LAST week’s parliamentary debacle was a depressing affair. The Labour opposition failed to oppose a Bill that would permit agents of the imperial state to commit crimes without fear of the consequences that would be visited on Her Majesty’s less privileged subjects.

It illustrated just how far we are from the hopes and expectations that were engendered when, as recently as early last year, Jeremy Corbyn’s party was regularly clocking 40 per cent approval ratings. 

Then the prospect of a left-led Labour government seemed more real to our ruling class than it did even to the most optimistic on our side of the class war. And they acted accordingly.

Less than half a decade ago, the rising left-wing tide in Labour — which Corbyn’s election (and re-election) signified — showed that the “mainstream” trends in Labour thinking were completely bankrupt. 

Corbyn’s opponents represented wings of the, mainly Parliamentary, Labour Party that were not only bereft of ideas but even of ideals.

The 2008 financial crisis was essentially the product of the particular form that global capitalism has developed and, in British terms, almost the most perfect expression of how our domestic economy had been hollowed out in the interest of the banks and big business. 

The crisis exploded the foundational beliefs of Labour’s last prime minister, Gordon Brown.

It was Brown, as Tony Blair’s chancellor, who made the City of London and the immensely rich and privileged people who exercise power and make money in the Square Mile the objects of veneration.

In his famous Mansion House speech, with a perfunctory nod to the captains of industry, he idolised the lords of finance, rather than, as one might have expected, the productive labour of people who made things. 

If the first break in this dead-handed domination of Labour politics came with the election of Ed Miliband, the election of his successor, Jeremy Corbyn, marked the transformation of Labour by a transfusion of people whose politics were the almost polar opposite of the New Labour cliques who to this day think the Iraq war was necessary and privatisation the centrepiece of economic policy.

Corbyn’s coronation was the product of a remarkable rise in Labour’s membership as young people joined with equal numbers of returning Labour veterans to change the political geometry of a party almost emptied of real-life connection with working people.

Owen Jones’s book is worth reading alone for his account of Labour’s transformation, the mobilising strategy, the effectiveness of the social-media operation, Momentum’s energising role in elections and in internal party affairs and Corbyn’s remarkable empathy with a diverse range of people who saw him evoking laughter and agreement from every group of workers while Theresa May failed even to connect with Tory voters.

The emotional high points of this period, with for the first time in decades people turning out in thousands to hear a politician speak directly to their concerns, the spontaneous affection and affinity which reached their height with Corbyn’s Glastonbury speech, the generational breakthrough that saw millions of young people vote for the first time with a cross-cultural fusion that united the grime generation with grumpy socialists.

Jones has written a compelling if ultimately unsatisfactory account of these years from an exceptionally privileged position as a participant chronicler and, to some extent, an intimate of the leadership.

Jones concludes that it was an ultimately dysfunctional leadership which hobbled Labour’s effort between the post-2017 euphoria that saw Labour’s vote rise by an unprecedented figure and deprived May’s Tory government of its majority, and the dismal day when a defeated Corbyn announced that he would not lead the party into another election.

He reports extensively on his discussions with those working in the leadership office and the party machinery and, whether they are on the record or not, his account gives substance to what we already knew. 

This was that the Labour leadership, despite its compelling mandate, faced a united front of unremitting hostility from a decisive element in the party’s apparatus and the main body of a Parliamentary Labour Party in lockstep with the millionaire media.

But this is a story not of uninterrupted advance and ultimate victory, but of attrition and defeat and Jones’s injunction that if we are to win power, “if our time is to come, we must learn from our past” is the test which we must apply to his analysis.

Jones’s picture of the “dysfunctional” leadership is, of course, rooted in the real-life clashes of opinion, divergent political positions, personal rivalries and human failings of any group of people engaged in a common project which are magnified and dramatised by the critical issues at stake.

Here was a group of socialists, mostly without practical and administrative experience in exercising political power of any great magnitude, attempting to take command and engineer a complete change of direction for the oldest capitalist state — and, moreover, one in which all the main levers of class, political and ideological power lay in the hands of people not only irredeemably opposed to their aims but possessed of the power to subvert them.

Until Boris Johnson succeeded in recalibrating politics with his “Get Brexit done” slogan, the main institutional power base Corbyn’s team had to deal with was the Parliamentary Labour Party and its praetorian guard in the party apparatus.

It is here that the anti-semitism issue came to play a critical part in an attempted demolition of Corbyn’s moral standing. 

Jones’s picture of the lifelong anti-racist Corbyn reduced to silent misery by manifestly untrue and malicious allegations is quite compelling. 

The sheer incomprehension of many Labour Party members, new and long-standing, that these allegations had any foundation in reality was no antidote, however, to the poisonous and demobilising effect they had.

There is some substance in Jones’s analysis of this — that Labour’s leaden response to this offensive never found an emotional connection with the main body of Jewish people in Britain nor found a way of talking to the very large body of Jewish people who don’t fit into the ideological matrix defined by the Board of Deputies or the Tory-inclined and self-selected Jewish Leadership Council. The plain fact was Labour had lost contact with a large proportion of Jews.

The fact that negative views about Jews as such, and anti-semitic tropes generally, have a currency in Britain and that trace elements were inevitably to be found among Labour’s large and growing membership can be weighed against the reality that Labour is less infected than its main opponents by several orders of magnitude. 

Nevertheless, the issue was weaponised precisely because Labour, for only the second time, was led by someone who stands for Palestinian national rights. 

This is not only a symbolic issue but for our ruling class and its international allies, and for the human bearers of capitalist ideas in the labour movement, it is a red line that must not be crossed.

Concern about Labour’s so-called “systemic” anti-semitism problem seems to have vanished since Corbyn left office. 

Being a Jew was no protection for Ed Miliband from zionism’s irredentist tendency when he took a similar stand. 

This alone demonstrates that the movement has to find a more proactive way of dealing with this bundle of issues if Labour is ever to give effect to a foreign policy that is not mortgaged to imperialism and Nato.

Jones is, of course, an active participant in Labour’s affairs and his admiration for John McDonnell — combined with the need to justify his various vacillations over Brexit — puts him among those who cannot fully assimilate into his thinking the central reason why Labour lost.

Jones is too good a wordsmith to think the issue can be airbrushed away but in evaluating This Land, The Story of a Movement, Len McLuskey’s perceptive New Statesman review nailed it.

“I am left not only disappointed,” he wrote, “but also with a belief that Owen’s narrative is designed to fit into his views on the Brexit ‘who was to blame’ game.”

Political journalists are too prone to think they can do politics better than front-line participants and, judging by his discussion of Seumas Milne’s role, Jones must imagine he could do a better job than this much-maligned comrade in arms to Corbyn’s anti-war campaigning. 

Milne is a formidable figure whose relentless political praxis is underpinned, as Jones recounts, with great charm and a powerful intellect. His account of these years is worth waiting for.

Simply to make the comparison focuses attention on the major weakness of Jones’s approach. 

In substituting office gossip for analysis, his account not only compromises his personal credibility — it displaces rational analysis of the main political reasons for Labour’s defeat, not least the brilliantly targeted ruling-class strategy that disaggregated Labour’s working-class base.

Whatever the personal conflicts, differences in style or analysis that affected the inner workings of Corbyn’s team, they are far less significant in explaining Labour’s defeat than — in whatever order they are ranked — the serial disloyalty of MPs, the sabotage by key figures in the apparatus, the wildly unbalanced media coverage, the highly manufactured “anti-semitism” offensive involving not only British and Israeli state actors but an unscrupulous assembly of reactionary forces of all kinds, and the fatal surrender over Corbyn’s original commitment to respect the referendum result. 

The key question raised by the book and for the left is what to do about the institutional power of Labour’s right wing in the party machine and Parliament.

In defeat there is an understandable tendency to abandon the effort to transform Labour and get lost in a myriad of useful struggles and worthwhile projects that deliver a more immediate return. 

If tempted by this route, it is worthwhile reflecting on why the right is so invested in maintaining political and organisational control, even when they lose the arguments.

The Irish writer Paul O’Connell remarked earlier this year: “It’s a big mistake to pathologise the Labour right and dismiss them as bitter careerists devoid of ideas — the instinct to preserve the status quo is class politics and ideology, they’re the personifications of capital in the labour movement — remove a few, the tendency remains.”

The issue here is not how to remove a few, but the many. If the route to victory on this front of the class war is political and ideological, it is also organisational. 

Forming a left-led government that is serious about socialism depends on making a new kind of MP the servants of the party and the class.