Jeremy Corbyn was never supposed to be the Labour leader. He didn’t even expect to win the leadership when he ran in 2015. Heck, the decision to run him might as well have been made via tic-tac-toe.

Jezza has been a fierce socialist and antiwar campaigner who faced off Tory and Labour governments alike. The prominent old videos of him are of him berating the Thatcher government for their many misdeeds or fighting the Blair-led deceitful war in Iraq.

His 2015 victory was unexpected and thought to be a fluke. His 2016 election as leader was the final (read temporary) nail in the coffin of the old ideology of the Labour party. The party was now decidedly social-democratic. The end to both leading UK parties following in the economic footsteps of Margaret Thatcher was here.

The next step was to make his leadership untenable. MPs threatened to split, threatened to join other parties, pointedly painted him, and by extension the Labour party, as unelectable. They painted the party as anti-semitic. They complained about alleged attacks and brought those complaints, very happily, to the public.

Even when it was found that the antisemitic attacks were seldom carried out by card-carrying members of the party, they pressed on. This was a war they were determined to win. The idea was that his position as leader would be untenable, due to a lack of support from MPs, and he would have no choice but to resign. Then they would field another consensus candidate, perhaps someone of greater pull than Owen “I agree with Jeremy” Smith or Angela Eagle. Maybe the disappointing son of Wedgewood Benn or Chuka “Safe Space” Umunna.

Labour’s decision to embrace the howls of antisemitism was wrong. What did they think would happen? That the peddlers of this fake rumour would just go away? That the transformative economic agenda in the offing would be allowed to take place? That the hostile MPs would change their tune?

The election is now upon us and this fake smear has brought the full weight of right-wing fascist propaganda upon the Labour party. Including foreign right-wing propaganda from the likes of Apartheid Israel and Hindu-Supremacist, Narendra Modi.

The onus is now on Labour to focus on elucidating the benefits of her Manifesto of Hope to all Brits. This is the time to show the Leavers in the North that it makes no sense to back the party of Thatcher and Jacob Rees-Mogg who have not delivered Brexit three and a half years after the referendum result. That the current lying Prime Minister has never been truthful in his life and was both for and against Brexit, right up until 23 June 2016.

Forward ever. We have to get rid of the Tories and welcome a new social democratic Labour government.