Chapter 1: What are Jeremy Corbyn's thoughts on May Day and its significance?
Gather ye rosebuds, while ye may. There's a new guest waiting, with quite a lot to say. So I'm going to shut up and say welcome to another episode of Rosebud. We do indeed have a very special guest for you. Cue the music, they're ready. Welcome to another episode of Rosebud. Thank you so much for being there. I'm here. I'm Giles Brandreth.
And today, if you're listening to this in real time, is the 1st of May, 2026. It's May Day. May Day. That is the international distress signal, but it's also a day of festival, a celebratory day, a political day. It is May Day.
May Day for many people is a celebration of spring, but it's also an important day among socialists because it is a celebration of workers' rights and has been for many years. And I thought this May Day, I'd like on Rosebud to have a true socialist to be our special guest. And I found one. Somebody I know. I was a Member of Parliament once upon a time. I was a Conservative Member of Parliament.
He was then a Labour Member of Parliament. His name is Jeremy Corbyn. He's been the MP in the United Kingdom for the constituency of Islington North since 1983. He's still an MP, but currently he's an independent. He's the parliamentary leader of a new party that he has jointly formed called Your Party.
But in this country, he's best known for having been the leader of the Labour Party, for having been the leader of the opposition, for having fought two general elections. neither of which he won, but certainly in one of them he came not far off winning. He's a very interesting person, and I think this is a very interesting conversation we are about to have.
So our May Day guest today is Jeremy Corbyn, MP. Cue the music. This is May Day. I'm Giles Brandreth and with me is Jeremy Corbyn. And I wanted Jeremy to have you as a guest today because May Day, well, May Day probably is an important day to you. And I feel when I was being brought up, May Day was a major international day.
It was there everywhere except Britain because it was always a workers' day holiday in most parts of the world, not everywhere. And then we always celebrated May Day with May Day marches and so on. There used to be the most severe arguments within the London Labour movement about whether the march should be on May 1st or the first convenient weekend after May 1st. Big debate.
LAUGHTER
And what is the origin of May Day?
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Chapter 2: How did Jeremy Corbyn's upbringing influence his political views?
a way of people coming together and celebrating a sense of unity and a sense of solidarity. And I've been on a lot of May Day marches. The most poignant one I went on, which I didn't realise it at the time, was 1969. I was in Chile. He was a very young man, travelling around Latin America, observing what was going on.
The Popular Unity Force, led by Salvador Allende, had just been formed, and they were ready to fight the elections the year later, 1970. And so I was in Santiago on May Day, and I came across this massive march assembling. So I joined in. We marched and all the songs were in Spanish and there was this fantastic sense of hope and determination. It was a wonderful experience.
At the time, I didn't realise the significance of it, but much later I did.
Have you ever been on a march that you really felt, in retrospect, was worthwhile? In the 60s, during my gap year, I was in America and I went on an anti-Vietnam War march. And there were millions of us. And I felt, I was a teenager, I felt maybe we are making a difference because people can see there are millions of us here.
I've been on a lot of marches and you sometimes think... I've come here, it's got cold, got wet, done lots of marching. I go on the Palestine marches, all of them, and sometimes I think, well, what have we done? We marched around London. And then I get home and I start looking at messages and calls and so on. Then people in Gaza and the West Bank say, thank you.
And so they say, the fact you're doing something gives us some degree of hope. And so... I think public political expression is very important. And when you've been on obviously some marches, that wonderful sense of solidarity you get, particularly if there's song and music involved. I don't know what it is about this country. There's many things good, but there's some things that are bad.
One of them is we don't sing enough. There's nothing more powerful than a group of people marching down the road together singing. It's very powerful. We should do more of it.
Do you sometimes worry, though, that you might be upsetting, offending other people? Obviously, some of the Palestine marches have distressed, upset people.
I think you have to have respect for other people and you have to make sure you don't go out to be offensive to people on the basis of their religion or their faith or ethnicity or whatever. But I do think you have to be prepared to go out and assert yourself. There's a difference there. And I would absolutely condemn people shouting offensive slogans on a march. I mean, it's a different issue.
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Chapter 3: What experiences shaped Jeremy Corbyn's commitment to social justice?
So May Day's already passed. May Day has passed. I've missed the march.
Well, but maybe we should have a special Jeremy Corbyn march. Who knows? That would be nice. Do you remember? Oh, Jeremy Corbyn. That must be one of the great moments of your life, wasn't it? Embarrassing. What did it actually feel like at the time? The moment of people saying, this was a lovely, lovely... It was Glastonbury, wasn't it? Ten years ago.
It happened in other places. It started at Prenton Park on the Wirral. It was in the election campaign, 2017. I had a very complicated day. We'd done a rally in Birmingham in the morning and then we were supposed to go to the Wirral to do a rally on the Wirral and the trains were off and the M6 was closed. Great. And we got to get from Birmingham to the Wirral.
So we went in a police car, six of us, all crammed up like this. You couldn't move for hours. So we eventually arrived in the Wirral, and we had this rally on the beach. It was amazing, an enormous event. And then afterwards, there was an invitation I had to go and speak to Wirral Live Music Festival. And there was a kind of debate in my team about this.
And I sort of said to them, are you sure you got this right? Because I'm not sure a politician in an election campaign turning up at a music festival is going to get a good reception. People go to that place for music. They said, no, it's going to be fine. You'll be fine. You'll be okay. I said, look, just go on and introduce Reverend the Makers to sing after you. So I go out on the stage.
and start my speech about working class music, about the history of music of Merseyside and Wirral and how it's an expression of community and solidarity and hope and so on. It's going okay. And I'm looking at the audience and it's definitely not hostile, definitely not. It's okay. And then there's a lot of noise starts coming back from the audience. I thought, oh God, there's a chant.
Because on the stage, you'll know this, you can't always hear what the audience is saying. You know there's noise, but you can't always identify exactly what's been said. So I kind of try to carry on against this wall of sound. I start looking more closely, and I realise they're all smiling and shouting. So I stopped, and that's where it started. Prenton Park on the Whirl.
But it's exciting. Does it echo in your head still?
Well, it was amazing. It was amazing because it just came from that, yeah.
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Chapter 4: How did Jeremy Corbyn's travels impact his worldview?
Well done. It's nice to have those moments in one's life.
Thank you.
Congratulations on that. I realised then that the power of bringing together music, inspiration and ideas into politics as well is very powerful. The most successful political changes have never come about just by... economic or social theory. They've come about from a popular feeling and a popular movement.
The hunger strike, the hunger marches of the 1930s were accompanied by those desperate people marching from Jarrow and other places, singing all the way.
But you're right, too, that people can't always recognise what the noise is. I remember being with Tony Blair when he addressed the W.I., Do you remember this? And I told him, oh, they'll love you. They'll love you too. They'll love you totally, yeah. And I'd even given him a couple of jokes. Why did you tell him that? Well, because I thought they would. Somehow I thought they would.
They'd see him as their potential son-in-law. They'd like him. This was reasonably early days.
Yeah, smartly dressed, nice young man. Not like that horrible Corbyn.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But somehow it didn't work. But he didn't realise it, because it was at Wembley. There was a big gap. The lights were on him. He couldn't see them. And he heard this noise. It turned out to be hostile. So you can't quite tell. Oh, Jeremy Corbyn. So, born 26th May 1949, my first question is always the same. What, Jeremy, is your very first memory?
My first memory was I grew up in Wiltshire in a small village near Chippenham and I was the youngest of four boys. I remember sort of a great sense of freedom as a very small child because it was a very small village there was no traffic even as a five-year-old walk around on your own sort of thing but at that age I just remember being fascinated by insects and animals in the garden.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Jeremy Corbyn face during his leadership of the Labour Party?
I said, yeah, yeah. They said, what were they? And I said, well, so they drew one, which was a V marking, and they discovered it was an adder.
Wow.
That's good. It's a good first memory. Great first memory. And it never stung me. Never bit me.
Well, there you are. Blessed from the beginning. So you run into the house. Who's in the house?
Who are your parents? Mum and Dad. Dad was an electrical engineer. Worked at that time for Westinghouse in Chippenham. And later left there to go and work for English Electric in Stafford, which is why we moved to the Midlands. Mum had done various jobs and eventually after I got a bit older went back into teaching and became a teacher, a secondary school teacher. How did they meet?
They met in the 1930s. They were both political in different areas and they met at a meeting in Conway Hall in Red Lion Square. They were both there supporting the Spanish Republic against the fascist invasion. And often when I go to meetings at Conway Hall, I say, I'm looking at you lot in the middle now and I'm looking over there. And they say, why say that?
I said, my mum sat there and my dad sat there and their eyes met.
Literally, they saw each other and that was it.
Well, they got together and then that was it. So the romance of the solidarity Spanish Civil War. So that was a huge motivating force for both of them in their lives, which was opposition to the fascists in Spain. Well, fascists everywhere, obviously. What were they like together?
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Chapter 6: What does Jeremy Corbyn believe about the current political landscape?
What were you doing?
My mother hated ITV with a passion. We were not allowed to have ITV on the television. She wouldn't have it. We didn't get ITV. It didn't come until a bit later, but she wouldn't have it.
Even when it was available.
Even when it came, she wouldn't have it. She wouldn't have it. No, we're not having that thing on. And she wouldn't want the television on late in the evening. Her version of late in the evening was 8 o'clock. So we could watch television. We didn't get a television until, like everybody else, I guess, that's about the 50s.
So we were allowed to watch things like Quatermass, which was a great programme. I think that was on at 8 o'clock, so maybe we got a special pass that day.
Did you read books?
Yes, I did. What were they? I read a lot, particularly history books and novels and so on. I was academically very unsuccessful in school, probably because I was too interested in a very small number of subjects. And I used to read a lot of Russian and American novels. I had a very good teacher, Mr. Birch. He was in CND and stuff like that.
He was the man with the green corduroy trousers and the CND badge. There's always one, isn't there? There's always one, yeah. Lovely man.
Ours was a maths teacher called Mr Gillingham.
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Chapter 7: How does Jeremy Corbyn reflect on his political career and legacy?
Yeah. And nobody thought there was anything odd about it. These days, any parent would be absolutely paranoid. God. They wouldn't, you know, they'd be watching the kids to the end of the road. And so it was, looking back on it, a time of unbelievable sense of security and freedom, which I find sad that these days children don't get that chance, don't get that sense of freedom of opportunity.
I wish they did.
I suppose it was because your father's an engineer and your mother's a teacher. It's a middle-class household, really. Yeah. You went away to an independent. Did you go away to prep school?
No, no, I didn't. I went to a Catholic primary school in Chippenham, Wiltshire. And were your parents Catholic?
Well, that's the... They had to claim to be.
You see... My mum was brought up very heavily within the Church of England. Indeed, her brother was a vicar. But she herself was an atheist, but had an unbelievable knowledge of the Bible. She was a Bible-reading atheist, and she said it's the greatest work of literature, King James Bible. So she said it's the greatest work of literature, the most wonderful stories, and so on. Okay.
My dad was a... active person within the Church of England, but his knowledge of the Bible was not as good as hers, so she would frequently correct him, which was quite funny actually. How I ended up in a Catholic primary school, I've no idea. It must have been a sort of witty compromise. And where did you go next?
And then we moved to Shropshire, and I went to another school there for three years, a private primary school. The best thing there was a teacher who loved poetry, and she gave me a love of poetry. What was her name? Mrs Brock. Yeah. Very nice lady. And then I went to secondary school. I eventually, on the second attempt, passed 11 plus. Horrible exam, terrible idea.
I went to grammar school in Shropshire, which was well into league tables and achievement and so on. So there were two streams, A and B. I was in the B stream. And then you were graded numbers one to whatever the last number in the class was. When I started, it was 31. And then a boy left, so we moved up to 30. And for most of my time, I was in the lower 20s or 30 on the grading of the class.
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Chapter 8: What lessons does Jeremy Corbyn share for the younger generation?
Why? Were you like this, given you had achieving parents, a thoughtful household, you read, you were comfortable with your brothers, I get it? Yeah, it was a contented family and an interested family.
They were all academically very good and very successful. Two of them got first-class degrees from Imperial College. That's Andrew, the later Andrew died some years ago, and Piers, who's still around.
Oh, he's quite famous.
Piers is almost notorious, I'm not quite sure why. Oh, no, no, don't call him notorious. He has an independent thought. Good. He has a different point of view to me on... On most things. No, not most things. Global warming particularly. We debate it sometimes.
Oh, he's a denier. That's him. Is he also the person who regrets the fact I got my Covid jab yesterday? He doesn't believe in that sort of thing.
He probably does, but he is certainly of the view that climate change is a product of solar activity and inevitable movement of the sun in relation to the earth rather than man-made or human-made activity. And my view is, yes, there is a natural phenomena as part of it, but we've poured so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the past decade
250 years that that has had an effect and we've also had an effect on the biodiversity of our planet. So we debate these issues whenever we meet.
So you have this thoughtful family, this debating family, this clearly intelligent family achieving.
But I was the one in school who's not achieving. Yeah, but why? Why? What's the source of this? Some of it was quite funny. He says, I remember going to the first day of the music class. The teacher stands us all around the classroom, around the walls, in alphabetical order. Or he says, put yourselves in alphabetical order. And then you've got to say who you are as he goes around the class.
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