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BOOKS Four years that shook Britain

JOHN GREEN recommends an insightful look back at Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the opposition

Is Socialism Possible in Britain? Reflections on the Corbyn years
By Andrew Murray
Verso £14.99

THE answer to Andrew Murray’s rhetorical title is, of course, yes, but the really pertinent question is, when? Given the defenestration of Jeremy Corbyn coupled with the extinguished hopes of the many, it could be a long wait.

Hardly anyone is better placed — he was special political adviser for the leader of the opposition — to analyse and explain the Corbyn phenomenon than Murray, so this book is to be warmly welcomed.

With his lifelong activist background, his role as co-chair of Stop the War and his strong association with the trade union movement, becoming chief of staff at Unite, together with his advisory role to the leader’s office under Jeremy Corbyn, he has gained a unique perspective on that era.

But his is no “kiss and tell” narrative – expect no exclusive inside stories or juicy gossip – what you get is a sober, insightful political analysis, quoting factual evidence to back it up.

Murray’s book is also a very useful history lesson, as he embeds the Corbyn phenomenon in the context of the whole development of social democracy.

If you wish to properly comprehend how Corbyn came to be leader of the Labour Party, what happened once he did, and how he was demonised and undermined by enemies from without and within, than you should definitely read this book.

He describes how the Labour Party blossomed under Corbyn’s leadership, with a mass influx of largely young people who saw the party under his leadership as becoming the vehicle to usher in the much-needed social change in the country.

This was also a drawback, Murray argues, “as the new members were drawn preponderantly from among Labour’s middle-class supporters,” particularly in London.

Quoting Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, he says that Momentum, vital as it was for the resurgence of a Labour left, “was weak or ineffective in the post-industrial regions, where the need for engagement in class struggles, organising and education was most acute.”

Perhaps this only underlines the profound changes that have taken place in Britain’s class composition and that we should perhaps no longer refer to post-industrial areas — where many young people have left and where the unemployed and retired now dominate the scene — as “working-class communities”?

And, should young people and students really be lumped together as the “middle class”? Murray sees the Stop the War movement, which certainly did bring out millions on to the streets, as a “dry run for what became Corbynism,” which, with all due respect to that movement, is perhaps somewhat exaggerated but it undoubtedly played a part.

And what role did anti-semitism play in Corbyn’s downfall? “It did resurface in the Labour Party in recent years,” Murray writes, but what evidence is there for this?

I would argue that anti-semitism was no more significant in the Labour Party than in other parties or in the population at large. Charges of anti-semitism in the Labour Party were only given prominence after Corbin’s successful leadership bid, and many of these were based on anonymous social media evidence.

Irrespective of any genuine anti-semitism within the party, there is no doubt in my mind that the whole issue was instrumentalised and exaggerated in order to get rid of Corbyn.

Murray also argues that “the disengagement of the left from the concerns of most of the people most of the time, over a prolonged period” played a key role in the rise of political apathy and lent support to populist politicians.

This was certainly true for the Labour Party but not of the whole left.

In this context, he also argues rightly that the wipe-out of the Labour vote in Scotland and Ukip’s erosion of the Labour vote in England was “nothing to do with Brexit or Jeremy Corbyn.”

He rightly demonstrates how the Brexit debate became Labour’s Achilles heel, certainly in the 2019 election. The leadership, for various reasons which he elaborates upon, was unable to present the public with a united, coherent and acceptable policy on the issue, and gave the appearance of a party at war with itself.

The left case for Brexit never gained purchase and was drowned out by the fatuous claims of a post-Brexit utopia by Farrage, Johnson et al.

While Murray’s brief historical chronology of the rise of social democracy in Europe is enlightening, he does rather confuse me when he says that socialism had “two main variants, Soviet Communist and West European social democratic,” both of which ran out of steam in the 1980s.

My understanding is that, certainly post 1917, the role played by social democracy was to ensure we never achieved socialism.

This book makes a vital contribution to the whole debate around the rise and fall of what for want of a better term has been labelled “Corbynism” and certainly provides the reader with a deeper, credible and explanatory narrative than any other to date.

It is an engaging, very readable book, with its lessons and insights driven home with at times coruscating wit, coupled with profound insights.

 

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