by Tom Bower
The left’s final mortification was the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Despite his self-promotion as a champion of the oppressed, Corbyn lacked any sympathy for East Europeans oppressed by the Soviet Union. During the bitter battle in Poland between the Solidarity movement and the pro-Soviet dictator General Wojciech Jaruzelski, many Labour MPs had occupied the Polish embassy in London. Corbyn refused to join the protest, with the excuse that he was ‘staying out to go on holiday.’ He did not celebrate the liberation of hundreds of millions of Europeans from Soviet control when in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. Similarly, Glasnost in Russia, the first step towards abandoning communism, provoked his despair. Tens of thousands of people, he lamented, had lost their security of employment, their pensions and their community. He made no speeches about the people’s victory over tyranny. On the contrary, he lamented that the Cold War had been won by the wrong side. NATO, he declared, should ‘shut up shop, give up, go home and go away’. The alliance was nothing more than ‘an engine for the delivery of oil to the oil companies and the major nations of the world’. Unlike the Soviet Union, he said, NATO had never been ‘overly troubled by concepts of democracy or human rights’. Remarkably, he was baffled by communism’s collapse. Unwilling to concede defeat, and as ever nostalgically clutching the red flag, he chose that moment to begin writing for the Morning Star, the newspaper financed by Moscow. By any reckoning, his personal commitment to Stalinism set him apart from most Labour Party members. Authoritarianism, his critics would say, was embedded within his soul.
His comfort was the performance of his trusted quartet – Ken Livingstone, Diane Abbott and Bernie Grant plus George Galloway – at Westminster. In the Commons chamber he could hear Livingstone praise the communist revolution in Afghanistan for having ‘advanced the rights of workers and peasants’, or Grant criticise Reagan’s ‘state-sponsored terrorism’ to topple the Marxist government of Nicaragua. Corbyn himself eulogised Cuba as ‘a beacon’, and Fidel Castro as ‘an inspiration … a champion of social justice’. Castro’s leadership, he enthused, ‘emancipated the world’s poorest people from slavery, hunger and the denial of human rights’. The Cuban leader’s imprisonment of political opponents and the country’s permanent food rationing were offset by free health-care. Corbyn ignored the fact that in 1962 Castro had urged Nikita Khrushchev to launch a nuclear attack on America. He also brushed aside the million Cubans who had fled to Florida, often on makeshift rafts. In his opinion, the cause of any suffering in Cuba was US imperialism. American presidents, he said, suffered ‘paranoia’ because the island was a ‘threat by example’.
His beliefs were unshakable, as was his fixation on certain aspects of foreign affairs – the plight of the Kurds in Iraq and Turkey, the Chilean regime’s acquisition of British arms, the fate of the Marxist rebels in Angola, and the Moroccan persecution of Polisario in the Western Sahara. All demanded his presence. He was soon heading off to Nicaragua to give his support to the Sandinistas. By chance, the Labour MP Brian Wilson and some Scottish doctors were helping to build a medical centre in the Nicaraguan countryside when Corbyn arrived. While Wilson’s group was living in discomfort, Corbyn, well practised in the art of negotiating upgrades, moved into the capital’s best hotel. ‘What are you doing here?’ Wilson asked when Corbyn turned up at the site. ‘Showing solidarity,’ came the reply. Corbyn’s penchant for revolutionaries wearing military uniforms and killing off their opponents evoked cynicism among Foreign Office officials. ‘Corbyn’s being a pain in the arse,’ complained Charles de Chassiron, head of the South American Department, about the MP’s endless questions about Chile. De Chassiron and most Foreign Office officials viewed Corbyn’s championship of justice in that country with some contempt, considering his stark inconsistencies.
On 2 August 1990, Saddam Hussein’s army invaded Kuwait. Amid considerable brutality, Kuwaitis were held hostage in their own country. Many British nationals were also detained. Only the Palestinians who had been given shelter and work by the Kuwaitis welcomed the Iraqi occupation. According to Corbyn’s logic, since Saddam, an ally of Palestine, was pledged to destroy Israel, it was right to support the invasion. In his opinion, the Kuwaitis were allies of America and Britain, friends of Israel, and therefore his foes. At the United Nations, Resolution 678 condemned the invasion and sanctioned military intervention if Saddam refused to withdraw. Despite the build-up of American and British forces in neighbouring Saudi Arabia, Saddam rejected the ultimatum. Corbyn felt no qualms about the contradiction that, while he preached that conflicts should be resolved by the UN, he supported Saddam’s invasion. Despite Kuwaitis being murdered, he voted in the Commons against the use of force. Sanctions, he argued, should be given more time. Days later, the allied armies stormed into Kuwait and also entered southern Iraq. Corbyn criticised that invasion, and damned President George Bush’s ‘occupation of all or part of Iraq and the imposition of a US puppet government’. In the Commons he asked for an assurance that nuclear weapons would not be used. ‘The carnage of the bombing must be stopped,’ he said, praising the Soviet Union’s ‘attempts to keep the hope of peace alive’.
He urged John Major, who had succeeded Margaret Thatcher in November 1990, to compare the hundreds of millions of pounds spent on the Gulf War, ‘causing 150,000 casualties and deaths’, with ‘the miserly figure of £28 million spent on the African famine’. Major was not amused. Corbyn’s account ‘missed out one or two material facts’, he said, including ‘the liberation of Kuwait … the Iraqis were murdering Kuwaitis, dismantling Kuwait, damaging the environment and committing unpardonable sins. I very much regret that the Honourable Gentleman does not recall that.’
Unwilling to topple Saddam, Bush halted the invasion on 28 February 1991. The US Army withdrew, abandoning the Kurds, a stateless people squeezed into the fertile land between Iraq, Iran and Turkey. They had good reason to feel aggrieved. In response to Bush’s appeal, they had risen up against Saddam – partly in revenge for his murder in 1988 of about three thousand Kurds in the city of Halabja by gas. Three years later, after America’s withdrawal, vast numbers were massacred in reprisal by Saddam’s army in further gas attacks. To prevent yet more deaths, Britain and America enforced a no-fly zone over a Kurdish safe haven. In response, Corbyn condemned the US for killing 100,000 people during the war, then criticised them for failing to protect the Kurds. He uttered no criticism of Saddam.
Over the previous years Corbyn had developed a close relationship with Ihsan Qaesr, an exiled Kurdish activist living in Islington. In July 1991, at Qaesr’s invitation, he travelled through Turkey to Iraqi Kurdistan. Escorted by a group of Peshmerga soldiers, he and Qaesr spent seven days touring an area hit by an Iraqi gas attack two months previously. The scenes of desperation, recalled Qaesr, were ‘unforgettable’. In their efforts to protect the Kurds from more deaths, America planned to bomb the Iraqi factories that produced the gas. To Qaesr’s surprise, Corbyn opposed any allied bombing of or attacks on Saddam’s military bases. Standing in the site of one devastating Iraqi raid, he told Qaesr that the UN should initiate a peaceful dialogue to negotiate a solution. Although he was grateful for Corbyn’s interest, Qaesr admitted, ‘I was frustrated by Jeremy’s refusal to support military retaliation and the military defence of safe havens for the Kurds.’
Corbyn occupied an unusual position. He had been sympathetic to East Europe’s communist regimes, he supported Saddam Hussein’s illegal occupation of Kuwait, he condemned Kuwait’s liberation, and he endorsed Fidel Castro’s dictatorship. Shortly after his visit to Iraq he travelled to Cuba with Claudia as official guests. The highlight was dinner with Castro, who in his welcoming speech hailed Corbyn as a trusted friend against American imperialism. The main course was meat. To Claudia’s bemusement, rather than mentioning the fact that he was a vegetarian, her husband swallowed the beef with his principles.
Corbyn’s lengthy absences from Britain had coincided with the political demise of Margaret Thatcher. Her flagship poli
cy, the poll tax, had provoked disobedience in Scotland and riots in Trafalgar Square. Alongside his close allies, Corbyn publicly vowed not to pay the tax. Eventually, after some dithering, he did pay, but assuaged his conscience by making a well publicised visit to Terry Fields, a Trotskyite councillor who had been jailed for sixty days for refusing to pay £373 in council tax.
Corbyn’s protests barely registered among the public. Wearing sandals and his usual rumpled clothes, and known for his unkempt beard, he continued to be dismissed in Westminster as a member of the loony left. Although he worked hard at the Red Rose to resolve his constituents’ problems, and was especially helpful to immigrants and refugees, he seemed oblivious to Islington being ranked as London’s worst borough for social services, housing, education and street maintenance. Under Margaret Hodge, the council leader between 1982 and 1992, the People’s Republic of Islington boasted a red flag fluttering above the town hall, and a bust of Lenin proudly placed inside the building. Ideological battles took precedence over care for the residents. At every level, councillors and their officials were seeped in chaos. Dismissed as a ‘barmy borough’ by Thatcher, the council had outlawed use of the word ‘immigrant’ in its communications, banned Irish jokes and provided gym mats for lesbian self-defence courses. Despite levying London’s highest council tax, the borough had debts that in 1998 would lead it to the brink of bankruptcy. Forty-seven per cent of its residents lived in 35,000 council homes notorious for infestation with crime, drugs, damp and dilapidation because Islington’s unionised labour force refused to undertake repairs, despite threats of dismissal. NUPE, the workers knew, would protect their jobs. A recent auditor’s report highlighted tax arrears of £23.7 million, with £4 million missing in uncollected fines. Foreign benefit cheats were pocketing thousands of pounds because council investigators had been ordered not to contact immigration officials. Despite that record, Margaret Hodge was surprised by Corbyn’s silence. While she regularly received complaints from Chris Smith, the Labour MP for Islington South, she never heard from Corbyn. Nor did Smith, although he did recall hearing Corbyn complain in the Commons that all Islington’s woes were entirely due to the limits on Whitehall’s financial grants. ‘The answer to our problem lies with the government,’ Corbyn told a minister. Spending more money was his answer to every problem when he met his constituents. Frequently seen cycling around Islington on his way to some event, he never volunteered to challenge the council’s performance, other than to stage a successful campaign to change a by-law to allow clothing factories owned by local Greek Cypriots to operate at high noise levels despite residents’ complaints. Helping immigrants, especially those with visa problems, guaranteed him votes from entire communities. He was consistent in his inconsistencies.
Preoccupied by the needs of immigrants, Corbyn appeared uninterested in the systematic sexual abuse of vulnerable children in Islington’s residential homes, all of which were staffed by council employees, members of NUPE. Over the previous five years, evidence of sex orgies run from a ‘hot house’ on the council’s Elthorne estate had been exposed. Children had been rented out from a brothel to paedophiles. Among the many victims was Vivien Loki, a seventeen-year-old girl whose decomposed body was discovered on the estate six months after her murder by a paedophile. Further north, at Gisburne House, another Islington home, children were being abused on an industrial scale. ‘All this,’ Islington social worker Liz Davies discovered, ‘was happening on Corbyn’s doorstep. He knew all about it because it was raised by [Conservative MP] Geoffrey Dickens in the Commons.’
In October 1992, five Islington council social workers, led by Liz Davies, confronted Corbyn in his office at the Red Rose and revealed that dozens of drugged, hungry and distressed young people of both sexes living in twelve council homes were being routinely raped by council employees. Paedophile gangs were rampant across the borough, and at least thirty employees suspected of crimes had been allowed to quietly resign. Peter Righton, founder of the pro-paedophile group the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), had been given authority by the Home Office to brief council social workers to place vulnerable children with known sex offenders. Their criminality was known to the NCCL, run by Harriet Harman. In conjunction with PIE, the NCCL had agreed that known paedophiles could stay overnight in children’s homes to avoid infringing their rights as gay adults. Having set out this appalling scenario, the social workers told Corbyn that their complaints to Margaret Hodge had been ignored. After the Evening Standard published a detailed exposé of Islington’s employment of known paedophiles, and the officials’ shredding of documents to cover up the crimes, the council accused the paper of ‘gutter journalism’.
The council employees’ meeting with Corbyn lasted ninety minutes, during which he pronounced, ‘I’ve heard similar issues from other constituents,’ and then said little else. As usual when confronted with complicated or unpalatable facts, he retreated into his shell, mumbling and smiling but offering no meaningful replies. At the end he promised to speak to Virginia Bottomley, the health minister, but she does not recall any such conversation having taken place. He had even protested when Geoffrey Dickens mentioned the abuse in the House of Commons. ‘We heard nothing more from Corbyn,’ Liz Davies recalled. ‘We don’t know whether he did anything to help us.’ Later, John Mann, a moderate Labour MP, accused Corbyn of ignoring the reports, and blamed the ‘trendy left’ for a cover-up motivated by cowardice, self-interest or laziness. Corbyn, Mann wrote, had ‘inadvertently helped the rubbishing of allegations’.
Later, several investigations would reveal that the ‘establishment’, with Whitehall’s approval, had concealed the network of paedophiles abusing children in forty-two Islington council homes, precisely the sort of protection racket a left-wing MP would usually delight in exposing. Yet Corbyn was silent, except to denounce Mann’s attack as a ‘new low’. He had called, he claimed, for an independent inquiry. Nothing in the public record confirms such an assertion. ‘Corbyn ignored the abuse,’ Tony Allcock, the editor of the Islington Gazette, recalled, ‘to show solidarity with the left-wing councillors and NUPE and the other trade unions.’ The local MP, he observed, ‘did not react well to criticism’, especially the charge that he allowed ‘dirty deeds to be done in his name’. To deflect the attacks, Corbyn presented himself as a good man whose behaviour was beyond reproach. Those who criticised him personally were accordingly bad people, and he refused to engage in personal abuse. At the time, he was not important enough for any national newspaper to report his apparent indifference to the children’s fate. Only the Islington Gazette highlighted his disregard of the borough’s chaos in the months before the general election of April 1992. Not that he cared about such coverage. According to the opinion polls, Labour would win.
Wilfully separating himself from Neil Kinnock and the main party, Corbyn looked askance at the leadership’s attempt to produce a vote-winning manifesto based on the banishment of socialism. ‘It’s soap-opera populism,’ he scoffed about both Labour’s ‘new agenda’ and Peter Mandelson’s demand for party discipline. Particularly repugnant to him was the acceptance of Thatcher’s market economy, manifested in Canary Wharf, the new financial centre which provided jobs for 100,000 people. ‘We do our opinion polls,’ he mocked, ‘find out what people want and say, “OK, you can have it,” without asking what kind of society we now have and what kind of society we want to replace it.’ Despite the improvements to services, he wanted all Britain’s privatised industries to be renationalised, especially the telephone network. This was wilfully ideological. Since the privatisation of British Telecom in 1984, the public no longer faced a six-month wait to get a telephone line, and the utility’s appalling record for providing repairs had improved. BT now provided telephones on demand, and no longer were British visitors to America awestruck by the huge banks of pushbutton phones and instant connections by credit card; but for Corbyn better services were irrelevant. ‘It is a negation of democracy,’ he complained, ‘that we ha
nd our services over to the private sector’ – or ‘vultures’, as he called entrepreneurs.
As Corbyn moved from council estate to demonstration, meeting or picket line, he noted that others were also angry about the ‘betrayal of socialism’. Those he regarded as the authentic voice of the party’s rank and file were disillusioned. Principles were being abandoned in the hope of winning power. Many local parties were in a state of political exhaustion after Labour’s headquarters, taking its lead from Neil Kinnock’s speech at the party conference in Bournemouth in 1985, systematically forced any remaining Trotskyists and communists out of the party. ‘The man who destroyed the Labour Party’, wrote Benn of Kinnock. Corbyn shared that anger. ‘The branches have had a hell of a battering with expulsions, candidates imposed on them by Machiavellian procedures and so on,’ he complained, seemingly having forgotten his own conduct ten years earlier in Haringey. ‘People are not coming to meetings and there’s a low level of local activity.’ The removal of Trotskyites, he observed, had left the party with ‘a shallow, unhealthy base’.
The 1992 general election handed the Conservatives their fourth successive victory, albeit with a majority cut from 102 to twenty-one. Although opinion polls leading up to the vote had shown Labour consistently if narrowly ahead, this time the defeat did not surprise Corbyn. Only real socialism, he believed, would win a majority for Labour. Unlike him, the party’s moderates were plunged into despair. They questioned why Labour won only 34 per cent of the vote, while the Tories got 42 per cent. Even diluted socialism had been rejected. An exception was Islington North. Winning 57 per cent of the ballot, Corbyn increased his majority to 12,784. As usual, he relied on the immigrant vote, solicitously attending their events while maintaining his calculated lack of interest in the council’s misconduct.
After the election, Keith Veness resigned as his constituency agent. ‘I’ve had enough,’ he told Corbyn. ‘You’re an anarchic shambles, without any discipline.’ In particular, he was fed up with the candidates’s obsession with leaflets. ‘There’s so much paper around that no one can open the doors,’ he carped about the offices at the Red Rose. Corbyn’s financial indiscipline was another irritation. Whenever Veness protested that there was no money for another leaflet, Corbyn replied, ‘We’ll find it.’ As his friend’s tirade finished, Corbyn said amicably: ‘Oh, don’t worry, mate. Are you all right?’
