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IN BRITAIN, THE LEFT IS STANDING WITH JEREMY CORBYN  
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Interview with Jeremy Corbyn by Owen Dowling
July 3, 2024
Jacobin
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_ In Thursday’s general election, Jeremy Corbyn is defending his
seat from a private health care boss backed by Keir Starmer. The
campaign is a fight over the Left’s most basic values — and has
stirred an extraordinary activist turnout for Corbyn. _

Jeremy Corbyn, Photograph: Danny Lawson./PA

 

It’s six weeks since Rishi Sunak ran up the white flag, announcing
the long-awaited election
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finish off fourteen years of Conservative rule. Excepting Nigel
Farage’s malodorous late entry as new leader of the hard-right
Reform
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the campaign has unfolded largely without drama. The obligatory
televised head-to-heads between party leaders amounted to a bleak
ceremonial changing-of-the guard, marking a transfer of power (if not
a real break with Tory orthodoxy) that has long seemed a certainty.

This Friday is thus bound to see Keir Starmer
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as prime minister. He will be lauded by the corporate media, having
long since been rubber-stamped by the establishment, as the terminal
exhaustion and exhibitionist criminality of this Tory party reached
irrecoverable depths. Starmer reaches Downing Street atop an
expensively embalmed but thoroughly dead Labour Party, his path
carpeted with a torn-down and ritually desecrated red flag.

For socialists, the prevailing outlook nationally might reasonably be
one of dejection. Starmer brings with him a rogues’ gallery of
management consultants, corporate lobbyists, and neo-Blairite bag
carriers. In government, his party looks set to link arms with
whatever hard-right rump inhabits the opposition benches in exorcizing
any alternative to the UK’s present carnival of reaction.

At the constituency level, however, a handful of green shoots of hope
could yet spring. Activists turning to left-of-Labour and more
progressive Green candidates are waging a decentralized electoral
challenge to the Starmer ascendancy over issues including public
investment, the National Health Service, the climate, migrants’
rights, and the Labour leadership’s unforgivable role in
legitimating Israel’s genocide in Gaza. But one such candidacy has
naturally attracted the lion’s share of headlines: Islington North,
where former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn seeks reelection as an
independent.

Barred from standing for Labour in the seat he has represented since
1983, the incumbent Corbyn now faces challenge from the party
machine’s candidate, Councillor Praful Nargund. As a sign of what
Starmer calls Labour’s “new management,” Nargund is a
smartly-done-up but press-shy IVF magnate, who was previously
filmed opining
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“privatization of health care is very, very important.”

I attended the public campaign launch
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“Jeremy Corbyn: An Independent Voice for All of Us” at the end of
May. Five weeks on, I found a Corbyn campaign mobilizing en masse for
victory, as the battle for Islington North enters its climactic final
phase.

Arriving at one of the three muster points for the hundreds of
canvassers meeting in the midsummer sun this past Saturday, I found a
packed crowd of all ages and backgrounds, ringed around a lineup of
guest speakers. The crowd was in turn encircled by local kids playing
on bikes (some amusing themselves and the candidate in shouting “We
love you, Jeremy!”). Corbyn’s ground game locally is stirringly
reminiscent of the mass rallies during Labour’s insurgent 2017
election campaign.

Having first stopped by the campaign’s bustling nearby nerve center,
I reach the scene just as one orator, Chilean exile activist and
former political prisoner Cristina Godoy-Navarrete, is giving way to
the Palme d’Or–winning socialist director Ken Loach (who has also
been expelled from Labour).

The eighty-eight-year-old Loach, who spoke to Jacobin last year about
his recent _The Old Oak_, told the crowd: “[Islington North] is the
most important part of this election. If Jeremy wins, that shows our
strength. If Jeremy wins, it shows we can put integrity and principle
before shallow opportunism.” Reminding Corbyn’s campaigners of
previous Labour leader Neil Kinnock’s “shocking” betrayal of the
miners’ strike in 1984–85, and wider concession to the
institutionalization of Thatcherism, Loach was excoriating in his
denunciation of today’s Starmerism: “When it comes to Starmer’s
integrity, I have to quote my old friend Ricky Tomlinson, who under
the circumstances would say: ‘Starmer’s integrity? My arse!’”

Counterposing Starmer’s Labour — now “a neoliberal party, up for
every exploitative device the ruling class can throw at the working
class” — with the party’s former leader, Loach sang Corbyn’s
praises: “What we desperately need are integrity and principles. In
the match over integrity between Jeremy and Starmer, there’s no
contest. . . . I’ve known him for many years, I’d trust him with
anything, he’s a wonderful friend, a wonderful comrade, and I’m
proud to stand alongside him.”

At the event, I spoke to Corbyn’s campaign director James Schneider
(formerly the erstwhile Labour leader’s head of strategic
communications). He tells me that this is “almost certainly by some
distance the largest campaign in any individual constituency in the
country.” But there have also been obstacles for this insurgent,
independent bid: “The snap election meant we started with no data
— the Labour Party of course has lots of data — and encountered
lots of confusion over whether Jeremy was independent or Labour. All
that is why it’s been so important to get everybody out knocking on
doors to explain to people that Jeremy is running as an independent
and why.”

While Labour’s imposed candidate, Nargund, “has been
subterranean,” refusing to take part in debates, Corbyn represents
“millions of people around the UK whose views and values — which
are the mainstream, majority views and values in our country — are
shut out from a political process which is extremely antidemocratic
and elitist.”

Laura Smith — from 2017 to 2019 Labour MP for Crewe and Nantwich and
subsequently a Labour councillor before her recent resignation of the
party whip — is also supporting Corbyn’s campaign. She tells me
that “the saddest thing about this general election is the absolute
lack of hope people have.” For Smith, being Labour “was a big part
of my identity, but over the issue of Palestine, seeing more and more
progressive policies just dissolving, hearing right-wing rhetoric
coming out of people who should know better — I just couldn’t
support it, really, anymore.” But there are alternatives: “Now,
more than ever, we have to have strong voices in Parliament speaking
out on Palestine, we have to keep people talking about there being
another option to austerity and privatization.”

As the afternoon progressed, I accompanied Corbyn to the vibrant
Islington Street Festival, hosted by the Arachne Greek Cypriot
Women’s Group. The event was thronged with older-aged and family
revelers, folk music and dancing, and grilled cuisine under a suitably
near-Mediterranean heat. I spoke to the former Labour leader about
issues of multiculturalism, community, and internationalism in this
election — both locally and nationally.

“It’s About Democracy, It’s About Peace, It’s About Justice”

OWEN DOWLING

How important to your experience as MP has the multiculturalism of
Islington North been? How would you as an independent MP give voice to
these diverse communities in Parliament?

JEREMY CORBYN

The multicultural nature of the constituency is absolutely a massive
part of my life. There are probably over seventy languages spoken in
Islington North, the biggest would be: Turkish, Greek, Somali, Arabic,
Eritrean, Ethiopian, and French for mainly people from West Africa.
So, there is a lot of diversity here. I’ve always worked with all of
the communities, so that won’t change.

This afternoon we’re at a Greek Cypriot women’s celebration.
Arachne is a women’s organization that was set up a long time ago
after Cyprus was invaded and the partition of the island. The
women’s organization here has been very supportive of all the
Cypriot women living here, and in particular with regard to the
isolation of many of the older women; many of the younger people
can’t afford to stay living round here, so there’s quite a lot of
elderly women from the community here, and Arachne is very important
for them.

OWEN DOWLING

Starmer’s Labour has recently courted controversy as it has aired a
series of xenophobic dog whistles about refugees, the talked-up
“threat” of “the small boats” in the English Channel, and
deportations. Labour’s candidate standing against Nigel Farage in
Clacton has seemingly been demobilized
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and great offense was given in recent days by remarks from Starmer
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cabinet colleague Jonathan Ashworth
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“people coming from countries like Bangladesh.” What is your
response to this?

JEREMY CORBYN

I am disgusted. The Bangladeshi community, like all communities,
deserves respect and acknowledgement for their enormous contribution
to our society. And the way in which Labour then paraded itself around
“stopping the small boats”. . . I’m sorry, but to them I just
say: go to Calais [the migrant encampments on the other side of the
English Channel] — indeed, Keir Starmer went to Calais some years
ago, before he was leader.

They must acknowledge that those people in Calais are utterly
desperate. They’re victims of war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria,
Lebanon, Libya; they’re very poor, very hungry, and very
disorientated; they’re being brutally treated by the far right in
France and the French police. They are victims of all the injustices
and inequalities on our planet. Surely to goodness, humanitarian needs
come first. A Labour government must support them and grant them safe
routes to live in a place of safety.

OWEN DOWLING

It has now been suggested
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Starmer’s prior ostensible commitment to recognize a Palestinian
state in office has been “delayed” — we’re told, for fears
that it will irritate Washington. With the ongoing US-backed genocide
in Gaza, a prospective Israeli assault on Lebanon, and the state of
the recent presidential debate, are you concerned about a Starmer
Labour government’s deference toward the White House? How as an
independent MP will you hold this Labour government to account on
foreign policy?

JEREMY CORBYN

Well, it appears that the idea of recognizing a Palestinian state has
been put on the back burner for as long as I can remember. There was
once a backbench motion vote in Parliament to recognize the state of
Palestine, a nonbinding motion, and ever since then we’ve had
nothing but prevarication. I made it very clear in our manifesto, when
I was Labour leader, that we would recognize the state of Palestine
straightaway: unconditionally, unilaterally.

Surely, since the vast majority of the world’s nations have done
that, it’s time to get onboard with the rest of the planet, and not
allow the US and a small number of Western European states to
effectively veto it. I want to support and recognize the state of
Palestine, demand a cease-fire in Gaza, and above all see an end to
the arms trade with Israel. We’ve just produced a book
called _Monstrous Anger of the Guns_
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that title was a reference to Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem For Doomed
Youth” — which deals with the power of the global arms trade.

OWEN DOWLING

You’ve been out on the doorsteps for five weeks now. How do you
think it’s going, and what would be your message to our British
readers about how best they can make themselves effective for
socialist politics in this election?

JEREMY CORBYN

Well, if you’re in Islington North, come and campaign and vote for
us. It’s not about me: it’s about democracy, it’s about peace,
it’s about justice, it’s about sustainability. We’re getting a
huge resonance from people all across the constituency. I make no
predictions on the result, all I know is that in less than five weeks
we’ve set up a campaign from nothing which has been very, very
effective.

We’ve got a lot of support and a lot of enthusiasm, and I’m
humbled by the numbers of people that have come out to help us —
some of whom I haven’t seen for years, but who remember campaigns we
were involved in in the past and say “this is for the campaign we
did for a playground,” “against road widening,” “against
deportations,” “for peace,” for many different campaigns we’ve
organized over the past four decades.

We’ve got a huge enthusiastic base here, they understand why I’m
standing as an independent, and what I’ve said to them is that if I
win as an independent there’ll be a monthly people’s assembly in
Islington that will be their place for them to express their views,
and above all to help empower our communities to fight for the social
change we need for our future.

_Owen Dowling is a historian and archival researcher at Tribune._

* Jeremy Corbyn
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* British Elections
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* the Left
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