UK Labour Party leader Keir Starmer was emphatic that former leader Jeremy Corbyn will not be allowed to run as the party’s candidate in the next general election.
Asked about whether Labour would allow Corbyn to stand as a candidate for Islington North, his longtime constituency, Starmer told BBC Radio 4: "I don't see the circumstances in which he will stand at the next election as a Labour MP.”
“Obviously, we've not got to the selection of that particular constituency yet, but I don't see the circumstances in which Jeremy Corbyn will stand as a Labour candidate,” he said.
Corbyn was removed as the party whip and has been sitting as an independent MP since October 2020 – when he alleged that Labour’s internal issue with antisemitism that led to a wide ranging investigation was “dramatically overstated” by his political opponents. But he has remained a member of the party.
The former Labour head was suspended from Labour following the publication of a report compiled by the Equality and Human Rights Commission which found numerous cases where the party leadership under Corbyn underplayed, belittled or ignored complaints by Jewish members, and sometimes actively interfered to support political allies.
When asked if the selection process for candidates had already included Corbyn's constituency, Starmer responded that the party was in the middle of choosing candidates and was still focusing on seats they had little chance of winning.
"We're going through various constituencies at the moment. The ones that we've selected for first are the ones that are the most marginal, so we're working through the constituencies, but as I say, I don't see the circumstances in which Jeremy Corbyn will stand at the next election as a Labour MP,” Starmer said.
"As you'll appreciate, it takes a lot of time and resource to do batches of them, which is what we're doing at the moment. We started with the most marginal seats that we don't hold, for obvious reasons, and we're getting through those as quickly as we can, and we'll continue to do so,” he said.
In November, senior party sources told The Guardian that Corbyn had been banned from running for the party.
According to the officials, Corbyn’s ban is permanent and he will not be allowed to run in future elections.
In February 2022, party insiders met to discuss ways to stop Corbyn from running for the party in the seat he has held since 1983 in Islington North.
In response to Starmer’s comments, Corbyn told PoliticsJOE that his local party was “obviously concerned” by the announcement that he would be barred from running for Labour.
"My local party is obviously concerned. They want to have a selection process, and they're demanding that that take place, and that would mean that I would have to be reinstated into the parliamentary Labour party, from which I should never have been suspended in the first place. That's the demand we're making,” he said.