How can the left capitalise on its still popular agenda?

Mike Phipps reviews This is Only the Beginning: The Making of a New Left, From Anti-Austerity to the Fall of Corbyn, by Michael Chessum (second edition), published by Bloomsbury.

When it first appeared in 2022, Michael Chessum’s This Is Only the Beginning proved to be one of the more thoughtful accounts of what went wrong with the Corbyn project: “the institutional failures, the lack of pluralism and democracy, the culture of loyalism and the failure to successfully confront the rise of right-wing nationalism.”

The key lesson that Chessum drew from interviews and his own experiences is that the “the official leadership of the new Labour left seemed curiously allergic to devolving power to their own activists.”  It lacked “the means of cohering a genuinely thriving, democratic movement which can mobilize outside of election periods.”

Part of this was deliberate. Corbynism was the product of at least three movements: the radical anti-austerity campaigns in which Chessum himself participated, the rather moribund Labour left and key trade union leaderships. They in particular were crucial to Jeremy Corbyn’s victorious leadership campaign, but in their application of traditional methods of patronage and control, they undoubtedly pulled the project in a direction which, Chessum feels, stifled the energy and enthusiasm of many thousands of young activists.

As noted in our original review of this book, “It was also trade union bureaucrats – from within the Corbyn project – who killed off the policy of Open Selections for Labour candidates. The same top-down approach created an atmosphere where you either totally supported the leadership or were seen as a potential traitor, as attitudes on Brexit increasingly underlined.”

But for those who genuinely wanted to engage with the tens of thousands of new members of the Party that had joined to support Jeremy Corbyn, the big strategic problem remained: how? You met them during election campaigns – new, young activists, who turned canvassing into mass events. It was a lot more difficult to find them in any other setting: very few came to Party meetings. That may have a lot to do with the routinism and set agendas that dominate Labour’s structures, but other events also failed to engage them, notwithstanding the best efforts of Momentum and others.

Part of the problem was that many of these new supporters had joined to campaign in support of Jeremy Corbyn but did not see the need, or understand how, to fight the right wing of the Party on a weekly basis. At the same time, Labour is an essentially electoralist Party in which political education is often left to the enthusiasm of a few individuals. These nuances cannot all be reduced to the ‘elitism versus grassroots democracy’ binary at the heart of Chessum’s narrative.

What’s new?

This new version of the book brings events up to date with a bump. “By the middle of 2023,” writes Chessum, “median earnings in the UK were still 2.7 per cent below where they were at the time of the 2008 financial crash. This was compared to an average growth of 8.8 per cent among OECD countries. Around a million Poles migrated to the UK in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the vast majority in search of economic opportunities. But in 2022 the Financial Times noted that by 2030, the average Polish family would be better off than the average British one on current trends.”

The causes are easily identified: “Privatization, lack of infrastructure investment, an underregulated labour market and an addiction to austerity meant that the cost of living crisis tore through British society.” The effects of that austerity on the NHS became clear when Covid hit, with Britain having under half the number of beds per 100,000 patients as the average developed country.

The nationwide lockdowns did not end social struggle. Teachers took audacious action to defend their health and safety. Black Lives Matter protests broke out in response to the US police killing of Geroge Floyd, as did marches against the government’s attempts to criminalise protests. More significantly, the Covid pandemic showed Boris Johnson’s government entirely unfit for office.

Then came the 2022–3 strike wave in response to the cost of living crisis: “the biggest wave of industrial action so far this century.” Between June 2022 and December 2023, more than 5 million working days were lost due to strikes, more than any eighteen-month period since 1989. Moreover, this action was widely popular – as captured by RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch’s elevation to “working class hero.”

Lynch was central to the Enough is Enough campaign in August 2022, which had 400,000 supporters and  thousands queuing to get into its launch rally in London. Yet by 2023, this promising movement, reminiscent of peak Corbynism, pretty much disappeared. Why?

“Once again, huge excited crowds gathered to hear from famous speakers, but they were never given the space to become anything more than passive observers,” suggests Chessum. “Once again, the agency remained on the stage. The masses were not invited to take ownership of the movement or to debate its strategy. That would be left to the professionals.”

All change?

Labour’s victory in the 2024 general election was driven by a mass yearning to overturn the legacy of Tory rule and the lingering Thatcherite  economic consensus. “But if Starmerism can be defined as anything,” notes the author, “it is an attempt to evade this task.” With each U-turn and ‘tough choice’, the public thirst for change is rejected and replaced by a tone-deaf and electorally disastrous commitment to continuity.

Those U-turns began the moment Keir Starmer became Labour leader. Chessum reminds us that Starmer’s 2020 leadership campaign produced a video showcasing his  credentials as a champion of progressive causes, starring a striking miner, Doreen Lawrence and a protester against US military bases at Menwith Hill. Nor would his ‘ten pledges’ last long.

That the rise of right wing populism threatens to debase out politics is a commonplace. But it is fuelled by the casual breaking of promises by our orthodox political class. As Chessum says, “The brand of professional politics which Starmer has mastered, with all its inbuilt cynicism and amoral calculation, has been debasing politics for decades.”

Even some of those who conspired against Jeremy Corbyn might now be missing the refreshing integrity and genuine political alternatives that he brought to the political conversation. The problem is that, although much of the left’s radical agenda remains publicly popular, as a political force it has been marginalised.

Part of the reason for this crucial contradiction is the left’s reliance on networks or temporary campaigns rather than more effective organisation, and a tendency “to view social media not as a tool for building real-world activism but as a substitute for it.” Chessum’s critique is sound, but the remedies are missing. He longs for a better way of doing politics, but in the two-plus years since his book first appeared, neither he – nor we – are much nearer a solution.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.