On June 9 2020, Sir Keir Starmer’s office released a photograph of the Labour leader and his deputy, Angela Rayner, “taking the knee”, in a room in Parliament. It was timed to coincide with the funeral of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

It was literally, metaphorically, and even geographically, a misstep. Kneeling is an act of obeisance, the deferential acceptance of a higher authority. The Leader of the Opposition was making that obeisance in a Parliament whose elected Members are supposed to take the knee to no earthly power.

My impression at the time was that Sir Keir did not fully understand this.

He probably thought he was expressing simple solidarity with victims of racism, but in fact he ceded a dangerous amount of power to an ideology which is itself racist (anti-white and anti-Semitic) and pursues methods that are quasi-revolutionary. Although purging his party of the extremists empowered by Jeremy Corbyn, he was also, unintentionally, giving them aid and comfort.

Little short of four years on, we have the scenes in the House of Commons on Wednesday. The most striking thing about Mr Speaker Hoyle’s action that day was not so much that he defied long-established conventions by handing to Labour an Opposition Day reserved for the SNP – though that was bad – but why he did so.

I am not referring here to the view that Sir Lindsay was trying to save his own job in what might soon be a Labour-controlled House of Commons. I do not know his private motives. I am talking about his publicly stated reasons.

Mr Speaker said he wanted to “prevent further division”. He was worried about the safety of MPs. As he confusedly put it, when he returned to apologise to the House later, “I take very seriously… the danger – that is why I wanted everybody to be able to express their views. I am very, very concerned about the security of all Members.”

It is not the Speaker’s job to “prevent further division”. It is to facilitate division in an orderly way. Indeed, the official word used to describe a vote in Parliament is “a division”. Dividing the House is how parliamentary democracy proceeds. Yet the Speaker himself was frightened. Why?

Because, if we take Sir Lindsay at his word, he feared for “the security of all Members”.

He had been told by some, mostly Labour MPs, that they had been threatened in their constituencies and online. Outside in Parliament Square, a large crowd was calling for whatever ceasefire motion would be most horrible for Israel. He was trying to give time for whatever amendment would cause jittery MPs the least aggro.

The consequence was that a relatively anodyne Labour amendment was passed, with the other parties going on strike in protest at Sir Lindsay’s handling.

The wider effect was that it looked as if Parliament was cowering in terror. The mob, online or out of doors, was affecting what could be said, just as it had intended.

It is striking that the mass lobbies of MPs taking place at present are almost all about Gaza.

The plight of Israel and of Gaza is indeed important, but is it really the issue that dominates the minds of most voters? As voters are saying in the current by-election campaign, “This is Rochdale, not Gaza.” After all, Britain has no direct responsibility for that terrible conflict.

Why am I relating Sir Lindsay’s fiasco on Gaza to Sir Keir’s kneeling at the fate of George Floyd? Because, with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, which bent his knee in the summer of 2020, fear entered the bloodstream of our body politic – fear that if we do not defer to extremism, we might not survive.

The fear is partly of disgrace. This is an era in which the mere accusation of racism can ruin a career, silence a writer, cancel a private bank account. It is also actual physical fear.

In this space three weeks ago, I wrote about the plight of Mike Freer, the Conservative MP for Finchley, who has decided to retire because of the blizzard of threats, insults and worse. His constituency office had been set alight and he was stalked by the Islamist who ended up murdering his parliamentary colleague, Sir David Amess. All the worst threats related to his support for Israel (which makes him, in Islamist minds, a racist).

Because Labour MPs more often sit for seats with big Muslim votes, they receive Gaza-related threats more often than Mr Freer’s fellow Conservatives do. Many, especially moderate Muslim ones, are under intense pressure to support Islamist efforts to help efface the memory of the Hamas massacres and disable Israel’s military campaign.

Immediately after those October massacres, Sir Keir came out strongly in condemnation and boldly in support of Israel’s right of self-defence. But subsequent events, such as the debacle over Labour’s Rochdale candidate, prove how difficult such a stance is within his party. Did his toughness come too late?

When Sir Keir rightly attacked anti-Semitism in his party, he did not analyse its nature clearly enough. It is not like the old Right-wing anti-Semitism which regarded Jews as creepy foreigners. Rather it a lethally political cocktail of two things – whites on the hard Left who hate anything white, Western or British, and Islamists who, for pseudo-religious reasons, see Jews as the eternal enemy and imagine Allah is telling them to take Palestine by slaughter.

This was not a case, as Sir Keir seemed to think, of getting rid of a few hateful nutcases (though Corbyn’s Labour certainly contained some): it required, and requires, a confrontation with an entire ideology.

To speak only of Labour’s “anti-Semitism problem” is to miss the point. It is a subset of Labour’s Muslim problem – its inability to distinguish clearly between most Muslim fellow-citizens, who are much like everyone else, and the extreme activists who infiltrate marches, charities, clubs, schools, universities, youth groups and political parties, and whip up hatred on social media. Politicians – mostly white – repeatedly make the mistake of identifying such noxious characters as “speaking for Muslims”.

And even today, when the Conservatives have been in office so long, only a handful of Cabinet ministers – Michael Gove, Oliver Dowden, Kemi Badenoch, Grant Shapps and Rishi Sunak himself – are surefooted on this subject. The Tories have suffered much less grass-roots party infiltration than Labour, but many of them are equally inclined to appeasement because of ignorance and fear.

Central to BLM, as to Islamism, as to the eco-fanaticism of Just Stop Oil, is the idea that our Western democratic way of life is a greedy, racist, “phobic” fraud. Although some extremists are godless and others are religious fanatics, all unite around a story of exploitation, “colonialism” and victimhood. So self-righteous are they that they take positive pride in besetting not only Parliament but even MPs’ private houses.

They have been brilliant at making people who reject their version of history very uncomfortable, thus inhibiting free speech.

Even in my rough old trade of newspapers, which lives by that freedom, we find ourselves having to navigate ever more carefully a regulatory, legal and cultural environment that is windy about any strong statement in any area of life which might provoke extremist wrath.

In a sense, Mr Speaker is right. The security of MPs, and therefore of a free country, is under threat. But the remedy is the opposite of the one he sought, which invites even more intimidation. Don’t take the knee; fight back.