The last time I visited Ilford, east London, was in the run-up to the 2017 general election, hoping to help make Wes Streeting the local MP and Jeremy Corbyn the prime minister. It feels like a long time ago. I went campaigning with a group that included a man who worked for Vice and told us he made more than £80k and wanted to pay higher tax. I had the clipboard, dispatching canvassers to knock on doors. Labour’s data showed a reasonable number of those doors, at one point, had had BNP supporters behind them.
It feels like a long time ago because it was. Vice doesn’t exist any more. Corbyn has been booted from Labour. But Ilford remains a great place to observe both the hopes and contradictions of the British left – including its latest iteration, which in typical fashion has been marred by miscommunication and infighting. I made my return trip last weekend to see Corbyn, now the independent MP for Islington North, speak alongside Andrew Feinstein and Leanne Mohamad at an event called Breaking the Two-Party Nightmare. The organisers described it as a 500-person event, which sounded generous: the room was respectably full, but it was far from standing room only.
The people around me chatted eagerly about the campaigns they’d been involved in, how they’d come across the event (TikTok), and their appreciation for the works of the Israeli politician and writer Ilan Pappé. The audience was mostly British Asian, with a smattering of the kind of badge-laden older white people who can always be found at such events (a man in the row across from me was wearing a T-shirt styled after the poster for Goodfellas, only with Corbyn’s face superimposed on it, and the legend “For the many not the few” at the bottom).
It was a special occasion. Last Friday marked a year since Labour’s sweeping election victory; more pertinently, it was a year since Leanne Mohamad fell just 528 votes short of unseating the now Health Secretary Wes Streeting. Feinstein took a very respectable number of votes running against Keir Starmer in Holborn and St Pancras, and Corbyn retained his Islington North seat. They all ran as independents, attacking Labour from the left, and gathered in Ilford to talk about it. But, between them, their status begs larger questions about the possibilities of life beyond Labour. How much damage can the political forces stirring on the left do to the party they believe has betrayed them?
Mohamad, a 24-year-old British Palestinian, wearing a purple suit that matches the event’s branding, was first to speak and acted as host for the evening. She was warm and earnest; Corbyn offered his usual irascible moralism; but of the three it was Feinstein who was the most natural speaker, the one whose years in politics show (Feinstein was previously an ANC MP in South Africa). His speech is weighted with pregnant pauses, and the theme he works to is that our politics, and particularly Keir Starmer himself, is corrupt. He described the Prime Minister as having “one redeeming feature, and that is that we don’t have to figure out when he is lying, because we know every single time his lips move, the man is lying”.
If the freebiegate-populist message of Feinstein seems distinctly modern, Corbyn offered something different. Part of his appeal has always been as a man out of time, a traveller from a pre-neoliberal world. He was wearing what I can only describe as a very Jeremy Corbyn pair of semi-open brown shoes, and talked about nuclear disarmament and “issues of world peace”. He described the two-child limit as the product of Iain Duncan Smith having a fit of “19th-century moralism”. Corbyn remained every inch the man first elected on Michael Foot’s 1983 pledge to end “the long Victorian night” of Conservative rule.
The binding cause for both speakers and audience was Gaza, just as it was a central part of their campaigns last year. Mohamad was frank about this, saying that the war is intrinsic to the rest of her politics, which is “focused on what truly matters to our community – health, crime, housing, education, youth services, the cost-of-living crisis, and, yes, foreign policy, because what happens abroad is not separate from our values here at home”.
It has been accurately observed that these outsider performances at last year’s election owed much to Labour’s “quietist line” over Gaza. In these conversations, however, it’s hard not to feel that the independents are guilty of a quietism of their own when it comes to the war in Ukraine. (“I don’t support what Russia is doing in Ukraine,” Corbyn said, but for an evening so dominated by foreign policy, it is striking how little it comes up.) Beyond the allegation that Labour is spending on “welfare, not warfare”, the discussions also don’t present much in the way of political economy – a worked-out theory of what government should be responsible for, how it should pay for things, and what the consequences of not paying for them are. Perhaps it is more remarkable that they don’t have to.
Corbyn talked about the popular vote totals Labour racked up in 2017 and 2019 (when he led the party) being higher than Labour’s in 2024. This is, of course, a pretty silly argument when talking about trying to form a majority government under a first-past-the-post electoral system. It’s like saying you’re really good at football after being smashed at tennis. However, if you want to have an assertive left-opposition party that will never be in government but will bag 10 per cent of the vote (which polling suggests a Corbyn-led party could snag now) and 25 seats, you don’t have to care about Stevenage woman. In fact, you don’t want your support to be too thinly spread. The ability to stack up votes in London or Bristol is what will get you where you need to go.
And what kind of left opposition does Corbyn even want? This event took place 24 hours after Zarah Sultana announced that she had resigned from Labour and that she would “co-lead the founding of a new party” with Jeremy Corbyn. It has since been reported that Corbyn was far from delighted with the speed and style of this announcement. His next move remains hard to discern: on stage in Ilford, he did not discuss Sultana’s statement, though Mohamad did say that her resignation from Labour was one of the things that gave her hope (along with Zohran Mamdani’s Democrat primary victory in New York).
While Corbyn talked about having “some time now to organise” up to elections next year, he didn’t claim to be doing so as part of any particular group. If I’d known nothing about Sultana’s announcement, I’d have assumed he was talking about independent bids of the kind he, Mohamad and Feinstein made last year; he talked warmly about drinking tea and working with the other independent MPs elected last July. But otherwise, he was reticent. Instead of a Q&A with a roving mic, we got an unwieldy QR code system by which the audience could submit their questions, which were then read out by Mohamad. They were all unthreatingly soft-ball (what inspires you? What do you like to eat in Ilford?). None mentioned the – or a – new party.
[See also: Are we entering a new era of left-wing infighting?]
Feinstein called Mohamad “the people’s member of parliament for Ilford” and said that at the next election she will send Streeting “into his political retirement and a very well-paid job in the private healthcare sector”. Somewhat less plausibly, he also referred to Corbyn – 76 now and likely 80 at the time of the next general election – as the future prime minister. We also got a foretaste of the lines that will be used against Streeting when Mohamad runs at the next election: she claimed he is “currently using his post as Health Secretary to give our health data to Palantir, the same company that powers Israel’s AI warfare”.
Wes Streeting’s potential defeat at the next election is an under-discussed reality of British politics. He was lucky not to lose his seat last year; I understand there is some discontent at the lack of resources Mohamad’s campaign received, something she alluded to on stage. Perhaps a cabinet secretary’s seat being under threat is less remarkable in a world where all that’s solid melts into Reform poll leads, but it is nonetheless something our politics hasn’t really digested. Streeting has said he is “definitely not” tempted to scarper to a safer seat. Saying it now and saying it in three and a half years’ time, however, are two different things.
I left as Mohamad was offering the audience the chance to go home with a jar of Corbyn’s jam (two jars are ultimately auctioned for an astonishing £1,500). On a table in the lobby are cans of Labbaik cola, in the colours of the Palestinian flag, for thirsty attendees who’ve just taken in a solid two hours of political discourse. On the street outside is a souped-up car. Painted on its bonnet are a Palestinian flag, the words “Nakba 1948: resistance is justified when people are occupied”, and what appears to be a cartoon of Harley Quinn in a keffiyeh.
The event was a success; there will be more like it in Ilford and around the country. Britain has become a multi-party system and there is an appetite for a party (or perhaps just candidates) that talks about peace, Palestine and poverty. The launch of Sultana’s new party has been messy and the left beyond Labour is fragmented, with some elements filtering into the Greens and some likely preferring the more decentralised independent model.
These people do not have to play the same games the major parties do; whatever Feinstein says, I do not believe Jeremy Corbyn wants to be, much less will be, prime minister in four years’ time. They want an audience, representation for their views, to hear people saying what they think from the green benches, to stick it to Labour. It is clear from my evening in Ilford that there is an audience ready to buy what they are selling. Whether they exist outside of these urban enclaves, however, is another question.
[See also: Inside Robert Jenrick’s New Right revolution]
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