Sir Keir Starmer’s motion to prevent Jeremy Corbyn from running to be a Labour MP at the next election has been officially approved.

Labour’s National Executive Committee passed the proposal by 22 votes to 12 on Tuesday afternoon.

It means it is now down to Mr Corbyn to decide whether to run as an independent candidate.

This could cause a distracting challenge for Sir Keir as he battles to take power from the Tories when the country next heads to the polls.

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But his motion cited the dismal defeat Mr Corbyn led Labour to in the 2019 general election, which saw the party get its lowest number of seats since 1935 and support in its former heartlands crumble.

Labour’s chances of winning the next election and securing a majority in the Commons would be ‘significantly diminished’ if Mr Corbyn was endorsed, it claimed.

Mr Corbyn repeatedly refused to comment on whether he’d be seeking to become an independent MP in a tense conversation with a journalist on the street on Monday.

The veteran left-winger, who has represented Islington North since 1983, yesterday criticised Sir Keir’s move as ‘undermining the party’s internal democracy’ before its approval.

The vote comes about after the politician was suspended in 2020 for insisting that the scale of Labour’s antisemitism problem under his leadership was ‘dramatically overstated for political reasons’.

He also described anti-Semitism as ‘absolutely abhorrent, wrong and responsible for some of humanity’s greatest crimes’, adding that ‘one antisemite is one too many’.

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