US Green Party's Jill Stein says Jeremy Corbyn should join British Greens
9 May 2024, 19:29 | Updated: 9 May 2024, 19:31
Jill Stein, who has twice been the presidential candidate for the US Green Party and is close to a third nomination, has said Jeremy Corbyn should move to Britain's Greens.
Ms Stein told LBC's Andrew Marr that former Labour leaver Mr Corbyn should "absolutely" move to the UK Green Party.
The MP for Islington North lost the Labour whip under his successor Keir Starmer after saying that the scale of the anti-Semitism in the party had been overstated.
Dr Stein, who gained over around 1.45 million votes in her run for the US presidency in 2016, said that she met Mr Corbyn at a UN climate summit, and saw eye to eye with him on most subjects.
She also said that left-wing Bernie Sanders' two failed runs for the Democratic nomination show that "you cannot have a revolutionary campaign inside of a counter revolutionary party".
"I think it really... demonstrated very clearly that there's only so far you can go," she added.
Dr Stein said: "This is why you have to establish an independent political party so that you can make progress from one election to the next.
"You can't simply have all your progress dismantled by the party that's taking its marching orders from Wall Street and the war machine."
A frequent criticism of Ms Stein is that she helped enable the rise of Donald Trump to the presidency by splitting the left-wing vote in 2016.
But she told Andrew that the Democrats and the Republicans were both bad for the US.
"I think we have good reason to be afraid of Trump and we have good reason also to be afraid of Joe Biden," she said.
"When the right to protest and the rights of free speech are basically being shut down by both of our political parties, we need another political party".
She added: "Our future is really bleak with either of them."
Asked whether Mr Trump or Mr Biden were worse as a presidential candidate, Dr Stein said: "I think it depends on what issue you're looking at. The important question to my mind is, what do we need in order to have a survivable future?
"When you have Joe Biden basically, engaging potential war now on three fronts, Joe Biden, who is driving the Middle East war to potentially become a globalised war and a nuclear war and when you are leading the charge on genocide, there is no greater hallmark of fascism than that.
"So, I think we have reason to stand up knowing that if we stand up, and if we stand together, we actually have the potential to change the direction of this country."