Jeremy Corbyn just ripped through the evils of racism to deliver a message of genuine hope to a rapt audience in Liverpool.
And while the Conservatives continue to use xenophobic policies and racist rhetoric to shore up votes, the Labour leader’s intervention couldn’t be more timely.
Say no to racism
In his speech at Momentum’s The World Transformed (TWT) conference on 24 September, Corbyn hit out at the dangers of scapegoating minorities:
Those that would seek to divide us against minorities will create an atmosphere of hate. That atmosphere of hate intensifies as they get nastier and nastier towards whichever minority they’re choosing to blame. At the end of that process, you’ve created hate, you’ve created distrust, you’ve created oppression, and you’ve created a horrible atmosphere of violence.
This is how we take on all those who seek to divide us.@TWT_NOW #Lab18 pic.twitter.com/injUmA48mP
— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) September 25, 2018
The Labour leader didn’t directly say who “those seeking to divide” were. But his speech came only hours after shadow home secretary Diane Abbott labelled the Tories “the party of racism”.
And looking at Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’ policies, Boris Johnson’s Islamophobic comments, and Sajid Javid’s continuation of the Windrush deportations, it’s not hard to see why.
Ignoring the real issues
Corbyn stressed that whipping up hatred wouldn’t achieve concrete gains for society. For him, unity was the only way to improve Britain:
You haven’t built a school, you haven’t built a hospital, you haven’t trained a teacher, you haven’t educated a child. We have to stand as one community with all our pride in our diversity, in order to be united to bring about the social changes – the social justice – that our movement, our party was created to achieve.
Together, we can win
And praising the bottom-up organisation behind TWT, he pressed home why solidarity was so important in modern-day politics:
The World Transformed brings together people with experience, people with knowledge, people with imagination, people with hope.
And it’s people with imagination, hope, ideas, and that creative ability to organise with others that does transform our society, does transform our world, and does show popular movements coming together, united for social justice, are so much more powerful than anything that tries to divide us with the super-competitive neoliberal economics.
I know which side I’m on. I know which side you’re on. Together, we can win this.
A new hope
In Liverpool, Corbyn delivered a message of real hope for the millions of Britons who have long waited for a truly progressive answer to the UK’s ills.
We are in a time when centrists are pandering to prejudices. They often offer little more than empty platitudes to the systemic problems facing the UK. And this is while leading Conservatives like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson pull the Conservative government ever further to the right.
The UK is having an identity crisis, and Corbyn’s message is an urgent one. Racism won’t solve our problems. But solidarity could.
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Featured image via YouTube
