Only Corbyn will keep you safe

The title is a lie. No one can keep you safe anymore, not entirely. But Jeremy Corbyn will keep you safer, and here’s why.

Theresa May has suppressed a report on terrorists’ revenue. It was apparently too ‘sensitive’ to publish, which in politics means ‘damning’.

One can make a reasonable guess at its contents. Just days before Saturday night’s attack in Borough Market, the independent candidate for Hastings and Rye, Nicholas Wilson, accused the Home Secretary Amber Rudd of continuing her predecessor’s financial collusions with Saudi Arabia in return for oil. You can see Mrs Rudd passing a note to the debate moderator, a spineless C of E vicar, who then snatches away Mr Wilson’s microphone — and with it his freedom of speech.

One ought to let that sink in; the easiest way to do so is to render it in plain English and sort of stare at it for a bit: The Prime Minister, whose most sacred duty is to keep the citizens of her country safe, has deliberately censored a report on where a religious death cult are getting their cash.

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Now add to this fortuitous farce some statistics. Between 2010 and 2016, Theresa May, during her tenure as Home Secretary, cut police numbers by 20,000, an average of 2,000-3,000 job losses per year for six years. Only 107,000 of those remaining officers are in ‘front-line’ roles, a definition the government has stretched to include middle-management and forensics.

The PM claims there are hundreds of ‘extra’ officers on the streets. Either she is right, and has warped the laws of arithmetic, or she has added to her litany of platitudes, redefined the word ‘extra’, and appropriated officers from other regions.

The former head of Belfast’s Special Branch Jim Gamble, the former senior Met officer Peter Kirkham, and even David Cameron’s former strategy advisor Steve Hilton have all emerged to say much the same thing: whilst Islamic terror may be the new normal, Theresa May continues to make it more inexorable. Her strategy? More police cuts, more hospital cuts, and more cuts to emergency services. And let us not forget the Investigatory Powers Act, whose destruction of one our most fundamental rights is apparently justified ‘because terrorism’.

But amid the cuts, censorship, and negligence she has the gall to accuse Jeremy Corbyn of weakness and, at times, something approaching treason. I will concede that the most worrying thing about Corbyn’s response to Islamic terror is his failure to call it Islamic. After years of paralysis by political correctness, only now are politicians, journalists, and Muslim reformers such as Maajid Nawaz insisting on the religious core of these attacks. It is not racist or ‘Islamophobic’ to point this out. On the contrary, it allows moderate Muslims the lexicon to distance themselves from a fundamentalist reading of their own faith.

Any thinking person will observe that foreign interventions culture the petri dish of terror. Our PM conflates this with excusing terror, in part because her government is funding the terror. Corbyn is right to make this observation. But whether or not he becomes Prime Minister, he must cease insisting on the solely ‘political victory’ terrorists ‘crave’. He must accept that that political victory is a theocratic victory.

In any case he is already on more solid ground that May. If you vote Conservative in this election because you think you will be safer, then you have failed to distinguish between party and policy. Diane Abbott may have botched the numbers. But only one manifesto has pledged, and at least attempted to cost, 10,000 fresh police officers on the streets of our country.

I have criticised Corbyn from the day he was voted leader of the Labour Party, and I continue to have deep reservations. But, then again, on Saturday night three men ran around Borough Market stabbing people while shouting ‘this is for Allah’. I refuse to vote for a party who continues to fund the source of those men’s ideology, while savaging the only people who can protect us when it happens again.

Only Corbyn will keep you safe

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