The high street in Wavertree, south Liverpool, is not what you’d call a bustling location. Most of its shops are either shuttered or have seen better times. Even the old Grade II-listed town hall, which had a failed reinvention as a restaurant, is now closed down. Over its Palladian entrance remains the original Latin motto, sub umbra floresco: “I thrive in the shade.”

To judge by the area’s recent political dramas, it’s a phrase that hasn’t gone out of fashion. Last week, the constituency’s sitting MP, Luciana Berger, announced that she was quitting the Labour party to join the Independent Group. Among the reasons she gave for leaving was growing antisemitism within Labour.

On the same day she departed, it was revealed that Derek Hatton, the controversial former deputy leader of Liverpool council and Militant Tendency member, had been readmitted to the party in the nearby Riverside constituency, whose Jewish MP, Louise Ellman, is under threat of deselection. But he was quickly suspended after a six-year-old antisemitic tweet came to light.

The people of Wavertree had mixed feelings about these shady goings-on. At the Liverpool Cat Welfare shop, the owner, Jean Ellis, lamented the area’s decline, saying the high street had never recovered from the closure of its post office. She was sad about Berger because she liked her. “She’s very sincere. Very nice,” she said.

What did she think about the allegations of antisemitism? “I don’t know,” she said, looking bemused. “All the wars are about religion.”

Stephen Brown, who supplements his pension by selling sausages to the local pubs, also said he was sad Berger was gone. “She didn’t deserve to be treated that way,” he said, adding as an unthinking afterthought, “even though she is Jewish.”

Like most people I encountered, Brown is a diehard Labour supporter, but not one particularly aware of antisemitic issues, including his own. “I’ve got nothing against Jeremy Corbyn,” he said, “but he got into bed with the wrong Jews.” What did that mean? “The high rollers,” he explained.

Though sympathy for Berger was common, almost no one I spoke to had a good word to say about Hatton. Michael, a builder in a baseball cap, thought he was untrustworthy. He didn’t know about his tweet, but he said: “I work with Jews in the building business, and they’re lovely people. Then, when you’re in the pub with your friends, someone will talk about the Jews, the Rothschilds and all that.”

Not just in the pub. The chair of the Wavertree constituency Labour party (CLP) is Alex Scott-Samuel, a former academic at Liverpool University, who has appeared on a show broadcast by conspiracy theorist David Icke, claiming that: “The Rothschild family are behind a lot of the neoliberal influence in the UK and the US.”

Luciana Berger, MP for Liverpool Wavertree since 2010, after her resignation last Monday from Labour. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

The Rothschild trope is a conspiracy theory popular among antisemites. The fact that Wavertree’s chair was promoting it placed the CLP in the spotlight, causing its executive members to become tight-lipped around the media. But some days ago, the CLP defiantly broke its silence with a tweet detailing “what the press won’t tell you”.

Contrary to that claim, I can tell you that the tweet went on to say that Wavertree CLP had taken the following decisions: “1. To condemn the dictatorship in Sudan and the Tory links to it. 2. To support the campaign to get the UK to commit to take 10,000 refugees. 3. To oppose the US-led coup attempt in Venezuela.”

No call, then, to reopen the post office.

There are plenty of other Derek Hattons in Wavertree CLP but nothing seems to happen despite numerous complaints Clare McIntyre, Labour councillor

Clare McIntyre, one of Labour’s three councillors in Wavertree, told me that she dreaded going to party meetings because she had been subjected to a campaign of harassment. Though an avowed socialist who has twice voted for Corbyn, she says she has fallen foul of the Momentum group which, according to her, has a stranglehold on the CLP executive.

Her crime, she said, was to have supported Berger against antisemitic attacks – “I’ve seen up close the sheer level of abuse and racism she’s suffered” – and to question why Corbyn wasn’t doing more to tackle the issue.

She has also been a vocal critic of Hatton, pointing to his proposal that rape victims should be named in court if their alleged attackers were found not guilty as a sign of deep-seated misogyny. She sees his attempted return as symbolic of a larger and more disturbing trend.

“There are plenty of other Derek Hattons in the Wavertree constituency party but nothing seems to happen despite numerous complaints. I think Momentum in Liverpool is a mask for Militant. There are decent Momentum people and then there are the others who have their own agenda. … Militant haven’t gone away. They’re just the same people with bus passes now.”

There's no antisemitism here. We're very cosmopolitan Catherine, former teacher

Off Wavertree’s rundown high street is Sandown Lane, a beautiful tree-lined street with large Georgian houses that seem to inhabit a different universe to the main road just yards away. It’s also home to the local party headquarters.

“Needless to say,” McIntyre told me, “it’s where most of the activists on the left live.”

Anne Maloney, a retired teacher who lives in one of the elegant houses, is not a party member, but she’s a loyal Labour voter. What did she make of Berger as an MP? “I wrote to her once,” she told me.

What about? “Palestine. I firmly believe Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian territories. She wrote back saying she supported the Palestinian people. But I didn’t think she was campaigning for the Palestinians. The problem is any criticism of Israel is always seen as antisemitism.”

Her neighbour, a woman in her 40s who didn’t want to give her name, concurred. She said that she voted Green and had never agreed with Derek Hatton but, as a supporter of the Palestinians, she couldn’t see what was wrong with his tweet. Had she read it? “A summary of it, yes.”

The original wasn’t long. It stated: “Jewish people with any sense of humanity need to start speaking out publicly against the ruthless murdering being carried out by Israel!”

Essentially, Hatton did what the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance defines as a concrete example of antisemitism: “Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.”

His tweet rendered them guilty until proven innocent. If they didn’t condemn Israel, they had no humanity. And what happens in history when we strip a minority of its humanity?

“Well, yes,” said the woman. “Perhaps he went too far, but there are two sides to every story.”

Another former teacher, a few doors away, named Catherine, said: “There’s no antisemitism in this lane. We’re very cosmopolitan.”

Her words echoed the line that the Labour party, both in Wavertree and nationally, keeps restating, as accusations of antisemitism keep growing. Hatton’s tweet serves as a kind of awareness test. Many Labour supporters in Wavertree, and across the country, insist that it’s about Israel, completely blocking out the fact that it places all British Jews in the moral dock.

It’s been often said that Corbyn has to find a way of uniting the metropolitan middle class and the disaffected northern working-class Labour voters. In Wavertree, there are signs of an unholy alliance taking shape between those on the wrong end of austerity, who associate Jews with wealth and power, and bourgeois radicals who view Jews through the prism of Palestine.

Not one person I spoke to would think of themselves as antisemitic, but perhaps it’s the unreflective denial that is enabling antisemitism to thrive in the shade.