Neil O’Brien is Conservative candidate for Harborough.
“The murders of Corporal Howes and Corporal Wood were particularly savage and vicious… They were stripped of most of their clothing and they lay in their own blood in the back of the taxi when you took them to the waste ground to be killed, and in that pitiable and defenceless state you brought about their murders as they lay on the ground.”
Sir Brian Hutton, sentencing IRA members to life imprisonment for the ‘Corporals Killings’ in 1988
“19 year old Lancashire soldier Gary Barlow became separated from his patrol in the lower falls and was surrounded by a crowd of locals. While he burst into tears with fright some women suggested they escorted him to the nearest army base. Other women, however, kept him waiting until a Provisional arrived. Then, while Barlow was crying for his mother, the gunman shot him through the head.”
Description of unsolved murder of Gary Barlow in 1973, from Dominic Sandbrook, State of Emergency.
“It’s about time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle. It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table… Because of the bravery of the IRA and people like Bobby Sands, we now have a peace process.”
John McDonnell, speaking in 2003.
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Some people say that Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell and Diane Abbott are naïve. That’s absolutely untrue. Corbyn, McDonnell and Diane Abbott are people who have quite deliberately, knowingly, eyes-wide-openly, spent their whole careers providing succour and political cover for anti-British and anti-Western terrorist groups all over the world.
They have spent their lives trying to weaken our laws, and attacking the people who risk their lives trying to protect us from evil and dangerous people.
And they lie as they try to cover their tracks.
Today, the Labour leader presents his decades of support for the most violent Irish republican terrorist groups as a far sighted move to bring about a peace process.
But at the time, Corbyn supported the extremists against those who wanted a peace process. Corbyn voted against the Anglo-Irish agreement which initiated the peace process. In Parliament, he said: “We believe that the agreement strengthens rather than weakens the border between the six and the 26 counties, and those of us who wish to see a United Ireland oppose the agreement for that reason.”
None of this is ancient history. As I write, Corbyn has committed Labour to oppose the Prime Minister’s plan for automatic life sentences for terrorists.
And look at his record. Corbyn said ISIS bride Shamima Begum should be allowed back into Britain and ‘given our support’. He opposes measures to remove passports from individuals who travel to Syria. He is against the security forces using lethal force to stop terrorists.
In 2015, he said: ‘I’m not happy with the shoot-to-kill policy in general – I think that is quite dangerous and I think can often can be counterproductive.” McDonnell takes the same line: he signed a letter saying Britain should “Disband MI5 and special police squads, [and] disarm the police.”
Abbott has criticised putting terrorists under house arrest. In 2005, she said, “To have individuals interned in their own homes in the middle of our cities is, if anything, even more incendiary than imprisoning them.”
She in particular rarely misses a chance to attack the police or security forces. In 2018, she even criticised London police for using their cars to ram moped thieves off the road, saying, “Knocking people off bikes is potentially very dangerous. It shouldn’t be legal for anyone. Police are not above the law.” She seems to have overlooked the fact that violent moped gangs are also quite ‘dangerous’.
Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott voted against legislation in 2001 which designated Al Qa’ida, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad as terrorists and banned them from the UK. Corbyn said it was to “encourage peace process”. Just months later Al Qa’ida launched their 9/11 attacks.
Charles Clarke, then Labour’s Home Secretary, said: “It must have given comfort to the proscribed organisations that people like Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell were giving them tacit support.”
While at home, the Corbynistas would weaken our defences, abroad they would fundamentally change Britain’s role in the world. They would not support action overseas to keep us safe..In a 2017 interview with Andrew Marr, Corbyn spent a minute refusing to answer if he would authorise a drone strike on Abu Bakar al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIL.
Instead of terrorists, Corbyn has always blamed terrorism on the west. Discussing the attacks in Washington and New York less than a month after 9/11, he told Parliament that “what goes around comes around.” Three days after al Qaeda’s suicide bombings in London in July 2005, he spoke at a Stop the War Coalition rally and said the attacks were “because of the way we inflict an insecurity on so many other people around the world.”
In a 2009 speech in London, where he was addressing the Stop the War Coalition, Corbyn famously described Hamas and Hezbollah as his “friends.” Asked later if he regretted saying this, he said: “No. It was inclusive language I used which with hindsight I would rather not have used.”
He famously laid a wreath at an event honouring terrorists involved in the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. It’s worth recalling that some of Israeli athletes killed that day were castrated and tortured before being murdered.
Corbyn famously invited two convicted IRA terrorists to Parliament just days after the IRA murdered five people in the Brighton bombings. It wasn’t a one off though. In 1989, the Labour campaign for Peace in Ireland demanded that he be expelled from the party, after Sinn Fein / IRA representatives were invited to the Labour conference days after murdering 11 Marines at their barracks.
Corbyn was again threatened with expulsion for inviting Sinn Fein to parliament during the IRA’s 1996 bombing campaign. His response to the Salisbury poisonings was to question the evidence of our own security services that the attack could only have come from Russia. “I want to see incontrovertible evidence of it. If we are going to make a very, very clear assertion like that we have got to have the absolute evidence to do it.”
He is influenced by his chief of Communications Seumas Milne, who has attended cosy conferences paid for by the Kremlin. Milne described Russia’s invasion of the Crimea as “defensive” and blamed, “the West’s attempt to pull Ukraine decisively into its orbit” (i.e: Ukrainians dared to vote for a pro-western government).
I could go on and on, and for readers who want to know more, I would recommend the twitter archivist, “Mr Corbyn in the Times”. @TimesCorbyn. But I must stop and get out there on the campaign trail again.
As a Conservative you are constantly subject to holier-than-thou, criticisms from the Labour side.
But even lifelong Labour supporters must feel their stomach churn when they think about the record of the cabal now running the Labour party. I can’t put it any better than the former Labour MP Ian Austin, and if you haven’t seen his speech below, I recommend it to you.
We’ve got to stop Corbyn.