And now a word from Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti, soon, we are told, to be appointed to Jeremy Corbyn’s cabinet for services to compiling a whitewash of a report into antisemitism in the Labour Party. You’d have thought a peerage would be thanks enough, but in the “new politics” of Labour’s accidental leader political favours are still the norm. It was basically the “whitewash for peerages scandal”. Her elevation to the House of Lords and, soon, front bench activity for the Labour Party threatens to wreck her reputation as a human rights campaigner.
Her new friend Corbyn does not choose his friends very well in terms of human rights. His active or tacit support for Putin, Castro, Venezuela’s odious “socialist” president Maduro and of course Press TV, the media arm of the Iranian regime who executed and persecuted people throughout the time Corbyn took money from them. And that’s without his very active and enthusiastic support for the murderous IRA at the peak of the troubles. The friends of Corbyn are now, by extension, the friends of Chakrabarti.
Let us look at one particular example, Nicolas Maduro. Corbyn’s friend presides over human rights abuse, he is a known homophobe, he has curbed the free press, his government randomly arrests and detains political opponents; in short he is not one of the good guys and Venezuela is not the socialist paradise Corbyn claims it to be. 90% of Venezuelans are eating less than they did a year ago, extreme poverty has risen by over 50% in recent years and the animals in the country’s zoos are starving to death. But all the evidence of the failed and corrupt Venezuelan state doesn’t impress Corbyn’s slow-witted fellow MP Richard Burgon who says: “The left in Latin America is showing that there is an alternative to the agenda of austerity, cuts, privatisation (sic) and unemployment” (and yes, he was referring to Venezuela because he said these words at a “Rally for Venezuela”). That alternative being money-laundering, high level corruption human rights abuses, restrictions in the freedom of the press and all the other things that oppressive regimes specialise in.
Chakrabarti cannot have her cake and eat it. Her so called “independent” report on antisemitism can no longer be taken seriously given her subsequent peerage and her reputation lies in tatters. By accepting the peerage and, quite possibly, a front bench job for Corbyn means accepting her leader’s past and current associations with terrorists and murderers. I am not sure how well this fits with her previous job at Liberty.
I leave the last word with the Community Security Trust, which monitors antisemitism, who said Chakrabarti’s appointment was “a shameless kick in the teeth for all who put hope in her now wholly compromised inquiry into Labour antisemitism”. It’s no different from Tony Blair’s dealings with Bernie Ecclestone or the millionaires who pay to get access to senior Tory MPs, right up to the prime minister.
The things people will do or say to get a gong, eh? I didn’t expect a formerly respected human rights lawyer to be among them.
