JEREMY CORBYN made an impassioned call for peace and solidarity with refugees at the Morning Star Christmas rally on Wednesday night.

Linking the refugee crisis to British wars, he said: “The biggest criticism I got as Labour leader was for giving an apology for the Iraq war.”

The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria had made the world “a more dangerous place. The real issues — poverty, environmental destruction, exploitation, racism and discrimination — are not going to be solved with F16 bombs.”

Thousands of people watched the virtual rally which heard Morning Star reporter Bethany Rielly talk on the appalling treatment of asylum-seekers by the Tory government and its determination to deport 1,000 people by the end of the year.

And Unite chief of staff Andrew Murray said we should not forget the achievements of the Corbyn era.

The 2017 election, when Labour got its biggest vote share increase since 1945 on a socialist platform, was being written out of history, he warned.

“The worst thing you can do is give the ruling class a fright and not overthrow it.

“We gave the Establishment a shock and they don’t want that again,” he said, pointing to the purges occurring as Labour seeks to expunge Mr Corbyn’s legacy.

“By one count 25 radical Jewish socialists are presently suspended from labour.

“You can’t discuss the EHRC [Equality and Human Rights Commission]. You can’t discuss IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance].

“You can’t discuss Jeremy’s suspension and you can’t discuss the fact you can’t discuss this.”

Mr Murray said the left needed to unite in defence of democracy and free speech and for the policies of Labour under Mr Corbyn that had been vindicated by the experience of Britain during the pandemic.

Former Crewe and Nantwich MP Laura Smith, whom Mr Murray said should have been Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary rather than Sir Keir Starmer, whose second referendum manoeuvring did such damage, pointed out that Labour’s 2017 and 2019 manifestos had many of the answers to the issues raised by Covid-19 — “public ownership, public broadband, state investment, a green industrial revolution.”

Former Morning Star industrial correspondent Mick Costello praised the Corbyn movement’s revival of popular interest in politics and pointed to an uptick in industrial militancy by trade unions as grounds for optimism, while sports editor Kadeem Simmonds highlighted the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on the sporting world and the way sport is influencing politics, with footballer Marcus Rashford doing more to hold the government to account on feeding children than the official opposition.

Multiple speakers praised the paper’s wide coverage of sport, literature and art, with Morning Star ambassador Maxine Peake describing its cultural coverage as “second to none.”

Mr Corbyn said he made sure not to miss the Frosty’s Ramblings column and pointed to the importance of reading the Morning Star even when disagreeing with it, as he said he sometimes did with Mat Coward’s gardening column, “having radical gardening ideas of my own.”

“It should not be called the Morning Star,” Mr Corbyn concluded, “but the Daily Miracle.”

The Morning Star Christmas rally is available to watch on our Facebook page at mstar.link/MStarXmasRally.