John McDonnell apologises profusely on Question Time for comments praising IRA - Politics live

I posted the quotes from John McDonnell containing his two apologies earlier. (See 10.30pm.)

Here are the other key quotes.

• McDonnell said that Jeremy Corbyn told him after the Battle of Britain service that he normally does sing the national anthem, but that this time he was lost in thought.

I said afterwards ‘why didn’t you sing?’ and he said ‘actually I normally do’, but it was quite a moving event and he was casting his mind back to the war…the national anthem isn’t just for those who are monarchists, it’s for everyone and it represents the whole country and that’s why people sing it.

• He said that Labour under Corbyn would be happy to raise the top rate of income tax to just 50p in the pound.
  

On income tax it isn’t an issue for us. The Tories reduced it from fifty to forty-five and we’d like to just go back to the fifty. We think that’s reasonable.

• He said Labour was not advocating withdrawal from Nato.

This is from STV’s Stephen Daisley, but others are making the same point.

Here are some tweets from the Corbyn campaign about the programme.

Salmond says that, under our current policy, if the little Syrian boy had not died, he would have been turned away as an asylum seeker. That can’t be right, he says.

McDonnell says it was only a month ago that David Cameron was describing refugees as a swarm. But attitudes changed enormously after the death of the young boy.

A year ago he and Jeremy Corbyn were at the Home Office asking for Britain to take more Syrian refugees. At that point only around 100 had been accepted, he says.

He says the government should be taking more Syrian refugees.

Nigel Dodds, the DUP leader in Westminster, has responded to McDonnell’s IRA apology. He suggests it is not truly sincere, and does not go far enough.

And this tweet, with an excerpt from what McDonnell said about IRA violence in 2003, is being retweeted a lot.

This is what some journalists are saying about John McDonnell’s performance so far.

There are more women in work than ever before, says Truss.

But they are paid 21% less, says McDonnell.

Women are not in top positions in the shadow cabinet, Truss says.

But more than 50% of its members are women, says McDonnell.

The excellent BBC Question Time Twitter feed has posted what John McDonnell said about his 2003 IRA remarks at the time.

A member of the audience says she thinks McDonnell will say anything to try to win people over.

McDonnell says he understands why people are sceptical of politicians. There are too many career politicians.

Q: But you are one yourself? And you will say things that people want to hear, even if they are not true?

McDonnell says that he supports the right to recall MPs.

And he says that he wants to extend democracy. There should be more of it in the workplace, he says.

Tim Stanley asks McDonnell to explain why he talked about the British occupation of Ireland. But Britain did not occupy Northern Ireland. It is as British as Surrey.

And he said the bombs and bullets contributed to peace in Northern Ireland. Does he still think that?

McDonnell says he supports peace. He has been involved in groups campaigning for peace. He says he had to use the language that Republicans understood to secure the path for peace. But it was worth it, because now people are not dying in Northern Ireland, he says.

McDonnell says Labour wants to put the top rate of tax back up to 50p in the pound. But that is where it was a few years ago.

McDonnell says that he does not support withdrawal from Nato.

Salmond says printing money is not an extreme proposal. It is what the government has already been doing, under quantitative easing.

Here are two Tory MPs reacting to the McDonnell apology.

A member of the audience says McDonnell is an IRA terrorist sympathiser.

Dimbleby reads out the McDonnell quote.

McDonnell gives the explanation quoted earlier. See 10.30pm.

He explains in some detail that he was speaking at a time when people, like him, were encouraging the IRA to give up their weapons.

He says that it was a mistake to talk about honouring the IRA.

He has apologised many times, he says.

But, he says, if he helped to save one life, it would have been worth it.

But, if he gives offence, he apologises from the bottom of his heart.

Sandi Toksvig says she has not often heard politicians apologise. She commends McDonnell for what he said.

Q: How can you say you will be nice when you made that comment about assassinating Margaret Thatcher?

McDonnell gives the reply quoted earlier. It was an “appalling joke�?, he says.

But he takes up Stanley’s point. He says that he does not accept that Corbyn’s policies are extreme. It is not extreme to want to tackle the housing crisis.

Salmond says he finds the Telegraph (which Stanley writes for) extreme.

Salmond says he disagrees with Corbyn on some of his foreign policy stances. But he does not find his anti-austerity stance extreme.

Someone in the audience asks about the story about Labour MPs ringing Tim Farron up to discuss defection. David Dimbleby asks the audience member whether he believes that story. Dimbleby sounds sceptical.

Tim Stanley says he agrees with everything McDonnell said. Jeremy Corbyn sounds like a nice guy, he says. But he thinks that Labour’s policies are just too extreme for voters.

Question Time is coming from Wembley in London tonight.

As usual, the programme is pre-recorded.

And the BBC is reporting that John McDonnell used the programme to apologise “from the bottom of his heart�? for the comments he made about the IRA in 2003.

This is what McDonnell said in 2003.

It’s about time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle. It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of [hunger striker] Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table. The peace we have now is due to the action of the IRA.

Shadow chancellors do not normally appear on BBC Question Time, but we’re in an unusual era and tonight the nation will get its first proper chance to get the measure of John McDonnell, the leftwing backbencher who was catapulted from obscurity late on Sunday night into one of the most difficult jobs in politics when Jeremy Corbyn made him shadow chancellor.

According to Corbyn’s campaign team, he’s the people’s chancellor.

As if that was not enough of a draw, the panel also includes Alex Salmond, the former Scottish first minister. The other guests are Liz Truss, the environment secretary, Sandi Toksvig, the broadcaster and Women’s Equality party founder, and Tim Stanley, the journalist and historian.

I will be covering the programme starts at 10.35pm. I’ll be covering it in detail, bringing you reaction and analysis, and the best comment on Twitter, as well as summing up the news lines at the end.

If you want to follow me on Twitter, I’m on @AndrewSparrow.