In both cases, the MPs were victims of the crudest manipulation by the party apparatus. Beth Winter in Cynon and Merthyr Tydfil was railroaded out after a reselection process truncated and circumscribed to make democratic debate within her constituency party all but impossible.

And Mick Whitley in Birkenhead, one of the few former manual workers still to be found in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), was forced into an entirely unnecessary reselection fight against Allison McGovern, one-time chair of right-wing pressure group Progress, whose Wirral South seat is being abolished.

McGovern could easily have moved to the adjacent Labour-held Wirral West constituency, where the incumbent MP is retiring and much of her existing seat transferred, but chose instead to be used as a means to remove Whitley from Parliament.

These latest manoeuvres follow the banning of former leader Jeremy Corbyn from standing again, the withdrawal of the whip from Diane Abbott, which prejudices her parliamentary future too, and the continued blocking of union-supported candidates from consideration for Labour nominations in winnable seats.

Preferred candidates are overwhelmingly drawn from the professional classes, and are often people with scant achievements. The Labour standard-bearer in the forthcoming Selby by-election, for example, has only ever held a job at the Confederation of British Industry, where he worked in its public affairs team through the greatest PR disaster in the organisation’s history.

The striking thing about the left response to this unending onslaught on party democracy has been its absence. Right-wing fixer Luke Akehurst — one of a trio of Labour officials effectively choosing the next PLP — exultantly retweeted this assessment by a business journalist: “Keir Starmer is running rings around the left. Every announcement has them jumping up and down, shouting, crying, raging, vowing to ‘fight’. But nothing ever comes of it. They haven’t landed a single blow and they have no clue what to do next. A petulant army of paper tigers.”

There is limited virtue in playing a blame game as to why this situation has arisen, why the defeat of 2019 has turned into a wholesale rout. The key is turning the situation around.

One challenge here is the tendency of affiliated unions to give the parliamentary leadership — Keir Starmer, in effect — a blank cheque to go about its business as it sees fit. That attitude only waxes as it appears that Labour is on the brink of government. Who wants to fall out with the next prime minister over a left MP or two?

This attitude is, however, profoundly short-sighted. Labour is on the verge of ceasing to be “a labour party” in any meaningful sense, with socialism and trade unionism likewise marginalised and the party leadership more in hock than ever to the main centres of capitalist class power.

Whatever partial amelioration a Starmer government might offer on this or that issue, the entrenched subordination of Labour to the bourgeoisie would constitute a historic setback for working-class political independence and articulation.

Affiliated trade unions should unite with left MPs, disenfranchised constituencies and vetoed candidates in a common bloc in support of party democracy in the first instance.

This does not mean forming a new party, for which there is scant basis at present, but it does mean organising a more purposeful fight for socialist policies as well as for the integrity of Labour’s procedures. (Morning Star — IPA Service)