Douglas Murray

The news that Jeremy Corbyn thought the death of Osama bin Laden 'a tragedy' because he was never put on trial is not very surprising. Nor is it as far-out-there as most of his comments.I did a BBC Question Time immediately after bin Laden's death where I got the impression I was the only person in Britain not to feel sad about the terrorist's death. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Paddy Ashdown and most of the audience seemed horrified by the terrorist's early demise and were most exercised of all over whether or not he had been given an appropriately 'Islamic' burial.Fortunately there was a woman in the audience (in Hammersmith, London) who had been on the Tube on 7 July and had seen people ripped from their lives far more brutally and with far less reason than Osama bin Laden was.

I had a piece in the Sunday Times yesterday about Jeremy Corbyn and the dodgy excuse he and his spokespeople use whenever he is caught with another IRA terrorist, Holocaust-denier, Islamist or random anti-Semite. In general the claim is that he was only involved in the meeting as part of a 'peace process.' Occasionally he/they claim he was only there because of something he is even less qualified to speak about and that he only met the bigot in question because it was a meeting on 'inter-faith issues'. In reality Jeremy and his people are clearly just trying to cover his tracks for decades of supporting terrible people with a propensity for extreme sectarian violence. But I would genuinely like to open out as a competition one question I keep asking.

On Monday, Jeremy Corbyn was questioned by Channel 4 News about yet another Holocaust denier and anti-Semite of his acquaintance.  And now the BBC's World at One has asked Corbyn about another. There are plenty more, and this will be able to go on for quite some time.  But Corbyn’s defence was interesting in that it went to the heart of the political inequality of our time: that is the assumption that the motivations of the left are good even when they do bad things, while the motivations of their opponents on the right are solely bad even when they do good things.

The Labour party includes many sensible and intelligent people who want what is best for our country.  But all of them are currently gnawing their hands and weeping into their sleeves as they watch their party prepare to take this great leap backwards.  I know of Labour politicians who hoped that putting Jeremy Corbyn up for the leadership would shine a light on him and his ilk and thus chase out for ever the IRA/Hezbollah wing of their party.  Alas for them the infection turned out to be what the body most welcomed, and so here the sensible members of the party sit, sadly mulling their electoral mortality. In such times I feel that it is incumbent upon those of us who wish the Labour party well to provide some comfortable words.

Thanks to Guido Fawkes, I learn that the left-wing author Owen Jones has just appeared at the Sinn Fein summer school in Ireland.  According to Sinn Fein’s own newspaper, Owen used the opportunity to praise Sinn Fein’s ‘progressive’ politics, suggest that people take inspiration from the 1916 Easter Rising and announce what a ‘passionate believer’ he apparently is in a united Ireland. https://twitter.com/An_Phoblacht/status/614527801262104576 There are a number of interesting things about this.  The first is that it exposes what a sham the far-left’s attitude towards political violence really is. Owen isn’t the first person of his ilk to have supported Sinn Fein.

The Prime Minister’s Birmingham speech on radicalisation and Muslim communities in the UK given earlier today is a rather important one. Regular readers will know that I’m not easy to please in this area, but it seems to me that David Cameron has come to understand the real problem of Islamic extremism and has been developing his attitudes towards that problem. There might be any number of reasons for this, but the most likely one is simple observation. Anybody can see that there is a problem, and a Prime Minister who has oversight on the intelligence and security threats that never come to fruition as well as those that do has a starker confrontation with the scale of the challenge than most.

It is often said that British ambition and influence in the world are on the wane. But there can be few greater demonstrations of this than our country’s lack of attention to one of the biggest issues of our time. I am in Washington at the moment, and have been admiring how intensely the Vienna negotiations have been on the political and news agendas here. But in Britain? Obviously the British Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, has been involved in the P5+1 talks. But it would have been easy to miss the fact. There has been no meaningful criticisms from within the Conservative party to the deal which Philip Hammond has just put this country’s name to.

As we watch the Eurozone catastrophe enter its latest ‘final phase’ one phrase keeps recurring to me.  That phrase is ‘banging on about Europe’.  Does anybody else remember when those words were used (at least since Maastricht I think) to dismiss absolutely anybody who was worried about the overreach or mismanagement of the whole EU project?  Europhiles from the three main parties loved the phrase.  Whenever they wanted to portray a political opponent as a tedious, fringe obsessive the words sprung to their lips.  For instance, whenever he wanted to paint the Tory party as a right bunch of nutters, Nick Clegg would portray them as the type of bores who keep ‘banging on about Europe’.