Last Thursday evening, Jeremy Corbyn was addressing a local Labour council meeting concerned with “Action on Housing!” at a community centre just up the road from where he lives in Islington, north London. The former Labour party leader, with eviction concerns of his own, was in his element, drawing on decades of local knowledge of venal landlords, housing trust failures and planning battles, cracking jokes about the attention span of Michael Gove, the housing secretary, nodding and winking to the concerned and the converted in his audience.
While he spoke, however, you couldn’t help being struck by one glaring oddity. It concerned his use of pronouns. Asked about national Labour policy on rent controls, or about the housing crisis being a key element of the next party manifesto, he had no hesitation in using the collective “we” to describe the Labour election campaign ahead.
