Who are the post-Corbyn left?
| Date | 22 December 2022 |
| Author | Jones, Morgan |
Review of Michael Chessum, This is Only the Beginning. The making of a new left, from anti-austerity to the fall of Corbyn, Bloomsbury 2022
There is not much to recommend the soft left--a place largely defined by equivocation--as a political home, but it's mine, and if you're reading this in Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy, there's a good chance that it is yours too. It is the Labour left's 'yes, but' faction. To be on the soft left is to be a fairly consistent but ultimately unreliable vote for the party's left; it is a position that leaves one with few allies, and it is worth, therefore, thinking about who those are, and why.
Michael Chessum's new book is a good place to start. Chessum is probably best known as the public face of Another Europe is Possible, the left wing anti-Brexit group, and his book is an account of his decade on the left, first as a key player in the student anti-fees demonstrations in 2010, and then up through the early days of Corbynism--he was a member of Momentum's first steering committee--and into the bitter rancour of the post-Brexit Labour Party.
A whole slew of Corbyn-years post-mortems are hitting the shelves about now, and Chessum's will probably rank amongst the better of these. He spends as much time talking about the student movement and the vibrant world of resistance to austerity in the early part of the decade as he does the higher political affairs of its closing years, while still relating the two sections with clarity and coherence. 'It all started at Millbank' is the nascent cliche of the Corbynite...
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