Words: Sally Churchward. Pictures: Chris Moorhouse.
Jennie Formby is far from the first person to leave the Labour Party in favour of the Greens in recent years.
But she’s probably the only one whose defection has made national headlines.
It’s six years since her time as General Secretary of the Labour Party came to an end, with Keir Starmer taking over the leadership from her comrade Jeremy Corbyn – a subject she has much to say about, not all of it on the record – and she’s since retired from politics and her long career as a prominent trade unionist.
But it was still worth a splash in the broadsheets when she let it be known earlier this year that she’d signed up to join the Green Party.
Jennie is baffled as to why anyone would be interested in her – she asks why I wanted to talk to her a few times during our interviews, conducted first in a cafe in Southampton, her home city of more than 40 years, and later, answering follow up questions over Zoom.
But a quick glance through her CV shows why she makes the news.
Most conspicuously, of course, she was general secretary of the Labour Party when her close ally Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the party.
Notably, during that time she was battling stage 3 breast cancer, travelling to London to an often volatile workplace several days a week whilst also suffering exhaustion from the chemotherapy she was undergoing.
She became a familiar face on the podium at political events, for example receiving a rapturous welcome from a crowd of around 200,000 when she addressed the Durham Miners Gala in 2018.
Before that, she was one of the first women to become a full-time union official in the UK when she was still in her 20s. A dedicated trade unionist, she moved up through the ranks, becoming a regional and then national officer, political director, and regional secretary before being on the National Executive of the Labour Party for Unite.
She features in several political books on manoeuvrings and more within the Labour Party, including The Fraud by Paul Holden and Taken as Red by Anshuka Asthana.
I’d first seen her in the flesh at a talk by Jeremy Corbyn in Southampton, where she had joined the then leader of the Labour Party on the stage at the city’s 1865 Club.
She was, and is, a charismatic presence – easily able to captivate an audience of thousands, and warm, personable and open in a one-to-one chat.
Jennie is autistic – not something I’d come across in my research but a side comment she mentions casually, as part of a chat with our photographer rather than in the flow of the interview. I check that she’s happy for it to be mentioned in the piece – I know a lot of young autistic people and successful role models, such as Jennie, are important to those who can be struggling with a sense of being ‘different’.
“I struggled a lot when I was younger, especially with social interaction,” she says.
“The Union sorted things out for me. It was like coming home – real family.”
One of the things that’s most striking about Jennie is her passionate belief in fairness, justice, equality and the need to strive to make the world a better place.
And a key part of that is her strong belief in the importance of trade unions.
Jenny always wanted to work for a trade union. Well, almost always. For a brief spell she planned to follow in her father’s military footsteps (he was in the Navy) and applied to be in the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps.
“It was for the sole reason that they said you’d go to Hong Kong, Germany and Cyprus in the first three years,” she laughs.
“Then they phoned me up and said ‘come and get measured for your uniform.’
“But by then I’d bought a copy of Militant in Eastleigh one day and had joined Militant. I was very left wing and thought ‘oh my god, I’m not going to join the army!’ So I got a job at William Hills betting shop and organised the union there. That’s when I started in unions, as a branch secretary.”
She continues: “All I wanted to do was work for the union. There were no women full time officials in those days, so I took a secretarial course and applied for the next job because there were lots of jobs for secretaries. I was 19 at the time. They said ‘you’re too young, you have to be 25 and have five years’ experience’.
“So I went and got a job at BOC in Southampton and became a (union) shop steward. Then, when I was 20, there was another secretarial union job and I applied for it. Again they said ‘you’ve got to have five years experience and be 25.’ I said ‘you can’t have many people who specifically train because they want to work for the union, so try me. If I’m no good then you can get rid of me.’ They took me on. That was how I started working for the T&G (Transport and General Workers Union).”
As time passed, Jennie became frustrated with working as a secretary – after all, it had only been a means to the ends of working within a union.
“I was working in the education department, so I knew all the shop stewards really well, I knew a lot about what they were doing, supported all their disputes, was going on picket lines and things, but I thought ‘what can I do?’ because there still weren’t many women in the union.
“So I decided to do a degree and see if I could get a job as a researcher. I went to Portsmouth and started a degree in politics, sociology, economics and social policy. I was really enjoying it but after the first year, a job came up for regional officer in Southampton, for T&G. I applied for it and I was appointed.
“At that time there were only five other women officers in the union, and none in the southern region.”
Jennie laughs as she remembers a newspaper headline at the time – ‘women breaks through male barriers to lead transport union’ – an exaggeration of her role at that point, but perhaps a portent of what was to come.
Jennie is as passionate today about the importance of unions as she was as a 20-something, desperate to be employed by one. She’s seen their powers and ability to protect workers diluted by Margaret Thatcher and not restored by subsequent Tory or Labour governments but she still believes they are a potent – essential even – tool to protect and educate workers, especially those on the worst contracts and with the worst pay, hours and conditions.
“It’s something I’ve always felt really passionate about and I guess that’s what defines me more than anything else,” she says of trade unionism.
“It’s about fairness and justice. I have always believed in a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, and obviously that includes being healthy and safe at work, not being exploited, decent terms and conditions, holidays, sick pay, pensions, etc, because there are huge numbers of people who are horribly exploited.”
She feels it’s vitally important that workers have a better understanding of how the systems work that can leave them on low pay, with fewer rights and less protections, so that they can challenge them, rather than accepting the scapegoating of groups such as migrants for everything that’s wrong in modern society.
“There are all the global corporations, many of whom don’t declare any profits because they are operating toll manufacturing and syphoning all their profits off via the Cayman Islands or places like that and they are getting extremely rich.”
She continues: “sometimes they have share options or things like that, which bring in millions of pounds and all the time telling workers, ‘oh we don’t make enough money, we can’t afford it’.
“And far too many people are still being injured, poisoned, even killed or contracting industrial diseases at work and unless you’ve got a trade union behind you, you’ve got nothing to support you, really. Individuals who try to enforce the law firstly find it very expensive, and also very often find themselves sacrificed. But collectively you’ve got far more strength, power and ability to influence.”
Jennie is the first to admit that she was reluctant to step away from her trade union role, to become general secretary of the Labour Party in 2018. But her old comrade Jeremy Corbyn convinced her to take it on.
“I’d known Jeremy for quite a long time and he and John McDonnell asked me if I’d consider running for general secretary of the Labour Party.
“I was really reluctant because being a trade union official is me. Trade unionism is me through and through, it’s in my bones, it’s in my blood, it’s what I am. And although I’d been in the Labour Party since I was 18, I didn’t see myself as a politician at all. I was an activist and campaigner but Jeremy said ‘well do you think I wanted to be leader?’ – which is no secret, people knew he didn’t want to be leader – and I said ‘I’ll think about it’.
“So I applied for it and ended up as general secretary of the party for two years.”
In hindsight, is she glad she made that decision?
Jennie looks reflective. “Truthfully?” She pauses. I nod and wait.
“I was really proud to be able to support Jeremy because the whole party machinery was acting against him and I had a real battle to try to get it not so overtly against him. But it was an extremely unpleasant experience. The majority of the staff were so anti-Jeremy and they saw the party as theirs, and appeared to really resent anyone with a different political view coming in.
“There were a lot of people who loved Tony Blair. The NUS and Labour Students had a massive influence and they were still singing ‘We Love Tony Blair’ at their conferences decades after he’d stopped being the leader.
“So it wasn’t a pleasant experience working there, I have to say.
“Some MPs were very, very negative and of course there was this tsunami of claims of antisemitism because that’s the one thing they thought they could get Jeremy on. There was some antisemitism, but the overwhelming majority of the claims were spurious.”
She adds that prior to her taking over the role, the claims hadn’t been dealt with through a suitable disciplinary process.
“In the first year, we really worked hard with developing a new antisemitism and disciplinary process, so we had some recognisable procedures.”
Jennie talks about how accusations of antisemitism seemed to be thrown around, and were often hurled at people criticising the state of Israel, including at Jewish people, who were frequently described as ‘self-hating Jews’.
She adds that she sees deep hypocrisy in the accusations of antisemitism that were thrown at Jeremy Corbyn, and outcry, versus the antisemitic tropes now used by some to portray Jewish leader of the Green Party, Zack Polanski, and the lack of anything like the horrified responses given to Corbyn.
“There were marches against Jeremy, and all these people came together to say ‘enough is enough’ and then you see these antisemitic comments, imagery and all sorts of things against Zack, frequently in the mainstream media, who should know better, and the mainstream organisations are pretty much silent about it which I think demonstrates how much of what came before was really exaggerated to attack Jeremy. Because they couldn’t attack him on anything else. He’s honest, he’s decent, he was really loved by people.”
She remembers her father, an ex-Naval officer who was then in his 90s, telling her that he’d joined the Labour Party, not because of her role in it but because he really liked what he saw in Corbyn.
“He said he’d joined because Jeremy was the first politician who was honest and spoke the truth.
“The powers that be, the establishment, absolutely hated that and set out to destroy him. And they did destroy his chances of being Prime Minister, and the hope that the manifesto gave to so many of us.”
Throughout the time that Jennie was experiencing the challenges of being the general secretary of the Labour Party, she was having a huge personal battle against breast cancer.
“I was having treatment for cancer throughout the whole of 2019, including during the general election campaign.
“I kept coming to work because there was nobody to cover. I was going in on the train two, three, four times a week to London from Southampton. That’s why I shaved my head very early after I’d started chemo because I was sitting next to commuters and my hair was falling out in handfuls on them.
“I had quite advanced cancer. It was stage 3 advanced ductal carcinoma so I was having chemo every week and I was absolutely knackered.
“I’d have to lie down on the sofa in Jeremy’s room sometimes, and sometimes my daughter would come with me to carry my bags for me because she was working in London.
“It was quite gruelling, but I don’t think I noticed it at the time.
“I think it’s why I spent quite a lot of time doing nothing after I retired. I hadn’t realised the impact it was having on me and my family, because I was just so involved in the Labour Party.
“I was commuting so I was getting up at 4.30 in the morning and getting back at 10 o’clock at night and on holiday the phone was going all the time, so I never really relaxed.”
Jennie has now finished her treatment and had breast reconstruction surgery. She volunteers for Macmillan, supporting women set to undergo similar procedures.
She remembers kind words from Sir Keir Starmer from that time, which felt in stark contrast to how he treated her after he replaced Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party.
“Starmer used to say ‘oh, I admire you so much, you’re doing so much on the disciplinary things,’ because I’d done loads of reports on it and ‘well done, it’s really good the changes you are making,’ so he was really positive at the time,” she says.
When Starmer was elected as leader of the Labour Party in April 2020, it was always Jennie’s intention to resign, but she wanted to make sure her house was in order first and was far from happy with the behaviour of Starmer and his team towards her.
“I didn’t want to carry on working under Starmer, and I had every intention of saying ‘let’s talk about how we can have a smooth transition’, etc.
“I also got every team to put together a ‘bible’, of all who everyone was, what their jobs were, what the role of the department was, all that sort of stuff, so he could have that straight away and see how the party machine worked, from every region to everyone in head office.”
Jennie describes how an expected team call was replaced with a 1-1 between her and Starmer, at which she suspects Morgan McSweeney was sitting next to him, directing the conversation.
“Bearing in mind I’d had lots and lots of interaction with him every week at shadow cabinet, he rang up and I was like hello ‘Keir, congratulations again, it’s a really good result, you’ve got endorsement from every group, from the trade unions, from the MPs, you’ve really got a good mandate there. I’ve made sure that you’ve got a really good handover for all of your new staff etc etc’.”
She shares that she was shocked when Starmer told her that he wanted her to resign almost immediately as general secretary and make a public announcement to that effect that day or the following day.
“I said ‘I’m a bit taken aback Keir. Obviously you want a new general secretary, but I’m not prepared just to go like that, you make it sound as if I’m guilty of gross misconduct or something like that if I just leave straight away’.”
An inquiry into leaked documents was due out that July and the outcome of the Equality and Human Rights Commission investigation into antisemitism in the party was also imminent.
“I told Keir ‘I’m actually quite shocked because I’ve worked so hard for the Labour Party. I came in every day when I was ill because no one else could do the General Secretary’s job, and you yourself said how much you admired me’.
“I took a decision then, I was 60, had a brilliant pension from Unite, so I took my pension early, had a lump sum from the pension, had a lump sum from the Labour Party and I decided to retire.
“I didn’t do anything for a little while because my mum died and my dad was in a care home in Southampton and I was with him for about three hours a day.
“I had been volunteering – doing an older gentleman’s shopping and helping at an elderly people’s lunch club and I volunteered with (refugee charity) Clear, but then I stopped doing that because I was with my dad so much.”
After taking some time out to recover, rest, relax and enjoy travelling and life with her husband Freddie and their blended family of five children, Jennie has found her way back to becoming a political activist again on a local level, within the Green Party and the local anti-racist movement in Southampton.
“I’m not involved in the Green Party in any formal way because I wouldn’t presume – I only just joined a couple of months ago – so as far as I’m concerned, I’m there to be a foot soldier. I did lots of leafleting and canvassing for the local elections and baking cakes for socials, and spreading the word on social media wherever I can,” she says.
“I’m involved in the anti-racism movement in Southampton as well.
“I’ve been inactive for such a long time and had thought that I was done with demonstrations, but then I saw the riots in the name of Henry Nowak.
“I thought ‘no way. There are people in Southampton going out week after week after week to stand up against racism and where are you?’ So I started getting involved in Southampton Stand Up To Racism.”
Jennie began taking part in Southampton Stand Up to Racism’s counter-demonstrations in Portswood, where for around a year anti-asylum seeker protesters have been holding regular demonstrations outside a hotel housing asylum-seekers.
“Rather than concentrate on the people who are making the decisions, they’re intimidating these poor migrants who are basically imprisoned in that hotel. It’s horrendous. They have no influence or ability to actually change the rules and regulations.
“And actually, I’m extremely concerned about the boats coming over here because they’re dangerous. People are being exploited. People are dying. “There should be safe passages for migrants and refugees and far more protections to stop them being victimised and targeted with aggression and abuse. It’s so shocking to see that there’s ten violent attacks every single day on migrants.
“I know there have been cases of some of the people who’ve come over here being violent, sometimes sexually violent, but it’s a tiny minority of people and that’s representative of all society. Unlike some of the far right groups, many of which seem to be dominated by people who are criminals. They say we’ve got to protect our women and children when you’ve got people who are being convicted for creating indecent images of children, for domestic violence, for fraud, it’s quite horrific.
“It’s terrible how much people are being hoodwinked. It’s this divide and rule isn’t it, because it distracts people from what’s really happening.”
We return to the subject of trade unions and their important roles in uniting workers nationally and internationally and in helping to educate workers.
“Education is so important because clearly all of the ills we’re talking about are symptoms of the disease of capitalism, which is now out of control. We are seeing far more short-termism being operated by companies because they’re just looking at how to make the quickest buck. That’s why it’s so important to educate workers about who the real enemy is, who it is who is really suppressing their wages or getting rid of their jobs.”
Despite her long career in unions and politics and the heartbreak and disappointments it has brought, Jennie remains upbeat and optimistic about the future. She is particularly positive about the Green Party, like many, no doubt relishing the sense of finding a political home, having become disillusioned with the Labour Party.
Jennie admits to not always having had a positive view of the Green Party.
“I always had this impression of the Greens as being a bit Lib-Demy, a bit wishy-washy, maybe not Trade Union friendly.
“But I really liked what I saw from Zack Polanski, talking about redistributive justice,taxing the wealthy, obviously all of the climate stuff, housing, rent, all that stuff. Really the kind of thing that Jeremy stood for as well – social justice, equality, redistribution of wealth. And I started looking at their different policies and they have really good policies on employment and on Trade Unions, they’ve got really good policies on the economy, so I thought ‘it’s time to stop sitting on the side lines and join something and do something, because you do nothing by shouting at the telly’.
Jennie observes that, perhaps, unsurprisingly, while Zack Polanski arguably shares may of Jeremy Corbyn’s values, he’s also attacked in similar ways.
“I have a lot of respect for Jeremy,” she says. “He’s a very principled politician. He’s been proved right time and time and time again about the things that he says and he’s stuck up for the under privileged and the downtrodden, both nationally and internationally, for his entire life and always fought for equality, fairness and a more just and equal society.
“That’s something we should all aspire to but,” she adds with resigned tone, “anytime there is someone like that, exactly the same as we see with Zack Polanski, they start getting characterised as lunatics. He was ‘magic grandpa’. I’m not sure what they call Zack, all sorts of things. But there are so many similarities in the ways in which Zack is treated compared to how Jeremy was treated.
“Because when people stop and listen, they do think ‘do you know what, I completely agree. We should be taxing the super rich and making these global corporations pay their taxes,’ but the super rich and the global corporations run our media, so they’ve got very powerful voices.
“I remember them doing it about Tony Benn. You’d see articles in the tabloids about his ‘crazy eyes’ and things like that. It’s just been happening throughout my entire lifetime.
It can be depressing but I do think there is hope.
“I feel encouraged every time I see people willing to fight back against the odds, and also see young people getting politically active. One of the lovely things about being in the Green Party is just how many young people there are, and how intelligent and aware and conscious of all of the key issues we’re facing these young people are, and they are willing and able to demand better for themselves and their families.
“I find tremendous hope in that. There are people who are saying ‘we just can’t carry on like this anymore and we want to do more,’ rather than just rant about it.”
Jennie reflects on how her priorities have shifted, following her retirement and the end of her cancer treatment.
“I had my last treatment and they said ‘oh good luck then’. I phoned up and said ‘what happens now?’ They said ‘you’ll have a mammogram on your surviving breast in a year.. I said ‘how do you know it’s all gone?’ They said ‘you’ll be fine’.
“I am fine. It could still be there. Who knows? I just live each day as it comes, really.
“That’s why I spend a lot of the money from my pension and when my dad died travelling – do it now, while you still can.
“You do what you can while you can, live your life, spread a bit of kindness where possible and if you’ve got the ability to help change things, then do.”
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