Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Stop flattering Corbynistas

Dear right-wing people, please stop the red scares. Please give the Cold War lingo a rest. Please remember it is not the 1950s anymore and that there’s about as much chance of Kevin Spacey taking the title role in a biopic of Jesus Christ as there is of Commies coming to power in Britain. Please stop referring to Jeremy Corbyn as if he were some Trotskyite firebrand, when in truth his drab politics is closer to Milibandism than Marxism (the Ed variety, that is, not the Ralph variety). You’re embarrassing yourselves with this pinko panic. Even worse, you are unwittingly flattering the Corbynista crew by indulging their teenage fantasies about being red and edgy. Stop.

This Corbyn-and-the-Czech story has got to be the lamest red scare of recent times. And that’s saying something, seeing as red scares are always nine parts paranoia and one part a smidgen of evidence that some academic or politician once flicked through a copy of Lenin’s ‘The State and Revolution’. This is the claim by Jan Sarkocy, a former Czech intelligence officer, that he rubbed shoulders with Corbyn in the late 1980s and even paid him for info that might prove handy to Prague and Moscow. Corbyn admits meeting a Czech diplomat but vehemently denies giving him information. But that hasn’t stopped sections of the press from going all Ronald Reagan, even a bit Joe McCarthy, and talking about the Corbynistas as if they were the Cambridge Spies Mark II.

Never mind that Sarkocy sounds a little, err, questionable. First there’s the small matter that Corbyn, a professional backbencher until he became Labour leader in 2015, would not exactly have been au fait with state secrets in Thatcher’s Britain. Precisely what kind of information is he meant to have hawked to the Czech? How many potholes there were in Islington? What Diane Abbott eats in the Commons cafeteria? It’s amazing Britain survived such meetings unscathed! Apparently Corbyn told the Czech what Thatcher ate for breakfast and lunch and he could predict what she would wear the next day.

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