Islington South & Finsbury Labour Islington South and Finsbury CLP website
Welcome to Islington South & Finsbury Labour Party
This is the website for Islington South & Finsbury Constituency Labour Party. Islington is a great place to live: London’s most densely populated borough, it is home to people from a large number of ethnic backgrounds. It boasts theatres, cinemas, countless pubs, bars and restaurants, and top-rate arts and cultural venues.
It has a rich political and cultural history – Marx and Lenin, composer Benjamin Britten, Joe Orton, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, and feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft all lived here. The ANC’s headquarters were in Islington during South Africa’s apartheid era and the UK’s first gay rights demonstration was held here, in November 1970.
Islington is still home to many actors, writers, lawyers and politicians, and parts of the borough are among London’s most affluent areas, but it is also the 14th most-deprived borough in England – it has the second-highest rate of child poverty and a third of its working-age residents are unemployed.
In contrast to neighbouring boroughs, Hackney and Haringey, the deprivation is not concentrated in one area. While this means that rich and poor often live side-by-side, they live very different lives: rather than being able to enjoy the borough’s attractions, many of Islington’s residents struggle to make ends meet.