FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Labour Leader Corbyn Questions Theresa May’s Claims
March 14, 2018 (EIRNS)—Following British Prime Minister Theresa May’s hysterical charges against Russia today in the House of Commons, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and his spokesperson, suggested there could be an alternative explanation and raised the issue of the intelligence services’ role.
Business Insider website quotes Corbyn’s spokesperson saying that the Labour leader didn’t believe there is sufficient evidence to conclude that Russia poisoned Sergei and Yulia Skripal, and suggested that British intelligence services may have it wrong. After all, the spokesperson said, “there is a history between weapons of mass destruction and intelligence, which is problematic, to put it mildly.” The spokesperson hypothesized that a “mafia” or another former Soviet state, not the Kremlin, could have been involved.
The Guardian quotes Corbyn saying that the Skripal poisoning was “an appalling act of violence. Nerve agents are abominable if used in any war ... it is utterly reckless to use them in a civilian environment.” But, it’s not inconceivable that the nerve agent might have been used by someone other than Russia, he said. He recalled that May had said in her March 12 speech, that either this was a direct act by the Russian state, or that the Russian government had lost control of its “catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others.”
Thus, he continued, any response must be based on clear evidence. “If the government believes that it is still a possibility that Russia negligently lost control of a military-grade nerve agent, what action is being taken through the OPCW with our allies?” And, “what response did the British government make to Russia’s request for a sample of the nerve agent to test it?”
May harrumphed that the Russians had already been given a chance to explain where the nerve agent had come from, and then boasted that her government had attained “consensus” among the MPs. Judging from the remarks that were made by backbenchers “across the whole of the house” last Monday, she proclaimed, there is clearly a consensus “across the backbenches of this house.” She lamented, that unfortunately, this consensus doesn’t extend to Corbyn, “who could have taken the opportunity as the U.K. government has done to condemn the culpability of the Russian state.”
May’s Tories are far behind in the polls from Corbyn’s Labour Party for local elections coming up.
