Mick Hartley

More on Corbyn and the Stop the War crowd, from James Bloodworth:

The Labour leadership's apparent indifference to the bloody murder of hundreds of thousands of Syrians by dictator Bashar al-Assad has….been buttressed by a soggy 'anti-war' posture which looks hollower every day. For groups like the Stop the War Coalition, which Corbyn chaired for many years and continues to support, stopping the war has come to mean little more than ignoring it or keeping one's own hands clean.

The protest group claimed to have 'stopped the rush to war' back in 2013 when former Labour leader Ed Miliband appeared to scupper US-led military action against Assad for the sake of a short-term bounce in the polls. Since then, when the war in Syria was supposedly 'stopped', several hundred thousand people have perished under Assad's bombs. Yet even many less rigidly-minded activists seem to have accepted the idea that the mouthing of slogans is a satisfactory substitute for meaningful action, and that military inaction was inevitably without its own costs.

Well-meaning calls for a show of principle from Jeremy Corbyn over Syria are almost certainly a waste of time. It is not that the Labour leader has no principles – it is far worse than that. He is, as his supporters like so often to boastfully claim, an inflexible 'man of principle'. Yet those principles, held up as sacrosanct, are as putrescent as a maggot-ridden carcass. Corbyn and his comrades in the Stop the War Coalition inhabit a world where if the United States didn't do something then it didn't happen, or it may as well not have happened for all the attention it warrants.