Jeremy Corbyn Biography

Jeremy Bernard Corbyn (b. 26 May 1949) is a British politician who has served as Labor Party leader and opposition leader since 2015. In 1983, Corbyn was first elected MP for Islington North. He identifies himself ideologically as a democratic socialist.

Born and raised in Wiltshire, as a teenager, Corbyn joined Labor. He moved to London and became a representative of the trade union. He was elected to the Haringey Council in 1974 and also became Hornsey Constituency Labor Party Secretary until he was elected MP for Islington North in 1983.

His activism included roles in Anti-Fascist Action, Anti-Apartheid and Nuclear Disarmament Campaign, and advocating for a united Ireland. He often voted against the Labor whip as a backbench MP, including government “New Labour” under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. From 2011 to 2015, he chaired the Stop the War Coalition.

In 2015, Corbyn was elected Labor leader. Taking the party to the left, he advocated the renationalization of public utilities and railways, a less interventionist military policy, and the reversal of welfare and public services cuts in austerity. He won a second leadership contest after Labor MPs tried to remove him in 2016. He supported continued membership in the 2016 referendum, although critical of the European Union.

Labor finished again as the second largest party in parliament in the 2017 general election, but increased its voting share to 40 %, resulting in a net gain of 30 seats and a hung parliament. Before becoming a leader, Corbyn was criticized for allegations of antisemitism in the Labor Party and for alleged antisemitic associations. Corbyn apologized for his opposition to antisemitism and his commitment to rooting it out in the party and affirmed it.

Jeremy Corbyn Age| How Old Is Jeremy Corbyn

He is 69 years old as of 2018.

Jeremy Corbyn Early Life

Corbyn was born in Chippenham, and raised in nearby Wiltshire’s Kington St Michael. He is the youngest of Naomi Loveday’s four sons (born Josling; 1915–1987), a teacher of math, and David Benjamin Corbyn (1915–1986), an electrical engineer and power rectifier expert. A physicist and meteorologist is his brother Piers Corbyn. His parents were members of the Labor Party[8] and peace campaigners who met during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s at a committee meeting in Conway Hall to support the Spanish Republic.

The family moved to Pave Lane in Shropshire when Corbyn was seven years old, where his father bought Yew Tree Manor, a country house that once belonged to the Lilleshall estate of the Duke of Sutherland.

Jeremy Corbyn Education

Corbyn was educated before attending Adams ‘ Grammar School as a day student at Castle House School, an independent preparatory school near Newport, Shropshire. While still at school, Young Socialists, his local Labor Party, and the League Against Cruel Sports became active in the Wrekin constituency.

He joined the Labor Party at the age of 16 and attained two A-levels of E-grade, the lowest passing grade possible, before leaving school at the age of 18. In 1966, while at school, Corbyn joined the Nuclear Disarmament Campaign (CND) and later became one of its three vice-chairs and later vice-president.

After school, for a local newspaper, the Newport and Market Drayton Advertiser, Corbyn worked briefly as a reporter. At about the age of 19, he spent two years as a youth worker and geography teacher doing Voluntary Service Overseas in Jamaica. He later traveled through Latin America, visiting Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile in 1969 and 1970.

He took part in a student demonstration against the Brazilian military government in São Paulo while in Brazil. He also attended a May Day march in Santiago, where he was impressed by the atmosphere surrounding Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity Alliance that swept to power in the 1970 Chilean elections: he noticed something very different from what I had experienced… What Popular Unity and Allende did was weld the folk tradition, song tradition, art tradition and intellectual tradition together.

Jeremy Corbyn Early career and Political Activities

He returned to the United Kingdom in 1971 and worked as an official for the Tailors and Garment Workers National Union. Corbyn started a course at North London Polytechnic in Trade Union Studies but left without a degree after a year after a series of arguments with his curriculum tutors.

He worked as a trade union organizer for the National Union of Public Employees and Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union, where Tony Benn approached his union and “encouraged… to produce a blueprint for workers ‘ control of British Leyland” the plans did not proceed after Benn moved to another department.

He was appointed a member of a district health authority and was elected to the Haringey Council in South Hornsey ward at the age of 24 in early 1974. He was re-elected as councilor in Harringay ward after boundary changes in 1978 and remained so until 1983.

Corbyn successfully moved a motion as a delegate from Hornsey to the 1978 Labor Party conference calling for dentists to be employed by the NHS rather than private contractors. In another debate, he also spoke of a motion calling for greater support for law and order as “more appropriate to the National Front than to the Labour Party” Corbyn became the agent and organizer of the local Labor Party and was in charge of the Hornsey general election campaign in 1979.

He was involved with the London Labor Briefing around this time, where he was a contributor. Described as “Briefing’s founder” by The Times in 1981, The Economist named Corbyn as “Briefing’s general secretary figure” in a 1982 article, as did a profile on Corbyn compiled in 2004 by parliamentary biographer Andrew Roth, alleging that he joined the editorial board as general secretary in 1979. Corbyn successfully moved a motion to the 1978 Labor Party Conference as a delegate from Hornsey calling for dentists to be employed by the NHS instead of private contractors.

He also spoke in another debate of a motion calling for greater support for law and order as “more appropriate to the National Front than to the Labour Party” Corbyn became the local Labor Party’s agent and organizer and was in charge of the 1979 general election campaign in Hornsey. About this time, where he was a contributor, he was involved with the London Labor Briefing.

Described by The Times as “Briefing’s founder” in 1981, The Economist named Corbyn in a 1982 article as “Briefing’s general secretary figure” as did a profile on Corbyn compiled by parliamentary biographer Andrew Roth in 2004, alleging that he joined the editorial board as general secretary in 1979.

Michael Crick said Corbyn was “a member of the editorial board” in his 2016 edition of Militant, as did Lansley, Goss and Wolmar’s 1989 work, The Rise and Fall of the Municipal Left. However, Corbyn said these reports were inaccurate in 2017, saying to Sophy Ridge “I read the magazine. I wrote for the magazine. I was not a member of the editorial board. I didn’t agree with it.”

He was working on the unsuccessful deputy leadership campaign of Tony Benn in 1981. He was keen to allow former member of the International Marxist Group Tariq Ali to join the party, despite the fact that Labor’s National Executive had declared him unacceptable, and declared that “as far as we are concerned… he is a party member and will be issued with a card.”

In May 1982, when Corbyn was chairman of the Constituency Labor Party, Corbyn gave Ali a party card; in November; In Briefing’s July 1982 edition, Corbyn opposed expulsions from the Trotskyist and entryist group Militant, saying, “If expulsions are in order for Militant, they should apply to us too.” In the same year, he was the “provisional convener” of “Defeat the Witch-Hunt Campaign” based at Corbyn’s address at that time.

Corbyn was selected as the Labour Party candidate for the constituency of Islington North, in February 1982, winning the final ballot by 39 votes against35 for GLC councillor Paul Boateng, who became one of the first three Black British MPs. At the 1983 general election he was elected Member of Parliament for Islington North, after defeating the incumbent Michael O’Halloran and immediately joined the socialist Campaign Group, later becoming secretary of the group.

In February 2017, Morning Star said about Corbyn: “He has been bullied, betrayed and ridiculed, and yet he carries on with the same grace and care heal ways shows to others – however objectionable their behaviour and treatment of him might be.”In 1983, Corbyn spoke out on a “No socialism without gay liberation” platform and continued to campaign for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights.

Corbyn was given a medallion at the end of the strike by the miners in recognition of his help.

Corbyn responded, saying that: “It’s not a fashion parade, it’s not a gentleman’s club, it’s not a bankers’ institute, it’s a place where the people are represented. “In the 1980s Corbyn took a keen interest in the conflict in Northern Ireland.

He wanted to develop dialogue with the Irish Republican Party Sinn Féin and so, when Gerry Adams became the first Sinn Fein MP in 1983, Corbyn met with Adams at Westminster along with a number of other Labour MPs. In 1984, Corbyn and Ken Livingstone invited Gerry Adams, two convicted IRA volunteers and other members of Sinn Féin to Westminster.

He became known during the 1980s for his work on behalf of the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six, who were eventually found to have been wrongly convicted of responsibility for fatal IRA bombings in England in the mid-70s. In the run up to the 2017 general election, Corbyn said that he had “Never met the IRA”, although Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott later clarified that although he had met members of the IRA, “He met with them in their capacity as activists in Sinn Fein”.

In 1986, Corbyn was arrested with 15 demonstrators protesting against the trial of a group of IRA members including the Brighton Bomber Patrick Magee.

After refusing police requests to move from outside the court, Corbyn and the other protesters were arrested for obstruction and held for five hours before being released on bail, but were not charged.

Following the 1987 Lough gall ambush, in which eight IRA members and one civilian were shot dead by the British Army in an operation to defend a police station, Corbyn attended a commemoration by the Wolfe Tone Society and stated “I’m happy to commemorate all those who died fighting for an independent Ireland.” In the early 1990s, MI5 opened a temporary file on Corbyn to monitor his links to the IRA. The Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch monitored Corbyn for two decades, as he was “Deemed to be a subversive”, someone who might “Undermine … Parliamentary democracy”.

According to The Sunday Times, following research in Irish and Republican archives, Corbyn was involved in over 72 events connected with Sinn Féin, or other pro republican groups, during the period of the IRA’s paramilitary campaign.

He voted against the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, saying “We believe that the agreement strengthens rather than weakens the border between the six and the26 counties, and those of us who wish to see a United Ireland oppose the agreement for that reason.” In 1998, he supported and voted for the Good Friday Agreement, saying he looked forward to “Peace, hope and reconciliation in Ireland in the future.” Corbyn supported the campaign to overturn the convictions of Jawad Botmeh and Samar Alami for the 1994 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in London; Botmeh and Alami had admitted possessing explosives and guns but denied they were for use in Britain.

Corbyn signed five early day motions in support of their case between 2002 and2006, raising issues of public interest and calling for their parole. In 1990, Corbyn opposed the poll tax and nearly went to jail for not paying the tax.

Corbyn sat on the Social Security Select Committee from 1992 to 1997, the London Regional Select Committee from 2009 to 2010, and the Justice Select Committee from 2010 to 2015.

Between 1997 and 2010, during the most recent Labour Government, Corbyn was the Labour MP who voted most often against the party whip, including three-line whip votes.

Jacobin described him as “a figure who for decades challenged them from the backbench as one of the most rebellious left-wing members of parliament.” In October 2001, Corbyn was elected to the steering committee of the Stop the War Coalition, which was formed to oppose the Afghanistan War which started later that year.

In 2002, Corbyn reported unrest: “There is disquiet…about issues of foreign policy” among some members of the Labour party. In 2006, Corbyn was one of 12 Labour MPs to support Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party’s call for a parliamentary inquiry into the Iraq War.

Corbyn is a member of a number of Parliamentary Trade Union Groups: he is sponsored by several trade unions, including UNISON, Unite and the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers.

Corbyn was chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Chagos Islands, chair of the APPG on Mexico, Vice-Chair of the APPG on Latin America and vice-chair of the APPG on Human Rights.

Corbyn hosted a call-in show on Press TV, an Iranian government television channel, from 2009 to 2012, for which he was paid up to £20,000, according to the register of members’ interests at the House of Commons.

Corbyn’s final appearance was six months after the network had its UK broadcasting license revoked by Ofcom for its part in filming the detention and torture of Maziar Bahari, an Iranian journalist.

Of com ruled in November 2010 that Corbyn did not show due impartiality when he appeared on Press TV as a guest on George Galloway’s weekly show.

Corbyn was one of 16 signatories to an open letter to Ed Miliband in January 2015 calling for Labour to make a commitment to opposing further austerity, to take rail franchises back into public ownership, and to strengthen collective bargaining arrangements.

Before becoming party leader Corbyn had been returned as Member of Parliament for Islington North seven times, gaining 60.24% of the vote and a majority of 21,194 in the 2015 general election.

Jeremy Corbyn Family| Daughter|  Jeremy Corbyn Wife

Corbyn lives in northern London’s Finsbury Park, Islington. He was three times married and twice divorced, with his second wife having three sons. He married Jane Chapman in 1974, a Haringey fellow Labor councilor and now a professor at Lincoln University; they divorced in 1979. Corbyn had a brief relationship with Diane Abbott and went on a East Germany motorbike tour with her after finishing his marriage with Chapman.

In 1987, he married Claudia Bracchitta, a Chilean exile, granddaughter of Ricardo Bracchitta (Santiago Consul General), by whom he had three sons. Following a difference of opinion about sending their son to a grammar school–Corbyn opposes selective education–they divorced in 1999 after two years of separation, though Corbyn said in June 2015 that he and his former wife are still “get on very well”

His son later attended the school of Queen Elizabeth, which was the first choice of his wife. Their second son, Sebastian, has been working on his leadership campaign and is now working as chief of staff for John McDonnell. His second oldest brother, Andrew Corbyn, a geologist, died in Papua New Guinea in 2001 from a brain haemorrhage. Jeremy Corbyn went to Papua New Guinea, where he traveled to Australia with the body, where the wife and children of his brother stayed.

Corbyn went to Mexico in 2012 to marry his Mexican-born partner Laura Álvarez, who runs a coffee import business that is fair trade. Her coffee business came under scrutiny in 2015 after being accused of “exploiting workers in her native Mexico” by selling luxury coffee marketed as “fair trade” and made by impoverished farmers who earned just £ 93p of the selling price of £ 10 per bag.

A former Mexican human rights lawyer, she first met Corbyn shortly after his divorce from Bracchitta, coming to London to support her sister Marcela after her sister’s alienated husband abducted her niece to America. For assistance, they contacted fellow Labor MP Tony Benn, who introduced them to Corbyn, who met on their behalf with the police and spoke at fundraisers until the girl was in 2003.

Álvarez returned to Mexico, maintaining a long-distance relationship with the couple until she moved to London in 2011. Corbyn has been described by Álvarez as “not very good at house work but he is a good politician” He has a cat called El Gato[431] and previously owned a dog called Mango, described as the “only constant companion” of Corbyn at the time by The Observer in 1984. Corbyn missed the birth of his youngest son as he lectured at the same hospital on NUPE members.

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Jeremy Corbyn News| Brexit| Jeremy Corbyn Polls| Policies| Latest News

Jeremy Corbyn’s project could solve Britain’s problems. But we will never know if we focus only on its flaws, not its policies.

Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is on borrowed time. That assumption has hung over it throughout his three and a half years in charge. It’s there during every Labour crisis. It’s there before every perilous election – such as the local polls this May. And after every bad or even so-so Labour result the end of Corbyn’s leadership is there in the minds of his many enemies, of many commentators, of many anxious Corbynistas.

When the party is doing better under him, such as during and immediately after the 2017 election, this sense that he is on perpetual probation recedes, but never completely and never for long. In June 2017, two days after Labour had won its largest general election vote since Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide, the then Labour MP Chris Leslie told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We shouldn’t pretend that this is a famous victory. It is good … but it’s not going to be good enough.” Twenty months later, without waiting to see if his scepticism about Corbynism’s electoral potential was justified, he left the party to co-found the Independent Group.

Some of the temporary, besieged feel of the current Labour regime is down to Corbyn himself: his initial reluctance to fill Labour’s leadership vacuum, his relative lack of conventional political skills, his advanced age for a modern British party leader. He will turn 70 in May, shortly after the local elections, which will be handy for his political obituarists if Labour does as poorly as polls currently suggest.

Yet the unforgiving standards by which he is judged are also applied to the Labour left as a whole. Despite Corbyn’s two enormous democratic mandates, the left is endlessly said to have “taken over” the party; to be a “sect”, a “cult”, an alien “virus”. The language has become so commonplace, it is rarely pointed out how loaded it is. The Labour left has been othered.

Many people in the rest of the party, and wider British politics and the media, don’t consider the left to be a legitimate Labour tribe, let alone legitimate rulers of the party, let alone a legitimate potential government. This is rarely stated explicitly. Excluding a large and currently vibrant group from mainstream politics can be an awkward argument to make in a democracy – especially when the radical right of the Conservative party has never been othered in the same way. Instead, starting with Margaret Thatcher, it has often run the country. But once you appreciate the implacable hostility the Labour left arouses, it explains a lot of otherwise puzzling British political phenomena.

In recent weeks, MPs at a meeting of the parliamentary Labour party have reportedly applauded the Independent Group breakaway, despite the immense damage it has done to the chances of a Labour government. Tom Watson, in theory Corbyn’s loyal deputy, has said things that could end up on Tory election posters, such as “I love this [Labour] party but sometimes I no longer recognise it.” He has also set up the Future Britain group, scheduled to meet for the first time on Monday night , for “social democratic” Labour MPs to assert themselves against “doctrinaire utopianism”, which sounds like none-to-subtle code for the left.

Meanwhile, as ever, seasoned political journalists, who spent decades tolerating the dark arts of Alastair Campbell and New Labour’s other arm-twisters, have declared themselves horrified at the “bullying” of opponents by Corbynistas. Tom Bower, biographer of Gordon Brown and a dozen other bruisers, gives his current book on Corbyn the subtitle Corbyn’s Ruthless Plot for Power. Corbyn supporters may be tempted to reply: we should be so lucky.

Despite, or, rather, partly because of, all the panics about the Labour left, it has rarely been dominant in the party. The last leftwing leader before Corbyn was George Lansbury, in the 1930s, another relatively elderly London radical, who lasted three years before being forced to resign by more centrist figures who did not like his pacifism. The fact that Labour’s leader in the early 1980s, Michael Foot, is also often regarded as a leftwinger, when he actually spent much of his tenure frustrating and arguing with the left, and its key player Tony Benn in particular, is a sign of how exaggerated the conventional picture of the Labour left’s strength can be.

“Labour leaders tremble at the relentless advance of Benn’s army,” warned the Express in May 1981, after Benn launched his famous bid for the party’s deputy leadership. And yet, in large part because the press othered him so effectively, as a kind of foreign demagogue – “Ayatollah Benn”, according to the Sun, after Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini – he did not win.

Labour centrists often talk about the need for the party to be “a broad church”. Rather less often, they accept that control of it ought to alternate between its different tribes, in a roughly representative way. Eight years ago David Owen, the former Labour minister and SDP co-founder, told the New Statesman that after the defeat of Jim Callaghan’s centrist government (in which Owen served) at the 1979 general election: “It was not unreasonable for those on the left to try to shift the balance of power in the party closer to their views.”

But back in the 80s Owen was rather less willing to let the left have its turn. He co-founded the SDP partly to block it. The SDP’s founding document, the 1981 Limehouse declaration, which he helped draw up, denounced “the drift towards extremism in the Labour party”, supposedly being led by Benn, as “not compatible” with the party’s “democratic traditions”. Last month, at the launch of the Independent Group, Leslie caricatured Corbynism in almost exactly the same way. Labour, he said, had been “hijacked” by “the hard left”.

Does it matter that so many people don’t want British politics to include a left of any significance? Even if you’re not at all leftwing, recent British history suggests it does. Between the fading of Benn’s influence in the mid-80s and Corbyn’s leadership win in 2015, the Labour parliamentary left – effectively the entire Commons left – dwindled to a few dozen MPs, occasionally admired, more often patronised and derided, almost always marginal to the making of government policy. Meanwhile more mainstream, supposedly more realistic politicians gave us Thatcherism, frequently disastrous wars, the financial crisis, austerity, and an increasingly dysfunctional version of free-market capitalism.

Now that we are living with the aftermath of all that – with a Conservative right promising further destructive experiments; and a Labour centre-left that has come up with almost no fresh ideas since the heyday of Blairism, two decades ago – it seems an odd time to decide that British politics can do without a leftwing alternative. Corbyn’s Labour project is rickety, incomplete and overambitious. It may be easier to concentrate on its flaws and scandals than to evaluate its policies, and then decide whether any of them are solutions to the country’s multiple crises. But if Britain could, somehow, finally, stop questioning whether the Labour left belongs in mainstream politics, it may even discover that the left has things to offer.