Jeremy Corbyn will not stand as a Labour candidate at the next general election, Labour leader Keir Starmer has said.
Starmer had previously publicly indicated that Corbyn would not be able to stand as a Labour candidate, but had not confirmed that the Islington North MP would be barred from doing so until today.
Starmer made the announcement in a speech on Wednesday, where he marked the Labour Party’s progress in tackling antisemitism. The party has now been taken out of ‘special measures’ by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, 18 months since they found the party had acted unlawfully in its treatment of Jewish members.
“Let me be very clear, Jeremy Corbyn will not stand at the next general election as a Labour party candidate,” Starmer said in the speech. “What I said about the party changing, I meant, and we are not going back, and that is why Jeremy Corbyn will not stand as a Labour candidate at the next general election.”
Corbyn was suspended as a Labour MP by Starmer for saying, in his response to the 2020 EHRC report, that the scale of antisemitism within Labour had been “overstated” by his opponents. He was eventually readmitted to the wider party but remains barred from representing Labour in Parliament, and sits in the commons as an independent.
Starmer went on to say that Labour was “unrecognisable from 2019 and it will never go back”, before going on to invite any Labour MPs who “don’t like the changes we have made” to leave the party.
Corbyn has declined to comment on speculation he might stand as an independent candidate.
Momentum, the left-wing campaign group set up to support him when he was Labour leader, expressed their disappointment at the decision on Twitter. “It should be for Labour members in Islington North to decide their candidate – that is their democratic right. This Party does not belong to one man alone – it belongs to its members and trade unions.”