I promised in the election that we would hold monthly People’s Forums, and that those would be where I would report on what I’ve been doing as an MP and where we as a community would debate and discuss crucial issues. Tonight we held the first; we’ve delivered 50,000 leaflets across the constituency since the election to do three things: to thank people for voting in the election, to point out that I was there to represent everybody, and that the first forum would be on the nineteenth of September. We put it on Eventbrite and it became massively oversubscribed straight away. So we then thought very long and hard about whether we should turn it into a huge public meeting, open-air or something else. We thought, no, what we’d try and do is have an interactive forum here and have people participating online as well as present in the room. 

We started with my report on what I’ve been doing in Parliament since the election; they tried very hard to restrict me to ten minutes, they almost succeeded but not quite. We then had roundtable discussions on housing, followed by speeches from ACORN, Islington Homes for All, and John Glackin from Streets Kitchen — which is essentially a homeless people’s kitchen and food supplier — to discuss the totality of the housing crisis, and crucially what we’re going to be campaigning on: legislation for the private rented sector, and local planning issues. I also asked people to support the response we’re putting in on the National Planning Framework policy document that the government is closing consultation on next week. It’s crucial that local authorities be empowered to build council housing; this document does the opposite, it disempowers them and is an open door for the biggest corporations.

The people who came and helped in the campaign, many were from the Labour Party, formerly very active people in the Labour Party, and obviously had enormous technical experience of elections. They were crucial to the campaign because they have that knowledge of polling day and all the issues that go with it. But what was different this time was a very large number of volunteers came to help who had never been involved in anything political before at all, and loved it: they loved the fact that there was no hierarchy, there was just a campaign, and that their job was to go out and identify support and then persuade them to vote when polling day came along. Many of those local people — and they’re mostly local — have stayed in touch, and we therefore got volunteer teams together to deliver to the whole constituency, and then to come tonight and help. We’ve now got feedback forms to deal with, and I’ve got hundreds of questions to answer that people dropped in tonight. So we’ve really got that inertia going of people that want to do something.

Thank you for both questions. I did refer in my report, albeit briefly, to issues of international peace, and my views are quite well known. Two weeks ago, I was in Berlin with the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, and we had a day-long meeting about Ukraine with speakers from both the Russian peace movement and from the Ukrainian peace movement, and messages from Boris Kagarlitsky (who is of course imprisoned) and others. Nobody in the room supported what Russia is trying to do in Ukraine. Everybody in the room said that what’s happening is incredibly dangerous. Pouring in long-range missiles, which will then be used to attack Russian military sites with NATO weapons, is also incredibly dangerous and could lead to the most massive escalation of the war, including potentially a ground war between NATO and Russia. 

Ukraine has been the fighting ground of Europe for five hundred years: is it going to be that again? Or is there going to be a peace process? And interestingly, António Guterres lost his rag a bit, ten days ago, did you see it? He just basically let rip at the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, saying: ‘You are culpable in all of the wars raging right now, you’ve got to do something about it.’ I suspect there will be some initiative on Ukraine, probably led by the African Union, with Latin American leaders supporting it in some way; it is very, very important that there is, and I hope there is. How many more conscripted soldiers from Ukraine and from Russia are going to kill each other? It’s just a death fest.

Yes, there’s the danger of nuclear weapons there. And NATO is now on to this totally arbitrary decision to raise defence expenditure to 2.5 percen and to produce a new generation of nuclear weapons, on top of the installation of nuclear weapons from the US in Europe and in Britain. This is extremely dangerous. 

Secondly, on Lebanon and Israel. The illegal occupation of Palestine by Israel is at the centre of conflict throughout the Middle East. There are 40,000 dead already in Gaza. Now we have this business of Israel, apparently, getting these pagers manufactured that can be exploded at a certain time by the means of a radio message. Wow. What if you or I accidentally bought one of those pagers — because it was a very reputable name they were made under — we don’t know, and we’re on a plane. It goes off. What are you looking at? Hundreds dead. I mean, it’s beyond mad what they’ve done. So yes, the question then is: what would it take for Western Europe and the United States, and Britain in particular, to stop the supply of arms to Israel?

Yes, I do. I’m looking forward to all the discussions we’ll have on the side of the inauguration. I’m very honoured to have been invited by President-Elect Sheinbaum to come for the inauguration, and I’m looking forward to travelling to Mexico. I’ll be leaving on Monday night.