Jeremy Corbyn’s indulgence of terrorists disturbs me more with each week he sits atop the Labour Party

JEREMy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet re-shuffle has been mocked by David Cameron and many pundits. It’s true it was an absurdly drawn-out affair. I expect most of the nation couldn’t care less about the outcome.

But despite the hilarity, Mr Corbyn and his Hard-Left clique have got almost all they want.

The pro-Trident Maria Eagle has been shunted out of Defence to Culture, the most minor Shadow Cabinet job, and replaced by the nuclear unilateralist Emily Thornberry. Hilary Benn stays at Foreign Affairs but with a pair of manacles around his wrists.

An obscure moderate called Michael Dugher has been sent packing, as has the equally reasonable Shadow Europe minister, Pat McFadden. Three other low-profile, moderate junior Shadow ministers have also walked out in disgust.

We would be making a serious mistake if we said that the demotion of some shadow ministers, and the dismissal or resignation of others, is unimportant because we have scarcely heard of them. The point is that the Opposition front bench is now significantly more Left-wing than it was. Mr Corbyn may seem a bumbling, semi-lovable ass who can’t make up his mind. In fact, he is a determined operator, surrounded and advised by other determined operators, engaged in nothing less than the transformation of Labour into a Hard-Left party.

The accepted wisdom is he won’t succeed. Either the moderates in the Parliamentary Labour Party will rise up against him. Or, if they don’t, Labour will go down to the mother of all defeats at the 2020 General Election.

My advice to anyone who cares about democracy and the future of this country is not to take either of these assumptions for granted.

For all his apparent reasonableness and decency, Mr Corbyn is ruthless and singleminded. I don’t think he really believes in Parliamentary democracy.

What can be said of him can be said with equal vehemence of his long-time friend John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor.

Let us examine the sacking of Pat McFadden. He has made the most extraordinary allegation against his leader — namely that he was dismissed for condemning terrorism after the Paris terrorist attacks.

Mr McFadden had criticised the Stop the War Coalition — previously chaired by the Labour leader — for claiming that the people killed in Paris had ‘reaped the whirlwind’ for Western intervention in the Middle East. He said in the Commons: ‘No one forces them to kill innocent people in Paris and Beirut. Unless we are clear about that, we will fail even to be able to understand the threat we face, let alone confront it and ultimately overcome it.’ Quite right.

Sympathy

According to Mr McFadden, Mr Corbyn felt his criticisms of Stop the War were ‘an attack on him’, and this belief was instrumental in his sacking. This is an amazing allegation. Mr McFadden is suggesting he was dismissed for being critical of terrorists.

Can it be true? I believe it is. And the reason I do is that there is plenty of evidence going back many years of Mr Corbyn demonstrating a sympathy for terrorists and their causes. Corbynistas admire terrorists for pursuing political ends through non-parliamentary means.

Much has been written about how as a young MP in 1984 he invited Gerry Adams, then president of the IRA’s political wing, and widely believed at that time to have been a recent active terrorist, to a meeting in the House of Commons.

A mere fortnight earlier, the IRA had tried to blow up Margaret Thatcher and the rest of the Cabinet, killing five people.

During his career as a backbench MP, when few noticed or cared what he was doing, Mr Corbyn consorted with members of Hamas and Hezbollah, terrorist organisations committed to the destruction of Israel. He referred to his ‘friends’ at Hamas.

As recently as 2009, he shared a platform with an Islamist firebrand called Dyab Abou Jahjah, who had previously said that he regarded ‘every death of an American, British or Dutch soldier [in Iraq] as a victory’.

Only a few days ago, Mr Corbyn refused to answer questions about the latest grotesque Islamic State video showing a jihadi with a British accent and the murder of five Syrian men.

The Labour leader was at King’s Cross station in London fielding questions about rail fares. Why didn’t he condemn IS? Perhaps it was an oversight. Or perhaps Mr Corbyn finds it much more difficult than most of us to denounce terrorist activity. His colleague John McDonnell also has a shameful record of indulging terrorists. In 2003, he said it was ‘about time’ we started ‘honouring’ IRA terrorists.

Only after being appointed Shadow Chancellor a few months ago did he offer a partial apology.

In 2010, he also said he would like to ‘go back to the 1980s and assassinate Margaret Thatcher’. An attempt at a joke, perhaps, but also an image conveying extreme violence. It was not a nice thing to say.

McDonnell was co-editor of a Leftist paper called the Labour Herald in the mid-Eighties which enthusiastically supported Colonel Gaddafi, and praised his supposed achievements in Libya. After a Gaddafisponsored terrorist attack on a Berlin nightclub patronised by U.S. troops, America bombed Tripoli. The Labour Herald accused President Reagan of ‘warmongering’ and described him as a ‘terrorist’.

The evidence is so extensive that one marvels that Corbyn and McDonnell have been able to shrug off the past. The reason they have been able to do so with considerable success is that they are adept at presenting themselves as avuncular old chaps who are essentially benign and harmless. Pat McFadden has discovered otherwise.

Many people on the Right got Tony Blair wrong in his early days as Labour leader when they referred to him as ‘Bambi’.

Now they are equally mistaken in seeing Jeremy Corbyn as cuddly or a breath of fresh air. When they praise him for having principles, they forget how damaging those principles would be if he were ever to achieve power.

Vilified

Fashionable opinion is certain that such an eventuality is inconceivable. Mr Corbyn is said to be enthusiastically supported by, at most, only 50 out of 231 Labour MPs.

Even with a few dozen timeservers who will support any regime, there must still be a large majority in the Parliamentary party who would like to get rid of him.

My message, though, is not to underestimate the guile of the Corbynistas. They are planning to hand key powers over policy and recruitment to Labour’s ruling national executive committee on which Corbyn has an effective majority.

This committee will be said by the Corbynistas to represent the views of the people who voted for him by such a large majority. Labour MPs who question the power of this body will be vilified as undemocratic.

In other words, like the Hard-Left the world over, the Corbynistas are intent on removing power from democratic representatives and investing it in ‘the people’ — in fact, the few hundred thousand people, many of them not even Labour Party members, who voted for Corbyn. The old Soviet politburo would be proud of him.

Can the Corbynista take-over succeed? you would think not. Even if the Parliamentary Labour Party is successfully neutered, which is far from certain, the British electorate will surely not be fooled.

All one can say is that it is working so far. While being written off as a silly old duffer, Jeremy Corbyn has refashioned the Shadow Cabinet, and the long march of the man who not-so-secretly admires terrorists goes on.