Is Corbyn the UK Equivalent of Obama?

[dropcap]P[/dropcap]erhaps around election time you, like me, read an interview with Chuka Umunna where he was asked about being dubbed the UK’s Obama, but Jeremey Corbyn, really?!

Certainly Obama and Corbyn have their similarities: they were both involved in activism and protest before they moved into politics and serve as leaders of the more left wing political parties within their respective countries, although comparing the Democrats and Labour is itself a stretch.

However there are equally undeniable differences: a Harvard law graduate and a university drop-out or, more obviously, a black man and a white man. So why am I even asking this question?

I’m currently on exchange at University of California Santa Barbara and am taking a Black Studies class titled “Obama as a Political and Cultural Phenomenon”. What our professor has been arguing to us so far is that race is fundamentally institutional to the United States and, recently, he did so by comparing it to the centrality of the class system in the United Kingdom.

If race to America is what class is to the United Kingdom, is Corbyn our equivalent to Obama?

That’s not to say the two are mutually exclusive and I could spend an entire article going into the details of his theory but for the sake of this article, if we are to take his argument as true, then it’s worth asking; if race to America is what class is to the United Kingdom, is Corbyn our equivalent to Obama?

The Weekly Bull/Flickr

Corbyn, at least compared to the majority of high up politicians, has a relatively working class background.He attended a state secondary school and is arguably more working class than many of us, as he preferred working for rather than studying Trade Unions and thus dropped out after just one year at North London Polytechnic, not quite Warwick.

Perhaps a better example of this apparent class difference are the pictures that went viral last month: both Party leaders from the 80s were placed side by side: Cameron in his tails at a Bullingdon Club social is compared to Corbyn being taken away by police at an anti-Apartheid protest.

Cameron in his tails at a Bullingdon Club social is compared to Corbyn being taken away by police at an anti-Apartheid protest.

Returning to Obama it is interesting to note the similarities between the opposition responses to both candidates coming into leadership; both were, and still are, accused of association with, or even direct involvement in, terrorist organisations.

Are the same arguments that were used against Obama, possibly as a result of his race, now being used against Corbyn because of his class?   I’m certainly not saying this is the case and obviously such a comparison is limited. The class system, at least in theory, allows for social mobility in a way that a race based system cannot, to pick out just one oversimplification made for the sake of keeping the word count down.

Nonetheless this article was never intended to answer but only to ask a question which is, at least I think, well worth considering as Labour enters into its new, and all too controversial, phase of leadership.