Rebecca Long Bailey was sacked — but she wasn't the real culprit

Ask yourself, and try to be honest: how often do you read an entire article before engaging with it on Twitter, or retweeting it?

It is something I have been guilty of, and judging by a lot of the interaction I get below my own pieces, rather a lot of you are guilty of it too. It’s understandable — Twitter is a feast of options, and the ever-refreshing feed waits for no man. But nonetheless, we have all been guilty of tweeting something because the headline was a zinger and would rack up the retweets.

Now ask yourself this, and again, be honest: does Rebecca Long-Bailey strike you as the sort of person to read articles in their entirety before retweeting them?

I’m not even trying to be cruel — one could quite easily argue that, in the role of shadow education secretary, RLB had a lot on her curriculum, and only time to briefly skim her notes every day. It’s why headlines are so important — a busy gal on the go needs to know the crux of an article sharpish. And the headline in question, it must be said, gave no inclination of what anti-Semitism may have lain within the copy. “Maxine Peake: ‘People who couldn’t vote Labour because of Corbyn? They voted Tory as far as I’m concerned,’” it read. And what about that, exactly, is there that a Corbynista like Long-Bailey might disagree with?

In her tweet, Long-Bailey makes no mention of Peake’s thoughts on Israel. Long-Bailey has a poor track record on the issue of anti-Semitism in her party, but in this instance, it is difficult to say she herself has been anti-Semitic. That doesn’t matter: she has been sacked for something she hasn’t said, and many across the political spectrum are rejoicing.

But what does that remind you of? People being sacked for things they may or may not have said on Twitter? It sounds to me an awful lot like “cancel culture,” something conservatives in the UK, ostensibly, are meant to rally against. The argument for so long has been that people to the right of the spectrum can lose their jobs for what they do or do not say, while their ideological opposites are protected. But as far as I can tell, the idea is that the practice is bad, not that it should be rolled out across the board. Equal opportunities cancellation on dodgy grounds is still an illiberal, destructive thing.

Still, Long-Bailey is not long for this political world. I can’t say I am sorry, and it is a refreshing thing that the Labour Party has gone into overdrive to restore its image. But we should recognise that in this instance a person has been felled by a low blow — the sort of tactic her own side often uses, something that should not make us feel giddy and gleeful. It now takes people employing the cancel tactics of the internet mob to remove unsuitable politicians from high positions. And it is a game that, should they choose to play it, free-thinking people cannot win.

But beyond this, the move in itself is only a token gesture in the fight against anti-Semitism. People went after Long-Bailey — a spent force — in a heartbeat, but the fact remains that an actress, regularly seen across the BBC and elsewhere, felt comfortable saying what she said to a national newspaper without fear that treading the boards of anti-Semitic tropes could hurt her. Will she lose prestige? Work? Will she be challenged within her industry? The top of the Labour Party may be shifting, but a lot of the people who donate to, vote and campaign for it are not.

Scrutiny, too, must be applied to the journalists involved in this case. One might have thought that Maxine Peake’s views on Israel would have been worth at least at least a kicker, if not the headline itself. It’s not like they didn’t pick up on what was said — they even went to the trouble of quoting an Israeli source denying the claim. Yet still, they buried it deep down in the copy, opting instead to describe, in glowing terms, how it took only ten minutes for Peake to call for the destruction of capitalism. It is as yet unclear how long it took for the racism to emerge — but didn’t the public deserve some sort of warning in advance what was coming?

Knocking a politician off their perch is a sport many enjoy, but RLB is not the main issue in this instance. The real culprits here — the actress who raised the trope, and the journalists who failed to spot it — will face no repercussions. If we are to root out anti-Semitism in Britain, it is imperative that other sectors beyond politics get their houses in order too. And if we are to resist cancel culture, we cannot tolerate its most underhand aspects when used against those we dislike.