Now purge the rest of this sickening cult

Jeremy Corbyn has been suspended from the Labour Party and had the whip removed. Anyone who ever supported this far-left deplorable should feel ashamed. Mr Corbyn’s meteoric rise – from obscure backbencher to party leader – was an indictment of a party gone mad, along with a Labour elite that, with a few honest exceptions, lost its courage and its moral compass.

Everyone knew what Mr Corbyn believed. As a backbencher, he called Hamas and Hizbollah “friends”, shared a platform with a plane hijacker, met with people convicted of IRA terrorism and was in the pay of Iranian state TV. During the 2019 general election, this newspaper called him an anti-semite, although he emphatically denied it. That year, he led his party to its worst defeat since 1935 – and yet, despite his obvious extremism and incompetence, he still won two leadership contests and, in the 2017 general election, came terrifyingly close to power thanks to a bungled Conservative campaign. Labour’s tolerance of Mr Corbyn put Britain in serious danger. The shameful treatment of the few moderates who spoke out – abused and driven from their own party – leaves a deep scar in our public life.

Yesterday, those critics were completely vindicated. The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report into anti-semitism in Labour found that the party broke the law on two key counts: harassment committed by two of its agents (including the disgraced Ken Livingstone) and political interference into the complaints procedure (it also found that the procedure itself was inadequate, along with training and sanctions). At best, Labour did not do enough to prevent anti-semitism. At worst, it “could be seen to accept it”.

The EHRC gave Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer a mountain of evidence and invited him to act, and, at first, it looked like he would limit himself to implementing the report’s procedural recommendations. But then Mr Corbyn published a statement so astonishingly wrong-headed that it could almost serve as his political epitaph: “One antiSemite is one too many,” Mr Corbyn wrote, “but the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media.” He added: “That combination hurt Jewish people.”

He said, in effect, that Jewish people who complained about anti-semitism had exaggerated the problem and hurt other Jewish people. Mr Corbyn was then suspended by Labour.

One of the most sickening things about the Corbyn cult was the halo of virtue that hung over him – the assumption that calling yourself a socialist is enough to make you a good person, a fantasy stoked by the celebrities and MPS who heralded the arrival of a kinder, gentler politics. In reality, the man they sang for at Glastonbury came from the fringe of the fringe, a hardcore of Seventies Marxists whose hatred of capitalism and Israel long ago tipped into the toleration, even articulation, of anti-semitic lies. Jewish Britons knew this. They had seen it so many times before. When they spoke up, Labour should have listened, but instead, leading MPS put them through the nightmare of Mr Corbyn’s leadership, campaigning to elect him as prime minister not just once, but twice.

Sir Keir was one of them, although he has finally done the right thing and should stick by it. If Mr Corbyn has been suspended for what he said, we can presume that he said it because he believed it – so there are likely no grounds for this appalling man’s reinstatement. The whip should be permanently removed.

And Sir Keir has to take a hard look at Mr Corbyn’s allies in the Commons, because a housecleaning would not only be the right thing to do but also politically intelligent. Past leaders have defined themselves by taking on the far-left, from Neil Kinnock’s war on Militant to Tony Blair’s revision of Clause 4 – and this is Sir Keir’s opportunity to do something similar. It is time to drive Corbynism out of the Labour Party altogether.

‘There are likely no grounds to reinstate this appalling man. The whip should be removed permanently’