Keir Starmer is still embroiled in battles with Labour’s far left

EVEN BEFORE the anti-vaxxers turned up, it was an absurd demonstration. Four groups—Labour Against the Witchhunt, Labour in Exile Network, Resist and Socialist Appeal—gathered outside a nearly empty building in the sweltering heat to protest against measures that would see their followers expelled from the Labour Party. It was no use. The party’s National Executive Committee (NEC), which was meeting online, voted to proscribe all four.

Labour continues to clean up the mess left by Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing perma-protester who led the party from 2015 to 2020. Mr Corbyn lost one general election (in 2017) by a surprisingly small margin, and another (in 2019) by an enormous one. Under his leadership, anti-Semitism flourished. Mr Corbyn himself was suspended from the party last year for claiming that anti-Semitism had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons”.

The four proscribed groups have limited appeal. The first three exist to provide harbour to members expelled or suspended from the party for anti-Semitism. Socialist Appeal, which stands “for the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky”, has its origins in the long-banned Trotskyite Militant Tendency. The purge will affect no prominent party member save possibly Ken Loach, a radical film director. But if it seems like a tidying-up exercise, that is a...