It all happened with a sense of enormous urgency, with the coincidence of the Labour Party banning me from even applying to be the candidate, Sunak calling a general election, the Labour machine imposing a candidate, and my announcing I’d run as an independent. That meant we started on that day with absolutely nothing except our determination, but we very quickly built up a campaign of good friends and supporters: rented an office, staffed it very quickly, and within a few days had a canvassing system in operation.

We then appealed for volunteers, of which hundreds came along and joined in the campaign, and we managed to actually physically speak to more than half the electorate during the course of the campaign, which is almost unprecedented. That was by intensive door-knocking, as well as what we called dynamic canvassing, where you’d be on the street or at an event, talk to people, and if they wanted to support us, they could register that support.

On polling day, we had a very sophisticated operation, with teams allocated to all of the polling districts with knocking-up sheets and rotors, and we turned out somewhere near eighty 80 percent of our promised vote. Obviously, there were many people who we’d not contacted who also voted for us, and interestingly our canvassed returns pretty accurately reflected the result we got. The opinion polling done during the campaign was misleading, and we questioned the methodology of it anyway. Putting us some distance behind — as one of the polls did —  actually encouraged people to come and help, so we ultimately got more support from that.

The distinctive feature of the campaign was not necessarily the mechanics that I’ve just described to you; it was much more the message we put across, a simple one about my standing as an independent who was prepared to hold any incoming government to account, but also one challenging the economic narrative being advanced by both major parties, which is essentially a duopoly of an austerity straitjacket — we offered an alternative to that.

We also spent a lot of time making sure that no community was left behind. For example, we worked with the rough-sleeping and homeless groups in order to get people to register to vote, and many did. We also produced leaflets in eight different languages, which we distributed at churches, mosques, community centers, streets, and shops and so on, and that also made quite a big difference. It wasn’t so much that everything was influenced by the written material, but it was the message that we wanted to be able to reach people in all languages.

We got almost 50 percent of the vote, which was the result not just of this but also of many, many years of work by my excellent constituency office in dealing with thousands of individual problems people have had regarding the Department of Work and Pensions, housing, refugee and immigration status, planning, police and crime, and youth issues.

It was also down to the background of an empowered community: we had won the fight, albeit some years ago, to prevent the Whittington Hospital losing its A&E [emergency room], which would have meant its effective closure as a hospital. Also, I pointed out that before that we had a huge campaign to prevent major roadbuilding in the community, and also campaigns to get more parks and open spaces. So our result comes from a tradition of community empowerment, and I think there are a lot of lessons in that.

The last thing I’d say on it is that I’ve been a parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party on ten occasions, and before that a council candidate on three occasions. This was a completely different campaign, because you couldn’t go on to any doorstep and assume anything; you couldn’t turn up there and say, “Hi, I’m the Labour candidate,” and they’d say, “Alright,” and vote for you or not. We had to explain on every doorstep why I was now standing as an independent and what my policies were. This meant that conversations were longer and more intense, but also that our support was very real. This will now be translated following the election into a local People’s Forum every month, my accountability as an independent MP, and the empowerment of community initiatives like private-rented-sector campaigns.

Ralph [Miliband] was indeed in truth a bit more than skeptical — he was positively acerbic about the Labour Party at various times. The discussions we had at those ILCS meetings in the 1980s were very interesting: among others, there was Tony Benn, Ralph Miliband as you’ve said, and also Hilary Wainwright. Tariq Ali was there quite often, as was Jim Mortimer, then recently general secretary of the Labour Party but who originally came from a more Communist Party–ish sort of tradition. Tony came from the complicated liberal-left-Christian-socialist ideal, Hilary came from more of the libertarian-community left, and Tariq Ali from a revolutionary perspective.

So some of the arguments were quite long-winded and quite considerable, but what wonderful people, what wonderful minds they all had. It was all very informal, and I think that was our failing. We should have recorded it all and turned it into a book, because the meetings were fascinating.

The debates were then, after the 1984–85 miners’ strike, about what socialists in Britain should do, because the labor movement had suffered a massive defeat in the strike. Tony was very strongly of the view that the Labour Party could still be a vehicle for socialist transformation, and indeed challenged Neil Kinnock’s leadership in 1988, albeit unsuccessfully.

Going forward in time, Tony often talked about how frustrated he was with the Labour Party during the Tony Blair years. But he once jokingly said to me, “Old comrade, do you think we should resign from the Labour Party and set up something else?” I asked, “Are you serious about that?” and he said, “I don’t know, but I’ve got a horrible feeling about the inaugural conference and what it would be like, with everybody vying for positions and thousands of points of order and procedure.” He always quoted the example of Britain’s Independent Labour Party (ILP) earlier in the twentieth century and what had happened to that. So Tony Benn was very much of the fight inside the Labour Party.

You pose the question as though it’s a sort of either/or. But neither Tony Benn nor I ever saw it as completely an either/or. I’m sure you’ve read about his deputy leadership campaign in 1981; that was the first time somebody had fought an election campaign inside the Labour Party by taking it outside the Parliamentary Labour Party. All other elections were either elections for the National Executive Committee, which were clearly influenced by constituency parties and unions, or leadership elections, which were solely the preserve of the parliamentary party.

When Tony stood for deputy leader in 1981, that was the election that tested Labour’s new electoral college system [i.e. engaging a wider electorate, not just MPs], which meant that the campaign went outside: Tony had rallies and mass meetings all over the country, many of which I attended — in fact I organized some of them and was very much part of that campaign. What Tony was trying to do was build up a popular campaign for an internal election, which was very much what we did many years later for the Labour leadership election in 2015.

Neither of us ever saw Parliament as the only vehicle for our politics. In 1991, Tony produced his Commonwealth of Britain Bill in the House of Commons (seconded and strongly supported by me) which was about democratizing Britain — which is a supremely limited democracy in many ways, as reflected in the House of Lords, the royal prerogative, the electoral system, and the enormous powers invested in the office of prime minister.

I think that to achieve a socialist society you have to fight for elected positions as a way of demonstrating the strength of opinion behind you. But you also have to campaign in a popular way so that people understand how you’re going to bring about socialist change. I remember after the previous general election in December 2019, speaking at a health rally in Manchester in absolutely horrible weather, somebody said to me, “God, I wish you’d won the election.” I said, “So do I, actually, but why do you say that?” and they replied, “We wouldn’t have to be out here in this freezing rain having a rally defending the NHS [National Health Service], because it would have been defended already.”

I said: “It’s true you wouldn’t have to be out here doing that, but you would have to be out here anyway defending the government and what it was trying to achieve. For the first time in your life, you’d be on a demonstration in support of a government, because we would have had the most enormous battles to fight with the financial as well as the political and military establishments in Britain to bring about the changes we wanted.”

So I think it’s unnecessary to pose the question as a binary choice; it’s not. You fight for elected positions to try and achieve change within them, and if blockades are put in your way, then you mobilize people to try and overturn those.

The result of the united left in France last Sunday was amazing, really special, and so welcome. But to quote Shakespeare: they have scorched the snake, not killed it.

Rassemblement National, Marine Le Pen’s far-right party, is still a very significant force in France’s National Assembly and still clearly a huge force within French society, and the endemic racism of the whole country has given it that platform. At least it prevented from becoming the government of France, but it has shown its strength, which is something that must continue to be opposed.

Therefore, I absolutely welcome and will work with Jean-Luc Mélenchon and all the groups on the Left in France. The other results across Europe back in the June elections were interesting: in Belgium and Finland the Left did very well, in other countries less well. I think the lessons we take must be that you have to mobilize people around the issues of wages, living standards, and conditions as a way of intercepting the poisonous normal discourse of blaming migrants and refugees for falling living standards and conditions, which is what the far right stir up in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. The language used against asylum seekers is unspeakable in so many cases; in France it is as bad as or worse than here.

Opposition to the racist right has to be strengthened and made more effective; anti-racist campaigning isn’t something that should be seen as separate from the rest of what we do — it has to be an intrinsic part of it. That means uniting communities to work together, and that’s what you’ll have observed in our own election campaign in Islington North: the sense of all the communities coming together was one that gave us that win. That victory didn’t come out of four weeks’ campaigning. It came out of forty years of work trying to bring communities together and saying that “actually, all of your interests are the same — housing, health, education.”

I will indeed be in Mexico for the inauguration of Claudia Sheinbaum, and I think she will make a very good president. She’s incredibly well-prepared, very intelligent, very analytical, and very determined. I’ve got a lot of time and respect for her; likewise for my good friend AMLO who is stepping down.

But I’ve also been involved in supporting the various left campaigns in Latin America: in Bolivia, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, and elsewhere. I do think that the recent attempted attacks on the government in Bolivia are a sign that the combined forces of financial interests, mining interests, and military interests have not gone away and are a threat to any progressive government in Latin America — indeed, anywhere in the world. So the role of the Progressive International is a very important one.

On September 17, the Peace & Justice Project will host our second International Conference in London, which will bring together international wages, environmental, refugee, human-rights, and peace campaigns and unite working-class and solidarity organizations via the umbrella of the Progressive International. I think that international solidarity is very important and is actually growing.

There are major wars raging throughout the world at the moment: in Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, the Congo, Palestine, and elsewhere. Thousands of lives have been lost in all of them; vast amounts of money have been made by the arms industry in all of them, and there is indeed huge pressure from the arms industry for foreign policies of war.

There was more internationalism in support of peace before World War I than there is now. Those huge movements for peace before 1914, with leaders like Jean Jaurès, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and Keir Hardie, which united across Europe to try to prevent World War I and then to end it, are something we have to learn from. We need to cultivate that sense of internationalism for peace once again.

Amid all the horrors in Gaza, which are vile and disgusting in every single way, a simple message has got across internationally: there has to be a cease-fire brought about by an end to the arms supplies to Israel and a determination by the wider world to demand that. I’m optimistic that all those hundreds of thousands of people that have come together in support of Gaza will remain together as an amorphous but nevertheless united voice for peace and for social justice.

The election of myself and of four others also as independents, not to mention candidates such as Leanne Mohamad and Andrew Feinstein who fought very strong campaigns, represents a popular force within our society that can only grow. The language of xenophobia and hate that was used during the general election has to be countered, and through the strength of this movement it always will be.

I’ve often had a quite strained relationship with the Labour whips. I do think our parliamentary system needs to be improved in lots of ways. The new Labour government has an enormous majority: they could use that majority to end the two-child benefit cap, to give justice for the Waspi women [victims of a change in the state pension age], to build council housing — there are a whole lot of things that they could do that wouldn’t need to fundamentally change the nature of the economic basis of our society. But they look to me as though they’ve deliberately put themselves into a financial straitjacket from the very beginning.

I will be in Parliament speaking up on peace issues as I’ve always done, and on issues of housing and social justice. Doing it on my own would mean just one voice, so you have to build alliances. I’ve already met the other four colleagues who were elected as independents; I’ve also had conversations with the Scottish National Party (SNP) and Plaid Cymru leaderships who I know very well; I know some of the new Green MPs better than others, but of course I’ll work to build those relationships with them too. Such alliances have to also be built with people who are in the Labour Party who nevertheless hold very similar views to me.

So yes, there’s going to be an awful lot to do. But the major action is going to be outside of Parliament: outside of Parliament on Gaza, outside of Parliament on housing, outside of Parliament on the environment, outside of Parliament on all the burning issues confronting ordinary people.

Labour won a huge majority of parliamentary seats on the lowest-ever popular vote for a governing party — only 33 percent — which is much less in popular-vote terms than Labour under my leadership achieved back in 2017, and a lower number of votes than we received in 2019. So, it’s actually a very fragile situation, however masked it is by the huge parliamentary majority.

I think that thoughtful people in the Labour Party need to reflect on that. A more radical offer could win a lot more support and a lot more confidence from the poorest communities in this country. If the new government cannot do something about inner-city poverty, child poverty, student debt, low wages, and particularly the housing crisis (which means building council housing by the way, not just executive private-sector homes), then there’s going to be a very unforgiving public out there in a couple of years’ time.

Our campaign was very much outdoors and inclusive; we had eight or nine open-air rallies, finishing off with a big eve-of-polling-day rally on Highbury Fields. That will be followed up at the end of this month with the first of our report-back assemblies that will be held every month in the constituency, which will involve my reporting back on the issues that have come up in Parliament and what I’m doing, with the first assembly having an emphasis on housing. It’s going to be a different form of politics, which will be inclusive, popular, and open. This will be replicated elsewhere across the country; of that I’m very confident. Watch this space — you’re going to enjoy it!