WITHIN Jeremy Corbyn’s 40 years as MP for Islington North, five stand out — those stretching from his election as Labour Party leader in September 2015 through to his suspension from the party whip by his successor in October 2020.

Those were the years in which he lent his name to an “ism” and generated a political movement which had, for a time, extraordinary vitality.

It is scarcely a secret that Jeremy Corbyn, who the present writer has known and campaigned alongside for many years and who worked with him during his leadership, never expected to be Labour leader nor coveted the post.

His original election owed much to the incapacity of his opponents to offer a fresh agenda to a party membership demoralised by election defeat and the equivocations of a Labour elite still overwhelmed by the legacy of New Labour at home and abroad.

Corbyn not only stood in a different tradition, he worked in a different style, characterised as “straight talking and honest.” A serial rebel on points of principle shared by millions, he represented a longing for an alternative to austerity and imperialist war and also embodied it through long and active participation in the movements against those depredations.

In voting for Corbyn Labour members could be in no doubt that they were voting for something very different, for a reconnection to a tradition of ethical socialism long buried under managerial newspeak and the politics of truckling to capitalist power.

Now, we all know how it turned out. One could view the defeat of Corbynism as almost overdetermined, given the enemies ranged against it, from the state apparatus to the media to the City of London, with the point of the poisoned spear being the enraged and entitled majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party, abetted by a factional, not so say corrupt, racist and misogynist, party apparatus.

Nevertheless, Jeremy Corbyn nearly became prime minister. A few more gains in the sensational general election of 2017 and it would have been impossible for then-premier Theresa May to cobble together a governing majority with the Democratic Unionist Party. What would have happened then is uncertain, and Corbyn’s path to Downing Street would not have been clear… but still.

That 2017 campaign established the electoral potential of Corbyn’s brand of radical social democracy — radical by the standards set through 40 years of neoliberalism anyway. The facts remain extraordinary — a jump in Labour’s share of the vote over just two years from 30 to 40 per cent.

That is only the third time in more than 50 years that Labour has broken through the 40 per cent mark in a general election. In absolute terms, almost unbelievably, more votes than Tony Blair secured in England in his landslide year of 1997 (although far less in Scotland, alas).

That was a near-victory for a movement of tens of thousands of activists, but who could deny Corbyn a large share of the credit? In the aftermath, even the PLP was grudgingly acquiescent.

It was a campaign marked by a significant act of political courage, when Corbyn, who had previously delivered on his election pledge to apologise to the British and Iraqi peoples for Labour’s leading part in the catastrophic aggression of 2003, responded to a dreadful terror attack in Manchester by pointing out that British foreign policy had made such crimes more, not less likely.

It was an indictment of the “war on terror” — and one which was endorsed by most of the electorate, according to instant polling evidence.

I have written about the decline of the Corbynite project thereafter in my book Is Socialism Possible in Britain? To summarise — the movement and its leadership impaled itself on the Brexit issue and ended up abandoning the successful 2017 policy of accepting the referendum decision to leave the EU in favour of giving the Remain side a second crack at winning a majority before the first decision had even been implemented.

Undoubtedly, that is what many Corbyn supporters wanted — misguidedly in my view, but it is necessary to acknowledge that Brexit as an issue fused economic, political and cultural issues into a knot beyond the capacity of the contemporary left to unravel. It spoke to the breadth and volatility of the coalition that needed to be assembled to have a shot at winning electorally.

In a sense, the electorate had offered a democratic way out — whatever you think of leaving the European Union, the decision has been made so, however reluctantly, just get on and implement it.

In fact, most Corbyn supporters were surely much more invested in getting their leader into Downing Street to implement his agenda than in staying in the EU. 

But in the face of the mass movement built up for Remain, largely steered by Corbyn’s avowed enemies, the leadership lacked the confidence to work on that assumption.

The weary tale of parliamentary obstructionism and political drift, characterised by anything but “straight talking,” which drained Corbynism of much of its vitality before its electoral denouement at the hands of a Boris Johnson who was at least lucid on the matter immediately to hand, needs no further retelling.

Nor can one address those years without acknowledging the debilitating failure to address the issue of anti-semitism within the Labour Party politically.  

When 85 per cent of Jewish people feel there is a problem, there is a problem, no avoiding it. That, again, is a longer story, but the smear that Corbyn is personally anti-semitic should have no part in it.

Underlying the whole experience was a brutal lesson in the limitations of parliamentarism and, indeed, of the Labour Party as a vehicle for social advance.  

Corbynism’s ascent was never the product of a shift in parliamentary opinion — as if! — but rather of mass popular movements of discontent imposing themselves briefly on the heavily policed citadels of conventional politics.

The fact that those mass movements, be they political or industrial, did not exhibit any great momentum in the Corbyn leadership years was a debilitating weakness.   

The beleaguered parliamentary left needed something like a combination of the strike wave of the last 12 months and the anti-war movement at its 2002-4 peak to adequately back it up. Alas, such movements cannot be conjured out of the air.

As a project to transform the Labour Party, the Corbyn years probably achieved least and what it did has been most easily reversed.  

It is simplistic to attribute that to a lack of the required ruthlessness and clarity, although that is part of the story. The nature of the beast — a parliamentary-centred party that has served imperialism for most of its century-plus history — may have more to do with it.

Also, any political torrent must catch up in its flood a fair deal of detritus. Along with the hundreds of thousands of enthused socialists came a share of quacks, pedants, sectarians, charlatans, congenital vacillators, habitual back-stabbers and state flunkeys. To attempt to advance with Paul Mason tethered to one leg and Bob Kerslake to the other would challenge a Hercules.

Today, the tide has gone way out. The movement Corbyn conjured into being has largely dispersed and no-one has been found to rally the retreating troops, neither among left MPs nor in the trade unions. 

And the Labour right wing has taken decisive prophylactic measures to guard against any repetition of what was for them a traumatic experience.  

The aridity of their outlook is matched only by the authoritarianism with which it is imposed. Order reigns in the Labour Party once more.

Still, the “Overton window” of acceptable political options has been shifted. Keir Starmer can abandon the public ownership of the water industry and the ending of tuition fees, to take two examples, but he has to argue the case as best his limited attributes permit — he cannot take it for granted that such proposals are unconscionable, as could be assumed in the Blair-Brown years.

And hundreds of thousands of people have been given a glimpse of the politically possible. Once seen, never unseen.

Corbyn has undoubtedly paid a heavy personal price for these gains, in terms of abuse, intrusion and ultimately a cynical attempt to deprive him of his parliamentary seat.  

He has not been diminished, and it is inconceivable that his reputation could ever shrink to the pitiful dimensions of his persecutors.

Around the world of progressive politics, a world not circumscribed by the diminutive political culture of British parliamentarism, his years as Labour leader remain a beacon, an earnest glimpse of the possibility that a government in London could have taken the side of global peace and social solidarity.

His own integrity and stubborn defence of principle have left their ineffaceable mark on politics, and his legacy will surely re-emerge in unexpected and novel forms and generate a movement mighty enough to overcome firstly, its own weaknesses and secondly, the class enemy which the Corbyn leadership forced to confront, however briefly and partially, the intimation of its own mortality.