You may be wondering why the Tories and their cheerleaders in the British mainstream media are so angry with Jeremy Corbyn over his response to the Salisbury chemical weapons attack. In this article I'm going to briefly outline some of the main reasons.
Russian funding of the Tory party
The first reason the Tories are incandescent with rage is that Corbyn dared to raise the £820,000+ that has been pumped into Tory coffers since Theresa May became Prime Minister, including £30,000 just a few weeks ago for the wife of a former Putin government minister to buy access to the current Tory defence secretary Gavin Williamson.
The Tories hate that Corbyn has landed such a telling political blow, but all they can do in response is resort to profoundly hypocritical displays of synthetic outrage.
Just weeks ago the Tories and their mates in the mainstream media whipped up a massive storm over ludicrous and libellous allegations that Corbyn had been a Czech spy that were based on a single unreliable and repeatedly discredited source who was such a fantasist that he also claimed to have founded Live Aid.
Given the furore they created over the ridiculous Czech spy nonsense, it's impossible to imagine the Tories not making a massive fuss had it been Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party that had taken vast amounts of Russian cash, and even allowed the wife of a Putin crony to buy access to Labour's shadow defence secretary, rather than them.
But then a propensity for extreme displays of hypocrisy is an essential component of the Tory psyche isn't it?
Magnitsky powers
The next big reason the Tories are furious with Corbyn's stance is that he's been putting pressure on the government to adopt so-called Magnitsky powers to blacklist Russian oligarchs and stop them flooding the UK with their dark money.
The Tories are incandescent with rage over this because they see this flow of dark Russian money as a valuable income stream, both for their political party, and for their reckless gambler mates in the City of London.
Not only would Magnitsky powers harm the flow of Russian dark money into the City of London, it would also create problems for members of some of the brutal and repressive regimes the Tories adore, like the Saudi Arabian tyrants who are committing war crimes and acts of genocide in Yemen.
If new rules are introduced to bar people who are complicit in human rights abuses because of pressure from Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party, tyrants like Crown Prime Bin Salman could be banned from even entering the UK.
International law
Another reason the Tories are furious with Corbyn is the way he's insisting that the UK government should abide by international law by providing samples of the nerve agent used in the attack.
Corbyn has also called for the Tories to make a formal request for evidence from the Russian government under Article 9.2 of the Chemical Weapons Convention, and asked whether the Tories have ensured that High Resolution Trace Analysis has been conducted on the nerve agent so as to establish the location it was produced in.
The apparent reason the Tories hate this evidence-seeking approach from Corbyn, and don't want to abide by the norms of international law is that they want to adopt the hot air and bluster approach to the situation, rather than taking the appropriate actions if the objective was to actually catch the culprit(s) and bring them to justice.
Arrogance
Aside from these three specific reasons (raising Russian donations to the Tory party, calling for Magnitsky powers, and demanding respect for international law) there's one crucial underlying factor without which their synthetic outrage displays would be worthless.
The reason the Tories and the right-wing political commentariat are acting like this is that they know millions of people are naive headline-reading half-wits who simply believe what they're told without checking the details for themselves.
The Tories know that nobody who checked the details of what Corbyn has actually been saying could find fault with his condemnation of the attacks, his criticism of all the Russian cash sloshing around in the Tory party, his call for tougher measures to keep Russian dark money out of the UK, or his demand that the UK government respect international law rather than going for Theresa May's "hot air and bluster" approach.
But they also know that if they resort to outright lies about how Corbyn is "soft" on the Russians (when he's actually calling for the Tories to be much tougher on Russian dark money than they intend to be), their chums in the mainstream media will regurgitate their lies, and millions of naive headline-reading dupes will mindlessly absorb this Orwellian reality-reversing propaganda and believe it as if it's the truth.
Aside from the numerous practical reasons for them to resort to this barrage of lies, the underlying fact is that they resort to bombarding the public with reality-reversing lies because they're arrogant enough to think they'll get away with it.
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