I’ve always liked Jeremy Corbyn. He’s been my MP for the 32 years I’ve lived in Islington North. For 10 of those years he lived just a few doors away in a Victorian street on the very northern edge of his constituency. On many a morning we chatted on the pavement as I came back from taking the kids to school and he headed down to the tube and to Westminster.
I occasionally marched behind him on local campaigns against cuts at the Whittington Hospital and transport issues, and I was a minor supporting act in events for CND and against the Iraq war, sometimes marching as far as the plinth beneath Nelson’s Column.
Not once have I ever considered voting for anyone other than this conscientious and dedicated MP, and our pavement chats were all about fighting the Tory government’s assaults on everything that the Labour Party had put in place since our childhoods. I claimed to be better qualified in this field as I was seven weeks old when Clem Attlee came to power in 1945, whereas Jeremy had missed the first four years.
We talked of the unbridled power of capital then running amok through the City of London just a few tube stops away. We talked of the poll tax and the struggle against the privatisation of public services that was then in full swing under John Major. On every subject I tended to agree with him. Especially that the radical gains of the Attlee government that had given us both so much were being dismantled ruthlessly on a daily basis. He saw it in the Commons at horrifyingly close range, even if always from the
very back of the backbenches. Nevertheless, there was one issue we tended to skip over. It was the then vexed issue of residents parking in our own streets.
I would apologise for bringing up the subject and say that, whilst it wasn’t as important as the plight of the Sandinistas or support for the PLO, it mattered a great deal locally.
At this, Jeremy tended to glaze over. He was not a car person. He rode a bike, he used public transport and he walked. I too did all of these things, but I also drove a car and that, I think, made me suspect in Jeremy’s eyes. He seemed to regard residents parking as a bourgeois issue far removed from the concerns of working people. In this, of course, he was wrong.
At that time our streets were almost the last available free parking in Islington for commuters to leave cars for days, sometimes weeks, at a stretch, and head to the tube or the hospital. We were clogged with double parking and cars parked across corners and junctions. There was even a local Arthur Daley who used the streets as free storage place for his wrecks.
Far from it being purely a car owners’s problem, the issue of residents parking had a direct bearing on the wellbeing of everyone who stepped over their front doorstep. From toddlers in their buggies to the elderly, it blighted lives and it took years of divisive campaigning to eventually clear the streets of unrestricted commuter parking. We even improved life for shift workers at the hospital by fighting for sympathetic controlled hours. However, as it didn’t tick one of his boxes, I don’t recall our MP taking any part in the campaign. It was a small thing but it gave the first niggling indication that while Jeremy was very good at being a thorn in the flesh, he tended to avoid being the actual flesh.
He had strong principles and favoured a seamless set of received positions unchanged by time and the compromise of office, but what did it matter? He was a much admired campaigning MP. He was never going to be invited into office. He was certainly never going to be leader of the Labour Party.
He would never need to ponder what Clem Attlee would have done, whereas I got the chance to do just that in 2009 when I played the great man alongside Brendan Gleeson’s Churchill in ‘Into The Storm’ on ITV. Then, last year, it happened. Suddenly Jeremy Corbyn’s name was on the ballot paper for Labour Party leader. I was stunned, and at the same time, delighted. I found myself encouraging my sceptical friends to support this breath of fresh air from the left, though deep down I wondered if Jeremy really wanted the job. After all, as far as I knew, he had studiously avoided any position in government during all of his 30-odd years in parliament.
So when the chips were down, could he be like my hero Clem? Could he be a man, bold enough to nationalise the coal, steel and rail industries yet willing to deal evenhandedly with a local issue that didn’t interest him? Could he, like Major Attlee, see no contradiction in serving with distinction throughout the first world war, secretly setting up Britain’s nuclear arsenal in the 1940s, yet confronting the private ownership of major industries and setting up the NHS?
Could he sing the words of the national anthem as gustily as he sang ‘The Red Flag’ and ‘The Internationale’? Clem Attlee did all these contradictory things. He was a man for all seasons but in this social media driven age, contradictions are no longer permitted.
So far, the signs haven’t been encouraging. Locally, Jeremy fell at the first hurdle when he slept his way through the consultation for a major road upheaval likely to marinate our area in extra pollution and rat-runs simply because the buzzwords ‘cycle lanes’ and
‘affordable housing’ allowed him to overlook the scheme’s glaring faults. The consultation for this scheme, which led all the way to the courts, has made Jeremy’s phrase ‘democratic deficit’ echo emptily round our streets.
We gave him the benefit of the doubt that understandably his attention was elsewhere, but that wee niggle resurfaced and came back with a vengeance over the EU referendum campaign. Nothing in Jeremy’s history would have made you expect him to support Britain remaining in the EU and the Remain campaign must have been
miserable for him. It certainly looked that way.
The 75% remain vote in Islington was one of the highest in the UK but you wouldn’t have guessed that from Jeremy’s reaction on the 24 June when he called for Article 50 to be immediately invoked. On that memorable Friday he managed to look much more at ease than his Islington neighbour Boris (Johnson). Jeremy was now speaking to a constituency far away from north London and today the burning question is whether that constituency is big enough to put a Labour government back into power.
So this week I have my £25 vote for the leader. Do I give it to my long-term diligent MP whose aims I admire but whose delivery sometimes disappoints or do I vote for an even more untested apparatchik simply because his colleagues think he might save their necks, along with the Labour Party’s? It’s a dilemma that might even have taxed Clem Attlee.
Bill Paterson is one of Scotland’s most distinguished actors
Drawing of Jeremy Corbyn by Bob Smith
By Bill Paterson | 21 September 2016