A range of coroners’ reports followed the expiry of Corbynism. In early 2020 Jeremy Gilbert published his five-part analysis of the election defeat on openDemocracy, pinpointing various factors—a conflict-averse leader, a misplaced emphasis on austerity, an insufficient focus on democratic reform—that guaranteed Labour’s impotence before a bullish Johnsonian nationalism. Former shadow cabinet members Ian Lavery and Jon Trickett, by contrast, identified Brexit as a prime mover in the catastrophe. Joe Guinan wrote for Red Pepper on the failure to build a radical constituency through community organizing and political education, while Owen Hatherley pondered the difficulty of pitching redistributive policies to embittered homeowners in deindustrialized regions. Yet the first extended treatments of this topic, which reconstruct Corbynism’s collapse through the testimonies of aides and shadow ministers, arrived almost simultaneously last September: Left Out, the standard journalistic account by Times reporters Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire, and This Land by Owen Jones, which appeared three weeks later.
Jones, Britain’s best-known left-wing commentator, was born in Sheffield in 1984. His parents, both members of the Militant Tendency, met while canvassing for Labour in the late sixties; his father was a trade-union shop steward, his mother a prominent computer-science academic. Other relatives were Labour councillors and radical preachers; Jones attended miners’ rallies as an infant and marched against the poll tax as a toddler. After reading history at Oxford and a stint as a trade-union lobbyist he worked for two British left grandees: archiving the papers of Eric Hobsbawm, and serving as a parliamentary researcher to John McDonnell. His breakthrough came with the release of Chavs in 2011: a bestselling account of the class hatred cultivated by Thatcher and augmented by New Labour, skewering the stereotypes of proletarian delinquency that dominate tv shows and tabloids. Fêted by reviewers, Jones’s debut elevated him from Labour functionary to salaried columnist: initially at the Independent, and then at the Guardian, where he continues to write weekly entries. From this perch he attacked the coalition austerity programme, produced several searing indictments of the Metropolitan Police, and published The Establishment (2014), which tracks the movement of Hayekian outriders from obscure free-market think-tanks to the centre of the uk’s ruling bloc. More ambitious than Chavs, if less timely and original, the book increased Jones’s standing as a socialist mascot in the world of liberal broadsheets, with a sharper class sensibility than most writers who emerged from the 2011 student protests.
While Pogrund and Maguire tell the ‘inside story of Labour under Corbyn’, Jones’s survey of the last half-decade has a broader aim: to portray the hopes aroused by the reconstituted Labour Party, and to show how these were deflated by missteps at the top. Jones, a self-described ‘participant-observer’ in the Corbyn experiment, describes the Labour left as the only plausible vehicle for achieving social transformation in the uk. He is determined to find out what went wrong over the past five years so that the necessary lessons can be learned, and socialists can refine their approach to future struggles. This involves correcting two ‘standard narratives’ of Corbynism: one, that it was doomed from the outset—a utopian delusion sustained by a millennial personality cult; and two, that it was wrecked by a deliberate sabotage operation from internal party enemies and the media. Jones does not deny the ferocity of the anti-Corbyn onslaught—‘a character-assassination campaign unprecedented in British political history’—but he insists that the leadership ‘also shot itself repeatedly in the foot. It’s important to make this point—and I will, throughout this book—because not to do so would lead to a fatalistic conclusion that any radical political project will inevitably be destroyed by entrenched establishment opposition.’ While Left Out tells a linear story that starts two years into Corbyn’s tenure and ends with the ascent of Keir Starmer, This Land’s chronology is looser, organized thematically around the Brexit debacle, the war with the plp, the antisemitism controversy and the most recent general elections. Its unifying thread is the ‘disastrous failure in strategy’ that allegedly prevented Corbyn from surmounting such hurdles: the incapacity to pitch a ‘coherent, long-term’ vision against this omnidirectional assault.
The book opens with a genealogy of Corbynism, tracing its origins back to Bevan in the 50s and Benn in the 80s. The radical tradition they upheld was mostly extinguished after serial defeats initiated by Callaghan’s cuts and compounded by industrial decline. Corbyn and McDonnell were its relics. But as the privations of the Third Way spawned new ‘cycles of resistance’—alter-globo and environmentalist protests at the turn of the millennium, anti-austerity and tax-justice campaigns throughout the 2010s—the Labour left began to renew its relevance. ‘A mass political constituency was starting to form, below the radar, one which understood that the various discrete injustices against which they had campaigned were all in fact linked’. Corbyn promised to translate these disparate forces into a national project by capturing the Labour Party, hitherto reviled by most of his supporters. This powerful base enabled him to weather the attacks that immediately followed the 2015 leadership election. While staff at Labour hq briefed hostile journalists and expelled left-wing members, the new shadow cabinet stonewalled every attempt to resuscitate an earlier kind of social democracy. Less than a year into his tenure 23 shadow ministers had resigned, and Corbyn was subjected to relentless personal abuse by mps intent on ‘breaking him as a man’. Most leaders would have quit, writes Jones, ‘but Corbyn was no normal leader’. Because his movement ‘rejected the parliamentary focus of traditional Labourism’, drawing its strength from a newly politicized mass membership, his position remained secure amid successive coup attempts.
Yet the leadership was plagued by strategy and communications failures, which Jones itemizes in a long chapter titled ‘Dysfunction’. The mishaps began with Corbyn’s refusal to sing ‘God Save the Queen’ at a Battle of Britain memorial service and reluctance to wear a white tie at a Buckingham Palace banquet. A few months later, the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition came perilously close to giving the monarch a jar of mouldy homemade jam for her ninetieth birthday. Corbyn shunned media trainings and autocues, preferring to speak off the cuff and often failing to hit the talking-points provided by his team. He avoided antagonism at all costs, unable to make crucial decisions for fear of alienating supposed allies—including the shadow cabinet members bent on his destruction. Jones writes that Corbyn’s strategy should have emerged from ‘the party’s electoral aims, the key demographics being targeted, the organizing on the ground, the policy positions’; yet in practice it was ‘just an extension of comms’—the daily news stories determined his strategic orientation, rather than the other way round. These problems were exacerbated by communications director Seumas Milne, who, despite working twelve-hour days, would ‘turn up to strategy meetings late and would waltz in and out, often munching on food, much to other participants’ irritation.’ Since he refused to answer correspondence, ‘decisions would be made based on snatched conversations in Milne’s office during his rare appearances’, while his ‘political idiosyncrasies’ gave the tabloids ready-made attack lines. When Milne questioned the knee-jerk assumption of Russian state culpability in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, the front pages were instantly emblazoned with ‘putin’s puppet’ and ‘corbyn, the kremlin stooge’. This episode underscores a distinction that runs throughout Jones’s book, between Corbyn and Milne as clumsy, obstinate amateurs, and McDonnell as consummate tactician, determined to professionalize the operation and ‘avoid pointless controversies which delivered no political gains’.
Despite these internal rifts, the 2017 election saw Corbyn almost clinch the prime ministership, aided by a revitalized campaign team and a perpetually faltering opponent. Given his increased political capital, writes Jones, ‘it was the ideal moment for Corbyn to make categorically clear that Labour would never support a new referendum, and would seek to implement the 2016 decision’. But instead the leadership kept its position ‘intentionally vague’, convinced that a robust Leave stance would needlessly enrage the members whilst bailing out the beleaguered Tories. While autopsies of Corbynism invariably identify the Brexit polarization as a fatal turning-point, This Land is unique in detailing how Corbyn’s ambiguous position was partially responsible for creating that chasm in the first place. His protracted indecision generated a political vacuum that enabled the arch-centrist Remain movement to grow throughout 2018, winning over previously sceptical figures like Starmer and McDonnell. By May 2019, both had embraced the need for a second referendum, and duly scuppered negotiations between the government and opposition—forfeiting the final opportunity to secure a ‘soft’ Leave option. Starmer ‘frankly just didn’t want a deal’ due to his Europhiliac instincts, while McDonnell deemed the Corbyn–May compact a tactical error. He calculated that anything other than a decisive Remainer turn would split the party, demoralizing activists and empowering the centrist breakaway Change uk. McDonnell thus formed a second referendum pressure group inside the shadow cabinet, swaying the perennially indecisive Corbyn after purging the Leave faction from his office. Jones acknowledges the disastrous electoral fallout of this policy, but he concludes that ‘Labour had no real choice’. ‘Whatever decisions the party made’, he writes, ‘it would not have ended well’.
As Brexit ‘destroyed Corbyn’s appeal as a straight-talking man of principle’, his moral credibility was detonated by ‘the antisemitism crisis’. Here Jones offers an almost verbatim repetition of Pogrund and Maguire’s argument: that the British left, and Corbyn in particular, were insensitive to antisemitic hatred due to an economistic view of prejudice that failed to see how relatively ‘privileged’ groups like white post-war British Jews could be its target. Jones accepts that Corbyn ‘could point to an extensive record’ in this area—signing Early Day Motions opposing antisemitism, fighting fascists during the Battle of Wood Green, campaigning to save Jewish cemeteries, championing the cause of Yemeni Jewish refugees—but that does not affect his verdict that antisemitism had ‘become a blind spot’ for the leader. Immune from blind spots himself, Jones goes on to provide an account of the Israel–Palestine conflict that contains no mention of the Nakba. (Towards the end of the chapter Jones makes a passing reference to the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland, yet this is entirely absent from his Israel-for-beginners potted history, which frames the entirety of his subsequent analysis.) ‘The collective communities of the kibbutzim seemed like incubators of a new socialist society’, he writes, fulfilling the ‘incontestable need for a Jewish homeland’. After the Six Day War, ‘Israel came to resemble a colonial occupier’, and ‘to some, the Palestinians came to resemble the Algerians’; yet ‘Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands was—and is—fundamentally different from those projects of European settler-colonialism’ because its founders were fleeing their home nations, rather than extending their dominion. However, ‘with the arrival of Likud in power, Israel jettisoned its original socialist principles’ and set the country on a ‘depressing right-wing trajectory’ which alienated its progressive allies. The state’s noble origins have thus been gradually eroded since the late 60s, a virtuous pre-occupation Israel hijacked by Netanyahu’s Chicago School ascendancy. For Jones, those who failed to recognize the socialist kernel at the heart of Zionism assumed that accusations of antisemitism were merely an establishment ploy, and responded with unhelpful ‘defensiveness’. Countless opportunities to defuse the issue through constructive dialogue were supposedly missed. Corbyn should have made an official visit to Israel, written apologetic articles in the Jewish Chronicle, unhesitatingly accepted the ihra definition of antisemitism, given a speech at the London Jewish Museum, and spent more time engaging with the ethno-nationalist Jewish Labour Movement. Had he done all these things, Jones assures us, the antisemitism controversy ‘need never have happened’.