LONDON (Reuters) – Islington, the north London neighbourhood where Labour’s new hard-left leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has his powerbase is also home to the “champagne socialists” who flourished under the party’s former hierarchy when it ran Britain.
Islington remains solid Labour, although the party languishes in opposition after two national election defeats, and not so long ago the red flag flew over the town hall.
For 32 years Corbyn has been member of parliament for ethnically mixed Islington North, one of the borough’s two constituencies.
Once a thoroughly working class borough, Islington is today also home to the wealthy “chattering classes” who inhabit the elegant Georgian squares and spacious Victorian villas of its smart southern districts.
These people have an entry in the British political lexicon as “Islington socialists”, shorthand for a rich north London class which backs fashionable left-wing causes and votes Labour, traditionally the party of the working class.
At the last general election in May, “Vote Labour” posters appeared in the windows of multi-million-pound Islington houses with expensive cars parked outside.
These voters thrived when Tony Blair, a former Islington resident, won three elections for Labour between 1997 and 2005 and pursued pro-business policies. But their ideas are deeply at odds with Corbyn’s old-school socialism.
This month’s election of Corbyn, 66, as leader of the party and the British opposition highlights the difference between his relatively deprived constituency, and more affluent Islington South, where Blair’s New Labour project emerged in the 1990s.
“There has quite clearly been a division between what one could describe as the old traditional socialist left, which Corbyn obviously is reflective of, and the New Labour right of that era,” said Mark Wheeler, professor of political communications at London Metropolitan University, which lies in Corbyn’s electoral district.
The term gentrification was coined with Islington in mind and while the middle class has moved into parts of Corbyn’s constituency, much working class housing and deprivation remains.
But in the south of the borough, prices are soaring for the privately-owned homes that often stand cheek-by-jowl with sprawling public housing estates.
LEFT-WING ACTIVISTS
Nick Rosen, a journalist who got to know Corbyn when they were both left-wing activists in the 1970s, said the Labour leader detected hypocrisy among some of his richer constituents.
Rosen recalled an interview he did with Corbyn in the 1980s. “He said he was very angry with those middle class people in his constituency who would oppose public housing developments on the grounds of the environment but actually were worried about having black kids living next door,” Rosen said.
Rich and poor don’t mix much in the borough, which has London’s second worst level of child poverty and where teenage gang violence is a serious problem.
In the last few months, a youth was fatally stabbed while riding his bicycle while another was killed with a machete in a park where mothers take their babies and children play.
Youth workers say poor youngsters see a world they can never be part of. The smart shops and cafes of Upper Street, Islington’s main shopping thoroughfare, are not for them.
“There is a lot in Islington that is not perceived as being for the young people who we work with,” said Alex Elliott, operations manager at the charity Urban Hope. “If people are surrounded by aspirational things that they’ve got no way of enjoying themselves, then inevitably that causes some tensions.”
Charlie Allen, an Upper Street tailor whose clients include royalty, sports stars and entertainers, works with Islington Giving, another charity supporting local youths.
“There’s a high suicide rate among men, poor men at that, who have just given up, because there’s a lot of affluence, and I think that’s got something to do with that,” he said. “They feel as though they have underachieved.”
PEASANTS’ REVOLT
Islington has always attracted radicals. In 1381, leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt held a rally there and in 1790 Tom Paine began writing “Rights of Man” in a local inn, The Angel.
Closer to the political centre, Blair and his then ally Gordon Brown reached one of the most famous deals in modern British politics at the Granita restaurant on Upper Street.
Over fish and a bottle of white wine, they agreed who would lead New Labour, a reformed, centre-left version of the people’s party which ruled from 1997 till 2010.
“They were two people who clearly had stuff to discuss,” recalled Granita’s former owner, Vikki Leffman. “They didn’t want to be bothered.”
Granita closed in 2002, the space occupied by a Tex-Mex joint called Desperados, and Upper Street remains nicknamed “Supper Street”.
Traditional Islington pubs have been replaced with family-friendly gourmet establishments. Houses once packed with tenants in bedsits have returned to single-family use and are worth huge sums due to an influx of bankers, lawyers and other top-earners.
Frank and Gill Hopkins, a company executive and a teacher who moved to Islington in 1970, recalled how in Lonsdale Square, there was only a handful of middle class families, while some houses had two families on each of their five floors.
At the time a surveyor’s report said the Gothic Victorian property they bought for 19,000 pounds ($29,000) was “in poor condition in a rather seedy area”, Frank said. “This was Islington in 1970.”
The neighbourhood had its drawbacks then. Some of the other middle-class families were very left-wing, Gill said, and “decided we were not their sort”.
Shopping on Upper Street was far from today’s upscale consumer experience. “There was a peculiar furrier and an odd shop that sold pink corsets,” Gill said.
That probably wouldn’t have worried Corbyn, whose shabby dress sense is as well known as his far-left views.
But the man who sells Corbyn his 1.50 pound ($2.30) undershirts, Ali Rifat of B&H Quality Underwear and Socks in Islington’s Nag’s Head market, has only admiration for his now famous customer who stands up for the working man.
“I would vote for him,” Rifat said. “I’d like to put up a poster on election day.”
(Editing by Peter Millership and David Stamp)
