Corbyn's Weasel Words

Jeremy Corbyn's weasel words about the Russian attack in Salisbury using a military grade nerve agent have drawn much deserved criticism from right across the political spectrum - and rightly so.

But the Labour leader's refusal to condemn Russia are part of who he is - this is not a just a 'bump in the road' or a difficult issue for Corbyn to handle.

Witness the following Twitter comments posted by Corbyn supporters who believe in just about every conspiracy theory under the sun in response to The Times journalist David Aaronovitch.

 

It’s been fun. My favourite is the guy who doesn’t believe Putin would off an opponent but does believe that Tony Blair offed Robin Cook. But enough now. 


As all this stems from #Israel, @jeremycorbyn is quite justified. Today you can trust the #Russians more than the #Americans


The whole thing sounds cooked up by a cabal of media folk fed the fuck up reporting on Brexit.


Has anyone re accused Blair of having given Mo Mowlam her brain tumour because he was jealous at how popular she was? Nut jobs


That's bizarre because I had a guy who thinks Blair offed the spy and Putin offed Robin Cook


Is it just coincidence he died of a heart attack a mere *two years* after resigning?

Corbyn's Politics Stink (14/03/18)

Daniel Finkelstein wrote an opinion piece in The Times back on 20 February 2018 in which he described Jeremy Corbyn's attitude towards the old Soviet Union which, of course, finally fell apart in 1988 after an unsuccessful attempt at internal reform under President Mikhail Gorbachev.  

The Labour leader's 'weasel words' over Russia's nerve agent attack on a former spy and his daughter on UK soil are just the logical extension of Corbyn's politics which cared little for the realities of life under the Soviet Union - or now in Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, Iran and so on which are all 21st century dictatorships. 

The essential problem is that Corbyn's politics stink to high heaven.

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/corbyn-s-feelings-for-soviets-are-not-a-secret-2mfd5s8x5

Jeremy Corbyn’s feelings for Soviets are not a secret

By daniel finkelstein - The Times

The Labour leader was always plain about his attachment to the Soviet Union, which still shapes his view of the world


Jeremy Corbyn valued Soviet leadership. He was worried about the break-up of the Soviet Union. He believed Nato was an instrument of Cold War manipulation. And he informed the communists of this, in order to inspire a revival of socialism.

I do not know this because of some recently unearthed file, or the evidence of a maverick agent. I do not know it because I am a Tory peer seeking fabricated allegations with which to smear the Labour leader. I know it because he said so himself.

No one would have had to pay Mr Corbyn to take a sympathetic view of the Soviet Union’s world role because he saw that as all part of the service as MP for Islington North. And far from advancing his ideas in clandestine encounters, Mr Corbyn was entirely open about his opinions.

It is a big mistake to view Mr Corbyn’s attitude to the Soviets as some sort of dirty secret — he didn’t see it as either dirty or secret — or to think that it is now just dredging up an irrelevant past. In fact it is an important part of his politics and remains highly relevant.

Let’s start here. Mr Corbyn was not, and is not, a Soviet-style communist. They come from two different socialist positions. Mr Corbyn and the Soviets are at different ends of the ice pick.

It’s not just that in 1988, he petitioned parliament to demand that the Russian government “gives complete rehabilitation to Leon Trotsky”. It’s that the new left, of which Mr Corbyn is a part, was created as an intellectual and political response to the failures of Stalin. Its aim has been to develop a new, more decentralised, insurgent socialism in which control of industry and politics belongs to the shop floor.

In view of the allegations of collaboration by Mr Corbyn and his colleagues with the Czechs, it is worth noting the significance of Czechoslovakia for the new left. It was the suppression of the Czech communist reformers during the Prague Spring of 1968 that persuaded the new left that the Soviets had become irredeemably authoritarian. The new left is anti-imperialist and rejects the idea of everyone eating breakfast on Moscow time.

In a speech made to a conference organised by the communist newspaper Morning Star shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Mr Corbyn put it this way: “If there are two areas where I think grave mistakes were made by the Soviet Union,” he said (an eyebrow-raising way to express things. If? Two?), “it was the ability of the system to recognise the importance of the national question and the way in which the Communist Party of the Soviet Union became an extremely elitist body”.

It is interesting to note both what he included and what he left out. This, however, is not the end of the matter.

For the new left, the hope for socialism comes from emerging states with popular, often revolutionary, socialist leaderships. Cuba, for instance. Nicaragua under the Sandinistas. Anti-colonial struggles in Africa. Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. Or (although this is in the post-Soviet era) Venezuela. The Soviets played an important role in advancing, financing and protecting these states.

For Mr Corbyn there are two parts to this. The first is intellectual. Despite the divergence between different socialist factions, they come from a common tradition, a common idea. As he told fellow socialists in 1991: “In this very hall, where we are meeting tonight, there were, many years ago, meetings denouncing the activities of the British government in trying to destroy the newly born Soviet state. People marched and organised in this area of London in support of the Soviet revolution of 1917. I certainly haven’t come here to bury those ideas.”

He saw the collapse of the Soviet system as a blow to the common tradition, and attacked the leadership of the Labour Party (Neil Kinnock at the time) as “continually denying the birthright of this movement” thus opening the door to the triumph of capitalism and putting pressure on emerging states to support liberal economics.

The second, even more significant, role that Mr Corbyn ascribed to the Soviets was protecting socialist insurgent states from the West. Speaking to the Morning Star, he gave Cuba as an example. “The only country in the world that was prepared to help them break the blockade of the US was the Soviet Union”.

Yes, he acknowledged that there are criticisms that can be made of the Soviets, but “what I am defending is the principle of anti-imperialism, internationalism and solidarity”. This principle of left solidarity is very important to him. He pleaded, for example, with fellow socialists not to criticise Castro because “sections of the left attacking Cuba at the present time with all the problems it has got are, frankly, not very helpful at all”.

The Cold War in his view was an error. As he wrote in the Morning Star in 2012: “Since 1948 this Nato military alliance has gorged itself on resources that could have been so much better deployed on health and poverty-elimination programmes”. In the same article he describes the organisation as “an instrument of Cold War manipulation” that has never been “overly troubled by concepts of democracy or human rights”. He clearly does not appear to regard “thwarting the Soviet Union” as having much value in terms of promoting human rights.

I anticipate two responses to this exposition of Mr Corbyn’s attitudes. The first is that it is a scandalous attack on the Labour leader because the right is becoming desperate. But all I am doing is repeating, as fairly as I can, what Mr Corbyn has said on the record. My concern is description, not attack. Mr Corbyn presumably doesn’t regard these views as disreputable or he wouldn’t hold them. If it really is a smear to record, accurately, Mr Corbyn’s own words, then what does that say about the nature of those words?

The second, only slightly more reasonable criticism, will be that this is all ancient history and who really cares? Well, it isn’t that ancient, and history matters. But the more important reason to talk about Mr Corbyn’s attitude to the Soviets is that they help us understand his politics.

In John Bew’s biography of Clement Attlee, Citizen Clem, he makes clear that the central decision of Attlee’s life was that he and Labour would support a popular front of liberal democracies rather than, as was being urged upon him, a popular front of international socialists. Every Labour leader since then has accepted Attlee’s choice.

Jeremy Corbyn is the first to dissent from it. Of course that matters.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk