Keir Starmer has made a big deal, publicly, of creating a “broad church” within the Labour Party. But privately, many members of the Parliamentary Labour Party feel it is anything but. The sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey, his rival in the recent leadership election, and shadow education secretary, will do nothing to convince the left of the party that Starmer sees them as anything but a hindrance that he would rather see forced out, at worst, and sidelined at best.

Long-Bailey’s crime was sharing an interview with the actress Maxine Peake; the working-class left-wing activist spent many hours campaigning for Labour during both the 2017 and 2019 elections. In a wide-ranging discussion, Peake calls for the dismantling of capitalism, decries the privileging of capital over human lives during the pandemic, and — this is Starmer’s issue — links the death of George Floyd to the fact that Israeli intelligence is involved in the training of some US police forces. That, Starmer argued in the press release announcing Long-Bailey’s swift and unceremonious sacking, was an “antisemitic conspiracy theory.”

In a 2016 report, Amnesty International USA expressed concern that “Baltimore police received training on crowd control, use of force and surveillance [from] Israel’s national police, military and intelligence services.”