It is shocking isn’t it? I mean, who knew Stop The War (sic) threw a Christmas party each year? You’d have thought they’d be more of a Winterval crowd. Perhaps there is hope for them after all.
But it is not at all shocking that Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition, is, as matters stand, going to attend the most glittering event of the festive season. This is who he is. This is who he has always been.
This has been obvious, too. All you had to do was open your eyes. All you needed was the ability to read.
It is not, I think, an exaggeration to think that Jeremy Corbyn has more friends at Stop The War than inside the parliamentary Labour party. He certainly has more supporters there given that no more than a dozen Labour MPs actually voted for Corbyn in the Labour leadership election contest he wondrously – disgracefully – won.
So while it may be possible to have some sympathy with Hillary Benn, the puppet Shadow Foreign secretary (puppet because he has negligible influence on Labour’s foreign policy) when he was asked this morning about Corbyn’s chumminess with Stop The War the measure of that sympathy should be strictly limited. Because this is who Corbyn is. This is who he has always been.
Corbyn has never made any effort to hide this. He was, after all, the Chairman of Stop The War until, gosh, late September. They are who he is, too.
So Jeremy Corbyn cannot disassociate himself from Stop The War without repudiating himself too. I see no reason why he should do that not least since doing so would be to live a lie. Stop The War have been cheering this country’s opponents for more than a decade now and Jeremy Corbyn has not just been happy about this, he has sat at the pinnacle of the organisation doing that cheering.
No wonder, then, that Corbyn has suggested his party will henceforth ‘consult’ Stop The War on matters of foreign policy. If this seems a redundant notion it is only because Stop The War already run the Labour party. It is not just Corbyn, it is Seumas Milne and John McDonnell too.
Hillary Benn, like other members of the Shadow Cabinet, has signed up to this. That’s their prerogative but they cannot reasonably claim they did not know what they were signing up to. Nor can they argue any of this is a surprise. They still chose to ‘serve’ even though the nature and worldview of those they serve was abundantly obvious all along to anyone with the wit to acknowledge reality.
Stop The War argues that this week’s dead Parisians were ‘reaping the whirlwind of western support for extremist violent in [the] Middle East’. It is ‘precisely because of what we are doing in the region that we face this threat’. There are no grounds for supposing Corbyn disagrees with this analysis. (You might think even Stop The War could pause to ask why if, as we are told, Iraq is the spawn of everything, Islamist terrorists are launching attacks in a country that, rather notably, opposed the Iraq War. But if you think that you would be mistaken.)
The best that can be said of Corbyn is that he believes what he says. His kind of straight-talking deplores the death of Jihadi John and is perturbed by the thought of British police officers shooting terrorists in the midst of an assault on London or any other British city. That is his prerogative. It is not, I think, the kind of sentiment liable to command majority support across the country. It is not the kind of thing liable to leave people thirsting for Prime Minister Corbyn.
No-one claims to have an answer to the multi-faceted, intricately-laced, set of condundrums confronting every major european leader in this arena. No-one, I think, really believes confronting Islamic State in Syria and Iraq is enough or liable, on its own, to end the matter. But not confronting them is also a choice and one that, quite evidently, Corbyn prefers.
Because confronting them demands that we first grant them agency and admit that just as we are responsible for our actions so they are responsible for theirs. It is a feature, however, of the Stop The War mindset that those who assail us cannot be considered responsible for their actions. As such they are let off the hook. It is a telling double-standard.
None of this is new. Many of the people who failed the Rushdie test failed the Charlie Hebdo test a quarter of a century later. It should not surprise us that they are failing the Paris test too. This is who they are. This is who Jeremy Corbyn is.
Labour were warned about this. They cannot claim they were not told because they were. If Labour MPs wish to serve this kind of leadership that is their choice but it is one from which the rest of us are permitted to draw our own conclusions. Are you with Corbyn or against him? Because there is no other option and the choosing time approaches.
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