Why does the left still love communism?

The allegation that the Czechoslovak communist state tried to cultivate influence in the Eighties Labour Party is deadly serious. It’s important to remember why. Part of the imperialist Warsaw Pact, Czechoslovakia was a brutal dictatorship hell-bent on subverting Britain’s security. Contact with representatives of this regime would have been extremely unwise – and yet Jeremy Corbyn, who insists that claims made about his association with a man posing as a Czech diplomat are a smear, does not deny their meeting. “A cup of tea in the House of Commons,” is how Mr Corbyn’s spokesman described it.

In Prague, dissidents are commemorated with a line of bronze statues that appear to decay as they disappear into the horizon.

Why doesn’t the very memory of communism fill the hard Left with revulsion? They are quick to pounce on the historic errors of European empires or the United States. And yet, even when acknowledging its crimes, communism is treated with greater balance. Fidel Castro was a “champion of social justice” (Mr Corbyn). Mao Tse-tung “some people would judge  … did more good than harm” (Diane Abbott). “For all its brutalities and failures”, communism delivered “rapid industrialisation, mass education” (Seumas Milne, Mr Corbyn’s strategy and communications director).

There is in fact nothing good to say about communism. Nothing it accomplished economically or socially wasn’t achieved in the free world – and with far greater success and without the bloodshed.