My name is Josie Long and I am a stand-up comic. I’m also a clumsy, novice political activist. For most of my life I’d felt pretty certain that I was someone with a good social conscience. I felt deeply that I was a feminist and a socialist. I cared about green issues and social justice and all of those things that people whose hearts are in the right place care about, that that was me done. Obviously I was on the right team, obviously I was nice, so I could get on with baking rye bread and watching foreign films.
I began to feel unsettled when Boris Johnson got voted in as mayor of London. (I hate Boris so much I cannot enjoy London’s bike share scheme.1) I felt suspicious of everyone around me for the first time. Growing up under a Labour government, I’d been used to regarding the authorities with a kind of complacent half-approval. I saw them a bit like dear old friends, albeit dear old friends whom I deeply suspected had betrayed me.
