, RA stewarded lots of events in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Republican events were frequently the targets of far right violence (the English far right had close connections to Loyalist paramilitaries (see
But Gilligan appears to be being a bit dishonest here: unless he has evidence otherwise, there's no reason to think that Corbyn would have been the person who arranged security for these meetings he spoke at.
Gilligan claims Corbyn was either the national secretary or honorary president of Anti-Fascist Action when it launched in 1985, that he was "involved with it" until the mid-1990s, and that RA "made up the activist core" of AFA.
It is indeed true that Corbyn held such an office in AFA when it was formed, as can be verified in
Nigel Copsey's excellent academic history of anti-fascism in Britain, as well as
another article by him, and
a 2012 MA dissertation for which Corbyn was interviewed.
However, what Gilligan doesn't mention is that this incarnation of AFA came to an end within a couple of years, as
described here by Copsey:
However, this original AFA unravelled due to internal tensions between militant anti-fascists and more moderate anti-racists. ‘The basic contradiction, from which everything else flowed’, we have been told, ‘was between the opposing concepts of AFA as a militant action group and AFA as just another law abiding anti-racist protest group independent from political affiliations’. By 1988, fractured by in-house sectarianism, AFA had all but collapsed. The following year, however, AFA was resurrected as a militant, physical force antifascist group.
The dissertation similarly says that the question of physical violence divided AFA, with Corbyn falling on the side of non-violence:
This strategy would spit AFA in 1989, Jeremy Corbyn whilst stating he believed there was no ‘absolute right to free speech’ believed that only purely defensive physical confrontation should take place, thus, no pre-emptive violence.
I can't find a source for when Corbyn ceased to hold office in AFA, but am confident it was before the 1989 relaunch. The student dissertation says he was "involved until 1989". What's crucial to note is that the 1985 incarnation was a broad-based organisation, involving liberals and Labour members (and Red Action was briefly suspended from membership by the liberal leadership in 1987) - whereas it was the 1989 incarnation in which Red Action made up a good part of the activist core. I was involved in this later period, and I am 99.5% certain that Corbyn wasn't. That is, I am pretty sure that Gilligan is wrong when he says Corbyn was involved until the mid-1990s.
Corybn is mentioned twice in the "official" history of AFA,
Beating the Fascists [
pdf/
buy], which reflects the Red Action version of the story. The first is the 1985 incident noted above. The second (p.121) is to note that he spoke an AFA event on Remembrance Sunday in 1986, a peaceful event designed to reclaim the day from the fascists who had been marching through London annually. There were violent incidents involving AFA in the 1985-89 period, but Corbyn was not involved in them; nor did he endorse the use of violence by AFA members.
Verdict: barely half-true.
Did Jeremy Corbyn have anything to do with the Warrington bombings?
There is one small further twist in this story, which is a
bizarre claim made in 2013 that Red Action was somehow connected to the 1993 Warrington bombs claimed by the Provisional IRA. The claim seems to be based solely on some circumstantial similarities between the Harrods bomb, whose co-perpetrator, Patrick Hayes, had been a Red Action member; it is pure speculation, with absolutely no evidence. Because this speculation was mentioned
in a Wikipedia article,
David Aaronovitch raised it in a tweet in the wake of the Gilligan story (see footnote 1 on the role of Wikipedia in this story, see footnote 2 for whether the Warrington speculation has an plausibility).
Unlike Harrods and Ramsgate, there were victims in Warrington, so if they were involved this would add weight to the case against Red Action. However, in relation to Corbyn, this story simply adds another degree of separation and speculation. Corbyn may have had links to the Provisional IRA, but not via Red Action.
Conclusion
Having looked at this fairly thoroughly now, whatever grains of truth in Gilligan's account are heavily diluted by half-truths and falsehoods. I am not making this point to defend Corbyn, but to defend truth. If Corbyn is to be indicted, let it be for things he actually did.
Red Action's legacy is a mixed one. Its support for the physical force form of Irish Republicanism is highly problematic, and the fact that some of its members were passionate enough about this to get drawn into the P.IRA's terrorism accentuates this. On the other hand, Red Action did more than any other group to defeat the violent fascists who were a significant presence in England up until the mid-1990s, and should be celebrated for this. It is important to remember that far right activists murdered or inspired the murders of several black people in Britain in that period, regularly physically attacked left-wing paper sales, and sold openly Nazi material in public; Red Action and AFA curtailed this.
Red Action's politics were contemptuous of the form of leftism Corbyn represented. Like Orwell, they derided "sandal-wearing", pacifist, do-gooding leftists. They accused the Labour Party of having abandoned working class communities. I don't agree these days with Paul Stott (a former AFA activist who has
written about Red Action academically), but this thread captures the relationship between RA and JC well:
1. A footnote on Wikipedia
The pro-Corbyn alt-media has of course also been keen to debunk any relationship between Red Action and Jezza, including alt-left conspiracy-mongers
The Canary, blogger
Tim Fenton of Zelo Street and
George Galloway. They have drawn attention to the role of Wikipedia in this, suggesting some kind of co-ordinated smear against Corbyn involving the Murdoch press and Wikipedia editors.
It is true that after Gilligan wrote about Red Action, someone edited the Red Action page to mention the article, and that this occurred before Aaronovitch tweeted. But this is easily explained by the fact that people who edit Wikipedia might be looking at pages relating to stuff in the news. More Corbyn defenders than Corbyn attackers have been editing the relevant pages since this event, presumably not as part of a co-ordinated action but because they care about what Wikipedia says. This paranoid narrative about co-ordinated smears seems to have attached itself to Wikipedia in the last four months, with George Galloway and his followers promoting various bizarre and elaborate fantasies about GCHQ or Murdoch newspapers directing Wikipedia edits (Galloway offered a £1000 reward for the identity of one Wikipedia editor). This kind of conspiricism is a feature of too much of the pro-Corbyn internet, and makes it harder, not easier, to disentangle truths from smears in the media frenzy around JC.
2. A footnote on the "IRA"
Gilligan, and many of those who talk about Corbyn's IRA connections, use the word "IRA" rather sloppily. The term is used for a number of different organisations. In particular,
the organisation known as the IRA from 1922 onwards split in 1969
between
The Official IRA (OIRA), the remainder of the IRA after the 1969 split with the Provisionals; was primarily Marxist in its political orientation. It is now inactive in the military sense, while its political wing, Official Sinn Féin, became the Workers' Party of Ireland.
The Provisional IRA (PIRA) broke from the OIRA in 1969 over abstentionism and how to deal with the increasing violence in Northern Ireland. Although opposed to the OIRA's Marxism, it came to develop a left-wing orientation and increasing political activity. (Wikipedia)
The Official IRA was initially the larger of the two IRAs, although the P.IRA soon outgrew it, and was often called "the Stickies", due to the stick-on lillies they sold on Easter Sunday; the P.IRA is more often known as "the Provos". The Stickies were less engaged in armed struggle (and mainly directed violence at the British military, rather than civilian targets), particularly after declaring a ceasefire in 1972.
The INLA was a breakaway from the O.IRA that opposed the ceasefire, and one former Red Action member,
Liam Heffernan, was involved in planning a foiled INLA terror campaign (convicted on the evidence of
a paid informant turned MI5 agent), and Red Action probably had closer links with the political wing of the INLA than with either of the IRA wings. Heffernan is mentioned in the Gilligan piece as another indictment of Red Action, although it is unlikely other RA members knew of Heffernan's INLA connections, and inconceivable that Corbyn might have.
The point to take away is that when Gilligan and his ilk throw the term "IRA" around without qualifying who they are referring to, they show their ignorance of the complexity of the Troubles, and their lack of credibility in reporting on this.
3. A footnote on the Warrington bombs
I think there are lots of reasons to be doubtful about the speculation about Warrington. Hayes himself couldn't have carried out the Warrington bombs - the perpetrators of the first Warrington bomb, in February, were caught, and Hayes was already in prison when the second one occurred in March. So the speculation is that he was somehow "connected" to it, e.g. was part of the supply chain for the explosives, or that it was someone "like Hayes", i.e. another Red Action member. In fact, it is unclear if Hayes was actually a "member" of the P.IRA, if the campaign Harrods was part of was "sub-contracted" to him (a very unusual practice in P.IRA history - they were extremely paranoid about infiltration) or if he was working in their name and under their influence without being a formal operative (much as many terror actions are carried out by "self-radicalised" individuals in the name of ISIS who are not actually ISIS "members"). Hayes had a large quantity of weaponry in his flat when arrested, which has very rarely happened with actual P.IRA operatives, who would not take that risk. He was already known to police because of his work with AFA, so it would be risky to use his active service too widely. All his other actions were in the London area. He
confessed at his trial to incidents in the London area he was not charged with, yet never mentioned Warrington. All in all, the association between Hayes or Red Action and Warrington is completely tenuous.
4. A footnote on Republicanism in the London left
As noted above, support for one or another form of Republican militancy was not unusual in the London left in this period, especially in parts of London where there was a large Irish community, such as Corbyn's Islington (then only at the beginning of the gentrification that has remade it as a middle class area). Even Peckham's Harriet Harman, for example, can be
seen here engaging with the Communist-dominated Connolly Association, which maintained links with both P.IRA and O.IRA, and the Association and the Labour Committee on Ireland successfully lobbied for Labour Party support for Irish unification. Rubber bullets, a covered up shoot to kill, miscarriages of justice, the daily persecution of Catholics in Belfast and Irish migrants in London all contributed to a sense of solidarity from many on the left for the cause, if less so for the tactics - and the escalation of terrorism against mainland security targets in the early 1990s did a lot to erode that support.
The Troops Out Movement was one of the more broad-based pro-Republican groups, which didn't explicitly support armed struggle. I remember attending their London march in around 1991, probably one of the
annual Bloody Sunday commemorations, which were supported by a range of other Irish groups and well attended. By the later 1990s, I had turned against all forms of nationalism, but did, as part of AFA, help steward a couple of these kinds of events, as they were regularly subject to fascist violence. For example, over 300 fascists were arrested
attacking the 1993 march. The obverse, intimacy between the English far right and armed Ulster Loyalism in this period, is also now little remembered. This context is vital for understanding Corbyn and McDonnell's politics.
Bob's beats
Marxish
Marxish
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