Jeremy Corbyn to be blocked from standing as Labour MP at next election
Jeremy Corbyn is to be blocked from standing as a Labour MP at the next general election.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer is expected to confirm his predecessor will not be allowed to stand at a meeting of the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) on Tuesday.
A senior Labour source said: ‘Keir Starmer has made clear that Jeremy Corbyn won’t be a Labour candidate at the next general election.
‘The Labour Party now is unrecognisable from the one that lost in 2019.
‘Tuesday’s vote will confirm this and ensure we can focus on our five missions to build a better Britain.’
Sir Keir is set to forward a motion at the NEC meeting tomorrow, stating that Labour’s ruling body will not endorse Mr Corbyn as a ‘candidate on behalf of the party at the next election.’
The motion, expected to be backed by the NEC, states that Labour’s political interests at the next general election are ‘not well served’ by Mr Corbyn running as a candidate.
‘The Labour party’s standing with the electorate in the country, and its electoral prospects in seats it is required to win in order to secure a Parliamentary majority and / or win the next general election, are both significantly diminished should Mr Corbyn be endorsed by the Labour Party as one of its candidates for the next general election,’ the motion says.
Mr Corbyn, who led the party for five years from 2015, had the whip removed in 2020 after saying antisemitism within the party had been ‘dramatically overstated’.
His membership was later reinstated but he sits as an independent MP for Islington North in north London after Sir Keir refused to restore the party whip.
Sir Keir vowed in February that Mr Corbyn would not represent the Labour party at the next election, insisting the party had changed and ‘we are not going back’.
He said he had ‘challenged’ the former leader ‘both in the shadow cabinet and publicly’ on antisemitism.
But in a statement posted on Twitter, Mr Corbyn, who has been an MP for 40 years, described Sir Keir’s statement about his future as a ‘flagrant attack on the democratic rights of Islington North Labour Party members’.
‘It is up to them – not party leaders – to decide who their candidate should be,’ he said.
Allies condemned the decision to kick Mr Corbyn out of Labour, with former Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, describing it as a ‘mistake’, while Diane Abbott remarked how Sir Keir had once called the veteran left-winger a friend.
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