JEREMY Corbyn appears to have caved in to pressure from his own MPs by performing a U-turn on a shoot-to-kill policy, stressing he backed “proportionate and strictly necessary force” to save lives in a terror attack in Britain.
The Labour leader’s initial remarks caused consternation among some of his Labour colleagues and Conservative Ministers.
In a series of interviews, Mr Corbyn questioned the legality of the drone strike that killed Mohammed Emwazi - known as Jihadi John - told MPs they could not expect a free vote on extending RAF air strikes against Islamic State(IS) into Syria, and said he was “not happy” with a shoot-to-kill policy, warning it was “quite dangerous” and could be "counter-productive".
This led to his views being “savaged” at the weekly meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party at Westminster.
Hilary Benn, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, when pressed on the issue, made clear he could “not answer for Jeremy” but Labour’s stance, he insisted, had not changed and that the party supported the use of lethal force by the police and armed forces in order to protect human life in the event of a terrorist attack.
He also refused to say whether he would carry on in the Shadow Cabinet if Mr Corbyn attended a rally of the Stop the War Coalition next month after it said the French capital had "reaped the whirlwind" of Western support for "extremist violence" in the Middle East.
Mr Benn also defended use of a US drone strike, in a joint operation with the UK, to kill Emwazi in the IS stronghold of Raqqa, saying: "There is no doubt that he took part in the killing of a number of hostages, including David Haines and Alan Hemming, he presented a real threat, and therefore it is right in those circumstances to take the action that was taken by the Americans, with British support, because there was no realistic prospect of him being apprehended."
Later during Commons exchanges, a number of Labour MP’s supported the UK Government’s position on shoot-to-kill and Syria.
Chris Leslie, the former Shadow Chancellor, said: "The Prime Minister is right; the police and security services need our full support at this time."
It emerged that in a report to Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee, Mr Corbyn appeared to have changed his stance.
While he stressed "any kind of shoot-to-kill policy" posed "clear dangers to us all", he added: "But, of course, I 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."
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