USDAW members rejected a plea today for the union to demand that Jeremy Corbyn be reinstated as a Labour MP. 

Delegate Michael Cashin told the retail union’s annual conference that Labour party leader Sir Keir Starmer’s withdrawal of the whip from his predecessor was a “shameful attack on a man who stands on the side of the union movement.”

Sir Keir’s widely criticised action — backed by Usdaw, GMB and the Musicians Union in a vote of the party’s national executive committee last month — followed Mr Corbyn’s claim that the scale of anti-semitism in Labour had been overstated for political reasons.

Speaking in Blackpool’s Empress Ballroom, Mr Cashin said: “Jeremy Corbyn stands for true Labour values: if you cut him, he will bleed Labour.

“Denying him the chance to win his [Islington North] seat for a 10th time would be shameful,” he insisted, to applause and cheers. 

Cardiff delegate Jack Meek, aged 24, said that he owed his political awakening to the now independent MP. He said: “I wouldn’t know what a union is without him.”

But general secretary Paddy Lillis’s call for the conference not to interfere in another organisation’s disciplinary process eventually won the day.