Jeremy Corbyn was leader of Britain’s Labour Party from 2015 to 2020 — with his strong opposition to the Iraq War playing a major role in his initial election by party supporters. Throughout his leadership, he faced fierce establishment criticism for his (by British standards) unconventional foreign policy, including his well-known positions in solidarity with Palestinians and in opposition to nuclear weapons. Today, Corbyn’s successor as Labour leader Keir Starmer has trashed much of his record, as he seeks to return the party to a Blairite-style ‘Atlanticist’ line.
Under Starmer’s leadership, Corbyn has been forced out of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and today sits as an independent in the House of Commons. Yet he remains a leading figure in the anti-war movement, and has been a fixture at London’s protests for Palestine in recent months — the biggest in Europe, routinely mobilising hundreds of thousands of people. Just weeks after the outbreak of the war, in November he sat down for an interview with transform review’s David Broder. They discussed Corbyn’s life in the peace movement, his intellectual influences, and the meaning of anti-imperialist politics in a historic great power like the United Kingdom.
Discussing your rise to the Labour leadership, we often talk about the role of the movement against the 2003 Iraq War in expressing a growing public distrust toward the main party establishments. Faced with war in Gaza, we again see a big divide between mainstream media-political discussion and the views expressed on the mass protests — and even in opinion polls. Where is this sentiment coming from, and how has it changed over the last decades? Is it still the Stop the War Coalition organising demonstrations, or local groups, or people turning out because of social media and family ties?
JC Social media has obviously changed the ability to communicate and organise. Whilst we used it as much as we could all those years ago, it was very limited compared to today, where basically everything is done by social media. We had two local demonstrations in my Islington North constituency last weekend, on a Friday night and Saturday lunchtime. I was looking at the crowd in Finsbury Park — a very mixed area in terms of faith, language, ethnic origin and so on. The demonstration was pretty representative of the community as a whole. There was a big Muslim attendance. There was a big Jewish attendance. There were various people from all the local churches, and a lot of local political and trade-union activists. It was a big turnout, with a lot of people I had never seen before at a demonstration. So, the movement has reached out.
The media in Britain has always been fairly disconnected from the reality of a lot of people's lives. That’s become even more true. There’s an establishment that talks to itself and among itself. But an awful lot of other people simply don’t follow mainstream media, or Parliament, and get their information from a diversity of social media sources. Some are good, some are inaccurate, and so on. But that is the reality of how politics works. The strange thing is, we're moving back to the politics of the street in a way that hadn’t happened for a long time. I think this issue of Gaza is changing people's perceptions of foreign policy.
At a recent rally in Trafalgar Square, I said was time to recalibrate our thinking about international politics. Yes, we're quite rightly demonstrating for a ceasefire in Gaza. But it’s not the only war going on: there's also the war in Congo, promoted by the big mining companies. There's the continuation of the war in Yemen, which is heavily supported by the British arms industry. There's the continuation of the conflict in West Papua. So just maybe, this is a turning point in which the peace movement will assert itself. I think that the coalition of Stop the War, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and lots of other groups like my own Peace and Justice Project, is going to assert itself more and more.
For many left-wingers of my age, today in their thirties, the 2003 Iraq War was a politicising moment. Looking at the years you became active, it was the period just after decolonisation, but also a time of attempts to re-establish neocolonial control, and of war in Vietnam. When you first got politicised, and involved in CND, what inspired you to take part?
JC I didn't realise it at the time, but I grew up in a low-key political household. My mum and dad had been active in support of the Spanish Republic in the 1930s and were both committed socialists and peace people. They weren't super active when I was a child: they were both working, they had four children, and they hadn’t so much time for such things. But I was encouraged to think and read.
In my childhood in the 1950s, there was the Suez Crisis, petrol rationing and all that. I remember discussing that in school, but I don't think we really understood. Then the independence of Ghana was reported, and I remember seeing on TV these pictures of the Union Jack coming down and the Ghanaian flag going up with the Black Star, which was impressive. The whole thing was presented as a triumph for British liberalism, allowing African people to manage their own lives. It was never presented as the product of the heroism of Kwame Nkrumah and many others, or the 1945 Pan-African Unity Conference, which helped to bring about that unity which resulted in most of the independence movements.
I also remember being a minority of one at school in supporting nuclear disarmament. I went to a grammar school, which had great pretensions of being something more, a quite conservative place where many of the boys were the sons of army officers and serving soldiers. It was a state boarding school as well as a day school. The Army would pay for a state boarding school for the lower ranks; the higher levels went to private education elsewhere. The class system is alive and well in the British armed forces. So, I was in a minority there.
When I refused to join the Cadet Force in school, I was hauled in by the head teacher to explain myself. I said, ‘well, I thought it was voluntary whether we joined.’ He said, ‘it is voluntary, but everybody has to has to volunteer.’ So, I said, ‘well, it doesn't sound very voluntary to me and I'm not volunteering.’ He said: ‘let me ask you a straight question. What would you do if the communists arrived here?’ I thought that was a little weird, because my brother had stood as a Communist candidate in the school election the year before. So, I replied, ‘well, it wouldn't bother me particularly. I'm sure we could talk to them.’ He rolled his eyes, and I was then told to undertake gardening duties during the Cadet Force afternoons. Just to rub it all in, me and another boy were made to weed the flower beds next to where they were parading up and down in heavy boots. The idea was to humiliate us. It didn't work. At age 15 or 16, I got involved in CND marches.
Was that about ‘peace’ per se, or did you see it as a matter of supporting liberation movements and decolonisation?
JC In CND, there’s always been a huge breadth of ideas. There's been those strong pacifist elements, through Pax Christi, particularly the former Peace Pledge Union, who would argue for a totally pacifist position. Then there are others who would see it as a force for international solidarity and decolonisation. Those contradictions exist within it: CND is a place where people debate things in a very respectful manner.
Many of those people in the 1960s were also active in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and other groups on Vietnam, but also would have been active in decolonisation movements over Rhodesia, later Zimbabwe. That was a huge issue in that the white minority government in Southern Rhodesia made a unilateral declaration of independence and were treated with kid gloves by the British government. Jeremy Thorpe was roundly condemned for calling on Harold Wilson’s (Labour) government to bomb the railway lines, to stop supplies going to the white minority leaders in Southern Rhodesia. Eventually, Britain would claim credit for Zimbabwean independence as a great triumph of its own policy, though the real reason was the role of the guerrilla forces ZAPU and ZANU-PF in forcing out white minority
leader Ian Smith.
I’ve often heard you refer to the British media presentation of the movement against apartheid in South Africa, in which you were involved. Today, it can often seem as if that fight was uncontroversial, as if somehow Britain or the West or democracies supported the anti-apartheid struggle — even though they didn’t. So, I wondered if you could draw a comparison: what was it like to be in the activist minority, then and now?
JC For instance, Britain was the primary mover, shaker, profiteer and beneficiary of the slave trade. It took most slaves across the Atlantic, and the economic establishment in Britain benefited hugely. But today, a British leader, William Wilberforce, is revered as the person who ended the slave trade. I've heard Tory MPs saying that what really stopped it was the brilliance of the British Navy in intercepting privateers who were carrying slaves after the slave trade had been abolished (as it always had been in Britain itself). Somehow or other, this morphs into the legend that it was liberal Britain that saw the error of its ways and ended the slave trade. Well, all that is nonsense. The slave trade ended because of the sacrifices of tens of thousands of lives in Jamaica and other countries in slave uprisings, which stopped the sugar trade, which damaged the profits of the City of London. They saw the need to get rid of it because it was no longer sustainable, through a blunt economic calculation.
‘The EU obviously did not succeed in preventing the war or the invasion. The UN didn't succeed either. The most serious forces trying to bring about a ceasefire in Ukraine are Latin American and African governments.’
We see the same reinventions when we look at other great issues in history, including the anti-apartheid movement. It grew in the 1960s and ‘70s particularly, but its antecedents were the National Party election win with white votes in 1948, and then the shootings in Sharpeville in 1960 and the Rivonia Treason Trial in 1964, which resulted in Nelson Mandela and the others going to prison. I grew up in a household that was totally anti-apartheid, and my late mother banned any South African products from ever entering our home. But the anti-apartheid movement was seen as marginal and extreme, indeed a Soviet tool against a pro-Western government in South Africa. The opposition grew a bit with the 1969 protests against the South African rugby team touring Britain, and then, in 1970, ‘Stop the Seventy’, i.e. against the South African cricket team. I took part in those protests, and that was a bit of a turning point. But the movement wasn't mainstream until much later.
I was a member of the British Defence and Aid Fund for Victims of Apartheid, in which we funded anti-apartheid activists from South Africa to get education around the world in Dar es Salaam, in Lusaka and some in London and Paris and other places. We were all condemned for undermining the Western alliance. It wasn't until Mandela's 70th birthday that the movement became sort of mainstream. The ANC had cleverly made him a figurehead. When he was released, suddenly everybody was anti-apartheid. And when Mandela came to Britain to speak to both Houses of Parliament — after he'd been to Cuba and many other places — there were all these Labour and Conservative MPs who had never taken any role in the opposition to apartheid, now announcing that they were the ones that had finally tipped it over. It was sort of like an establishment envelopment of the anti-apartheid movement, about 25 years too late. But this is the sort of illusion that goes on.
The myth you mention — Britain is to thank for decolonisation — is particularly bound up with the self-narration of the Labour Party and Harold Wilson’s governments (1964-70, 1974-76). He is often credited with keeping Britain out of the Vietnam War, with standing up to white minority rule in Rhodesia, and even conceiving some sort of withdrawal from Ireland. But this was also the period when you joined Labour. How much space was there to advance anti-imperialist ideas, and what discussion was there about Britain’s changing place in the world?
JC The Labour Party has always had a slightly contradictory position. In the late nineteenth century, there were huge debates about whether the colonies should be incorporated into the empire, in the sense of having equal voting rights and being represented in the UK Parliament, somehow on the French model. There was a debate in the UK labour movement about imperial trade preference, and whether we should develop the empire into a trading bloc. Industry was dedicated towards export to British colonies, and the colonies sent raw materials to Britain, and it was only much later, with the growth of world trade and membership of the European Economic Community, that this whole system basically collapsed.
Labour supported Indian independence after World War II, but couldn't really do anything else because ever since the early 1900s, there had been a significant Indian intellectual influence in the British labour movement. Think of Dadabhai Naoroji, actually a Liberal, but elected an MP in my borough of Islington in 1906. In 1947, Clement Attlee’s government panicked and agreed on the partition of India and independence, though that cost more than a million lives in the fighting that followed. But the same British government was also sending troops into Malaya and suppressing national uprisings all over Africa. And the Fabian colonial bureau was at the same time advocating dominion self-government and the education of national leaders with the support of the UK Foreign Office. The idea was to create a governing elite in these countries that would probably carry on as dominions. Still, there were parts of the movement — like Fenner Brockway and others through the Movement for Colonial Freedom, which became Liberation — which campaigned unashamedly for the independence of the colonies.
Those contradictions have always existed in the Labour Party. They certainly did over the Rhodesia crisis in the 1960s, and they certainly did over the Vietnam War. When I joined Labour in 1966, I was very angry about Vietnam and Wilson's political support for the USA. He didn't send troops. He was under enormous pressure to do that partly because of the huge loan his government had just negotiated with the Johnson administration in the USA. The deal ran something like this: Britain would continue buying Polaris nuclear weapons, and hand over Diego Garcia as a base for the US. It would not send troops to Vietnam, but would politically support the US on the world stage, and thus at the UN Security Council. That was essentially the deal Wilson made. Some people say that at least he kept us out of the Vietnam War, when most other governments would have taken us into it. You can argue that, but the political support was more significant.
Wilson also faced the contradiction that Britain could no longer afford to be a global military power. The current Tory government thinks it can — and is now trying to increase arms expenditure to 3.5% of GDP, the highest it's been for a long time. And Wilson had the policy of withdrawing from East of Suez, which meant withdrawal from Aden, which was the fulcrum of war at the time. The 1950s–60s were dominated by wars of colonial retreat which Britain fought; some were unbelievably brutal, like in Kenya in the 1950s. The exaggeration of the size, power and influence of Mau Mau resulted in the most appalling atrocities and concentration camps. People were castrated, violated and humiliated and imprisoned. I don't think we should ever forget the brutality of it.
From 1945, the Labour government did amazing things on the domestic scene, health and so on. Yet its international policy was an imperial one of trying to hang on to the Empire, with the exception of India, a bit like how in 1776 the British Empire had let the US go and then expanded around the rest of the world.
One important thinker in the peace movement in that era was E.P. Thompson, who theorised the arms race in the language of ‘exterminism’. It is somehow a critique of the classical Marxist idea of imperialism — or the materialist reading of states cornering global markets — because it focuses on military bureaucracies and leaderships and the ideological and psychological factors that that keep militarisation and the arms race going. This would seem to apply somewhat to Britain’s efforts to remain a global power. What did you think of Thompson’s ideas: and do you think it applies even after the Cold War is over?
JC Nuclear weapons had been developed in an arms race with Nazi Germany. But there was a sideshow throughout World War II, which was US and British opposition to the Soviet Union, basically reigniting the Cold War of the 1920s and 1930s. They did not share nuclear research with the Soviet Union, although it probably knew as much about that as anybody else, because the theory could be well-known to any physicist around the world. After World War II and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Albert Einstein and even many nuclear scientists that had developed the weapon said it was the time to dismantle it. That didn't happen. Harry Truman busily developed more of them, and they were threatened to be used in Korea in 1950s, by which time the Soviet Union had developed its own weapon. We then went into the nuclear arms race on the basis that security could be best achieved by being able to outbid each other on nuclear weapons, and indeed the great liberal of the time, John F. Kennedy, won the 1960 US election on the basis that the Republicans hadn't developed enough nuclear weapons and warheads. So much for the Kennedy peace dividend.
Then, we had a continuation of the arms race around the Cold War. China developed its first nuclear weapon in 1964, on top of what the French had already got. And Britain, by the way, because Attlee clearly had either enormous delusions of recreating a British empire or just didn't trust the Americans, managed to spend £200 million on developing the antecedents of the H-bomb in secret from even his own ministers. Parliament was never told. The Cabinet was never told. It’s not even clear if any ministers knew except for Attlee and possibly Ernie Bevin. Winston Churchill, when he became Prime Minister again in 1951, was told about this by the Cabinet Secretary, expressed astonishment at it, and congratulated Attlee on developing such a magnificent weapon in secret. This then became too expensive because of the economic stresses on the British economy.
Thompson is absolutely right that the whole idea of armaments up until World War II, particularly, was one about using armed forces to protect markets. That's what a lot of the African colonisation was about. In Latin America, where colonisation was mainly by Spain and Portugal, Britain did not try to colonise any more than France did after the independence movement of the 1820s, but instead tried economic colonisation through banking systems and trade agreements, and using the threat of the Navy, where appropriate, to back that up.
So, Thompson was right on all that. On the nuclear issue, he was absolutely brilliant because he just pointed out the absurdity of it. And his book, Protect and Survive, stands the test of time. I knew Dorothy Thompson, a fascinating woman who was an admirer of Queen Victoria, who she thought was actually a closet feminist, being oppressed by the British establishment. We once did a debate in a school where I was representing Karl Marx, and she represented Queen Victoria.
Part of Thompson's argument that could be said to have stood the test of time is that after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War was proclaimed over — indeed, declared by George H.W. Bush to have been ‘won’ by the West — we don’t see a dismantling of the architecture of armaments and weapons built up during the Cold War, but rather its expansion...
JC Not immediately. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and then the Soviet Union, there was a mood around of the ‘peace dividend’, of reducing arms expenditure and the number of nuclear warheads. The ABM treaty and others actually played a part in that. There was a significant reduction in nuclear warheads, but not total nuclear disarmament. And there was also a lot of pressure from the arms industry. It was alarmed because it could see its market disappearing. Some of the more farsighted ones moved into developing other products: civilian planes, ships, trains, etc.
This was, then, a time of pressure for a peace dividend and conversion to peaceful products. At the same time, there was huge lobbying going on by NATO in particular. I just remember those endless breakfasts that RUSI (Royal United Services Institute) used to put on where they'd take MPs in, give them kippers and fried eggs, and then somebody from the armed forces would say, speaking confidentially, that they needed to tell you about the real threats out there in the future, and the need to game out where the future wars will be. So, we’d have to once more expand our armed forces and not allow this continual reduction. Lobbying went on very heavily all through the 1990s, and in a sense, the Gulf War was quite an important proving ground, both for weaponry and also in terms of the arguments that there were other irrational actors on the stage that we had to intervene against and deal with. This then morphed into 2001, the Axis of Evil speech, and then the Iraq War.
Looking at the causes of the war in Ukraine, even accounts which don’t deny the blame of Vladimir Putin and the Russian elite in invading Ukraine nonetheless also look to earlier factors in explaining why conflict persisted after the Cold War. What do you think could have been done differently in the 1990s? Was it possible to build an international peace order — some would say ‘security architecture’ — that would have lessened tensions between states and produced a peaceful post-Cold War world? And what could the international response be now?
JC The free-market plundering of the Soviet Union and former Eastern European states was a huge factor for destabilisation. Which is to say, the mass privatisation promoted by American economic advisers and banks, and the easy way in which huge resources were taken out of Russia and happily invested in Paris, in London, Frankfurt, in New York and so on. Living standards dropped dramatically in Russia, as did life expectancy. Alcoholism and mental health issues soared. This created the perfect breeding ground for a supreme nationalist to emerge. Boris Yeltsin either chose not to do anything about this plundering, and the destruction of so many people’s lives, or else happily presided over it.
Putin was then brought in — promoted, by the way, by Tony Blair and others — to be Yeltsin's deputy. He became prime minister and eventually president. There was no attempt to protect and improve living standards on the principles of universal provision. The Donbas issue was handled terribly, and thousands of people died even before the Russian invasion of the rest of Ukraine, which was appalling and disgraceful.
The organisation for Economic Cooperation and Security in Europe should have been the dominant factor in the 1990s onwards. Instead, the Warsaw Pact collapsed and NATO decided on a programme of expansion, which it's done ever since. The European Union could have been a possible honest broker. But then, particularly after the Lisbon Treaty, it made itself very close to NATO, and this limits the possibility of it being an honest broker to bring about a ceasefire in Ukraine. My own feeling is that Angela Merkel managed to promote the Minsk Accords and Minsk II as well. Some say that she did that as a temporary measure in order to build up Ukrainian forces. Others say she did that as a staging post towards a longer non-aggression agreement, or something like that, between Ukraine and Russia. Now, the EU obviously did not succeed in preventing the war or the invasion, and has not succeeded in bringing about a ceasefire. The UN didn't succeed either. It’s unclear how much effort was ever put in by the UN on this. Probably not very much. The most serious forces trying to bring about a ceasefire are Latin American and African governments. President Lula in Brazil and AMLO in Mexico believe that they have a role to play because neither of their countries have any huge economic interests in either Russia or Ukraine. And African countries are concerned, partly because of the reliance on grain from both Russia and Ukraine to sustain their populations.
At some point, there's going to have to be a ceasefire. Rumours are that the US now feels that everything's getting a bit out of control, with the war in Gaza and the war in Ukraine, and they're now putting pressure on for there to be negotiations. I think it might well end with a settlement that was already on offer [in spring 2022], after many thousands have died in the interim. A huge amount of money has been spent on weapons, both by Russia and by NATO countries in support of Ukraine. The war is disastrous, obviously for the people of Ukraine, and for those Russian conscripts that have died. In the long term, it’s probably pushed Russia and China closer together. NATO has a choice. Either it can become even more of a global force than it already is and lead us into a new a new Cold War with China and its allies. Or it could become something rather better, which is to promote disarmament and an understanding that the needs of the world are not going to be met by more weapons of mass destruction, but by environmental sustainability and growing economic equality.
To get back to the British context: it seems that the 2003
anti-war movement played an important role in building connections between the left and Muslims, more than happened in most European countries. Of course, there's no single ‘Muslim community,’ but Islamophobia has an important role in British public debate, and the anti-war movement took particular care to resist that: including by defending civil liberties, resisting harmful stereotypes, opposing restrictive laws on processing of terrorism suspects, and so on. What do you think was the importance of that moment in building such ties, and do you think it is here to last?
JC I think it’s a very important point you raise. The Stop the War Coalition, which I was part of founding in 2001, was initially met with a lot of scepticism by both the left in the Labour Party and the traditional peace movement. They said, ‘what do we need it for? We can fulfil this role perfectly well’. I was strongly on the side of having a Stop the War Coalition, and we arranged a special role for CND within it.
In the Stop the War Coalition’s initial declaration, which was in opposition to the war in Afghanistan in 2001, we also had a statement about Palestine. We were very keen, therefore, to reach out to all communities and the organised Muslim communities. The Muslim Council of Britain was involved from the very beginning, and was represented on the steering committee. I used to normally chair the quarterly council meetings and was chair of the Stop the War Coalition for a while. It was a very diverse meeting, in a way that had never been the case before. Stop the War Coalition is different in the sense that it did mobilise huge numbers of young people in the black community and the Muslim community, as well as the Jewish left in the run up to the Iraq War.
I spoke at probably two hundred public meetings in the run up to the Iraq war, in all parts of Britain, but also Europe and the USA. I was always impressed by the diversity of the audience compared to left-wing meetings that I'd been at before. I think Stop the War should be recognised as being a major factor in the in opposition to Islamophobia in any form, by the inclusion of the Muslim community and Muslim leadership. Today, when we demonstrate over Gaza, the young black community and the young Muslim community are coming out on these demonstrations and marches, people who are not recognised by the mainstream media at all. Our Home Secretary Suella Braverman has called these ‘marches of hate.’ It's the exact opposite of that. And she knows that. Even the police recognise that these arewell-organised marches of people who passionately want to see peace.
And of course, there's been some conflict within the Labour Party over the stance taken by Keir Starmer.
JC There is massive conflict on this. Starmer’s approach has been to refuse to call for a ceasefire on the grounds that Israel has a right to self-defence — and therefore to conclude that everything Israel is doing is self-defence. He seems unable to deal with the obvious war crimes in the bombing of places of worship, schools, hospitals and so on, and tried to ban anybody in the Labour Party from calling for a ceasefire. He then modified that slightly and said they want ‘humanitarian pauses’: we are now apparently going to have four hours where you can bury your dead if you're quick and then you're going to be under bombardment again four hours later. This is absurd and macabre.
Surely there has to be a ceasefire and whatever Starmer says, an awful lot of the people in the Labour Party think that. And it's interesting that the language of Labour MPs has changed quite a bit, because they've seen the revulsion of the public, at the scenes they're seeing of what's going on in Gaza.
You’ve been involved in the peace movement throughout your life. There are, in Britain, many important movements of public opinion expressing revulsion against wars in the Middle East, and wars around the world involving Britain. But there are also movements that seek a more direct-action approach to dismantling the war machine, including recently by Palestine Action, which, for example, seek to interrupt the activities of British weapons companies and their engagement with Israel. What role do you think that those actions have in the overall ecology of a peace movement?
JC Direct action has always gone in parallel to the often bigger, slightly more mainstream movements. You can think back to the late-nineteenth-century growth in the women's suffrage movement, which was essentially a fairly intellectual movement, saying women should have the right to vote, but they would maintain the property qualification and the class distinction within it. Parallel to that grew the suffragette movement, led particularly by Sylvia Pankhurst. They undertook a great deal of direct action and were all condemned at the time. Many of the leaders were imprisoned — women who now make their way onto banknotes and postage stamps. That’s the final accolade for a movement. Those that further back in time led the slave revolts in Jamaica, then became global heroes for what they they did. More recently, the founding of CND was preceded by the Committee of 100, which was very into direct action, unusual in conformist post-war Britain. Bertrand Russell lying down in Whitehall was seen as a big deal at the time.
The direct action over the war in Gaza has had a huge effect. In some of the court cases over these actions, the right to assert your moral revulsion has held up in court. In some cases, the people that were charged with criminal trespass and criminal damage of planes destined for Israel have successfully defended themselves.
Now, the government is very keen to make sure that our right to dissent and to demonstrate is curtailed. They complain that there aren’t the police numbers to deal with a million people turning up for a demonstration. But some police officers say, well, actually, we have a duty to protect a democratic right to protest. I’m not quite sure if Rishi Sunak believes in that right.
But we can think back to the campaign against apartheid: during the South African rugby tour in 1969, people ran on the pitch waving flags. The cricket tour was suspended in 1970, on the basis of threats to go and dig up cricket pitches to prevent the matches taking place. So, direct action has always had an effect. And those that are condemned for direct action today will be seen differently in future. In fifty years’ time, they’ll be on postage stamps, too — so long as people are still using stamps...