At the launch of Islington North’s first ‘People’s Forum’, Jeremy Corbyn speaks to Tribune about organising community campaigns outside the Labour Party — and responds to the latest international crises.

Addressing a popular campaign rally on Highbury Fields on the eve of polling day during the recent general election, Jeremy Corbyn pledged that if re-elected — this time as an independent  — the socialist Islington North MP would seek to host monthly ‘People’s Forums’. These assemblies, he explained shortly following his 7,000-strong election victory over Labour’s Praful Nargund, would entail ‘a monthly opportunity for residents to hold me, their elected representative to account’, a ‘chance for local people to ask me anything about the month gone by and give me instructions for the month ahead’, and a ‘shared, democratic space for local campaigns, trade unions, tenants’ unions, debtors’ unions to organise, together for the kind of world we want to live in.’

Tribune’s Owen Dowling went along to the inaugural People’s Forum on Wednesday night, convened in Crouch Hill’s Brickworks community centre — the same venue as held Corbyn’s packed community campaign launch as ‘An Independent Voice For All Of Us’ back in May, providing a resonant sense of a mission accomplished for a local activist cadre who successfully parried Keir Starmer’s effort to deprive them of their longtime socialist representation in Parliament.

From tables arranged for facilitated group discussion on the evening’s theme issue — housing — attendees first heard Corbyn’s welcome, and report on his activities as MP in the first weeks following this summer’s ‘fascinating’ re-election mobilisation as an independent, ‘very different from any other election campaign I’ve ever fought in.’ Detailing the various issues he has been focusing on in Parliament under the new Labour government, he also explained the nature of the recently-announced ‘Independent Alliance’ formed with the four other progressive independent MPs yielded by the election, and their close correspondence with the Green Party, Plaid Cymru, and Scottish National Party contingents in Westminster —  as well as with ‘many in the Labour Party, particularly those who’ve been recently suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party because of the vote which they took’ in opposing the two-child benefit cap.

Fielding questions from local forum participants on housing associations, disability accessibility, knife crime and young people, Corbyn also spoke on the constituency’s recent mass rally outside Finsbury Park Mosque opposing the far right, international peace concerns, and the subject of housing in Islington. With homes ‘completely unaffordable for anybody who lives here’ and most residents living in either council or housing association property or the private rented sector, the urgency of rent controls was reiterated, as was the socialist principle that: ‘housing should be a right, not a market opportunity and a privilege.’ The ensuing discussions were given a particular urgency in the light of the ‘devastating’ Grenfell Tower Inquiry report, with flammable cladding throughout Islington a major concern for Corbyn’s office: ‘We lost seventy-two people for no reason whatsoever, other than the greed and the lies of those companies that sold that cladding equipment.’

Islington North’s first People’s Forum was, everyone this reporter spoke with concurred, a politically stimulating success, and seems likely to remain a fixture of popular socialist recalcitrance towards the policies of the right-wing Labour government the constituency rejected. Future forums, it was hoped, would foreground subjects including health, education, young people, and Black History Month, to be held in different areas of the community at varying times so as to help maximise engagement. Opening proceedings in expressing that ‘it’s an honour and a privilege and a pleasure to represent Islington North in Parliament’, it’s clear that the close relationship between Corbyn and his constituents which saw the Labour Party machine publicly humiliated in July’s election is set to thrive in a national setting otherwise increasingly characterised by stifling cynicism towards the prospects of genuine democratic representation.

Tribune spoke to the former Labour leader following Islington North’s maiden People’s Forum on the political thinking behind the evening’s assembly, what’s changed for the longtime MP in becoming an independent, and his responses to the latest international crises.

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OD

We’re here tonight at Brickworks following the first of the Islington North People’s Forums that you mentioned during the election campaign that you intended to hold if re-elected as an independent. Can you briefly summarise what tonight was about, and how it reflects the political vision for which you stood in that election?

JC

I promised in the election that we would hold monthly People’s Forums, and that those would be where I would report on what I’ve been doing as an MP and where we as a community would debate and discuss crucial issues. Tonight we held the first; we’ve delivered 50,000 leaflets across the constituency since the election to do three things: to thank people for voting in the election, to point out that I was there to represent everybody, and that the first forum would be on the nineteenth of September. We put it on Eventbrite and it became massively oversubscribed straight away. So we then thought very long and hard about whether we should turn it into a huge public meeting, open-air or something else. We thought, no, what we’d try and do is have an interactive forum here and have people participating online as well as present in the room. 

We started with my report on what I’ve been doing in Parliament since the election; they tried very hard to restrict me to ten minutes, they almost succeeded but not quite. We then had roundtable discussions on housing, followed by speeches from ACORN, Islington Homes for All, and John Glackin from Streets Kitchen — which is essentially a homeless people’s kitchen and food supplier — to discuss the totality of the housing crisis, and crucially what we’re going to be campaigning on: legislation for the private rented sector, and local planning issues. I also asked people to support the response we’re putting in on the National Planning Framework policy document that the government is closing consultation on next week. It’s crucial that local authorities be empowered to build council housing; this document does the opposite, it disempowers them and is an open door for the biggest corporations.

OD

Now outside the auspices of the Labour Party, what has been the difference in the short period since the election in your experience as the local socialist MP?

JC

The people who came and helped in the campaign, many were from the Labour Party, formerly very active people in the Labour Party, and obviously had enormous technical experience of elections. They were crucial to the campaign because they have that knowledge of polling day and all the issues that go with it. But what was different this time was a very large number of volunteers came to help who had never been involved in anything political before at all, and loved it: they loved the fact that there was no hierarchy, there was just a campaign, and that their job was to go out and identify support and then persuade them to vote when polling day came along. Many of those local people — and they’re mostly local — have stayed in touch, and we therefore got volunteer teams together to deliver to the whole constituency, and then to come tonight and help. We’ve now got feedback forms to deal with, and I’ve got hundreds of questions to answer that people dropped in tonight. So we’ve really got that inertia going of people that want to do something.

OD

Tonight has obviously been about the local community, but it’s impossible to escape the heavy weight of international concerns at present. You stood in the election as both a local campaigner and an internationalist, and you’ve just launched your new book with Andrew Feinstein and others on the global arms trade, Monstrous Anger of the Guns.

Do you have a response to the two major geopolitical controversies of recent days: one, the spectre raised last week of the prospective authorisation of the firing of British and NATO ‘Storm Shadow’ missiles from Ukraine to strike targets inside the Russian border; and two, the latest Israeli attack in Lebanon?

JC

Thank you for both questions. I did refer in my report, albeit briefly, to issues of international peace, and my views are quite well known. Two weeks ago, I was in Berlin with the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, and we had a day-long meeting about Ukraine with speakers from both the Russian peace movement and from the Ukrainian peace movement, and messages from Boris Kagarlitsky (who is of course imprisoned) and others. Nobody in the room supported what Russia is trying to do in Ukraine. Everybody in the room said that what’s happening is incredibly dangerous. Pouring in long-range missiles, which will then be used to attack Russian military sites with NATO weapons, is also incredibly dangerous and could lead to the most massive escalation of the war, including potentially a ground war between NATO and Russia. 

Ukraine has been the fighting ground of Europe for five hundred years: is it going to be that again? Or is there going to be a peace process? And interestingly, António Guterres lost his rag a bit, ten days ago, did you see it? He just basically let rip at the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, saying: ‘You are culpable in all of the wars raging right now, you’ve got to do something about it.’ I suspect there will be some initiative on Ukraine, probably led by the African Union, with Latin American leaders supporting it in some way; it is very, very important that there is, and I hope there is. How many more conscripted soldiers from Ukraine and from Russia are going to kill each other? It’s just a death fest.

OD

And there is the danger of nuclear escalation as well.

JC

Yes, there’s the danger of nuclear weapons there. And NATO is now on to this totally arbitrary decision to raise defence expenditure to 2.5 percen and to produce a new generation of nuclear weapons, on top of the installation of nuclear weapons from the US in Europe and in Britain. This is extremely dangerous. 

Secondly, on Lebanon and Israel. The illegal occupation of Palestine by Israel is at the centre of conflict throughout the Middle East. There are 40,000 dead already in Gaza. Now we have this business of Israel, apparently, getting these pagers manufactured that can be exploded at a certain time by the means of a radio message. Wow. What if you or I accidentally bought one of those pagers — because it was a very reputable name they were made under — we don’t know, and we’re on a plane. It goes off. What are you looking at? Hundreds dead. I mean, it’s beyond mad what they’ve done. So yes, the question then is: what would it take for Western Europe and the United States, and Britain in particular, to stop the supply of arms to Israel?

OD

You mentioned just before we started that you’re soon headed off to Mexico for the inauguration as president of the socialist Morena party’s Claudia Sheinbaum. Do you feel that Latin American radical internationalist politics represents a source of hope at the moment, globally, amidst all this horror?

JC

Yes, I do. I’m looking forward to all the discussions we’ll have on the side of the inauguration. I’m very honoured to have been invited by President-Elect Sheinbaum to come for the inauguration, and I’m looking forward to travelling to Mexico. I’ll be leaving on Monday night.

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