How the left came back to life

FEBRUARY  26, 2025

Michael Chessum introduces the new, expanded paperback edition of his book This is Only the Beginning.

Every thirty years – Bevanism, Bennism, Corbynism – a tide has drawn the left into the Labour Party, replenishing the activist base of the Labour left and giving millions of people hope of genuine mainstream political representation. 

There may not be another. Even after the 1980s, the left was viewed as a part of Labour’s broad church. Now, we are viewed – both by the Labour right’s apparatchiks and their media allies – as an existential threat and as a direct competitor for jobs and influence. The pendulum may swing to Blairite excess, the assumption goes, but an Ed Miliband usually follows. That can’t happen unless a critical mass of the Party establishment lets it. 

On the left, Corbynism permanently raised the expectations of its hundreds of thousands of activists, and many millions of supporters. Even if the pendulum swings back, that mass of people will not be satisfied by the prospect of a soft left Labour leader sometime in the 2030s. They are right to be impatient, because the climate crisis cannot wait and neither can the task of building an alternative to the far right. A leftward shift taking place among Britain’s under-40s also means that the electoral space to Starmer’s left is now massive. 

Corbynism was the most extreme of Labour’s tides. While a small core of existing Labour activists were key to its success, the project’s support base was built almost entirely outside the Party. In 2015, the activists of the anti-austerity movement, the anti-war movement and a million other struggles came together. Most had been defeated on their own terms, but had marched on in the hope of building a left political alternative. Crucial to their success was a new generation of activists, whose radicalisation was embodied in the student revolt of late 2010. 

This Is Only The Beginning is the story of how the left came back to life in the 2010s – of how these threads came together, what happened to them and what we need to do now. So many of the histories of the Corbyn moment and the recent British left have, despite the wide worldviews of their authors, placed an overwhelming focus on court histories. Just as the new Labour left political method became increasingly elitist (its activists were entrusted largely with door-knocking rather than setting policy) so many histories of the project suck all the agency upwards. 

I hope that this book does something different, by focusing, not on decisions taken by plucky aides or deals hammered out in smoky back rooms, but on the mass movements that actually built Corbynism. In the absence of the left’s grown-ups – its failing institutions and technocrats – it was left to hundreds of thousands of young people, radical retirees, public sector workers, benefit claimants, squatters, weirdos, precarious migrant workers, single mums and concerned citizens to throw themselves at the austerity consensus in the hope that it might break. It is from them, not the left’s celebrities and icons, that we should draw our inspiration.

The central argument of the book is that the mass movements that preceded Corbynism created the conditions for a new left – pluralistic, democratically-minded and rooted in social and industrial struggle. But these movements took form in a period in which the organised left was weak, and most were defeated years before Corbynism took shape. As a result, this new left lacked coherence. So the new left was sucked into the Labour Party and flipped on its head. Where once the British left had struck and marched without political representation, the years between 2015 and 2019 would be directed almost exclusively towards electoralism. 

At the heart of this new left was the ‘generation without a history’ (the theme of Chapter 2). The radicalising youth of the early 2010s were born into the end of history, and the explosive student revolt (Chapter 1) was a crucial moment in the shattering of the wider neoliberal consensus. The crucial characteristic of this generation was that it was cut off from the traditions of the organised left by the defeats of the 1980s and 1990s. A left activist coming of age in previous generations would have found themselves surrounded by an ecosystem; an activist coming of age in 2010 or 2011 found themselves in what seemed like a desert. 

This lack of historical mooring gave millennials a sense of intense creativity. The occupation of Millbank Tower, which kicked off the student movement (and to an extent the wider anti-austerity movement) in November 2010 was as much as anything an act of collective imagination, inspired by a disconnection to the past. Across the generations, the 2010s were an era in which the historical playbook didn’t work; and in which leaps of faith and suspensions of disbelief were vindicated. As one Generation X anarchist activist told me: “If you’d said to me ten years earlier that I was going to be in the Labour Party, I would have told you to stop smoking crack”. 

But the same thing that gave the movements their dynamism also made them vulnerable. The Labour left was tiny in 2015, and the veterans of the social and industrial struggles – young and old – ranged from being sceptical of the Party to actively hostile towards it. My generation was never ‘in and against’ the Labour Party. It was first against the Labour Party and then just in it. 

As a result, what started as a bid for ‘a new kind of politics’ rapidly became a conventional Labourist project. Corbynites focused on elections – internal and external – to the exclusion of building social or industrial power, and the project was led from above with very little internal democratic life. The lack of an empowered grassroots was not an accident, but the result of a series of conscious decisions. I use Chapters 5 and 6 to set these out in detail – from the shutting down of Momentum’s internal democracy, to the sabotaging of open selections and the failure to allow members to set party policy. 

I joined the Labour Party in 2012. I remain a member, and I have no immediate plans to leave. There is an important job to be done inside the Party, whatever one’s perspective on the projects that exist outside. But my perspective on Labour has shifted – not because of Starmer’s many betrayals, but because of the experience of Corbynism. 

If you want to know how, read the book. 

This is Only the Beginning: The Making of a New Left, From Anti-Austerity to the Fall of Corbyn is published by Bloomsbury. The paperback edition, released this year, contains a new chapter covering the cost of living crisis, as well as a new conclusion.