BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN

As Guido pointed out yesterday morning, John McDonnell yesterday claimed he didn’t know that hammer and sickle and pro-Assad flags were flying above his head as he addressed a May Day rally – despite standing just yards away from them. McDonnell was asked if he knew the flags were in his vicinity as he spoke: “No, of course I didn’t know” he told BBC Radio’s Nick Robinson on the Today Programme.

Of course, McDonnell could have asked Jeremy Corbyn, who attended the same May Day March last year, about possible dodgy photo-shots with Communist flags:

At the time of the May Day 2016 march, Jeremy Corbyn was accused of keeping ‘controversial company’ after marchers on the May Day rally were seen carrying Stalin banners.

The Labour leader, thought to be the first in 50 years to address the event, insisted his party was ‘absolutely against’ anti-Semitism and other forms of racism. But it was pointed out to Corbyn at the time that the presence of communist marchers bearing flags with images of the Soviet dictator and quotes would have given the Jewish community ‘no comfort at all’. Josef Stalin sent hundreds of thousands of citizens, many of them Jews, to the deadly Gulag prison camps.

Or McDonnell could hark back to his old comrade, Redmond O’Neill’s funeral in London in 2009. The late Mr O’Neill had his coffin draped by Labour comrades in a communist flag and even had a hammer and sickle wreath placed up alongside it:

He could ask his Shadow Cabinet colleague Diane Abbott, who was there, standing in front of the coffin, delivering a tribute:

Or Ken Livingstone, for whom he worked at the GLC, who was tearful in his address:

On the Today Programme yesterday, McDonnell went on to excuse his ignorance about the presence of a communist flag behind him by blaming the flag on the fact the May Day rally was organised by unions. As if Labour do not have close ties with the unions and share the same roots.

Say, Jeremy Corbyn speaking at this Durham Miners’ Gala (from 02:00) in 2015 alongside Labour’s UNITE comrade Len McCluskey and ASLEF’s firebrand leader Tosh McDonald (who calls Corbyn the Messiah):

The same Durham Miners who are not afraid of marching – who are not afraid of honesty – with their political roots on public display for all to see:

In summary, Mr McDonnell, we don’t believe you, or Labour.

You feel as comfortable in proximity to the hammer and sickle as you do to Mao’s Little Red Book. You knew those flags were there. Your rabble-rousing, subversive communist sympathies are exposed and transparent to British voters. No wonder the Communist Party of Great Britain will not put up any candidates against you or Labour.

Why not just come clean? Be honest. Admit that you’re a Communist.

Each day that passes it becomes clearer that the only reason Labour ever got to power in the nineties was by pretending to be the Conservative Party. Now the cat’s out of the bag, Labour is exposed and has nowhere to go. Electable, Centrist, Blairite Labour is a blip in Labour’s past. There’s nothing British about communism and there never will be – the Labour of John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t stand a chance against the common sense of the British Electorate. Karl Marx was wrong on most things – when he wrote that “the Capitalists would sell us the rope to hang them with” he was clearly just having a laugh.

Let us hope that on June 8th the final nail is driven into Labour’s Communist, Capitalist-hating, Britain-hating, IRA-sympathising coffin. That a decent opposition rises and rejects this far left-wing ideology of fools.