I think Starmer would do well to remember that the conversation about this that’s inevitably going to detonate on Twitter is not at all representative of how this will go down with the ordinary people in the street.
A crucial part of this issue is understanding how social media shapes the conversation on all varieties of identity based politics, and how destructive this trend is to civil political and social discourse. If he backs down in the face of Twitter criticism, he’ll show that he hasn’t understood that, at all.