Mick Hartley

I think Daniel Finkelstein, in the Times today (£), hits on a key point. Corbyn has never made any secret of where his political sympathies lie: that is, against NATO, and in favour of socialism, as broadly conceived in the hard-left circles in which he's always moved, ie. less Stalin, more Trotsky. The Russian Revolution was, for Corbyn, a heroic moment in the class struggle, against imperialism and against the exploitative nature of capitalism. Any criticisms of the Soviet Union and East European repression would be countered by throat-clearing about how Stalinism was not real socialism, and how the dream of real socialism had disappeared with the ice-pick in Trotsky's skull. But that's the point: unlike previous Labour leaders, Corbyn is for socialism, and not for liberal democracy. 

Jeremy Corbyn valued Soviet leadership. He was worried about the break-up of the Soviet Union. He believed Nato was an instrument of Cold War manipulation. And he informed the communists of this, in order to inspire a revival of socialism.

I do not know this because of some recently unearthed file, or the evidence of a maverick agent. I do not know it because I am a Tory peer seeking fabricated allegations with which to smear the Labour leader. I know it because he said so himself.

No one would have had to pay Mr Corbyn to take a sympathetic view of the Soviet Union’s world role because he saw that as all part of the service as MP for Islington North. And far from advancing his ideas in clandestine encounters, Mr Corbyn was entirely open about his opinions….

Mr Corbyn was not, and is not, a Soviet-style communist. They come from two different socialist positions. Mr Corbyn and the Soviets are at different ends of the ice pick.

It’s not just that in 1988, he petitioned parliament to demand that the Russian government “gives complete rehabilitation to Leon Trotsky”. It’s that the new left, of which Mr Corbyn is a part, was created as an intellectual and political response to the failures of Stalin. Its aim has been to develop a new, more decentralised, insurgent socialism in which control of industry and politics belongs to the shop floor….

Yes, he acknowledged that there are criticisms that can be made of the Soviets, but “what I am defending is the principle of anti-imperialism, internationalism and solidarity”. This principle of left solidarity is very important to him. He pleaded, for example, with fellow socialists not to criticise Castro because “sections of the left attacking Cuba at the present time with all the problems it has got are, frankly, not very helpful at all”….

In John Bew’s biography of Clement Attlee, Citizen Clem, he makes clear that the central decision of Attlee’s life was that he and Labour would support a popular front of liberal democracies rather than, as was being urged upon him, a popular front of international socialists. Every Labour leader since then has accepted Attlee’s choice.

Jeremy Corbyn is the first to dissent from it. Of course that matters.