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Enthusiasm for Jeremy Corbyn at Bradford Literature Festival [1]
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Date: 2023-07
Last Sunday, Jeremy Corbyn walked on stage at the Bradford Literature Festival to deafening applause and cheers from more than 700 people.
Both the audience’s size and fierce reaction were unexpected. I had been asked to chair the talk with the former Labour leader, and organisers had said weeks earlier that around 200 tickets had sold.
The reality had been particularly surprising since the media treats Corbyn as something of a non-person – a position made easier by the current Labour leadership obviously wanting him to disappear into never-never land.
Yet walking the short distance from the festival’s hospitality centre to the venue, Corbyn was constantly stopped by people wanting to talk to him, take selfies with him, and tell him how much they admired what he stood for.
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Bear in mind that the event was not organised by ‘leftie’ supporters and took place in Bradford, a city with a mixed political makeup. The three inner-city parliamentary seats are held by Labour but adjacent constituencies, including Keighley, Shipley and Pudsey, are Tory. Plenty of people from these towns and further afield come to the festival, which has been running since 2014 and increasingly pulls in big names.
This year Corbyn had been invited to reflect on his views on international peace and security, in the context of a speech he made at the UN centre in Geneva six years ago when he was leader of the opposition.
His speech in Bradford focused on the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small corporate elite, exacerbated by tax avoidance, climate change, the refugee crisis and what he described as a “bomb first and think and talk later” approach to conflict resolution. He highlighted these same challenges in his 2017 speech. Six years on, they have only become more urgent.
When the 30-minute talk and subsequent discussion came to an end, there was a sustained standing ovation from the packed hall. In the words of one organiser, the staff were “blown away” by his reception. I learnt later that Corbyn gets this kind of reaction just about anywhere he goes – it was not a one-off by a long shot – but there is little or no media coverage of this.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of his continued popularity is that it comes amid a backdrop of hostility from the Labour Party leadership.
Days before Corbyn took to the stage in Bradford, the party’s leadership put the head of the cross-party centrist Compass movement, Neal Lawson, under investigation. The move, which is seen by many as a step towards suspension and surprised even experienced Labour politicians, is part of an alleged wider ‘purge’.
As one backbencher told me a few days ago when I asked whether they felt safe: “The noose is certainly tightening. There’s likely a bullet with my name on it but the pulling of the trigger is either part of a pre-prepared sequence of shots or on a tripwire, ie don’t vote for this and this happens.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/jeremy-corbyn-bradford-literature-festival-enthusiastic-reception-labour-party/
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