In a recent speech, Jeremy Corbyn explained the role his Peace and Justice Project is playing in supporting the establishment of a progressive mass movement that can harness Britain’s hunger for change.
Earlier in March, Corbyn spoke to the Canary at the launch event of Southport Community Independents, one of numerous locally-rooted and locally-focused groups that could eventually become the constituent parts of a new national party of the left. But he also gave a powerful and revealing speech to attendees. In it, he said progressive policies are clearly popular and possible. And he insisted that the Peace & Justice Project has been working to support the resurgence of people power step by step. These are the two major points he made.
1) Never forget: policies of popular empowerment resonate with voters
‘There’s massive resonance with social justice, but you’ve got to go out and tell people about it’
Even before Britain truly saw the vicious cronyism of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, it was already less popular than under Corbyn’s leadership of the party. And Peace & Justice Project founder believes it’s important to remember that. As he told the attendees in Southport:
the highest ever Labour vote achieved in this country was in 2017. [And in] the 2019 result… we still achieved a far higher vote than most of the other election results of this century.
With that in mind, he stressed:
Don’t run away with the idea that putting forward policies (about redistribution of wealth, redistribution of power, giving young people hope – not abuse, protecting our environment – not destroying it, looking for peace rather than war) doesn’t have a massive resonance out there. But you’ve got to go out and tell them about it. That’s why we’re forming these independent groups all over the country.
A big reason to focus on local engagement is to bypass the elitist propaganda that helped to weaken the 2017 and 2019 campaigns. And that’s one factor helped Corbyn in his own constituency in the 2024 election. Because people came from all over “to show that we were not going to allow lies and money to defeat what our message was – which is about… a society based on social justice and peace, not based on greed, racism and the nastiness that the right offer to us”.
People’s support for “a properly functioning welfare state” didn’t stop after 2019, but Labour’s did
Corbyn later argued that, in Labour’s 2017 and 2019 manifestos, the argument for “a properly functioning welfare state” was clear, and millions of people duly voted for it. And he stressed that “public ownership of the public services that have been doing very well”. On the other hand, he said:
The water industry, privatised under Margaret Thatcher, was asset stripped by the corporations. That logic has seen prices going up all over the place, the highest ever levels of pollution of our streams, our rivers, and our seas, and the appalling amount of waste because they haven’t invested enough in maintaining those pipes. I think the private sector have adequately proved over the last 30 years they’re incapable of delivering us reliable supplies.
He also described how, on all the demonstrations and picket lines he’s been on:
there’s a whole thirst in the generation of people in our society that are fed up with a country that has such huge degrees of inequality and poverty, that has food banks in every town and city in the whole country, and has an economic and budget process that has increased that level of inequality even since the last general election, when the opportunity was put there in front of parliament for the government to take one small step to eliminate some of the disgraceful child poverty in our country.
But Starmer’s Labour has thrown that opportunity away, refusing to “eliminate the two-child benefit cap”, “compensate the WASPI women”, end homelessness, or “increase the level of disability benefits that are so abysmally low that more than a third of the families with any member of the family who has any disability are living in poverty”.
Since Corbyn’s speech, of course, things have got even worse, with the government taking billions from disabled people and handing them to the arms industry. This is despite massive support across Britain for taxing the super-rich to fund vital public services.
2) The Peace & Justice Project has been working hard behind the scenes to support the resurgence of people power
Bread and roses. Welfare, not warfare.
Corbyn’s formation of the Peace & Justice Project after leaving the leadership of the Labour Party was about “empowering people”, he said. This has included supporting young people with musical opportunities and backing trade union struggles. But as he argued:
socialism, and social justice, doesn’t just come from the economic arguments, important as they are. It comes from international solidarity, but it also comes from inspiration… It is bread, but with roses too, and I think it’s important to get that message across.
Corbyn stressed that he wants peace, and doesn’t want “conscripted soldiers from Ukraine killing conscripted soldiers from Russia”. And he asked:
Where are the planes coming from that are undertaking the surveillance over Gaza?
This is in reference to Britain’s participation in Israel’s genocide in Gaza via RAF Akrotiri.
But international solidarity is key not just because of basic human compassion. It’s also because imperialist actions abroad hurt us at home too. Speaking about the government putting billions more pounds into military spending, he stressed that this would be billions “not spent on health, on education, on housing and the environment” or “trying to deal with the issues of abominable levels of poverty and dislocation in wartorn countries around the world”.
Continuing the mission and momentum of 2015 to 2019
The mission for the left and the Peace and Justice Project, Corbyn said, is “about redistribution of wealth and power within our society”. And he insisted:
we’ve got to be able to come together to achieve these things. That’s why we formed the project.
As part of these efforts, Corbyn and others have been “going all around the country” to try and build an “alliance of all of us that are moving in the same direction”. That means people demanding “council houses for social rent”, “decent wages, environmental sustainability, a fully funded, publicly owned National Health Service and a National Care Service”. The latter, he stressed, is vital because people are having to give up their careers, sell their houses, or get into debt in order to look after people “that ought to be cared for publicly by a National Care Service”.
Groups around the country that have been organising for this mission need to unite “to be a coherent force in the elections that are coming up”, he argued. These include council and mayoral elections in May this year, and the national elections in Scotland and Wales in 2026. And he called these:
huge electoral opportunities to put forward a radical alternative ahead of a general election
To get there, community empowerment and mobilisation are essential
Regarding the future electoral opportunities, Corbyn insisted that it’s “not about what you do then – it’s what we do now about mobilising and empowering people”. He explained:
If you get together as a community and you are defending a hospital against closure, or you want a piece of wasteland turned into a park, or you see an empty building that would make a wonderful nursery for children to enjoy and develop from, you get together, you campaign. You don’t always win… But if you get together… and you achieve something, you’re suddenly emboldened and strengthened as a community. And you don’t get pushed around anymore by planning decisions and other things that are taken against your interests. Because it’s about community empowerment. I always wanted the Labour Party to become a community-based organisation with community organising at the community level.
In fact, he told the Canary his efforts around community organising when he was Labour’s leader were what faced “the biggest opposition… from the Labour Party bureaucracy”.
But now, communities all over the country are organising, and they share a clear mission. Independent and Green MPs, local parties with progressive councillors, trade unions, social movements, and high-profile political and cultural figures have just united to call for an alternative to Labour Party austerity in a Dignity Declaration. As Corbyn said in his speech, organisation is “happening all over the country”, and “these are exciting times”.
Southport Community Independents are one example of the kind of local mobilisation and empowerment that is going on around Britain, with Corbyn thanking their leader Sean Halsall for inspiring people “with your dedication, your humanity and your honesty”. Halsall himself told the Canary that being proactive right now is the key to building “a mass party of the left” in the near future. And that’s exactly what he, Corbyn, and many others are doing to make sure positive change becomes a very real possibility.
Watch Corbyn’s full speech below:
