Why Jeremy Corbyn's Terror Scandal Won't Rock His Base

Jeremy Corbyn has spent the past week answering questions about what he was doing pictured holding a wreath for the victims of the 1985 bombing of the Palestine Liberation Organisation in Tunis, but suspiciously near the graves of two people involved in the 1972 Munich Massacre, when 11 Israeli athletes were murdered.

On Monday, he flim-flammed, saying: "I was present when it was laid, I don't think I was actually involved in it." LBC's James O'Brian thought this was a brazen, Trumpian nadir, tweeting: "Today seems to have been Jeremy Corbyn's 'I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue & shoot somebody & I wouldn’t lose voters,' moment. Let's hope that his 'base' has more intellectual integrity than Trump's. I still can't quite believe that I'm far from sure it does."

It said as much about just how out of touch the media can be as it did about the Labour leader. Corbyn was lying, badly, in an attempt to put out a gathering press inferno with a water pistol. Trump, on the other hand, was joking that he could murder people and not lose votes. Those two things are not the same. Corbyn and Trump are similar in that they're symptoms of disaffection with the political norm. They both have a belligerent attitude to media scrutiny. It's around there that the similarities end.

But if the media want to make comparisons with Trump, maybe a bit of introspection would help. While comparisons between the actual politics of Trump and Corbyn are specious horseshoe theory nonsense, the media is reacting similarly to Corbyn as the US press did to Trump.

Before his election, journalists tried again and again to end Trump with scandals. How could anyone possibly vote for a man who alienated seemingly almost everyone with any number of vile comments? Surely the next revelation will wipe him out, they thought.

And yet, to the disbelief of the liberal establishment, the insurgency grew. This failure to understand the political situation was mirrored in the Hilary campaign, which made the bold offer to the disaffected American people: "I'm not a racist." And so Trump won.

There was a similar moment this week when Sky News ran footage of Labour supporters queuing for an appearance of Jeremy Corbyn in Stoke, following the wreath-laying revelations. None of his supporters were phased. "He's won the Nobel peace prize! The man is all about peace," says one woman, presumably confusedly referring to the less prestigious Séan McBridge Peace Prize.

Sky News correspondent Lewis Goodall tweeted: "Big turnout for Jeremy Corbyn event in Stoke. Over 400 activists. Every one we spoke to agreed: Corbyn is being smeared, Labour does not have a problem with anti-Semitism and that the whole thing is largely concocted by the media and Tories. His base is completely solid… The sense of belief (and how it manifests) is staggering – the only thing I can think of which comes close, is the relationship Trump has with his base."

Whether anyone who follows this stuff should be staggered by the nature of Corbyn's support base nearly three years into his leadership of the Labour Party is an open question. But for those who truly just can't believe that these idiots are still attracted to a politician who at least offers them some sort of hope – even when the much-loved and respected media tell you that he is in fact a massive jerk – let's try to break it down.

The Corbyn terror story is supposed to be a classic gotcha: the family-man MP brought down by screengrabs of sexts to a teenager; the parsimonious minister enjoying lavish hospitality thanks to some corporate spivs. And now: the lily-livered peacenik found to be courting terrorists. What a hypocrite!

But it's not that – not really. Certainly, Corbyn's "man of peace" persona has made him a hostage to fortune. But this is in fact a politician who has had a very consistent foreign policy outlook having his behaviour policed by a moral rulebook he never signed up to.

That rulebook will give a relatively free pass to any atrocity, or any meeting with any dictator, so long as it's in the "national interest". Last month, Trump visited Britain, May kowtowed and the discussion was about the US President's lack of diplomatic decorum. Few questioned whether "our greatest ally" should have been welcomed at all for any number of affronts to humanity, but one person who did was Jeremy Corbyn.

To acknowledge this is to run the risk of engaging in "whataboutery". On Wednesday, #WeStandWithCorbyn started trending on Twitter. While some of the tweets were anti-Semitic and conspiratorial, others simple statements of faith in Corbyn, many belittled the issue, comparing it to various political wrongdoings: "Arm child killers and terrorist supporting countries and nobody bats an eye lid. Lay a wreath at a memorial and people lose their fucking minds. Welcome to the British press and the state of politics in the UK! #WeStandWithCorbyn."

This is somewhat dodgy territory. It elides what Corbyn is supposed to have done. Whataboutery can end with a kind of ethical one down-manship, where politicians are judged not by the morality of their actions, but the immorality of everyone else in comparison. For a politician, it is the perfect way to evade a question. "Sure, I may have drowned your dog, but did you know factory farming kills millions of animals and can be linked to climate change? So what's your problem?"

This kind of moral relativism is part of the problem in the first place. Corbyn's own rulebook – the anti-Imperialism of idiots – can allow for "my enemy's enemy is my friend" – hanging out with bad guys if they're enemies of the real bad guys: the Babylon that is the American Empire.

There's also a particular concern that whataboutery could lead to Labour's anti-Semitism scandal being dismissed on the basis that the Tories have an Islamophobia problem, so they're pretty much quits. That badly needs to be avoided. The scandals are distinct, real and do not cancel each other out. Does Labour have an anti-Semitism problem that it needs to deal with? Yes. Does Jeremy Corbyn have questions to answer about past events that he has attended, and the people he was associating himself with by being there? Also yes.

That said, as the scandal is interpreted through the lenses of Corbynite anti-establishment feeling via Westminster-bubble hackery and politicking, the ethics begin to look less clear.

For all that the Corbyn "cult" thing exists, Corbynistas are savvier than they get credit for, insofar as they understand what the press refuses to acknowledge: that politics is not a question simply of principles, but also of conflict. It's not that this stuff can be dismissed as mere "selective outrage", but that in the Westminster bubble at least, outrage does tend to be selective.

When Home Secretary Sajid Javid said, "If this was the leader of any other major political party, he or she would be gone by now," he was explicitly inviting a comparison. So of course people are going to weigh his words against the foreign policy of the Conservative government, which has approved the sale of £320 million of arms to Israel since 2014 – including parts for sniper rifles that may have been used to shoot civilians.

The sighs of condescension that anyone might engage with such moral relativism come heavy from a pundit class who are obsessed with the narrow cynicism of "electability" and all the grim compromise that entails, and who only indulge the possibility of political agency beyond the two big parties when it means indulging the "legitimate concerns" of racists. It's possible to conceive of a politics that doesn't need to invest so much in the values and transgressions of a small number of individuals, but that kind of thing isn't as good sport as hoisting an old duffer by his petard. A more transformative kind of politics is overlooked in favour of these simplistic tales of hypocrites and fools.

If you want to move towards a more ethical form of politics, you have to actually offer it, otherwise you're engaged in the same sort of dangerous moral nihilism that you accuse others of flirting with.

@SimonChilds13