Sir Keir needs to kick out Corbyn for good
The suspension of Jeremy Corbyn is not Sir Keir Starmer’s Clause 4 moment – yet. For a start, Tony Blair chose that battle; Sir Keir had Mr Corbyn thrust upon him. In the run-up to the publication of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report on anti-semitism in the Labour Party, it is said that Mr Corbyn was reassured that no action would be taken against him personally. Sources close to Sir Keir deny this and it would have been very strange. The EHRC’S report concluded that the office of Mr Corbyn broke the law, so why on Earth wouldn’t the man in charge of that office be held to account?
No, it was not Sir Keir who put Mr Corbyn in the dock. Mr Corbyn did, on Thursday morning, by issuing a paranoid, narcissistic statement of denial that even Sir Keir could not ignore, suggesting that anti-semitism had been exaggerated by his enemies. Now Mr Corbyn has been suspended from the party and lost the whip, yet Sir Keir still equivocates in a lawyerly fashion: Mr Corbyn’s future will be left up to an investigation and Sir Keir declines to comment on the process. This is ridiculous. Either, as he states, Labour has a zero-tolerance policy towards anti-semitism or it does not. Either Mr Corbyn said something totally unacceptable or he did not. Which is it?
Labour is not sure how to deal with Mr Corbyn because he is not just a bug in their system, he is a feature. The party is awash with thousands of activists who joined to support him; the backbenches are dotted with Corbynites; the head of Unite, Labour’s biggest donor, has called the suspension a “grave injustice”; and Sir Keir himself served in Mr Corbyn’s shadow cabinet for three years.
The moral confusion was articulated by deputy leader Angela Rayner, who said her former boss was “a fully decent man” albeit with “an absolute blind spot and a denial” when it comes to antiSemitism. This is an unintelligent, glaring contradiction, and it embarrasses every MP who tries to live with it.
Sir Keir needs to kick out Mr Corbyn for good. If the far Left wants to follow him into the wilderness, let them: Labour will never be electable so long as it pretends that these extremists inhabit the same moral universe as the rest of us. There really is only one course of action open to Sir Keir, and either he takes it now or he misses a chance both to do the right thing and to look like a serious leader.