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Jennie Formby, Labour’s former general secretary, says she has joined Greens | Labour

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A former Labour general secretary has defected to the Green party, in the latest sign that allies of Jeremy Corbyn are moving in large numbers to Zack Polanski’s party.

Jennie Formby, who managed the Labour party from 2018 to 2020, told the Guardian she had signed up as a Green party member and intended to campaign for it before May’s local elections.

Formby is the latest senior ally of Corbyn to defect to the Greens, even as the former Labour leader tries to establish Your Party, his own leftwing alternative to Labour.

The defection of figures such as Formby, the former Labour adviser James Meadway and the former North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll offers the Greens a policy and organisational heft they previously lacked, but also threatens to distance the party from its environmental roots.

Formby said: “Zack and the Greens are not scared to talk about economic justice and tax increases. I am increasingly concerned by seeing the extent to which Labour is in hock to corporate sponsors.”

She added: “The Greens also have some important policies on workers’ rights, which is important to me – all these things made me want to join the Green party and I want to do everything I can to support them.”

She said had voted Green since 2022 but had joined the party as a member four months ago and intended to campaign for her local council candidate.

Formby, a former political director of the Unite union, took over as Labour’s general secretary in 2018, having secured the support of Corbyn and the then shadow chancellor, John McDonnell.

She quit that post in 2020, shortly after Keir Starmer became leader, saying that the change in leadership meant it was the right time to step down. She is now highly critical of Starmer’s leadership, saying he started to break his promises almost as soon as he became leader.

“Keir was elected on a bunch of things he immediately reneged on,” she said. “He does not have a set of principles which he is willing to stick to.”

She added that she had quit Labour in part over its treatment of MPs who signed a letter criticising the war in Ukraine and calling for a peace deal which recognised Ukrainian self-determination but also “addresses Russia’s security concerns”.

A Labour source said: “The Green party has the wrong answers for Britain. Whether it’s opposing housing and clean energy schemes across the country, or their lack of serious and credible proposals on the challenges facing working people, Zack Polanski’s party are not the answer.”

Polanski speaking during the launch of the Greens’ local election campaign in London on 9 April. Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

Polanski has reshaped the Greens since he became leader, focusing less on environmental issues and talking more about the economy, including taxes and the cost of living.

He recently announced his party would no longer focus on GDP as a measure of economic success but instead on people’s mental health, social cohesion and community welfare. He has campaigned in recent weeks for ministers to set aside billions of pounds to support households if energy bills rise due to the Iran war.

His strategy has seen the party jump in the polls from 10% to 16% and take the former Labour stronghold of Gorton and Denton. Meanwhile Green party membership has more than tripled, from 68,500 last September to 220,000 this month. The focus on economic policy has also brought over many of those who worked with Corbyn at the top of the Labour party.

As well as Formby, Meadway and Driscoll, others have joined in recent months, including Michael Chessum and Joe Todd, who worked for the leftwing organisation Momentum and the former Corbyn adviser David Prescott.

Chessum recently told the Financial Times: “[The Green party] is in the process of being re-founded. That doesn’t mean moving away from its environmental principles. It’s about becoming a mass party of the left.”

Formby denied that the Corbyn supporters who had left the Labour party were re-forming their movement in a new party. “I think this movement is new, and has a lot of energy,” she said. “I was very supportive of Jeremy, of course. But there is clearly an appetite for it – it’s something people are very excited about.”



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Austria v Jordan: World Cup 2026 – live | World Cup 2026

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Key events

Lance must be watching a different game to me with the query “who is the audience?”. “I’m watching from my apartment in San Francisco and can’t figure out why they started a game at midnight for most of the USA, Canada, and Mexico and 4am in Europe. Who’s watching this besides you in Australia? OTOH, the level of play deserves late night so maybe FIFA are geniuses.”

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''Scary' clash in Channel' and 'Oh frigate!'

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The papers lead on warning shots fired by a Russian warship near a UK-registered yacht in the English Channel.



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Ukraine war briefing: Moped ban in Crimea as official says noise is Kyiv plot using youth | Ukraine

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  • Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014, has banned riding moped scooters, quad bikes and motorcycles at night-time, saying they sound like ⁠drone attacks and suggesting children are doing it deliberately at Kyiv’s behest. Sergei ​Aksyonov, the Russian-installed governor of the illegally occupied peninsula, said the ban would be in place between 8pm and 6am from Wednesday onwards.

  • Oleg Kryuchkov, Aksyonov’s adviser, claimed ‌separately on Telegram: “The enemy is recruiting your children for night-time ridesThe moped ⁠noise hampers the work of defence systems. Their engines sound similar [to drones].” ​Ukraine has recently intensified drone attacks on Crimea, nominally the home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet – targeting the peninsula’s supply routes and triggering a fuel crisis. A limit of 20 litres (5.3 gallons) of fuel per car at petrol stations would continue, Mikhail Razvozhayev, ​the governor of Crimea’s biggest city, Sevastopol, posted on Tuesday. Long lines of motorists queueing in Russian-controlled Crimea, southern Krasnodar region in Russia proper, and elsewhere underscore the sensitive domestic fallout from Ukraine’s strikes.

  • A Ukrainian drone attack started a fire at the refinery that is the ⁠largest fuel supplier to the Moscow region, and two industry sources told Reuters that it had halted operations. The strike on Gazprom Neft’s refinery in south-east Moscow on Tuesday damaged a primary refining facility that accounts ⁠for 53% of the plant’s capacity. Emergency services said the ⁠fire was put out and did not affected operations – information that was contradicted by Reuters sources. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, said the Moscow refinery was hit from a distance of 500km (310 miles). “This is a just response to Russian strikes – and to the dragging out of a war that must be ended.” Gazprom Neft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

  • The US could soon reinstate sanctions on Russian oil shipments, Donald Trump indicated, as leaders at the G7 summit moved on Tuesday to put the war in Ukraine back on top of their agenda. Trump said the sanctions on Russia – partly waived by the US due to the Iran war, ostensibly to help lower oil prices – can go back in place as more oil moves through the strait of Hormuz. “Soon we’ll be able to do that because the oil is now flowing. We’re in a position to do that soon.”

  • Russia should make peace with Ukraine, the US president said after a “very good” meeting with Zelenskyy. “Look, Russia should make a deal,” Trump told reporters, adding that too many young men were dying on the battlefield on both sides. “I’m gonna do whatever I can.” The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said of Trump’s statement: “I found him to be very cooperative, and ‌I also saw him listening very attentively. And ‌in that respect, once again, it gives me a certain degree of optimism that we here, as Europeans and as Americans, are now doing everything we can, together, to end the war.”

  • A Ukrainian ⁠Su-24M bomber aircraft crashed on a mission in ⁠the Khmelnitskyi region ⁠in ​western Ukraine on Tuesday ⁠and its two-member crew was killed, ⁠the Ukrainian ​air ‌force said. Ukraine is estimated to have about a dozen of the ageing SU-24 family of warplanes. They are used to launch the Scalp/Storm Shadow cruise missiles supplied by Britain and France.

  • Russian strikes on Ukraine killed at least eight people on Tuesday, officials said. A drone strike in Nikopol, central Dnipropetrovsk region, killed “a mother and son – a woman of 87 and a 51-year-old man” as well as a third person not immediately identified, said the regional governor, Oleksandr Hanzha. “The enemy targeted people ‌walking along the road with an FPV ​drone,” Oleksandr Hanzha said on Telegram. He posted a ​blurred photo ​of a ​wheelchair on ​a ‌road and ​what appeared ​to be a body underneath.

  • Russian shelling of the Donetsk region city of Sloviansk killed three people, while drone strikes on the southern Kherson region killed two people and wounded 16, according to officials. Five Russian ⁠attacks on the ⁠south-eastern Ukrainian ⁠city of ​Zaporizhzhia left one ⁠person dead, three injured and set ablaze ⁠a ​home ‌and a ‌shopping centre, ‌said Ivan Fedorov, the regional governor.

  • Repairs to the nearly 1,000-year-old Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery in Kyiv could take around two years, an official said ⁠on Tuesday. A ⁠Russian attack on ​the complex set fire to the roof of the Dormition Cathedral within ⁠the vast Unesco world heritage site. More than ‌80% of the 11th-century cathedral’s roof had been damaged, but firefighters managed to prevent the fire from spreading inside the cathedral, Maksym Ostapenko, director general of the complex, was cited as saying by Interfax Ukraine news agency.

  • A Russian artist critical of Vladimir Putin and the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, has been shot and killed in ⁠the eastern Polish town of Biała Podlaska, a prosecutor has said. Local media identified the victim as Robert ⁠Kuzovkov, who was also known by his artistic pseudonym, Semyon Skrepetsky. Pjotr Sauer writes that five shots were fired at the ⁠victim, including one ⁠to the head, in the attack on Monday, ​according to Marcin Kozak, a spokesperson for the district prosecutor in Lublin. Two Belarusians ⁠had been detained but no one had yet been charged. Other Russian exiles suspected Kadyrov was responsible.

  • The Chinese ⁠embassy ​in London said it had complained to British ⁠authorities about sanctions on several entities, including four from ⁠China, for allegedly supplying key military equipment ​to Russia. “China has consistently promoted peace talks and strictly ​controlled exports of dual-use goods,” an embassy spokesperson said. “Normal exchanges and cooperation between China and Russia should ⁠not be disrupted or affected.” Britain’s latest sanctions ​package, ​announced on Tuesday, includes cracking down on ​third-​country suppliers of critical military equipment to Russia in China, Thailand and Turkey.

  • The US extended by 15 days until 1 July a sanctions waiver on Serbia’s Russian-controlled oil company NIS, allowing it to continue importing and processing crude, the firm said. Washington has demanded since early 2025 that Russia’s sanctioned Gazprom Neft sell it stake in NIS, which has been threatened by US financial sanctions that have been repeatedly postponed. Talks on the sale of the Russian-held stake in NIS to Hungary’s MOL energy company have gone on for months, with the US Treasury’s foreign assets control office extending the deadline for their completion until 16 June.



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