Jeremy Corbyn has long tried to airbrush his past support for the IRA from history – when challenged over reports that he stood for a minute’s silence to honour eight IRA gunmen killed by the SAS after they bombed a police station in 1987, he claimed that he was only taking part in the silence “to honour all those who died in Northern Ireland”. Directly contradicting what the original report said…
Now another report from 1984 has been uncovered with a detailed description of an event where Corbyn was the guest speaker and “stood in silent respect for IRA fighters killed that day”. The event was a meeting of the Irish Solidarity Committee in Southampton in March 1984 – nine months after Corbyn became an MP.
Corbyn reportedly accused the British Government of being “systematically” engaged in “state terrorism” and said the motives behind their “imperialist presence” were because British governments “feared” the possibility of “Ireland outside NATO”. An “ultra-left sect” at the meeting actually disagreed with Corbyn on this last point. There’s a first time for everything…
This is much harder for Corbyn to brush off – the report is not from a right-wing paper like the Sunday Express but from the hard-left Socialist Organiser. Corbyn himself was a regular contributor to the Socialist Organiser for many years, ranting about everything from nuclear disarmament and renationalisation to the internal Labour “witch-hunt” against Militant and the hard left. Sounds familiar…
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