Starmer’s suspension of Corbyn took courage

Keir Starmer’s decision to suspend Jeremy Corbyn shows a courage so many lacked when the far left ran the party from 2015 until 2019. Do not underestimate the risks he is running.

Starmer might have let Corbyn’s characteristically conspiratorial remark that anti-Semitism in the Labour party had been ‘dramatically overstated for political reasons’ pass. He must have guessed that Corbyn in his arrogance and delusion would reject or choose to ignore the findings of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission that his own staff interfered with investigations into anti-Semitism. It wouldn’t be out of character.

Corbyn’s time as party leader, indeed his whole life, has shown him to be willing to dismiss hard facts with paranoid insinuations of a put-up job. And he wasn’t going to change now. Who in his view had ‘overstated’ left-wing racism? In his habitual passive-aggressive style, Corbyn cleverly let the question hang in the air like smog. The Labour right, the actual right, or the ‘Zionists’? His supporters could take their pick as long as they accepted that he was the innocent victim of a conspiracy.