Jeremy Corbyn

1 August 2024Review

OR Books, 2023; 300pp; £17.99

During the five years that Jeremy Corbyn led Labour, there was a constant stream of damaging accusations that he was allowing anti-semitism to take hold of the party.

Asa Winstanley of the Electronic Intifada has put together a devastating exposé, documenting a co-ordinated smear campaign by the Israel lobby in the UK, in partnership with the Labour Right and the Israeli embassy.

The campaign was designed to halt criticism of the illegal Israeli occupation and to bring…

1 June 2023News in Brief

Labour party activists in Islington North, in London, have backed former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn is a member of the Labour party but not a Labour MP, as a result of decisions made by the current Labour leadership – which has also barred him from running as a Labour MP in the next election.

A motion ‘thanking Mr Corbyn for his “commitment and service to the people who have a democratic right to select our MP” was endorsed by a whopping 98 per cent of local [Labour…

8 December 2020Feature

PN and friends reflect on the UK's December 2019 general election

On 12 December, the Conservative party won a landslide victory in the general election in Britain, turning Boris Johnson’s minority government into one enjoying an 80-seat majority. It is widely believed that two of the biggest factors were the public’s desire to ‘Get Brexit done’ (the Conservative slogan) and its distrust of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (after years of lies and smears directed at him).

The parties most in favour of nuclear disarmament did quite well.

The…

1 December 2019Review

Pluto Press, 2019; 272pp; £14.99

The headline findings from this new study of the Labour Party’s anti-semitism controversy are astonishing.

Between June 2015 and March 2019 eight national newspapers printed a massive 5,497 stories mentioning Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and anti-semitism.

A Survation poll commissioned by the authors in March 2019 found ‘on average people believed that a third of Labour Party members have been reported for anti-semitism’ when ‘the actual figure was far less than one per cent.’…

1 October 2019Feature

Jewish Voice for Labour examines 'a farrago of half-truths, distortions and outright invention'

With the transmission on 10 July of the Panorama programme 'Is Labour Antisemitic?' the BBC has reached a new low point in its retreat from its once-praised tradition of impartiality.

The BBC has entrusted a programme of great sensitivity to a muck-raking journalist whose prejudices are well known. The result quite predictably is a farrago of half-truths, distortions and outright invention.

The principal ‘witnesses’ offered by the programme were Labour Party ex-officials,…

11 October 2017Blog

Ian Sinclair talks to George Lakey, Matt Kennard and Alex Nunns

Ian Sinclair writes: My new Peace News article ‘The biggest fight of our lives’ includes comments from George Lakey, Matt Kennard and Alex Nunns. Due to space considerations I could only include a small portion of the commentary each of them sent me in the article itself. Below are their full comments.

Why is Jeremy Corbyn seen as such a threat to the British establishment?

Matt Kennard, author of…

22 June 2017Blog

How the British mass media exploded with outrage over Jeremy Corbyn's speech linking terrorism with British foreign policy - and then pretended the speech never happened

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn made an extraordinary speech just days after a suicide bomber killed 22 people, nine of them teenagers, one an eight-year-old, at the end of a pop concert in Manchester on 22 May.

In his speech on 25 May, Jeremy Corbyn linked the Manchester attack to British foreign policy, breaking a deeply-held taboo in British politics. (The taboo was also broken in the aftermath of the 7/7 attacks in 2005 by a number of Conservatives, including current foreign secretary…

1 February 2017Review

OR Books, 2016; 406pp; £15

Though there have now been a number of books published about Jeremy Corbyn’s election as the leader of the Labour Party, including Richard Seymour’s impressive Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (reviewed in PN 2596-2597), The Candidate is arguably the definitive account of those exciting days.

As the political correspondent of Red Pepper magazine, Alex Nunns is perfectly placed to chart Corbyn’s 2015 leadership campaign, writing a detailed,…

1 August 2016Review

Verso, 2016; 256pp; £12.99

Published a few weeks before the EU referendum, Richard Seymour’s latest book is an important and timely intervention into Labour party – and national – politics.

Seymour, a former member of the Socialist Workers Party, is known as one of the sharpest intellects on the Left, and his sympathetic analysis of the rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership doesn’t disappoint.

There is a welcome recap of the heady days of summer 2015, when the unassuming MP for North Islington…

1 October 2015Feature

Peace activists should mobilise in support of Corbyn, argues Ian Sinclair

As the Guardian noted, Jeremy Corbyn’s landslide victory on 12 September in the Labour leadership contest was ‘one of the most stunning electoral upsets of postwar politics.’ Billed at 200-1 by bookmakers when he entered the race in June, the Islington North MP won 59 percent of the vote, giving him ‘the biggest party mandate for any political leader in UK political history’, according to the Guardian’s chief political correspondent.

What makes Corbyn’s victory so…