Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t supposed to win in Islington North in 2024. Last year, the former Labour leader was officially barred from standing as a Labour candidate for Keir Starmer’s “changed Labour Party”. His victory shows that there is an appetite for a more radical policy agenda.
The man once described as “a friend as well as a colleague” by Starmer was dumped by the party he has been a member of for more than 50 years, that he’d represented in parliament for 40 years and that he led into the last two general elections.
Instead, Labour members in Islington got a taste of Starmer’s “changed Labour Party” when the party hierarchy imposed a candidate. Little could be more emblematic of Starmer’s leadership than a socialist being blocked from standing under the party’s banner, and a millionaire owner of a private healthcare company imposed – a young councillor from the south of the borough, Praful Nargund. Dozens of party members in Islington resigned in protest.
But in the end it wasn’t close. Jeremy Corbyn retained Islington North with a majority of more than 7,000 votes over the official Labour candidate. I wasn’t particularly surprised. In late May I was told by a Labour member out canvassing for the newly imposed Labour candidate: “There is solid support for Corbyn. His voters are very solid while [previous] Labour voters may vote for either candidate. I suspect a Corbyn win, but close.”
Last week I spoke to my former colleague Joss MacDonald – a speechwriter for Corbyn when he was leader – who told me how loyally the working class communities of Islington’s tightly knit estates were backing Jeremy “almost unanimously”.
Just as they did when he was leader, the Labour establishment threw everything they could at stopping Corbyn. Former leader Neil Kinnock was wheeled out for a promotional video for Praful Nargund. Lord Mandelson, determined to oust Corbyn, mobilised his followers to canvass the seat with him and on polling day former deputy leader Tom Watson took time out from his current job to campaign for the Labour candidate.
Corbyn told supporters before the result: “We have built this campaign from nothing. We don’t have party machinery. We don’t have big donors. But we have something more powerful: people – and tomorrow is our chance to make history, together.”
Corbyn has indeed made history. He becomes only the fourth Labour politician to win a seat as an independent: SO Davies in Merthyr Tydfil in 1970; Dick Taverne in Lincoln in 1973; Peter Law in Blaenau Gwent in 2005.
Many more have failed. For example, former Labour MP Simon Danczuk won just 1.8 per cent standing as an independent in 2017, while even the well-known Frank Field, who like Corbyn was a long-standing MP, polled just 17.2 per cent when he stood as an independent in Birkenhead, in 2019.
Corbyn only finally decided to stand on 24 May. That delay gave his hastily assembled campaign team just a few weeks to collate data from the tens of thousands of households in Islington North. One experienced campaigner told me they basically gathered five years’ worth of data in a matter of weeks.
As an independent standing against the official Labour candidate, Corbyn gained over 5,000 more votes than the Labour leader did in the neighbouring constituency. And that tells us something else. Both Corbyn and the policy agenda he spearheaded generated enthusiasm, passion and inspiration.
Starmer will need that if he is to succeed in government. He has become prime minister in a landslide but with far fewer votes than Labour received in 2017.
Labour members and voters know this too. During the election campaign, polling showed 80 per cent of Labour voters wanted Jeremy Corbyn back in the Labour Party. A magnanimous Labour prime minister should offer an olive branch and unite party members and affiliates again.
Perhaps, Keir Starmer might even recall his own words from 2020: “We should treat the 2017 manifesto as our foundational document. The radicalism and the hope that inspired across the country was real.”
It could be real again. As Corbyn said following his victory in similar terms, “the hope for a better world can never be extinguished”.
If he is to succeed, our new prime minister must harness that hope, or he will surely fail. He may not realise it yet, but Starmer needs the left.
Andrew Fisher is a former executive director of policy for the Labour Party