Keir Starmer’s Case for Excluding Jeremy Corbyn Gives Damp Squibs a Bad Name
After years of moralizing rhetoric, Keir Starmer couldn’t find a single credible accusation of misconduct to block his predecessor from running as a Labour candidate. All that’s left is a shrill campaign to exclude socialist ideas from public life.
Jeremy Corbyn at a rally of striking teachers in London, England, on March 2, 2023. (Guy Smallman / Getty Images)
Keir Starmer flagged up his intention to block Jeremy Corbyn from running as a Labour candidate in the next general election well in advance. However, when the move finally came on Tuesday of this week, Starmer’s modus operandi was even shabbier than we might have expected.
A motion that Starmer brought before Labour’s national executive discarded all the usual charges against Corbyn from his inner-party opponents. There wasn’t a single word about the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report of 2020, Corbyn’s response to it, or the issue of antisemitism in general.
We can only take this as a backhanded confession of failure from Starmer and his associates. After years of intense scrutiny and high-octane rhetoric about Corbyn’s supposed moral failings, they were unable to find anything — literally anything — that they could use in a motion that had to be fireproofed against a possible legal challenge.
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