LABOUR’S answer to a petition to restore the whip to Jeremy Corbyn reaching 70,000 signatures will echo that to his constituency party’s near-unanimous vote this week to give it the right to select its own parliamentary candidate — that it carries “no weight at all.”

The leadership’s indifference to the views of the entire local party membership at least underlines one thing — the completely anti-democratic character of Keir Starmer’s party.

There is no attempt to engage with, refute or even explain to curious journalists why Starmer’s excommunicated predecessor gets such a resounding vote of confidence from those who know him best. Simply a reassertion that their opinions don’t matter.

Labour’s leadership has repeatedly demonstrated this view. Starmer’s adoption and later betrayal of 10 now infamous pledges to win the leadership shows that he is both aware of members’ opinions and determined to suppress them. 

It is precisely because the Labour machine already knows how members feel that it has used such dirty tricks to get its way — from Starmer’s refusal to restore the whip to Corbyn after his party membership was confirmed by the national executive in 2020, through trawling social media records to find years-old “offences” to expel people for, to the rigging of selection processes and suspension of entire constituency parties.

The petition is still to be welcomed. It is an act of solidarity with someone who next month will have represented Islington North for 40 years, building the Labour vote there from 40 per cent in 1983 to an impregnable 64 per cent in 2019.

Starmer makes no secret of his contempt for the “politics of protest,” but protest has value, especially in a society growing rapidly more authoritarian — where the government are attacking our civil rights while the opposition wage war on free expression and debate in their own ranks. 

This is a marker: we will not be silenced. Raising the treatment of Corbyn and many like him — putting Labour MPs and councillors on the spot to justify the appalling conduct of the current party leadership — increases the cost of that conduct by publicising it, and helps prepare the movement for the ugly reality that a Starmer premiership would pose almost the same threat to our rights and living standards as a Tory one.

Second, the number of signatories is a wake-up call. 

At the height of the Corbyn surge, with tens of thousands packing rallies in unlikely corners of the country and hundreds of thousands flocking to join what became the biggest party in western Europe, there was much discussion in unions on how such energy and enthusiasm could be harnessed in industrial battles.

Since then, the situation has reversed. Union militancy has soared just as Labour withdraws its support from those struggles. 

To watch as the hundreds of thousands inspired by Corbyn drift into inactivity suits Starmer’s vision of a Britain that does as it’s told, but it doesn’t serve unions seeking to maximise political pressure for proper pay offers, or turn this year’s deal into a solid basis for further advance. Unions are weaker if the left is demoralised and dispersed.

And the Corbyn supporters are still there, as petitions like this and the big audiences being drawn to film screenings of the Platform Films documentary The Big Lie demonstrate. Silenced, purged and ignored by the Establishment media they may be, but they represent a potentially powerful body of activists, especially at community level.

It is in our interests to stop the ruling class blanking out the very existence of a huge movement for a left programme that in most key areas still reflects union demands. 

And that means refusing to shrug our shoulders at a demonisation of Corbyn that is ongoing, and designed to discredit the whole of the left. It must be confronted wherever it arises.