It was one of those moments when a leader looks decisive but really had no choice. The more Keir Starmer thought about Rebecca Long Bailey’s tweet, “Maxine Peake is an absolute diamond” – and the more he studied the interview in today’s Independent to which the tweet referred – the less choice he thought he had.
There seems to have been some confusion about what happened next. Long Bailey tried to distance herself from the comments in Peake’s interview with another tweet. “I retweeted Maxine Peake’s article because of her significant achievements and because the thrust of her argument is to stay in the Labour Party. It wasn’t intended to be an endorsement of all aspects of the article.” The wording of that second tweet was approved by Starmer’s office, she said.
The leader’s office then asked her to delete both tweets, she says. She asked to discuss it with Starmer, but the Labour Party press office put out a statement saying he had asked her to step down from the shadow cabinet.
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In between, Starmer will have read and re-read Peake’s words in the interview: “Systemic racism is a global issue. The tactics used by the police in America, kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, that was learnt from seminars with Israeli secret services.” There is no getting away from the absurdity of that sentence, that it would occur to a police officer in Minneapolis to kneel on someone’s neck only if taught to do so by Israeli “secret” services.
There are Labour supporters, as there are people across society, who are so steeped in anti-Israeli conspiracy theories that they find it hard to see the danger of possibly sliding into antisemitism by making spurious connections. All members of the party leadership and the shadow cabinet know that it has been a particularly sensitive issue.
Long Bailey was an awkward fit in Starmer’s shadow cabinet, where she took the education brief vacated by her friend Angela Rayner. Rayner had used it creatively to build herself up to the point where she became deputy leader. Long Bailey seemed unable to make anything of such an important post. Recently she caused Starmer problems when she welcomed the government “rowing back from full school reopening plans before summer”. The Labour leader wanted to attack the government for failing to deliver a good education to pupils.
Whether it was a forced choice or not, Starmer has suddenly solved two problems at a stroke. He has removed an underperforming member of his shadow cabinet. But more importantly he has delivered decisive leadership, making clear that when he says “restoring trust with the Jewish community is a number one priority”, as he put it in the statement sacking Long Bailey, he means it. Any party member or member of the front bench who thinks they can argue over whether something is or is not antisemitic, or whether they did or did not approve of it, knows where they stand. Party discipline has just tightened a notch.
Some of the Corbynites who feel strongly about it will resign their party membership. For Starmer, there are no downsides. It sends a message to the voters that he is a strong leader, a simplistic but important quality; that he is different from Corbyn; and that his politics are different from Corbyn’s – despite winning the leadership on a platform of all of Corbyn’s policies.
This now gives Starmer the chance to build on his impressive personal popularity by winning support across the centre ground from voters disillusioned with Boris Johnson.
