Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem

by Tim Shipman

The Labour leader claimed his stance on terrorism was to support peace and dialogue in conflicts around the world, but his political opponents pointed out that all too often this involved talking to the representatives of terrorist groups that opposed Britain, America and Israel, which he saw as imperialist nations. Newspaper readers were already familiar with the fact that Corbyn had referred to Hamas and Hezbollah as ‘friends’ during a meeting in Parliament in 2009, and also with his longstanding association with Sinn Féin, which had brought him into contact with convicted IRA terrorists. Most notorious was the occasion in 1984, two weeks after the Brighton bombing – in which the Provisional IRA attempted to murder the entire British cabinet in their beds at the Conservative Party conference – when Corbyn invited convicted IRA volunteers Linda Quigley and Gerry MacLochlainn to the House of Commons. In the years after that he was frequently pressed to condemn IRA violence, but refused to do so without bracketing it with that of loyalist paramilitaries.