Jeremy Corbyn | Cambridge Union

[Music] [Music] hello good afternoon welcome to the cambridge union it's great to see such a packed chamber and this afternoon we are joined by jeremy corbyn who served as leader of the opposition and leader of the labour party from 2015 until 2020 he now sits as the independent mp for islington north in january 21 he launched the project for peace and justice the way this event is going to work is mr corwin is going to give a short five minute introduction um from the podium and then there'll be questions from me followed by questions from the floor without further ado over to you thank you mr president and thank you so much for inviting me here to cambridge union today absolute pleasure to be here i've been here before when it was totally physically packed because that was in those days if anybody can still remember them with pre-covered when we were when we had normal meetings and normal discourse and we didn't all have to wear masks but never mind those days will come back um i just want to say a few words by way of starting today the g7 are meeting in cornwall and there's a wonderful sculpture being put up in cornwall of um non-recycled electronic goods that are called mount recycled more with a picture a face of all seven of the leaders there as a message to them about the environment and i just hope that this g7 summit is serious absolutely serious about the environmental crisis that this planet faces increase in co2 global warming sea level rising pollution destruction of so many natural places and reduction in biodiversity i also hope they'll face up to the reality of global inequality of ultra poverty that list that exists in many parts of the world that has got worse during the corona crisis and is getting worse and their solutions i hope are going to be one of public intervention to improve health care and health services all around the world but also an economic strategy that does empower the poorest in the world and an economic strategy that is absolutely serious about um how we guarantee people a basic standard of living because in our own society the poorest have got poorer in the past two years and have got poorer over the last 10 years at least and the gap between the richest and the poorest is rising and so there are so many issues that have to be faced around the world and that means an industrial revolution that doesn't threaten the jobs of people that work in industries that are currently polluting but instead finds a pathway out of that pollution to a sustainable planet for the future there are so many more things i'd like to say but i'll just conclude with this in the few minutes that i've got before we start going into questions and discussion there is a narrative that is in danger of taking us into a further cold war into further wars and into increased levels of armed expenditures at the same time as cutting levels of overseas aid that isn't going to bring about a more peaceful world any of that i think that has to be a reckoning that we need to live in a peaceful world for the future and look at the sources of conflict the causes of conflict which are inequality of poverty are the grab of resources and are the systematic abuse of human rights all around the world i made it my life's work to stand up for human rights um all around the world and during the many leaders meetings i've held during my time as leader of the opposition whoever they were i raised issues of human rights be it narendra modi president xi or president obama i always raise the questions of human rights abuses because that has to be how we bring about a safer world black lives matters has taught us what racism in the states was about it also led to a re-evaluation of the teaching of history and the understanding of history and the way in which notions of racial supremacy led to an acceptance of the slave trade we have to reacquaint ourselves with the whole history of that the wealth that was made out of it and the abominable use of human rights that it was just as we have to being clear that the rise of the nazis in germany was based on the exploitation of anti-semitism the based on the idea of supremacy of one group of people over another which then gained huge traction which ended up with the most disastrous event in history the holocaust against the jewish people as well as other minorities in germany at that time and so this sort of crossroads in our time post covid either the world can go in a more hopeful more unified more positive direction or we can descend into sort of market madness and another and another cold war i know which direction i want to go in which is why i've put a huge amount of my energy and effort since i stepped down as leader of the labour party into the project for justice and peace which is a place for all of these issues to be debated dealt with and campaigned on and that is what i love doing and i'm sure you love being students at cambridge it's a wonderful city and i hope that whatever you do in later life you not only just remember your time in cambridge but you use the brilliance of the education you get here to improve the lives of other people all around the world thank you very much for the honour inviting me today [Music] [Applause] thank you very much i'm going to ask questions for about 20-30 minutes followed by questions from the audience do you prefer life on the back benches to life in the leader's office do i prefer life well it's different i'm now back on the back benches where i always was before what i enjoyed about being a leader of the party was the ability to have resources to do campaigns and to mobilize and to motivate people and to develop policy changes life on the back benches is incredibly frustrating because you can spend the whole day just trying to get one question in so yes it's frustrating but it does mean that you have the time and the opportunity to take up causes that nobody else will take up and so you can give voice to things that wouldn't otherwise get a voice i wouldn't say prefer one way or the other i i actually i always enjoy life and i enjoy political discussion and debate and i enjoy campaigning why did you launch the peace and justice project and what do you hope to achieve well i launched it because i think there is a need for a place that will work on and develop the kind of policies that i managed to persuade the labour party to adopt not just me many others in both the 2017 and 19 election manifestos and i wanted a place that people could come together so we set ourselves telling me to turn right at park street okay thanks um what we've done is ourselves four specific areas of work one is media reform and media ownership which i think is a crucial issue for the future and like maybe this will develop into questions later but i do think there is an illusion that we have free media because we have free access to social media and internet even if you don't buy daily newspapers wrong algorithms decide what you read algorithms direct you in certain directions and there are issues about ownership of access to the media secondly environmental sustainability is outlined in the few minutes contribution i made there is absolutely crucial and we're working with all the other coalition groups around cop26 thirdly economic justice economic justice minimum wage guaranteed minimum income those kind of issues as well as supporting union recognition campaigns and lastly on international justice and the human rights issues which again i outlined in my contribution 50 000 people have become subscribers if you like to the peace and justice project and i'm very pleased with the progress we made we delayed launching for a long time because i was worried that covered would overshadow it we went ahead anyway and half a million people came on the global call and we've got wonderful people endorsing it such as former president morales and many others around the count around the world who've endorsed it so i'm very pleased with the progress we made thank you in september 2015 when you were elected as labour leader you pledged a kinder gentler politics have you delivered a kind of gender politics i tried to um i think people weren't always kind or gentle towards me but i don't care about that particularly i mean people do what they do um i wanted to develop a politics where there was a more inclusive form of debate and a better form of policy making within the labour party and the trade unions and an inclusive politics and so i have spent a lot of time uh campaigning on and supporting mental health campaigns and issues because i do think that it's one of the great unspokens in our world there's a number of people that suffer from mental health conditions that don't want to talk about it and feel discriminated against if they do so i tried to develop much of that i think by the time the 2017 election campaign came around we had achieved a very high level of inclusivity um in politics hence the very high turnout and participation in that election campaign indeed i remember coming here to cambridge for the debate which um theresa may she came here for your debate but she didn't come for that one um she didn't so she didn't come to cambridge then uh and that was what was interesting there was a magnificent number of people out the streets in cambridge who were just interested in politics and so yeah we achieved a lot in that direction but politics can be very brutal and the characterizations that i suffered in the mainstream media um i'm as i say i'm not particularly bothered what people say or think about me but you should be aware that that sort of routine abuse the daily mail did 14 pages of attacks on me on election day 2017 it does have an effect on people's perception of you i'll finish with this the best line i got in the 2017 election was i was uh getting ready for a rally in the northeast and there was a lady i was chatting to who after a while it was quite clear to me she wasn't really a labor supporter and she wasn't unpleasant or anything but she clearly didn't wasn't really a labor supporter or indeed any kind of socialist so i said um excuse me it's lovely to meet you i'm pleased you're here but what made you come she said well i read that you're such an evil man i'd have to come and see what you were like i said okay what's the verdict she said no i don't think you're evil i said will you stay for the rally and she did so she was won over but she millions others weren't you spoke of inclusivity in politics and your desire for a kind of gender politics and you say you tried and i'm just wondering how one reconciles that with the findings of the hrc they carried out a thorough 18-month statutory investigation which concluded and i quote that there were unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination for which the labour party is responsible do you take responsibility for those unlawful acts of harassment towards jewish people i became leader in september 2015 there were allegations that came to light of anti-semitic behavior within the party which i asked to be investigated and were i also observed there was no system for examining these no proper system of um concluding what the person had done was anti-semitic or not and so i wanted procedures to be improved i asked for procedures to be improved and to be speeded up i was not satisfied with the progress made within the party on this so i appointed now baroness chakrabarty to inquire into this and she did a very thorough inquiry into this i did not speak to her at any stage from the moment she was appointed until she presented her report and we accepted her report and changes were brought about within the party the hrc document does recognize that she made enormous progress on this and i then brought in further rules that were there egregious cases of anti-semitic behavior then there should be a fast-track process for dealing with them and later when jenny formby became general secretary the whole process was speeded up a great deal so i make it absolutely clear anti-semitism is an evil in our society any racism is an evil in our society islamophobia far-right racism anything is an evil in our society and i wanted it dealt with and i wanted that to be an inclusive space in the party um for everybody in order to contribute to it and that is what i tried to achieve the report also confirms that of 70 cases which are identified there were 23 of those 70 where your office and your allies intervened in those cases and if i if i just may finish this question i think earlier on you were saying that you respect authenticity and you want people to you know speak to you as a human and i think i want to do that so the reason i think this matters for a lot of people particularly in cambridge is because a lot of for a lot of us this isn't some story of political intrigue or some abstract news article this is our lived experience this is our coming of age moment in british politics as it were i joined the labour party in 20 2016 and my formative experiences were not kind or gentle i was subject to unlawful discrimination harassment as that report confirms what i was also subject to was online abuse in your name i interned for a jewish female labour mp who was driven out of the political party that she was a member of for 50 years and every time i went into a clp meeting i had the knowledge that simply by wearing a kippah which i've worn from the age of three i could be subject to harassment and abuse and so my question is how do you reconcile the lived realities of jewish members some of whom are here tonight with your rhetoric which just doesn't match up with what we saw when we were in the room let's be clear first of all no anti-semitic or racist stuff is ever done in my name ever i would not tolerate it i would not allow it i would not do it if people claim to do something like that in my name it is not done in my name so let's get that absolutely clear secondly the process that you talked of um i inherited basically a dysfunctional non-process within the party in which the leader's office would be routinely consulted by the party's um officials on almost any decision that was going i didn't think this was correct i didn't think this was the right way of writing things i thought there should be a separation which is why i asked um baroness chakrabarty to undertake the inquiry which she did and we then set up the government and legal unit process and i do not want there ever to be any racism of any sort within our party and i have to say that the experience that some members suffered was wrong and appalling of course but i wanted a process that dealt with that and ensured it was not the case i would also say that there are many people in the party that recognized what we were trying to achieve was important and that process would be better run um in the way that it is and so i supported the rule changes that the party brought about at the conferences that subsequently followed i think perhaps it would be useful if you would give specifics so for example luciano berger a jewish mp for in liverpool um in i think october 2018 the front page of the times showed that the labour party had sat for six months on a physical threat against her and hadn't informed either her office or the police six people including some people from the far right but also people from the far left have been convicted of um well the campaign of anti-semitic and misogynistic harassment that she faced what did you do specifically in this case with luciana to prevent her from being hounded out of the labour party luciano was not hounded out of the party she unfortunately decided to resign from the party so she's okay she's wrong the jewish woman i'm not saying she's wrong because i appointed luciana to the shadow cabinet in 2000 can i finish uh i appointed luciana to the shadow cabinet in 2015 as our shadow cabinet member for mental health and actually we worked very well together on mental health issues we traveled together we campaigned together and so on she did suffer the most appalling abuse for which we obviously gave her all the support that she needed and deserved she then had a prosecution that she took on this or the police i think the police probably took the prosecution and people were prosecuted for the treatment of her and i think that the abuse that she received the abuse that any other mp received is completely wrong she received appalling abuse diane abbott received appalling abuse dawn butler received appalling abuse and many others did as well online on social media and many people on social media hide behind non-existent names or fictitious names and continue that kind of abuse so it's actually quite hard to track them down and quite hard to find who they are or if they're anything to do with the labour party i think and i'm gonna end with this a lot of people from your office who who later spoke out about what was happening and we have the accounts of the whistleblowers in the panorama programme have identified what i think could be described as a as a sort of conceptual failure failure to understand anti-semitism and i i think actually andrew murray who was your special political advisor who was a member of the communist party for 40 years so he's really not one of the blairite critics actually put it best when he summed up the lack of understanding of contemporary anti-semitism and he said about you he is very empathetic jeremy he's empathetic with the poor the disadvantaged the migrant the marginalized the people at the bottom of the heap happily that is not the jewish community in britain today he would have had massive empathy with the jewish community in britain in the 1930s and he would have been there at cable street there is no question but of course the jewish community today is relatively prosperous and he continues racism in british society since the second world war what does it mean it means discrimination work discrimination in housing hounding by the police on the streets discrimination disadvantage education demonization and mischaracterization in the mass media that is not what happened to afro that is what happened to afro-caribbean and asian immigrants and their generation um it is not mainly what has happened to jewish people and he says for a whole generational for a whole generation that's now quite an influential cohort in the labour party and around jeremy personally that is what racism is they would say of course jewish migrants to britain in the first half of the 20th century they lived in appalling conditions they had it rough they were attacked by the fascists but you know that was then the jewish community has moved on it's developed it's integrated is it not the case that you struggle to conceive of jews as a minority and instead in the sort of discourse that you inhabit jews are recast occasionally as capitalistic oppressors or zionistic oppressors and so there's a inability to really deal with anti-semitism because you don't understand what it is no i don't think it is and i don't agree with andrew's characterization of what he perceives my views to be he's never had that discussion with me i know him actually quite well and i was more than surprised when i read that in his book i represent a very mixed constituency 70 different languages spoken in my constituency there are included within that many jewish people both those that would be followers of um roughly the position of the board of deputies those that are followers of jewish socialist group a jewish voice for labor a very large number of people particularly more in hackney than my area my area from the haradi community who i know very well who actually do suffer serious poverty within our society large families insufficiency of income and levels of discrimination against them and so i think it is um a little unfair to say that i don't understand the community i represent i do not have the lived experience of it obviously but i try to represent people and put myself as far as i can in their position while taking uh taking up any cases or causes that they have and so did my office behave in the proper way i insisted that the office act separately from the labour party head office in the sense that the leader's office should not be running every dot-com or in detail of what the party does there should be a um a process that is separate that will objectively look at cases and causes um of discrimination but the um reports that came out after the 2019 election about the way in which the governance and legal unit operated until it was um substantially reformed does not make for very good reading and i'm looking forward to the ford report when it finally if it finally comes out we have to have a process that's fair that's reasonable that does recognize that discrimination can and does happen and has to be dealt with but you also deal with it by education as well and i did um uh appoint the pairs institute through birkbeck college to undertake an education program which they prepared prepared to begin and they they did instead in fact start working on that before the 2019 election intervened okay just just on the point about your office i think what's transpired since leaving office and i know there have been various accounts by various people and is it not the case that you sacrificed a great deal for pushing forward with your beliefs on this so in the case of the margaret hodge suspension john mcdonnell broke ranked suspenders so in the case of margaret hodge and the confrontation she had with you john mcdonnell broke ranks in the case of the ihra definition as adoption by the labour party and i think it was um september 2018. it became increasingly clear that you were going to lose that one so by august all of the big trade unions had you know signed it by september and there was a majority on the nec but nonetheless you persisted and very rarely uh you spoke at an nec meeting against um the adoption of the definition in full and i'm just trying to understand where the intransigence comes from why on on several occasions you just failed to listen to the jewish community and you decided to tell them what was best no i've never told people what's best for them i do listen to all communities and speak to them and indeed have listened to a very large number of people on this issue the party discussed and eventually decided they would adopt the hihra definition although there were concerns about the examples that were used on the basis they could prevent debate and free speech particularly on issues relating to israel palestine the middle east which i'm sure you wouldn't want to suppress that debate any more than i would or anybody else would and so that was the area that was of debate and discussion and indeed the authors of the ihra now have some concerns about it i mean one of the drugs one of the examples indeed yeah for sure um but indeed but the it has to be clear that uh we're not tolerating any form of racism you can obviously discuss israel and palestine and i do and want to see justice there you don't and shouldn't and never could and never would rather i hope descend into any form of anti-semitic language in dealing with those issues okay let's take some questions from the floor um do we have microphones ready uh yes so could we start over there in the front on the right well um good afternoon how much responsibility do you take for the dramatic collapse of the labour party and the almost total absence of an effective opposition today in the what position of an effective opposition today well i led the party up to um the 2019 election um we obviously didn't win that election everybody knows that we got a vote that would have won any election back to 2005 but the um first-past-the-post system on this occasion worked pretty heavily against us as far as i'm concerned this government came in um promising to get brexit done and not to destroy our public services in the same time and boris johnson is busy doing exactly that walked out of the eu without any um effective dealing with the issues of trade in ireland for example now trying to do one-off trade agreements um around the world um and then was faced with covid and having condemned me for wanting to spend a great deal of money on investment in the future has spent all of that and more and so i feel there is a degree of vindication of the policies we put forward as to the opposition that's being conducted at the moment i yes i do think that the party has gone too far in supporting the government on its response to corona because the coronal response is one recognizing what it is a very serious condition secondly that you use it as an example of how to improve and develop public services and publicly owned public services you don't have 30 billion pounds over to serco and other companies to run an ineffective inefficient track and trace system which has actually cost a great many lives as a result of it and you make sure that the public money that's gone into the research on the vaccines actually is a benefit to everybody not some huge profit opportunity for big pharma so yeah i think um the party leadership could and should have been far more specific in opposition to the way the government has handled this and also recognized they do now but recognize much earlier on that 80 payment on furlough which only happened at all because john mcdonnell pushed for it in january 2020 i was later up until april 2020 when we had an emergency committee of the shadow cabinet dealing with it um is a wage cut for people and that the levels of poverty around the country have got considerably worse and the levels of stress um amongst particularly young people have got worse and worse and the um loss of jobs and the predicted loss of jobs coming up now means that we've got to be far more bold on the kind of direction that we were pushing economic and social policy and that is the way i want the party to go because i don't want this tory government in office but i want to see people empowered that's what my whole political agenda is about let's go um to the person in the pink shirt over there hi thank you very much for coming to speak to us today um my question is how do you feel about the shift of the sort of original voting base of the labor party but as well as like generally sort of left leaning parties even like democrats in the us from say working class maybe less educated to more like city city liberals and um shoot the parties on the left um sort of do anything about this shift on and can they didn't they failed the original voting base which transpired on the election of donald trump or the brexit referendum thank you well the election of trump was something that was i guess a surprise to many people that thought they were very good political commentators if they'd thought and looked at the it should not have been a surprise at all because trump managed to be quite effectively clever at being a populist working class outsider speaking up for communities in the midwest and so on whose livelihoods under threat from de-industrialization and all that goes with that and at the same time be a a billionaire property speculator who was actually protecting the financial interests of the very wealthiest in the united states and he managed to somehow rather link the two things together i've never forgotten his in my view appalling but very clever speech he made in ohio a couple of days before the election when he when he won the election to me also was disturbing was that he actually got more votes when he lost against biden than he did the first time round biden's campaign encompassed actually quite a lot of what um bernie sanders alexandra ocasio-cortez and others had been saying on a domestic agenda within the within the usa now left parties need to be clear what they're trying to achieve which is full employment is environmental sustainability is a security of life in health housing education all those issues but also be clear that you appeal to all sections of the community and that's why the work that we did on the green industrial revolution i can remember it like it was yesterday we first discussed the green industrial revolution um ideas um around the shadow cabinet table and i asked becky long bailey to lead on it and she said jeremy i'm very happy to do that but any policy we put forward has got to be as appealable in salford as it is in your constituency and i said i absolutely get that so we're not here to threaten people that work in industries of polluting it is about investment and change and improving for the future and um if you just play to a populist agenda as per johnson and trump then eventually you come unstuck because you're not actually offering um any solution now you say i don't i don't want to put words into your mouth but you were raised a question about left parties for the future in the direction in which they go i think it's quite interesting that despite all of the media piling in on the left the left candidate has just won the election in peru that wasn't expected evan morales party won back in bolivia having been removed from office and um left parties are not all necessarily in a weakened position all across europe although yes there are challenges and there are challenges from the far right there are challenges from nationalism and it does mean the left has to be far more engaged and active in life and in communities and so one going back to your point about what i tried to do as leader of the labour party i was very determined to set up a community organizing unit so the labour party would not be just an electoral machine important as that is your political party when all said and done it's got to be organizing in the community campaigns on health and education on housing and environment and clean air all those things it's got to be part of empowerment of people because we live in a society that actually disempowers people and i had enormous resistance within the bureaucracy of the labour party towards setting up the community organizing unit when we finally got it set up sadly it was the first thing that was closed down when my successor kirsten became the leader of the party and i think that is a huge mistake left parties have got to be part of the community politics is not a media discourse a channel for debate or a university discussion politics is real everyday life for people who are really up against it trying to hold down two jobs trying to feed children trying to survive the left has to have an answer to them isn't just about what you can say in tv studio yes you're in the blue shirt thank you uh mr corbin you've had a long year um and what um sort of trend of you have associated with yourselves with a whole number of individuals and groups um that i think a lot of people would find quite unsavory um and it is just um in the 1980s you signed a campaign to try disappearing see alongside people like ken livingston so which which campaign sorry um you there from 1984 here's alongside ken livingston um in a letter to disability as it was then pilot sion now the jewish labor movement from the labor terrorists and convicted of the blood libel the charge that jews um kill christian children as an honored citizen now if you look across the whole end perhaps really surprised me always is that um you never accidentally uh stood on a panel with someone who was pro-austerity and endorsed their views and never accidentally appeared and endorsed whites kkk did endorse the labour party under your lead [Applause] thank you mr president um no were you reporting the question quite rightly okay um i have met many people over many years which i profoundly disagree with profoundly disagree with and um i've challenged their views argued with them discussed with them but also recognized that in any situation to bring about any kind of resolution you have to talk to people you don't agree with and if you take for example the many debates about ireland the debates are now going on about afghanistan there has to be a discussion and so throughout the whole troubles in northern ireland did i speak to shin fein yeah i did quite open about it i did i criticized the british government for not speaking um to sinn fein when they absolutely privately were speaking not just to shin fein but to the ira itself that's the only way you ever move forward and gain any kind of peace process and so yes you do talk to people with whom you profoundly disagree have i gone out of my way to associate myself with people whose views i disagree with no i yes i've been involved in many campaigns over many issues about the rights and justice of people yes absolutely absolutely i have and that i will continue to do because if you want to live in a better world you've got to talk to the people that aren't necessarily on site with you just on that point in terms of you spoken generalities there can you identify when you disagreed for example with stephen seizer for whom you wrote a letter in support after he accused israel of being behind 911. with that particular case and also the case of red salad later made during the time i was working with stephen sizer he was speaking up um for palestinian people and i didn't agree with him 9 11 and i haven't had much contact with him since okay just the case of rey tala who you described as an honored citizen that was identified by the question well he was an israeli citizen he's an israeli citizen traveled to britain on an israeli passport was admitted to britain on an israeli passport undertook a speaking tour in britain and was later held by the home office by police and put under house arrest i thought he was and i did did meet him and did talk to him about the situation of um palestinians living within the borders of israel and what he thought any future could be for them and the future could be the relationship between israel and palestine i think that discussion was reasonable fair enough he didn't um tell me any of this any of the views that were later ascribed to him after he returned but the interesting thing was he's a radi israeli national israeli passport holder and was given the freedom to travel by israel i i think a lot of mps wouldn't necessarily consider it prudent to meet with an anti-semite when they're on house arrest but that's by the buy should we move on to another question um yes uh you right in the back and then afterwards if you could pass it in front to the person in front of you uh hi jerry um i think the thing which i found quite striking listening to you um is just a lack of ownership um and i say there's someone who empathize with it with a lot of broadly what you say but when joel asks you what responsibility you have for not creating a kind of politics you talk about how people haven't been kind to you when someone else talks about anti-semitism you talk about how some of your colleagues have been subjected to horrific racist abuse which is perfectly valid but what personal responsibility and individual responsibility do you take for the failings of the labor party under your leadership i led the party and i was proud to lead the party and i was determined to try to change the party in the direction of being a popular grassroots based socialist campaigning organization under my leadership membership went from two hundred thousand to six hundred thousand all debts were paid off when i left the leadership of the labour party there was um a plus in finances as well that's not the only way to judge a political party and it was the largest ever membership of any political party in britain i was proud of that i'm proud that we achieved that did we achieve the electoral success we wanted in 2019 obviously not the um brexit divide which i tried to bridge as best i could and the policies under which we fought the election were unanimously agreed by the nec shadow cabinet and party conference or virtually unanimously a party conference in 2019 did it work obviously not we didn't win the election campaign so do i take responsibility for leading the party and the results of course i do i mean i led the party and i i was quite open about what i was trying to achieve do i resile away from the policies that we put forward absolutely not i think they're more appropriate than ever for this country that we put forward and indeed any opinion poll examination of the main policies of the 2019 election manifesto such as public ownership of mail rail and water green industrial revolution national education strategy minimum wage living wage all those issues have overwhelming support even dare i say it uh universal free broadband which was dubbed at the time broadband communism even brought even boris johnson's in favor of broadband communism now so you know things do do come full circle i think the great thing we achieved was to engage a large number of people in political activity for the first time particularly younger people or older people returning to political activity and they haven't gone away and they're not going away and i hope they never do go away because we need that vibrancy of a pressure from the left in our political life in this country and that is something that i will i spend all my time doing and i'll spend the rest of my life doing the person straight in front of you corbin thanks so much for being here today um my question to you is how do you think we can bring about radical change in the current political structures of britain which is i think something you tried to do but we're ultimately unsuccessful and secondly what do you think the role of let me let me talk to her i'll talk slower sorry oh yeah yeah okay sorry go on yeah and then my second question off the back of that was what do you think the role of violence in this radical change is because i'm just thinking to your associations with the castro regime and palestinian resistance movements yeah bringing radical change within the current structure that was question was it yeah um good very important very good question um there is a huge level of um conservatism in the british state structure the british state hasn't been around for a thousand years without um an ability to survive and uh i was very well aware of the resistance that we would face not so much on issues like public ownership of mail rail and water because we were very clear about that um and there were arguments about the funding of it but nevertheless we were clear we were going to do that and after it's not the first time an industry has been nationalized in british history what was much more concerning to the wealthiest and most powerful in our society was the suggestion that there would be increased workers participation and control in companies there would be a right of workers to take over failing companies it would be the empowerment of people there were also strong objections to the general trend of the international strategy i wanted to pursue um because i think that um we spend far too much money on military expenditure we spend far too little on overseas aid and we promote a trade policy that is often unfair and i was anxious to change all of those things and develop trade and international relations policy based on much more on human rights than on perceptions of um strategic interest now that i was strongly condemned for but interestingly during the 2017 election campaign a horrible terrible tragic event occurred and that was manchester the killings that took place in manchester and some days later the day campaigning resumed i made a speech there about what i consider to be britain's failings in international policy afghanistan iraq libya i mentioned but there were others and i was advised by a lot of people not to make the speech and not to draw the link between britain's international policy and the growth of terrifying and horrible terrorism around the world but i did and interestingly it got a strong yougov approval within three or four hours and the debate sort of subsided there and then do i think we were objected to by powerful forces yeah absolutely i do and i i totally um i totally get that um when you say the question of violence in political change i'm not in favor of violence um and i would say that because i think that if you suppress a people's wish to achieve something then eventually there's going to be either violent suppression of the protest or there's going to be an eruption of anger it can lead to violence in terms of standing up for people's rights so you look at those that campaigning for land rights in india or many countries in latin america you look at other issues around the world and so surely the basis is that you have to work on the principle of decency justice and human rights as the basis of everything you do in order to bring about that change was it going to be easy in government to bring about the changes that we wanted no i fully got that and you would only bring about those changes by um peaceful support and mobilizing people i have um family connections and a quite close relationship and knowledge of chile and i first went to chile in 1969 on the year that popular unity was founded which won the election a year liata and salvadorende became the president and he faced the most bitter opposition from the u.s from the cia from the wealthy in chile and eventually it resulted in utmost violence which was uh the bombing of his palace and the and the coup and pinochet and all the horrors that followed from pinochet that violence came from the right not from the left that violence came from people trying to protect power and privilege against what they saw as an insurgent in in president allende and so um if you want if you want to avoid violence and we all do then you have to recognize that justice must prevail as well let's take a penultimate question um yes in the front room um my great-aunt is a lifelong labour member and she's 70-something but she still campaigned every day in very north um in the 2019 election and i think they lost by a couple of hundred votes with james ruth and on the days running up to the election the momentum campaign thing was advocating that any local campaigners didn't go to barry north where it was a nail-biting election but instead went to some of the target seats that they felt had mps who were perhaps more ideologically inclined uh to concur with them my question is was the central failing of the labour movement under your leadership and obsession with ideological purity at the expense of a genuine appetite for power ideological purity at the expense of a kind of genuine was labor under your leadership um obsessed with ideological purity at the expense of power is i think the question no no it wasn't we were very keen on winning the general election of 2017 and 2019 um i mean you'll have read plenty about this i'm sure you've studied it that there was um a lot of advice i got during the 2017 election campaign was one it was unwinnable two we should concentrate on a defensive strategy and only go on a defend key street key seat strategy and three that i should only go to labor held constituencies i rejected all three items of advice and went two constituencies i thought we could win and in many of them we did win and that we had to have um an assertive campaign all over the country in order to gain constituencies and so yes there was an argument no question about that and again if the ford report ever comes out it will um show what that discussion was about i'm not totally familiar with what happened in or didn't happen in berry and berry north at that time but all i would say is that my view that i put to momentum and to other organized groups momentum was the most effective of the organized groups was that i wanted them to concentrate on the seats we had to gain because the only way you could win an election was by becoming the largest party you're going to an overall majority and so i did ask them to concentrate um on winning marginals indeed i mean my own constituency sent people to stevenage and milton keynes and so on uh from london as a way of trying to gain gain seats and so ideological purity no it was about winning winning the election on the manifesto that we'd put forward and um well we all know what the final result was but i have to say we did put a huge amount of effort in and the numbers of people that came out and helped was quite phenomenal in that election campaign the date wasn't great mid-december and the circumstances were not great because it was on the cusp of the whole brexit issue was which i wanted to resolve by means of um discussion with the eu which i had already been holding anyway again publicly kirsten i met michelle barnier many times to discuss what kind of agreement trade agreement we could reach with the eu um the debate was not really prepared to understand what we were saying it was totally this simplistic approach that johnson took i just finished this because the eu thing is significant is that um essentially people that are up against it be there in a leave or remain area are up against it and i was trying to put forward policies that would bring people together and unite them and that was my whole strategy in the run-up to and the election campaign itself yes on the left in the furious backyard uh good afternoon mr corbin and thank you for coming to speak thank you for coming to speak to us today um irrespective of whether or not we accept your accounts of how you attempted to deal with anti-semitism in your party how do you go about explaining the phenomenon during your leadership to what do you attribute it because either you accept that there was a large spike in allegations of anti-semitic behavior after you became leader in which case you need to explain it with recourse to your own leadership or you must tell us that you know this was a problem that existed under miliband and brown and blair except it was a better kept secret so was it a problem with your leadership or was it a problem with the party you led there had been um occasions of anti-semitism in the past in the party of that of no doubt and there were some historical cases that um that could be found the numbers of people that were accused of anti-semitic behavior or utterances was actually very very small very very small amongst the total membership of the party and i was keen to a deal with any form of racism anti-semitism obviously being a very important one but also keen to defend the reputation of the labour party and of members as a whole hence the processes that i set up i received a huge amount of pressure on this many cases were reported to the party which turned out to be a not party members b um duplicates in some case and we had to or had the party rather had to sift through all those and deal with them appropriately and so i just want it clear anti-semitism is wrong absolutely end off i think our hour is up unfortunately and mr corman thank you very much for your time thank you to everyone who's submitted questions thank you to those who queued but sadly didn't get a seat because of a lack of space and if you could remain seated until after mr corbin has left in order to um in order to ensure that we don't crowd and we don't have a bit of a covered risk that would be ideal thank you very much for your time could i just say thank you very much as well for inviting me here today [Music] you

Channel: Cambridge Union

Views: 36,209

Rating: 4.1229773 out of 5

Keywords: Cambridge Union, Cambridge University, Speech

Id: Qks3u8obBvA

Length: 58min 16sec (3496 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2021