Labour’s Deputy Leader Angela Rayner has accused Russia of previously carrying out a nuclear attack in Britain.
In an effort to defend former hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn’s apathy over the 2018 Salisbury Novichok incident — where Corbyn attempted to divert blame away from Moscow for poisonings attributed to Russian operatives by suggesting the government’s response should be “proportionate and based on clear evidence” — Rayner added to a growing collection of public blunders.
“This was about… if the Russian state had done that, which we were looking at facts at the time, we didn’t know that at the time. When we did find out about that, it was an absolute disgrace that President Putin thought he could come on UK soil and use weapons, nuclear weapons, in that way,” Rayner said, apparently mistaking the nerve agent for a nuclear bomb.
“It’s despicable that any nation thought they could come on foreign soil and use those types of weapons and it needed a strong, robust response,” Rayner continued, failing to correct herself.
As of the time of writing Rayner had still not corrected herself or clarified her position, despite facing widespread ridicule from members of the public on Twitter.
The Novichok poisonings took place near Salisbury Cathedral and are believed to have been a Moscow-sponsored assassination attempt on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal. He and his daughter Julia were both hospitalised as a result, along with a police officer.
While the trio survived, an unassociated member of the public, Dawn Sturgess, tragically died as a result of being exposed to the nerve agent later on.
During the interview with LBC Rayner also attempted to insist that Corbyn — who is stridently anti-war — would have supplied Ukraine with missiles as the Conservative government has done after being asked about a comment from Prime Minister Boris Johnson suggesting that a Corbyn-led Labour government would have been “running up the white flag” and caving in to “Putin’s blackmail”.
Labour MP Admits White Working Class Disadvantaged by Focus on Ethnic Minorities https://t.co/o3mrGmLXWa
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) January 5, 2018
Rayner also received political flak on the 16th of March from Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab, who highlighted Labour’s deputy leader having previously referred to Corbyn as a “very strong leader”.
“Can I just gently say to her that when she was campaigning as the rest of them were to make the member for Islington North [Corbyn] Prime Minister, this Prime Minister [Johnson] was Foreign Secretary, leading the response to the nerve agent attack on Salisbury”, Raab asserted.
“The suggestion she’s making is sheer nonsense. But if she wants to talk about national security then I remind her that she and her Shadow Cabinet colleagues not so long ago wanted the honourable member for Islington North… a man who wanted and talked about abolishing the Army, pulling out of Trident — she voted for that,” he continued.
“Has there ever been a more ridiculous, reckless, naive moment to call for unilateral nuclear disarmament and pulling out of NATO? A Labour government would put at risk our security. We’re doing everything we can to protect it.”
Corbyn has been suspended from the socialist Labour Party he used to lead by his successor, Sir Keir Starmer — who formerly served in Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet — for saying that the scale of anti-Semitism within the leftist party had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons”.
Johnson Announces Ukraine Cash Giveaway… After Denying Britons a Tax Cut https://t.co/igjCOTiFWY
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) February 2, 2022
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