Jeremy Corbyn (born 26 May 1949) was the Labour MP for Islington North from 9 June 1983, succeeding Michael O'Halloran. He served as Leader of the Labour Party from 15 September 2015 to 4 April 2020, succeeding Ed Miliband and preceding Keir Starmer.
Biography[]
Jeremy Corbyn was born in Chippenham, Wiltshire, England in 1949, and he was raised in Wiltshire and Shropshire. After moving to London, he became a trade union representative, and he was elected to the Haringey Council in 1974. In 1983, he was elected the Labour MP for Islington North, and he was a staunch anti-fascist, anti-Apartheid, and anti-nuclear weapons and pro-Irish republican activist. He was a rebellious backbencher during the New Labour governments of Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and he chaired the Stop the War Coalition from 2011 to 2015.
Labour leadership[]
Corbyn on 19 December 2019
In 2015, Corbyn was elected Leader of the Labour Party, and he took the party to the left and advocated the renationalization of public utilities and the railways, a less interventionist military policy, and reversals of austerity cuts to welfare and public services. He survived a leadership spill following Labour's failure to defeat the Brexit referendum in 2015, and, in 2017, his party increased its share of the vote to 40%, achieving a hung Parliament. However, the party would go on to suffer from internal divisions due to allegations of institutional anti-Semitism, leading to the formation of The Independent Group by Labour defectors; many critics of the party's anti-Semitism pointed to Corbyn's calling Hamas and Hezbollah "friends". In the 2019 general election on 12 December 2019, Labour fell to 32% of the vote and suffered its worst electoral defeat since 1935, and he subsequently announced that he would not lead Labour into the next election. On 4 April 2020, he was succeeded as Labour leader by Keir Starmer.