ANDREW MURRAY would be launching  his new book The Fall and Rise of the British Left at the Labour Party conference in Brighton this week had heart surgery not slowed him down.

Labour's Andrew Murray

Yet  he is upbeat when I meet him to discuss it – something he has in common with a book that serves as a primer on the origins, heyday and crash of neoliberalism and on the fortunes of the socialist movement now challenging it.

Murray’s book is alive to the potential of a resurgent socialism to change Britain and the world. Was he aiming to lift our spirits in the face of constant media misrepresentation, belittlement and abuse?

“I wanted to step back and share experiences and reflections from more than 40 years active on the left,” he says. “And to answer a political commentariat that has been taken by surprise by the return of the left when it really shouldn't have been.

“If you weren't trapped in your own Overton window, you could have seen the signs that the left was coming back – the mass rallies of the anti-war movement, the anti-austerity movement.

“But the pundits didn’t have a clue. Corbyn’s leadership victory they could dismiss as a blip but the 2017 election astounded them. The limits of the politically possible had been so narrowly defined by journalists and politicians that what we’re seeing now wasn’t imagined and one of Corbyn’s achievements has been to bust that open.

“Neoliberalism takes politics out of the economy. The idea is to remove economic questions from democratic control. But the idea that markets flourish best when left to their own devices crashed with the economy in 2008.

“Jeremy has described the 2017 election as the moment politics caught up with 2008. The return of politics is the return of human agency – the idea that we are more than just blind actors controlled by market forces.”

The return of the mass rally and the mass party with tens of thousands of canvassers hitting the phones and the streets to win people over was a contrast to elections where voters were seen as passive absorbers of election broadcasts or spectators of TV debates whose actions were limited to putting a cross in a box on election day.

“As I say in the book, it was an election Labour won on the keyboard and the kerbside,” Murray points out. “On the one hand you had the traditional methods of rallies and door-knocking, on the other a social media operation, both Labour’s own and Momentum’s, that completely overwhelmed the Tories.”

If Labour members hit a high water mark of optimism in 2017, hasn’t that dissipated now? Has the party been forced to retreat under fire over the European Union, allegations of anti-semitism and other attacks?

“Labour’s zeal for change is undiminished and an election now would be eminently winnable,” Murray counters immediately. “It’s true that Brexit has become a bit of a black hole, sucking in all other questions and that has drowned out Labour’s economic programme.

“But to me it’s far from the most important question – which is to elect a Labour government and implement its programme – and Corbyn has been absolutely right not to let the 48 per cent versus 52 per cent become the only dividing line in politics.

“On the one hand you have the Tories cutting democratic corners to achieve a no-deal Brexit whatever the consequences, on the other you have the Lib Dems prepared to cut democratic corners to ignore the referendum result.

“But an election campaign will inevitably bring other issues and concerns to the fore. That will play to Labour’s strengths. And election broadcasting rules, which allow Jeremy’s message to reach people in a relatively unfiltered form, definitely helped last time.

“We may be behind in the polls today  but we aren’t nearly as far behind as we were when Theresa May called an election. So yes, I am optimistic – especially when I look back at my political life.

“In the 1980s we lost every single battle. The miners’ strike, the steelworks, the docks, Wapping, the shuttering of the Greater London Council. We didn’t win a thing.

“Now the situation is totally transformed. The left has not just clawed its way back to relevance but is able to give a lead to the country and in some respects to the world.”

He challenges my depiction of the evolution of Labour’s Brexit strategy as a series of retreats.

“A big majority of Labour members are Remain supporters, though how high that is on their list of priorities is a different question,” he says.

“Forty eight per cent of the country voted to Remain. I voted Leave but most Labour members and voters voted Remain. Now you have a mass movement for the EU in this country – you’ve had demonstrations of half a million demanding a second referendum.

“These people are not marching for the free movement of capital but in opposition to what they see as xenophobia and nationalism. Labour has to speak to the millions who voted Leave but it’s quite wrong to think you can ignore the other side.

“I would say the left Leave campaign has focused, rightly, on economics and the neoliberal economic model of the EU but has not done so well at addressing this question of values, reassuring people that leaving the EU is not going to turn Britain into a playground for Faragists and Donald Trump fans.”

In Murray’s analysis of the serial defeats of the left through the 1980s, he looks at the breakaway of the Social Democratic Party and its contribution to Labour’s defeat by Thatcher in 1983. A bid by defectors branding themselves Change UK tried something similar this year; it has not had similar success.

“That’s partly because the politicians who founded the SDP were more substantial political figures, a former chancellor, a former foreign secretary,” he says.

“But I also think in the 1980s there were a lot of people who were rooting for the status quo. They were frightened of what Thatcher was doing but they felt the Labour Party was too radical as well. They wanted to keep the postwar consensus.

“But now people know that the Thatcher-Blair consensus is broken. The status quo constituency is weaker than the constituency wanting change.”

That hasn’t stopped the Lib Dems pitching for the status quo vote. “The Lib Dems are completely a party of the status quo. Let’s not forget it’s a party that rode to the rescue of neoliberalism after the 2008 crash by imposing austerity with the Tories. Trying to put Humpty together again when it was obvious that wasn’t what was needed.”

The existence of defenders of the established system is not surprising; what Murray addresses in his book is what has fed the left’s new challenge to that system. In Britain, more or less uniquely in Europe, it is the left rather than the right that mounts the most serious challenge to politics as usual.

“We had a huge anti-war movement in Britain. Then, the crash hit us harder than most countries because of the size of the financial services sector and the weakness of other parts of the economy.

“We have a vehicle in the Labour Party with deep roots in British society and in the trade unions. The communist left in Europe has been fragmented, while the social democratic left has failed to move out of the shadow of the pre-2008 consensus.

“Britain is not the only place where the left is on the rise – there are encouraging signs in the United States.”

But is the left ready for a confrontation with British capitalism? Murray traces the origins of Thatcherism through the musings of the Chicago School and the Mont Pelerin society, and neoliberalism’s bloody baptism in Pinochet’s brutal coup in Chile.

He notes that the founders of neoliberalism identified who was likely to stand in the way of their project and how to overcome the opposition. By contrast, much of the left was taken by surprise by Corbyn’s victory, and many Labour members seem focused exclusively on winning an election, without reference to the many ways in which the British state could act to stymie a socialist government.

“It must be a matter of concern that generals talk of mutiny and former MI6 heads are trooped out to make very political statements about the leader of the opposition.

“Then there’s the economic and extra-economic power of the capitalist class. The first problem will almost certainly be the City and the reaction of the markets to a Labour government, and how we deal with that.

“But the left has a terrible tendency to panic. You’ve mentioned hearing people say it was all over for Corbyn after he allowed a free vote on bombing Syria back in 2015; I heard people saying that 48 hours into his leadership over his shadow cabinet selection. This tendency to lose our heads is debilitating.

“Let’s take this one step at a time, and we will find a way forward. Crucial will be the extra-parliamentary mobilisation that, at the moment, is still too weak. A socialist government will not survive unless it has active engagement and support from outside Parliament.

“But you can’t be a socialist if you don’t have faith in people’s power to change the world. There are plenty of grounds for optimism. Whatever happens in the short term, there is no going back to the Britain of before 2008.”

The Fall and Rise of the British Left is published by Verso, price £10.49.

Ben Chacko is editor of the Morning Star.