DOUBTLESS Sir Keir Starmer believes his purge of Labour MPs who have stood up for the poor and for social justice is a show of strength.

In reality it is the action of a weak and failing Prime Minister who knows he can no longer win support for his government through conviction.

The suspension of Neil Duncan-Jordan, Chris Hinchcliff, Brian Leishman and Rachael Maskell from the parliamentary whip — together with the spiteful removal of three other MPs from the unpaid role of official trade envoys — is the desperate thrashing around of a drowning Cabinet.

Their offence is to have been publicly and volubly right in their opposition to the attempt by Starmer and Rachel Reeves to save £5 billion at the expense of disabled people, the better to fund their war drive while keeping the City happy.

After he was forced into a series of humiliating climbdowns Starmer pledged that he would learn the lesson of the debacle and listen to his backbenchers more.

Here is the vindictive reality — if you dissent, he will try to destroy your political career.

Yet the threat is as empty as all the Prime Minister’s other bombast. The main menace that lies behind the suspension of the whip is that, without it, an MP could not stand for Parliament again as a Labour candidate.

For generations that meant almost certain loss of the Commons seat. No more. Most of the Parliamentary Labour Party is facing electoral oblivion in any case.

Just 12 per cent of the public approve of the government’s record, a historic low. Current polling shows the great majority of Labour MPs losing their seats at the next election, either to Reform, or to the new left party struggling to be born, or in Scotland and Wales to nationalist parties.

Certainly, at present it is as easy to see the suspended four — and the already-whipless John McDonnell and Apsana Begum who rebelled a year ago against the two-child benefit cap — securing re-election as independents than as candidates of the Starmer regime.

It is certainly hard to see this move breaking resistance to the new austerity agenda going forward. Only successful leaders can hope to get away with this sort of crackdown.

So this latest exercise in authoritarianism speaks only to Starmer’s loss of capacity to advance his right-wing agenda, as well as to his consigliere Morgan McSweeney’s blinkered view that whatever the problem is the answer lies in attacking the left.

But it is also a challenge to the Labour left. Over the last five years it has consistently failed to find the means to arrest the Starmer-McSweeney purge of the left, often for want of the simple virtue of sticking together when under attack.

The response to the latest suspensions has been robust, in words at least. The left has shown it can inflict defeats on the government, reversing specific policy proposals.

But it is now beyond obvious that only a fighting plan to actually oust Starmer himself has any prospect of reversing Labour’s dismal prospects in time to save the next election. They should take every opportunity — and even create them — to express no-confidence in this government of austerity, war and authoritarianism.

Failure to do so will certainly turbocharge the case for the new socialist party being promoted by Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn. The appeal of that venture rests in part on the perception that Labour is a lost cause.

Starmer’s latest sanctions against dissent tend to make that case. He has flung down the gauntlet — the left in the PLP, the affiliated unions and the membership must pick it up.