The British Labor Party no longer wants to let ex-Chairman Corbyn run
Former British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, who led the left-of-centre Labor Party while it was tainted by anti-Semitism allegations, will not be allowed to run for Labor in the next national election, his successor as party leader has said.
Keir Starmer said the party has changed “and we’re not going back and that’s why Jeremy Corbyn will not be the Labor candidate in the next general election.”
Veteran left-wing MP Corbyn was elected Labor leader in 2015 on a surge of grassroots enthusiasm and led the party to defeat in the 2017 and 2019 elections.
A longtime supporter of the Palestinians and critic of Israel, he was suspended from Labor in 2020 after Britain’s Equality Watch found that party officials had committed “harassment and discrimination” against Jews and said anti-Jewish prejudice was allowed to spread within Labour.
Starmer said he was determined to root out anti-Jewish prejudice in the party.
“Anti-Semitism is an evil and no political party that cultivates it deserves to stay in power,” he said after the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which has overseen Labor for several years, gave the party a clean bill of health .
“Those who try to blame others or downplay what happened in our party are part of the problem themselves, and we will have no patience or tolerance for that,” Starmer said.
Corbyn was suspended from the party in 2020 after claiming opponents exaggerated the level of anti-Semitism in Labor for “political reasons”. He had represented Labor in Parliament since 1983 and now sits as an Independent.
Starmer, a lawyer and former head of the UK Public Prosecutor’s Office, has pulled the party back into the political center since taking office in 2020. He has dropped Corbyn’s opposition to Britain’s nuclear weapons, has strongly backed arms shipments to Ukraine and stressed the party’s commitment to balancing the books.
Labor has a strong lead in opinion polls over the ruling Conservatives, who have been in power since 2010 and are mired in scandals. The next national election must be held by the end of 2024.
In a strong rejection of his predecessor, Starmer said on Wednesday that Labor had “changed irrevocably … from an inward-looking party to a public-facing party. From a party of dogma to a party of patriotism. By a party protest against a public service party.”
He said: “The Labor Party has been unrecognizable since 2019 and will never come back.”
“If you don’t like that, if you don’t like the changes we’ve made, I say the door is open and you can go.”
