Jeremy Corbyn: the Haringey Years
Below is an extract from Diane Abbott’s new biography which touches on her relationship with Jeremy Corbyn in the 1970s. The press have focused on Corbyn’s frugal lifestyle. He was reluctant to participate in what is now fine dining and a day out meant a visit to Marx’s grave at Highgate Cemetery. There is no shortage in the history of the left of this. The Islington North MP has an allotment in East Finchley, is keen on jam making and doesn’t drink. It actually sounds very much on message for 2024.
I was also active in the labour movement in Haringey in the 1970s. Corbyn was a Labour Councillor from 1974 until his election as an MP in 1983. I wasn’t in the Labour Party so didn’t run across him in Party meetings. There was however plenty of joint activity comprising the Labour left, the IS/SWP, Greens, community campaigns and trade unionists.
Diane Abbott is right it could be and often was an all inclusive life of political activism, particularly for those who were young, without other significant commitments. In this sense there were certainly other Jeremy Corbyns..
He was known as a brilliant organiser. He was the Labour agent for Hornsey at the 1979 Election including an effective canvassing system he had devised. He was also behind sorting out the fortunes of the old Wood Green Labour Club.
He is perhaps best remembered in this period however as the public face of the successful effort to oppose a march by the National Front in April 1977, known as the Battle of Wood Green. He was able to bring together those who wanted to make a peaceful protest and those who preferred a more robust approach (the march was broken as it moved out of Ducketts Common on to Wood Green High Rd).
Unlike many politicians one can think of Corbyn remembers and refers to that event as something positively achieved rather than claiming it was a youthful excess.
It was not inevitable that I would join the Labour party. Many Black politicos of my generation steered clear of it, believing the left tended to subordinate the politics of race to class politics. Instead, Black political activists of the 70s and 80s devoted themselves to community politics. If I had not been in a relationship with Jeremy Corbyn, I might have drifted away from Labour, but he drew me in and infected me with his love and enthusiasm for the party. I had never met anyone so absorbed by it. By day he was a full-time official for the National Union of Public Employees, the predecessor trade union to Unison. His evening and weekend
hours were taken up with being a Labour councillor in the north London borough of Haringey. Whatever spare time Jeremy had was consumed by being a volunteer organiser in various local Labour campaigns, and I could not help but get caught up in his whirlwind of activism.
Diane Abbott 2024
