Tuesday 17 November 2015

A Serious Politician

My former editor (the poor soul) on The American Conservative, Freddy Gray, writes for The Spectator:

There is nothing wrong with Jeremy Corbyn saying he ‘isn’t happy’ with a shoot-to-kill policy. On the contrary, it shows once again that he is a man of principle.

We may not agree with, or like, his principles — but can we at least recognise that, unlike his opponents, he is not bending to the national mood?

He is not willing to ditch his integrity in order to ease the public’s fear and sate our lust for a violent response to terror.

For Corbyn’s haters on the Labour right, his position proves once again that he is not a ‘serious’ person. For one of his shadow cabinet, his position even makes him a ‘f—ing disgrace’

Why? Corbyn may well be right. It’s certainly not disgraceful to oppose a policy of legal killing.

You have to be a bit fascist to be happy at the thought of armed policemen roaming the streets of London with a license to kill.

Shoot-to-kill is dangerous; just ask the family of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005, gunned down on the Underground by panicked officers in the days following 7/7.

In this country — unlike France — we try to arm our police officers as little as possible, and it’s perhaps as a result that we have relatively few homicidal shootings each year.

Corbyn may well be a disaster in the polls and totally unfit to lead the country.

But his refusal to endorse shoot-to-kill shows that — unlike most politicians, who’ll say anything to sound tough in the wake of a terror attack — he is a serious politician.

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