Jeremy Corbyn: 'There's always a crisis that needs your urgent attention'
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Version 0 of 1. Jeremy Corbyn has described how he refuses to spend too much time in his office because he does not want to waste time on internal crisis management. The Labour leader said that he had become “quite assertive” in managing his diary because he wanted to ensure he had plenty of time for the visits that keep him in touch with the people he represents – as well as some time for digging his allotment. In a long and wideranging interview with Red Pepper magazine, he also discussed his plans to open up Labour’s policymaking, why Labour lost the 1983 general election and his belief in people’s intrinsic goodness. Insisting that he was happy in his new role, even though it was one he was “pushed into” (he was initially reluctant to stand as a leadership candidate), Corbyn admitted that after he became leader, his office at first found it hard coping with the volume of correspondence he had received. “After only two or three weeks in office we discovered we had a backlog of 100,000 emails sent to me. We had a backlog of a thousand invitations to speak at places all over the country, and all over the world for that matter.” Corbyn said that his office management was now much better, but he admitted that one key issue was how to allocate his time. He said there was a weekly fight over his diary because he insisted on spending time meeting the people and groups he had always represented. “I’m quite concerned that if I spend time in the office someone will always find something for you to do. There’s always a crisis that needs your urgent attention. If I wasn’t there, either the crisis wouldn’t happen or it wouldn’t need your urgent attention. But the fact I’m there means that it becomes my problem, not somebody else’s. “So I’m quite assertive about the need to ensure I go travelling round the country. I’m doing basically three days travelling every week.” He also insisted on having half a day a week to himself, or a day, so he can dig his allotment, he said. Corbyn said that by the end of the year he would probably have done between 400 and 500 public meetings. He wants to get party members more involved in policymaking, and he said he wanted to use social media to enable the party to process the ideas put forward at meetings like these. “We’re going to try various experiments in how we reach out and how we involve people, how we use social media, how we use digital tools to share ideas and knowledge. “The idea is that we have a community conference on policy in which some people are there, some people are on Skype, some people are on a livestream feed, some people are sending in emails.” Asked about a line in Tony Benn’s diaries saying Corbyn attributed Labour’s 1983 election defeat to “the great incompetence of the party machine”, Corbyn said that he could not remember using that phrase. But he suggested that he did not believe that the 1983 manifesto, which included unilateral disarmament and withdrawal from the European Economic Community (EEC), was the party’s main problem. “I can imagine the thought processes I was having, which was that the party in ’83 presented a very interesting electoral platform, but lots of people in the party were quite frightened of it, and the Tories were running essentially a fairly xenophobic election surrounding the Falklands war, which we never challenged. “We also were faced with the SDP being set up by those leading Labour parliamentarians who left the Labour party at that time, so it was a very interesting period. I felt the party didn’t really understand what was happening.” In response to a question about how he managed to appear fearless when taking on powerful interests, Corbyn said he did not think anyone was all bad. “I have this 18th-century religious view that there is some good in everybody,” he said. “Sometimes you have to search quite hard for it. Sometimes it’s very hard to find and you wonder if it really is there.” He also said he was not intimidated by people with a university education. “Because I’ve never had any higher education of any sort, I’ve never held in awe those who have had it or have a sense of superiority over those who don’t. Life is life. Some of the wisest people you meet are sweeping our streets.” |