Recently elected Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer has unceremoniously sacked Shadow Education Secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey from the Shadow Cabinet. The Left wing Long-Bailey retweeted and praised a Left wing actress called Maxine Peake, after Ms Peake promoted an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in an article in the Independent newspaper. In the article Ms Peake made a comment about Israel being behind the death of George Floyd in the USA, because Israel had allegedly trained US law enforcement. This is a comment and a viewpoint that is common in far left circles, but it is a viewpoint that could be deemed as anti-Semitic by some. But the main issue for Sir Keir was that it drew attention to Labour’s massive problem with Jew hatred, a problem that got worse during the term when Jeremy Corbyn led the Labour Party.

Under Corbyn the problem of Jew hatred became such an issue and was so poorly handled by Labour that it caused many British Jews (apart from the far far Left Jews for Jeremy lunatics) to withdraw support from the party. It’s my belief that Labour went down the route of seeing Jews or the ‘hidden hand’ of Jews behind every problem, partially because this particular flavour of Jew hatred has been a feature of the far Left for decades, at least since the New Left came to the fore in the late 1960’s. However I also believe that Labour gave somewhat of a free pass for Jew haters because Labour is particularly favoured as a party by Pakistani Muslims, many of whom do seem to be particularly prone as a group to Jew hatred and lurid anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

In order to distinguish his leadership from that of his predecessor Corbyn, Sir Keir needs to be seen to be different and Long-Bailey’s retweeting of the Peake article gave him an opportunity to do just that. It also gives Sir Keir the excuse to rid the Shadow Cabinet of a rabid Left winger. There may well be more going on here than just Sir Keir trying to rid the party of Jew haters, something that I believe may be difficult as there are now so many of them both secular far leftist activists and those who hate Jews for Islamic religious reasons.

Sir Keir was forced, when he took over the leadership, to keep some far Leftists in senior positions in order to avoid a massive party split. The Left has been massively powerful in the party especially under Corbyn and that faction needed to be somewhat placated. The Maxine Peake retweet incident gives Sir Keir an excuse to get rid of one of these far Leftists. The question for me is this: Is this sacking just a PR stunt? Is it the case of Sir Keir doing the right thing or just wanting to be seen to be doing the right thing or is it just the excuse that Sir Keir needed to get rid of a potentially harmful far Leftist? If Sir Keir really is going to go after the Jew haters in Labour then he’s in for a tough fight as there are now so many of them, he could end up with a party that is very much denuded of members and activists if he goes after the far Left fraggles and the Islamic bloc vote, both of which don’t seem to like British Jews that much.

There is little doubt in my mind that Labour ‘s defeat at the General Election in December 2019 was in large part down to the Far Left and how the Far Left drove away many people who would normally vote Labour. If he is to rebuild his party and make it electable again then Sir Keir does need to remove or neuter the far left in the party. He could go to open war against this faction as Neil later Lord Kinnock did in the 80’s and 90’s but that battle made Labour look very weak and contributed to the General Election loss in 1992.

The far Left of course are screaming with rage about this sacking. It will be interesting to see whether this leftist screaming causes the Labour leadership to stop any process of internal party reform and stop any rooting out of the same nutcases who caused Labour to lose so badly in 2019? From my viewpoint I can see that the Labour Party is in for some unwanted ‘interesting times’ between now and the next General Election.