Thursday 19 November 2015

Bizarre Labour contortions on defence, Trident + security are impossible to fathom but genuinely worrying

Todays story takes a little telling but it is straight from The Thick of It, if it did not have really sinister overtones and a serious attack on a mental health campaigner.
First, Maria Eagle, MP, shadow Defence Minister was furious that anti-Trident / anti defence Ken Livingstone had been appointed by Corbyn to co-chair the Labour party’s defence review with her, apparently without her, or her deputy, Kevan Jones MP, having being consulted.

Then, Ken Livingstone spoke to the Mirror about his appointment, and was asked what he thought of Shadow Defence Minister Kevan Jones’s complaint that he shouldn’t be involved in the review given his preconceived views. Livingstone said Jones, who has spoken movingly in the Commons about his struggle with depression, ‘might need some psychiatric help’ and was ‘obviously very depressed and disturbed’. Livingstone repeatedly refused to apologise and retract for such a derogatory and inappropriate comment against a mental health campaigner; when before a number of TV / media outlets and he again refused to say sorry, claiming somewhat bizarrely that he’d spoken the way he did because he was from South London. Eventually he gave a half hearted apology, literally wrung out of the man.
The truth of the Labour Party position is therefore something which is difficult to ascertain at best especially when we consider that at the Scottish Labour Party Conference they specifically voted to adopt a policy of non-renewal of Trident. This was later heavily downplayed by the UK Labour Party with Angela Eagle saying it was no more than a contribution to the debate Trident renewal. Now Corbyn puts Livingstone in charge. You could not make it up.