One of Jeremy Corbyn’s more popular tweets is a comment from 2017 on Theresa May’s reluctance to condemn President Trump’s policy towards refugees. “If you are neutral in situations of injustice,” Corbyn tweeted, “you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” This message, similar to the much older aphorism that “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”, certainly seemed to strike a chord with Corbyn’s supporters: over 33,000 of them retweeted it.
Last night saw a procession of former Labour Party staff members, some of whom had joined the party specifically to support Corbyn, uphold this idealistic call by condemning, on BBC1’s Panorama, the record of Corbyn himself and his closest aides. The stories they told of political interference from the leadership in their efforts to expel anti-Semites from the party were shocking to hear first-hand. The impact this had on their mental health, to the point of depression and, for one, the contemplation of suicide, owing to the paralysing pressure they experienced from above, was heartbreaking. But worst of all has been Labour’s official response, which dismissed the witnesses as “disaffected” former staff members and their testimony as “politically motivated”.
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