Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn reversed his opposition to the government’s “shoot-to-kill” policy in the event of a terror attack, after being openly challenged by his own MPs for telling the BBC that he was “not happy” with the idea and thought it could be “quite dangerous” and “counter-productive”. On Monday, he was “aggressively heckled” during an angry meeting with Labour MPs, says Jon Stone in The Independent, with one shadow minister branding him a “f***ing disgrace”.
The next day he was “humiliated” in the Commons as his own MPs “lined up to condemn him and his supporters as apologists for terrorists”, says Matt Chorley in the Daily Mail. In a “desperate scramble to repair the damage”, he wrote to Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee saying he would “support the use of whatever proportionate and strictly necessary force is required to save life in response to attacks of the kind we saw in Paris”.
There is also said to be dissent over Corbyn’s opposition to military action in Syria, and speculation that the shadow foreign secretary, Hilary Benn, will quit the frontbench if Corbyn attends the Stop the War Coalition’s Christmas fundraising party, says Matt Dathan in The Independent. The anti-war pressure group came under “intense fire” from Labour MPs after posting a blog on its website (since deleted) titled: “Paris reaps whirlwind of Western support for extremist violence in Middle East”.
This episode is deeply regrettable, says Matthew Norman in The Independent. We need Corbyn to lead the opposition to a bombing campaign in Syria by arguing with “calm and cogent passion” about the counter-productive nature of “indulging the reflex desire for vengeance”. “Just as the US response to 9/11 seemed directly lifted from Osama bin Laden’s bucket list”, the response of Francois Hollande and David Cameron to the outrage in Paris plays into Islamic State’s (IS’s) hands. But by coming across as “devoid of visceral revulsion and fury” about what happened in Paris and so setting himself apart from the rest of us, Corbyn has robbed himself of a hearing.
Corbyn’s supporters present him as a “decent, principled and compassionate man”, says Dan Hodges in The Daily Telegraph. But “as the piles of sawdust on the streets of Paris show, we do not have the luxury of indulging such nonsense”. Corbyn addressed Hamas as “friends”; he appointed as shadow chancellor John McDonnell, who said the “peace we have now is due to the action of the IRA”.
Neither Corbyn nor McDonnell “actively supports terrorism”, but their instinct and “need to appease a constituency that views IS and ‘Western imperialism’ as different sides of the same coin means that, were they ever called on to confront the terrorists practically, they would falter. Reduced surveillance. Reduced global anti-terror cooperation. No airstrikes against IS in Syria or Iraq. No drone strikes anywhere. Direct Stop the War input into UK security policy.”
Labour MPs have to get rid of Corbyn. If they don’t, every one of them will be “tainted by the Tory charge that Labour cannot be trusted to keep this country safe”.