Since 2015, the British Labour Party has stood apart from the wider picture of Europe’s centre left. Under a leadership derided from the start as a fossilized remnant whose strategy was bound to result in calamity, Labour clawed its way back from electoral and organizational decline, during a period that saw its sister parties in France and Germany slump to unprecedented troughs; its dramatic increase in membership has made it the largest political party in Western Europe. The party’s leader Jeremy Corbyn, a left-wing veteran who was on a path towards retirement when the 2015 leadership contest catapulted him to centre stage, is currently in contention to become the next British Prime Minister. The turn-around has been all the more remarkable given that, for a quarter of a century, Labour was the most hawkishly militarist and neoliberal centre-left party in the developed capitalist world.

Yet the Corbyn project faces a number of obstacles that may prove insurmountable. The Labour Party itself is far from being a reliable instrument in Corbyn’s hands: while the leader and his allies have strengthened their position since the electoral breakthrough of 2017, they still face unremitting hostility from the party’s right wing, to supplement that of their Tory opponents and the mainstream media. Labour’s programme of social-democratic reform may be modest in historical perspective, but it represents enough of a departure from established orthodoxy to provoke fierce resistance from business and the state machine—especially if Corbyn also tries to recalibrate British foreign policy after taking office. Before it can reach that point, Labour has to navigate an issue—Britain’s departure from the eu—that cuts through the heart of its electoral coalition and has no precedent in post-war British experience. Brexit has thrown the whole political field into confusion, and Labour will struggle to achieve a majority in parliament after the next election, even if it emerges as the largest party. The conditions of its likely coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party, could include the extinction of any distinctive Corbyn project.

All factors seem to point towards ultimate defeat, except one: the fact that Corbynism has already survived against the odds to reach its current position. After nearly four years of a surprisingly tenacious political experiment, it should be possible to draw up a provisional balance-sheet. This article will examine the extent of Labour’s internal transformation under Corbyn, as the necessary precondition for any wider success. What is the present state of play within the party? How has the Corbyn leadership coped with its treatment by the British media, and with the challenges of the Brexit process?

In contrast with the new left-wing movements that have come to the fore in Greece, Spain or France since the financial crisis, comparable energies in Britain have been channelled through a long-established party with a century’s worth of organizational baggage to weigh it down. The British Labour Party was a late arrival: in the early 1900s, at a time when the German Social Democrats had already become the largest force in the Reichstag, Labour was just beginning to emerge from the shadow of the Liberal Party. The party adopted from the start a reverential attitude towards the Mother of Parliaments. A constitution drafted by Sidney Webb in 1918 codified its ideology and organizational form. Constituency Labour Parties (clps) permitted individual membership for the first time, mirroring parliamentary boundaries rather than workplace or residential communities. A new constitution, its Clause Four nominally committing Labour to ‘common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’, appealed to those radicalized by the temper of the times. But real power within the party lay with the trade-union leaders who supplied most of its funding, expressed through a block vote at Labour conferences and on the National Executive Committee (nec), while deference to Westminster gave the Parliamentary Labour Party (plp) full autonomy from the rank-and-file.

After two minority administrations—the second of which ended in catastrophe for Labour—and membership of national-coalition governments in both world wars, the party finally had the opportunity to govern from a position of strength after its landslide victory in 1945. Clement Attlee’s government showed the limits of Labour’s reforming ambitions, even at its high point. At a time of enormous popular desire for change, its agenda remained within strict limits. Nationalization of certain industries was never intended to be the first step towards a socialist economic system: Labour’s goal was to preside over a ‘mixed economy’ where private ownership was predominant. Attlee’s government also illustrated another perennial feature of Labourism, from Ramsay MacDonald to Tony Blair: its unflinching commitment to Britain’s ‘global role’. In the days of empire, that meant dogged support for the Great War and the Colonial Office; after 1945, all-round Cold War Atlanticism, fervent pursuit of the A-Bomb, and cuts to social spending to fund military operations in Korea and Malaya.

Labour possessed a left wing that took the ideas embodied in Clause Four seriously but was unable to challenge the leadership to any great effect. From the Socialist League of the 1930s to the Bevanites two decades later, socialist currents broke against two immovable rocks: the trade-union block vote and the autonomy of the plp.footnote1 The most determined effort came after the election defeat of 1979, in an attempt to draw a line under the Callaghan government’s imf-mandated austerity budgets. The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy proposed constitutional reforms that would make all mps subject to mandatory reselection by their clps and change the system for electing the party leader: from now on a tripartite electoral college, representing mps, trade unions and party members, would make the choice, rather than the plp alone. The left current grouped around Tony Benn hoped that these organizational remedies would create a parliamentary cadre sufficiently combative to implement a more radical programme.

However, the existing mps had other ideas. A liberal-Atlanticist section of the Labour right broke away to form the Social Democratic Party (sdp), anathematizing their former colleagues and splitting the anti-Conservative vote. Internal divisions, the sdp split, Michael Foot’s ham-fisted leadership, and the ‘Falklands factor’ accruing to Margaret Thatcher after her South Atlantic triumph knocked Labour out of contention for the 1983 general election. A ceaseless vendetta against the Bennite left ensued, under the direction of Neil Kinnock. By the time Tony Blair became Prime Minister in 1997, Labour’s programme stood well to the right of anything put forward by his most conservative predecessors. Blair and Gordon Brown, his Chancellor and eventual successor, upheld the main features of the post-Thatcher settlement, preserving her draconian anti-union laws and keeping privatized industries out of state hands. In some respects they went further than Thatcher had dared: imposing university tuition fees, making the Bank of England independent, and extending ‘marketization’ into the fields of education and health care. Brown also encouraged the worst proclivities of Britain’s financial sector under the rubric of ‘light-touch regulation’. On the international stage, Labour took on a belligerent role not seen since the last days of empire, serving as Washington’s loyal attack-dog from the Balkans to Afghanistan and Iraq.footnote2