Shadow Foreign Secretary’s claim that she’ll campaign against Corbyn in Islington North – a breach of Labour’s rules – leads to surge of promises to campaign for him at the next GE, with others saying they’ll canvass to unseat her
Labour front-bencher Lisa Nandy has appeared on Rupert Murdoch’s Times Radio to say that she will campaign in North Islington against Jeremy Corbyn in the next general election. Corbyn is currently sitting as an independent MP because of Keir Starmer’s breach of Labour’s parliamentary rules to withhold the whip from the former party leader, despite the EHRC’s strict ban on ‘political interference’ in disciplinary decisions.
However, he is still a party member in good standing, so Nandy would be breaking Labour’s rules to campaign against him – an auto-expulsion offence – but such is the Labour right’s contempt for the party rulebook that she will not face any disciplinary action for her comments, nor for campaigning against him.
Not from Keir Starmer or his head office minions, that is.
But Nandy’s comments led to a queue forming – or rather, two queues – in response to her threat. Many current and former Labour members have said, both privately and currently, that if she campaigns against Corbyn, they will travel from all over the UK to campaign in Islington for him – regardless whether he is wearing a Labour rosette.
And some have also said that, since Corbyn’s majority in the last two elections was huge and far healthier than Lisa Nandy’s – he received almost two-thirds of the vote in 2019 and his lowest win as an incumbent in the last three and a half decades was with fifty percent, with the rest far higher – they will travel to Wigan to campaign against her:
Skwawkbox has also received multiple direct and group messages from people who intend to take holiday in order to canvass for Corbyn or against Nandy, some even ready to fly in from overseas to do it.
In 2019, Nandy won by fewer than seven thousand votes on a turnout of more than 45,000 – and with Keir Starmer’s unpopularity in northern working-class seats can be considered relatively marginal. That fact – and what it means that Labour is prepared to almost certainly lose his seat to the Tories, even if they manage to unseat Corbyn – did not escape commenters:
Importantly, many also pointed out that Corbyn enjoys extensive support among the Jewish communities, on whose behalf Nandy claimed to be acting, in his constituency – some even wrote to the local press to stand with him publicly:
Keir Starmer has turned Labour into a rotting shell of the great party it so recently was.
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