The Elephant in the Room

We need to talk about Jeremy

Motherhood and apple pie

A few months ago, I went to the Liverpool Community Independents meeting. People were very excited because Jeremy Corbyn was speaking and it was rumoured that he might be (finally) announcing the creation of a new political party. In the event he did no such thing, and actually, I wasn’t even slightly surprised.

Younger readers may not be familiar with the US American phrase motherhood and apple pie. It’s used to denote things that the 1950s white majority America was extremely comfortable with, things that any politician could talk about and not find any disagreement. In other words: comforting, anodyne empty words about nothing you could object to.

Corbyn’s speech was the left-wing British equivalent of motherhood and apple pie. He said all the right things and got cheered in all the right places. I was probably alone in the crowd because the speech made me absolutely furious. It was full of what we might do if things ever fell our way, and had absolutely none of what we should do in order to make that happen. It was a warm bath of post war welfare state aspirations. It closed with a rallying call was all to go back to our communities and keep building our independent resistance, and that’s all it was, a pat on the head from the person that used to be…