In an exclusive interview, the Islington North MP talks housing, Keir Starmer’s Labour and running as an independent candidate in the 2024 general election
Jeremy Corbyn is feeling “indelicate”. He and his constituency team have just had a late lunch at Blue Owl café in Finsbury Park, but his aide Alex was fasting, so she just sat and watched him eat. Corbyn is tickled by the idea of his meal tempting her. “She didn’t seem to mind,” he grins.
Perhaps Corbyn is over bad manners. The Islington North MP, who this summer reaches 41 years representing his constituency, has been known for going against the grain throughout his veteran parliamentary career. The left-winger, 74, was unexpectedly mainlined into the heart of the British politics in 2015 after more than 250,000 Labour members backed his anti-austerity platform and voted him leader of the party. It’s eight years later, and he’s still pushing the same agenda. The difference is, he’s now pushing it from parliament’s fringes.
We meet in a bare meeting room at his constituency office, shared by human rights campaign groups Medical Justice, Stop the War and Indonesian advocacy charity TAPOL. For the bulk of the day, Corbyn has been conducting his regular Advice Bureau for constituents at the Old Fire Station community centre. What’s been top of the agenda?
“Housing, always housing,” he says, his voice mournful and his face disgruntled. He begins listing critical challenges people in the area face: a dearth of social housing, overcrowding in insecure, overpriced rentals and the “inefficiency of some of the housing associations”. Corbyn pauses and frowns. “The numbers of people that are virtually homeless… They’re either rough sleeping, or sofa surfing.”
There are few places in London where the housing crisis is more acute. Islington currently has 15,742 households on the social housing waiting list, the sixth highest of all of London’s 32 local authorities. Due to the national council home shortage, most of these people are housed in the private rental sector, with councils collectively paying £1.7 billion per year to keep roofs over the most vulnerable heads.
We have this image of being a wealthy borough of cappuccino-drinking middle classes. Well, yes, there are – but 40 per cent of the kids live in poverty
Jeremy Corbyn
“The Department for Work and Pensions is the most generous subsidiser of the private rented system possible,” Corbyn says of this malfunctioning system. “They’re paying millions out in excessive private rents. They raise the Local Housing Allowance a bit, landlords put the rent up a bit more. It’s cruel and brutal.”
The conversation drifts to the cost-of-living crisis in Islington, and the ways in which Corbyn thinks the Conservative Party’s austerity policies have shaped it. “In 2010, I don’t remember us having any food banks,” he says. “We now have a food bank in every ward in North Islington.
“We have this image of being a wealthy borough of cappuccino-drinking middle classes. Well, yes, there are – but 40 per cent of the kids live in poverty.”
I ask how that statistic makes him feel. “It makes me very angry,” he says. “None of this is necessary. The stress levels are huge. And the lack of housing anyone can afford means that the community begins to break up. There was a time you brought up your kids around here, you would have a reasonable expectation that if they wanted to stay living around here, they could.” Now, he says, the social fabric of the borough is being ripped up.
With the Tories failing to improve their ratings in the polls and a Labour government seemingly on the horizon, any non-politico could be forgiven for thinking Islington’s deepest inequalities may be about to improve. Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t think so. “Unless an incoming Labour government is prepared to raise taxation through a wealth tax, through corporation tax, through high levels of income tax, and to take into public ownership the services that have been fleecing the public for a long time – like water, gas, electricity – then the changes are going to be pretty minimal.”
It sounds like he fears Islington residents are looking at a Labour-flavoured austerity programme. “We can’t go on forever saying we want people to be better off unless you do something about it.” Those “we’s” are littered throughout the conversation. Corbyn is so faithful to his politics that he can’t help but make everything communal – even when talking about Labour.
“We now have more billionaires than ever within in our society, and we have more people living in serious or relative poverty than they have in my lifetime,” he says. “And it’s getting worse. There has to be something far more radical.”
Corbyn talks about Keir Starmer’s Labour Party like a parent talks about an ex who has taken their kids away from them. This is a man who’s held every position available in the party: from grassroots fundraiser to branch chair, constituency agent to national executive member – not to mention leader for five years. He had the whip removed in 2020 for not retracting a press release in which he said anti-Semitism in the party had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons.”
How difficult did he find being suspended by the party? “It’s disgusting, there’s no other way to describe it,” Corbyn responds automatically. “I believe people should be treated with respect. But I’m not here for myself.”
But it must have been devastating, personally, for you to be cut off from the party you gave your whole life to? “I’m not here to grind a personal axe,” he says, calmly. “I’m here to work for the people that have been good enough to elect me on ten previous occasions, and the local Labour Party the same. Why are they all being denied a choice and a vote? This is a democratic argument as much as anything else.”
In case anyone asks, I’ve no plans to disappear
Jeremy Corbyn
Thousands of those members who voted for Corbyn to be leader have left Labour since Keir Starmer took the reins. Many that haven’t left voluntarily have been pushed out. “I’m not mourning,” he says of his own expulsion. “I’m busy doing other things.”
Ever since he was suspended from the party, rumours have swirled about Corbyn running as an independent in Islington North. He has a swell of local support among residents and councillors, alongside an oven-ready platform in his campaign group Peace and Justice Project. Corbyn knows he poses a problem for Starmer, who should be treating the north London safe seat to one of his own Labour MPs.
So, Jeremy: will you run as an independent? “I’m here, I’m very happy to be here,” he says, poorly concealing a smile. “And just in case anyone asks, I’ve no plans to disappear.”
Corbyn may be out of Labour’s picture, but he’s willing to fight to get back in to politics’. For him, this is about more than just factionalism. This a fight for the left. “I plan to be available for the service of the people,” Corbyn says. “We’ll see what the people think.”
