Jeremy Corbyn

Last Sunday was my retirement speech at Speakers Corner. After speaking there for over 30 years, it is time to call it a day. It has been the principle source of my education and the place where I obtained my PhD in life.

I first visited Speakers Corner around 1983 and eventually began speaking in 1986 after being inspired by the inimitable Roy Sawh. As a youth, I was angry and needed an outlet to vent my frustrations against racism and the police brutality that I was experiencing on a near day-to-day basis. My early theme subjects were racism, Black Power and police harassment - before embracing an internationalist perspective. In those days the park was littered with many great speakers covering a multitude of subjects. Away from religion, there were also brilliant hecklers like Lerch (Matthew Palmer, who was the leader of the young Conservatives) and his sidekick Toad. The hecklers acted as quality control as they would slaughter inexperienced speakers. In those days, the park was not dominated by religious speakers as it is today. You were not allowed to swear or to insult the Queen. As a result of breaking those rules, I was arrested and went to Court several times for swearing. My defence was always that the word “Fuck” is an old English word and that I had been arrested by over zealous police officers for speaking English. I was acquitted each time, with one magistrate advising me to become a lawyer.

It was there that I met Haroon Jadahuan, the editor of the Muslim Chronicle who taught me about publishing. It has been the source of most of my international contacts in both business and politics, where I met the Head of Warner Brothers - who was to be a witness in one of my trials, became friends with the former Pakistani Foreign Minister Nawaz Shah, became acquainted with Sheik Muhammad of Dhubai, was consulted by Dr. Jibril Ibrahim - the then second in command of the Darfur JEM rebels, met the snakes from the Iraqi Interim Council before they ousted Saddam Hussein, where Saudi Embassy officials tried to put me on their payroll, where MI5 agents attempted to recruit me, where George Soros agents approached me and attempted to get me to join his legion of stooges, where other agents attempted to recruit me for the coup in Equatorial Guinea and other wild adventures, where I met David Shayler the ex-MI5 agent who exposed the British intelligence plot to assassinate Gaddafi, it was where I was recruited by the BBC after Alex Holmes, a BBC executive who went on to be the man behind Louis Theroux, commented after seeing a video of me at Speakers Corner - “this man has an encyclopedic knowledge of politics”… Speakers Corner has been the principle conduit for the majority of the wild adventures and weird and zany encounters that I have experienced in life. I owe Speakers Corner a great debt.

It is more than a place where people stand on soap boxes and exercise their lungs. It is a unique public space where strangers meet and discuss any subject that takes their interest. The real soul of Speakers Corner is not the speakers but the ordinary people who cluster on the ground and engage in conversation. There are people who I have conversed and argued with every week for almost 30 years, some I would even consider friends, and yet I still do not know their names, where they live, or what they do. That anonymity is part of the beauty of Speakers Corner.

In a world now absorbed by technology, Speakers Corner is one of the few physical spaces where the oral history of the world is related by the people who live it. Speakers Corner was the original Facebook.

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craner said:

And the 'Jews for Jesus' will never relinquish their spot.

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