Jeremy Corbyn is right about Russia

It’s not every day you find yourself thinking that, well, Jeremy Corbyn has a point, but that’s just how I felt when he wrote in yesterday’s Guardian and reiterated later that the Government was ‘rushing way ahead of the evidence’ in condemning Russia for the attack on Sergei Skripal. Yesterday he observed that ‘this horrific event demands..painstaking criminal investigation…to rush way ahead of the evidence being gathered by the police in a fevered parliamentary atmosphere, serves neither justice nor our national security.’ I don’t think he was being treasonous in suggesting that Russia should have been given more time to respond, and possibly a sample of the toxin to analyse. He didn’t say the Government was wrong; he simply said it was precipitate.

It’s difficult, in fact, to gainsay his analysis, that ‘either this was a crime authored by the Russian state; or that state has allowed these deadly toxins to slip out of the control it has an obligation to exercise.