None Must Be Left

The expulsion of the rightly delighted Jo Bird is yet another sign that there has never been a more dangerous time to be a Jew in the Labour Party. Indeed, until now, there has never been any dangerous time to be a Jew, as such, in the Labour Party. But now, Jews are five times more likely than average to be suspended or expelled. They are anti-Semitic, you see. Yes, really.

This is part of a general proscription and purge, for the first time ever, not of Trotskyist entryism, nor of Communist fellow-travelling, but of the views that are definitive of the Labour Left, simply as the left wing, any left wing, of the Labour Party. Tony Blair never did that.

Under Keir Starmer, however, there must be no remaining Labour Party member who opposed permanent austerity at home and forever war abroad, and who fought instead for economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends. There must be no one who even regarded that as a legitimate point of view. Starmer honestly imagines that these very highly politicised people will then just go away.

Not that it is all one way traffic, I suppose. Ben Wood is not going to win North Shropshire, but the point is that he has slid effortlessly from being Owen Paterson's intern to being a "Special Adviser" (on what?) to Labour's Leader and Chief Whip in the House of Lords, and then on at 26 to this, his first parliamentary candidacy, but not his last.

Has he changed his mind politically? Has anyone asked? At best, he would no doubt tell us that, "The party left me." That never, ever leads to the follow-up question, "Yes, that may have been why you left your old party, but why have you joined this one?" Five Conservative MPs got away with that one as they defected to Labour in the Blair years, in one case the night before Gordon Brown became Prime Minister.

Brown rapidly made Quentin Davies a Minister for the first time in his life, but he had been elected as a Conservative MP at all five of the 1987, 1992, 1997, 2001 and 2005 General Elections, and he had served in the Shadow Cabinets of Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard. The party had taken an awfully long time to leave him.