Rebecca Long-Bailey’s sacking has exposed the weakness of the Corbynites yet again

The former education secretary not only showed she did not understand the meaning of ‘zero tolerance’, but misjudged the strength of her position – and the faction that sustained it

The Corbyn true believers have chosen the wrong issue on which to make their last stand. They are protesting against the sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey as shadow education secretary for refusing to condemn an interview that has been disowned by the interviewee herself.

Thus they reveal not only that Keir Starmer was right to sack her, because she does not understand what zero tolerance of antisemitism means, but that they are powerless to do anything about it. They cannot hope to fight back on ground as weak as that.

There is no need to rehearse the arguments over Maxine Peake’s interview with The Independent, because Peake herself has said “I was inaccurate in my assumption” that a US police officer had learnt to kneel on George Floyd’s neck from the Israeli secret services. Yet that is precisely what Long-Bailey’s defenders seek to do, insisting that there is a connection between police brutality in different places around the world.

Long-Bailey came close to repeating this argument to the Mirror this morning: “There is a valid concern about police practices across the world and I don’t think that, worded in the right way, it’s racist or antisemitic to draw attention to that.”

Which is anodyne enough – but it wasn’t “worded in the right way”, as Peake accepted.

What Peake appeared to do in her interview was to insist that everything she didn’t like in the world is connected: capitalism, police brutality and the treatment of the Palestinians by the Israeli state. The problem with an ideology like that is that it encourages people to make connections where there are none. Why on earth would you need to mention Israel at all in explaining why a police officer in Minneapolis used excessive force on a black man? And why would you fail to see that, by mentioning Israel in such a sentence, you might be inciting prejudice against Jews?

Peake, to her credit, has seen that – but Long-Bailey and her defenders have failed to do so. Long-Bailey’s tweet, praising Peake as an “absolute diamond” and linking to the interview, was still accessible as this column was written.

It was Long-Bailey’s ideological refusal to compromise that doomed her. If she had deleted her tweet and apologised, as Starmer asked, he could not have sacked her – which puts paid to another conspiracy theory: that Starmer was looking for an excuse to purge his leadership rival.

But she wouldn’t do it, showing poor judgement not just of how others might interpret “zero tolerance of antisemitism”, but of the strength of her position and of the faction that supports her. Her defenders continue to insist that Starmer’s decision was an overreaction, but John McDonnell, Len McCluskey, Jon Lansman, Ian Lavery, Jon Trickett and Owen Jones have all exposed their impotence by calling for Long-Bailey to be reinstated.

They know it is pointless, but they can’t think of what else to do. Their group ran the Labour Party a few short months ago, with a supposed iron grip that prompted a lot of ill-informed commentary about how hard it would be to prise the apparatus out of their hands. But all it took was the party democracy that they venerated while they were winning: Starmer defeated Long-Bailey by a two-to-one margin among the party members who had given Corbyn and his clique their power.

The only power bases that could constrain Starmer would be the party members or Labour MPs, and the Corbynite purists are in a minority in both. Many party members may think that Starmer is a bit “right wing” for their taste, but they voted for him because he promised unity and they think he can win. Hence the Corbynite complaint that Starmer is putting unity at risk, which was repeated in a coded way by Long-Bailey when she spoke to Pippa Crerar of the Mirror: “The only way that we’ll win a general election is by being unified as a party; that’s why it’s so important for me to make the choice not to be critical about the way I might have been treated.”

But if unity conflicts with a policy of zero tolerance of antisemitism, insincere appeals to unity are going to lose out. Equivocating on antisemitism is not the way for Corbynites to persuade party members to turn against Starmer.

It was a striking coincidence that yesterday Jim McMahon, shadow transport secretary and a Starmer loyalist, confirmed the policy of renationalising the railways. It is a meaningless totem, as the important bits of the railways are already in the public sector – and even Tony Blair as leader of the opposition was formally committed to public ownership – but putting another lick of paint on the stick will reassure members for whom the “radical” economic policies of the 2017 manifesto are so important (the 2019 version tends to be quietly forgotten).

As long as Starmer has the membership and the MPs behind him, Long-Bailey’s defenders are fighting a losing battle on the wrong battleground.