In our latest premium content podcast, Andrew Fisher interviews Jeremy Corbyn MP, who talks about the formation of the new Your Party and how it might contest local elections in 2026. The former Labour leader also talks about the ‘control freak’ mentality of the party and how he was expelled after 50 years’ membership with a note suggesting he could call Samaritans.
In our interview, Corbyn says that he was suspended by Labour in 2020 “very unfairly”, and that the party’s all-powerful National Executive later passed a statement saying that he was “not fit to be a Member of Parliament”. Corbyn has been MP for Islington North since 1983.
“I thought it was extraordinary and very mean,” Corbyn tells Andrew Fisher, his former policy director, in this frank interview.
When his local Labour Party was refused permission to hold a selection meeting for its parliamentary candidate, Corbyn wrote to David Evans, then the party’s General Secretary, to say that he would like to be part of the selection process that was to be organised by Labour’s London region officials.
“He said you can’t be,” Corbyn recounts.
“So I wrote back and said under normal rules of natural justice, I’d like to appeal against this decision. And he wrote back immediately, like 10 minutes later, saying the rules of natural justice no longer apply in the Labour Party. There is no right of appeal, you have no right to hold public office, and I hereby draw your attention to the rules of the party on your behaviour.
“At that point, I decided to run as an independent, announced it and I was expelled by the Labour Party half an hour later in a letter which said at the end of it, if you’re upset about this, here’s the number for Samaritans.”
Corbyn describes the whole episode as “very sad”, and explains how the parliamentary Labour Party has a “control freak” mentality which means his former friends and colleagues, such as Diane Abbott and John McDonnell, will never be readmitted into the fold, and which has seen MPs in the Labour government vote against a ceasefire in Gaza and for benefit cuts, “Things no rational person would ever do.”
In the wide-ranging interview, the former Leader of the Opposition also talks about the 2017 and 2019 General Elections, about the probable “federal” structure which he thinks will be adopted by the new Your Party he has formed with Zarah Sultana, and how his Labour leadership was sabotaged by “the residual, unpleasant, self-serving bureaucracy that the Labour Party operates with”.
And, of course, Corbyn talks about courgettes and jam, and the government’s “disastrous” Infrastructure Bill which could put Green Belt and allotments at risk across the country.
- The Andrew Fisher Interview is part of our Under The Flyover podcast strand, premium content available free of charge to Inside Croydon’s paying subscribers. If you are not already a subscriber, click here to sign up now to access both our Jeremy Corbyn interview and our archive of podcasts and regular Croydon Insider news panel round-table discussion thingies
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Comrade Corbyn twice led the Labour Party to a resounding defeat.
Why would anyone think that his (assumed) leadership of The Allotment Party would be any different?
He has been reported as saying that the West should stop arming Ukraine because it would only extend the war. What would he do if a foreign power invaded England?