observing the usual pieties, Khan decided to exploit the event to condemn the ‘ Tory cuts’ to policing — somehow suggesting the wicked Conservatives were to blame for the current spate of terrorism on our streets.

His outburst was as unworthy of his office as it was utterly predictable. So perhaps Theresa May shouldn’t be blamed for reminding the nation of the stark choice we face when we go to the polls on Thursday.

This started out as a Brexit election. It still is, to an extent, even though terrorism will loom large over the next couple of days.

Those, like me, who have our reservations about Mrs May will have to take her on trust.

The alternative is simply too frightening to contemplate.

Don’t look back in anger, or repent at leisure.

By any yardstick, Brexit or national security, there’s only one way to vote. And it isn’t for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.

There’s as much chance of him approving shoot-to-kill as ordering North’ a nuclear strike on Islington