Jeremy Bernard Corbyn ( ; born 26 May 1949) is a British politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Islington North since 1983. He is the parliamentary leader of Your Party, which he co-founded with Zarah Sultana in July 2025. Corbyn had previously been a member of the Labour Party from 1965 until his automatic expulsion in 2024 for standing for election as an independent MP, and served as Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020 and was a member of the Socialist Campaign Group parliamentary caucus. He identifies ideologically as a socialist on the political left.
Born in Chippenham, Wiltshire, Corbyn joined the Labour Party as a teenager. Moving to London, he became a trade union representative. In 1974, he was elected to Haringey Council and became Secretary of Hornsey Constituency Labour Party until elected as the MP for Islington North in 1983. His activism has included Anti-Fascist Action, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and advocating for a united Ireland and Palestinian statehood. As a backbencher, Corbyn routinely voted against the Labour whip, including New Labour governments. A vocal opponent of the Iraq War, he chaired the Stop the War Coalition from 2011 to 2015, and received the Gandhi International Peace Award and Seán MacBride Peace Prize. Following Ed Miliband's resignation after the party had lost the 2015 general election, Corbyn won the 2015 party leadership election to succeed him. The Labour Party's membership increased sharply, both during the leadership campaign and following his election.
Taking the party to the left, Corbyn advocated renationalising public utilities and railways, a less interventionist military policy, and reversals of austerity cuts to welfare and public services. Although he had historically been critical of the European Union (EU), he supported the Remain campaign in the 2016 EU membership referendum. After Labour MPs sought to remove him in 2016 through a leadership challenge, he won a second leadership contest against Owen Smith. In the 2017 general election, Corbyn led Labour to increase its vote share by 10 percentage points to 40 per cent, their largest rise since the 1945 general election.
During his tenure as leader, Corbyn was criticised for antisemitism within the party. He condemned antisemitism and apologised for its presence, while his leadership saw a strengthening of disciplinary procedures regarding hate speech and racism. In 2019, after deadlock in Parliament over Brexit, Corbyn endorsed holding a referendum on the withdrawal agreement, with a personal stance of neutrality. In the 2019 general election, Labour's vote share fell to 32 per cent, leading to a loss of 60 seats, leaving it with 202, its fewest since the 1935 general election. Corbyn remained Labour leader for four months while the leadership election to replace him took place. His resignation as Labour leader formally took effect in April 2020 following the election of Keir Starmer, who led the party to victory at the next general election in 2024 with a vote share of 33.7 per cent.
After asserting that the scale of antisemitism within the party had been overstated for political reasons, Corbyn was suspended from the party in 2020. In May 2024, after the 2024 general election had been called, Corbyn was not allowed to stand as a Labour candidate for his constituency, and subsequently announced he would stand as an independent candidate for Islington North; he was then expelled from Labour. He won re-election with a majority of 7,247. In July 2025, Corbyn and fellow independent MP Zarah Sultana announced the formation of Your Party, and in March 2026 he was elected as the party's parliamentary leader.
Jeremy Bernard Corbyn was born on 26 May 1949 in Chippenham, Wiltshire, the son of mathematics teacher Naomi Loveday (née Josling; 1915–1987) and electrical engineer and power rectifier expert David Benjamin Corbyn (1915–1986). He has three elder brothers; one of them, Piers Corbyn (born 1947), is a weather forecaster who later became known as a climate change denier and anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist. For the first seven years of his life, the family lived in Kington St Michael, Wiltshire. His parents were Labour Party members and peace campaigners who met in the 1930s at a committee meeting in support of the Second Spanish Republic at Conway Hall during the Spanish Civil War.
When Corbyn was seven, the family moved to Pave Lane, Shropshire, where his father bought Yew Tree Manor, a 17th-century farmhouse which was once part of the Duke of Sutherland's Lilleshall estate. Corbyn attended Castle House School, an independent preparatory school near Newport, Shropshire, before becoming a day student at Newport's Adams Grammar School at the age of 11.
While still at school, Corbyn became active in the League Against Cruel Sports and the Labour Party Young Socialists within The Wrekin. He was also a member of the leftist youth organisation the Woodcraft Folk. He joined the Labour Party at the age of 16. He achieved two A-Levels at grade E, the lowest possible passing grade, before leaving school at 18. Corbyn joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1966 while at school and later became one of its three vice-chairs and subsequently vice-president. Around this time, he also campaigned against the Vietnam War.
After school, Corbyn worked briefly as a reporter for the local Newport and Market Drayton Advertiser newspaper. Around the age of 19, he spent two years doing Voluntary Service Overseas in Jamaica as a youth worker and geography teacher. He subsequently visited Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay throughout 1969 and 1970. While in Brazil, he participated in a student demonstration in São Paulo against the Brazilian military government. He also attended a May Day march in Santiago, where the atmosphere around Salvador Allende's Popular Unity alliance which swept to power in the Chilean elections of 1970 made an impression on him: "[I] noticed something very different from anything I had experienced... what Popular Unity and Allende had done was weld together the folk tradition, the song tradition, the artistic tradition and the intellectual tradition".
Early career and political activities
Returning to the UK in 1971, Corbyn worked as an official for the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers. He began a course in trade union studies at North London Polytechnic but left after a year without a degree. He worked as a trade union organiser for the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) and Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union, where his union was approached by Tony Benn and "encouraged ... to produce a blueprint for workers' control of British Leyland"; the plans did not proceed after Benn was moved to a different Department.
Corbyn was appointed a member of a district health authority and in early 1974, at the age of 24, he was elected to Haringey Council from South Hornsey ward. After boundary changes in 1978 he was re-elected in Harringay ward as councillor, remaining so until 1983. As a delegate from Hornsey to the Labour Party Conference in 1978, Corbyn successfully moved a motion calling for dentists to be employed by the National Health Service (NHS) rather than as private contractors. He also spoke in another debate, describing 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 Labour Party's agent and organiser, and had responsibility for the 1979 general election campaign in Hornsey.
Around this time, he became involved with the London Labour Briefing, where he was a contributor. He was described by The Times in 1981 as "Briefing's founder"; The Economist in a 1982 article named Corbyn as "Briefing's general secretary figure", as did a profile on Corbyn compiled by parliamentary biographer Andrew Roth in 2004, which states that he joined the editorial board as General Secretary in 1979. Michael Crick, in the 2016 edition of his book Militant, says that Corbyn was "a member of the editorial board", as does Lansley, Goss and Wolmar's 1989 work The Rise and Fall of the Municipal Left. Corbyn said in 2017 that these reports were inaccurate, telling 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."