KGB killers, a thug in the Kremlin and the shaming silence of Comrade Corbyn

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Sometimes silence is the most revealing statement. Consider the muteness of the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in the wake of the report of the public inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko.

The 328-page document not only confirmed that this British citizen — a former Russian security service colleague of Vladimir Putin given political asylum here — had been murdered in London by two Russian agents flown in for the purpose. It also set out how this assassination, using polonium from a Russian state nuclear reactor, had ‘probably’ been authorised by Putin himself.

The British Government’s performance over the whole astonishing business has been abject. The Home Secretary, Theresa May, had earlier attempted to block any public inquiry into the murder, until she was overruled by the High Court.

Silence is the most revealing statement: Consider the muteness of the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (left) in the wake of the report of the public inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko (right)

In the Commons last week her solitary material response was to say the Treasury would ‘freeze the assets’ of the hired thugs who administered the poison (in the bar of London’s Millennium Hotel).

The Labour backbencher Ian Austin rightly retorted: ‘Putin is an unreconstructed KGB thug and gangster who murders his opponents in Russia and, as we know, on the streets of London — and nothing announced today is going to make the blindest bit of difference.’ 

True, all true. But it should have been the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition saying this.

Maligned

After all, Jeremy Corbyn is passionate about the need to prevent what he calls ‘nuclear weapons proliferation’ — which is why he opposes the renewal of our Trident missile system. And Litvinenko’s murder was actually an act of state-sponsored nuclear terror, causing a trail of contamination which required roughly 700 people to be tested for radioactive poisoning.

But about this, too, not a peep from Labour’s leader, either on the floor of the House of Commons or anywhere else.

The reason is not too hard to establish. Jeremy Corbyn is an apologist for the Russian regime. And he appointed as his ‘director of strategy and communications’ Seumas Milne, a man who spent much of his time as a Guardian journalist writing columns in support of Putin (with whom he shares the view that Joseph Stalin has been unfairly maligned by ‘Western’ historians).

Home Secretary Theresa May speaks in the House of Commons, London, after a public inquiry found that President Vladimir Putin "probably" approved the assassination of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006

The former editor of the Guardian comment pages is a much cleverer man than Corbyn. Many in the Labour parliamentary party feel that their leader has fallen under the spell of the privately educated Milne — who actually acted as host at what The Times described as ‘a Russian propaganda summit in 2014, where he interviewed Putin’.

I’m not so sure: it seems to me more like a meeting of minds. Or, as the ‘@JeremyCorbyn4PM’ Twitter account gleefully declared: ‘Seumas shares Jeremy’s world view almost to the letter.’

That world view, in a nutshell, is that almost everything bad can be blamed on Britain’s past role as an imperial power and America’s current one as the largest capitalist economy (and leader of Nato).

It is hardly coincidental that until he became Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn had a regular column in the Communist daily, the Morning Star.

In its previous guise as the Daily Worker, the paper was shut down in January 1941 by the UK wartime coalition Home Secretary, Labour’s Herbert Morrison, because it was opposing our fight against the Nazis as ‘a policy to impose British imperialist peace on Germany’.

The reason for that line, of course, was that there was then a Nazi-Soviet pact. The moment Hitler invaded the USSR, the British Communists performed a 180-degree turn, declaring that our war effort was now part of ‘the struggle against fascism’. 

Interestingly, Jeremy Corbyn to this day uses exactly the same Soviet-era phrase to describe what most of his fellow-countrymen prefer to call World War II.

The attitude that Russian military action is almost by definition justified, while British military action is inherently suspect because we are an ‘imperial power’, has no more articulate advocate than George Galloway, the former Labour MP now running as a independent candidate for Mayor of London.

Thus, when Hilary Benn, to Corbyn’s fury, spoke in favour of Britain joining the bombing of Daesh forces in Syria, on the grounds that we would be fighting ‘fascism’, Galloway denounced the Shadow Foreign Secretary’s speech as ‘contemptible’, adding: ‘Can someone give Hilary Benn a tin hat and a gun and send him off to the bloody war he’s gagging for?’

Shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham speaking in the House of Commons after the public inquiry (left), and Russian President Vladimir Putin (far right)

Yet when Russia had joined in the same conflict, Galloway had tweeted: ‘As Stalingrad and Kursk turned the tide of WW2 so today Russia begins the end of the new fascism of Daesh.’

Got it? If Russia bombs the so-called Islamic state, then it is a glorious fight against fascism, but if we do the same then it is ‘contemptible’. Perhaps this is understandable coming from a man who has a regular programme on the Kremlin-financed television news channel Russia Today.

But what has this to do with Corbyn and his man Milne? Quite a lot, actually.

Bizarre

Galloway describes Seumas Milne as his ‘closest friend . . . we have spoken almost daily for 30 years’. And when Corbyn appointed Milne to be his director of strategy and communications, Galloway exulted: ‘Just what the doctor ordered.’ The geo-location of this particular tweet was . . . Moscow.

Then stir into this brew the former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, whom Corbyn appointed to ‘review’ Labour’s official policy on the British independent nuclear deterrent (which is to renew Trident).

Livingstone did an interview in yesterday’s Sunday Times in which, to quote the newspaper, he ‘gave a bizarre defence of Vladimir Putin’ in the wake of the Litvinenko report and defended Putin’s right to meddle in the Baltic states because they ‘discriminate against Russian speakers’.

What none of these apologists for Putin seems to recognise is that while it is true that Britain has an imperial past hardly free of vainglorious expansionism, the current Russian regime has an explicit desire to restore control of what it regards as its own empire, lost as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

This — and not ‘Nato’s attempt to encircle Russia’ as Jeremy Corbyn wrote in March 2014 — is the impulse behind Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which has led to the deaths of thousands.

In that context, Alexander Litvinenko was just one further casualty of Putin’s urge to revenge himself on the West. How strange and sad it is that the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition is on the Russian side.

The religious zealots who enforce public morals in Saudi Arabia have long made it a place no normal holidaymaker would ever wish to visit.

Not many of us would fancy risking a lashing or imprisonment for consuming a restorative glass of champagne in the infernal heat.

Now, however, they really have gone too far: Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti has ruled that chess must be forbidden as un-Islamic, declaring it a form of gambling. 

Actually chess does not involve gambling: unlike poker or backgammon, it is not a game of chance.

I am, as it happens, president of the English Chess Federation: so perhaps this means I am now blocked from visiting Saudi Arabia. What a relief.

TORY CANDIDATE ZAC GOLDSMITH IS A SORRY HYPOCRITE  

Conservative mayor candidate for London Zac Goldsmith

Politicians have a reputation for shamelessness. But sometimes an MP is guilty of such a display of it that even we hardened cynics are astounded.

This was my reaction to Zac Goldsmith, the Tory candidate for London Mayor, declaring that Scotland Yard should apologise to Lord Bramall, after it finally abandoned its pursuit of crazy claims that the former head of the Armed Forces had been part of a ‘VIP paedophile gang’. 

Goldsmith described the matter as ‘grotesque’.

So it is. But this is the same Zac Goldsmith (above) who, along with Labour’s Tom Watson, was most responsible for whipping up this ‘grotesque’ business.

In a parliamentary debate 14 months ago, he eulogised Watson and said he also wished to ‘pay tribute to Exaro’: the news agency responsible for encouraging the mysterious ‘Nick’ to take his claims about Bramall and other ‘VIPs’ to the police.

Then Goldsmith appeared on a documentary, declaring this so-called ‘VIP paedophile network’ to be ‘the biggest political scandal in British history . . . very senior people engaged in terrible acts and were then protected by the Establishment. I have no doubt at all about that’. It was partly because of such pressure from Goldsmith that the police put Lord Bramall through hell. 

Londoners should not vote for this shameless hypocrite. 

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