Here’s another scene from Jeremy Corbyn’s career which illuminates the strange and nasty darkness he so loves.
It’s the middle of January 2015. The terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo, a Jewish supermarket and police officers in Paris less than two weeks earlier are on people’s minds. The horror is hard to comprehend. Pain is giving way to anger. The world is with Paris.
Not Mr Corbyn, though. He is busy holding a “New Year of War and Terror” stopper meeting in Parliament. Luminaries such as George Galloway and Shameless Milne are speaking. The “our fault” line must be defended, amplified even.
Up comes trade unionist Andrew Murray’s turn to speak. At the time he was Corbyn’s predecessor as chair of the “Stop the War Coalition”. He was also his successor later in 2015, when Corbyn found he needed to dedicate more time to wrecking the Labour Party as its leader.
Murray is warmly introduced by Corbyn, sitting next to him, as a man who “has done a phenomenal amount to build the anti-war movement in this country”.
Murray soon hits his stopper stride. From four minutes in, he issues a ritual denunciation and a lawfare threat to the Daily Mail – oh where would stoppers be without that comfort blanket in times of mass murder by terrorists – and then he says:
We condemn the attacks in Paris unreservedly. But we also need to say that the barbarism we condemn in Paris is minute compared to the barbarism wrought by imperialism across the planet in the last thirteen years and we must condemn that barbarism all the more strongly.
The audience loves it and applauds.
I reckon the country as a whole has and will always have a rather different view on this kind of gross idiocy.
