UK : « Gaza, Palestine and genocide played a big role in this election. »

You participated in the campaign for the re-election of Jeremy Corbyn. Can you please tell us how it went?

Jeremy won his race. He was in the Labour Party for 40 or 50 years and he has been an MP in Islington North for decades. What happened was that the election was only called about three weeks ago by the former government, so there wasn’t much time for people to run campaigns.

Jeremy announced that he was going to run after the election was called. Jeremy managed to win after campaigning for about three weeks as an independent, which is unique because in London, where Jeremy is, Labour always wins and it’s always him.

And so the challenge on that campaign was to get people to realise that Jeremy was running as an independent. When I went door-to-door, we found that people really liked Jeremy Corbyn. He’s known as a constituents MP, meaning that he knows a lot of the residents in Islington North. Like literally when I went door-to-door, people said: “Oh yeah, Jeremy helped me out two months ago. Jeremy helped my wife and I out two years ago.” So they all have very positive experiences just on very local politics of Jeremy Corbyn. The challenge was because he’s been associated with the Labour Party for so long to convince people that they had to show up and vote, and they had to vote for him as an independent. Luckily, he won by I think 7,000 votes or something.

Did he had a competitor from the Labour Party?

The Labour Party ran a young person who had no history in politics other than being a lobbyist or do something with the privatising of the NHS. So they ran something like a corporatist kind of Labour politician. The Labour Party ran somebody, as did the Greens. I mention this because the Greens have a reputation of being something like a Jeremy Corbyn party, but in truth, they’re really, in my view, not. So the Greens ran a candidate and the Labour ran a candidate. The Labour candidate came in second.

Did the fight of Jeremy Corbyn in support of the Palestinian people in the context of the genocide play a role in this re-election?

Gaza, Palestine and genocide played a big role in this past election.

There are five independents who were elected. This is very unique by UK politics. Five UK candidates were elected and two of them were expelled by the Labour Party. That includes Jeremy Corbyn and a woman named Claudia Webb. And three of them left the Labour Party as a result of Labour’s stance on Gaza.

So that’s five right there. And then there’s now four Green MPs and the Greens only had one before. The Greens ran explicitly on a ceasefire. They’ve been calling for the ceasefire, the longest of the traditional parties. So that’s to say that while it was a big Labour victory, they didn’t really get that many more votes than they got in 2019 and less than they got in 2017, when Jeremy was the leader of the party. But the other parties collapsed. And because of Gaza, we saw the election of the five independents and the four Green Party candidates.

Usually, the unions support the candidates presented by the Labour Party. Did the unionists support Jeremy Corbyn during these elections?

It’s an excellent question. Most of the large trade unions are affiliated with the Labour Party. One important union that’s not affiliated with the Labour Party is the RMT, which is the union that’s for mostly rail workers. So that union with Mick Lynch, they decided to back Jeremy Corbyn. And so they were one of the only unions, to my knowledge, that backed Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign.

Washington, 6 of July 2024