Jeremy Corbyn Takes On The Tabloids

by in International

British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn has gone down a warpath against right-wing tabloids.

According to British tabloid The Sun, Soviet era Czechoslovak spy Jan Dymic claimed Jeremy Corbyn worked with the Czechoslovakian STB spy agency during the end of the Cold War. Other British tabloids have corroborated this claim.

The Daily Mail claimed that Jan Dymic was a liaison to Corbyn and spied in the United Kingdom for several years before Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher expelled his spy ring from the country.

The Telegraph and The Express latched onto this idea as well.

In response, Jeremy Corbyn went on the offensive:  

Corbyn took to both Twitter and Snapchat to denounce the tabloids going after him.

According to The Guardian, Corbyn suggested the reason for the recent reporting was that the owners of the tabloids were afraid of a Labour government going after their owners for tax avoidance.

Corbyn’s Labour party has also attacked Tory MP Ben Bradley after Bradley tweeted a claim that Corbyn was a paid informant to the Czechs during the Cold War. He then deleted the tweet after Labour’s legal team threatened to sue him for libel.

He has yet to remove retweets, however, that claim that Corbyn fed information to communist spies during the late Cold War.

Laura Smith, Labour MP, saved the original tweet.

Seen above, Bradley not only retweeted an apology to Corbyn, he also donated to an undisclosed charity and paid for Corbyn’s legal bill.

BBC reported that the charity donations were for a food bank and homeless charity in Islington North, Corbyn’s home constituency.

Corbyn’s response to the attacks on him did more than provoke Tory politicians to retract their statements.

According to The Independent, only 8 percent of voters think less of Corbyn because of this incident, and 6 percent managed to even think better of him because of it in based on YouGov statistics–a UK based market and data analytics company.

In a recent YouGov poll done after the controversy, the Labour party managed to have a greater percentage of voter share then the Conservative (Tory) party if general elections were held tomorrow.

Beyond the polling, the usual Tory-supportive Financial Times had an opinion article oddly sympathetic to Jeremy Corbyn’s attack on the tabloids.

Henry Mance, Financial Times writer, made the quip that the protections for tabloids printing nonsense is the British equivalent of the American Second Amendment protections for guns. The concluding point was that the British tabloids are defeating themselves with the low-quality news that they produce.

Mance stated, “Things have changed, not because he is wiser but because his opponents are more stupid. It’s as if the British tabloids are trying to put a fringe socialist in power. Perhaps they are the real secret agents.”

Sky News and, by proxy, the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records (BSTU) stated they lacked files on Corbyn, supporting Mance’s sentiments.

The BTSU posted a statement on their website about the Jeremy Corbyn Czech controversy, stating that “Thorough research in the records of the Ministry for State Security of East Germany in response to recent requests have not produced any records or any other information on Jeremy Corbyn,” BSTU spokeswoman Dagmar Hovestädt said.

The hysteria surrounding Jeremy Corbyn seems to have backfired this time.

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