Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The deep state needs to step up its campaign against Jeremy Corbyn

It’s the lowest point in British espionage since Pierce Brosnan. A top secret cyber hit squad has been busted trying to undermine Jeremy Corbyn through the medium of Twitter. At least that’s the claim from the Sunday Mail, a left-leaning Scottish tabloid, which has exposed the Institute for Statecraft as ‘a secret UK Government-funded infowars unit’. 

The Institute is based in a grotty old Victorian mill in Fife and can be distinguished from every other building in Fife in that it’s a mill. It doesn’t look like a place where they knock back shaken-not-stirred martinis in between designing fountain pens that double as rocket launchers but, what with austerity, maybe From Auchtermuchty With Love is the best we can do. 

The Sunday Mail, whose sister paper the Daily Record backed Jeremy Corbyn in the 2015 Labour leadership race, said documents it had obtained showed the Institute’s Integrity Initiative programme was funded by the Foreign Office to the tune of £2 million. It was set up to counter Russian disinformation on social media and seeks to engage like-minded journalists to that end. So where are these shady psyops we were promised? The Integrity Initiative’s Twitter account has tweeted of Corbyn:

‘His open visceral anti-Westernism helped the Kremlin cause, as surely as if he had been secretly peddling Westminster tittle-tattle for money.’

Wow. That’s pretty bad. Except the Integrity Initiative didn’t actually say that. Edward Lucas did in a column in the Times on February 22. The organisation simply quoted the column while tweeting it. What else? On March 21, they retweeted that notorious MI5 asset Nick Cohen, who had linked to a blog assailing Corbyn’s insidious weasel words about the parties responsible for Sergei Skripal’s poisoning. 

Then there was the charge that Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s spin doctor, ‘wittingly or unwittingly… work[s] with the Kremlin’s agenda’.

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