Jeremy Corbyn's leadership campaign sets up new local activist network called 'Momentum'

The group wants to organise activists across the UK

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (Getty)

Supporters of Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign to lead the Labour party have set up a new activist network to organise in areas across the UK.

The “grassroots network”, which will be called Momentum, plans to campaign on local issues and on topics within the Labour party.

The organisation’s founders say it has been registered as a limited company on an interim basis and will have a devolved democratic structure when it develops.

The campaign will be run on a voluntary basis and there are no plans to charge a membership fee.

Its website pledges to: “Organise in every town, city and village to create a mass movement for real progressive change; make the Labour Party into a more democratic party with the policies and collective will to make that change in government; bring together individuals and groups in our communities and workplaces to campaign and organise on the issues that matter to us.”

Momentum is a successor to Mr Corbyn’s leadership campaign, though it says it is independent of the leadership.

The group says it can contact all those who signed up to support the leader’s campaign; it also has a stylistically similar logo to Mr Corbyn’s campaign.

The group’s website says it will organise events, raillies, meet-ups and policy consultations “to encourage mass mobilisation for a more democratic, equal and decent society”.

“Now more than ever we need to unite and continue to build our movement to change our politics and to win together in 2020,” Mr Corbyn said, according to the LabourList website.

“We need us to put our values, the people’s values, back into politics. To do this, we need to keep up the momentum we have built over the last four months.”

Momentum in some respects resembles the Movement for Change, another grassroots network set up by David Miliband in 2011 to much fanfare.