Bristol West, in South West England, is just the kind of constituency where Jeremy Corbyn’s socialist politics took root these last five years. Young, metropolitan, and overwhelmingly working-class, the area is blighted by extreme inequality, with wealthy neighborhoods butting up against generational poverty and political exclusion.

One in twenty voters in Bristol West is a Labour member — there are nearly five thousand in total, overwhelmingly joining after Corbyn became leader. While local Labour MP Thangam Debbonaire had scraped a win against her Liberal Democrat opponents in 2015, it was this army of members who delivered some of the biggest majorities in the country in the 2017 and 2019 general elections, under Corbyn’s leadership.

But despite this record of success, the local Constituency Labour Party (CLP) is now in uproar after the suspension of leading activists. Their supposed offense is that they spoke up in defense of Corbyn, after he had himself been suspended from the party on October 29. Their treatment points to the stifling suppression of free speech in the party — and, from some quarters, a concerted attempt to drive out all traces of the socialist left.