KEIR Starmer’s Labour Party are almost certain to form Britain’s next government later this week.

After 14 years, the Tories have given up and already conceded defeat. With a Labour landslide all but guaranteed, left-wing independent campaigns have been a prominent fixture in this year’s campaign.

Starmer’s rightward swerve has left thousands uninspired by his electoral offer. Instead, an army of activists has turned out to canvass for third-party candidates across the country.

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Today, they hope, will deliver a different kind of Independence Day.

However, beating the Labour ­Party from the left at the ballot box in a General Election is no easy task. Only a handful of left-of-Labour ­candidates have achieved such a victory in the post-war period. While Britain heads to the polls, a brief analysis of this history proves instructive as the left prepares for a Starmer government.

At the 1945 General Election, Hammersmith North returned Denis Pritt as its independent MP with 64% of the vote. A left-wing lawyer, Pritt first entered Westminster on a ­Labour ticket in 1935 but was expelled from the party over his support for the ­Soviet Union in 1940. This led ­Labour to unsuccessfully challenge the incumbent MP five years later.

As a senior barrister, Pritt defended veteran trade unionist Tom Mann when he was charged with sedition in 1934. But this was by no means his first brush with the British state. Three years earlier, Pritt defended Nguyen Ai Quoc, more ­commonly known as Ho Chi Minh. When French authorities demanded the ­extradition of the future Vietnamese president from British Hong Kong in 1931, Pritt acted for Nguyen at the Privy Council, the last court of appeal for Britain’s colonies.

His highest profile case, however, came after he left parliament and ­returned to the courtroom to represent Jomo Kenyatta – the man who would go on to become Kenya’s first post-colonial president – in 1952.

Pritt was a human rights lawyer with a London constituency, but that’s where the comparison with Starmer ends. On the Commons benches, he found common cause with William Gallacher and Phil ­Piratin. Both men had also defeated Labour in the 1945 General Election, though as Communists rather than ­independents.

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A hero of Red Clydeside, Gallacher narrowly won his West Fife seat from Labour in 1935.

Piratin got to parliament a ­decade later after playing a central role in ­defeating Oswald Mosley’s British ­Union of Fascists at the Battle of ­Cable Street in 1936. The Jewish ­communist beat Labour in Mile End with 47% of the vote.

A quarter of a century passed ­before another left-wing independent was elected to Parliament at a ­General Election. Pritt and Stephen Owen Davies entered Westminster within a year of one another. The men shared a commitment to socialism but had very different upbringings. Pritt attended Winchester College while Davies worked underground as a miner from the age of 12.

The Welshmen won Merthyr Tydfil as a Labour candidate in 1934 and held the seat until he died in 1972. Davies served the constituency for longer than any other representative, but not always with the Labour whip. His support for Welsh devolution and nuclear disarmament earned him regular suspensions from the Parliamentary Labour Party.

It was the passage of time, ­however, that did for Davies’s Labour Party ­membership rather than his ­principled positions. He was deselected by the ­local party on account of his age ahead of the 1970 General Election but refused to stand aside, contesting the election as an independent. Loyal to their representative of more than three decades, Merthyr Tydfil voted overwhelmingly for the 84-year-old.

Merthyr Tydfil’s neighbouring constituency of Blaenau Gwent was next to elect an independent at the 2005 General Election. Peter Law successfully overturned a Labour majority of 19,000 after he was barred from seeking the Labour candidacy ­following the imposition of an all-women ­shortlist and the selection of the leadership-aligned Maggie Jones.

Some 20 Labour members were ­expelled after the election for ­supporting Law’s campaign – a purge for which the ­party later apologised, ­acknowledging it had overridden “the wishes of the people of Blaenau Gwent”. At the same election, George Galloway won Bethnal Green and Bow for his ­Respect Party.

“This is for Iraq,” proclaimed Galloway on election night as he claimed a victory for the anti-war movement over Tony Blair’s Labour Party.

Single-issue campaigners like ­Richard Taylor, who won Wyre ­Forest at the 2001 election as the ­Independent Kidderminster Hospital and Health Concern candidate, have broken through Britain’s electoral ­duopoly on occasion too.

All of the above examples beat Labour when the party was already in office. This emphasises quite how historic a Jeremy Corbyn victory, for example, could be in Islington North. It would be the first time in 79 years that a left-of-Labour candidate has beaten the party in an election when Labour was coming into government.

Regardless, with credibility noticeably absent from our politics, incoming MPs would do well to learn a thing or two from the principled stances of the likes of Denis Pritt and Stephen Owen Davies.