Owen Jones - This Land: The Story of a Movement

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First published by Allen Lane in 2020

Text copyright Owen Jones, 2020

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover design: Olga Kominek

ISBN: 978-0-141-99440-6

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To Keir and Rickman, two beloved feline companions, who got me through the double trauma of a pandemic and writing this book

This land is your land and this land is my land

This land was made for you and me

Woody Guthrie

Weve captured the top of the Labour Party by mistake.

Ash Sarkar

Why do you want to just walk away and pass the title deeds of this great party over to someone like Jeremy Corbyn? I dont want to, I resent it, and I work every day in some small way to bring forward the end of his tenure in office. Something, however small it may be an email, a phone call or a meeting I convene every day I try to do something to save the Labour Party from his leadership.

Peter Mandelson

This is going to be a fantastic year for Britain. So proclaimed Boris Johnsons Twitter account two days into 2020, accompanied by a picture of the British prime minister, thumbs up, suited and booted, conveying an air of workmanlike determination, ready to forge a new buccaneering post-Brexit Britain. Four months later, thousands of Britons were dead, the nation was in lockdown, the economy in collapse, unprecedented social upheaval beckoned, and Johnson was in intensive care. Amid such trauma, the recent past quickly becomes distant; it might, too, feel trivial, somehow detached from our new age of pandemic. But it should not be forgotten that, in the previous half decade, Britain had suffered its worst political turmoil since the last world war, a period of bitter division and stifled hope. The lessons we learn from this era will not just help determine the future of this profoundly troubled nation, but may have consequences far beyond Britains borders too.

It seems hard to believe now, but when, back in 2019 in what seems another age the Conservatives crushed Jeremy Corbyns Labour Party in a general election, stability of a sort appeared to beckon, albeit on terms millions resented. But as coronavirus triggered an unparalleled combined public health crisis, economic crisis and social crisis, those five years, it transpired, were just the warm-up act, the hors doeuvre of chaos.

This is the story of the political consequences of both the 2008 financial crash and the slash-and-burn cuts that followed over the next ten years and more, inflicted by Conservative governments bent on enacting the endgame of an ideologically driven attack on the state and society that had started some four decades earlier, with Margaret Thatchers ascent to power. During this period, Britains workers suffered the longest squeeze in wages since the Napoleonic War, a slide in living standards surpassed in the industrialized world only by calamity-stricken Greece. Public sector workers nurses, firefighters, teachers among them endured real terms pay cuts which shrank their wage packets by up to 14 per cent in just seven years.

What are the political consequences of stripping away both security and optimism from millions of citizens in a prosperous nation? This was the British experiment of the 2010s: a time of riots, protests, strikes and, most divisive and damaging of all, the protracted Brexit saga, whose culture wars would bitterly divide families, communities and the nation as a whole. In fact, it would drag Britains political system to the very precipice.

At the mid-point of this period of political bedlam, Britain witnessed an audacious political revolution. On 3 June 2015, a scruffy, amiable Labour Party backbencher whose name Jeremy Corbyn was little known outside of left-wing circles, declared his intention to run for the party leadership. His initial odds of winning were rated at 2001, and he seemed unlikely to gather enough nominations from his fellow Labour MPs even to appear on the ballot paper. When he cleared that threshold, his teams ambition was to avoid coming last, to achieve up to 20 per cent of the vote, and to place a brake on the partys rightward drift to embracing pro-austerity, anti-welfare and anti-immigration positions. That summer, Corbyn and his supporters pushed against a door they thought was made of reinforced steel; as things proved, it was made of cardboard. And so began an unprecedented political experiment in British democratic history, whereby the new, radical leadership of a major political party attempted to assert a transformative political programme which, if successful, would have changed the very nature of Britain in a hostile political environment determined to crush it, and whose fervid support from its grassroots membership was matched by embittered opposition from politicians within its own party. Ultimately, it failed, spectacularly so. Following the wreckage of Labours calamitous 2019 election result, the standard narrative of the Corbyn years now goes like this. Here was a man demonstrably unsuitable for high office, his leadership sustained only by the deluded infatuation of an ideologically crazed political cult. Midwife to Brexit, morally disgraced by the evil of antisemitism, intolerant of dissent, Jeremy Corbyn offered a policy prospectus which was self-evidently too extreme and otherworldly for the sensibilities of the British public. This era so the narrative goes was a tragic aberration, to be remembered only as a salutary lesson in where political radicalism and self-indulgence lead: to electoral ruin.

There is another narrative, its polar opposite. This contends that Corbyn and his project were wrecked solely by a deliberate campaign of internal sabotage within the Labour Party itself, wedded to a vicious and unrelenting onslaught from an overwhelmingly antagonistic establishment media. Corbyn, a decent and genuine man, was politically destroyed by a smear campaign on a scale without precedent, coordinated not just by the right, but by the liberal centre. Both these narratives need correcting; Ill do so in this book.

Though Corbynism emerged out of a fractured British political landscape, it was also part of a global phenomenon. Around the world, the aftershocks of the 2008 financial crash had had many impacts. One was the global growth of the far right, who typically blamed Muslims, migrants, refugees and other oppressed and marginalized minorities for growing social trauma. This helped to spawn Donald Trump in America; the resurgence of Frances National Front (now, National Rally); the German AfD; Britains UKIP and Brexit Party; Spains Vox party; Italys Lega Nord; Austrias Freedom Party. This era also saw the ascendancy of left movements which, rather than blaming social crises on the most vulnerable, realized that responsibility lay instead with elite vested interests, and championed a radical redistribution of wealth and power. So rose the Bernie Sanders movement in the United States; the anti-austerity Podemos party in Spain; Syriza in Greece; the Left Bloc in Portugal; La France Insoumise (loosely translated as France Unbowed); Irelands Sinn Fein; and, of course, Corbynism. The Corbyn insurrection, then, was just one manifestation of a broader wave of political unrest across the Western world albeit a very British one.