Foreign interference in other people’s elections is rightly abhorred by all who care about national sovereignty and the principle of non-interference in other people’s internal affairs.
More so surely when the country in question is not just your ally but, as expressed repeatedly by US President Donald Trump on his recent state visit to the UK, your closest ally with whom you are in a “special relationship.”
A recording emerged this week of an “off the record” briefing given to the Jewish leaders in New York.
“It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.”
The recordingleaked to Washington Post shows that this declaration of war against the British Labour Party was received with prolonged and stormy applause.
The Labour Party’s response was mild indeed: “President Trump and his officials’ attempts to decide who will be Britain’s next prime minister are an entirely unacceptable interference in the UK’s democracy.”
Leaving aside the ugly premise that the mild mannered allotment-tending knit-your-own-yoghurt pacifist Jeremy Corbyn would countenance making “life difficult for Britain’s Jews” or that Britain’s long-established democracy and highly developed civil society would tolerate such a thing if he did, the threat, indeed intention of Pompeo is clear and may indicate that the US is already subverting democracy in Britain.
The apparently endless disinformation campaign against Mr Corbyn has not let up from the day and hour he became the Labour leader and no concession – indeed surrender – on key parts of his past record on the Israel-Palestine question has mitigated it. He has dropped his old stance in support of a democratic state of Israel-Palestine, dropped his opposition to the “chilling” IHRA definition of anti-Semitism and expelled and suspended some of his oldest and closest allies for breaches of that definition. But the supporters of Israel in Britain – and it would appear the United States – simply refuse to accept Mr Corbyn’s YES for an answer. He is still routinely branded an “anti-Semite” for the crime of demanding the implementation of the Oslo Agreement signed on the White House lawn more than a quarter of a century ago.