Jeremy Corbyn

people that you knew your friends would they characterize you then as being fun funny interesting quirky or earnest weird weird yeah politically weird you see remember this is small town shropshire so it was quite a conservative atmosphere and uh i was thought to be just weird politically weird i remember um someone saying you know you and your family really ought to be locked up you're not safe

It was half a joke.

Only half a joke.

There's a lot of people who'd go along with that.

Didn't care.

No, because the issues at the time were... The Cuban Missile Crisis had a big effect on me.

And it had a big effect on everybody, actually, because everybody of this particular age can remember that.

Not sure it would have saved you.

Yeah, you thought you'd get under a big table.

The world held its breath.

So I was involved as a campaigner against nuclear weapons in CND and so on, which was then seen to be very extreme.

Yeah, and I was in quite a small minority, a very small minority in school who wanted to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

And so the interaction in school was often about those kind of issues and that sort of thing.

I ended sixth form, so it would be 17, 18.

But with two E's, you were not going to get into any... Well, no, what happened was you had to have a certain number of O levels to go into the sixth form.

But if you were near it, like one off, you could go into something they called the 6-5 special.

which was after the music programme at the time.

That was quite witty.

And then I was told I could do two A-levels.

So I did geography and history, which actually was all right because the history choice was you could do either European history or history of Russia in the era of revolution.