Corbyn ‘takes aim at Labour heartlands’ as Your Party unveils local elections strategy

Jeremy Corbyn has unveiled Your Party plans to target Labour’s heartlands in the upcoming English local elections in May. The start-up party is supporting allied community independent groups at the local elections. And it’s hopeful of several groups winning East London councils, with Labour’s core vote set to collapse in major cities.

It’s worth noting that this follows a period of stasis during which local groups have tried to keep things moving.

Your Party’s local elections campaign will focus on the destructive effects of local government austerity. Councils across the country are squeezed to breaking point, social care is in crisis and services are failing residents.

In contrast to the ‘snake-oil’ alternative of Reform, Your Party will stress the need for public investment and the in-sourcing of services. Local council divestment from Israeli apartheid will also be a key focus.

At Your Party’s founding conference in November 2025, members voted to adopt a targeted strategy. This aims to maximise the party’s seats, rather than standing everywhere. As party structures continue to develop, Your Party will support around 250 candidates across England. The vast majority of these will be standing as Independents or for allied local community parties.

Your Party targets

Key targets for allied groups include:

• Tower Hamlets, run by Lutfur Rahman’s Aspire since 2022.
• Redbridge (see below).
• Newham, where the Newham Independents Party has recently won multiple by-elections.
• Bradford, where Labour’s support has been in massive decline.

Allied candidates are also likely to make inroads in Birmingham and the West Midlands. Historic Labour bastions are turning away from the party over its complicity in the Gaza genocide and failure to tackle the cost of living.

The Your Party leadership sees Tower Hamlets as a ‘beacon council’. In recent years, under Rahman’s leadership, the council has rolled out free school meals for all primary and secondary school students. It has re-established the Education Maintenance Allowance which the Tory-Lib Dem coalition cut. And it has reinstated the Winter Fuel Payment which Starmer and Reeves cut.

Hopes are also high for the Redbridge Independents, who have won a series of stunning by-elections from Labour, with Your Party spokesperson Noor Jahan Begum elected to replace slum landlord Jas Athwal MP.

Health secretary Wes Streeting bemoaned the loss in later-published messages with Peter Mandelson, declaring that he was “toast” at the next election. Streeting hung onto his seat by just 500 votes at the last election after a strong challenge from young British-Palestinian Leanne Mohamad.

Corbyn was elected as Your Party parliamentary leader earlier this month after his allies were victorious in the party’s leadership elections. He is expected to tour the country in support of the Your Party-backed independents and groups in the coming weeks, following a first event in Redbridge.

Corbyn said:

These elections are the beginning of the fightback against austerity, privatisation and fear.

All across the country, there will be community independent groups offering an alternative to the despair of Labour and the division of Reform. We are proud to support those candidates and groups standing up for redistribution, inclusion and peace.

People in power underestimate the power of people at their peril – and arrogance in office always comes back to bite you in the end.

Rahman, executive mayor of Tower Hamlets, said:

Labour imposed some of the most severe austerity in the country when they ran Tower Hamlets council, further impoverishing one of Britain’s most deprived areas.

We’ve reversed these cruel cuts and made history as the first council to introduce universal free school meals for all primary and secondary pupils, re-establish the Education Maintenance Allowance scrapped by the Tories, and bring back the Winter Fuel Payments, cut by Starmer.

These are just some of our pioneering policies to provide more cost of living support to our residents than any other local authority, alongside unprecedented investment in frontline services and in affordable and social housing.

The alliance being brought together by Jeremy Corbyn, with Your Party, Aspire, and progressive independent and Green candidates, presents a real opportunity to replace more Labour-led councils with administrations rooted in and accountable to their communities.

In Tower Hamlets, we’ve shown how socialist, redistributive policies can transform lives and provide the hopeful, ambitious alternative needed to take on the far right — something Labour has utterly failed to do.

Noor Jahan Begum, Your Party spokesperson and Redbridge Independent councillor, said:

We are taking the fight to Labour in their heartlands. In Redbridge and across the country, people are telling us that they feel let down and abandoned by Labour, outraged by their complicity in genocide and fed up of the status quo.

We are offering something different: a politics rooted in and accountable to our communities, a politics that campaigns for the social transformation people are crying out for.

Featured image via the Canary