The Labor Party of Great Britain, led by Sir Cyrus Starmer, is rapidly falling into apostasy. So fast that Starmer would not have surprised anyone by expelling his predecessor from her, under whom he worked in the shadow cabinet without any public manifestations of dissatisfaction.

But wait ... It looks like this is where it all goes.

But first I have to tell you something about myself: in 1967, at the age of 13, I joined the Labor Party and remained in its ranks until 36 years later I was expelled from it by Tony Blair due to disagreements over the war in Iraq. Now I wish this party a total collapse, and I have a hundred different reasons for this.

And the number of these reasons is growing almost daily. But with them, everything is rarely as clear as with the demand to ban RT.

To be holier than the Pope and a greater royalist than the king himself - such a strategy, of course, exists in politics. However, it is possible to resort to it only occasionally, since here it is necessary to preserve the factor of surprise. When used excessively, it only leads to a downward slope - to apostasy.

And on this slope the Laborites have already come a long way, so when they reacted to the exposed "report on Russia" in the spirit of the events around the incident with the Jolly George ship, I experienced the same shock as the character of Claude Raines in the movie "Casablanca" who learned that in the cafe "Rick's" they play games of chance.

A century ago, members of the British labor movement sank Conservative plans to use the Jolly George to aid the invasion of Russia: workers refused to load it. And now the Labor Party [the same party of the working class] wants to drown RT, and the Conservatives, for various reasons, will still block such an initiative.

And the question here, in theory, is not even a choice "to prohibit or not to prohibit." At least, this follows from the declared principles of the media regulator Ofcom, which seems to be independent from the government. In fact, at the suggestion of the Labor Party, this belief is now greatly undermined.

Ofcom has the exclusive power to revoke broadcasters' licenses, and this is done in a kind of conditional judicial manner. Here are just a report, based on "open source reports" and containing zero evidence, published by the intelligence and security committee, which, by the way, did not bring ANY specific charges against RT and Sputnik (and certainly did not prove anything), there can be a sufficient reason to start a trial - no matter how conditional it may be.

The reason for this apostasy is not in the Blairist views of Sir Cyrus Starmer. For the first time, it was not the Blairites, but the Trotskyist John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor and right-hand man of Jeremy Corbyn, who were banned from speaking on RT for parliamentarians from the Labor Party.

This hasty decision, taken without the knowledge of his party colleagues, not to mention their agreement, which he peremptorily voiced while sitting on the couch on a Sunday talk show, caught my regular parliamentary guests by surprise. But the ban had an effect.

Over the past four years, the Labor Party has been subject to intense attacks from virtually all British television, radio and print media. The Laborites did not impose any sanctions on them. Nobody said that Rupert Murdoch's machine of lies against the working people crossed all boundaries, nobody boycotted the media, which told us day after day that "Corbin = a KGB agent." In fact, representatives of the Labor Party every day, like lambs, went to the slaughter and, in fact, were subjected to it.

The ONLY channel in the UK that provides fair and balanced coverage of British politics is RT. So there was a kind of political masochism here. And, apparently, the Laborites secretly enjoyed these flogs.

I anticipate the reader's question: "Apostasy from what?" I'll tell you from what. In a free country, freedom of speech should be sacred. How else in a democracy can leaders be held accountable and prevented from committing crimes against their people or other people? Isn't the presence of the media, whose position may differ from that of the government, a prerequisite for this? The opposition, demanding the elimination of media pluralism, is like a turkey that volunteered in advance to help prepare for Christmas. In a democratic country with a market economy, shouldn't the market determine who will have an audience and who will not?

As the great English writer Samuel Johnson once put it, "The most ruthless dictatorship of all is the dictatorship of the mainstream." Prohibiting the broadcasting of a TV channel in 2020 is, of course, an empty idea. A book that is being banned from publication has always topped the bestseller lists.

And as a result, these absurd impulses only further undermined the position and authority of those who, with less and less reason, are called the Labor Party.

Columnist Twitter - @georgegalloway

The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.