So long, Long-bailey

Just a few months ago, Rebecca Long-bailey was considered a potential leader of the Labour Party. If anything, after December’s calamitous election result she was seen as the favourite: a hard-left supporter of Jeremy Corbyn who would carry the guttering flame of socialism forward to yet more defeats. Such was the grip of Momentum on Labour that her leadership pitch had a fighting chance of success until the members came to their senses and elected Sir Keir Starmer instead.

Miss Long-bailey’s talents were deployed by the new party leader as shadow education secretary, where she has singularly failed to make the case for children to return to the classroom, saying schools must only reopen “when safe”, despite a mountain of evidence to show that they are. She has sided with Labour councils and teaching unions, demonstrating the Left’s characteristic bias in favour of the producers of public services and disdain for their consumers, in this case children.

Now she has been sacked, not for incompetence but for the modern “offence” of retweeting a comment made by someone else and for which she is therefore considered vicariously culpable. The suggestion from the Corbynite actor Maxine Peake was that the restraining technique of kneeling on a suspect’s neck that led to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis was taught to the US police by the Israeli Defence Force.

This was deemed anti-semitic, not least because it isn’t true and feeds pernicious conspiracy theories. Given Labour’s recent experience with party members espousing this vile doctrine, Sir Keir was taking no chances and no prisoners. The fact that it enabled him to remove from his shadow cabinet one of the leading figures on the failed Corbynite hard Left is purely coincidental.