By Douglas Murray
Wednesday, March 21, 2018
Salisbury is the perfect location for a very English type
of murder. But what happened on the fourth of this month in the cathedral city
was far from a bloodless Agatha Christie crime. The poisoning of Sergei Skripal
and his daughter in the center of the city has landed them in the hospital,
where they remain critically ill. Also hospitalized was a police detective who
was one of the first officials to enter the Skripal home after the attack. The
discovery that the nerve agent Novichok was used in the assassination attempt
has also led dozens of residents of Salisbury, including people who dined in
the same restaurant as the Skripals, to face the possibility that they too have
come into contact with the nerve agent.
The release of such a deadly nerve agent in a crowded
city has done many things, not the least of which is to throw a clear line into
the middle of Great Britain’s political and public life. Prime Minister Theresa
May and her government swiftly concluded (at the advice of the intelligence
agencies) that the only possible culprits could be the Russians. But the leader
of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, was never going to give up a life of
allegiances that easily. Both Corbyn and his closest adviser and spokesman,
Seumas Milne, are the sort of leftists who do not so much hate modern Russia as
feel let down by it — failing, as it did, to hold together in its glorious USSR
form.
Since becoming leader of his party, Corbyn has done a
great deal to try to recast himself as ready for his potential incarnation as
prime minister. Corbyn and his camp present his years of chumming up to IRA
terrorists as “peace-making.” He is pals with every available anti-Semite at
home and in the Middle East — but this is only evidence of yet more
“peace-making.” As for his unyielding fealty to every Marxist despot from
Castro to Chávez — it’s just part of his endless search for equality and
fairness for all.
Of course the hard beliefs that actually lurk beneath
such bromides occasionally become apparent. In recent days they have risen to
the surface.
The first instinct of Corbyn when Her Majesty’s
Government fingered Russia as the culprit was to call for evidence. No bad
thing in itself, but one gets the sense that, for Corbyn, the evidence might
never be quite enough to justify his reaching a conclusion he would gladly put
off until at least such a date as people stop asking. And then there was the
politicking. Americans are no strangers to the use of the Russians as a means
to pursue domestic political goals. But even American politicians would
probably not stoop so low as to make use of a nerve-agent attack in an American
city to score partisan points.
Corbyn’s second instinct — after providing smoke for
Russia — was to attack the Conservative party for allegedly having taken money
from dodgy Russians. Party funding is almost as much of a mess in the U.K. as
it is in the U.S. (the one advantage being that the sums in Britain are
infinitely smaller). But political parties are not allowed to take money from
people who are not British citizens. Corbyn issued blanket attacks on the Conservatives
for taking money from U.K. citizens who were born in Russia: We should deem
this a slimy generalization, just as we would if — whenever problems erupted
from the Indian subcontinent — the Conservatives attacked Corbyn for taking
donations from British citizens who happened to be from Pakistan.
But the most fascinating aspect of the hill that Corbyn
showed himself willing to die on (and polls suggested that if not dying, he is
certainly suffering for his stance) is one that came from a lobby briefing.
Last week, as Corbyn was taking flak for his stance, Seumas Milne was quoted
telling journalists:
I think obviously the government
has access to information and intelligence on this matter which others don’t;
however, also there’s a history in relation to WMD and intelligence, which is
problematic to put it mildly.
Past intelligence failures will obviously keep coming
back to haunt intelligence services and governments in Britain and America for
years to come. But it was the norm, until recently, for people in public life —
especially those aspiring to public office — to at least view the intelligence
services as being on their side. Principally because they were seen to be on
the side of the national interest.
In Jeremy Corbyn and his spokesman, we have a different
type of figure: people who view their country’s intelligence services as though
they are enemies. The fact that the same people have a tendency to view any and
all of the nation’s enemies as friends may be entirely coincidental. Or it may
not. Either way it is a reminder of how dangerous it is that people who should
be sitting in their family basement wearing tin hats are only a few government
slip-ups away from controlling the state they have always abhorred.
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