Can I, as a Liberal Democrat, come to the defence of Jeremy Corbyn, as stories of his contacts with eastern bloc diplomats run through the rightwing media? Rightwing researchers pursued the chimera of “the Chatham House spy” for years after the cold war ended, as the Guardian last reported in June 2003. The pursuit of Jeremy Corbyn revives this paranoid tradition of attacking those who sought to maintain a dialogue with our cold war antagonists. Everything that Jeremy Corbyn knew about nuclear weapons he was freely telling to anyone who would listen, and his only knowledge about MI5 would be that they were spying on him and many others who were campaigning for peace and justice. For the Czech it was far better to live in Hampstead than in a state-owned flat in a Prague suburb.

Source: The Guardian February 20, 2018 18:22 UTC