Starmer was “100% behind Jeremy Corbyn”. Thierry Monasse/Getty Images
Jeremy Corbyn has described Keir Starmer’s decision to stop him standing as a Labour candidate in Islington North as a “flagrant attack” on democracy. Such pique is understandable, perhaps, since Starmer claimed to be “100% behind Jeremy Corbyn” when the allegations of the former leader’s antisemitism were circulating in 2019. All the more so when you take into account Starmer’s reneging on his pledge to allow local party control over parliamentary selections.
But it’s not unusual for a Labour leader to attempt to define himself against a predecessor and make a decisive break with the past. Sometimes the differentiation is gained through dint of personality, as with the war-hero Clement Attlee who contrasted starkly with his pacifist predecessor George Lansbury. And the grammar-school boy Harold Wilson, who was a clean break from his aloof public-school predecessor, Hugh Gaitskell. Sometimes it is a deliberate political ploy: Tony Blair conjured Michael Foot to condemn the lack of professionalism that characterised “Old Labour”. Corbyn, himself, was elected leader in part as a repudiation of the kind of political triangulation that defined the New Labour years.
No post-war Labour leader has gone so far as Starmer, though, and attempted to block his predecessor from standing for election. Plenty of big-hitters have been expelled from the party – in circumstances which may have resonance for Corbyn. In 2000, for example, Ken Livingstone, who served as the legendary leader of the Greater London Council in the Eighties and then as a Labour MP for 13 years, was explosively ejected from the party when he dared to stand for Mayor of London against the wishes of Tony Blair. This backfired when Livingstone then stood as an independent and decisively defeated Blair’s handpicked candidate, Frank Dobson, who secured just 13% of the vote. Might Corbyn seek to follow Livingstone’s example as he considers his own options in his Islington North constituency?
Michael Foot, too, provides a blueprint of sorts. Twenty years before he became Labour party leader, he and three other Labour MPs lost the whip, though, like Corbyn, maintained party membership.
“Even if they expel me,” Foot declared on the eve of the decision, “I shall still go on supporting the Labour Party”. In this, Corbyn has followed Foot’s example, loyally supporting Labour candidates and canvassing with his local party in Islington. When it was proposed that losing the whip meant that Foot should also be stripped of his party membership, Foot’s ally Harold Wilson declared that such a suggestion was “plain daft”. When the Right-wing leader, Hugh Gaitskell, was replaced by Wilson two years later, the whip was restored and Foot’s political career resurrected.
Such temporary purges are not unusual. In 1939, Nye Bevan and Stafford Cripps were among those booted out of the party for advocating a Popular Front to combat fascism. These expulsions were generally unpopular, with many local Labour constituency parties issuing statements of support for the condemned. Nine months later, they were readmitted to the fold. Cripps would go on to serve as Chancellor in the Attlee Labour government, and Bevan founded the National Health Service.
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