THE Herald’s esteemed commentator Iain Macwhirter this week described the attacks on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s sympathy for the IRA as a witch-hunt, and whether a thorough examination of a potential Prime Minister’s attitude towards the sworn enemies of the British state is tantamount to persecution really depends on your point of view.
You don’t have to be a pro-IRA, communist sympathiser to agree but I find it hard to accept that it is not legitimate for his opponents to take him to task over his clear support for terrorists over many years at a time when Britain and the West are under constant threat of random terror from murderers who despise everything for which we stand.
Is it not perfectly legitimate to point out that Mr Corbyn did not just parley with Sinn Fein leadership but actively supported IRA events? Or that his supposed search for a peaceful solution meant ignoring the one Nationalist party, the SDLP, which was standing up for a peaceful way forward? Is it not also legitimate to point out that Mr Corbyn spoke at a commemoration for IRA terrorists the day after the IRA killed three British soldiers in the Netherlands?
Again, you don’t have to go very far, certainly not in Central Scotland, to find those who regard this as irrelevant at the very least and rank hypocrisy at the worst because, well, the British were speaking to the IRA at the height of the troubles too, weren’t they?
And yes indeed they were. But even if Home Secretary Douglas Hurd met a delegation including some killers to try to find a way through a morass which resulted in the deaths of more than 3,000 people, did he, Willie Whitelaw or whoever, give messages of support at meetings where collections were being taken for the cause, where the old songs were sung and where the programme celebrated the deaths of British servicemen? That’s precisely what Mr Corbyn was doing and ex-IRA man Sean O’Callaghan said last week that Mr Corbyn and John McDonnell had given them encouragement and that “by boosting our morale, they prolonged the violence and without a doubt for that, have blood on their own hands”.
Mr Corbyn’s apologists are asking us to accept there is a total moral equivalence between negotiating with a terror organisation and actively supporting its actions. The extension of this argument then must be that a government which enters into unofficial dialogue with a violent enemy is therefore tacitly condoning its actions. It’s like saying that everyone who negotiated the Armistice in 1918 was pro-German, which is, of course, utter nonsense.
It is also utter nonsense for Mr Corbyn to claim, as he does repeatedly, that he was only trying to bring about peace because there was no military solution. The fact of the matter is that the IRA, through Sinn Fein, was forced to accept peaceful negotiation precisely because it was outgunned, out-manoeuvred and so thoroughly infiltrated and watched that it had no alternative but to negotiate. It was no coincidence that one of the first demands from Martin McGuinness for the ceasefire was the removal of the observation sangars in South Armagh, not because they despoiled the countryside but because the gunmen couldn’t leave their houses without the Army knowing about it.
It was undoubtedly costly, but the military solution had in fact been found and at that point it was for the politicians to find a way through.
Of course his supporters are entitled to go on the defensive, but when someone puts themselves up for a job in which national security is the first priority why should anyone be surprised if a career-long sympathy for Britain’s enemies attracts attention.
This is my last column for The Herald. It has been a great privilege writing for the paper with which I grew up.
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