WHEN Jeremy Corbyn won Labour its biggest vote increase in seven decades in 2017, he smashed the “Overton window” — the accepted boundaries of mainstream political debate.

Hundreds of thousands joining a Labour Party championing public ownership, wealth redistribution and peace could still be dismissed, with the aid of a ferociously partisan capitalist media and the hostility of every major state, political and civic institution, as a bizarre aberration unreflective of wider public opinion. But three-and-a-half million extra votes were harder to ignore.

Corbyn’s Gaza (Independent Public Inquiry) Bill, tabled the very day that polling shows a majority of the public want a full arms embargo on Israel and even for the country to be expelled from the United Nations for its genocidal war on Palestinians, shows he is still playing that vital role: voicing, in the corridors of power, the views of millions of ordinary people shut out by a suffocating ruling-class consensus.

His Bill is supported by a range of independent and Labour MPs, as well as some from the Greens, Plaid Cymru and Scottish National Party.

The numbers should be much higher: Britain’s active role in the genocide runs deep, and too much of it is cloaked in secrecy.

The bits people know about, such as continuing arms sales to a military killing scores of civilians every single day, have appalled public opinion.

How much more so if the whole sordid story, the details of what is passed from the hundreds of RAF surveillance flights over Gaza to the Israeli authorities, the troop-training and logistical support, the ways in which our air force’s Akrotiri base on Cyprus supports Israel’s war effort, were to come into the open.

“We can’t tell the world what you’re doing,” our Prime Minister Keir Starmer told troops on Akrotiri. But this only underlines how vital it is to the public interest to know.

Israel’s killing machine has become so shameless, its ethnic cleansing project so open, that Starmer, like his Foreign Secretary David Lammy, has been forced into rhetorical condemnation. No MP should be allowed to use their empty phrases to pretend Britain’s part in the horror is reduced.

There has been no let-up in military co-operation, and even a supposed pause in trade negotiations did not stop them despatching the execrable Ian Austin — an old enemy of Corbyn’s, who interrupted the then leader’s solemn apology for Labour’s role in the Iraq war with screams of “shut up” and “you’re a disgrace” — as trade envoy to Tel Aviv shortly afterwards.

Just as when millions marched against war on Iraq, we have a government committed to a murderous foreign policy that runs totally counter to the wishes of the British people.

That closely policed Overton window, with political parties, state functionaries and a tame ruling-class media reinforcing daily which opinions are considered reasonable and which extreme, would have you think this is a warlike country, one where readiness to commit mass murder (by “pushing the button” to launch nuclear strikes) is seen as an essential qualification for government.

Yet, as former Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament leader Kate Hudson observed, the largest demonstrations in British history have often been in the cause of peace: against nuclear weapons, against the Iraq war and now against the genocide in Gaza.

And when in 2017 following the Manchester arena bombing, carried out by a terrorist well known to British intelligence and trained in a British proxy war in Libya, Corbyn spoke out about the role British foreign policy plays in fomenting instability and violence worldwide, the politicians and newspaper pundits were shocked to find the public agreed with him.

The British people want peace. The government’s continued support for Israel must be made untenable. The Gaza Inquiry Bill, and the “red line” Palestine solidarity campaigners drew around Parliament yesterday, help us to do that.