Video: Naomi Klein Interviews Jeremy Corbyn https://theintercept.com/2017/07/13/video-naomi-klein-and-jeremy-cor...

NAOMI KLEIN AND JEREMY

CORBYN DISCUSS HOW TO
GET THE WORLD WE WANT
Naomi Klein and Jeremy Corbyn discuss Trump, climate
change, and the future of progressive politics.

Naomi Klein

July 13 2017, 12:59 p.m.

DONATE ⟶ f t

Naomi Klein: I’m Naomi Klein, reporting for The Intercept, and I’m
here in London at the Houses of Parliament with Jeremy Corbyn,

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leader of the Labour Party, three weeks after the Labour Party in an
historic election won many, many more seats than anybody predicted≡
– except for some of the people in this room, who saw it coming. And
it’s just an enormous pleasure to be here with Jeremy and to talk
about the importance of a forward-looking, bold agenda to do battle
with the right. Hi, Jeremy.

Jeremy Corbyn: Lovely to see you.

NK: So, Jeremy Corbyn, it’s been extraordinary being in the U.K. this
week, and seeing the political space that you have opened up, and the
fact that now we’re seeing the Tories try to poach some of your
policies and scramble to try to appeal to young people by talking
about maybe getting rid of tuition fees.

JC: Well, social justice isn’t copyrighted, but it’s a bigger picture than
just the individual issues.

NK: I want to talk about this extraordinary moment in which the

project that really began under Thatcher in this country, and Reagan
in the U.S. — the whole so-called consensus that never really was a
consensus, the war on the collective, on the idea that we can do good
things when we get together — is crumbling. But it’s also kind of a
dangerous moment, when you have a vacuum of ideology, because
dangerous ideas are also surging. So what is the plan to make sure
that it is progressive, hopeful ideas that enter into this vacuum that
has opened up?

JC: It’s been a very interesting two years. We’ve had two leadership
elections in the Labour Party, which mobilized very large numbers of
people. It’s not about me. It’s about a cause, it’s about people. And
then we’ve just come out of a general election campaign in which we
started in a very difficult political position and ended up gaining

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three million more votes than 2015, and the highest Labour vote in
England for many, many decades. ≡
There was a big swing to Labour, but not quite enough, unfortunately,
to give us a Parliamentary majority. And so, we’re now in a situation
where there is a huge confidence amongst those that are
campaigning for ending the wage cap in the public sector for
investment in public services. And a huge degree of uncertainty by
the right and by the Conservatives.

NK: I feel like what your campaign has done, and the boldness of the
Labour Manifesto – and this election campaign has proved that when
you put the ideas forward, when you put the bold vision of the world
we actually want – not just the opposition to austerity, you know, not
just the “no,” but also a picture of the world that could be so much
better than we have, that’s when people get excited.

JC: The strongest message – indeed. I said this at many, many rallies
and events we held: “Look around the crowd. Look at each other.
You’re all different. You’re all unique. You’re all individuals. You have
different backgrounds, languages. Different ethnic communities. But
you’re all united. You’re united in what you actually want in the sense
of a collective in society.”

And I think the election campaign was a turning point away from the
supreme individualism of the right towards the idea that you’re a
better society when you have a collective good about it.

NK: And what about that picture of the world after we win? How
important is that?

JC: The picture of the world is a crucial one. It is about what we do to

deal with issues of injustice and inequality and poverty, and above all,

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hope and opportunity for young people. Hope that they can get to
college or university, opportunity they can get a decent job. And it’s ≡
also about the contribution we make to the rest of the world and the
relationship we have with the rest of the world.

I want a foreign policy based on human rights, based on respect for

international law, based for recognizing the causes of the refugee
flows, the causes of the injustice around the world. And that is
something we’re developing. And indeed, there were some awful
events during the election campaign. Before the election started there
was an attack on Westminster itself and on Parliament. There was
then the dreadful bomb in Manchester. And then there was an attack
in London on London Bridge.

NK: And you committed kind of political heresy because you talked
about some of the root causes. Yet that resonated with people.

JC: I’m not in any way minimizing the horror of what happened or
the awful things the individuals did, but I said you’ve got to look at
the international context in which there’s been this growth. And I
can hear myself like yesterday, on February 15, 2003, saying, “What
could be the worst-case scenario if we went to war in Iraq?” I wasn’t
defending Saddam Hussein. I was just saying, if you go to war in Iraq
and you destabilize the whole country, there are consequences.

NK: I think it’s important for Americans in this moment to

understand that you were able to say that, and that it resonated with
people because they know it to be true. Because we don’t know
what’s going to happen during the Trump administration. But we do
know that Donald Trump fully intends to take advantage of any crisis
to push forward this incredibly regressive, xenophobic agenda,
because he tried to exploit the Manchester attacks to say this is about
immigrants flowing across our borders. He tried to take advantage of

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the London Bridge attack to say this is why we need to Muslim ban.
≡
JC: He also attacked the mayor of London, who’s the first Muslim
elected to mayoral office anywhere in Western Europe. People were
extremely angry at the language he used toward Sadiq Khan, who is,
after all, elected mayor of the city.

NK: Well, what do you say to some of the world leaders who think
that they can only go so far in standing up to Trump? You know, like
maybe they’ll put out a sassy meme of some kind. But ultimately
they’re going to welcome him with open arms. What do you think
the stance of other world leaders who claim to stand for progressive
values should be in this moment?

JC: Well, I think they’ve got to meet Trump and discuss with him, as
one would with any leader. I was shocked by the language he used
during his election campaign — about women, about Muslims, and
about Mexicans, about other people in society. I was also appalled at
the language he used surrounding the Paris Climate Change
discussions. I mean, these are serious, serious global issues. What
kind of world are we going to leave in the future? What are we doing
to this planet? And he seemed to think this was an opportunity for
promoting polluting industries.

NK: Well, he actually said he was going to negotiate a better deal.

JC: Well, I’m not sure what he means by a better deal and that would
be an interesting discussion. But having worked, like you have, for a
very long time on these issues, the fact that finally India and China,
in a formal setting, came onboard with the idea there are limits to
emissions, there are limits to pollution, there are limits to what you
can do. For the USA having come onboard under Obama, then
walking away under Trump, is beyond sad.

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NK: But certainly because they’re going so rogue on climate, I think

there is a responsibility for everybody else to do more in this ≡
moment, not to just sort of – okay, he’s lowered the bar so much that
everybody looks good in comparison. And we are seeing examples of
that. We’re seeing – including in the U.S., we’re seeing cities stepping
up and saying, well, we’re going to speed up our transition to
renewables. And internationally I think we can see the same thing as
well.

JC: I think that the image of the USA is too often presented as the
image of what Donald Trump has said day-to-day, whereas the reality,
look at the number of jobs in renewables in California alone runs into
the hundreds of thousands. Look at the growth of renewable energy
systems across the USA, the number of states and cities that are
serious about protecting their environment and controlling what they
can of climate change.

NK: I want to talk a little bit about the way some of my friends in the
United States are feeling right now, who were very inspired by this
election campaign and by your leadership bid within the Labour
Party.

I have to tell you that people are feeling a little discouraged right now
in the United States. They are up against Trump, but they’re also up
against a Democratic party that is fighting them on single-payer
healthcare, on universal public healthcare, that seems to want to
keep charting what they see as a safe, centrist path, but what we’re
seeing again and again is it’s not safe because it’s a losing path. It’s
not speaking to people’s urgent needs for good jobs, for a free public
education and affordable healthcare. What do you say to the people
who organized for Bernie and are just feeling really frustrated right
now?

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JC: Bernie called me the day after our election here. I was half asleep
watching something on television. And Bernie comes on to say, well ≡
done on the campaign, and I was interested in your campaigning
ideas. Where did you get them from? And I said, well, you, actually.

And what I would say to people is: Don’t be discouraged. At the end of
the day, human beings want to do things together. They want to do
things collectively. And that’s the kind of society all of us are trying
to create. We went into an election campaign in a difficult political
position, and we put forward a manifesto that was collective in its
approach, was specific in what it would do, in the sense of ending
university tuition fees, in the sense of raising minimum income, and
we gained the biggest increase in vote for our party since the Second
World War. And we gained the support and participation of a very
large number of people. We didn’t win the election. I wish we had.
But in that campaign, we changed the debate in exactly the same way
Senator Bernie Sanders’s intervention into Democratic nomination
did mobilize a very large number of people.

NK: But you did win the leadership of the Labour Party. That
campaign wasn’t ultimately successful within the Democratic Party.
Do you think people should keep fighting for the soul of that party?

JC: Well, it’s the soul of the people, isn’t it?

It’s not for me to tell people what specific organizations they should
or shouldn’t have in the USA, because the party system in the USA is
very different.

What we’ve done is change the terms of debate, but the other key
point, and this is what works on both sides of the Atlantic, is a
method of campaigning. You knock on doors and you identify voters.
That’s key, crucial. But if you’re seen solely through the prism of

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media that is quite rightwing and quite conservative in its views, then
all you’re doing when you knock on the door is hearing an echo of ≡
what people have heard on a rightwing television station or through
the printed media.

Social media and the technology and techniques that are there
through social media give an opportunity that’s never been there
before to get that message across. Just think, those people that were
campaigning for social justice in Chicago in the 1920s, the best they
could do was print their own newspaper if they could afford it, or
make a leaflet and take it round and hand it out on bread queues. I
grew up in the era when you used to print your own leaflets and go
and give them out. You can now send out something on social media,
and you can reach potentially millions of people in five minutes. The
opportunities are there. And it’s not regulated, it’s not censored, it’s
not controlled.

William Randolph Hearst would have hated the Internet.

NK: It seems to me that you have received just about as bad media
treatment, smears from elite media, as is possible to receive. And yet
it didn’t work. In fact, it seems to have backlashed and contributed to
this feeling of loss of faith in many of these elite institutions.

JC: I think there’s something in that. After a while, a high degree of

media abuse makes you a figure of interest.

NK: You talk about changing the debate, and that’s clearly happened.
One of the places we’ve seen this is in the Grenfell Tower catastrophe
crime scene. And the way in which this horrific event has been
interpreted, it seems, throughout British society, is as extreme
evidence of a failed system that does not value human life, that puts
kind of a hierarchy on life.

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JC: What it exposed was something about modern urban living. This
is the borough in London that is the richest in the whole country. ≡
Very, very rich borough. And its council gave a rebate to the top
taxpayers last year. Gave them a little gift.

NK: Money back.

JC: That tower had several hundred people living in it, some of whom
were tenants of the local council, Royal Borough of Kensington and
Chelsea. Some flats had been bought independently, and they were
sub-tenanted or sub-sub-tenanted. Nobody really knew who was in the
block. The whole system collapsed. The reality was, it’s a product of
insufficient regulation, of deregulation, and it was a towering inferno
of the poor being burnt in the richest borough in the country.

And that’s a wakeup call about safety of buildings. It’s a wakeup call
about the idea you go forward to this wonderful free market Valhalla
of the future by tearing up every regulation like it’s a denial of the
opportunities for the private sector. And so the debate has turned full
circle on this. I went there the following day and spent quite a lot of
time talking to those that escaped from the tower, and talking to
traumatized firefighters and paramedics and ambulance workers and
police officers who were getting ready to go into the building – to was
then cooling from the fire – in order to bring out the bodies. They’re
the real heroes in this. It’s a lesson for the whole country. But people
are frightened.

NK: There’s a wall now – and I think you’ve probably seen it — where
residents have put up questions that they have for the authorities.
And you know, these questions are just completely heartbreaking.
There’s kids asking, Is my school safe? There’s on question from a
ten-year-old child who said, “Why does it take this to bring us
together?”

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JC: That’s a good question.

≡
NK: I think we learn this lesson again and again during times of
crisis, when we’re tested. We can either turn inward and against each
other, and we saw a lot of that after 9/11 in the United States, where
Muslims were scapegoated, and we lost a lot of liberties in this
country and around the world with these draconian laws pushed
through. Wars were started in the name of that attack.

And here we are in a time of overlapping crisis. Climate change is one

of those crises, and inequality is another, and racial injustice is
another. Do you think we can connect the dots and develop an
agenda that solves multiple problems at once, multiple crises?

JC: Well, climate change and refugees are linked. Climate change and
war is linked. Environmental disaster, not necessarily always
associated with climate change, is also linked when you have
deforestation and you end up destroying your local environment
because of it.

And so, if you look at the war in Darfur, look at the refugee flows into
Libya, partly from the war in Syria, also from human rights abuses
across the whole region. Also from people who have been driven off
their land in sub-Saharan Africa to make way for often very large
corporations buying up land to grow various crops, often rice or fruit,
to export somewhere else, leaving the local population unemployed
and hungry. There is a connection about the need for supporting the
living and development rights of everybody, not just yourself at their
expense.

NK: I want to ask you if there’s been a moment that really sticks with
you during the campaign or since that is the most hopeful moment
you’ve seen, where you could see the country that you want to live in,

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a glimpse of it.
≡
JC: There was a gentleman who came to our rally in Hastings, which
is south coast seaside resort fishing town. He was aged 91. I joked
with him, because I’d been told he was 92, and he said how dare I call
him 92, he was only 91. He joined the Labour Party in 1945, been a
party member ever since then. Very active all his life. And he said this
was the most hopeful time of his life. And he told me his mother had
been a suffragette who campaigned for the women’s right to vote at
the time of the First World War. And his grandfather had been in the
Chartists in the 1850s, which helped bring about some degree of
democracy in Britain. And I just thought, this man has come out to a
rally on a Saturday morning at that age because he’s full of hope for
young people.

We were characterized as an election campaign that was full of

young, idealistic people. Yeah, there were a lot of young people there,
and many of them with brilliant ideals and brilliant imagination.
There were also a lot of older people there who came there saying, “I
want something better for my grandchildren. I want something better
for society in the future.” It was a coming together of large numbers
of people.

NK: Well, I really want to thank you for your leadership and for your
boldness, because it isn’t only inspiring people in this country; I think
it’s inspiring people around the world who really do need some
inspiration right now, particularly in United States.

JC: Thank you very much. It’s not about you or I as individuals. When
people’s minds are opened up, there is no end to the possibilities.

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