Top 15 Jeremy Corbyn Quotes

The Salisbury attack is something we got wrong. When it happened, I thought, "Well, probably there’s Russians behind this, because of the use of novichok." I just thought it was Russian gangsters — some business interests, and so forth. I didn't think the Russian state was behind it. And we were wrong. The evidence that's emerged since is overwhelming. We misread that. I still think that the line Jeremy was trying to follow, which is, "Get the evidence first and then state sanctions, and so on, rather than the other way around," is a defensible position. You don't run into saying "This is Putin’s responsibility" when you haven't produced the evidence of it. In fact, this evidence has now been produced. Had we known then what we know now, we'd have taken a different view, I think. We just didn't think the Russian state would be so stupid and brazen as to do something like that — to carry out a poisoning attack on British soil. I know, given the Litvinenko precedent perhaps we should have done but that never really got sorted out so clearly . . . Up until then we'd still ha[d] a quiescent PLP. We were doing all right in the polls. That started bringing all the doubts about Jeremy and the leader’s office to the surface again.

We can't have both sides of the House shouting at the leader of the opposition!

Corbyn's Labour Party did not lose the 2019 general election because of the Salisbury poisonings alone—but they were a critical moment that embedded the image of Corbyn as weak and foolish.
This was driven almost entirely by Corbyn and his team, not by the Labour Party as a whole. Throughout the affair, Corbyn seemed more determined to protect Putin's reputation than British citizens. The most humiliating moment for the Labour Party would come at Corbyn’s hands, as he stood in Parliament and demanded the prime minister explain whether she had complied with Moscow’s ludicrous request to be sent a sample of the Novichok nerve agent used to poison the Skripals, so that, as he later clarified, "they can say categorically one way or the other" whether the Russian state-manufactured nerve agent used in the attempted assassination of a Russian ex-spy belonged to them.
The response from Labour’s own backbenchers to this staggering naiveté was so brutal that the deputy speaker was forced to intervene to ask them to stop shouting at their own leader.

He has long lived in a milieu where it is de rigueur to acclaim the Irish Republican Army as freedom fighters (not a popular view in much of working-class England and Scotland, where many families have sons and cousins who served in the army in Northern Ireland).

[P]ressed in a BBC interview to condemn IRA terrorism, Mr Corbyn five times evaded the question.

I like Corbyn’s foreign policy, above all. I know he’s elected for some other reasons, for like giving free bingo games or what – I don’t know, in England, you’re crazy – but talking about foreign policy, he understands more than any other western politician what it takes now to save the world, including the changes in the world.

Mr Corbyn and his supporters treat as a triumph the fact that he lost a general election by less than was expected by us pundits.

At this moment of grave danger, we simply cannot allow the party to flounder, become utterly irrelevant to the political debate and disintegrate into a second-rate pressure group. Make no mistake — unless we listen to our voters, our party faces political oblivion.

[O]n he goes, glibly, hearing nothing he does not want to hear, and seeing nothing he does not want to see: a god in tiny rooms.

The way in which the leadership has dealt with anti-Jewish racism is incompatible with the British values of which we are so proud — of dignity and respect for all people. It has left many decent Labour members both Jewish and non-Jewish, ashamed of what has transpired.
The claims that the party is "doing everything" it reasonably can to tackle anti-Jewish racism and that it has "investigated every single case", are a mendacious fiction.

Word of advice to #JeremyCorbyn - if #BorisJohnson delivers #Brexit, Labour will be crushed anyway. If the Tories flunk it, you'll be in power anyway. So just expel all these pro-Zionist traitors and at least have a clean, radical party.

Corbyn is not antisemitic. Not a fibre, not an atom, not a molecule of his mind or body could be so described. That is the Goebellian lie.

They wouldn't set up camps or anything like that. But the tenor of public life would be unbearable because the very people who are the enemy of Jews, as it were, the anti-Semites, will be empowered by having their allies in government. There is a fear, a real fear of that.

Jeremy Corbyn is leading the Labour Party into a dark place of ugly conspiracy theories and it has become a home for overt antisemites and antisemitism.
In 2018, Labour is not only a party with extravagant levels of tolerance for antisemitism but one which deliberately obstructs measures to counter hatred and punishes those who speak out against it.
Jeremy Corbyn needs to lead Labour out of this deep abyss and urgently demonstrate to the world Labour can return to being an anti-racist Party.

Jewish organisations know full well that vilifying Corbyn as an antisemite would drastically reduce his appeal, as antisemitism resonates only among assorted antediluvians, troglodytes, and fruitcakes. In other words, the irrefutable proof that Corbyn’s pursuers don't believe a word they're saying is that by labelling him an antisemite they hope and expect to isolate him. However, as the accusation is manifestly a red herring, it's also possible that the current hysteria will pass most people by entirely, not because they are unconcerned by antisemitism but because it hardly occurs to them as an issue at all. If the controversy has an effect it will be restricted to exacerbating divisions in the Labour leadership and perhaps also adding to a more general perception that the stories promoted by mainstream media are fake news.