Jeremy Corbyn is the worst hypocrite in modern UK politics – he poses as a caring man of peace after career dominated by links to murderous extremists
A minute’s silence for gunmen shot by the SAS, inviting Republicans to Parliament days after the Brighton bombing, protesting at a Provo’s murder trial, repeatedly refusing to condemn the IRA - why Jeremy Corbyn and Gerry Adams are blood brothers
LABOUR’S embattled leader Jeremy Corbyn is the worst hypocrite in modern UK politics.
He poses as a caring man of peace, an image reinforced by noisy opposition to nuclear weapons and British military action.
Yet his Commons career has been dominated throughout by links to murderous extremism.
So it is no surprise he finds his appalling connections to those who despise this country again hogging the headlines.
And rightly so, as Britons gear up for the ballot box in 17 days, the awful truth of what this man really believes is turned up to full volume.
Behind his supposedly benign facade, Corbyn is a warped apologist for terrorism.
This is a hardliner who described the assassination of al-Qaeda boss Osama Bin Laden as “a tragedy” and referred to the notorious Islamist movements of Hezbollah and Hamas as his “friends”.
But in this catalogue of moral inversion, nothing is more sinister than his long support for violent Irish Republicanism.
It is incredible in the current General Election campaign that the main opposition is led by a treacherous politician who for decades was an IRA cheerleader.
Corbyn did not merely support the goal of an end to British rule in Northern Ireland. He was an advocate for a vile organisation which deliberately butchered civilians, police officers and soldiers.
Corbyn now wants to ban the nuclear bomb.
But in the past he was all too keen to defend the bombers of the IRA.
No incident illustrated the depths of his anti-British betrayal more graphically than his presence at a Republican rally in May 1987 in London, when he stood for a minute’s silence to honour eight IRA terrorists who had been shot dead by the SAS during an attack on a police station in Loughgall, County Armagh.
“I’m happy to commemorate all those who died fighting for an independent Ireland,” he told the gathering.
Any normal British politician would have regarded the SAS ambush as a heroic triumph. For Corbyn it was a cause for regret.
His shameful words should disbar him from holding any responsible office in British public life, never mind the Premiership. The Loughgall tribute was part of the pattern with Corbyn.
I have had the misfortune to experience his fanatical Republicanism at first hand, because for ten years I was an activist in his Islington North constituency.
I regularly had to listen to his rants about the armed struggle and British imperialism. But what made his diatribes all the more offensive to me was I actually hail from Belfast.
The violence of the Troubles cast its shadow over my early life, never more chillingly than in August 1979, when one of my fellow school pupils was killed alongside Lord Mountbatten in an IRA bomb explosion off the Irish coast.
But Corbyn, wrapped up in twisted Marxist dogma about British colonial oppression, cared nothing for the innocent victims of Republicanism.
All that mattered to him was the triumph of the gunmen’s cause.
Between 1986 and 1992 he diligently attended the annual commemoration in London organised by the Republican Wolfe Tone Society to honour dead IRA members and imprisoned volunteers.
The programme for the Wolfe Tone event in 1987 heaped praise on “the soldiers of the IRA”, while for the following year declared that “force of arms is the only method capable of bringing about a free and united socialist Ireland”.
Corbyn spoke at this 1988 gathering to denounce the attempt by Margaret Thatcher’s government to reach a new political settlement in Northern Ireland because, he said, the initiative would not result in a unification. Almost from the moment he was first elected as a Labour MP in 1983, Corbyn paraded his terrorist sympathies.
In November 1984, weeks after the IRA’s bomb attack on The Grand hotel during the Tories’ Brighton Conference in which five people were killed, he invited a Republican delegation to Westminster.
The group included not only Gerry Adams, the President of Sinn Fein, but also two members of the IRA.
One was Gerard MacLochlainn, who in 1980 had been sentenced to six years for bomb-making. The other was Linda Quigley, a convicted IRA volunteer.
For his action, Corbyn was severely reprimanded by the Labour Chief Whip Michael Cocks, who said that he was “shocked” and “appalled”, adding, “in the present climate, for someone to ask people like this is highly irresponsible”. Two years later Corbyn was arrested outside the Old Bailey for refusing to move on while demonstrating against the trial of IRA terrorists, including Brighton bomber Patrick Magee.
Corbyn was taken to Snow Hill police station in London but released without charge. Unsurprisingly, Britain’s secret services opened a file on the MP because he posed a potential security risk.
On Sunday he repeatedly refused to condemn the IRA’s bombing campaign when asked by Sophy Ridge on Sky News, saying instead that he was against “all bombing”.
And when the BBC’s Andrew Neil recently pointed out that two of the guests at the 1984 Commons meeting “were IRA” Corbyn blandly replied: “Is there anything wrong with that since they had spent convictions?”
But even this outrage was exceeded by another sick Corbyn connection to the Brighton bombing. During the 1980s he was a key figure in ultra left-wing sect Labour Briefing, and involved in the production of its journal.
Like so many sectarian socialist groups of the 1980s, Briefing was ferocious in its backing for the IRA.
In a reference to Mrs Thatcher, the journal once stated: “Let our Iron Lady know this: Those who live by the sword shall die by it. If she wants violence, then violence she will certainly get.”
It cranked up the language to an even more disgraceful level in the aftermath of the Brighton bombing.
The magazine “reaffirmed its support for, and solidarity with, the Irish Republican movement”.
It then claimed “that the British only sit up and take notice when they are bombed into it”.
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The same edition printed a letter from a Briefing supporter, who praised the “audacity” of the IRA attack and sneered: “What do you call four dead Tories? A start.” The letter also ridiculed Tory Cabinet Minister Norman Tebbit, who was pulled from the rubble and whose wife was left permanently disabled by the bombing: “Try riding your bike now, Norman.”
When it came to Ireland, Corbyn always put his perverted ideology before humanity.
In the words of one former officer with the Royal Ulster Constabulary, he was “a useful idiot” for the Republicans.
He was a member of Labour Committee on Ireland and the Troops Out Movement, both radical anti-British organisations.
In 1989 he invited Gerry Adams to speak at a fringe meeting during Labour’s Conference in Brighton, prompting outrage from Kevin McNamara, the Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary.
“As far as I am concerned, there is no place for people who defend murderers at the Labour Conference,” said McNamara.
Just as reprehensibly, in 1996 Corbyn invited Adams to launch his autobiography, Before the Dawn, at the House of Commons.
The event was condemned by Labour leader Tony Blair and eventually banned by Parliamentary authorities on the grounds that Sinn Fein was a threat to security.
As a result, the book launch was moved to the London Irish Centre, in Corbyn’s constituency.
In the same year, Corbyn sparked another security controversy when he gave a Sinn Fein delegation, led by Mitchel McLaughlin, a tour of the Houses of Parliament.
“Very senior members of the provisional movement would be able to assess the layout of the place,” complained one official.
Corbyn’s two closest allies, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and his Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott, share his uncompromising Republican outlook. McDonnell and Corbyn are founder members of the extremist Labour Representation Committee, which as recently as 2012 passed a motion describing the murder of Northern Ireland prison officer David Black as a “political” act.
Corbyn now likes to pretend his support for Sinn Fein/IRA helped the peace process.
But this is spectacularly dishonest. Corbyn was never interested in dialogue or reconciliation, only in the triumph of Republicanism, as he showed in his hostility to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, which paved the way to new talks about Ulster’s future.
The only true way to achieve lasting peace in Northern Ireland was through the military defeat of the IRA, something achieved through heroism of the British Army, the RUC and undercover intelligence.
Yet this was precisely the strategy that Corbyn opposed.
Gerry Adams once called Corbyn a “friend of Ireland”. In reality, the Labour leader has long been a friend of terrorism. Yet he shows no remorse for acclaiming a movement that killed 2,139 people during the Troubles.
In fact he is still at it. In a radio interview with BBC Ulster in 2015 he explicitly refused five times to condemn the violence of the IRA.
And six months ago he recruited ex-Sinn Fein staff member Jayne Fisher to his leadership team as “head of stakeholder engagement”.
The former boss of Sinn Fein’s London Office has been involved in the Troops Out Movement and Labour Committee on Ireland.
On her appointment, the former Northern Ireland Minister, Lord Robathan, said that the victims of the IRA and “people who voted Labour in the past will be appalled that the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition sees fit to employ this person as a close aide.” He is right.
Corbyn’s nauseating record makes him utterly unsuited for any responsible position in British public life.
Leo McKinstry is an author and historian