We used to pride ourselves, in Britain, on not doing political extremism. This was something that took place overseas, to be learned about from anxious BBC reporters. The appeal of radical left and radical right, or anyone else who waved their flags a little too aggressively, was largely lost on us. Men with silly uniforms, and sillier ideas, were ignored if they were lucky, and mocked if they weren’t. Of all the nations of Europe few rejected the zealots as resolutely and comprehensively as Britain. This, I regret to say, is no longer the case.
Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour Party leader in 2015 was a watershed moment. On that, if little else, his supporters and detractors can agree. For the first time in the post-war era one of Britain’s great parties of Government is led by someone who could reasonably be described as an extremist. That’s quite a claim, and not one I make lightly. Put simply Corbyn, and some of those around him, have shown a questionable commitment to some of the basic principles which underpin the politics of a liberal-democratic society.
One of the foundation stones of a liberal-democratic state is the belief that using violence or the threat of violence to achieve internal political objectives is utterly unacceptable. Here the record of Corbyn, and some of those closest to him, is deeply worrying. Both Corbyn and John McDonnell, the man he thinks should be running the British economy, have a history of sympathising with groups which use violence to achieve political ends.
Take for example the IRA’s bombing in 1984 of the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton. This, an attempt to assassinate a democratically elected Prime Minister which killed and maimed senior members of her Party, is about as blatant an assault on the democratic process as it is possible to imagine. To say Corbyn’s response was troubling would be an understatement. Just weeks after the attack he hosted members of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, in Parliament including a man who had previously been convicted of possessing explosives for the IRA. Two years later Corbyn was arrested outside the Old Bailey at a protest to “show solidarity” with suspected IRA men, including Patrick Magee, who was later convicted of planting the Brighton conference bomb.
Between 1986 and 1992 Corbyn was also an annual attendee at the London “Connolly/Sands” Commemoration which offered support to IRA “prisoners of war” and published literature praising both the IRA and the use of violence to end the British presence in Northern Ireland. That the Labour Party is currently led my a man who chose to publicly sympathise with a group which was murdering his countrymen is beyond shocking, but it is true nonetheless.
When it comes to violent Irish Republicanism it isn’t just Corbyn who’s a cause for concern. John McDonnell, the man responsible for the British economy should Labour win a General Election, previously praised the “bombs and bullets” of the IRA whilst Diane Abbott, now Shadow Home Secretary, once said with relation to the Northern Ireland conflict that “every defeat of the British state is a victory for all of us”.
Nor are these concerning attitudes towards violence Northern Ireland specific. John McDonnell described rioters who attacked the Conservative Party’s Millbank headquarters in 2010 as “the best of our movement” and offered his “solidarity” to Ed Woollard, the protester who threw a fire extinguisher from the roof of Millbank and, in the words of the judge who convicted him, was “exceedingly fortunate” not to cause “death or very serious injury”. In 2012 McDonnell would go on to say that he wants to be in a situation where no Tory MP can “show their face anywhere in public” without being confronted by “direct action”.
In arguing that Corbyn, unlike any previous major party leader of the post-war era, has failed to unambiguously support the core tenants of a liberal-democratic society I’ve chosen to focus on political violence and intimidation. This is for the sake of brevity. A similar piece could easily be written about Corbyn’s past relations with various dictatorial regimes. One thing I do fear is that the shock might be rubbing off. When I mention Corbyn’s historic sympathy with certain terror groups to pro-Corbyn friends, they their eyes roll. At best I’ve brought up some near irrelevant fact from the distant past, at worst I’m promoting smears. This is how valuable conventions which underpin our democratic society, such as the one against the use of political violence, start to get eroded.
George Orwell once said that “the gentleness of the English civilization is perhaps its most marked characteristic”. Until quite recently this could quite reasonably be applied to the politics of not just England, but Britain as a whole. Alas those days are over. If Labour wins a General Election, Britain will have a prime minister and chancellor who have previously sympathised with those who use violence as a political tool, and shown a worrying ambivalence towards certain key liberal-democratic principles. This puts us into uncharted territory, and no one can be confident about where this would lead.
