Bell Ribeiro-Addy on Corbyn, Abbot and Abrams and why she’s not leaving Labour

Andy Burnham had been Prime Minister for barely two hours when Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Labour MP for Clapham and Brixton Hill, called on his government to end all arms transfers to Israel and suspend the UK’s bilateral trade agreement.

It’s characteristic of the 41-year-old socialist, whose forthright stance on racism, justice and equality has seen her stature rise among the left in the borough and beyond since she succeeded Chuka Umunna as MP for Streatham in 2019.

However, her grassroots standing has run contrary to her fortunes in the Parliamentary Labour Party. Appointed UK trade envoy to Ghana in January 2025, she was sacked six months later for voting against disability benefit cuts.

In September, her bid for the deputy leadership failed.

Starmer had won the leadership in 2020 promising continuity with Corbyn, who lost in 2019 on more votes than Starmer would later win with. The operation that delivered him was Labour Together.

It was a government dogged by its own bad decisions. On Gaza, on Palestine Action’s proscription, on jury trials, it kept finding itself fighting its own supporters. Labour haemorrhaged not only votes but whole councils at May’s local elections.

Burnham judged the damage serious enough to apologise for the party’s Gaza record before he had even taken the leadership – three weeks after entering Parliament through a by-election in Makerfield, the seat vacated for him by Labour Together’s former director Josh Simons.

In Lambeth, years of housing failure, a council accused of ignoring residents, and the same anger over Palestine had already primed voters for a reckoning. In May, twenty years of Labour control ended in historic collapse – 58 seats more than halved to 26, the vote share fell from 54.1% to 34.7%.

On 9 July Labour had two by-election chances but were unable to convince voters sufficiently in either ward: just 43 votes behind the Greens in Clapham Park, but third in Streatham St Leonard’s, behind both Liberal Democrats and Greens.

The next day Brixton Buzz met Ribeiro-Addy at The Ferndale pub in Brixton. We had spoken at the count at Kennington Oval in May, where I had cheekily asked when she would be joining the Greens.

It was a live question among her supporters in the borough. Many of her positions seemed at odds with the leadership, while Sonia Winifred, Martin Abrams, Michael Chessum and others had already left for the Greens. It did not seem far-fetched.

I was surprised when she agreed to go on record with her reasons for staying.

We sat down with two cold beers and began discussing the previous night’s results.

Turnout in Clapham Park had fallen from 33% in May to 20%. The Green share rose – from 37% for Joanna Eaves in May, to 44% for Michael Ball.

Labour’s Louie Somerville-Sutherland’s share improved too, as the smaller parties were squeezed. But having lost to Eaves by 37 votes in May, he lost to Ball last night by 43.

With all the borough’s parliamentary big guns out on the doorsteps – Steve Reed, Helen Hayes and Ribeiro-Addy herself – I asked why she thought turnout was so low.

“Yesterday was not good voting weather,” she laughs – polling day had fallen inside an amber heat health alert for London. “People are all electioned out,” she adds.

Having grown up in the ward, the constituency MP Ribeiro-Addy was among the most visible faces of the Clapham Park campaign.

I asked whether it had been wise for Labour to make the cost of the by‑elections a theme in its campaign videos, given that more than 200 had been triggered since 2022 by resigning Labour councillors – and that Burnham’s own route into Parliament, the Makerfield by-election and the Greater Manchester mayoral contest it necessitated, would cost around £5m.

She draws a distinction between her own words and the way they were packaged. “In any post there’s what’s in the video and there’s what’s in the text. What’s in the video, I stand by.”

“The cost of it, I wish we spent elsewhere. I would like the law to be changed so that anybody who stands down within 30 days, it just goes to the next person.”

Anyone who changes party should re-stand, she says, “unless of course it was through no choice of your own – I’m not so conceited as to believe people voted for me because I’m Bell and I’m wonderful. I stood as a Labour candidate. And unless they unwantedly gave me the boot, that’s not what I sold to the people.”

I wondered too if LTNs had been a wise line of attack on Martin Abrams, the council’s new Green Party leader.

But she was adamant: “Oh, no, that wasn’t part of the campaign at all, just to be clear. No, that was actually just me trying to have my first kind of open interaction with Martin, a congratulatory note to him and also something that I’d discussed with him previously.

“How could it be part of the campaign? It’s not the policy of the Lambeth Labour group, is it?”, she says.

Admittedly, my questions were slightly spurious, but the third issue was of an altogether more serious tone.

In the run up to May’s local elections, Labour HQ sent Brixton Buzz a press release calling on the Greens to sack five candidates over ‘racist, antisemitic’ social media posts – none were in Lambeth.

However, days later when The Spectator named Saiqa Ali, the Green candidate in Streatham St Leonard’s, as having allegedly made antisemitic social media posts, Lambeth Labour sent the Buzz a follow-up email – which included an open letter addressed to Zack Polanski and the then Green group leader Scott Ainslie – pressing us for coverage.

Ali, who had shared material including a post about a government ‘overrepresented with Zionist Jews’, apologised but was later arrested along with fellow Green candidate Sabine Mairey, on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred.

Brixton Buzz has since seen documents showing that Claire Holland, leader of Lambeth Labour, personally made the complaint to the police.

In the Clapham Park by-election, Labour repeated the tactic, with posts about Green campaigner Mark Bittlestone, as well as Ali and Mairey.

Abrams and Polanski have said antisemitism is being weaponised for political advantage. I put it to her that this tactic was something more people should speak out against. She agreed they “definitely should” – but did not elaborate further.

On the individual cases she was unequivocal. “Jeremy Corbyn was treated appallingly, and I’m never going to change my stance on that,” she says. “People think he was removed from the party for antisemitism. He was not. He has never been found guilty of antisemitism. He was removed by nothing more than an act of the NEC.”

She defended Martin Abrams, who said he had been smeared as a ‘fake Jew’ within the Lambeth Labour group, in the same terms, “He was treated appallingly too. In his resignation letter he made points about things that had been said to him as a Jewish man, and I think they are unacceptable.

I wish he had stayed with us. He was a good friend of mine, and a good Labour colleague, always willing to stand up and campaign. But we are where we are.”

She was resolute that the problem was real and had to be tackled. “I worked for Diane Abbott, whose constituency has a significant Jewish population, and I saw antisemitism. I saw what was done to the most visibly recognisable Jewish community in our country, and it was horrific. It’s important we recognise that it exists.”

But she was equally firm on two specific cases. “I don’t think some of the charges levied against certain people were fair – namely Diane, Jeremy.”

At this point some passers-by stop outside to wave to their local MP through the big pub windows – The Ferndale nestles the eastern edge of her Clapham and Brixton Hill constituency.

A few hundred yards up the road stands Lambeth Town Hall, where Morgan McSweeney and Steve Reed cut their teeth before taking their operation national – the testing ground for the Labour Together project that propelled Keir Starmer into Downing Street.

I sensed our conversation was coming to a conclusion, when she brought the matter to a head.

“Why am I still a member of the Labour Party?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “A large number of people have left the Labour Party and gone to the Greens, while some, like Corbyn and Sultana, have formed their own entity. And then there are others who, presumably like yourself, think there’s something to save from what many on the left regard as a party that represents capital more than workforce. So yes, why?”

“The Labour Party I joined, the Labour Party I still stand with, is the one that literally made a difference to my life, and to the area where I live. I still believe in it.

“I’ll tell you something Blair did, and it’s the last compliment I’ll pay him. For all the right-wing crap he pulled, he understood he could not mess with the movement. The Labour movement. There were certain things he couldn’t do to the membership.

“Every single leader since Brown, to win their leadership election, has had to lean left. Every single one, without fail. Then we had Jeremy Corbyn, who was actually on the left.

Then we had Keir, who said he’d do everything Jeremy did. And now we’ve got Andy Burnham. How did he come into the conversation? He was the left candidate. He may not do anything massively different – but that’s how he entered people’s minds…he’s perceived to be.

“The most important thing in any group is the membership. The Labour movement is a movement. It’s bigger than anybody who wins some sort of rigged election, or lies to win it. It is a truly socialist movement. And that’s why I’m still in it.

“People ask me, why would I not join the Greens? The leadership of the Green Party may be on the right side of things now. But that’s the leadership. What’s the membership? Are they my people? Are they socialists?

“I’m a socialist, I’m very clear.

And for all the terrible things Labour may have done, there’s one thing they’ve never removed: it’s a democratic socialist party.

That’s the party people join. I’m not going to join a party that’s not a socialist party. I’m just not.”

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