For months leftist analysts have been warning that the increasingly hysterical anti-Russia narratives being aggressively promoted by the western media would eventually be used to target the political left. Those warnings went largely unheeded in the United States where the Russiagate narrative was being ostensibly used to undermine the Trump administration, and the McCarthyite feeding frenzies which have become normalized for American audiences have now metastasized across the pond to the UK.

As a result, the Poms have now quickly found themselves in a political environment where anyone who remembers the Blair government's lies about Iraq is smeared as a "useful idiot", a private British citizen can be falsely labeled a Kremlin bot by a mainstream publication without retraction or apology, and a BBC reporter can admonish a veteran military analyst for giving a truthful analysis about the alleged Douma chemical attacks on the grounds that it could hurt the "information war" against Russia.

And now, in what is undeniably a whole new level of Russophobic shrillness, Russia is being blamed for the gains made last year by Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party.

According to a tweet from The Sunday Times, tomorrow's headline will read, in all seriousness, "Exposed: Russians tried to swing election for Corbyn". According to the text in the preview, the Times has allegedly found evidence that Russian bots have been retweeting publicly available posts supporting Labour and criticizing the Tories. Not creating fake news, not even circulating articles from RT or Sputnik, but retweeting conventional, publicly available political commentary.

This would be the same publisher, by the way, whose expertise on Russian Twitter "disinformation" recently led to a false allegation against an antiwar Finnish grandmother in an article about Kremlin trolls.

Tomorrow's Times front page features Corbyn against a red background in very much the same way the BBC superimposed his image in Soviet-looking garb against a red-colored Kremlin skyline last month, with a red Twitter logo plainly intended to evoke Cold War memories of the USSR flag. They're intentionally calling up old, generational fears of communists to smear a leftist politician as a Kremlin tool. It's about as subtle as a kick in the throat.