JEREMY Corbyn has revealed he “hopes” to stand at the next General Election – putting him on course for a fierce race against the Labour Party.
In an exclusive interview with The National, the former Labour leader said: “I hope I am able to be a candidate and will hold my seat.”
It is his strongest hint yet he will run against Labour at the upcoming General Election – after he lost the party whip in 2020 for saying that reports of antisemitism under his leadership had been overstated for political reasons.
While he has since been readmitted to the party, Keir Starmer (below) has refused to reinstate the Labour whip meaning he sits as an independent MP.
He has represented the north London seat of Islington North since 1983 and is a popular and well-known MP, with a majority of 26,188.
A spokesperson for Corbyn last week told the Sunday Times that he planned to “continue” to represent the constituency.
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If we were to run against the party in Islington North, he would almost certainly lose his Labour membership, which he has held since the age of 16.
The party’s rules prohibit members from “standing for public election in opposition to a party candidate”.
Speaking at his north London office, Corbyn characterised Starmer’s leadership as “control freakery” – accusing him of removing “democracy” from the party.
He said: “I’m very sad at the direction that the Labour Party has moved in since 2020.
“Starmer was elected leader on 10 points, all of which were taken from the manifestos he himself had been elected to parliament on and they’ve systematically been dropped in favour of other things. But crucially, has been the lack of democracy in the Labour Party.
“My whole strategy was that the leader should be leading the party but we should be developing a big democratic mass movement underneath. I was very proud that by the end of my leadership the party had 600,000 members, it’s probably about a third of that now.
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“We were well on the way to becoming the big social movement that I’d always wanted it to be and also that the leader shouldn’t be making every decision about how the party does things that is just control freakery.”
And he hit out at shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves’s (above) apparent endorsement of “trickle-down” economics.
Corbyn said: “The rather odd statements by the shadow chancellor seem to indicate that they too buy into this trickle-down theory of creating more super-rich people that somehow or other they will spend their money and assist other people’s economic development.
“There is no evidence anywhere in the world that this has worked. The only thing that works is public investment and public participation.”
Reeves earlier this week committed Labour to the Tory fiscal rules of covering “day-to-day costs” with revenues and committing to a target of reducing debt as a share of the economy.
The influential Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank has accused Labour and the Tories of a “conspiracy of silence” over spending cuts it believes will be effected by the Spring Budget.
Labour were approached for comment.
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