Heads up - webchat with Jeremy Corbyn Monday 19th Sept @ 2pm.

[JustineMumsnet]

Hello,

We’re pleased to announce a webchat with the leader of the Labour Party (and candidate in the current leadership election) Jeremy Corbyn MP on Monday 19 September at 2pm.

Jeremy has been MP for Islington North since 1983, and before 2015 was best known as a rebellious backbencher and chair of the Stop the War coalition. His leadership of Labour over the past year has inspired enthusiastic support as well as attracting sustained criticism. Among other things, he’s taken a new crowd-sourced approach to Prime Minister’s Questions, opposed military intervention in Syria and proposed the renationalisation of the railways.

His last webchat on Mumsnet (alongside fellow leadership candidate in 2015, Liz Kendall) featured lively discussions about socialism, electability and the provenance of Jeremy’s vests (Holloway Road market, since you ask).

Please do join the chat on Monday at 2, or if you can’t make it, leave a question here in advance. If you know people who you think would like to ask Jeremy a question, do please share the link around on social media too.

(If you’re interested in our webchat with the other Labour leadership candidate Owen Smith, take a look here .)

As always, please do keep in mind our webchat guidelines - one question each, follow-ups if there’s time and above all, keep it civil [taps nose like that geezer Shaw Taylor in Police 5] (Horribly showing my age there).

There were a great number of questions on the thread days in advance of this hour long webchat. Anyone who genuinely wanted to engage would have got answers to a large proportion of these prepared in advance of the hour "live' in a word document so that they could be pasted at the start of the hour. I like my politicians to appear prepared.. And to know how to book train seats in advance...

Prostitution has been in the news in the last few days with that idiot Libdem MP (hence the pro-Nordic model posts)

Woman = whatever has also been in the news - the "first woman on the front line", the transing 10 year old, Maria millers pro-self ID report. And add to that a lot of lefty women have been blocked by the Green Party

It's hardly shocking that the issues have come up here.

@LibrariesGaveUsP0wer

MNHQ - Can I ask a question? Do you tell guests that questions will be up in advance?

The best webchats have been where guests have pre-prepared answers to a few of the early questions and copy and pasted them when they first come on, meaning they get through quite a bit and have time to answer the stuff that comes in during the chat or just before.

I am wondered whether that is their own initiative or something they are directed towards as an idea.

TBH, I think it speaks volumes that he came on 2-3pm. So half of MN is at work, and the other half are about to leave for the school run (ok, that's hyperbole, but you get my point).

We do yes, and we try to encourage people to have a read through and arrive with some pre-prepared ones.

We also know that school run isn't the best time - apologies for that (do fill in the webchat survey as we ask about what times would suit you best)

To be fair in this case the guest is in the final days of a campaign and is operating on a very tight schedule. This can often be the case tbh - the more 'current' the issue or guest, the less time they have to dedicate to preparing and the less wiggle room we have on time. (Not always the case, but not unusual either.)

V sorry also to everyone pissed off about the biscuit question in the survey - there's an 'other' box in which you can state very clearly that you want the biscuit question to GO AWAY

Haha.. I guess I deserved the sarcasm for my woman comment... didn't come out quite as I'd intended. Of course, vaGina, periods, tits.. check.

As I did, rowan

There are loads of Qs so please bear with, we're trying to get through as many as possible.

oh, so biscuits and books were the only ones that stood out eh, HQ?

FFS what a waste of time.

total tosser.

On a positive note, this webchat has been so awful that it might actually make some of Corbyn's supporters see sense and realise that he isn't the leader Labour need.

I think the biscuit question is ok (just) when it's a web chat with Lorraine Kelly or Peter Andre, and no-one their right minds really cares but secretly hopes they're going to say 'Jaffa cake' or 'orange Club'; but on the serious political ones where a lot of posters have put serious time and effort into formulating questions and they're ignored in favour of such twaddle, it's insulting to them.

Thank you for the answer Rowan.

I do appreciate that Jeremy is a busy man. And I do get that time of day might not have much wiggle room. It's a tough balance between scheduling and getting the most current guests.

Though on the other hand he does have a very large team around him who could have triaged questions for him to answer based on importance!

For those of you who support Labour, and who took part in the Owen Smith webchat, how did you think they compared?

He doesn't just wander about on his own, does he? I thought he had an advisor, some help.

There is morning stopping any of his team coming on here and having a quick look at the questions

I don't think anyone believes be typed the answers up himself

No excuse he as always answers the questions he wants to answer and doesn't bother wasting his time answering ones be thinks are of no importance

And people want him as PM the mind boggles

I expected JC to be a good webchat person. People who can just bosh out what they think without reference to getting their comments vetted etc. can usually type faster than the identikit image conscious politicians we usually get. But this one was terrible.

Come to think of it - we had JC before didn't we? He was one of the livelier better engaged people from the original labour leadership election - I remember thinking at the time that this was likely because he wasn't checking each answer twice with his legal team etc.

This was terrible in comparison.

Damn - I forgot to put Caroline Lucas down as a future webchat person....

Two things:

I'd really like to know the ratio between number of questions asked and number answered. Even allowing for repition. He didn't seem to get through many.

Then, to those who are Jeremy supporters, do you think he did a good job of answering the questions? Both in terms of numbers and substance of the answers?

"Though on the other hand he does have a very large team around him who could have triaged questions for him to answer based on importance!"

Exactly Libraries and tbh I think his attention to this event was lacking. We barely received his full attention for long it seems. It's a shame because mumsnetters are politically invested and I would venture to say that everyone who contributed to this chat and all the mumsnetters who were interested enough to read it are committed voters. No voting apathy here!

Rain, exactly. I always vote. I get other people out vote.

The MN 'constituency' is pretty significant.

Hence my loathing of it being caricatured as fucking biscuit eating.

I do have a point, actually, VoyageofDad, whether you say so or not.

I'm not arsed about the few minutes it takes to answer the biscuit question so much as the fact that #biscuitgate is currently trending on twitter rather than the fact the Jeremy has said to an audience of mainly women that he thinks pimps and johns should be de-criminalised, ignored everything about consent, everything about women's rights, everything about sex-segregated spaces, everything about what a woman actually is, everything about anti-semitism and fudged his way through a very small number of other sensible questions.

BBC report on the webchat

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37409187

Well that was lame. No answer on the anti-Semitism questions and all I got was some random PMing me to tell me the accusations aren't real but a conspiracy. Because it's been so hugely successful at discredit ... They just lost so badly in the election since this kicked off

I don't care either way about the biscuit question but it does bother me the media uses it to portray the mumsnet community in a patronising light to imply that we're silly little women who aren't capable of engaging on real political issues. It just gives the media an opportunity to belittle us all and you can bet that's how this will be written up in the Daily Fail!

That BBC report misrepresents what was said about the prostitution debate. Nobody wanted those who are prostituted to be criminalised.

Well that's hilarious, the BBC summary of the chat seems more expansive and thorough than Corbyn's actual responses! to me and not accurate in places.