Years-old speeches 'emerge' with strategic timing
When newspapers tell you something has ’emerged’ or ‘surfaced’ without saying how or from where, it’s best to be on your guard.
A story in yesterday’s Sunday Times is a case in point. Under the headline ‘Corbyn: Tribute to WWI is pointless’, it begins:
“Jeremy Corbyn has said he can’t see the point of commemorating the First World War.
The Labour leader used a speech to the Morning Star, the newspaper founded by the Communist party of Great Britain, to denounce the government’s decision to spend ‘shed loads of money’ on events last year to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the conflict.
The comments emerged just a week before Remembrance Sunday, where Corbyn is due to lay a wreath at the cenotaph in his role as leader of the opposition.”
From this you would get the impression the Labour party leader has made these remarks recently in relation to the coming Remembrance Day ceremony.
What we learn in paragraph five though is that Corbyn’s quotes are taken from a speech made in April 2013 – that’s to say, over two years ago.
Other papers have taken up the story in similar fashion. The Telegraph‘s headline announces ‘Jeremy Corbyn questions why Britain commemorates the First World War’. Note the present tense word ‘questions’. The Daily Express yelps: ‘Jeremy Corbyn says spending ‘shedloads’ on remembering WWI soldiers is POINTLESS’. Again, the words are ‘says’ and ‘is’.
And the Daily Mail‘s story begins:
“Jeremy Corbyn has sparked criticism for saying he cannot see the point of commemorating the First World War, while also denouncing the ‘shedloads of money’ spent on last year’s centenary events.
The Labour leader’s comments have emerged on the eve of next week’s Remembrance Sunday… [etc.]”
While they make clear when the remarks were made, these stories are potentially misleading, as they could give the impression of this being a new intervention by the leader of the Labour party, rather than old remarks made when the prospect of his achieving that post was remote, to say the least.
As with the Sun‘s front page story on the Monday after Corbyn was elected leader, reporting three-year-old comments by Corbyn about ‘abolishing the army’, these WWI stories have the whiff of premeditation.
As it happens, Corbyn was perfectly right to question David Cameron’s pledge to spend £50million marking the war’s centenary in a time of public spending cuts. He was also right to speak against the prevailing wind on the war, with hazy words about ‘sacrifice’ and ‘freedom’ thrown around without going very much deeper.
(Interestingly, the first person to put these reservations in print was Guardian columnist and newly appointed Corbyn spin doctor Seumas Milne. With tedious ideological consistency, Milne lamented how the war ‘laid the ground for the rise of Nazism’ without mentioning the equally disastrous rise of Bolshevism in Russia.)
However, Corbyn’s past remarks and positions are fair game for scrutiny, especially since he presumably still holds these views. (Whether they are Labour party policy or not is another matter.) These stories are really a symptom of Corbyn’s sudden move from backbench freedom to the intense public glare of national politics.
That said, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the press has gone through his old speeches and is saving them up as part of a slow-drip campaign to damage his reputation. This is as much a political act as Corbyn’s decision to make those speeches in the first place.
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24 Responses to “Do Jeremy Corbyn’s old remarks on WWI deserve press coverage?”
thruthseeker
how about digging up the drug taking prostitute association with good old gideon
Australian Inquisitor
I think that’s unfair criticism.
In 2013, there was a lot of uncertainty over how the Government wanted to commemorate the 14-18 war. The RBL may have had its own clear ideas, but there was a worry that the taxpayer-funded element would be an exercise in triumphalism, which was clearly never going to float Corbyn’s boat.
As it was, of the £50 million put aside, £40 million went to refurbishing the IWM, which didn’t really need refurbishing but earned Norman Foster a shedload of money. That’s the same Norman Foster who cares about Britain so little that he chucked in his peerage and resident status in 2012 so he didn’t have to pay tax. Not that such a thing would worry our incumbent PM. Taxes are apparently only for the little people. Avoiding them was what paid for Cameron Snr to pay for little David to go to Eton
S&A
A ‘lot of uncertainty’ seems to be shorthand for some griping by a bunch of old trots. The solution for Corbyn and anyone else like him was to either try and get involved in the commemorations, or to ask some questions in parliament about how they were to be organised, and how to ensure they didn’t turn into this mythical jingoistic jamboree.
As for the £40m spent on the IWM, I’m not sure why you think preserving a national resource that educates millions of visitors about the price of war is such a waste. And it did need refurbishing, particularly its library and archive (again, an invaluable resource for national education).
But then I’m not sure the likes of Corbyn really want us to remember the dead of either of the wars. I’m sure that if he can throw a ton of public money for a PIRA festival, he’d be up for it.
Australian Inquisitor
I’m not talking about a “bunch of old trots”
I’m talking about historians and history buffs with a keen interest in 14-18. don’t take my word for it – have a look at some of the archived threads on Great War Forum (free to view) populated in the main by 50something Daily Mail readers, so old maybe but certainly not “trots” by any stretch.
Questions were asked. The answers were not forthcoming because nobody seemed to know.
Regarding the IWM – yes, it’s great, but as a regular visitor I can assure you that as military museums go, it was a very low-priority case for £40m funding.
As for the library and archive, you obviously missed the furore around IWM’s decision to sell off its library despite the 2013 grant in order to “reduce costs”.
The rest of your post needs some qualification if it’s to be anything more than mud-slinging.
Cole
Cameron may be repellant, but hasn’t spent decades hanging around with extremists.