Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh has declared his support for former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

The Scottish writer, who used to live in Corbyn’s north London constituency of Islington North, described him as “kind” and told The Times he backed the veteran left-winger despite the fact he had “that middle-class naïve socialist thing that everybody from an oppressed minority must be good, so ended up supporting Islamic fundamentalists.”

Welsh also created a video in support of Corbyn’s campaign in which he said that Corbyn was a “very good” local MP. He added that he thought mainstream political parties had become “absolutely abysmal”, “monolithic” and that there was “no room for any personalities” or anyone showing independent thought.

The longstanding supporter of Scottish independence added that he struggled to vote for any of the mainstream parties and that, even though he lived in Sir Keir Starmer’s constituency of Holborn and St Pancras, he hoped residents of next-door Islington North would back the former Labour leader.

Jeremy Corbyn, who was first elected to Parliament in 1983, will contest the seat as an independent candidate. He was prevented from standing for Labour by the party’s governing body, the National Executive Committee (NEC).

Corbyn, who led Labour between 2015-2020, had been sitting in Parliament as an independent for most of the last Parliament. He had the party whip removed from him in October 2020 after he refused to accept the conclusions of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) report on antisemitism in the Labour Party under his leadership. In a Facebook post, Corbyn said that the scale of antisemitism in the party had been “dramatically overstated” for political reasons by his rivals and the media.