I’M A JEZZABEL (JUST FOR A DAY)
Who needs Glasto when there’s Jezfest? Er, me, says our underwhelmed infiltrator
WE HAD queued for over an hour in the blustery wind for a burrito… only to find they’d already run out. It’s about to rain. And even though the Star Attraction is about to come on stage, I am not having to curb my enthusiasm. Glastonbury it ain’t. In fact, so far, my experience at the £1 million People’s Festival for the Many not the Few (Jezfest for short) had not exceeded expectations.
When it came to advance ticket sales, Labour Live was such a natural disaster that people had joked they’d need to lay on a whole other fest – call it Labour Live Aid – to pay for it. There were tales of tickets being given away for free. Fake news? Tory propaganda? There was only one way to find out.
I’ve come here on the day to party with the party desperate to see if Corbynmania is contagious – a disease so mysterious that it gripped Glasto last year, during the youthquake that saw even my daughter voting for JC.
Only, that was then. This is now. A year is an awfully long time in politics.
Yes, they’d managed to round up enough punters around the balding fields and marquees to avoid an own goal. But the unpalatable takeaway for the party (given the burritos had run out) was this: the Labour leader was not as box office as he was last year. The field of the cloth of red was half empty.
It was hello, Wood Green! And a warmish welcome to the dialectic junkies and activists and community organisers who had given up their Saturday for a long day of ‘talking about socialism’, ending with a silent disco with the GMB union.
Confession: as a new convert to the liberal cause, it was my only socialist music festival to date and the farthest north I’d ever set foot in the capital. But there’s a first time for everything.
In fact, most people I know would prefer to contract hookworm than watch David Lammy MP and Eddie Izzard perform on the main stage in pink fluoro top and skinny jeans.
But not I. I was excited to be a Jezzabel for a day to see what it was all about: to try on a Tories Out vest, ping the annoying picture to the family WhatsApp group, then trot off to soak up the atmosphere in the Solidarity Tent, where Len McCluskey was reaching his climax. ‘I’ll tell you what the solution is to NHS funding, to climate change, to the broken capitalist system, to delivering the will of the people,’ the Unite union leader said.
I got my notebook out with trembling fingers. At last, someone was going to reveal the magic bullet even before the Magic Numbers came on stage (a late booking, allowing Theresa May to crack that ‘the headline act at Labour Live are
The moment we’d waited for… Jezza is among us
the Shadow Chancellor and the Magic Numbers – that just about sums them up’).
What, Len, was the answer to these intractable problems that afflict our divided country?
The crowd in the solidarity tent – kids squirming on the floor holding up red clackers and vuvuzelas, men with beards and sandals, so many women with pink or purple dip-dyed hair – hushed.
‘The solution to all these problems is to get Jeremy Corbyn into Number Ten,’ McCluskey roared. ‘Keep up the fight, comrades.’
Is that it? I felt like calling out, but as people were pointing at me and saying: ‘Oh look, what’s the Foreign Secretary’s sister doing here,’ I thought not.
A rumour was going round that the Unite union was giving out free ice cream (well, Labour’s election manifesto promised free unicorns for all, so I believed).
In the queue I chatted to Mike Coram, an NHS nurse, who said that for the past eight years it had been non-stop crisis in the hospitals. ‘The solution is Corbyn’s plan,’ he said staunchly. ‘Oh, and what’s that?’ I asked. ‘I’d have to get the manifesto out,’ he answered.
On the way to the main stage, I bumped into Labour MP Emily Thornberry in jeans. ‘I’m not on duty,’ she told me, ‘I’m here with my daughter, enjoying the day.’ This took a while to sink in: you mean some people had come here for actual FUN!
Some people’s idea of a good time turned out to be spending two hours in a tent with people wanging on about ‘making unions relevant again’ with a gang called McStrike. Well, each to their own.
On the main stage, Momentum mascot Owen Jones performed a collection of his greatest hits, naming and shaming the usual suspects – ‘the bankers…the Tories…Iain Duncan Smith…’
I had a bad feeling about what was coming next. ‘And Boris Johnson,’ he screamed.
Over at the Literary Tent, people were listening intently to a man explaining how robots would do all the jobs. Then at 6pm, John McDonnell came on in dad jeans.
He said he would soak the rich, as he always does, and then it was showtime. ‘I have a dream we will see a socialist in Number Ten,’ he shouted. ‘And that the socialist is Jeremy Corbyn!’ It was the moment we had all been waiting for. The loudspeakers played Seven Nation Army. The crowd chanted ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn. Oh Jeremy Corbyn. OOOH JEREMY CORBYN!’
And then he was among us. On to the stage came the Jezziah in a short-sleeved M&S shirt, and gave his stump speech, which was received with ecstatic applause by his fan club. It wasn’t exactly the Beatles playing Shea Stadium, as he went on about an economy that shares, a society that shares, not a party for the rich funded by the rich and so on.
But then someone handed me a red Labour scarf saying Jeremy Corbyn… and a beer.
At last a Jezfest offering that I didn’t find difficult to swallow.