In the wake of his tone-deaf response to the Equality and Human Rights Council (EHRC) report that deemed his leadership complicit in anti-Semitic activity, Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension from Labour is the end of an era for some. For others, it is the start of a long slog back to credibility for the party. Whichever it is, despite the triumphalism with which most of the party and the public celebrated what they saw as the rightful punishment of a man who let anti-Semitism spread like a rot through every rank of this party, the whole thing felt like a great sigh. The celebrations will ring hollow in the days to come.

As Keir Starmer said, it was a ‘day of shame’ for the Labour Party. ‘We have failed Jewish people,’ he says, ‘our members, our supporters, and the British public.’ It’s hard to hear, especially for me, one of the many who were drawn into the Labour movement by Corbyn himself, by the life he put into an ailing party floundering after the collapse of Blairism and the directionless rule of Ed Miliband. But Starmer is right, and he was right to punish his predecessor for not respecting the facts.

Corbyn is, naturally, challenging his suspension. He has learnt nothing from this, and perhaps I was wrong to think he ever would. Just listen to his response to the EHRC, how he claims anti-Semitism was ‘dramatically overstated for political reasons’, how ‘one anti-Semite is too many’ (how brave of you to say, Jeremy), but how ‘the scale of the problem’ detailed by the report does not reflect reality.

In those few words he breaks from an old pattern. For the past two years he has answered questions about anti-Semitism, without fail, by calling it a ‘scourge’ in our society. He has acted in a manner morally upstanding and innocent enough to let those of us who had faith in him believe that for all his faults, he was a good man trying to deal with a hideous anti-Semitic contingent within his party.

Then he let the mask slip, just for a second. He has told us what he really thinks. There is a conspiracy against me, he seemingly says, cooked up by the media and my political opponents. They are the ones bringing this to the fore, they are the ones bloating the issue up beyond belief.

There we have the real Corbyn, the man eight out of ten Jewish people in Britain said they felt was anti-Semitic. The man a lot of us, myself included, look back on now and wish we had recognised sooner. The evidence was there: the ease he had dealing with anti-Semitic Islamist groups, his unique fixation on the state of Israel, his proud defence of a mural so obscenely hateful Stephen Bush, writing in the Times of Israel, described it as something out of a ‘sitcom about a hapless buffoon who accidentally commissions an expensive work of art, only to find it is visibly and transparently racist.’

When we see this Corbyn, the honest Corbyn, we can understand at last the awful reality of his five-year rule over the Labour Party. We can understand why he emboldened the sickest thoughts of the disgraced Ken Livingston and Chris Williamson, and why he drove good MPs like Luciana Berger and Chuka Umunna away. We can understand why, to some, this is the beginning of the end of this painful chapter in Labour history; the man who headed this all is, at last, done for.

I understand. But they should know better.

This might be the beginning of the end, if we are lucky. The few Corbyn loyalists who survived the moderate wave that ushered in Keir Starmer and held onto or gained positions in the Shadow Cabinet are, mostly by their own fault, dropping from the ranks. Most prominent among them was Rebecca Long-Bailey. After trailing a distant second place in the leadership election she was made Shadow Education Secretary, an important position that could have given her a platform to speak for the socialist wing of the party. She spent a few months there, retweeted an article containing advocacy for an anti-Semitic stereotype, and lost it all.

Her fall, along with the resignations of some more junior leftist Shadow Cabinet members, puts an end to any chance of a Corbynista voice in Starmer’s ear. Meanwhile, the governing NEC has seen its former socialist majority collapse with no sign of recovery in the near future. The joining of the moderate intra-party pressure groups Labour First and Progress under the umbrella of ‘Labour to Win’ promises a united front in upcoming Young Labour elections, for which Labour to Win has posted a slate of candidates who promise to help lead a new generation of Young Labour members ready to face down anti-Semitism in the party. At the council level also, action against those who have made anti-Semitic statements is faster and more decisive than it ever was under Corbyn.

The whole party has been turned on its head. The old leader is gone, his lieutenants have little power, and the party rank and file have turned against him. The few members fanatical enough to be problematic but willing to remain within the party are seemingly every day more dissuaded by Starmer’s crackdown on their ugly style of politics. Supposing Corbyn’s challenge to his suspension fails, – at it most likely will – there is a sense among some that the whole thing is nearly over. 

However, for all that this is a watershed moment, and a welcome one at that, it is not the way Labour rids itself of anti-Semitism. Too many people were complicit in the problem, too many were enablers, too many, like myself, wanted to believe Corbyn so badly we lost perspective and ignored the rot. Too many have been excused of that; they voted for new leadership, they picked the right people for the NEC, they tweeted their support when they saw news of the suspension. They are the new era of Labour, and Starmer himself is one of them, having been at the top level of the Shadow Cabinet for years as Brexit Secretary, now dismantling something of which he was an essential part.

Labour cannot forget what its members and its new leadership allowed. On levels both institutional and personal there has to be a reckoning with the culture that let anti-Semitism rise in the first place, and let it sit and proliferate so long. Corbyn’s suspension is the start of a long process, kicked off by the much-too-late admissions from the party these last few months, culminating in the response to the EHRC report, that the Labour Party failed Jewish people in this country.

Over the course of years, the party can change. It can better itself, learn how to make itself a safe space for Jewish members, how to make Britain a safe country for its Jewish population. Labour can move on. I have faith in that happening, in time. But right now, there is a hell of a lot left to do.

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