It’s the kind of no-nonsense language that the Democratic grassroots have been demanding in recent months. Polling shows that an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters have swung wildly against Israel, with younger Independents and Republicans also trending in the same direction. According to one poll, only Russia scored worse than Israel when it came to the negative views among young Democrats (even Iran outscored the Jewish state). 

It would seem, then, that Platner and likeminded progressive office-seekers around the country have hit upon a winning issue. But it’s one thing to adopt more Israel-critical policies in response to popular opinion — and quite another to transform the party into a singularly Israel-obsessed vehicle: one in which opposition to the Jewish state functions as the main priority, a source of factionalism, and an ideological purity test. 

That way lies marginalization, a fate not unlike that of ex-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his Your Party in Britain. This, just when Democrats are poised to re-emerge from the political wilderness amid President Trump’s historic unpopularity and a faltering GOP majority in Congress.

The danger for Democrats doesn’t lie in the shift itself — a recalibration in America’s relationship with Israel is overdue, as voters across the spectrum are emphatically telling pollsters. The real threat, rather, is in the way an intensified focus on a single foreign-policy issue risks pulling the party off course, leaving it vulnerable to a vocal activist subset that doesn’t necessarily reflect broader public opinion on other questions. 

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Corbyn offers an instructive cautionary tale. After being expelled from Labour in 2024, the 76-year-old socialist went on to co-found a Left-wing breakaway party the following year. Your Party — the name itself was a magnet for ridicule — promised to be everything that Labour wasn’t: an unapologetically socialist outfit that would tax the rich, nationalize utilities, defend the National Health Service against privatization, and, most importantly, take a strong stance against Israel. During its first week, the party attracted hundreds of thousands of voters disillusioned by the Starmer government, as well as a former Labour member of Parliament and four independent Muslim MPs who were elected on pro-Gaza platforms. 

Yet within days, problems emerged. Before it had even officially launched, a leadership fight between Corbyn and another MP resulted in a mini-schism. What was ostensibly a disagreement over the party’s internal structure quickly spilled into a chaotic membership drive, generating as many factions as it did representatives. The bigger problem, though, was the ideological division between its MPs. Unsurprisingly, Your Party’s socially conservative Muslim MPs took a very different view on issues such as gender identity and trans participation in women’s sports, which ultimately contributed to the departure of two MPs. 

The inherent tension in the “rainbow-and-crescent” alliance of progressive activists and Muslim social conservatives is a problem for Democrats, too. Over the last few years, clashes between Muslim-American parents and local Democratic leaders over school curricula have spilled into courtrooms and onto the streets, largely driven by Muslim opposition to LGBTQ content. For the most part, however, the alliance has been held together by a shared opposition to Israel.

Similarly in Britain, Israel was the centripetal force around which Your Party’s members revolved. Or so they thought. Instead, it turned out to be another source of division. Zara Sultana, Your Party’s erstwhile co-leader, came out as strongly as an anti-Zionist, whereas Corbyn refused to use the term. The result was an ironic dynamic in which Corbyn, long one of Britain’s most prominent critics of Israel, was denounced by elements of his own movement for insufficient purity on the issue. Now, the party can barely muster enough candidates to represent it in next month’s local elections.

The United States has a different party and electoral system than Britain’s, but the parallels are clear: Left-wingers’ competitive signaling on Israel incentivizes candidates to adopt maximalist positions, alienating supporters and cannibalizing other issues in the process. In San Francisco’s House race, for example, Scott Wiener, a liberal Zionist, has faced sustained criticism from activists for refusing to describe Israel as an apartheid state or characterize its military campaign as genocide. Several debates were interrupted by pro-Palestine hecklers, which ultimately led to Wiener resigning as co-chairman of the state’s Jewish Caucus before leaving it altogether.

It made little difference. Wiener’s progressive rival, Saikat Chakrabarti — who has embraced the term “genocide” and called for a ban on both defensive and offensive weapons transfers to Israel — is within striking distance of him in the polls. Meanwhile, in Michigan, Senate candidate Abdul al-Sayed, who has shared a stage with Hasan Piker and talked openly about how Israel is “just as evil as Hamas,” is now tied for first in the polls to secure the party nomination. Similar dynamics have unfolded in Illinois’s and New Jersey’s special elections, too, which became as much a referendum on the Israel lobby as on any local issue.

None of this is to suggest that Democrats should maintain the status quo on Israel. Under Netanyahu, the Jewish state has become more aggressive and unrestrained in its conduct across the Middle East, not bothering with the pretense of a two-state solution. The Jewish state has rarely stopped to weigh even the costs of wielding the power of life and death — in perpetuity — over some seven million Palestinians. 

But, again, there is a difference between treating Israel as one foreign question among many, on one hand, and turning it into an ideological litmus test that supersedes everything else, on the other. This has created a purity spiral in which Democratic candidates across the country are jumping over each other to prove their pro-Palestine credentials — or at least, to ward off any hint that they are “soft” on the issue. Even Gavin Newsom, ever the tumbleweed in shifting winds of public opinion, went so far as to compare Israel to an apartheid state (a remark he later walked back). 

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One major reason for this drastic shift is the rise of independent media. As the influence of traditionally pro-Israel legacy outlets has waned, a new ecosystem of progressive streamers and online platforms has filled the space. These outlets will approvingly repost clips of, for example, Graham Platner calling the US’s relationship with Israel “shameful,” while castigating moderate Democrats for equivocating on the issue. 

For influencers and outlets like Zeteo, the Young Turks, Majority Support, and Hasan Piker, Israel is a near daily fixation (to say nothing of Tucker Carlson and other podcasters on the Right), which creates what Cass Sunstein and Timur Kuran call an “availability cascade”: a self-reinforcing feedback loop, in which constant mention of an issue makes it seem more important, urgent, or widespread, thereby further increasing its visibility.

Today, the question of whether Israel is committing genocide has the same political potency (and clippability) as “what is a woman?” for progressives and “did Trump win the 2020 election?” for Republicans. In just the last week, it has been asked of former President Barack Obama all the way down to Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg in the New York 12th district contest. And every podcast, speech, and special election primary in which a candidate’s position on Israel determines their standing only reinforces that dynamic at the national level. As a preview of what’s to come, earlier this month, the Democratic National Committee weighed a proposal at its spring conference to condemn the “growing influence” of money in primary elections, with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee singled out in the debate; the resolution was ultimately rejected. Without any kind of counterweight in the party, expect more resolutions like these to emerge.

In Britain, Your Party’s launch was meant to signal a new moment of unity for Left-wing dissidents from the Labour mainstream. Instead, it exposed how little consensus there was beneath the surface. Democrats should be wary of repeating the same pattern. Primary season is already drifting into an anti-Israel spectacle; if that dynamic accelerates, Democrats risk a Corbyn-style implosion that hands Republicans an unforced advantage in 2028.

We’re in the same venue that, just months ago, hosted government ministers and their hungover special advisers at the Labour Conference. But now, we’re here for an event to mark Your Party’s official foundation, and the vibes are unsurprisingly different. The former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, having had the whip removed by Keir Starmer five years ago, is establishing a new electoral vehicle with that other former Labour recalcitrant, Zarah Sultana. It’s worth remembering that both would still be languishing on the backbenches as Labour MPs were it not for the Prime Minister’s Stalinist approach to party management. After all, Corbyn stayed in what Peter Mandelson boasted was a “sealed tomb” of the Labour Left, all the way through the Iraq and Afghan wars, privatizations, PFI. But today, finally, the Left hopes to break from its Labourist sepulcher.

Outside the confines of a heavily scrutinized party of government — with in-built constitutional connections to politically moderate trade unions that represent millions of workers — all the neuroses of the Left come to the fore here in Liverpool. This is Glastonbury for people who unironically quote Lenin, an airport-hangar-sized space teeming with aging members of all manner of sects, and who thrive during the most arcane and interminable of debates. Motions, seconders, points of order: this is the language they speak. After Corbyn has opened with one of his woolly, meandering speeches, full of odes to “communities”, “people coming together”, “peace”, “the homeless” and “refugees”, the journalists are banished from the hall, and the revolutionary proceduralism is turned up to self-parodic levels.

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When the CIA declassified its Simple Sabotage Field Manual, it revealed how its agents would infiltrate activist organizations to hamper their activities. “Haggle over the precise wording of communications, minutes, resolutions”, it reads; “Never permit shortcuts to be taken to expedite decisions”; “Talk as frequently as possible at great length”; and “bring up irrelevant issues”. Your Party’s delegates seem to have imbibed this advice — not because they’re intelligence operatives, but because they have an incredible knack for the reverse Midas. Within minutes of the first session, the chair is being heckled and booed as she begs security to eject a shouting participant. “LET. HER. SPEAK!” goes a sporadic chant from the audience.

It’s as if the entire exercise has been conceived to confirm everyone’s worst suspicions about the hard Left. And when not concerning themselves with how many kulaks can dance on the head of a pin, the two actual issues that provoke the giddiest of cheers are the twin obsessions of Palestine and transphobia, questions that motivate vanishingly small numbers of voters. Most of them, perhaps, are in this room. The night before, one speaker at a pre-conference rally diagnosed a pre-revolutionary mood in the country, as in Petrograd in 1917. Britain, he claimed, was simmering with renewed class consciousness. The war in Gaza has “united the working class” and opened their eyes to the true nature of “capitalism” and “imperialism”. Any day now, the whole edifice could come crumbling down.

Well, maybe not just yet. Demographically speaking, scanning the room of delegates, Your Party appears to largely be retired boomer activists, who cut their teeth in the heightened political tensions of the Cold War, or else in the municipal struggles of the New Left in the Eighties. Some have been involved in the Stop the War Coalition, and many seem to be members of parties that define their politics according to their relation to the work of three or four Russian and German thinkers who died over a century ago. Alongside that cohort are some younger, millennial socialists; the downwardly mobile graduates with no future, angry at high rents, low wages and all of the contemporary identity struggles that consume the hyper-online.

A third cohort had been earmarked by Corbyn, but has been significantly alienated by the first few months of the party’s eager self-immolation: the Muslim working class, represented by the four so-called Gaza independents, two of whom have quit the founding process after falling out with Sultana over trans rights. Corbyn’s strange ability to articulate the vague, platitudinous ethical socialism redolent of a non-conformist preacher could have allowed his Your Party colleagues a semblance of unity. But they have all fallen badly at the first hurdle, humiliating themselves and their movement, turning themselves into a national joke that just keeps on giving.

The former Labour MP Sultana has courted the support of the myriad revolutionary Marxist groupuscules after a pair of botched, unilateral launches threw the nascent party into disarray. After the political operatives around Corbyn preemptively expelled some Socialist Workers’ Party members from the conference, Sultana called it an “undemocratic witch hunt” and boycotted the first day in protest, flouncing away from the venue for the gathered cameras. One old-timer Tankie confides that he was uncomfortable with the exclusions. “Even Stalin,” he tells me, “would wait for a rulebook to be formally adopted before he expelled people for breaking rules”. One prominent Corbynite in favor of the ban jokingly messages to say that the ejection of SWP members from the building is, only semi-ironically, “a delicious vision of what Grey Cuba could have been”.

As well as pushing for the inclusion of the sects in Your Party’s structures, and despite standing on an incredibly thin Labour manifesto last year, Sultana has spent her time on podiums advocating for nationalizing “the entire economy”. Because if there’s one takeaway from this tumultuous foundation process, it’s that those presiding over the Your Party perma-crisis would be capable of abolishing the entire private sector, and managing the whole means of production, distribution and exchange themselves, Soviet-style. Sultana herself is still holding on to £600,000 scraped from the membership portal she preemptively launched, apparently in a bid to bounce Corbyn into action. The Information Commissioner’s Office is investigating potential breaches of the law, and, according to one source, Corbyn is the only person among the Independent and Your Party MPs resisting reporting her to the police and Parliamentary Standards Commissioner. These, then, are the bureaucratic geniuses who could formulate Five Year Plans for an advanced economy.

Yet it’s political differences that have become the core dividing lines between Zarah and Jeremy, with the latter, perhaps for the first time in his life, somehow representing the more Right-wing strand of his party’s thinking. The former Labour leader tells me that there is no Your Party witch hunt, and that, simply put, people “can’t be members of two parties at the same time”. He is also keen to emphasize his more limited desires for public ownership: of water, energy, the old, postwar state-delivered utilities. His is a brand of old-fashioned allotment Leftism, all tatty jumpers, homemade vegan flapjacks and CND marches. Sultana, on the other hand, has adopted the combative, sometimes crazed rhetoric of the convert. One pro-Jeremy wag describes the supportive network of Trotskyists around her as “Cultana”, with a worldview shaped by the extremities of early-2020s identity politics, online cancel culture, “calling out”, and neo-Maoist public purification rituals.

But in insisting on pursuing a “member-led” process, on “empowering the grassroots” and involving a panoply of bizarre interest groups in an exercise in “ultra-democracy”, Corbyn has opened a Pandora’s box, unwittingly handing power to cults that tend towards parasitic relationships with whatever body they attach themselves to. The favored strategy of the “bottom-up social movement”, and the “prefigurative” and “democratic” structure so desired by the Left’s idealists, lends itself not to democracy, but to activist-ocracy, to domination by militant cliques of hardline oddballs who adore whiling their evenings and weekends away in damp halls full of political eccentrics, and who love nothing and nobody but the sounds of their own voices.

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And yet this is the future that Your Party’s foundational delegates have chosen: yesterday, on the final day of the conference, it was announced that members had decided to reject the “single-leader model” in favor of a “collective leadership” made up of a body of 20 non-MPs. Neither Jeremy nor Zarah will lead Your Party. In exposing the public to their spats and civil warfare, the two have lost control of the vehicle they set out to build. What’s more, Your Party members will, after all, be able to have their “dual memberships”, ensuring that it becomes, in effect, an umbrella group of the warring Trotskyist parties camped outside. The foundational conference has voted itself into permanent, certain obscurity.

There’s a genuine political space for a party that represents the socialist — not the ecological — tradition, especially in the country that birthed the labor movement centuries ago. Vast spaces have opened up on Labour’s Left flank, with broad elements of Corbyn’s 2017 and 2019 programs still attracting widespread popular support in polling. Dominic Cummings wrote of a “crude heuristic” that the median voter is, roughly, “national socialist”, meaning that they “are both more left than Blairites (e.g. tax the rich) and more right than Tories (e.g. on violent crime)”. But the hard Left are congenitally predisposed to fail to take advantage. They are stuck in the quagmire of their own dogmas, and they lack ability to compromise with electoral realities. The strong intellectual tradition associated with the last century’s Communist and Labour Party, the work of EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Stuart Hall, Anthony Crosland and many others besides, has disappeared. In its place is a void, with a political culture dedicated to self-destructive language-policing over alliance-building, determined to make enemies, burn bridges, and turn the perfect into the enemy of the good.

Slightly further to the Right, the Your Party tragicomedy solidifies the Greens’ hegemonic pull over any voter more progressive than Starmer. Zack Polanski is the principal beneficiary of this weekend’s debacles, alongside a Labour Party that no longer needs to worry about a competent, coherent force that further bifurcates its Left flank and costs them marginals (if not winning many seats themselves). The chances of that happening, of Labour being troubled by this new upstart, are almost nil. Instead, the Left have fiddled while Rome burns, with Reform on the march, and swathes of working-class Britain rushing to Farage. Your Party will not threaten this seemingly inexorable trajectory, and will be barely noticed by the average voter. Nor will it threaten a floundering Labour, nor the Greens, nor concern anyone beyond its own alphabet soup of acronyms. It is unlikely to survive the next election. Once again, the revolution has been postponed, this time indefinitely.

Zarah Sultana, co-founder alongside Jeremy Corbyn of Your Party, seems to have taken this history to heart. A “fascist” threat, she says, is “growling at the door”. But the real venom is reserved for enemies and rivals on the Left, with the Green Party coming in for particular ire. The traditional standard-bearers for environmental politics are not sufficiently “anti-Zionist”, says the Coventry South MP: they support boycotts and sanctions against Israel, but not, as Sultana does, a complete cut of diplomatic ties. What’s more, she adds, they’re not a “class-based” socialist party.

It’s difficult to know whether Sultana is aware that her own “class base” is an incredibly niche subset of post-graduate activists, plus an ageing cohort of hard-Left retirees who still define their politics according to categories dreamt up in Bolshevik Russia around the death of Lenin. Indeed, to bolster her already-weak position in a party struggling even before its founding conference plumps on a name, Sultana is actively courting the extremities of British Trotskyism, adopting a series of maximalist positions couched in Marxian language. Forget Israel — we should also leave Nato. Nor is nationalising a few industries enough; true socialism would require “the fucking lot”, the whole “means of production” tout court. Sultana has also emphasised her rhetorical commitment to a “member-led democracy”, which would allow all manner of malcontents to exercise their influence over Your Party. Despite the ultra-democratic promises to leave policy to members, she has been content to pre-define Your Party’s politics on the hoof, recently chucking “climate reparations” for Jamaica into the mix. This, she contends, is just the start of a “10, 20, 30-year project” to “run government”.

As a result of these statements, a coterie of bizarre political groupings has flocked to Sultana’s embattled wing of Your Party: the Socialist Worker Party; the Socialist Party; the Revolutionary Communist Party; the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty; and Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (rs21). Each presents their own idiosyncratic and fantastical vision of leading a proletarian revolution. This is all while a real revolution of the actually-existing working class takes place in provincial, post-industrial Britain, where “C2DE” voters flock to Nigel Farage. In this context, the inter-party warfare that has broken out on the Left, and indeed the conflicts inside Your Party between Corbyn and Sultana, feel like fiddling while progressive Britain burns.

Sultana entered parliament at the 2019 election, at the age of 26, and was immediately spoken of as a future standard bearer of the Left, just as Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott approached their twilight years. She has been encouraged in this view by her husband, Craig Lloyd, a former trade-union official who, according to several sources I spoke to, has taken to telling anyone who’ll listen that he’ll eventually become general secretary of Your Party, storming the complacent establishment alongside his co-leader wife. This is in spite of Lloyd having no senior management experience in any of his previous professional positions. No matter: the pair are modelling themselves as the Left’s new power couple — British socialism’s answer to the Clintons.

After Corbynism as an organised political force was swept away by Boris Johnson’s brief experiment with Brexity, big-tent Tory populism, the recriminations began almost immediately, with the defeated Left soon resembling rats in a sack. Within the simple “Corbynite” masthead sat a messy mixture of competing ideological strands: old-school trade unionists grappled for dominance with the traditional hard-Left, while a younger crowd of Millennial socialists, steeped in the language of online progressivism, attempted to build something they called a “social movement” — pointedly not a traditional political party — from below. Sultana, a young, dynamic, non-white woman, exhibiting all the radical, aggressive certainty of any good student union-dweller, was perhaps the best-placed talisman of that latter tendency. Rather than the antiquated politics of 20th-century socialism, all brass bands and closed factories, this youthful contingent would push for Green New Deals, Universal Basic Income, four-day weeks and “fully-automated luxury communism”.

In the early 2020s, that crowd became synonymous with the increasingly dogmatic and pernickety assertions of identity politics and cancel culture, earning them a reputation for political pedantry and humourlessness on an epic scale. A case in point is Sultana’s broadsides against a cartoonist for depicting her on a box of raisins (the same newspaper spent years depicting David Cameron as a human condom and George Osborne as his pliant gimp).

This particular brand of progressivism was a departure from the Old Left’s, but, under Labour’s ossified structures, a semblance of unity between the more orthodox and more experimental groupings was possible. Now that these structures have gone, Corbyn himself has demonstrated neither the communicative abilities nor the political dexterity to join these competing factions together.

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Keir Starmer’s authoritarian approach to party management has therefore birthed a monster, his wave of suspensions and expulsions repeatedly splitting Labour’s formerly broad church. Like a North London Stalin, he has enforced an iron discipline on the emasculated Corbynite wing of the Parliamentary Labour Party, removing the whip for the most minor of infractions. When it became clear that Sultana was unlikely to be readmitted after her suspension for voting against the two-child benefit cap, rumours of the founding of an alternative picked up pace. For readers unfamiliar with Sultana’s role in Your Party’s chaotic foundation, and indeed with the surreal, schismatic culture of the British hard-Left in general, the story of internecine factionalism hits first as tragedy then as farce.

In an attempt to bounce the perennially dithering Corbyn into announcing her in a leadership role, Sultana announced the party’s launch without the agreement of her fellow organisers. She then did something similar for Your Party’s membership portal. This second action triggered civil war within Your Party, as well as legal squabbling over the future of the substantial monies collected on Sultana’s watch. A truce, of sorts, has now been tentatively agreed.

Either way, Your Party’s descent into Leftist self-parody has destroyed Sultana’s reputation, confirming her as a serious liability. The general public sees Your Party as po-faced, hectoring, lacking in self-awareness and obsessed with arcane minutiae; Sultana certainly seems determined to prove them right. And yet despite repeated setbacks, she retains the confident air of someone convinced that her substantial social-media following, shadowed by that growing Trotskyist fan club, will be enough to retain the backing of comrades eyeing Zack Polanski’s Greens with envy.

There’s an extent to which our cynical, fractious politics might suit the abrasive invective of tubthumpers like Sultana. But that righteous anger needs to be accompanied by a positive emollience, a self-deprecation, a relatability — none of which are present in the beleaguered parliamentarian. There’s an ironic air to a figure like Lee Anderson or even Farage himself. Everything is said with a nudge and a wink; they’re their own best satirists, inviting you to laugh alongside them. In contrast, the Left’s default tone is bitter rage and oblique, holier-than-thou screeds against anyone and everyone. With honourable expectations, they exude ideological zealotry.

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“The revolution”, said a condemned Georges Danton in revolutionary France, will “like Saturn, devour its children”. And so it goes again. Sultana will likely lose Your Party’s ongoing factional struggle — unlike Corbyn, she lacks a solid base in her constituency, and unlike the pro-Gaza independents, she lacks the grassroots voter networks, built through local mosques and community groups, that propelled four MPs to the Commons last year. Her TikTok game won’t be enough to defeat the phalanx of battle-hardened, former trade-union organisers stacked up behind her prime rival.

If she is ousted from the upper echelons of Your Party’s structures, Sultana might be tempted to try her luck with the Greens. But would Polanski ever give prominence to someone who has demonstrated only an aptitude for scorched-earth politics, and who has shown repeatedly that being queen of the Leftist graveyard will always take precedence over the collective reputation of the labour movement? Indeed if Sultana’s uncompromising approach to politics has to an extent proved useful in making a name for herself — notwithstanding her attacks against her own colleagues for their views on transgenderism — it’s increasingly clear that it’s little help when it comes to the painstaking but necessary work of coalition-building. Even critics who may otherwise back Sultana, but increasingly feel that broad Left unity is required to combat Reform, are condemned for “middle-class entitlement” and using “angry/irrational brown woman tropes”.

When the Comintern eventually abandoned their “class-against-class” line in 1933, they performed a speedy about-turn, calling for “Popular Fronts” with liberals and social democrats to defeat fascism. Hitler had assumed the Chancellery. Rearmament was underway. It was too late. The damage had been done by years of over-enthusiastic sectarianism. Despite Sultana’s protestations, Reform are not a “fascist” threat. But the fragmentation on a Left obliviously revelling in its own demise will presage Britain’s own shift to the Right. As ever, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

Being a millennial socialist in 2025 must feel like being a hippy in 1974: The Beatles have split up; Hendrix and Joplin are dead; Nixon is in the White House; and another, more aggressive youth subculture — punk — is emerging to replace your fading utopian idealism. The party is well and truly over. Keir Starmer has expunged any trace of radical fervor from Labour. And, as a result of his adoption of bland, buttoned-up technocracy, many young, enthusiastic Left-wingers have left the party. To make matters worse, the stuttering launch of Your Party, the new vehicle for Corbynism, turned into a carnival of infighting, undermining the reputations of all concerned. Across the Atlantic, Trump has returned to the Oval Office, and here in the UK, Gen Z voters are more likely to opt for Nigel Farage than for the Greens’ fledgling “eco-populism”. With woke-liberal messaging adopted wholesale by the upper echelons of the corporate world, the contemporary transgressive pole is now the backlash against the painfully self-righteous, the censorious, and the overtly politically correct. When academia, the arts, cultural institutions, the educational establishment and the civil service demand acquiescence with ultra-liberal social mores, it’s little wonder the counter-cultural moment lies with the populist New Right rather than the progressive Left.

In today’s climate, it’s easy to forget that there was a time when the Labour Left, resurgent with the energies of millennial socialist activists backing Corbyn, felt like it was ascendant, that anything was possible, and that the future of the Labour Party, if not the country, belonged to a class of cool kids shaping an ultra-progressive form of socialist revival. Unlike the party’s tired moderate wing, the millennial Left was brimming with ideas and high-minded, quixotic intellectual debate, and it attached itself to the Labour Party like a limpet during the Corbyn era. The Blairite modernizers, discredited by their Faustian pacts with a sub-prime City and the disasters of Iraq, would call for moderation and sober managerialism, but Labour’s millennial Left organized workshops on Italian revolutionary philosophies, followed by grime and acid house listening parties hosted by Turner Prize-winning artists, and set up “mega-games” in which participants could simulate responses to establishment attacks in the first year of a Corbyn government that never quite came. The millennials were riding a wave of optimism as the official opposition engaged in an institutional turn towards what a Marxist shadow chancellor called “socialism with an iPad”. They were enthused, not repulsed, by Jezza, who was lovingly referred to in the activists’ community centers and Glastonbury Pyramid Stage crowd not disparagingly as “Magic Grandpa”, but reverentially as “the Absolute Boy”.

Rather than spend their nights listening to drunken parliamentary staffers belt out “Things Can Only Get Better”, the Corbynista cool kids would retreat to darkened warehouses to smoke roll-ups, talk about Judith Butler and the Kurdish communes, and dance to trendy sub-genres of electronica until the early hours. Ditch the Marks & Spencer apparel and business-friendly media-speak of bland traditional Labourism, and replace it with septum piercings, oversized jeans, vintage T-shirts, mustache-mullet combinations and neo-Maoist views on landlordism, and you’re approaching the world of millennial socialism. It was dynamic and counter-cultural, with an agenda full of knowing nods and winks towards the anti-authoritarian New Left tradition and Sixties creative “happenings” — homo ludens to the old party establishment’s homo economicus.

And this wasn’t a purely British phenomenon. In the US, Bernie Sanders had led an insurgency against the Democrat’s Clintonian establishment, and on the continent a wave of upstart populist parties — Podemos in Spain, La France Insoumise and Syriza in Greece — found success in challenging the more moderate proclivities of traditional social democracy in their own countries. Like Corbyn’s Labour, they garnered the votes of mainly young, university-educated urbanites, but also built a larger electoral alliance that included older public sector workers, sections of the low-waged metropolitan precariat, and some ethnic minorities.

But the continental experiments in radical Left social movements-cum-parties have largely faded out or else collapsed completely, mirroring the diminution of the Labour Left. Millennial socialism is on the wane. And so, for the beleaguered cool kids, the outlook is rather bleak. This is the context in which the 2025 edition of their annual Corbynite festival The World Transformed (TWT) took place in Manchester last week, for the first time running separately to Labour’s own official conference. In its earlier versions, during the Corbyn years, the festival took place in either Liverpool or Brighton: suitable bastions of working-class anti-Toryism and middle-class progressivism respectively. Back then, TWT received praise from some unlikely quarters, including from Blairite apparatchiks and Corbyn-sceptic commentators, with innovative events aimed at a more youthful, vigorous and once-dominant Left wing — a Momentum-aligned fringe in vegan-friendly venues. But the millennial socialists are today looking for new solutions to their old problems.

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The spatial distance from Labour’s powerbrokers matches a yawning political divergence. The mood this year was somber. A hodgepodge of competing Leftist interest groups came to Manchester to state the case for their own version of the socialist creed and to fight over the diminishing scraps of the socialist mantle in a set of graffiti-adorned theater spaces and worthy, charity-run community venues in Hulme and Moss Side. It was not so much a united, popular front but a threadbare, garish patchwork, pulled in different directions and coming apart at the seams.

The millennial socialists were still there in force. They still have their fashions and their radical philosophy, but they’ve lost their mojo, their once-obvious vim. Marooned outside the Labour Party, they are lost, uncertain, divided, without clear strategy, and without a viable or agreed vehicle for power. Gone are the playful attitudes, the joyful optimism and post-ironic, cultural-political exuberance. Instead, there are speakers from the Revolutionary Communist Party, rs21 (Revolutionary Socialism for the 21st century), as well as issue-specific campaigning groups such as the Trans Liberation Group. Every meeting harbors nervous talk of countering an incipient “fascist threat”, by which speakers mean the Reform part. Forget the £40 billion in extra taxes levied on employers, and forget £100 billion in extra capital spending. No: Starmerism is actually “austerity 2.0”. Worse still, the government is “genocidal” and “authoritarian”. And, worryingly for these radicals, nobody quite agrees what a rebuild looks like.

At stake is the future of the British radical Left. There remain several competing tendencies among the millennial socialists, including those who want to build an anarchic, “bottom-up”, ultra-democratic “social movement” rather than a traditional party, uniting Just Stop Oil and BLM-type activist groups into a federated structure that contests elections without sacrificing an ethos of direct action. Others in Corbyn’s own camp of old-fashioned, trade unionist advisors wish for a more conventional “top-down” Left-wing operation, using Your Party’s small parliamentary platform to present an anti-war, social-democratic message to the public, getting support from trade unions, and shifting the Labour Party to the Left just as UKIP shifted the Tories to the Right.

Zack Polanski’s Leftward turn at the helm of the Greens has won more than a few converts, and a so-called “Red-Green alliance” has been mooted by Polanski. But before any formal co-operation is agreed between the Greens and a putative Corbyn-Sultana-led Your Party, recriminations abound over Your Party’s form, policymaking, personnel and purpose. In a forced display of unity, Sultana and Corbyn appeared together to speak in front of a crowd of keffiyeh-clad enthusiasts last week. A well-placed source tells me their allies are in the process of sending legal letters to each other. Nevertheless, the two sat to listen admiringly to a French parliamentarian talk of her party’s refusal to countenance a national retirement age above 60.

But there was no sign of the four other independent MPs who form the parliamentary nucleus of Your Party. Despite having joined with Corbyn and Sultana (for now), these Muslim men have shallow socialist pedigree. They sit in the Commons as the beneficiaries of a groundswell of revulsion toward the Gaza war in their heavily Islamic constituencies. And yet all four of these MPs are landlords; they voted against Labour’s new VAT taxes on private schools; and predictable spats over transgenderism broke into public view weeks ago, with Sultana calling out the gender-critical views of a Your Party comrade.

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By Emily Jashinsky

One TWT speaker confided to me that the Left “just need to learn how to speak normally. Stuff like this [festival] is important, but we’re not going outside our comfort zone.” But others will militate against any position that doesn’t imply principled, glorious detachment from anything approaching the general public’s values or everyday concerns. Historically high levels of migration are the number one issue for voters, but at TWT any suggestion that we should reduce numbers is enough to invite immediate excommunication. The cost of living and a faltering economy come next on the list of public concerns, but these concerns are little addressed here beyond the illusory panacea of a “wealth tax”. There’s much talk of “the working class”, but few suggestions of how a group of post-graduate Leftists will persuade low-income blue-collar workers in post-industrial towns that they should ditch Farage and instead vote for people who are part of groups with names like “Queers for Palestine”, and who also, by the way, advocate for open borders.

There’s still some lip service paid to actual power among the depleted crowd of millennial socialists, who still talk of strategy, of mass movements, of what a good Leftist might call “hegemony”. But there’s little of its application in evidence. During the halcyon days of Corbynism when the cool kids were in the office of the leader of the opposition, and when TWT speakers and attendees seriously influenced policy, it felt like maybe, just maybe, the millennial socialists might one day win. True enough, the social milieu that they represented would never represent a majority of the electorate. But there was a willingness, a recognition that their project would make a hegemonic offer to the broader social body. Indeed, promises on higher public investment, nationalized utilities and the minimum wage could attract widespread support. At the apex of a genuine, mass party of government that was attempting to weave together a cross-class electoral coalition, millennial socialists were kept on the straight and narrow. But, having rejected Labourism, they have capitulated, relegating themselves to sub-cultural obscurity.

Today, like the hippies in Nixon’s America, the movement is a shadow of its former being, a set of disparate strands goading themselves into ever-more radical positions. Instead of a vehicle for political power, it’s a set of niche, minoritarian fan clubs that hold their purisms as axiomatic. The discord is the latest symptom of an increasingly fragmented body politic, with dozens of separate cultural-political tribes talking solely to each other and consuming reams of self-affirming timeline content that merely buttresses their own group prejudices. Mass politics is over, and the two-party system is imploding. But as long as the Left is kept clean, with all the correct positions, they are seemingly unconcerned that their success in detaching a chunk of Labour’s vote at the next election can only possibly result in a victory march for the very “fascism” they’re claiming to oppose most vehemently. No matter to them — as long as it’s only the cool kids at the table.

Today’s deputy leadership contest is being held as Labour faces a similarly extinction-level event — not that either candidate has a chance of resolving that. The party is in a double bind, with the Corbynite Your Party and a revived Greens under the “eco-populist” Zack Polanski snapping at their Left. To their Right, Reform is marching into Labour territory to demand nationalization of the steel industry, a restoration of the winter fuel allowance, and an end to the exorbitant interest payments handed to commercial banks by a cash-strapped Treasury.

The Government has no response, and can only resort to characteristic prevarication and half-measures. The Prime Minister obsesses over process, managerial tweaks, and civil service procedure, while the dissonance between tasks and means grows ever more extreme. We’ve seen countless failed managerial resets: five “missions”; six “milestones”; three “foundations”; and 30 priorities. Starmerite policy ephemera is a feature, not a bug, of a PM with no coherent guiding philosophy.

The inanity of Downing Street’s triumphal announcement of “phase two” was already obvious. But the emptiness of its “delivery, delivery, delivery” sloganeering has now been brutally exposed by the personnel bloodbath and open mutiny by the victims of the chief of staff Morgan McSweeney’s reshuffle axe.

Amid the perma-chaos, the PLP has deigned to present to Labour members two near-identical candidates from the party’s mushy-soft center-left as potential deputies: both, until recently, served happily in Starmer’s cabinet; neither is associated with the Corbynite ancien régime; and it’s difficult to discern what major ideas, policies and strategic approaches, if any, set them apart.

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Rachel Reeves is Gordon Brown in a dress

By Jonny Ball

Lucy Powell, the recently sacked Leader of the House of Commons, is up against the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson. Both are very different politicians compared to their predecessor, Angela Rayner, who acted as the sine qua non of Labour’s claims to working-class authenticity. But the former deputy’s shadow looms: both Powell and Phillipson have made much of what they share with her, their northern roots and their gender, in a kind of glum replay of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch with fewer laughs, each presenting themselves as the deserving heir-to-Ange.

But the drama of this deputy leadership battle, lies not in bold ideological fault lines as it did back in 1981. For there are none. Rather the contest is a low-key proxy war between the Prime Minister and the party’s clear favorite to replace him, Andy Burnham — the King in the North, who gave Powell his early endorsement as “someone from these parts”. Burnham even has his own parliamentary faction, Mainstream, a fledgling outfit bringing together “radical realists”, who range from a benighted former Blarite policy adviser, Corbynite academics and soft-Left parliamentarians. Whether this hodgepodge of characters can actually achieve anything is another matter entirely. Labour has no shortage of internal groupuscules, some more effective than others. Little unites Mainstream’s founders other than a vague distaste for a spluttering Starmerism. But if Powell can mount a solid campaign as the unlikely voice of an aggrieved progressive membership, then it will be to Burnham’s ultimate benefit.

Manchester’s Metro Mayor isn’t the only ghost at Labour’s tragic feast. Jeremy Corbyn is here, too. It might be 10 years since he was elected leader of the Labour Party, spawning a movement of millennial socialism that set him at odds with a “modernized” party, but he is gearing up to prove a major irritation today. Starmer could try to ignore him, but Blair and Mandelson were similarly complacent when they described how they shut the awkward squad of socialists MPs — Corbyn, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott — in “their sealed tomb”. Look how that worked out. The seal was broken a decade ago by the Labour membership’s frustration with the tepid reformism on offer from party moderates. The Corbynites returned from the dead with a response to Britain’s secular decline that was red-blooded, full-throttle, and which promised transformation over tinkering.

Corbyn provided an answer after Blairism and its Brownite mutation had acquiesced to the political economy of Thatcherism — being “intensely relaxed” about people getting filthy rich, at ease with globalization, and striking a Faustian peace deal with the City. Under New Labour, there would be significant private provision of public services, independence for the Bank of England, and a retreat of the state from the economic sphere. Pumping the tax revenues from deregulation, and privatization drives into the welfare, healthcare and education budgets, they thought, would be change enough. The Gremlin in the machine back then was the global financial crisis, when the entire neoliberal growth model collapsed under the weight of the US subprime mortgage market. It has existed ever since on the life support of bank nationalizations, quantitative easing and state-backed asset bubbles.

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What's the point of Corbynism?

By Matthew Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts

Corbynism’s rise in 2015, then, coincided with the beginning of a second term of austerity, in response to the implosion of the City. Despite negative real interest rates, capital spending was squeezed by the Coalition and the Cameroons in all-out efforts to eliminate the deficit. State capacity was diminished, productivity and real incomes squashed, and the country was left with a starkly depleted public realm.

Which is where we find ourselves today, at a political and economic impasse, with an economy that cannot grow and a polity that is becoming ungovernable. This is the origin story of our current economic and social malaise, a harsher, zero-sum politics, the rise of Reform, Brexit, intensifying culture wars and, of course, Corbyn. Osborne’s Notting Hill set had succeeded in unlocking a set of morbid symptoms that cumulatively destroyed their world view. Today, anybody advocating a return to end-of-history economic liberalism has been relegated to the status of hopeless nostalgists on the sidelines of the political stage; Rest is Politics fans tutting into their phones in the local Gail’s.

Corbynism played a crucial role in that shift. But its core base was concentrated among young, downwardly mobile graduates in larger cities, rather than “the many” (not the few) who were at the heart of the movement’s promise. Corbyn was never a working-class hero — more allotment radical — and much of Labour’s traditional vote was profoundly alienated by his foreign policy stances as well as the social milieu he so awkwardly represented. Your Party is a further retreat from that zone of mass politics and the construction of viable electoral coalitions. As well as being riven by the kind of personal and political divisions that have become the hallmark of the non-Labour Left, it is a capitulation — a recognition of permanent exclusion from real proximity to the levers of state. Even its potential as a “UKIP of the Left” is being hindered by early factionalism, as former Corbyn staffers and trade union heavyweights brief relentlessly against his putative “co-leader”, Zarah Sultana. Her vision of a progressive ultra-liberalism clashes with the views still held by the coterie of Leninist ideologues surrounding the former Labour leader. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that she is out-maneuvered and defects to Polanski’s Greens.

True, the minoritarian tribe attempting to fuse disaffected urban progressives with socially conservative Muslim voters may yet act as a successful disruptive force, but it is unlikely to wield direct influence in the corridors of power. Instead, it will assuage the consciences of its members and supporters, safe in the knowledge that no compromises will ever have to be made with anyone outside of their small fractions of the electorate. It was ever thus on the fringes of the Left.

In any case, Starmer has expunged this kind of politics from his Labour Party. It’s unfortunate that he is yet to land on anything with which to replace it. Instead, we have a void. Vague, inchoate nods towards a more interventionist, activist state are hinted at, then forgotten. We hear snippets of critiques of neoliberal growth; Reeves’s “securonomics” model is floated but never realized. Implementation, after all, would require the arrival of the promised “insurgent government”. Instead, the Prime Minister disavows his own speeches and sacks ministers hours after giving them his fulsome support. It’s hard to see how he calms this chaos of his own making.

In the past, Starmer would have turned to the talismanic McSweeney. But today, his svengali is vulnerable. Not just tainted by the Mandelson appointment he approved, the party strategist’s relentless enthusiasm for bashing the Corbynite Left and achieving maximum seat-to-vote efficiency has been matched only by an ability to alienate Labour MPs. No. 10’s authority is shot among a parliamentary party in a funereal but restive mood, with many backbenchers nervously eyeing their wafer-thin majorities as their party languishes in the polling doldrums.

It seems Downing Street has forgotten the dictum from Harold Wilson, that the Labour Party, like a bird, “needs the Left and Right wing to fly”. The progressive activists are exhausted by Starmer’s half-hearted pandering to Reform; and voters, disillusioned by record levels of legal and illegal mass migration see nothing but a stiff North London lawyer flip-floppings on policy, over-promising but under-delivering. It’s no wonder Britain’s working class, the hallowed hero-voters of McSweeney’s imagination, are abandoning the Labour Party in droves. There should surely be howling embarrassment, recriminations and recalibrations at the top table at the idea that Labour has now definitively become the party of the rich.

Instead, the public gets Phillipson v Powell. This vapid struggle to become Starmer’s ceremonial number two is not only a symptom of the quality of our MPs but also a stark illustration of the existential troubles of a listless Labour party, and a broader Left in crisis. And meanwhile, the populist Right advances with the spirit of the age billowing in their sails.

It feels good to get this off my chest. Being swept up in the Corbyn frenzy of 2015-17 was borderline compulsory for posh teenagers queasy about their own privilege. It gave me some distinction among friends whose only impression of this strange, shabby Islington MP was that he was determined to take away their holiday homes. This was an embarrassing chapter in my life, during which I never left the house without a velvet choker — the fashion at the time.

That first wave of Corbynism, like my predilection for chokers, was doomed. It insisted on ideological positions untethered from reality, its adherents allergic to the views of those outside the morally pure vanguard. The frenzy of Corbynistas was vibes-based, conviction-lite and fact-free. The faces of that movement were young, vital and countercultural; it was them versus the Tory gammons and the square New Labourites. For a teenager, the choice was obvious. Of course, none of those yelling “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” to the tune of Seven Nation Army at Glastonbury had a handle on the catastrophic economic vision of John McDonnell. Nor would one expect them to; how do you find the time to read a manifesto when you spend all day skulking around the Dalston Oxfam?

Now a chaotic new Corbyn party — a venture with the Coventry MP Zarah Sultana — claims once again to have the answers to Great British inequality and division, this time in an even more vicious political landscape as Reform paws at the door. Proving its proletarian credentials, the provisionally named “Your Party” is offering strangers on the internet the opportunity to suggest its official name. Unfortunately this does not appear to be a straightforward voting system – Party McPartyFace would inevitably result – rather, YouGov has listed some of the top suggestions being mulled over by top brass. Among them are The Collective (which sounds like a high-markup coffee shop in Hackney Wick), Arise (a yuppie pilates studio) and The People’s Party. This latter one, the favorite among those YouGov surveyed, is an interesting choice. How many People’s Parties the world over have ended up being brutal authoritarian juntas? Heed the rule of thumb: parties and states with promising names – “people’s republics” and so on – are often anything but. Just saying.

Once christened, the first hurdle, a rite of passage on the hard-Left, will be surviving infighting. Last week, a squabble straight out the gate showed “Your Party”was still in the mire over antisemitism. Sultana had told the New Left Review that during his time leading the Labour Party, Corbyn had “capitulated to the IHRA definition of antisemitism” (Corbyn adopted the definition in 2018). She went on to describe his leadership as, of all things, “conciliatory”. For those keeping score, it is worth remembering Corbyn’s interview with Piers Morgan days after October 7, 2023. “All attacks are wrong,” was his response. Pushed repeatedly to condemn Hamas, he refused. Some conciliation.

If these early tiffs don’t kill it in the cradle, “Your Party” could be a disruptor. It has already had fairly buzzy beginnings: despite the perceived chaos, at the time of writing, more than 700,000 people had signed up on the website to register their support (though it’s worth remembering that unlike other parties, it does not charge for membership). Ipsos found that 20% of voters would be “very or fairly likely” to back the party — and 33% among those aged 16-34. Corbyn told Tribune magazine that these potential voters were responding to the usual shopping list of gripes: high bills, high rents, sewage in the waterways. He added: “Plenty of good comrades have approached me over the years suggesting that there needs to be a new political voice in this country,” citing his retention of the Islington North seat as an independent. Seen from Upper Street, the future of socialism is bright.

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By Matthew Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts

But the Londoners who cling to Corbyn — he himself admitted they made up an outsized proportion of those who had registered interest in the new party so far — are still the feckless, limp normies voting not for “the many” but against their parents. For them, politics is simply another opportunity for self-expression. Since Corbyn was booted off his perch, these types were left to whinge about gentrification and the scourge of landlordism while moving their Oka furniture into ex-council flats in Mile End and paying £15 for pan con tomate. Feckless, ridiculous, but harmless. It is one thing droning on about cultural imperialism at a flatroofed pub, and quite another being given a genuine political soapbox. Taking them seriously is so 2015. Next!

More so than ever being on the hard-Left is now an empty identity marker, almost guaranteed never to be tested. This is precisely what makes it so appealing to the middle classes: it is a shortcut to radicalism without any personal risk. The movement is emotionally seductive, an imitation of Seventies socialism with the reading comprehension of today’s youth. And with no answers on immigration, welfare abuse and feminism — “trans people are human beings” was Corbyn’s glib response to the Supreme Court decision on the definition of biological sex — it is structurally hollow. One gust of realism on any of these issues, and it topples.

A decade on from the initial wave of Corbynism, Your Party wants to meet Britain’s new challenges with a suspiciously 2015-esque agenda: Sultana has proposed a “resolutely anti-racist and pro-trans socialist program”. So let’s look at what’s on the to-do list as summer winds down in the UK: protesters surround hotels filled with migrants; pedestrian crossings are painted with the St George’s flag; Nigel Farage announces plans to introduce “mass deportations”. Directives to be kind can no longer mollify the working-class communities — Labour heartlands — inflamed by demographic upheaval. Corbyn’s metropolitan socialist movement is disgusted by the concerns of those communities, disappointed that they have strayed so far from his tutelage, that they are not the “good comrades” of Soviet fantasy. What’s the plan, Jezza?

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Predictably, this time round Corbyn continues to be paranoid about a conniving press (maybe he and Donald would get on?). He told Tribune: “Many in our media struggled to understand the idea of letting ordinary people shape the future of our party. For the 650,000 people who signed up, it wasn’t so hard to understand.” It is the same reasoning which scuppered the project in 2017 and 2019; again, the real villains are the newsrooms stuffed with cackling hacks throwing darts at Corbyn’s photograph, too venal or too stupid to admire his gleaming vision for a fairer world. And again, we get the same old utopian twaddle about “ordinary people” as a benevolent, uncorrupted but misled mass. These peaceable working men and women just want affordable housing, clean rivers and for everyone to get along, yeah? If they’re angry about the small boats, it’s only because of that dastardly Lord Rothermere. Ordinary people have simply been led astray, and their unsavory concerns can be wafted away with a stick of incense and a bung of Universal Basic Income. , Your Party is bringing a water pistol to a civil war, and in so doing will split the Left and hand the keys to Farage. For this, the migrants will not thank them.

Until then, the movement will serve its true purpose: to make its members feel good about themselves while letting “ordinary” communities roil with discontent. Criticism from the mainstream will only enhance the pleasure. It’s already starting: to crack open the comment section of Jezza’s Instagram page is to be hit with the stench of self-satisfaction. It’s a dumpsite of half-baked sloganeering: “United we rise. Decided we fall,” writes one typomaniac (it’s hard to text one-handed); another, responding to a mini-debate on the efficacy of wealth taxes, trumps their opponent with the scorcher: “Carry on [as] cheerleaders for the big guns… it makes you look great.” How politics looks, remember, is its most important metric. “You think a man who fought Apartheid is worse than the current PM who has allowed genocide?” bleats another, perhaps the only Briton who still believes our leaders can sway global policy. Starmer, why the hell haven’t you just told Bibi to pack it in, you massive fascist? It’s no small irony that one of the issues that killed Corbyn off is the one that’s breathing new life into his insurgent party.

Your Party begs a fundamental question for our time, one also being posed by Reform: what’s the benefit of a political movement “run by the people” when those people are so fatally misinformed? And why lean on the “ordinary” masses when they never chose you at the height of your powers? That the party is emerging from its shell as immigration once again becomes a national flashpoint is a grim omen. Once again, the hard-Left will ponder itself to death. Launder your class guilt elsewhere, Corbynites. We’ve seen this film before, and we all know how it ends.

Tony Blair rarely felt the need to apply such discipline. He tolerated numerous revolts, most spectacularly on the Iraq War vote in early 2003, and even serial rebels like Jeremy Corbyn or John McDonnell were allowed to keep the whip. The clique around Starmer today believe that the “sealed tomb” in which the Left had been placed during the Blair era wasn’t secure enough to prevent its re-emergence in 2015. The lesson learned by Starmer’s closest aide, Morgan McSweeney, and those around him was that the Left must never, ever be allowed anywhere close to power again. The munificence of the Blair years was, on this reading, a terrible mistake for which the price is eternal factional vigilance.

Such single-minded dedication is, as some on the Left suggested a while ago, a cause for concern. People who know little other than how to fight and win an internal Labour Party battle were, of course, going to try to apply the same techniques to their opponents, only now with the full force of the American state. The Government’s approach to Palestine protestors in recent months, even as ministers have been dragged into making some mealy-mouthed complaints about Israel’s behavior, suggests the Left’s fears were well founded. At least one retired vicar could be found among the more than 100 peaceful protestors arrested earlier this month for the crime of supporting Palestine Action, and smeared as terrorists using legislation originally intended to target Al Qaeda. This never happened under Blair: at the peak of the anti-Iraq War protests, when demonstrators broke into RAF Fairford and vandalized planes intended for bombing runs in the Middle East, they were charged only with criminal damage (and defended by one Keir Starmer QC).

Even so, the problem for Starmer is more severe than the party’s perennial factionalism. His authoritarianism speaks to a fundamental lack of confidence in his leadership, its goals and perhaps also himself. The contrast with Starmer’s presumed role model is, again, stark. New Labour involved a serious attempt to think through how the world was changing. It had an intellectual core: thinkers such as the LSE sociologist Anthony Giddens, doyen of the “Third Way”, or those on the policy side such as Geoff Mulgan, founder of the Blairite thinktank Demos, weren’t only ornamentation. Moreover, Gordon Brown was a serious political thinker, editing at the age of 24 the now-legendary volume of essays, The Red Paper on Scotland, which proudly bore the influence of Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci, and later producing a well-received biography of the Scottish radical socialist James Maxton. He had grappled with the dilemmas of what Marxism Today called the “New Times”: the decline of the traditional working class, the triumph of Thatcher and her co-thinkers, and the early years of globalization. If Brown reached conclusions about the global economy that the traditional Left did not agree with, they were at least substantive arguments, reinforced by a crop of new think tanks, including the Institute for Public Policy Research and Demos, to match the more established ones on the Right.

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By Dan Evans

I say this with some jealousy: Corbynism had no want of academics, but landing, as it did, from a clear blue sky in the summer of 2015, the movement had to be assembled on the fly from the equivalent of bits of string and Fairy Liquid bottles. The one think tank whose radical history left it perfectly positioned to provide some intellectual heft and direction, the New Economics Foundation, where I used to work, chose instead a path of obscurity under Blue Labour veteran Marc Stears. The result was that where we might have had an intellectual anchor, we instead had an empty space. Corbynism lacked a deeper, shared understanding of the society in which we lived and a longer-term strategy for a future government.

This absence was felt keenly. Serious time and resources were put into developing economic policy, with detailed proposals on banking, finance and novel ideas such as a Universal Basic Income. If there’s an unexpected legacy for Corbynism, it is the step-change in the intellectual quality and focus of the British Left’s policy work. A new Left party, a rejuvenated Greens under Zack Polanski, or both together, are in a far stronger position today as a result. On this intellectual confidence and purpose, as on much else — promises of greater public spending, surges in party members, and general election votes — Corbynism and New Labour were far closer to each other than either is to Starmerism.

By contrast, Starmer has next to nothing. The closest thing to an authentically Starmer-aligned think tank, Labour Together, has seen funding cuts and redundancies since the election. Insiders have reported that it has become “listless”, without “purpose or sense of direction”, and has lost around one in six of its staff since the summer. The rest of the centre-left policy shops have either all kept some distance from the Government, or been kept at some distance. The tendency that has had the most obvious impact on Starmerism is from well outside the Left, in the form of the Yimbys whose demands for planning deregulation have been widely repeated by the Government. The odd senior think tanker has moved over to Downing Street or some ministerial advisory role, but there’s no systematic attempt at forging a Starmerite consensus equivalent to Blair’s promotion of the “Third Way”. The Prime Minister’s defenders claim this is a pragmatic government — choosing whatever works — but the reality is that in the absence of a clear orientation, Labour has ended up permanently on the back foot.

“Starmerism”, such as it is, represents a return to Labour’s lowest common denominator: what Perry Anderson in the Sixties called a “complacent confusion of influence with power, bovine admiration for bureaucracy, ill-concealed contempt for equality, bottomless philistinism”. Labour’s principled, socialist past is still mythologised today, but at its birth, as the “Labour Representation Committee”, conservative trade union leaders squeezed out the radicals. Founded in reality on the principles of compromise and subordination, Labour’s first Parliamentary breakthrough in 1906 was the result of a secret deal struck between its leaders, Ramsay MacDonald and Keir Hardie, with the Liberal Party. The party’s first government was a confused mess; its next ended in a catastrophic split that saw MacDonald leading a majority-Conservative National Government. It took further Left-wing splits and a world war to knock Labour into shape. But it has never lost its roots: a party born, as postwar Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin put it, “from the bowels of the TUC” has always had an ingrained suspicion of not only socialism, but abstract ideas and big picture thinking in general. If it had tolerated a Left wing, it was because, in a stable two-party system, elections could not usually be won without it.

The wrinkle is that Starmer was himself once keenly interested in ideas and in the Left. In the Eighties, he sat on the editorial board of a well-produced green-tinged Left magazine, Socialist Alternatives, which was closely aligned with the iconoclastic post-Trotskyist International Revolutionary Marxist Tendency. Later, he was better known as a prominent Left-wing barrister. When it came to his 2020 leadership bid, he could successfully leverage this illustrious past, promising Corbynism without Corbyn to a still-raw Labour membership. He has since done everything possible to distance himself from his own history.

He got lucky. After two years of drift, Liz Truss’ implosion at the hands of the Bank of England gifted Labour a majority. But without any serious work — an attempt to build deep roots, to win over broad swathes of the population, and to develop a coherent program for government — they would win a “sandcastle majority”, easily swept away with the turning of the tide. On some level, it seems clear now that Starmer and those around him really did believe they could rock up in Downing Street, declare the grown-ups to be back in charge, and wait for economic growth to return. This suggests an extraordinary level of naiveté about the British state and economy — as if all we needed to do was apply a new lick of paint, rather than rip out the rotten wood and rewire the entire house. It has left this government, more than any in recent memory, totally at the mercy of dysfunctional core state institutions like the Treasury and the Bank of England.

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Labour’s soft-Left insurgency

By James Meadway

The damage has already been immense, as Reform surges in the polls and turns over councils that had been in Labour hands for generations. It is not certain the party will last much beyond this Parliament, at least in its current form. This could be considered a tragedy. Hundreds of thousands of selfless and public-spirited people have given their time to the party, and many still continue to do so. Millions of voters in Britain, over decades, have trusted it with their support. In office, the party has delivered meaningful, even transformational, change for the good of the country, whether in establishing the NHS, the Equal Pay Act, or — and we should acknowledge this — in the socially liberal reforms of New Labour. Even its shorter-term reforms — the Sure Start centers or the significant boost to schools funding under Blair — had a positive impact while they lasted.

But the worst of Labour has been grim, and often arrived with the best. Blair had Iraq and the war on terror. Attlee had Malaya and Partition. Starmer has Gaza, and — he is unique in this respect, a Labour leader like no other, not even Blair — no contrasting upside. And if the economic projections of the Office for Budget Responsibility are to be believed, nor will he find one. The “achievements” the party leadership points to, primarily the addition of four million extra NHS appointments, are threadbare. Rishi Sunak saw an even bigger improvement in numbers during his last year in office.

Starmer will likely get votes at 16 through. This is not nothing, but not remotely approaching the scale of constitutional reform managed by New Labour, or even that proposed by Gordon Brown’s Commission in 2023 which was studiously ignored by Starmer in government. The Assisted Dying Bill has become a poorly managed farce — troubling for an issue so manifestly serious. Rhetorical flourishes about Starmer taking on the “bulging benefits bill” that is apparently “blighting society” end up as just that. Markets correctly smell frailty.

All the while, whispers of a leadership challenge grow louder. Labour MPs nervously look at their thin majorities — more than ever before have less than 5% as a buffer — and ponder their future. The much-admired Andy Burnham has been speaking far beyond his brief as Mayor of Manchester, and reportedly has a quick route back to Parliament, should the need arise. Angela Rayner’s leaked memo, setting out tax-raising alternatives to Rachel Reeves’ spending cuts, will not have hurt her leadership ambitions. But any leadership contender now requires the signatures of 80 MPs to stand, after changes brought in under Starmer: in a deeply factionalized Parliamentary Party this excludes anyone but the more milquetoast or leadership-approved from the ballot. The talk, over the past few weeks, was that Starmer loyalist Shabana Mahmood had been recruited as campaign chair for Wes Streeting.

The Blairite Health Secretary is unusual amongst Labour MPs in being a genuine ideologue. Streeting has ideas about the world, and some desire to put them into practice. He would present Labour with the sharp break with its own past that New Labour never managed — he could finally complete the Blair Revolution. There are examples of this transformation elsewhere: Italy’s pure centrist Democratic Party were once the Democrats of the Left, and before that the million-strong Italian Communist Party. There is maybe 20% of the electorate who, as in Italy, could be persuaded to vote reliably along these lines: typically better off, more often employed in the public sector, moderate on foreign policy, and given something of a Blue Labour gloss to (it would hope) ward off Reform. This version of Labour could, in principle, leverage that support to claw its way out of the current political chaos as the dominant partner in future coalition governments. With a new Corbyn/Sultana party and the Greens to its Left, the political logic for a British “Democratic Party” is clear. There is a route out of Starmer’s quagmire, but it will require a conclusive break. A break to the Left inside the party has been made impossible; a break to the Right is all that remains.

The chaotic announcement of a new party co-led with Zarah Sultana, one of the few surviving Corbynist MPs, arrived swiftly on the heels of a major Left-led Parliamentary rebellion against the Government’s welfare reforms. The potential significance of a Left revival is reflected in Keir Starmer’s latest attempt to reassert his authority via another round of suspensions from the Parliamentary Labour Party, including Diane Abbott.

The only real surprise is how long it took for Corbynism 2.0 to get its act together: for all the shortcomings of the first version, the ideas that drove the movement have subsequently become common sense across an increasingly postliberal political spectrum. On all sides, it is now assumed that the purpose of the state is to protect a national community of producers from a parasitic globalism, and that social problems can be reduced to populist oppositions between the “many” and the “few”.

Corbyn’s much mocked post-election claim that he “won the argument” is, to an extent, true. He was, as it turns out, on the “right side of history” — albeit not, perhaps, in the way his supporters like to think.

Somewhat awkwardly, given the anti-capitalist pretensions of Corbynism, its history is that of capitalist development itself. After the 2008 crisis instigated the unravelling of neoliberalism, the consensus across global and political divides today seems to be that only a more state-driven economy — with greater barriers to the movement of goods and people — can keep the capitalist show on the road. In retrospect, it is clear that Corbynism was rubbing with the grain rather than against it.

But if Corbynism 1.0 failed to capitalize on this prescience, will it do any better second time round? As in 2015, any new party’s success depends on whether it is able to keep together the disparate, at times contradictory, elements of its support long enough to exploit the possibilities opened up by a rapidly fragmenting electoral system.

Corbynism was never politically coherent. As we charted in 2018, it emerged from a diverse mix of ideological and organisational elements, each raging in their own way against the End of History. This spanned two sets of struggles straddling the financial crisis. From the pre-2008 period, vague liberal-Left anti-Iraq war and pro-Second Intifada sentiment combined with a sectarianism that was variously Leninist and, in certain localities, Islamist. Post-2008, meanwhile, saw a newer, younger Left opposed to austerity and welfare cuts led initially by the horizontalist likes of Occupy and the student movement, before being co-opted by the trade union machine in the Miliband era.

Back then, the fractious components of the Corbyn coalition could only be glued together by the persona of “Jezza” himself. Whereas other figureheads would have been too precise about their worldview to please the motley crew the movement assembled, Corbyn’s moralistic platitudes about peace and justice seemed to create a common, if vague, cause.

A superficially Marxist friend-enemy distinction buttressed this worldview: the idea that society was divided between the 99% and the 1%. Crossed with a crude anti-imperialism fixated on the malevolent power of “the hand of Israel”, this Manicheanism created a favourable environment for the antisemitism found within parts of the movement. But it also gave Corbynism momentum, propagating a Left-wing version of Brexit based on state aid and protectionist barriers to the movement of capital, goods and people.

The difficulty this Lexit iteration of Corbynism faced was that the political divides it dealt in were exploited with much greater dynamism by an equally populist Right, which had a clearer path for how to put some of the same policy principles into practice. By the time of the 2019 election, voters could get what they really wanted elsewhere, red in tooth and claw on issues — principally borders and national security — that the Left were squeamish about confronting.

The election defeat was followed by Starmer’s ruthless program of de-Corbynisation which left its remnants cowed and adrift. Populist without being popular, Leftist intellectuals and policy thinkers rooted around for a new friend-enemy distinction around which to anchor Corbynism without Corbyn.

A listless Left turned inwards, seeking divides within and between the people that incorporated an ever-smaller part of the population on the “right side of history”. After the Brighton-based Northern Independence Party’s farcical attempt to pit ferret-wielding Northerners against the bowler-hatted South, some Corbynites landed on a cleavage between young urban graduates, radicalised by the novel experience of renting and precarious work, and their more conservative parents in the countryside, on whom the young waited for intergenerational transfers of wealth.

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But a political gambit based on the fleeting social demobility of a young middle class, only an inheritance away from growing old in suburbia, was always set to be transient. It never had a chance to prove itself anyway. Labour’s landslide in 2024 proved the political efficiency of seeking votes from across these apparent rural-urban divides.

Starmer’s victory effectively banished Corbynism back to its primordial pre-2015 state — a disconnected mess in search of a cohering force. It was possible, however, to make out its future form in a handful of highly localized harbingers: victories of various independent candidates, the not-insignificant challenges faced by Wes Streeting and Starmer himself in their own constituencies, and Corbyn holding onto his Islington seat.

The current wave of post-Corbyn Corbynism emerged from the Left’s response to Hamas’s October 7 attacks and Israel’s subsequent brutal war in Gaza, with Palestine increasingly seen as the centripetal force around which the future of the planet is organized.

Just as the mythology of Corbyn’s career — singlehandedly overturning apartheid and bringing peace to Northern Ireland — had political utility in the past, so does the Left’s enchanted image of Palestine bring shape to the same chaos of incompatible interests today — ranging from religious sectarians to social justice campaigners. Amid reports of creative differences with Corbyn over the timing and structure of any new party, Zarah Sultana’s gamble seems to be that “Gaza” might replace “Jezza” as the conceptual glue of the Left’s coming political coalition, with Sultana becoming the new bearer of the “right side of history”. Instead of vague homilies to peace and justice, Sultana offers a more precise and direct appeal: “We are all Palestine Action”. The aim is no longer to rally a mass movement, but sharpen the wedge and activate a vanguard that can meet the low bar set for electoral success now that leadership of a major social democratic party is safely out of bounds.

We’ve seen some of these electoral experiments before, from “Respect” to the “People’s Alliance of the Left”. They tend to be led by people who, despite seeing themselves as Trotsky-style strategic geniuses, draw upon little experience of political success and operate in a state of militant obscurity happily disconnected from public opinion. The legacy of Corbyn’s leadership of one of the country’s traditional parties of government, however, means the current provisional committee for a new party begins with a pool of existing MPs and muscle memory of steering a mass movement. Beyond this, precisely which social and political divides this iteration of Corbynism seeks to exploit is unclear. Without any capacity to convincingly call upon a “people” or “many” as its core constituency, the Left has little to say on the national stage other than “nobody likes us and we don’t care”.

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And yet, the contradictory character of the array of actors that Sultana-Corbynism seeks to bring together could actually act as an advantage in a multi-party electoral geography. As mass politics crumbles except possibly among the populist Right, the eking out of small victories in specific localities shaped by particular demographic dynamics could still make heavy political weather.

The new Left tendencies within UK politics would not need to take votes from Labour in every constituency to pose a problem to a disoriented governing party and sway debates in their direction. Local challengers would place further pressure on a new crop of Labour MPs often reluctant to support government positions unpopular with their constituents, for example on welfare or foreign policy.

Despite attempts by Starmer to instill collective discipline, the threat of a Left party would provide cover for breaking with Government over decisions MPs would rather not have to make. These would concern issues that Corbynism presents as being merely a matter of political will: legal and illegal migration, the deprioritization of some budgets to make way for defense and security commitments, and the development of a leaner, meaner public sector.

In these respects, then, perhaps a rebooted version of Corbynism has the opportunity to prosper in ways it could not before precisely by reducing its reliance on the figure of Corbyn himself and dispensing with a belief in mass social and political dividing lines that typically bear little electoral fruit.

The issue is that there is a very fragile potential coalition to hold together. It is set to include socially conservative Gaza independents with whom Corbyn sits in Parliament, Leninist organizers and operators with whom he has long surrounded himself, plus socially liberal young Leftists who likely feel the pull of the Green Party under a potential Zack Polanski leadership. In the intense social media heat of how views are aired and policed on the Left today — something Corbynism 1.0 did not have to reckon with in 2015 — even the magnetic pull of Palestine may not prevent this coalition from crumbling.

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And so while the new Left party is unlikely to pose any immediate threat to the Starmer government, it does raise the question of how, buffeted between threats from Right and Left, the governing party should deal with the potential split in its ranks.

Labour, too, casts about for its own friend-enemy divisions in anticipation of a Farage- or Jenrick-led surge towards 2029. Half the trouble here is that the Government finds it hard to say precisely who is going to lose from the policies they announce. Who will sit out the retooling of the state? Which sectors of economic activity will have to make way for defense reindustrialization? Understandably occupied with pacifying an election-winning coalition drawn from across the country’s fissured service-driven economy, few in Labour seem prepared to spell it out.

Pragmatically, the best bet might be to identify an enemy without, rather than an enemy within, in the shape of geopolitical rivals in Russia and elsewhere. The Government can plausibly point to the inability of the populist Left and Right alike to offer anything other than dividing lines within our own society rather than a story that can unify against a common threat. Indeed, the rise of a new Left party may enable Labour to link the dividing line without to a dividing line within, pointing to its rivals’ refusal to take seriously national security and their discomfort about any obvious commitment to the protection of liberal democracy.

Ironically, translating this rhetorical pitch into practice requires the Government to advance a radical political-economic offer itself reminiscent of the productivist and protectionist policies the party espoused, at points, under Corbyn and his Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell. The difference is that now such policies are driven not by the belief that they will overturn democratic capitalism but by the necessity of its defense.

Back in 2018, we were skeptical about claims from those such as Jonathan Rutherford and Maurice Glasman that the only alternative to Corbynism was Blue Labour. We argued that there was still a viable soft-Left path to the preservation of a global liberal order based on rule of law and international openness — a politics with which Starmer himself is sometimes now associated. Although an avenue may be opening with the first stirrings of post-Brexit European solidarity in the face of Russian aggression, such a route has been largely foreclosed by a global experience of defeat.

Today, for a lack of other options, the future of the Left once again appears to face a choice between Corbynism and Blue Labour — but on different terms. Last time around, the two tendencies represented rival attempts to reconstruct the same postwar social and economic compromise, based on the production of physical goods rooted in particular places rather than the distribution of the revenues of services generated anywhere in the world. Today, Corbynism, with or without Corbyn, is ceding this common ground precisely at the time when geopolitical circumstances make it most vital. Instead, it busies itself with building a minor political vision confined to selective social and foreign policy issues.

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Some former Corbynites, however, have adjusted themselves to the new reality by retaining a radical vision for political economy while putting it in service of a new seriousness on national security — the journalist Paul Mason, for example. Recovering Corbynite MP Dan Carden, meanwhile, has become among the most powerful proponents of Blue Labour’s postliberal politics of production in the Parliamentary Labour Party. His transition from “Red” Labour to “Blue” is less surprising than it seems to some once the performative politics are stripped away for the substantive policies.

Such voices on Left and Right alike today advance a similar vision of state-led reindustrialization focused on bringing jobs back within the UK’s borders to places battered by a relentless Treasury fixation on abstract economic growth concentrated in cities. In the long run, this increasingly hegemonic vision of a state-led national economy of producers may well be as chimerical as the fantastical images that have held Corbynism together. But, in the world as it is, rather than the world as we would like it to be, this is the contested terrain upon which Labour now has to fight.

The recent Industrial Strategy, Strategic Defence Review and National Security Strategy documents do some of this work, on the policy side at least. But without a truly political component, political economy is just plain old economics. These policies must be framed within an active argument about the future of the country and its place in the world for Labour to play the field and win from a position of incumbency. To navigate the hegemony of a postliberal moment, Labour must make the case for why what remains of liberal society must be defended against a populist challenge posed not only from the Right, but from the Left, as well.

While tacking to the progressive soft-Left may be easier to stomach, Labour forgets at its peril the need to compete with the Right on concerns around civil order and economic protection. In this sense the leftwards pressure of Sultana-Corbynism, whatever form it eventually takes and however low the bar is set for success, may not bring about the return of the Left so much as the defeat of the center by a resurgent Right. If history always progresses on its bad side — as Marx and Engels suggested — then, as in 2019, Corbynism may well find itself on the “Right” side of a wrong history once again.

This down-at-heel cosmopolitan community, home to immigrants, artists and students, had always been poor but peaceful. Yet on that afternoon 20 years ago, something had changed. The atmosphere was tense: the familiar sounds of Asian music, reverberating from youthful sound systems, had been replaced by a chorus of police sirens, and the colorful aura of the storefronts was lit up by flashing blue lights.

It was 12 July, and earlier that morning residents had been forced to evacuate their homes following the discovery of a bomb factory in a nearby flat at Alexandra Grove. The unkept hovel in question could have been any student digs. But instead of alcohol and pizza boxes, the rooms contained enough explosive material to devastate this entire neighborhood. The rudimentary devices which had brutally torn through the lives of 52 victims in London the week before had been made here.

The strong police presence was met with mixed emotions. You could sense the hostility as both Makkah Masjid and the local Leeds Grand Mosque were ransacked by investigators seeking to understand the teachings and instruction which had radicalized four men from this city. This, in turn, was met by the fear of reprisals against local Muslims.

Like many of my generation, I had watched the televised violence of 9/11 in horror. Yet while that act of terrorism marked all our lives, it was still a tragedy that had played out over there. What was taking place in Leeds on that summer morning for years later, was the “War on Terror” coming home. As Zygmunt Bauman put it, that which was global, was truly local — especially the new forms of violence it was creating.

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Acts of terror have always been about communication. The images of destruction carry a powerful message, and the acts rely heavily on symbolism. If the abiding image of 9/11 was that of the planes striking the Twin Towers, in London, it was the pictures of the ripped-apart bus which left an indelible scar on Britain’s collective consciousness.

Terrorism, as 7/7 showed us, wasn’t just about a fear of the unknown. It was about weaponizing the familiar and intimate — turning the everyday into the source of nightmares.

Even though this played out all those years ago, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it could all happen again. Similar forces and dynamics are still at work amid our communities, and are arguably more dangerous still. The processes required to prevent such violence are being lost within our divisive political landscape. The Prevent Strategy, for example, launched by Labour in response to the 9/11 attacks, has been met with criticism from all sides for failing to stop radicalization, instead alienating minority communities. And governments, from Tony Blair onward, have struggled to get to grips with community alienation and failure to integrate.

Blair, who was PM on 7/7, left office tainted by his entanglements in the Middle East. Today, the United Kingdom risks being ineluctably drawn into an even more fraught conflict with Iran, even as events in the region remain our most divisive political concern. We only have to look at the continuing protests in London to see how explosive the issue has become, with Keir Starmer struggling to deal in a constructive way the debate on Palestine.

Things were quite different at the turn of the 21st century. We were only just realizing we had entered into an age marked by the catastrophic actions of individuals, to say nothing of the worrying limits of liberal multiculturalism. It no longer took an army of millions to bring about a global security crisis, just a handful of radicalized individuals. Their ability to disrupt was amplified by the power of the media and the attention it permitted.

In some ways, we have learned how to address these acts of violence, seen again at Manchester Arena in 2017, and not treat it as a threat to our entire way of life, as Tony Blair did. In an article for Foreign Affairs, the then PM explicitly linked the “War on Terror” to a battle for global values. Today, we more readily see these as the acts of deranged individuals.

But is the focus on lone wolves naive? The radicalization of potentially dangerous individuals is arguably a deeper problem than ever before across the political spectrum. Back in 2006, don’t forget, mobile phones were still primitive, and Facebook had only just carried out its first pilot roll-out. Twitter was yet to be launched. Yet if the early years of the War on Terror fostered a “with-us-or-against-us” mentality, part of the official doctrine, the tribalism of our social media-enabled politics today is far more divisive, dogmatic and assured.

The subsequent penetration of smartphones and social media into our every day has enabled a politics of immediacy that exacerbates divisions and amplifies calls for violence, even as it further hampers social solidarity. The first decade of the War on Terror placed too much importance on simplistic “Clash of Civilizations” narratives — which ended up in the widespread demonization of Islam. But the calamitous corrective to this has been to insist there is no correlation between Islamic teachings and violence and oppression.

We have only to look at the disastrous response to the Southport attacks, and the catastrophic mishandling of the investigation into grooming gangs, to see how the politics of correctness fuels the rise of counter-parasitical movements feeding off similar feelings of anger and resentment. If it is ridiculous to claim, for instance, that all followers of any belief system fully advocate violence, it is equally absurd to claim it has no relation whatsoever to acts of slaughter and the quashing of basic rights. No political or religious project or identity should be immune from criticism: they can all become violent and oppressive.

The problem here is that when it comes to Islam, the Labour Party still doesn’t know how to deal with it, happily promoting social liberalism while also making criticism of the more violent strands of Islam still harder. All the while, cities such as Bradford and Leeds are becoming increasingly segregated, in terms of lives, religion and politics. All across Britain, meanwhile, identity politics is more divisive than ever. Battlelines have been drawn and are fought over by those who insist they are on the right side of history.

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Twenty years on, then, we have far less confidence in our leaders and a feeling of despair surrounds the idea of multiculturalism — a feeling that politicians on both sides of the political divide will be inclined to weaponize. Indeed, while the War on Terror simply withered away, we are none the wiser as to why youngsters are radicalized. This was spelled out in the Government’s official report into the attack. It stated: “What we know of previous extremists in the UK shows that there is not a consistent profile to help identify who may be vulnerable to radicalization”. This, too, has been borne out in Prevent’s continued failure to target and defuse potential suspects.

Today, then, political positions are hardening. We have a far more organized far-Right movement, and on the Left, we see the new divisions forming, as with the rise of the Independent Alliance, which will once again place identity and the question of foreign policy front and center. Meanwhile, the possibility of further terrorist attacks can’t be ruled out. It is amid such moments of political febrility that the idea of civil war doesn’t seem so fantastic. We should remember that, as we remember those who perished 20 years ago.

A few days ago, I found myself on Tavistock Square in London. There is no sense that such a horrific event took place on these sun baked streets. Nor, as I traveled through Edgware Road Station, did I suspect that others on the train would be remembering those images from within the blown out carriage, as the smoke billowed from a smoldering blackness. It is all too easy to forget such appalling horrors: the victims, their families, the rescue workers who had to confront the unimaginable.

If we are to do justice to the memory of 7/7, then, it is not only to follow a ritual of remembrance. It is to remember that the forces that led to the detonation of those bombs 20 years ago aren’t extinguished. And that Britain today is contending with rising disenchantment. We need political leaders who will defuse this dangerous moment, not light the touchpaper. We don’t want to become the unwitting authors of another catastrophe.

Rishi Sunak surprised almost everyone by calling a snap election in May, including the former Labour leader — who remained a party member but had lost the party whip in 2020. It was clear he would never be permitted to stand for Labour again, but as Sunak stood outside No. 10 — resembling a bedraggled school prefect — Corbyn moved quickly. Two days later he announced he would run as an independent. The party he first joined in 1965 was firmly in his sights.

For many, the move against Corbyn several years earlier was primarily driven by the desire to break with his socialist politics. Indeed, it was the first in a series of moves that the leadership undertook to defang the party’s Left. Later came top-down deselections of Faiza Shaheen and Lloyd Russell-Moyle, while Sam Tarry lost a close vote with the controversial “Anonyvoter” system being deployed. And yet, in the election itself, confounding historical precedent, Corbyn  – as an independent – retained his seat. The battle for Labour, and the future of the British Left, had begun.

Expelled from the party, and outside the tent, Corbyn is arguably more trouble for Starmer. He now sits under his own flag, alongside four other outsiders propelled to Parliament by their opposition to austerity and trenchant criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza. And while their election campaigns weren’t coordinated, these five independents are now getting organised, announcing a formal Independent Alliance earlier this month. That makes them the fifth largest grouping in Westminster. Alongside four Green members, moreover, theirs is the largest gathering of “Left of Labour” MPs in history. What was initially an inchoate rejection of Starmer across a grab-bag of seats is becoming a national movement.

Worse still for Labour, this all began during what was supposed to be the pinnacle of Starmer’s appeal. Yet within three months of forming a government, one recent poll has Labour as low as 29%. Six-in-ten voters now say the Prime Minister can’t be trusted and, most remarkably of all, Starmer is less popular than Rishi Sunak.

Not that the Conservatives will benefit from Labour’s deepening woes. Despite his penchant for freebie designer glasses, the public still views Starmer more favourably than leader wannabes Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick and James Cleverly. More broadly, the electorate remains more critical of the Tories than Labour. All those years of ineptitude haven’t been forgotten overnight.

And it is that presumption — that winning consists of being the “least worst” option — which perhaps explains the decision to cut the Winter Fuel Allowance for 10 million pensioners. In a two-party system, all that matters is being slightly less despised than the other guys. But Britain is no longer a two-party system, something Labour ignores at its peril. With the Lib Dems, the country now has its largest third party for a century — business has even started paying attention to them — and the SNP are looking to hit back under stable leadership. Elsewhere, the Greens and Reform are now truly national players. It wasn’t just Carla Denyer saying Labour should scrap the two-child benefit cap, but Nigel Farage too. Despite having more than 400 seats, the optics are that Labour is not only at odds with the country, but that electoral alternatives are increasingly conspicuous.

Yet the biggest problem for Starmer arguably remains his former comrade in Islington North, with Corbyn and his fellow independents a lightning rod for what was the Labour Left. The potential repercussions of his zero-tolerance approach on dissent can already be seen. Last month, Labour suspended seven MPs after they voted in favour of an SNP amendment to scrap the two-child benefit cap. A day later, Corbyn and his band of merry men signed a joint letter in support of those rebels, saying they looked forward to working together — and that they represented an alternative to the two establishment parties. The subtext was obvious: leave Labour and sit with us.

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But as Starmer’s difficult inheritance becomes clearer, there will be increasing dissent within the party as to how he approaches various challenges. Those who disagree with the party line are already considering other options — including the Independent Alliance. In August, Labour announced its membership had fallen below 400,000 for the first time in a decade. For the party’s Right — anti-democratic fixers by disposition — that is considered a good thing. But many of those leaving will go elsewhere and campaign against the red rose. In Chingford, Faiza Shaheen, whose independent campaign denied Labour the seat in July — it was held by the Tory incumbent, Iain Duncan Smith — has several hundred supporters who have left the party with her. If Shaheen chooses to stand at the next general election that could matter.

For socialist MPs in parliament, subject to intimidation from the party machine, joining the Independent Alliance is less risky than it might sound. For those seven suspended MP’s, for example, the choice is not between standing with either Corbyn or Starmer at the next election — but being an MP at all. In all likelihood, if they continue to rebel, the Prime Minister and his retinue will use the same tactics they deployed against Shaheen earlier this year, and failed using against Diane Abbott: as soon as an election is called, their candidacy will be revoked by the party’s NEC. The sensible solution — from a purely self-interested perspective — is for those such as John McDonnell and Zarah Sultana to assume they’ll never be allowed to stand under the Labour banner again. As that becomes clearer expect them to sit alongside Corbyn.

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A wider recognition of Starmer’s authoritarian style among Labour MPs will test his disciplinary approach. Rosie Duffield, hardly on the party’s Left, has already said she owes more to her constituents than the PM. This is dangerous ground for Starmer, who needs his big majority if he wants to address difficult challenges like the housing crisis. Some will stand up to Starmer — playing a game of political chicken in the knowledge there is an alternative with Corbyn. Meanwhile other, less courageous MPs, will pretend that abstention is somehow an act of defiance (more than 50 Labour MPs abstained on the Winter Fuel Allowance Bill). But that will prove bad politics — with a poor voting record manna for independent challengers at the next general election. Had Jess Philips not defied the party whip on calling for a ceasefire, for instance, she would most probably have lost her seat.

My bet is that a new party won’t happen, even with Corbyn open to the possibility. The strength of the five independents is that they are masters of what they don’t say: their platform of opposition to war, support for public services and criticism of Israel is overwhelmingly popular with the median Labour voter. Having a more detailed programme, where they’re liable to disagree among themselves over things such as LTNs or biodiversity, comes with too many downsides. An expanded alliance of independents at the next General Election — which does politics in the broadest of strokes — makes the most sense for now.

While covering the Batley and Spen by-election in 2021, I had the chance to meet some of Batley’s business families (the Yorkshire town is the cornerstone of the nation’s bed-making industry). Even then, it was clear that a generational shift was happening, especially in Muslim communities. “Our grandfathers voted Labour, but now we are saying it doesn’t have to be like that,” one told me. ”We want to shape things.” These are precisely the kinds of thick associational networks that powered independent candidates like Shockat Adam and Adnan Hussain to victory in Leicester South and Blackburn respectively. Because they are outside the M25, and don’t make sense through the prism of two-party politics, Westminster presumes they don’t matter. But soon they may have to sit up and notice.

Next year’s May elections will primarily focus on Tory-held county councils, so expect the Lib Dems, Greens and Reform to flourish. But elections in 2026, especially in Birmingham and London, could be a flashpoint for Starmer. As the Greens demonstrated before their success earlier this year, building power in councils is an effective first step to winning at Westminster. Wes Streeting and Jess Philips will be paying close attention.

This year, Labour’s victory wasn’t as definitive as it should have been. Their mandate was achieved with only 33.5% of the vote. Five years from now, they could still win a decent majority, albeit on an even smaller share of the vote. But to their Left there could be dozens of coordinated independents and Green Party MPs. As the contours of national politics shift, such figures could yet prove as influential as Reform, whether that is peeling off angry voters on issues such as corporate pay, inequality and cuts to the welfare state, or more potentially Tory-coded issues such as failing to clean up Britain’s rivers and coastlines.

For the first time in its history, the Labour Party is exposed on its Left, as well as its Right. This resets the parameters for what “centrism” actually means — a significant shift given the absence of a compelling orthodoxy at present. The Tory majority of 2019 proved to be volatile, and fleeting. And with Corbyn and his awkward squad snapping at its heels, come the next election, Labour may find itself in a similar position.

Jeremy Corbyn’s removal and non-personing has been meticulous. Incredible now how his name — “Corbyn to stand as an independent candidate”; “Corbyn considering running for Mayor of London” — comes at you from what feels like the past, even though he was party leader just three years ago. He is so faded from my consciousness, as indeed from the party, it’s like an acid flashback to a trip that started very promisingly, then went bad very quickly.

Those of us who voted for Corbyn in the 2015 Labour leadership election always liked his policies more than his personality: “irritable traffic warden”. But just remembering the energy of that first rush, after his hilarious elevation to leader, feels so weird and dislocating, the way quite a few things Before Covid now echo from a distant epoch. George Osborne editing the Evening Standard. Labour gaining 30 seats in a general election. Wait, did a political vacuum really open up, sucking in thousands and thousands of highly motivated young people, chanting “Oh Jeremy Corbyn” in a genuinely funny way to the “Seven Nation Army” riff? Was that really him on stage with Run The Jewels at Glastonbury? Was there a palpable sense that the Labour Party once again stood for nationalisation and a rebalancing of wealth from shareholders to citizens?

Yes, dear grandchildren, and I kind of miss whatever that was. “Corbynism” doesn’t seem quite right. I don’t miss Corbyn himself at all. He stood in a distinguished line of similarly totemic, charismaphobic Labour figures. Tony Benn was forever telling us politics was about “issues, not personalities” and he had a fervent following too, including me. Corbyn always seemed so peevish and impatient, stubborn and inflexible. And obviously nobody misses the shitty anti-Semitism, or the Corbitburo’s tetchy, flat-footed apology-via-denial. I don’t miss that chaotic bunker period before the 2019 election, when Labour HQ was panic-burping six new manifesto pledges a day — Milkshake Tax! Badger Amnesty! Municipal Wi-Fi!

Once upon a time I would have felt a surge of glee at the possible mischief of Don Quixotic having a tilt at the London mayoralty: why not, shake things up a bit. But we’ve all had quite enough of mischievous politics in the last four years or so, haven’t we? Particularly at the lying, contemptuous, wine o’clock, Christmas-jumper government level. If Corbyn did enter the race, it would be either tragic or hilarious, depending on which side of the culture war you’re on. Sadiq and Jeremy slugging it out to a pointless draw could seriously harm both of them and allow the Tory candidate in. And please, does London really deserve Call Me Susan, who says she’s political Marmite and who admires Liz Truss?

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Wes Streeting is a man for all factions

By Ian Martin

The contrast between Starmer and Corbyn is striking, considering their very different attitudes to floating voters. Starmer would, it seems, do anything to win the approval of Conservative voters, a section of society Corbyn clearly scorned. But just as the current leader is winning admirers from a wide political spectrum, so Corbyn gathered respect from the most unlikely places. We’ve recently discovered how fond Rory Stewart is, but I was astonished in 2015 to read a piece by Peter Hitchens in praise of the old git.

Hitchens had gone along to Great St Mary’s church in Cambridge, one of the stops on Corbyn’s never-ending public speaking tour, the absolute sweet spot in his comfort zone; he found “a shuffling queue of Soviet length”. The church, as with every venue on the tour, was massively oversubscribed. “I warmed to Mr Corbyn personally for two things,” Hitchens wrote. “One was the unaffected, barely conscious way he bent down to scratch the head of a dog belonging to someone in the crowd. The other was when he acknowledged the majesty of the setting, the beautiful heart of one of the loveliest places in England, at sunset.” Even his opponents seemed to recognise a decent bloke. Part of that respect was grounded in the idea that Corbyn stuck to his principles, whereas Starmer is demonstrably willing to bend to win.

I too went to one of those Corbyn On Tour gigs, priority seating reserved for party members. Lancaster’s massive Priory Church, stuffed to its ancient ribs with what looked like the city’s entire middle class. That was the first reality check: where were the horny-handed sons and daughters of actual labour who would power the revolution? I could understand how the Cambridge event might mobilise the bourgeoisie, but clearly the old Dumbledore magic was strong in the North West too. Corbyn emerged to the sort of reception reserved for national treasures, and then, oh God, he started his speech. Obviously, it was the same speech he was doing every night, instead of his actual job. It was increasingly acknowledged by supporters, even at the peak of his popularity, that he was shit at politics but great at preaching. I found him strangely underwhelming, a political curate sermonising from memory.

His words reverberated in the sacred air. He would make the case for a public good, explain the current situation and what should be done to improve matters, reaching an emotional peroration: “and that’s why…” One item on his setlist was music teaching in schools. “And that’s why every single pupil deserves the right to learn an instrument!” This blew the roof off, huge applause. A little later he was into his stride about how British manufacturing had been destroyed by global capitalism, how steelworkers had been sold out by successive governments, and he was dead right. “And that’s why we need to rebuild Britain’s steel industry!” I started clapping, along with two or three other egregious muppets. Our light, quickly-halted smattering carried the social shame of philistines applauding in the wrong place at a classical music concert. Lesson learned: clarinet lessons good, steel industry bad.

Nevertheless, on the morning of the 2017 general election we local volunteers had a spring in our step, leafleting in the pouring rain. The local Labour party HQ was buzzing with hope. Then later, the exhilaration of the exit polls, the narrowness of the defeat. Theresa May forced into a costly Confidence and Supply arrangement with the fun-loving DUP. That’s the point, in retrospect, when Corbyn should have said he’d taken the party as far-Left as he could, accepted that the game was up and that it was clear he was essentially a rebel and definitely not a leader, handed over to someone younger and ideally of a different sex. Angela Rayner would have been a good bet, except of course for her Blairite credentials — as a teenage mother she was an early and grateful recipient of support from her local Sure Start centre. Maybe anyone would have done; nobody, as it turned out, could have been any worse than he was at the job after 2017.

The morning of the 2019 Get Brexit Done election was the antithesis of 2017. Despair was in the air, the messaging supply lines were broken, Corbyn was mostly hiding. I was out leafleting again, but nobody seemed to have a grip on strategy or logistics. One householder remonstrated with us more in bafflement than in anger — we were delivering the third batch of identical leaflets in the space of two days. Corbyn and his team were reduced to the status of a Downfall meme.

And now everything’s set fair for an incoming Labour government. Conference will be a dress rehearsal, a victory parade in advance. And yes, I suppose once in power, Starmer can only become more radical, having already moonwalked several yards to the Right of One Nation Tories. He could not have differentiated himself more decisively from his predecessor, who wanted to do a soft-shoe shuffle in the opposite direction.

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Why I've given up on the Conservatives

By Aris Roussinos

Now it’s Starmertime, and I’ll vote Labour, of course I will. I’ve voted Labour at every general election since 1974, my first, when we managed to heave nautical Tory Europhile Ted Heath overboard. Sixties legend Harold Wilson was reinstalled, but ill health caused him to be replaced by the bumbling Jim Callaghan, whose chief purpose in retrospect seems to have been as a music hall warm-up act for Margaret Thatcher. Our son was born in 1979; he would live in a Tory Britain until he was 18.

I can’t imagine not voting Labour. If I lived in a marginal and the only hope of hosing out a Tory was to vote Vichy Democrat, I’d hold my nose and do it. But our MP is brilliant, and has established a sound majority. Likewise, I can’t imagine not despairing of Labour. It’s too mad, or too managerial, or too boring, or far too keen to freeze out the interesting headbangers. It’s always felt slightly like being in an abusive relationship. The party can change. There are still good times. Everything will be better once they’re back in power.

Yet again this year I renewed my party membership, eventually. I say renewed, but nobody at local, regional or national level had answered any of the dozen or so emails I sent in response to the reminder, so by the time I got through to someone at Labour’s near-impenetrable centre of operations my membership had lapsed and I had to rejoin. Five years ago, an energetic young person would have rung me to ask if I was renewing but they seem to have drifted off. Starmer and his top table need to remember what powered the brief Corbyn reign: youth. It’s all very well looking at psephological forecasts and laughing about how the Tories are literally dying out. But where are the young people? They are not chanting Starmer’s name. They are not cheering his airless prose. I say this as an old man who would welcome upheaval. Still, head down, one foot in front of the other, let’s win the next one and prepare for disappointment. God, being Labour’s hard work.

Labour’s class of 2017, of which I am a member, has struggled through the past few years of Brexit legislation, the Corbyn era, our party’s greatest election defeat in history, the shame of both antisemitism and the Forde report, and the virtual-voting lockdown Covid parliament.

We are no longer the new kids. We have graduated to “middle school” and are starting to establish ourselves as members of the Shadow Cabinet, junior prefects, Head Girls and Boys under our current Headmaster. This week, he doled out the Senior School roles first, then the prefects and milk monitors were appointed. Our sports teams were fully filled and kitted out for the start of the new competition season.

It’s always fascinating to watch from the sidelines as this charade plays out.

First comes the not-so-subtle toadying up to teachers (aka lobbying), then the speculation and rumours, followed by the seething rage as current shadow ministers have to endure the humiliating and crude discourtesy of reading another’s appointment to their role via a Labour Party tweet. Watch them quietly boiling away for days, with a rictus grin plastered on as they wait to announce themselves “thrilled” with whatever’s left. Which kind of begs the question: how did they grin and bear the past 10 months or two years as Minister for Endangered Birds if what they really longed for was to be Minister for Ethical Fashion?

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The Labour Party has a woman problem

By Rosie Duffield

As somebody who wandered into this Hogwartian world from an ordinary job, I am a stranger to the dark art of “spin”. I do not come from a long and distinguished line of former wizards working at the Ministry of Magic, I did not get a scholarship here because my friends or family saved me a seat and I did not go to kindergarten with anyone who works in the Headmaster’s office.

So I watch with amusement at those who slotted into the very safest Labour seats — where they replaced disgraced, retiring or fed-up former colleagues — get promoted to the shadow frontbench after a mere handful of appearances in the chamber (of secrets) and without so much as attending even the first lesson in How to Communicate Well With Muggle Voters. Hardly the most obvious possessors of sparkling charisma or subject specialism, they are tweeting their gratitude before even the first chair is installed in their new offices. So what is their secret? What is the magic needed to proceed so effortlessly at such rapid speed?

I feel like a muggle. I do not possess that particular spell — it seems to be a closely guarded one, handed down through families or magical societies. But I’m not a dunce at this school. My own achievements may pale in comparison but I am proud of them: winning a seat never before held by a woman, or any member of my party; refusing to allow fear or threat or the silence of those around me to stop me from calling out antisemitism and telling the most basic of truths about male violence and biology. But more than that, I appear to have influenced not only Government policy but my own school rules as well. Something that I have been campaigning on, along with friends at other schools, has now made it into our mission statement. But I found out in the same way that those anointed to the front row did — through social media.

So, back in the real world, I will continue to fulfil the role I have been permanently cast in: the child announcing the Emperor is stark naked as he parades a new suit of clothes spun by a couple of charlatan tailors, versed at spinning tall tales to please those in power.

It’s the opening rally of Marxism 2023, the “festival of socialist ideas” organised by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). We are tightly gathered into the Quakers’ central hall at Friends House. But, unlike your traditional Quaker meeting (austere, silent, confessional), the mood is one of daring, colour, braggadocio. Speeches are interrupted by whooping applause, if not by collective chanting. Not a great deal of laughter though — in this place enthusiasm goes hand-in-hand with militancy. Side-lined from the Labour Party since the catastrophe of the 2019 election, the hard Left is no longer satisfied with the lucid registration of historical defeat. I’m told this is the biggest Marxism festival for a decade, since the crest of the post-Occupy and anti-austerity movements. But now the final disintegration of capitalism is nigh. They believe this is their time.

Never mind the old joke about socialism taking up too many evenings with dingy “meetings”. Marxism 2023 isn’t shy. Settling in for a long weekend of proselytising, it has booked out the blocks and quads of the entire SOAS campus. And aside from a brief scuffle with some far-Right counter-protesters, all goes smoothly. The Art Deco halls of Senate House are bedecked in posters. On the grass and patios a fleet of trestle tables has docked, groaning under the weight of revolutionary literature. An intergenerational crowd moves between them. The grizzled remnants of the old labour movement are here, “the warriors for the working-day” with their buckets for donated change. But I also meet students attending for the first time. There’s one thing they all agree on. There’s a fresh energy here. “It’s younger.” “More enthusiastic.” “More open.”

But, like Milton’s rebel angels, the radical Left has been exiled from frontline influence to that bottomless hell of irrelevant perdition: the university campus. Do they have answers for our historical moment? Here to narrate the theoretical underlay over video link is Adam Tooze, who has probably done the most to repopularise a Marxian worldview in recent years. In conversation with SWP vanguardist Alex Callinicos, he trades names and abstractions. Lukács and Horkheimer; “complex totalities” and “conjunctural analysis”. But they capture the mood best when they returned to plain Anglo-Saxon. We are living through an “oh shit” moment, says Tooze. A polycrisis of pandemic, climate change, war and neoliberal collapse not seen since the Seventies. The rough end of capitalism (or, as they say around here, its copious “internal contradictions”) has never felt more real. There’s talk of Hobsbawm’s “age of catastrophe” — the years 1914-1945.

So far, so inarguable. It’s a language that’s trickled into the mainstream commentariat, words such as “structural” and “systematic” polished off and redeployed. And labour (not the party) has organised itself in response. The recent record of Britain’s trade unions is a point of pride at Marxism 2023. Fighting for wage increases ahead of inflation, they’ve had their busiest year for a generation. The number of days lost to strikes in 2022 (2.47 million) was the highest since 1989, and the 2023 figure will exceed even that. Picket lines are a daily constant, whether at railway stations or primary schools. And Marxism 2023 was themed around collective action. Tucked away in the smaller rooms, of course, there were still events such as “Family affair: does capitalism want you to have kids?” But the headliners were far more grimly dialectical. “System crash.” “The New Age of Catastrophe.” Not for them the woolly identity politics of the 2010s: here is a harder, sharper project.

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How landlords became monsters

By Nicholas Harris

The challenge for the radical Left has always been how to convince workers to connect their experiences with the politics of revolution. But Darren Westwood, an Amazon warehouse worker from Coventry who addressed the opening rally alongside Smalls, has already done this. He mobilised the first British strike action against Amazon in January after he was offered a 50p per hour pay rise (to £10.50, a fraction over minimum wage) — when he questioned it, he was told he “should’ve bought shares”. It started as a wildcat strike with a few mates, but now, with hundreds of colleagues signed up and the support of the GMB union, he says it’s “all-out war”.

But until that Damascene moment, he had little politics beyond alienation. He didn’t really bother voting; he doesn’t see the parties as red or blue, but “a dirty purple”. The only choice was “which one is less shit”. But: “I consider myself now as a Marxist. My eyes have been opened and I see it as an alternative. And people point to Venezuela — ‘inflation’s through the roof’. That’s Great Britain now under capitalism … Everyone in this country is angry with what’s going on. Everyone. And all the voices are saying the same thing: there’s got to be a change.” That final clause is a clarion that any voter on Right or Left could have sounded in the past decade.

One of the stories of that decade has been the Left’s failure to successfully interpret this rage. A brief flowering of populist-socialists around Europe has wilted. In Britain, the populist Right has been the principle beneficiary of our turbulence and alienation, turning apathetics into activists and offering the promise of social transformation through projects such as Brexit. As the economic situation worsens, particularly at the crummy extremes of the gig economy, some of that energy is being diverted Left — to its most traditional institution, the trade union — and it can be detected throughout the Festival. Ben, a student from Bradford, is here because he’s “bored as fuck”. Back home, he says, “all you end up doing is going out, getting pissed — the so-called student lifestyle. And it’s just boring. I want to see something change, so I’ll come down here and see it.”

There’s a tentative path forward for the Left if they can capture this, translate that visceral grumble into a politics of inspiration. But the path backwards is here too. Just after lunch on Saturday, Jeremy Corbyn speaks at the culture tent. He’s been asked to discuss his three books that changed the world. There are cheers as he arrives and he looks happy. A reverential hush comes over the crowd. It doesn’t matter what he’s going to say. It’s him that’s saying it. But there’s an immediate air of disappointment as he starts boring away about An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. By the time he’s onto his visit to the Texas agricultural museum, and certainly by the time he starts actually reading from the book, even this captive audience begins to trickle away. He’s a grandfather reading stories, not a leader.

But Keir Starmer’s not their leader either. Whenever I mention his name people look revolted. Some look as though they’re going to spit. I ask Ben to describe him in a word and he laughs: “You wouldn’t be able to say it.” (“Tosser”, he later clarifies.) “I don’t have enough swear words,” an otherwise kindly 77-year-old woman tells me, shaking her head. The hard Left had an accord with the Labour Party so long as Corbyn was in charge, perhaps even as long as Starmer pledged to imitate his policy platform. But the purges, the obsessive ideological discipline, have forced them elsewhere. Lewis Nielsen (joint national secretary of the SWP and an organiser of Marxism 2023) tells me their strength and their success lie outside Parliament, “in protests, with strikes… Real change comes from below”.

They say they’ve sold 4,000 tickets; Lenin seized the Winter Palace with fewer. But are these people plotting a revolution or waiting for one? And what follows — a centrally-planned economy run by the SWP? Marxism 2023 has been tastefully marketed in Barbie pink (“Did Marx ever wear pink?”), with the party name excised from the posters. But through the gates, you hit a blizzard of joining-forms and evangelical cadres — who look at you very strangely when you stand them up. Socialist ideas aside, it’s clear this Festival is substantially a membership drive. And there are historic questions about the SWP’s own toxicity. Some 700 members disowned the party after it allegedly covered up a rape case in 2013, including prominent Marxist writers like Richard Seymour and China Miéville (the SWP later admitted it “failed the two women who made the complaints”). It may be a harder, sharper world than the soft Left, but it can also be a nastier one.

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By Aris Roussinos

After 2008, the Occupy movement also believed they were bearing witness to the final irresolvable crisis of capitalism. And they were wrong. Different people have come to Marxism 2023 seeking alternatives, seeking answers to their sense of political rage. But how much do university lecturers and Amazon warehouse workers really have in common, other than the fact that they’re both on strike? When, at the closing rally, Amy Leather from the SWP leadership declares, “we’re against all immigration controls and we say, ‘open the borders, all refugees welcome’”, how many people does she expect to win over?

If we read Marxism 2023 as a symptom rather than a cause though, it clearly reflects political energy searching for an outlet. Anton Jager has described our age as one of “hyperpolitics”: politics is everywhere again, on the streets and in our lives. But it is not being practised through the parties or associative structures which traditionally generate change. Instead we see the scattered, the lost and the angry — everywhere from the gilets-jaunes to the BLM protesters and the Brexit vote. The question of state failure and democratic deficit is repeatedly posed and never resolved. However fervent its leadership, this isn’t a vehicle for revolutionary socialism. Its reach is too narrow. Its heraldry — the clenched fist, the Internationale — looks back, not forwards.

After the pipers comes a succession of American cop cars. One is from Los Angeles; another is playing KRS-One’s “Sound of Da Police”. Next are the floats, soliciting charitable donations, and then the local worthies. The scouts, a youth farming group, naval cadets, and a topless child manning a machine gun mounted on a truck are all present.

This is Nuneaton Carnival, an annual fair launched in 1930 to raise money for the local hospital that has been a fixture ever since. Today, following a four-year Covid-enforced break, the market town is out to party. It is Middle England as conjured by the fever dreams of Paul Dacre, a provincial part of Warwickshire where one might once have spotted old maids cycling to communion through the morning mist.

If Nuneaton lives at all in the public imagination today, it is as the place where George Eliot was born and Ed Miliband died. In 2015, it was viewed as the ultimate bellwether constituency: had Miliband won Nuneaton he would have been prime minister. But it wasn’t to be. David Cameron would later crow it was at 1.53am, when the town declared, that he knew he had won the general election outright.

Being 37th on Labour’s list of targets, the Warwickshire market town ought to have flipped that night. Other than at Thatcher’s pomp, in 1983 and 1987, the constituency had been red from 1930 to 2010. Brexity, deprived, struggling with the cost-of-living crisis and convinced that immigration is too high, it is the exact type of seat that Sir Keir Starmer is straining to win at next year’s general election. Since 2010, it has been held by Marcus Jones, a stolid Midlands solicitor who has lived in Nuneaton all his life, and whose lead over his Labour rival yawned to a 30-point gap at the last election.

Arriving at the town by train, the first sight is of Hell. On platform 1, a mural — about eight feet high and 20ft across — seems to depict the town alight: long tongues of flame wrap themselves around buildings, bridges and trees, consuming all. This Guernica of the West Midlands — On the Right Tracks by Joanne Bannister — was commissioned by Nuneaton & Bedworth In Bloom. I try to find someone to ask about it, but the ticket office is shut, and no staff can be found.

Across town in Gala Field, rows of gazebos mark the spot where the carnival procession is to begin and end. Amid the food trucks and tombola stalls, I meet Martin Parrack, who has pitched up to run a PR drive on behalf of the Warwickshire Freemasons.

“I’m here to dispel the myth that we’re in the Illuminati,” he tells me in a flat Brummie accent. “The principles of the Masons are to be good to your neighbours and your family.” Between the secret handshakes and cloak-and-dagger ceremonies, I suggest, you must talk to a lot of different people. How do you think the town is doing right now?

“The membership of the Masonic temple in Nuneaton is growing,” he says. “Young people who can’t afford to buy houses in Coventry or Birmingham are moving to the town. They’re moving to areas that wouldn’t have been so… desirable in the past.”

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But the region, he adds, is not in a good place. “Tamworth is struggling, Nuneaton is the same. I recently walked from Birmingham to Nuneaton, then from Nuneaton to Atherstone, to raise money for charity. If you walk through Nuneaton town centre, you can see a marked decline in footfall. Today is a Sunday, but that was midweek. It’s not vibrant.”

A few stalls down, two local women soliciting donations for a disability charity share much the same story. “We’re still at the tail end of Covid, feeling its after-effects,” the younger woman, who is in charge, tells me. “Society has changed. People are less sociable. The community spirit has petered out a bit.”

Her older colleague chimes in. “Covid was the final nail in the coffin,” she says. “The high street is declining. People are counting their pennies.”

Nuneaton has been on a slow decline for some time. Once an epicentre of the Industrial Revolution, the flat land around here was pockmarked with coal mines sunk deep into the earth. Just a decade ago, the Daw Mill colliery — just a 20-minute drive away — was one of the largest in Europe still operating.

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Then, in February 2013, a fire broke out 740 metres below ground. Sparked seemingly from nothing, it spread quickly to a ventilation unit and 100 miners had to be evacuated. Fourteen stayed behind to contain the blaze, but to no avail. A few years earlier, employees had been making £70,000 a year, with dozens chasing every vacancy. Now, out of nowhere, the mine was forced to close; 650 men lost their jobs.

Today, at Nuneaton Museum, a small exhibition featuring a spread of historical curios are all that remains of the industry. A woman working behind the desk tells me the closure of the pits was a blow to the town.

“We ran an event where we invited people in to discuss their memories of mining,” she says. “There is definitely a big sense of sadness at the loss of the industry. There was a fondness for coal. It was a real part of the town. It was in the bones of Nuneaton.” Can the area be revived? “There are a lot of plans in place to regenerate the town and to bring it out of what’s perceived as a slump,” she insists.

As for who they’ll vote for, she says locals are “sick” of the Tories. “The choice to vote for the Conservatives was made in desperation,” she explains. “Labour used to be popular, but there was a loss of faith in the party.”

Lianne Parry, a volunteer busy talking to the few guests who wander in, agrees that Starmer could win the seat. “The faith in Labour could come back,” she claims. Nuneatonians voted for Brexit, but they didn’t understand what it was or what it would do. “After it happened, they wondered why things were so difficult, but they voted for it without asking questions.”

I walk from the museum up into town, towards the high street. When the 18th-century non-conformist historian William Hutton visited Nuneaton, he described it as being “in the domain of sleep”. Some 250 years later, little has changed. Nuneaton Beds and Sofas is having a closing-down sale; the Myton Hospice a clearance sale; Debenhams is boarded up; a sign in the window of Gattsbys solid oak furniture specialists declares: “Sorry — closed.” The high street is largely deserted. The first man I try to talk to rides away at speed on his mobility scooter, insisting he does not live in Nuneaton.

I stop in at Lord Hop, a microbrewery set up in a shop that was once a former beauty salon. Its landlord, who was born in Nuneaton but now lives outside, says the footfall is so low, he often closes at 7pm during the week. Despite that, he insists, “the town is coming back”, with a new cinema and restaurant set to open. “It’s natural to be optimistic,” he tells me. “We never fully recovered from Covid. Covid chucked everything out of sync.”

In response, the Government “chucked money at the town”, he adds — but the £4 million from the levelling-up fund was not enough. It failed to tackle the real causes of decline — inchoate talk of council “corruption” and big business getting away with something, as well as a broader sense that the area hasn’t taken advantage of Brexit. Online, equally vague rumours about municipal corruption have been raised, with little substance behind them. “Where is all the money going?” ask Nuneaton and Bedworth Community Association on a website that also features a video suggesting the World Economic Forum “runs the world”.

The first crack in Labour’s local base of power came in 2008, when the Conservatives took control of the borough council for the first time since it was established in 1974. The “last fortress of socialism in Warwickshire” had fallen, the Coventry Telegraph reported. On a flying visit to the town, David Cameron congratulated then councillor Marcus Jones, the future agent of Miliband’s doom.

Could Jeremy Corbyn do any better? It was at a Labour leadership hustings in Nuneaton, after all, that the oddball backbencher drew such great applause that both Owen Jones and Toby Young foresaw his eventual victory. Held just a month after Miliband failed to win over the town, the occasion was designed to excise the spirits of defeat, but — as if the party’s new leadership had been built upon a burial ground — it would only come back to haunt them. In 2019, the Tory margin of victory stretched to 13,000.

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“They’re all the same, all the politicians are the same,” says Nick, a regular nursing a pint of porter. “Corbyn was very Left-wing. He wasn’t interested in improving the town, he was interested in his own agenda. He believed in God knows what.” Nor was Corbyn strong enough, says the landlord — not strong enough to take on the capitalists, not strong enough to reverse decline, not strong enough to represent them.

Starmer, meanwhile, is too posh and too remote. Bill Olner, the Labour MP who represented Nuneaton from 1992 until 2010, was different, they say. Nick adds: “He mixed with the locals. He was a working man all his life until he was elected to parliament.” After his defeat, Olner, a former electrician and union shop steward, joined the local council and served until he contracted Covid and died in the local hospital.

Yet if it was Nuneaton where Labour’s crack-up began, and Nuneaton where their entry into the wilderness was confirmed, it may yet be the origin of their revival. A recently watered-down green energy plan from the party would mean investment for a new electric battery factory in the region. Locals remain confident things can change, while sceptical of the ability of politicians to help. Or, as Harry Ghale, one of the town’s many retired gurkhas told me as he helped set up a community barbecue: “Nuneaton is okay. I’m not bothered about who wins the next election.”

Roughly 20 miles away, a similar scene was playing out in Newcastle. There, a group of Labour members walked out after the chair refused to allow a proposal to boycott the mayoral selection process.

Both incidents were unprecedented in recent Labour history; and both illustrate the ruthless manner in which Keir Starmer and his aides have purged even relatively mild Left-wingers from the party.

Driscoll, who has served as the Labour mayor for the much smaller North of Tyne area since 2019, is routinely described as the “last Corbynista in power”, though this probably exaggerates how Left-wing he really is. His offence, it soon emerged, was guilt by association.

In March, in his role as mayor, Driscoll had hosted an “in conversation” event with the socialist film director Ken Loach, two of whose recent films were set on Tyneside. Loach is persona non grata in Labour, cast out for directing a production of Perdition, a play accused of antisemitism, in 1987. Party officials seemed not to realise that one of Loach’s subsequent works — his 1997 documentary McLibel — had included a substantial interview with a young human rights lawyer called Keir Starmer. Sometimes guilt by association matters; sometimes it doesn’t.

The rapid decline of the Labour Left since 2019 has been astonishing. Earlier this year, Labour announced that under no circumstances could Jeremy Corbyn stand as Labour’s candidate in his Islington North seat at the next election. At the same time, of the 123 new Labour candidates so far chosen to stand in vacated or target seats, only two are firmly on the Left: Faiza Shaheen, an economist who will again challenge Iain Duncan Smith in Chingford and Woodford Green, and Chris Webb in Blackpool South.

Under Starmer, the party apparatus has gone to extraordinary lengths to stop Left-wingers from getting on to the longlist. And in many cases, the victims are trades unionists and socialists whose politics — like Driscoll’s — are not exactly Corbynite. This week, l learnt of two would-be MPs in north Lancashire who have just been told by party officials that there is no point in applying as they will be excluded at the “due diligence” stage.

Indeed, the problem seems especially acute in the North West and Northern regions. In Copeland, for instance, Joe Ghayouba, a popular councillor who is half-Egyptian and has campaigned for Palestinian rights, was excluded; in Carlisle, Louise Atkinson, a black councillor and teacher who is president of the National Education Union, was mysteriously omitted without explanation. Even when reasons are provided, they are often trivial. One contender was told their offence was to “like” a past tweet in which Nicola Sturgeon said she’d tested negative for Covid.

If this seems ruthless, it’s only because Starmer is able to be. His aides have conducted by far the most tightly organised operation the party has ever known. Candidate selection is overseen by the two Matts — Matt Faulding and Matt Pound — and greatly assisted by long-standing Labour NEC member Luke Akehurst. Faulding was once deputy director of the Blairite think tank Progress, while Pound used to run Labour First, which represents the “Old Labour Right”, and organised to get Blairites picked as candidates during the Corbyn years. Labour First is now run by Akehurst, who as an NEC member gets to chair many of the panels that have been excluding Left-wingers. In other words, these three unknown men are now running the operation to choose the next generation of Labour politicians. Each is easily more powerful than most members of the shadow cabinet.

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True, Labour’s due-diligence process certainly needed beefing up; in February, Jared O’Mara became the second Labour MP elected in 2017, following Fiona Onasanya, to be sent to jail for offences of dishonesty. But Labour’s due diligence process isn’t just about character flaws or past misdemeanours. As Akehurst admitted to me last week, there is a strong “political element” behind blocking candidates: “Maybe they’ve been incredibly publicly disrespectful of the current leadership… or they’ve got a constant record of breaking the whip as a local councillor… If we’re in a… hung Parliament situation, or a very narrow majority at the next election, I don’t want to have allowed people to become Labour MPs who are not solid votes for the Labour Party.”

Here, of course, Starmer’s hitmen are partly emulating the ruthless tactics of Corbyn and his allies. Under his regime, loyalty rather than ability also seemed to be the main qualification for selection. The Corbynites, for instance, felt not the slightest guilt in brazenly overturning the selection of Camden councillor Sally Gimson in Bassetlaw on what were obviously trumped up and minor charges.

Yet Starmer’s high command has gone far beyond the harsh rule of the Corbyn years, even pitting MPs against each other in some seats. When Left-winger Beth Winter was defeated by loyalist Gerald Jones in the new Merthyr Tydfil and Cynon Valley seat this week, she complained that the Welsh party had fixed the process against her. Such is the strength of the Starmerite machine that many on the Left have simply given up trying.

And why wouldn’t they? Under the Akehurst criteria, it’s unthinkable that Neil Kinnock, John Prescott, Clare Short and Robin Cook, all of whom were rebels in their early careers, would be selected. Nor do I think Angela Rayner, the party’s deputy leader, would get on the Labour list today — she couldn’t be described as a Corbynite, but her trade-union background would make her suspect to some of those working for Starmer.

Past Labour governments, by contrast, have always thrived on being a “broad church”. Attlee’s cabinet counted Nye Bevan and Stafford Cripps among its towering figures, yet both had suffered periods of expulsion from the party only a few years before. Wilson’s benefited from the presence of Dick Crossman and Barbara Castle; Callaghan had Tony Benn and Michael Foot (another former expellee), while Blair’s deputy John Prescott had been one of the “tightly knit group of politically motivated men” denounced by Wilson during the 1966 seamen’s strike.

As the experiences of both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss demonstrated, it’s a mistake to confine one’s government to a narrow band of loyal yes-men and women. Cabinet government needs the odd maverick, people who are willing to come up with alternative ideas and scrutinise and challenge existing policy. “Keir is blocking off his exits,” a former Corbyn aide recently told him. “You need some people who are creating space, and who enable the party to be a bit bolder.”

Meanwhile Team Starmer’s treatment of Corbyn and, to some extent, Diane Abbott has also instilled a sense of fear among the three dozen die-hard MPs who still belong to the Socialist Campaign Group in Westminster. They’ve deliberately kept quiet in recent months, terrified that the leadership will jump on the slightest excuse to deprive them of the whip and disqualify them from standing for Labour.

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“People are very worried that anything that is in any way challenging will be used in a disciplinary process against them,” John McDonnell said recently. “You don’t want to put yourself in a position of vulnerability and then let other people down as well.” McDonnell advises colleagues to keep their heads down, to keep their noses clean. But he also attempted to cheer up Left-wing MPs by reminding them that if Labour gets a small majority next time — of just 20, say — then they could suddenly be back in business, effectively holding the balance of power in the Commons, as the old Tribune Group did during the Wilson/Callaghan government of the Seventies. And that, of course, is what the two Matts and Luke Akehurst fear.

The Labour Left aren’t just victims of a Starmerite plot, of course. They lack leadership, ideas and confidence. The 2019 election defeat knocked the stuffing out of them. Yet tens of thousands of people who took part in the Corbynite movement haven’t just vanished or died. Many have ripped up their Labour membership cards, but many are still active in politics — in unions, pressure groups and single-issue campaigns. Consider the Corbynite group Momentum, which has refocused its work on issues such as climate change and getting people elected to local government councils.

What’s more, history suggests the Left will be back. The Attlee government spawned the Bevanite surge of the Fifties, while disillusionment with the Wilson and Callaghan governments led to the rise of Tony Benn and the Bennites in the Seventies and Eighties. More recently, the Iraq war and other alleged “betrayals” of the Blair-Brown era eventually prompted the most astonishing Left-wing turn of all — the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

And when this happens, the fight rarely ends. Like mafia factions engaged in a perpetual tit-for-tat vendetta, the Labour Right and Left closely observe each other’s tactics, then adopt them, with ever more draconian reprisals. If and when the Labour Left returns, it will be with a great sense of vengeance — and Labour’s politics will get more bloody than ever.

The former are happy to have a set of cartoon cut-out villains to rail against: incels and misogynists who openly talk about their hatred of women; racists who unabashedly use racial slurs and claim that black people are genetically inferior; anonymous trolls who openly invoke Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust as examples to be emulated. These online villains, for their part, are more than happy to be given attention, and want nothing more than to be known as consummate outsiders; scary barbarians just waiting for a chance to pillage all the norms that liberal society holds dear.

As it happens, though, this sort of thing is mostly theatre. Far from being outsiders and outcasts, these dissidents are not so much enemies of liberal society as its products. Like the “Dirtbag Left” that once gathered around Bernie Sanders and had notions of upending capitalism only to meekly be reabsorbed into the machine they purported to fight, the average edgy Hitler worshipper on Twitter is far less scary than he tries to appear. If John Steinbeck said that the US would never be fertile grounds for socialism because every American worker considered himself merely a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, then one can add today that our online world mostly consists of temporarily embarrassed middle-class liberals.

A recent storm of drama and division within the online “vitalist” movement illustrates this well, and in a humorous fashion to boot. Vitalism, for the uninitiated, refers to an extremely heterogeneous collection of tendencies and idiosyncratic personalities, loosely affiliated with the Right and Donald Trump. This affiliation with the 46th president, however, is strictly one-way: while many vitalists would like to attach themselves to the “Trump movement” in some fashion, it seems very doubtful that Trump actually wants them or even knows that they exist.

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The intellectual tendencies that make up the vitalist movement are broad —in some cases openly nonsensical — and it is probably fair to say that they have very little broad electoral appeal. What they do say runs the gamut from various oddball interpretations of Nietzschean philosophy and a veneration of scantily clad male underwear models to talking about black criminality and how we live in a “longhouse gynocracy”. In general, this is mostly a subculture concerned with edginess and self-referential jargon. Some people are only there to shitpost; others hope to market their own personal “brand” to make money from the sale of protein powders or podcast subscriptions. And finally, a few truly foolish souls clearly hope to use their online notoriety as a springboard into legitimate politics.

One of the leading voices within this subculture — a person going by the non-de plume of Bronze Age Pervert — recently had details about his real identity posted online by a rival within these online spaces. BAP, it turned out, was actually a Yale academic from a fairly well-to-do background, with many connections inside what Donald Trump would probably deride as “the swamp”. Unfortunately for his online stans, however, he was also Jewish.

Normally, a person being Jewish is hardly cause for scandal or even concern, and certainly not an online civil war. In an online environment where people openly praise Hitler, however, that sort of factual reveal is pretty awkward. Indeed, BAP himself clearly had a habit of playing with fire here, posting tweets such as “I’m an Aryan supremacist and believe in the extermination of hundreds of millions”, all to loud cheering from his many fans.

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To the shock of absolutely nobody, however, it turns out that the Nazi Germany fandom still has something of an antisemitism problem, even in 2023. The result is that many of his former fans feeling legitimately betrayed, while other, more loyal fans have been fighting a bitter battle to try to explain why the online racist movement can’t afford to judge people merely based on their ethnic background, because groups of people are really just made up of individuals that can be good or bad. Imagine that.

Now, this all might reasonably lead someone to how this could all happen. What sort of appeal would an online space obsessed with “naming the Jew” — a forum that is often genuinely distrustful of and disgusted by Jewish people — even have for a Yale-educated Jewish man from a well-to-do and academically successful family? The answer to this question is quite simple: there is very little new in the contradictions surfacing on the online Right, because all of them have happened before — on the Left.

For the Left, the 2010s saw a massive cohort of “overproduced elites” turn towards the ideologies of socialism, communism, and social democracy in huge numbers. People graduated from first and second-tier universities only to find no jobs waiting for them in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. In response, they turned toward Left-wing organisations and forcibly colonised them. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was an incredibly sleepy fossil of an organisation until Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign and the victory of Donald Trump, when it was inundated by tens of thousands of young, almost entirely college-educated radicals. In the UK, Labour was flooded by the same sort of people through Momentum, and they catapulted Jeremy Corbyn from the sidelines to party leadership, much to his own surprise.

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Of course, this would end in disaster. Bernie Sanders was reabsorbed into the Democratic party machine, and the DSA mostly devolved into infighting, as the ambitious simply saw it as a convenient ladder by which they could secure a sinecure inside the Democratic party. Jeremy Corbyn, meanwhile, presided over a massive loss of working-class support, leaving the “real actual communists” furious with the racist “gammon” workers they had spent the last few years pretending to care about. This was a movement driven by the insecurities, needs and demands of people with academic backgrounds whose promised place inside the economy had suddenly disappeared, and they latched onto communism and socialism as their lifeline back into the middle class.

The ongoing drama surrounding Bronze Age Pervert and his cohort is, in this sense, just a slightly absurd rethread of this story. Bernie Sanders lost in 2016 and Donald Trump won, but the middle-class jobs for the scions of academia did not return. And so, many of them flocked to “racism” as the new frontier as “socialism” collapsed in on itself; in certain cases, such as that of occasional art critic Anna Khachiyan and part-time actress Dasha Nekrasova from the popular podcast Red Scare, the transition from vaguely scary Left-wing aesthetics to vaguely “based” Right-wing aesthetics has essentially been seamless — a slick brand update that kept the Patreon payments flowing.

To put this controversy in exceedingly simple terms: where once the workers of Britain and America felt that their cause and movement was being shamelessly usurped by people who weren’t workers and didn’t care about them, today racists and antisemites in both Britain and America are mad that their own racist and antisemitic spaces are being usurped by self-interested outsiders, some of whom are quite literally Jews. And they’re not actually wrong. Like a horde of hermit crabs in search of new shells, Western society’s inability to absorb the huge amount of surplus “leaders” and middle-class “elites” it has produced has led to them looking wherever they can for flags, causes and movements to usurp, all in the hope of the pay cheque (and social status) they felt that they were owed.

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Should we sympathise with legitimate fans of Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler who feel as if they’ve been robbed of their own movement, their own “safe space” away from the ever-present threat of Jewish domination? Maybe not. But to borrow from that famous line in The Big Lebowski, one can say what one will about the tenets of National Socialism — to them it’s an ethos. To the overproduced scions of a disappearing Western middle class, by contrast, racism is mostly just a branding device, an angle for a podcast, a lunch ticket, a mask. The cause itself, the ideology, worker’s rights, naming the Jews — none of it really matters in the end.

These people have worn many masks before, and they will wear more masks in the future, until liberal society recognises them for who they are and finally gives them the only thing they really care about: a white-collar email job, ideally one that carries a little prestige and can be performed remotely.

But it’s not unusual for a Labour leader to attempt to define himself against a predecessor and make a decisive break with the past. Sometimes the differentiation is gained through dint of personality, as with the war-hero Clement Attlee who contrasted starkly with his pacifist predecessor George Lansbury. And the grammar-school boy Harold Wilson, who was a clean break from his aloof public-school predecessor, Hugh Gaitskell. Sometimes it is a deliberate political ploy: Tony Blair conjured Michael Foot to condemn the lack of professionalism that characterised “Old Labour”. Corbyn, himself, was elected leader in part as a repudiation of the kind of political triangulation that defined the New Labour years.

No post-war Labour leader has gone so far as Starmer, though, and attempted to block his predecessor from standing for election. Plenty of big-hitters have been expelled from the party – in circumstances which may have resonance for Corbyn. In 2000, for example, Ken Livingstone, who served as the legendary leader of the Greater London Council in the Eighties and then as a Labour MP for 13 years, was explosively ejected from the party when he dared to stand for Mayor of London against the wishes of Tony Blair. This backfired when Livingstone then stood as an independent and decisively defeated Blair’s handpicked candidate, Frank Dobson, who secured just 13% of the vote. Might Corbyn seek to follow Livingstone’s example as he considers his own options in his Islington North constituency?

Michael Foot, too, provides a blueprint of sorts. Twenty years before he became Labour party leader, he and three other Labour MPs lost the whip, though, like Corbyn, maintained party membership.

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“Even if they expel me,” Foot declared on the eve of the decision, “I shall still go on supporting the Labour Party”. In this, Corbyn has followed Foot’s example, loyally supporting Labour candidates and canvassing with his local party in Islington. When it was proposed that losing the whip meant that Foot should also be stripped of his party membership, Foot’s ally Harold Wilson declared that such a suggestion was “plain daft”. When the Right-wing leader, Hugh Gaitskell, was replaced by Wilson two years later, the whip was restored and Foot’s political career resurrected.

Such temporary purges are not unusual. In 1939, Nye Bevan and Stafford Cripps were among those booted out of the party for advocating a Popular Front to combat fascism. These expulsions were generally unpopular, with many local Labour constituency parties issuing statements of support for the condemned. Nine months later, they were readmitted to the fold. Cripps would go on to serve as Chancellor in the Attlee Labour government, and Bevan founded the National Health Service.

But in the cases of Foot, Bevan, and Cripps, these expulsions came relatively early in their careers, as a kind of rite of passage, burnishing Left-wing credentials before entering the party establishment. To find an example of a Labour leader being expelled after rising to the top of the party, we must travel back to the interwar period and the travails of Labour’s first prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald.

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In August 1931, there was a run on the pound. MacDonald told his Cabinet that severe public spending cuts would be required in order to restore confidence in the markets. These cuts were highly controversial within the Labour Party. Many Labour MPs felt that the poor had suffered enough during the depths of the Great Depression. On Sunday, 23 August 1931, the Labour Cabinet clashed for four hours over the proposals, with MacDonald ultimately failing to win over his colleagues.

That evening, a melancholy MacDonald met with King George V to keep him informed of the situation, anticipating the end of his premiership. He returned to the palace the next morning, to convey his resignation and those of his ministers. Given that Parliament was “hung”, it was expected that the King would ask Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin to try to form a new government. Yet, to almost universal astonishment, MacDonald returned to announce that George V had asked him to stay on as prime minister to form a National Government with the support of the Conservatives and Liberals.

A month later, the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) voted to expel MacDonald and all those MPs who collaborated with him in the formation of the National Government, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Snowden. Their names became bywords for treachery in the lore of the Labour Party. The historian John Shepherd reflected: “No 20th-century party leader has been more hated than Ramsay MacDonald.”

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Yet, it is worth noting that MacDonald’s successor, Arthur Henderson, felt enormous heartache over what had happened. Henderson had no love for MacDonald personally: the two barely on speaking terms even when he served as MacDonald’s Foreign Secretary. Yet, the act of expelling someone who had devoted decades of service to the party did not give Henderson any joy. Indeed, Henderson couldn’t bring himself to sign the notice of expulsion, using a rubber stamp instead. If Starmer is required to sign a similar form deciding the fate of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, we can guess that his hand will waver less than Henderson’s did.

The Labour Party is a “broad church”, a necessity for the party under a First Past the Post Electoral system. While it contains, as Peter Shore once said, the title deeds to parliamentary socialism in Britain, there have always been different interpretations and traditions of Left-wing thought within the party. Historically, its leaders recognised this diversity of thought as one of Labour’s great strengths. Harold Wilson said that the Labour Party needed both its Left and Right wings to fly.

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Keir Starmer appears to be less ecumenical. For him, the Labour Party requires strict orthodoxy, where dissenting traditions are not allowed. He has used the longlisting powers of the NEC, which has a pro-Starmer majority, to block any parliamentary candidates who show a whiff of disloyalty to the leader.

The Labour Party may have the wind at its sails in the polls now, but the Starmer project has left it without a very deep keel. The party will be weaker if his legacy in the Parliamentary Labour Party is to produce a cadre of similarly (and, therefore, narrowly) minded MPs, whose defining feature is their loyalty to him. In the short-term, blocking Jeremy Corbyn’s re-selection enables Starmer to achieve a decisive break with the recent past, but the longer-term ramifications could be less salutary.

It is a useful phrase to measure core beliefs because it takes us beyond the idea of conspiracy theories, with all their distracting details and absurdity, to the underlying intuition that fuels them. In this world view, the “elites” are faraway and malevolent, exercising control in self-serving ways; meanwhile, democratic politics and the mainstream media are regarded as little more than distractions, likely in the service of powerful secret masters.

Whatever people believe about specific conspiracies — and this week offered no shortage of them, from UFOs over North America to hushed-up explosions in Ohio — our findings reveal how widespread the underlying mindset is that propels them. Thanks to our partner Focaldata and a statistical process called MRP, we can now see which constituencies are the most and least conspiratorial in the country. The results shed new light on how these voters should be viewed by the main political parties.

First, it is clear that conspiratorial thinking is not a “Right-wing” phenomenon. Voters who believe in a controlling secretive elite are much more likely to vote Labour than Conservative, and much more likely to live in a safe Labour constituency. By this measure, the 10 most conspiratorial constituencies in the country are all safe Labour seats, whereas the 10 least conspiratorial constituencies are all Tory (except Chesham and Amersham, which switched to Lib Dem in the 2021 by-election).

As the above table shows, the “most conspiratorial” list is made up of poor and highly diverse inner-city constituencies, which may explain why people come to feel so alienated and suspicious. In these places, a conspiratorial world view is the norm — in Birmingham Ladywood, for example, only 14% of people disagree with the statement. Meanwhile, in the rolling Chiltern hills of Chesham and Amersham and the affluent enclaves of Henley and Mole Valley, where the elites likely seem less distant and more on your side, few are concerned. It is a useful reminder to politicians of all parties that, while they may find conspiratorial voters troublesome, many come from the most disadvantaged communities.

Second, the results should encourage new anti-establishment parties on both the Left and Right. Thanks to our unusually large sample size of more than 10,000 respondents, we were able to measure the attitudes of voters who chose even the smallest parties in 2019 with a high degree of confidence. More than any of the mainstream parties, including Labour, the voters most prone to a conspiratorial outlook come from the anti-establishment parties: 54% of Brexit Party voters agree with the statement, alongside 45% of Plaid Cymru voters and 43% of SNP voters. So, while the Brexit binary pushed a larger proportion of voters towards the two main parties in 2019, it seems there are millions of voters who remain potentially open to new populist appeals.

There is a specific lesson here for the Labour Party. When I first tested this phrase at YouGov during the Labour leadership election of 2015, the belief that “the world is controlled by a secretive elite” was revealed to be a defining characteristic of supporters of Jeremy Corbyn: 28% of Corbyn’s backers strongly agreed with it, compared to 16% of Yvette Cooper’s and just 7% of Liz Kendall’s. Today, 42% of Labour voters agree with it, of whom 18% strongly agree. Antisemitism may have finally been dealt with in the Labour Party, but the mindset that drove it has not disappeared.

This suggests that, rather than Brexit or the election of Trump, the shock outcome of the 2015 Labour leadership election was the first real marker of the new era of low-trust and high-volatility politics; and the best way to understand it is by looking at the general election that took place immediately before. Today, it seems almost comic to recall, in the context of the eye-watering sums borrowed by successive Conservative governments, that the 2015 election was dominated by technical discussions of exactly what percentage point of austerity was appropriate to cut the deficit. Tory strategist Lynton Crosby calculated — correctly, as it turned out — that if nothing more interesting were discussed, the Tories would win by default. It was a cynical way to treat an electorate, for which he was rewarded with a knighthood. Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, meanwhile, frightened of seeming weak on economics, committed a Labour government to “austerity-lite”.

Come the election, the differences between the main parties were marginal; voters sensed a stitch-up in which the Tories and Labour had colluded to starve them of a more meaningful choice. It is hard to say they were wrong: 2015 saw the UK’s highest ever immigration numbers, for example, but this topic was hardly mentioned in the campaign. A rejection of this non-choice sowed the seeds not only for Corbyn’s election but for the Brexit result the following year.

The story of what happened in the years since 2016 is well-known. First came the attempts to frustrate the Brexit vote, which confirmed voters’ worst suspicions about cross-party collusion and elite disregard for the democratic process. And then came the rolling Covid lockdowns, which in turn radicalised a whole new constituency. There has perhaps never been a policy so life-altering and so little-debated, with a cross-party consensus parroted throughout much of the media. In those dystopian months and years, millions of people lost trust in authorities and turned to alternative explanations. These were not Right-wing activists or spotty teenagers in basements: they were mothers, grandparents and people who had never before been political. It’s hardly surprising that Google recorded the all-time high of searches for “conspiracy theory” in March 2020.

The pattern, from the 2015 election through to the pandemic, is that whenever views are suppressed, distrust and alienation follow. It is when the “Overton Window” is too narrow, not too wide, that politics feels fake and conspiracies abound. The distrust that now cuts across society is not the fault of a few small-time cranks and bad-faith opportunists — it is overwhelmingly the creation of elites who consistently tried to deny the electorate real choices.

Fast forward to the past few months, with the ejection of Liz Truss as prime minister and the rehabilitation of pre-2015 figures such as Jeremy Hunt, and many will be hoping that the era of political turbulence is finally coming to an end. It certainly feels it; for the first time since 2015, there are two technocrats at the helm of Britain’s major political parties. Centrists in both parties are hoping that as Corbynism and Brexit recede into history, the “grown-ups” will be back in charge.

But today’s UnHerd Britain data suggests that, beneath the surface, voter distrust and suspicion are more present than ever; and that the currents that propelled both Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit still run right through Labour’s heartlands. If the 2024 election is anything like 2015 — with the mainstream parties becoming harder and harder to tell apart — it could be the beginning of a whole new wave of democratic revolts.

In historical terms, this is a striking shift. For four decades, the Labour Party was the chief Eurosceptic party in British politics — far more so than the Conservative Party. Every Labour leader between Clement Attlee and Neil Kinnock had expressed opposition to joining (or support for leaving) the European Economic Community (EEC) at some point as a frontbench Labour MP. The first truly pro-European Labour leader was John Smith, who defied a three-line whip in 1972 to vote for the Conservatives’ European Communities Act. Pro-Europeanism was viewed as a Right-wing project — an attempt to constitutionalise capitalist principles in ways that would curtail the power of socialist governments to plan their national economies as they saw fit.

In the late Eighties, Labour finally abandoned its opposition to EEC membership, though the change was driven more by a response to repeated domestic defeats than a principled embrace of the European project. The promise of a “social Europe” was regarded by many Labour MPs as a chimera, but it at least offered some alternative to Thatcherism. So the party came to accept supranational legal limits on British governments, hoping the EU could mitigate the excesses of Conservative rule. Yet this Mephistophelian deal meant placing limits on future Labour governments, too. Policy tools which had once been fundamental to previous governments’ socialist programmes — trade policy, currency management, state aid and nationalisation, and capital and labour controls — were all sacrificed in exchange for the promise of minimum labour standards and regional development funds delivered through European institutions, rather than Whitehall.

Over time, more stridently pro-EU voices grew within the Labour ranks, but there was a sizeable contingent of Labour MPs even during the New Labour years who were sceptical of EU membership. Few outwardly advocated leaving the bloc, believing it to be too difficult or simply not politically feasible, but many argued against deeper integration, opposed the single currency, and raised concerns about European judges limiting labour rights. One of them, of course, was Jeremy Corbyn.

Even during the 2016 referendum itself, there was more openness to the Labour Leave argument. It’s not a coincidence that a third of people who voted for Ed Miliband to be prime minister then voted to leave the EU. For the most part, it was only after the Brexit vote that Remain voters started reacting with varying levels of horror and disgust to the idea that someone on the Left could vote for Leave. I have always found this viewpoint rather perplexing. My own arguments for leaving the EU were rooted in three core principles: democracy, socialism, and internationalism. They are both the reason I am a Labour supporter and why I was — and continue to be — a Brexit supporter.

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Joining the EEC in 1972, for instance, took a variety of national powers out of the hands of the UK Government and, by extension, parliament. EU countries are constitutionally transformed from nation-states to member-states, as the Cambridge academic Chris Bickerton has explained. This means that a variety of policy instruments are removed from national governments altogether, or their implementation becomes contingent on the wishes of the European Commission or interpretations of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Perhaps more obviously, EU membership is simply not compatible with a belief in socialist planning. At its core, the Single Market is designed to limit the power of national electorates to plan their own economies. Of course, a certain degree of national economic planning is permitted within EU membership, but it is conditional. Any time a national government takes a decision that is viewed as distorting the hallowed Single Market — which must be prioritised above all else — those policies are blocked.

Additionally, EU membership sits uneasily with genuine internationalism. Some of the most vocal Labour MPs to campaign against racism, colonialism, and global inequality — including Barbara Castle, Judith Hart, Joan Lestor, and Anne Kerr — were all staunch Eurosceptics. They condemned the EEC as a “neo-colonial” project, which created “a circle of privilege” for the “white tribes of Europe”. They believed it morally reprehensible that some of the richest, most privileged countries in the world should club together and create a superior form of citizenship in order to further enrich themselves.

Finally, the EU’s governing institutions remain mostly obscure and untransparent. We still don’t actually know which MEPs voted to make the Right-wing German politician Ursula von der Leyen President of the European Commission. Even worse, from a socialist perspective, European judges have struck down labour practices that they claim impose onerous restrictions on business, as in the infamous cases Laval and Viking. The former limited Swedish trade unions insisting on higher working conditions for construction workers from Latvia who operated in Sweden. The latter prevented a Finnish transport union from taking action against Viking Line for reclassifying their workers under the flag of a lower-wage EU country to ignore Finnish collective bargaining. Because these judgements are based on judicial interpretation of fundamental EU treaty rights, no legislation, either at a national level or from MEPs, can overturn them.

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By Tom McTague

So, if the EU has all these obviously egregious impacts on the goals of the Left, then why have so many Labour Leavers seemingly given up on Brexit? Part of the reason, it seems to me, is that the Labour Party has totally and catastrophically vacated the post-Brexit policy space to the Right. Initially, there did seem to be some interest from members of the Corbyn Shadow Cabinet to think about the opportunities Brexit might provide for a Labour government. Corbyn himself spoke passionately about forming trade agreements with countries in the Global South that would benefit and support their economic development, rather than exploit them. Given his uniquely strong connection with the grassroots party membership and his own history of opposition to EU integration, Corbyn ultimately failed to “sell” Brexit to the Labour Party.

Indeed, there are so many areas of policy where Labour ought to have spent the last few years seriously thinking about the post-Brexit opportunities. How can we use procurement better now that we are out of the Single Market? How can we follow the example of Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Act to provide economic stimulus through publicly supported domestic manufacturing? Can we use the increased income from no longer subsidising European university students to support students from poorer countries instead? What would a socialist trade policy look like, once protection of continental European industries and agriculture is removed from the equation?

Instead, Labour has wasted the years since Brexit almost as much as the Tories have. Labour had stood on a manifesto in the 2017 election which promised to take the UK out of the EU, Single Market, and Customs Union. That election saw the biggest increase in its vote since the 1945 General Election and the only net gain in Labour seats since 1997. A majority of the seats Labour won in England were Leave-voting seats off the Tories.

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When Labour believed in Brexit

By Richard Johnson

But then the surprise hung Parliament gave hope to certain Remainers. It didn’t matter that every household in the country had been told that the outcome of the referendum would be honoured. Facilitated by Labour’s Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer, Labour MPs — with a few honourable exceptions — did everything they could to stop the implementation of the Leave vote. As a party member my entire adult life, it was the closest I have ever been to quitting.

Today, though, the Labour Party has apparently embraced Brexit thanks to Starmer’s post-2019 Damascene conversion. But the reality is that Labour is still not making the case for Brexit on Labour terms. Virtually every time a Labour politician speaks about Brexit, it is framed as an attempt to mitigate the damage. Labour’s underlying assumption is that Brexit has failed because the UK has diverged too much from the EU. A better Brexit is one closer to the EU. But, the reality is that the UK has not diverged enough from the limitations which EU membership placed on national economic planning.

There is much to cheer about Brexit from a Left-wing perspective, but very few are brave enough to express that view. My regret is not Brexit — but that Labour has failed to rediscover its historic love for it.

The slang-words describe two teenage tribes. One wore Reebok Classics, brands like Ellesse or Diadora, and (often Burberry) baseball caps. They smoked straights, drank alcopops (if they could get hold of them), liked football, and listened to the charts. The girls wore large earrings and carried drawstring bags from sports shops. The boys gelled their hair.

The other lot wore Vans and DC skateboarding shoes, baggy jeans, and Billabong hoodies or rucksacks. They smoked roll-ups and cannabis (if they could get hold of it), liked skateboarding or hacky-sack, and listened to rock or reggae. The girls had heavy eye make-up, and sometimes a nose piercing. The boys did not gel their hair. Read Mods and Rockers, but for pubescents growing up at the turn of the century.

This was a culture war played out in miniature, in an era of relative prosperity and peace. But it’s one which I think, as I’ll explain later, helps us understand modern political divides.

At my secondary school in Norwich, the two clans were omnipresent and — to start with, at least — mutually exclusive. I was ushered into the former tribe, when it became clear that I liked football and had never stood on a skateboard in my life. Each UK region had different descriptors for the groups, I later learnt, but our area used “townie” and “pikey”. “Pikey” being a derogatory term, albeit used to describe something completely different, I’ll use the word “mosher” in the rest of the article, to describe the skater tribe’.

As well as a general mood of sectarianism between the two groups — a “mosher” girl in my class was beaten up by “townies” from another school in Year 8, and retributions followed — there were political differences, too. Those who marched against Iraq were mostly of “mosher” heritage. And “mosher” saw themselves, more generally, as upholding social liberalism. This largely involved mimicking the other side’s use of the word “gay” (an all-purpose “townie” insult at the time) by grunting “Yer gay” in the broadest Norfolk accent they could muster. This backfired, in progressive terms, as many “moshers” discovered a liking for the term “gay” once they’d sampled it, and were soon chucking it about just as casually as their “townie” peers.

By age 16, affiliations had weakened. The clans had discovered common ground — or common enemies. People mixed and matched. And every now and then a “mosher” would surprise the “townies” by revealing themselves, under the big shoes and pocketed trousers, to be good at football. In particular, the ubiquitous desire for marijuana, alcohol and cigarettes made it necessary for the identities to mingle. A large group of smokers in our year — of both “townie” and “mosher” vintage — took to loitering in a circle at the end of the field, furtively imbibing cannabis or tobacco, and hocking phlegm into a huge, symbolic puddle of shared mucus.

Yet a duality remained. Many former “townies” left school at 16 or 18, and went to work — sometimes earning decent salaries and getting on the housing ladder, sometimes not. They had more money to spend and went out in different clubs — the sort where local footballers frequented the VIP area. And they learnt to drive.

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Why do we pretend to be working-class?

By Chris Clarke

“Moshers”, meanwhile, morphed into hippies or indie kids. They did not want to be known as “geeks” any more than the “townies”. But when the moment came, they were more likely to stay on at Sixth Form — and then, often, to leave the city to study or travel. As economic inequality moved into focus post-2008, some will have learnt to see terms such as “townie” and “chav” as marks of bigotry — little better than racial slurs. Many former “moshers” may now, in fact, be more offended by these words than those they once used them against.

The phenomenon I describe — evident across many parts of Britain, and especially away from big cities — ran far deeper than hobbies and fashion. Its roots were social. Where I grew up, “townies” mostly came from houses built this side of the Second World War. Some lived on the council estates which formed part of the school catchment. Many others lived on newer developments further out, or in expanses of owner-occupied suburban semis. We lived in a city and were proud of this status, but the “townie” strongholds — as their label, I suppose, implies — tended to be the areas which were least urban or least urbane.

The “mosher” spirit, by contrast, emanated from — although was not unique to — the Victorian or Georgian terraced houses closer to the city centre. These had bay windows and smaller gardens, and were en route to the university, in and around an area known as the Golden Triangle. This neighbourhood was characterised by its shabby chic tastes, strong social capital and high house prices. It was not super-rich, by any means, and may not even be much more affluent than “townie” dominated areas further out. But its sense of itself was quite different.

So, what does this nascent identity politics, conducted on the playing fields of Blair’s Britain, tell us about the UK in 2023? It would be daft to overstate it, but I think some contemporary fault-lines are evident.

The first is about what I’d call “the glossy and the matte”. This is a political distinction for all the ages; between those looking to advertise their social status and those looking to disguise it. Dressing up and dressing down, new money and old, gaucheness and “good taste”. Even George Eliot’s Middlemarch, set in the 1830s, touches on the same theme. It’s telling, I think, that my school, comprised as it was of a pretty ordinary economic intake, devised an alternative caste system on the basis of glossy and matte preferences.

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By Richard Vinen

Many of the subtler barriers to modern social mobility come down to the same distinctions. Amol Rajan’s documentary “How to break into the elite” depicts working-class graduates donning sharp suits for job interviews in the arts, only to find that the well-paid executives interviewing them are wearing t-shirts and trainers.

The second fault-line is between economic and cultural capital; materialism and post-materialism. It’s a while since I read Chavs by Owen Jones, but one thing that didn’t ring as true when I did was the idea that anti-“chav” sentiment sought to deride poverty. In my experience, at least back then, it was about a mutual contempt, between those who valued the signifiers of wealth or status and those who valued the signifiers of taste or intellect. It’s true that most of those in social housing were “townies”, but it’s also true that most of the “townies” I went to school with did not live in social housing.

I do think that the hierarchy which “moshers” sought to create was just as bad as that which “townies” were cultivating. But I don’t think it was quite as simple as “haves” mocking “have-nots”. Certainly, this isn’t what “pikeys” thought they were doing. Many regarded themselves as the underdogs, and their primary accusation was that “townies” were parochial — not that they were poor. In return it was they — the “dirty mosher” — who were disparaged for their lack of respectability.

The most obvious modern echo here is the Corbyn project. Scruffy and proud of it, the movement was contemptuous of what Tony Blair called “aspiration”. Corbyn and his team spoke primarily to post-materialist values and higher cultural capital, and appeared to see those who valued economic capital — “townies” and their ilk — through the lens of “false consciousness”.

Third, the fissure exposed a fault-line between mainstream and alternative. One interesting thing about my school’s dynamic was the fact that “townies” and “moshers” were so evenly matched in terms of numbers. A generation beforehand, “mosher” culture might have been peripheral, but by the time I went to school there were whole industries dedicated to “mosher” clothing and music. “Mosher” — ism was, at core, an act of rebellion — against suburban conformity and materialism. But, by 2001, striking out in this way was a popular pastime.

This links to a perennial question for those in the “alternative” corner: what happens when the identity you champion becomes mainstream? Many culture war debates relate to this. James Harris recently critiqued Stewart Lee, for example, for continuing to base his comedy on the idea that he’s part of a pioneering Left-wing vanguard. In fact, Harris writes, Lee’s liberal values are now very common.

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Should Martin Lewis be Prime Minister?

By Chris Clarke

Finally, as I’ve already touched upon, the “townie”-“mosher” split often ran along the fault-line between those who stay in the town and those who migrate elsewhere. Analysis from a few years ago cast this as a central tension in US politics, determining which way people voted in 2016. And Brexit may well have followed the same pattern.

Why were “townies” more likely to stay in the place they grew up and “moshers” to move to bigger cities? Beyond some of the socio-economic reasons, and those relating to access and expectations, there was a values dimension. Just as “townie” clothing was about adhering to the rules of contemporary fashion, the “townie” approach to life was commonly about succeeding within the framework of the place you lived. “Moshers”, by contrast, often styled themselves as misfits, for whom “every day was like Sunday”. They rejected the framework and were less tied to the place itself.

The upshot of this is that many “townies” and “moshers”, pulling in opposite directions from the very start, may have diverged more and more as the years passed. This applies to the age they had children, their experiences of the UK housing market and whether they cycle or drive.

So, what became of the “townies” and the “moshers”? They’re now in their mid-30s, and the world has changed shape since they were buying Nokia phone cases, watching Ali G, and half-listening to their parents discuss 9/11. The caps and skateboards have been retired, the gold chains and hacky-sacks decommissioned. But in a sense, I think, the confused conflict which they were engaged in lives on.

It governs how people define “success” in their own lives, and it explains why many of the polarisations which emerged after Brexit were so heavily rooted in symbolism, be it TV or food preferences. For millennials trying to make sense of all this, it’s worth taking a trip down memory lane, to the classrooms of 2000s Britain and the strange social eco-system which existed there.

Ten years on, the West is undergoing a furious period of labour militancy. Farmers are protesting in the Netherlands, in Germany, and in France. Rail workers are threatening the US economy with shutdowns over pay increases and a lack of paid sick leave. In Canada, truckers shut down several border crossings and occupied Ottawa for the better part of a month. British nurses and Canadian teachers are on the verge of mass walk-outs. In France, nuclear industry workers threaten strike action, while a strike among refinery workers earlier this year led to acute fuel shortages, with hour-long queues and rationing at petrol stations.

This wave of militancy displays no signs of cresting soon. If anything, given the general economic situation, things are likely to get worse: inflation is exploding, energy is in short supply, and the cost of living is rising. Workers will get angrier, and they have the ability to make their anger felt in painful ways.

Intriguingly, this revival of labour militancy has done nothing to alter the fortunes of the radical or populist Left. It has only revealed that the rift between them and the working class across the West has become more or less permanent. Six years after Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn saw their stock soar, legitimate worker anger often finds itself being dismissed as a tool of the “far-Right”, and labour militancy is feared and despised.

It’s easy to laugh at the Left in this situation — but its arc from enthusiasm to horror in the face of actual protests and labour struggles out in the street is fairly rational. The Left’s fear speaks to one of our era’s central political conflicts: a growing consciousness among working people that the biggest dividing line runs between the people employed in the “real” economy and those working in the “virtual” one.

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How the Left betrayed the Truckers

By Malcolm Kyeyune

Over the last decade, a number of terms have been invented to describe this divide, from “Professional Managerial Class” to “the email caste”. None of these labels are perfect, but their growing popularity speaks to the fact that more and more people can now see that there really is a conflict at play here. The man driving a truck or a tractor and the revolutionary working for a billionaire-backed NGO are not only not natural allies, but their different roles in the economy increasingly make them real enemies.

It is no surprise that farmers end up on this struggle’s frontline. One absurd illustration of the deep contradictions in our debt-laden, de-industrialised Western economies can be seen — where else? — on Twitter and TikTok, where you can watch clips of young, radical climate protesters who want to “abolish farming”. Farming, as it turns out, is so very damaging to the planet in terms of CO2 pollution that we must do away with the industry altogether.

Put aside the ludicrousness of this wish, which if implemented would doom us all to starvation. Rather, consider the fact that we live in a society where having this position — fighting against farming for the sake of climate change — is not only possible but also admired. For young people in college towns, the question of where the food comes from is completely abstract; and as they plod along their chosen life path, from university radicalism to an NGO to government service and then back again, they need not encounter anything to make them change their opinion of the world. Their disconnect from material reality — from the farmers working hard to grow their crops, and from the truckers who make sure the food shows up on the shelves — is nearly complete. Student climate protestors do not seem to realise that food does not grow inside the supermarket.

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More perniciously, a growing crisis of over-regulation created, then driven, by “the email caste” is also taking shape. This ever-growing body of ordinances only creates frustration and anger among the material workers who have to live by them. It is not that these rules are necessarily malicious. To take one example, the idea that we should make the internal combustion engine redundant by the mid-2030s is probably motivated by genuine concerns for the environment. The problem is that these laws are completely disconnected from reality.

Last year, the Canadian trucker Gord Magill asked a simple, radical question: “How essential are the ’email job’ caste?” Magill’s essay was one early example of a new class consciousness, slowly brewing in the West. It was an open acknowledgement that there is an “us vs them” divide that refuses to fit into the Left’s conception of the “99% vs the 1%”. For Magill, it is the farmers, the truckers, and the aeroplane mechanics who comprise the “us”. And it is the NGO employees, the activist regulators, and the managers who make up the more immediate foe.

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Justin Trudeau's phoney dictatorship

By Malcolm Kyeyune

Whether you’re watching a farmer protest in the Netherlands or a trucker occupation in Canada, or even a wildcat airline pilot strike in Florida, there are growing echoes of this analysis everywhere. The figure of the enemy today is increasingly no longer the capitalist in the top hat. It is Klaus Schwab; it is the manager and the regulator. They hope to close down your farm, digitise your currency, and abolish private ownership. At one point during the 20th century, the figure of the “social engineer” was popular inside the worker-dominated social democratic parties of the West. In 2022, that same social engineer has now become a hated enemy. He is no longer seen as having any good intentions towards ordinary working people, nor can he even be trusted to understand how the real world works.

The 2020s, then, promise to be a decade filled with discontent and increasingly dramatic shows of worker militancy. Beyond inflation, beyond anger at the rising cost of fuel, heating and food, there is now a simmering political rage motivating people to take to the streets and the pickets. Like Gord Magill, workers are deciding that they’ve had enough of being ruled by an “email caste”. If email workers no longer care about the real economy they’ve left behind, why should workers care about them?

Leading Corbynites write books that question whether socialism can ever even exist in a country like Britain. Or they vaguely tell the Guardian that they will change what “common sense is in the country”, before they attempt to change the Labour Party again. Momentum, joked Blairite poster boy Wes Streeting on Saturday, should change its name to Inertia. Momentum was supposed to be the spearhead of a millennial revolution, one that would permanently alter British politics. Yesterday’s winners are today’s punch lines.

But they are still here, just. They incubate in a discoloured ex-church building that looks like an ossuary, 15 minutes’ walk from the official conference. This is the World Transformed, the hard Left’s political festival and refuge, taking place for the seventh time, wobbling on its last legs. “There was a real energy before,” says a man selling Stuart Hall essay collections, “and now…”

I’m told it used to be different. I’m told there was an energy at this festival in the ancient days when Corbyn was Labour leader. Soft Left MPs like Ed Miliband used to be drawn to The World Transformed. Moths flapping to the light. “This was the cool place to be,” a council worker tells me wistfully one night. “But Miliband and the rest were pretending to be more Left-wing than they actually were.” That energy peaked in 2018, he reckoned. Then came 2019, and the Left was shredded. Their failure was historical. Overnight, Corbyn became the new Michael Foot, the new George Lansbury.

So, those who remain are not pretend Left-wingers. They are the diehards, and they come to the festival to fantasise. Penny Grennan is not pretending. She stood as a Parliamentary candidate for Hexham in 2019 and lost by 10,000 votes to the Tories.

This afternoon she is selling raffle tickets (first prize: Jeremy Corbyn allotment jam) and t-shirts that call Keir Starmer a wet wipe in a room that smells like vegetable soup. She teaches protest songs to the next generation. There are several decades of fruitless canvassing written all over her face. “We are a family here,” she says. Up the road, “the Labour party machine is voracious. It is about control and obedience.” I feel like I am talking to a particularly sweet old nun. It’s an ignoble feeling: pity. Penny has wasted years on something that doesn’t exist.

Fantasy blots out everything. I read a pamphlet that says Corbyn failed because he was not… Left-wing enough. I go down to a studio where the “youth are rising for a green new deal” — a ropey American policy idea that is older than most of the youth. Rather than rising, the youth are sitting on metal fold-out chairs in circles, drawing lines on A3 paper with felt tip pens. I am back in school.

On a panel to discuss abolishing the monarchy, Mish Rahman, a member of Momentum’s National Coordinating Group, says: “Five white people, wearing black, with a Union Jack behind them — it’s intimidating, like a far-Right rally.” This is the only room in the country where that is an applause line. We are in a parallel reality.

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They discuss the myth of nationality, and the myth of social peace in Britain. “For a thousand years the English have been ruled by families that aren’t English,” one says. One headed by “a clan of parasites”. Well, it’s not Huw Edwards in a black tie. “The Queen was in the thick of imperialist violence,” says the Momentum guy.

The only revelation is that they don’t understand the country they live in at all. Like every event at this festival, they speak, cleverly, to themselves. This is utterly irrelevant to what they are supposed to be doing, which is making people vote for them.

Other countries, ones the British Left will never have to win votes in, are preferred. For a political tribe so diminished in Britain, all that remains is a fantasy of over there. An afternoon panel about South America. The auditorium is full, because Jeremy Corbyn has shown up. He is accompanied by a Bolivian Trade Unionist, a Brazilian journalist, a Colombian senator, and a documentary filmmaker from Chile.

“What can we learn from Colombia?” Bone-rattling stories are told. Unlike in Macclesfield, there is scope in Bogotá for heroic revolutionary action. The struggle there is so beautiful. The struggle here is so banal.

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Corbyn listens. He looks happy, and cocoon-safe in his happiness. He is introduced as a “revolutionary leader who shows solidarity with Latin America every single day”.

Corbyn tells the room about Allende. The room shivers. Corbyn tells the room about the torture chambers he visited in Villa Grimaldi, Santiago. The room brrrrs. There is some glee in his description of these places. There, we can see, says Corbyn “that wonderful golden thread… the survival of the human spirit against all the odds.”

What kind of intellectual life is this? To look to Bolivia for patterns to mimic. To simplify the whole world into classes and struggles. To offer people, in a democracy, not straightforward, easily explained improvements to their lives, only the deus ex machina of a “more egalitarian socialist future”. It is the intellectual world of the fantasist.

This festival doesn’t care. It is either these fantasies, or the Westminster cynicism and business-as-usual politics being offered on the Albert Docks by Starmer. They choose the debilitating fantasy, and they choose Jeremy.

The future of Corbynism is supposed to be Zarah Sultana, MP for Coventry South. Sultana has more TikTok followers than anyone else in Westminster. On Monday night she hosts a pub quiz in the auditorium. She is late.

When Sultana arrives, she is deadpan and mock-surly with the audience, who treat her like she’s Jeremy Corbyn, or Taylor Swift. She announces that she is here to “chat shit and build socialism”. One is much easier than the other. I try to see what this audience sees in her. Sultana has a majority of just 401 in Coventry. The future of the Left is already endangered.

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They still sing for the past, as he walks up the stairs. Oh, Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn touched them so closely. In his otherworldliness, any one of them, any Penny Grennan, so otherworldly themselves, might have been him.

It was not Brexit, or anti-Semitism that destroyed this movement. It was Corbyn, and the people who still flock to him this week, and their consuming fantasy of politics as a struggle, that the public rejected. In his very person — and he represented his followers so well — he exposed this movement’s flaws and showed them to be without remedy.

The image he created in the minds of the country was so different to the image in the minds of his supporters. The pictures never matched. “There is no such thing as Corbynism,” he said on the day he blew it in 2019. Corbyn was wrong then — of course there was — but he is right now.

I approach the “absolute boy”, who is sitting on a sofa. I ask him if he felt like he had been released from a burden he was never up to shouldering.

“No. No. Not at all,” says Corbyn. He seems sad. “I wanted to make changes in the Labour party, and the Labour movement. I wanted to see changes in this country. Economic policy that put food in children’s stomachs, that put them in schools, that gave them nurseries, that ended food banks…”

Corbyn talks in the past tense, and trails off. He knows he failed. All he and his movement have now is the past. The present belongs entirely to Starmer.

Marxism taught the people at this festival that this moment ought to be seized by revolutionaries. Instead, they are marooned on the far side of power, eating vegetable soup and singing songs to a faded messiah. When they call Keir Starmer a wet wipe, or say that they hate him, they are only expressing their own impotence.

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By John McTernan

At the official conference Labour thinks it is back. There is not a soul anywhere in the ACC who thinks the party will lose the next election. Starmer finds himself with a 17-point lead over Truss, and he’s barely had to campaign. The confidence is expressed in sterile ways engineered to disgust the hard Left.

Blue chip lobbyists who avoided party gatherings when Corbyn was in charge are back. Big ticket donors are back. The canapés are better than they have been in years — and the better the canapés, the more electable the party is. Blathering on about Palestine is out, Rachel Reeves’ fiscal prudence is in. Goodbye John McDonnell, hello Peter Mandelson. The revenge of the centrist Dads is complete. Let’s party like it’s 1997.

“But,” a woman clutching a champagne flute asks me one night, “what about the Left? What are they even doing now?”

What are the Left doing? Nothing that relevant any more.

Starmer’s grand idea is to freeze the energy price cap at its current rate of £1,971, preventing further rises to an estimated £3,500 in October and over £4,200 in January. This will, he says, save households around £1,000. Now, when calculated on the back of a cigarette packet, this all seems to add up. The only problem is that households which use the most energy will be the biggest winners — and these tend to be richer households, with larger homes to heat.

The proposal, then, is classic Starmer: another sweeping gesture in a policy area that should be Labour’s for the taking. Consider the political context. The economy is flailing, the Conservative Party has moved on from an unedifying defenestration to an even more unedifying leadership election, and Corbyn and his outriders have largely been silenced. And yet, Labour’s lead in the polls has fallen from 11% in the week after Johnson’s resignation to around 5% since the start of August. On current boundaries, it leaves Labour 18 seats short of a majority.

The blame for this can be laid squarely at the feet of Keir Starmer and his economic timidity. As has been frequently noted, the British public sits largely to the Left on economic affairs and to the Right on social affairs (or on the authoritarian side of the authoritarian-libertarian divide). Research by Paula Surridge suggests the average position of 2019 Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat and Brexit Party voters can all be found in a Left-authoritarian quadrant. Even more encouraging for proponents of Left-wing economics is YouGov’s finding that, among people who consider themselves Right-wing, 57% say the government should have a significant or dominant role in managing the economy, while 48% think the minimum wage is too low. Starmer should be pushing against an open door.

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The Conservatives are clearly aware of this. It was, after all, George Osborne who introduced the “national living wage”, Theresa May who introduced the energy cap, and Boris Johnson who centred his premiership on levelling up. But we have seen no similar recognition from Starmer. Rather, despite standing on a largely continuity-Corbyn platform (in policy terms, at least) in the 2020 Labour leadership contest, he has tried to shift to the Right economically. “The role of government is to be a partner to private enterprise, not stifle it,” he wrote last year in a 14,000-word pamphlet which sounded more like a TaxPayers’ Alliance press release than Marx.

It also demonstrated that Starmer has learned the wrong lesson from Labour’s 2019 general election defeat. Corbyn’s personal unpopularity was an obvious cause of Labour’s drubbing, but his economic policies were popular — until people realised they were linked to him, or the Labour Party. (The same happened with Conservative policies under William Hague.) For all his flaws, Tony Blair was right to warn that progressivism was an electoral vote-loser; it’s that part of the Corbynite agenda Starmer needs to ditch, not the economics.

In this, Starmer shares the root of his faults with Rishi Sunak: both had been MPs for less than five years when they were put forward as party leaders; their promotions were rapid. And both are now floundering because they have no instinct for where their respective party bases sit.

But Starmer suffers, even more than Sunak, from a lack of political imagination. When the energy price cap was increased to £1,971, Starmer described the new level as “a very, very big problem”. And yet his new position is to keep the cap at this very level — by spending more than £30 billion. This is a politician who reacts to events, rather than shaping them; a politician who has no sense of what a better tomorrow looks like. By this point in the cycle, voters should be sick of hearing Labour’s next election slogan. Instead, Starmer’s only discernible pitch seems to be: “At least we’re not the Conservatives.”

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Perhaps that will be enough to win in 2024. But perhaps it won’t. Liz Truss, the clear frontrunner in the Conservative leadership contest, has a three-point lead over Starmer — and that’s amid a toxic internal battle with Sunak. Placing Starmer against a Conservative leader without the personal baggage of Johnson and with a clear vision of what she believes in will only make his own ideological vacuity more apparent. Yes, Twitter might titter at Truss. But when voters see on the news that Starmer can’t even decide whether to let his frontbench attend a picket line, that hardly seems important.

So what should Starmer do? Well, the most obvious step would be to recognise that things in the UK are just a bit shit at the moment, and a lot of this is down to short-termism. Starmer’s original leadership campaign slogan, “Another future is possible”, is probably the right one. But coupled with this optimism is the need to be as ruthless as the Conservatives, who are happy to reward their voters (the wealthy, the elderly, homeowners) at the expense of other groups who are less likely to vote for them (students and welfare recipients).

Starmer should also follow the “housing theory of everything”, which argues that a lot of problems in the UK are at least partially driven by a lack of homes being built in areas where people want to live. In the UK, that’s often due to the greenbelt, especially around London. Happily for Labour, a lot of those areas are Conservative or Conservative-Liberal Democrat seats. The party should explain how they will fast-track more houses in these places (a good starting place would be within 800m of all commuter stations). These people were never going to return a Labour MP anyway, but the policy could be deployed to show Labour can take tough decisions. Similarly, rich pensioners (who will not vote Labour) get a lot of money from the state which they don’t need and which would be better spent elsewhere, either on poorer pensioners (who will vote Labour) on the NHS or on social care.

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By John McTernan

As for the cost-of-living crisis, if Starmer really wants to make energy more affordable, he needs to recognise that a price-cap freeze won’t help those who can’t afford to heat their homes now. Instead, he should take the £30 billion-odd this policy would cost and pump it into Universal Credit and council tax rebates for the working poor. For a long-term policy, Starmer should back large-scale, state-owned nuclear power and massive investment in battery technology, both tied to new apprenticeships and a green jobs revolution.

Finally, he shouldn’t be shy about what Labour councils are doing right. Under Corbyn, you couldn’t move without hearing about the Preston model, but since 2019 and the Conservative focus on levelling up, Labour seems to have completely vacated the pitch on local urban renewal. If Labour can’t do anything in opposition, it could at least tell people what they’re doing in local government.

Ultimately, however, a bold, economically Left-wing but socially-centrist policy platform is unlikely to emerge at the next election. As the saying goes, when someone shows you who they really are, believe them. And in the more than two years since he was elected leader, Starmer has shown very little sign of doing anything bold — let alone returning Labour to power.

At long last, the Conservatives are clearing up the mess New Labour made of our gambling laws. In December 2020, the current government promised the most comprehensive revision of them since 2005 — to ensure they are “fit for the digital age”. The White Paper is reportedly due to be published at the end of this month.

When Blair’s permissive legislation came into force in 2007, it shifted gambling from being an activity that was tolerated to something that was actively promoted and marketed, in order to stimulate demand. The attempt to “modernise the regulation of gambling for today’s world” had apparently good intentions. In 2004, Blair demanded that opponents of his reforms “go and talk to the people of Blackpool who urgently need the regeneration” that he claimed would be brought about by resort-style super casinos. Gambling, in his eyes, was a vehicle for economic development. He did not represent public opinion in this respect; the vast majority opposed the introduction of more opportunities to gamble.

Gordon Brown ditched the plans for Las Vegas-style super-casinos when he became Prime Minister, meaning Blair’s “modernising” legislation achieved just three notable things: it legitimised Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (FOBTs) in betting shops, which had previously operated outside of the law. This gave bookmakers permission to offer machines of up to £100 every 20 seconds on every high street. It also loosened the restrictions on gambling advertising, while also removing the need to prove there was demand for a new gambling outlet in order to acquire a license to open one.

There were no provisions to adequately regulate gambling websites based offshore, which accounts for practically all of them. The justifying logic was that the gambling took place where the server was located: people accessing these sites from Britain were supposedly gambling in Gibraltar or the Isle of Man. This ludicrous loophole enabled massive betting brands to base themselves in tax havens, advertise to consumers in Britain and build their businesses free of tax or proper regulation — without even providing jobs in the country it had market access to. Britain was exporting billions of pounds every year to these companies, and all we got in return was a massive upswing in the most harmful effects of gambling.

Public Health England (PHE) estimates there to be at least one gambling related suicide a day, with gambling harms impacting not just finances but relationships, employment prospects, mental wellbeing and physical health. PHE calculate the resulting cost to government to be in excess of £1.2 billion a year. YouGov’s polling of 18,000 people suggested that 2.8% suffered from a gambling addiction — scaled up across the UK, this is the equivalent of 1.4 million people, with a further 1.5 million at-risk.

Labour did very little to rectify some of the more obvious downsides of its gambling legislation. It wasn’t until 2014, under the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government, that a “point of consumption” tax was levied on all gambling profits derived from this country. Sadly, it couldn’t be backdated to 2005. Many of the firms remain offshore to this day, which means they still don’t pay UK corporation tax. The coalition government also stipulated that online gambling firms had to be licensed by the Gambling Commission if they wanted to advertise in Britain — a totally obvious regulation New Labour never bothered to insist on.

True, it was Labour that formed the Gambling Commission, but it did a pretty poor job of it. The regulatory body has been criticised by the National Audit Office, the Public Accounts Committee, the House of Lords Gambling Industry Select Committee and MPs from all parties — the running theme being that the Gambling Commission has been “outgunned” by the sector it’s supposed to have a handle on.

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Starmer has proved the Blairites wrong

By Matt Zarb-Cousin

“Light touch” regulation doesn’t work in online gambling. As even the most ardent neoliberal would recognise, the sector cuts across the logic of the free market: it is a win or lose contract between the consumer and the vendor. Given the unlevel playing field between individual and corporation, regulation that upholds consumer protection has to be rigorous.

Yet the Gambling Commission has seen its role as to facilitate the industry’s growth. Consumer protection has been abysmal. Even free bets aren’t free, with gambling firms insisting on obscene so-called “wagering requirements” before people can withdraw their winnings. There have been many cases of people being credited a bonus when they deposit funds into a gambling account, only to find that they are unable to withdraw their winnings unless they bet the total value of what they deposited 99 times — and on products like slots, which have a fixed margin, meaning it’s impossible to win. The Competition and Markets Authority called this “a con”, but the Gambling Commission still permits these unfair terms and conditions.

It also fails to protect the most vulnerable. Online gambling firms derive 86% of their profit from the 5% of people who are addicted or at-risk. In “VIP schemes”, personal account managers encourage people, including those known to be addicted, to gamble as much as possible. Firms profile their customers using third party data and betting history, in order to tailor marketing to gambling addicts who will spend the most. The accounts of gamblers who consistently beat the bookmakers are closed or restricted.

And the most addictive product, online slots, is persistently promoted. Our outdated gambling laws mean there are no limits to stakes online as there are on machines, meaning people are able to gamble thousands in seconds. More than half of the sector’s £7 billion annual profits come from online slots, which are more harmful than any other product — 45% of those who engage with them become problem or at-risk gamblers.

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How Labour became the nasty party

By Giles Fraser

Compared to the revenues of gambling companies, fines from the regulator are paltry. When they are levied, companies simply see them as a cost of doing business. 888, which is in the process of acquiring William Hill, confirmed that the latter has set aside £15 million in anticipation of a fine. (William Hill is the subject an ongoing license review related to social responsibility and money laundering obligations.) 888 has agreed to pay £2.2 billion for William Hill’s betting shops and its two million online customers based in Britain.

Having unleashed this hellscape, Labour sought to make amends under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership by proposing to review online gambling and to cut the maximum stake on FOBTs from £100 to £2 a spin. But it was Tory Minister Tracey Crouch who delivered the latter policy in 2019, which has led to a 50% reduction in people citing these machines when they present for gambling addiction treatment. This correlates with a 40% reduction in revenue from FOBTs, with no commensurate uptick in other products. Police call outs to betting shops were also down by 38% in the year after the stake cut was enacted.

Building on the success of this, Boris Johnson’s government introduced the ongoing gambling review. But while its scope chimes with policies proposed by Tom Watson when he served under Corbyn, the Labour Party is currently very quiet on the issue.

Watson proposed a series of radical reforms to gambling laws, to bring them into the digital age. This included the introduction of a Gambling Ombudsman to improve consumer protections and the requirement that online slots, like physical machines, have stake limits. He also suggested forcing all gambling companies to reapply for their licenses, and a statutory levy on gambling firms to fund research, education and treatment. This agenda has been adopted practically wholesale by the Conservatives. Since leaving Parliament, Watson has joined as an adviser to the board of Flutter, the betting giant that owns SkyBet and Paddy Power.

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Is Tony Blair Labour's future?

By John McTernan

He is part of a trend. Former Labour MPs Michael Dugher and Anna Turley have respectively become CEO and consultant to the Betting and Gaming Council. Former Ed Balls adviser Gary Follis also works there. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer’s refusal to publish donors to his leadership campaign until after the contest had concluded meant contributions from Peter Coates, the founder of Bet365, couldn’t be taken into account by party members until it was too late. Perhaps Labour’s ongoing silence on the issue of gambling reform is the price paid by a cash-strapped party not wanting to upset too many billionaires who might be able to bail them out come election time.

It won’t help them win votes, though. YouGov’s tracker consistently shows that over 60% of people feel unfavourably towards the gambling industry, while just 7% have a favourable attitude. There is also huge public support for limiting stakes for online slots, and for affordability checks when someone loses more than £100 in a month, which would prevent harm in the middle of a cost of living crisis by curtailing escalating losses in accordance with what’s affordable to an individual. Polling from Survation found support for these reforms to cut across geographical lines, with substantial appeal in “red wall” areas. The pollster also found that 70% of Tory MPs agree that unaffordable losses should be prevented, 64% agreed that gambling should be more regulated, and 68% agreed with introducing stake limits online.

In other words, while Labour remains silent, gambling reform is actively supported by Boris Johnson’s backbenchers. It could therefore become a populist dividing line, putting the government on the side of the public while the opposition appeases offshore corporations. And if Labour does choose to sit idly on the sidelines while the Tories rectify Blair’s mistakes, it will be clear to the public that no lessons have been learned by a party seemingly more interested in working with the gambling lobby than challenging an industry that’s exploiting the nation.

It was the final of European Cup, Burton tells me, sitting in his living room with Paul Trippett, who was also there that night. They made Blair watch the match; then they talked. “No disrespect to the MPs round here in the Seventies, but they were cannon fodder,” says Trippett. “They put their hand up at the right time and it was a culture of booze and not getting very much done. And all of a sudden there’s this young lad and he’s a breath of fresh air”. Burton adds: “If you were normally wanting a seat, you tell people what they want to hear. But he didn’t.”

In 1983, Labour Party policy was for nuclear disarmament and the nationalisation of Marks & Spencer. Burton and Trippett had to sell it on the doorstep. When voters stared at them, Burton and Trippett had to say it probably wouldn’t happen. The party leadership was addicted to Socialism in a constitutional monarchy and unserious about winning power except over rival factions in the Labour Party. “We were New Labour before anybody mentioned New Labour,” says Trippett. “If you don’t get power, you can’t do anything.’”

The majorities were astonishing in safe Labour seats like this one, but they were a taunt. “We need,” Blair told them, “to engineer our policies so that they can actually vote for us [in the midlands and the south]. And then once they vote for us and we get a majority in parliament we can then do the things that you guys want to do for your people in the north-east.” It is a contortion that has divided Labour since Blair left in 2007; his success only compounded the bitterness.

“Every time I listened to him speak, I used to cry,” says Burton. In the footage of Blair’s election night count in 1997, Burton is at the edge of the screen, writing numbers in a notebook. Then they got on a plane from Teeside to London with Blair to watch him speak outside the Royal Festival Hall. “And he said,” says Burton, “‘a new dawn is rising’ and the sun started to shine in the dawn”. When Blair left the hall for Downing Street, Burton thought he would walk on the water.

Sedgefield is 160 square miles of County Durham, and vital: the first steam-powered passenger train open to the public, Locomotion No.1, was assembled here. Blair called it a microcosm of the country — community minded but hard-headed and aspirational — and treated it as such. The media called him an Islington man as a slur, but he wasn’t. (Corbyn was.) Rather, he thought the London Labour Party was “pretty crazy”. He grew up nearby in Durham and there was an alchemy between Blair and his activists here. “We were desperate for power,” says Trippett, “We’d had 18 years of unremittent Tory government.” Blair’s offer of capitalism to fund public services — of emphasising wealth creation as well as taxation — his positioning of Britain as a global power and his fixation on law and order was invented in Sedgefield.

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Tony Blair's war on reality

By Mary Harrington

Sedgefield is, as they say, “a real mix”. In the south of the constituency, in the suburbs of Darlington, people are monied and commute into Teesside and Durham. In the east, in the old pit villages, where high streets are bare and buses stop running at six, there is shuttered poverty. Newton Aycliffe, William Beveridge’s idealised new town, was once tidy and preening. Now it is tattered redbrick, though the landscape around it is lush. Sedgefield is small-c conservative, conscious of fairness, and ambitious for itself. It is that archetypal English rural constituency, which is considered a joke in Westminster, but isn’t: save the NHS, hang the paedophiles. When Blair won in 1997, he thanked his constituents, then the police.

Sedgefield town itself is ancient, bustling, and wealthy: a tourist destination for people from surrounding cities to visit at weekends. Restaurants, gift shops and gastropubs surround a tidy green. Corbynites would tut, then settle in: it could be Islington. Black Range Rovers are parked on the streets. Posters advertise a medieval fayre, an easter egg hunt, a flower club, and Jubilee tea parties.

The Dun Cow Inn, where Blair brought George W. Bush for fish and chips in 2003 is warm and faded. They like Blair here. “He modernised the party,” says one man. “Blairism was a reasonable thing,” says another. “He had lovely children,” said a third, pointedly, as if I am poised to say otherwise. One woman thinks that he was “corrupted by power”. When I ask why his legacy is so conflicted, another woman says, “Iraq, and that’s all there is to it”, and turns away. It was his defining example of hubris and nemesis, and it left him looking more like an archetype than a man.

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How Blair broke Britain

By Aaron Bastani

Sedgefield went Conservative in 2019. Phil Wilson, who worked for Blair from 1987 and took his seat in 2007, lost as Jeremy Corbyn was conceding. Paul Trippett worked in Wilson’s office. At the beginning of the campaign, he says, they had two teams out, one in an affluent suburb of Darlington and another in a working-class village. The message came back: “We are going to struggle.” Trippett asked them: “What’s the problem?” If it had only been Brexit, they replied, they could win. “But we couldn’t win the seat with Corbyn as leader. We couldn’t sell him. We didn’t want to sell him.” Trippett had been there before in 1983, with Burton and Blair himself, and they loathed the people around Corbyn. Their policies were time travel, Wilson says, but in the wrong direction. The Tories were campaigning in the 1950s and Labour in the 1970s, offering, “Competing images of the past”.

“In 2017 we were given the benefit of the doubt because they didn’t think we could win,” says Wilson. “In 2019 they didn’t vote for us because they were frightened that we would. I remember in 2017 a woman in the polling station saying, ‘Phil I voted for you. But get rid of him.’ That person wouldn’t have voted for me in 2019. Brexit was a part of it, but the biggest fundamental was Corbyn. He went against the grain of your traditional Labour voter who was patriotic, who saw him as a terrorist sympathiser. Giving the Russians the benefit of the doubt over Salisbury? Just embarrassing”. The seat went blue with a tepid majority of 4,513.

Now, Trippett says, “we have to work every seat like it’s a marginal”. The last pit closed 50 years ago and the monolithic culture the mines birthed has gone. Voters think like consumers, and, like consumers they are volatile and hungry. They no longer say: if I don’t vote Labour my grandmother would turn in her grave. They say: what’s the Labour Party going to do for me? Are the voters too individualistic as consumers, too fractured? Trippett ponders: “I don’t know how a political party can be a broad church these days.” It may take time, he thinks, to get Labour into power. Not the next election perhaps. But with the right candidate they’ll get Sedgefield back. Now Starmer is following Blair — emphasising security and law and order — the polls look friendlier. “You win from the centre,” says Trippett, “it’s always been in the centre. Sometimes it pushes a bit one side and sometimes the other but this block in the middle never changes”.

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Cherie Blair's class war

By Joan Smith

I meet Blair online. For someone who has lived through drama he is almost preposterously calm: atrophied by power, by slander. He is polished, wary. He calls Sedgefield, “crucial. I always grounded myself in my constituency and in the community”. He would arrive on Friday for constituency business, address the Labour club, and go to church in Trimdon village on Sunday. It was from this tiny medieval building opposite John Burton’s house that he addressed the nation after Princess Diana died.

The Tory victory of 2019, was, he says, “Corbyn and Brexit: Corbyn more than Brexit in my view. If you put forward Jeremy Corbyn as the potential prime minister of the country in a constituency like Sedgefield, they think you’ve gone crackers”. Labour voters here, he says, “are very patriotic, they are very tough on law and order, and they expect people to behave themselves respectably”.

Why is New Labour so traduced? “The reason,” he says, “is there are two groups of people in whose interests it has been to trash the New Labour concept and record. One on the left who want to say, ‘because you’re New Labour, you’re basically a sell-out’ and they wanted to take control of the Labour Party. And then you got another group of people who are the right-wing people who hated me and New Labour because we kept winning.”

“Once you leave office, unless you have a constituency prepared to argue for the record your enemies close in on it,” he says. “That’s why eventually,” — is the eventually a caveat? — “I think one route back for Labour will be to understand that it should be proud of the last Labour government, and they won’t get there unless it articulates that”.

Further reading

Centrism always fails

By Will Lloyd

I wonder if it is that simple. Labour is currently polling 13% ahead for the local elections on Thursday. The economy is the most important issue for voters and that is the government’s responsibility. 57% want Starmer as PM, compared to 43% for Johnson. And 47% of voters think he should resign. Starmer is polling well by invoking parts of Blair’s offer, and he is benefiting from Johnson’s chaos, but his problems are different. The economy is not booming as it did under Blair, and there are crises in housing, energy and inflation. Labour is two parties now, and Starmer is far to the Right of his enemies. They don’t want a negotiator to tweak capitalism: they want a socialist Utopia.

In Sedgefield, Labour voters hate Corbyn, despise Johnson and aren’t sure of Starmer yet. There is a weird kind of emptiness here politically: a waiting. It is true that Blair offered a future that came to devour him, but in 2019 both parties chose, as Wilson said, a backward glance. Starmer will make gains on Thursday by following some New Labour paths, but that settlement is a quarter of a century old. However much they long for them in Trimdon, the old politics are gone.

What was it about the final years of Blair’s premiership that ensured his political legacy? There’s the obvious point that when he became PM it was his first and only job in government and he had energy but no experience. By the time he left, he knew exactly how to get things done but was running out of road.

I was Blair’s Political Secretary between 2005 and 2007 and had a front row seat for the end of the “Blair Years”. They were rugged times. There were new opponents on the benches opposite with the election of David Cameron as Tory leader. And there were old enemies on manoeuvre on the Labour benches, as Brown’s attempts to dislodge Tony became increasingly obvious and frantic. Remember the rolling resignations of the Parliamentary Private Secretaries — Khalid Mahmood, Wayne David, Ian Lucas, Mark Tami, David Wright and Chris Mole? Probably not, but it was the “How many letters have been submitted?” moment of its day.

Eventually, Labour MPs were ground down by the relentless friendly-fire attacks and Blair stood down as PM in May 2007, a year earlier than he had planned. Yet he never became bitter. I remember a meeting in the Den, the PM’s room between the private office and the Cabinet Room, when a colleague exasperatedly said: “But Gordon just wants to be Prime Minister!” After a moment’s reflection, Tony replied: “It’s not an ignoble ambition.” Thoughtful and scrupulous.

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The only way Boris can survive Partygate

By John McTernan

The Labour Party’s internal wrangling was an opportunity Cameron seized. He repeatedly found ways to create alliances with Labour rebels to oppose government policy — the core was the awkward squad which included Corbyn who voted with the Tories numerous times. But the number of rebels was growing. It is an iron law of politics that ministers who serve loyally when in the government suddenly find their consciences when they return to the backbench in a reshuffle. Where once they had demanded the whips push through their policies, they now found their personal and political integrity required them to question — and often oppose — government legislation.

By the third term, there had been many reshuffles and the number of former ministers outweighed our majority. In response to this, I ran a small group we called the “Non-embittered Former Ministers”. We also added Keith Hill as the Prime Minister’s PPS. A former union official, he added reach to our political networks among MPs, and every week allocated the precious hour after Prime Minister’s Questions when backbenchers got to meet with the PM to raise concerns, float policy ideas or introduce guests. On one memorable occasion, I brought Shakira in to meet the Prime Minister — she was in Westminster for a parliamentary event. Tony started to explain that he knew her music and admired the way it combined Colombian music traditions with modern American pop music. “Ah”, replied Shakira — silencing us all. “So you think I am some kind of allegory of globalisation?”

But it wasn’t all about party management. There was the pressure, too, of external inquiries. This was the first time the Metropolitan Police had ever investigated Number 10 — a complaint from an SNP backbencher that should have been dismissed immediately as party politics led instead to the “cash for honours” probe. In the absence of any evidence, the Met spent 18 months trying, and failing to find any. The PM’s behaviour was respectful: he let it be known that being interviewed under caution would be a resigning matter — a contrast with the attitude of the current Prime Minister. And he unreservedly backed the few of us, including myself, who were questioned by the police. His confidence that it would come to nothing was morale-boosting during a deeply stressful period.

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New Labour was beyond parody

By Ian Martin

In the end, third terms should be critical for legacy. Margaret Thatcher’s third term, despite the disaster of the “poll tax”, embedded and made irreversible many of her changes. The task New Labour set itself was to leave most of the Tory reforms, but to rebalance some and to rebuild the public square which had been brutally neglected. So, mass picketing and car park show of hands strike ballots were left outlawed, but workers rights were extended, in particular with maternity rights and the statutory right to bank holidays on top of annual leave. The “right to buy” your council home was maintained, but two million social homes were renovated to Decent Homes standards. Choice in health and education was built on, and extended, while waiting lists were slashed — with a now nearly unimaginable guarantee of an 18-week wait for routine treatment.

In turn, most of Blair’s reforms became irreversible. The National Insurance increase to fund the NHS was kept, and has been mimicked by Boris Johnson’s government. Health performance has been hampered by persistent underfunding, the pandemic, and the ill-fated Lansley reforms which are now being abandoned — but the NHS was kept on the road by appointing former Blair adviser Sir Simon Stevens as Chief Executive of NHS England.

There were also significant moments. The G8 meeting in Gleneagles in 2008 deciding to make poverty history by wiping out the debt of heavily indebted countries in the Global South. London winning the bid for the 2012 Olympics. And the tragedy of the 7/7 bombings which drew great compassion and leadership from Blair.

Of course, Blair’s leadership ended in resignation, and New Labour’s third term ended in defeat for Brown. Unfortunately, for a decade party members took the quixotic view that the only reason voters elected increasingly Right-wing Tory governments was that Labour was insufficiently Left-wing. And under Miliband and Corbyn the party moved further and further away from the centre and further and further towards destruction.

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By Mary Harrington

Blair didn’t despair. He made the argument about how Labour could win again. And he has consistently continued to make critical policy interventions — such as driving the argument on vaccination rollout. This strategic patience has paid off. The true legacy of the 2005-2007 Blair government is finally becoming clear. Labour’s desire to win is back. Policy ideas are unashamedly Blairite. And Starmer’s mantra “Opportunity, Security, Respect” could come straight from a Tony Blair conference speech.

History will be the ultimate judge of Tony’s reputation. It will weigh the Iraq war against the Good Friday Agreement which ended the war in Northern Ireland. For Labour Party members and activists it has thankfully settled into the realisation that Labour’s electoral record in the last eleven elections is: Lose, Lose, Lose, Lose, Win, Win, Win, Lose, Lose, Lose, Lose. And the only way to win is to build on Tony Blair’s record rather than spurn it.

Ask yourself what the party’s core message is and how it would improve lives and communities around the country, and few, if any, answers are forthcoming. But ask yourself what the party actually does, and the answer pops up instantly. Labour gives every impression of being preoccupied with purges and internal warfare. Talking to the country appears less a priority than removing all remaining vestiges of anything associated with the previous leader. Scarcely a day goes by without Keir Starmer making a new effort to signal to the electorate that the bad old communist Grandpa is gone.

Still licking its deep and self-inflicted wounds from the general election of 2019, the party under its current leadership appears desperate to convince voters that the Corbyn era was nothing more than an aberration, a squalid interregnum which came about because a proud movement momentarily took leave of its senses. Such a strategy is not without merit, of course. After all, that Corbyn was unpopular on the doorstep is undeniable, as is the fact that the gulf which existed between the Labour Party and its traditional base at the point of his departure was greater than it had ever been. So great, in fact, that there remains a question mark over whether it might ever be bridged.

In his eagerness to detoxify the Labour brand, Starmer should be aware of one or two risks. The most obvious is that a return to anything resembling Blairite liberal-centrism — undoubtedly the wistful long-term desire of many within Labour’s ranks — would do nothing to bring about rapprochement with the party’s old heartlands. Indeed, it is indisputable that while the rupture unquestionably worsened under Corbyn, it began several years before.

Second, not everything the Corbynites did was wrong or unpopular. True, they took hyper-progressivism to suffocating new levels and, in doing so, alienated huge swathes of provincial and working-class Britain. But they did get some things right. Most notably, in seeking to challenge four decades of neoliberal orthodoxy and shift the dial towards a fairer and more redistributive economy, the party under Corbyn showed a boldness of thought that had, for a long time, been sorely lacking.

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Labour was, for instance, right under Corbyn to declare that austerity was not an economic necessity but a political choice; right to assert that a nation cannot cut its way to prosperity; right to argue for investment-led growth; right to see the role of government in the economy as active participant rather than mere bystander.

This agenda was savaged by critics and pundits. They thought it reeked of the twentieth century and top-down, Soviet-style command economics. They were wrong. Corbynomics amounted to little more than the type of Keynesian interventionist approach which was adopted by every British government for three decades after the end of the Second World War, and has long been the hallmark of the Nordic economies. As Keynes’s most prominent advocate and biographer Robert Skidelsky argued, Corbyn deserved praise for confronting what had become the entrenched conventional wisdom and seeking to reassert the proper place of government in the economic life of the nation.

And while it is de rigueur for political pundits to now claim that “Corbynomics” were in large part responsible for the party’s annihilation in 2019, the reality is that much of the agenda was popular —  far more so than the man after whom it was named. People like the idea of an increase in the minimum wage; they frown upon huge disparities in wealth and income; they are sympathetic to progressive taxation and public ownership of key utilities and services; they want regional inequalities addressed and boardroom excesses tackled; they support the concept of worker representation on company boards.

That is why, with a cost-of-living crisis now taking millions of families to the brink, and the prospect of the biggest drop in living standards since the Fifties, Labour must not shy away from offering a healthy dose of radicalism now. They must contrast themselves with a flailing chancellor. Rishi Sunak was happy to splash the cash during the pandemic. But at the moment, all he offers voters desperate for a recovery are the failed Thatcherite policies of the past.

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So while Labour has been right to call for such measures as a windfall tax on the oil and gas companies and the scrapping of the national insurance hike, it must not limit itself to arguing about particular tax and benefit rates here and there. Instead, it needs to set out a bold vision for a complete reordering of economic priorities. That means — and I can’t say I’m holding my breath here — agitating for an approach that would see the government assuming full control over macroeconomic policy and opposing any further ceding of authority to technocrats with no democratic mandate. It would mean elevating the needs of our long-neglected productive sector — the real economy in which most people live and work — over those of finance.

Why should a party with such a radical tradition resign itself to the defeatist belief that there is no alternative to the dominance of the market over vast areas of our national life; that bankers and business leaders always know best; and that, in the end, government intervention in the economy should be seen as nothing more than an occasionally necessary evil?

The public are ready for Labour to be audacious once more. A decade of austerity has impoverished millions. The pandemic revealed dangerous flaws in globalisation — from supply chains and Britain’s missing industrial base. Our over reliance on global markets was utterly exposed. Voters understand all of this. Labour must make the case for the self-governing nation state, untethered from fragile markets and exploitative multinationals. But Labour rarely speaks in these terms.

If the party wanted a truly bold idea to express a new economic philosophy, it might embrace the “family wage” — a concept designed to ensure that families are able to enjoy a decent quality of life on the wages of one earner. This really would signal a revolution, as many across the Labour movement bristle at the proposal whenever someone is brave enough to float it. They often argue that it would serve only to reinforce the patriarchy, but such a reaction demonstrates how far the movement has retreated from its historical purpose.  It seems large numbers within Labour’s ranks would sooner see both parents be forced to go out to work than entertain any suggestion the economy be reordered to grant them the flexibility to allow one, should he or she wish it, to be a full-time home-maker.

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By Paul Embery

In any event, Labour must seek to use the current crisis as a springboard to set a new economic narrative. But, in doing so, it must not strive to exorcise every demon from the years 2015-19. While ridding the party of the worst elements of Corbynism is certainly no ignoble ambition, an indiscriminate blitz would be injudicious and counter-productive electorally.

Of course, any approach that is seen to run counter to the demand for economic retrenchment will be met by the usual vested interests protesting, as they did when Corbyn ran the show, that “There is no magic money tree”. But not only does such an objection demonstrate a misunderstanding of the nature of money — it can, in fact, be created out of nothing — it would, in the wake of the billions suddenly conjured up to get us through the pandemic, surely ring hollower than ever.

The perfect storm of a government in disarray, a forbidding economic landscape and an increasingly disaffected electorate presents Labour with an open goal. This is not a time for timidity or tinkering at the edges. It’s a moment for the party to display again its historical radical impulse.

It is 40 years now since the outbreak of the Falklands War, one of the strangest, most colourful and most popular conflicts in British military history. Today this ten-week campaign to free the South Atlantic islands from Argentine occupation seems like a moment from a vanished age. But that was how it felt at the time, too: a scene from history, a colossal costume drama, a self-conscious re-enactment of triumphs past.

On the day the Invincible sailed, Margaret Thatcher quoted Queen Victoria: “Failure? The possibilities do not exist.” In the Sun, executives put up Winston Churchill’s portrait. And as the travel writer Jonathan Raban watched the departure of the Task Force on television, he thought it was like a historical pageant, complete with “pipe bands, bunting, flags, kisses, tears, waved handkerchiefs”. He regarded the whole exercise with deep derision, until the picture blurred and he realised that, despite himself, he was crying.

For many people the Falklands War was only too real. There were serious issues and genuine lives at stake, not just for the 1,813 islanders who had woken to find military vehicles roaring down their little streets, but for the tens of thousands of Argentine conscripts and British servicemen who were soon to be plunged into the nightmare of combat. And although polls suggest that about eight out of ten Britons strongly supported it, there were always those who considered it a mistake, a tragedy, even a crime. A certain Jeremy Corbyn thought it a “Tory plot to keep their money-making friends in business”. The novelist Margaret Drabble considered it a “frenzied outburst of dying power”. A far better writer, Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges, famously called it “two bald men arguing over a comb”. That seems an odd analogy, though, for almost 2,000 blameless sheep farmers, who had no desire to be ruled by a junta that threw dissenters out of helicopters.

One common view of the Falklands campaign is that it was Britain’s last colonial war. But this strikes me as very unpersuasive. When we think of colonial wars, we think of wars of conquest by white men in pith helmets against brown-skinned underdogs. We think of embattled imperialists struggling to stave off a nationalist uprising, or fighting in defence of white settlers against a native majority. But the Falklands War was none of those things. There was no oppressed indigenous majority — except perhaps for the islanders themselves, some of whom had been there since the 1830s. As for the Argentines, their Spanish and Italian surnames were a dead giveaway. Indeed, few countries in the Americas had done a more thorough job of eliminating their original inhabitants.

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What of the British? For all the “Empire Strikes Back” headlines, they had actually spent the last decade trying to give the islands away. Less than 18 months before the invasion, Mrs Thatcher had sent the chain-smoking Nicholas Ridley to urge the islanders to accept a sovereignty deal with Buenos Aires. His words have a blackly ironic ring today. “Do you want the Argentinians invading you and us kicking them out in a state of perpetual war?… I mean, it’s all very well sitting here saying someone else must come and kick the Argentinians out. Of course we will, but is that good for sheep farming, for fishing, for looking for oil, for all your futures, for your children, and your grand­children and your great­-grand­children?”

On paper, much of what he said was perfectly true. Not unsurprisingly, however, it went down like a lead balloon. When Ridley flew home, the islanders saw him off with a loudspeaker playing Land of Hope and Glory, This Land Is Our Land and We Shall Not Be Moved. He didn’t come back.

Not a war of decolonisation, then. And still less a Victorian war of conquest. Yet there’s no denying that this was a war with a sense of history. On the morning the Task Force sailed, the Daily Mail interviewed a veteran of the First World War, Tommy Mallen, for whom it had been a day of catharsis. “I thought England was done for, spineless, a doormat for the world,” he said. “I’d pass the war memorials or see Nelson’s Victory and wonder what it had all been for. But I was wrong, thank God. We are still a proud country, and we’ll still protect our own.”

The fleet’s commander, Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward, said much the same. Two months later, bursting with pride after the successful landing at San Carlos, he too looked back to the age of Nelson. “What difference,” he wondered, “between Ardent, crippled and burning, still fighting and Sir Richard Grenville’s Revenge all those centuries ago? Or between this and that October day off Cape Trafalgar as Nelson and Hardy walked the quarter deck of the Victory shortly after noon?”

The references to Nelson, the most romantic of all British patriotic heroes, were no accident. From start to finish there was something oddly 18th-century about the Falklands campaign, not least the fact that so much of it involved the high seas. One of its many ironies was that until the Argentines invaded, the Thatcher government had been planning to slash the Royal Navy to the bone. But the spectacle of the Task Force ploughing through the Atlantic was perfectly calculated to stir the hearts of a seafaring people who had grown up with tales of Drake and Nelson. And from the moment the fleet left, press and public alike relished the connections with Britain’s maritime history. In that respect, the news editor of the Sun, who took to wearing a naval cap and demanded that his subordinates address him as Commander, spoke for millions.

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Kyiv will rise again

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Today much of the Sun’s coverage would have sensitive readers running for the hills. The “GOTCHA” headline, glorying in the sinking of the General Belgrano, was merely the most infamous example in a long series: the repeated admonitions to “STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA”, the paper’s “Argy-­Bargie” joke column, even its operation to airlift 50 gigantic posters of Page Three girls to the RAF base at Ascension Island.

Yet none of this would have seemed shocking to newspaper readers in 18th-century London. Britain fought at least seven major campaigns against the Spanish Empire in the course of the 18th century, from the War of the Spanish Succession and the War of Jenkins’s Ear to the Seven Years’ War and the struggle against Napoleon, and the press coverage back then was much the same. On one side, the jolly, earthy, open-hearted Jack Tars, the defenders of individual liberty and plain-speaking Protestantism. On the other, the inheritors of Spain’s Black Legend: flamboyant, superstitious and unspeakably cruel. “A jumped-­up junta of barbarous men,” roared one Tory backbencher. “The very thought that our people, 1,800 people of British blood and bone, could be left in the hands of such criminals is enough to make any normal Englishman’s blood boil,” thundered another.

He was speaking in the spring of 1982, but he could so easily have been talking two centuries earlier. Indeed, it’s striking how often MPs reached for parallels, not just with the Second World War, but with the campaigns against the Spanish, the French and other similarly sallow and superstitious foreigners. “Let us hear no more about logistics — how difficult it is to travel long distances,” declared the Tory backbencher Edward du Cann. “I do not remember the Duke of Wellington whining about Torres Vedras. We have nothing to lose now except our honour!”

History never repeats itself, of course. But when you start noticing the Georgian resonances, it’s hard to stop. A few months after the Task Force returned in triumph, the social commentator Peter York claimed that the single most powerful “piece of everyday symbolism” in the country was the mock-Georgian front door, “strong and safe and solid… a revisionist burst of bourgeois individualism”. The members of Visage, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, with their whitened faces, billowing pantaloons and over-elaborate eye make-up, would have made superb extras in a stage revival of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. So too would the greatest sporting icon of the age, whom you can easily imagine roaring out “Hearts of Oak” on the deck of the Victory.

As the cricket writer Derek Hodgson put it: “Regency England would have recognised him instantly as the man who could ride to hounds from dawn, fight 25 rounds bare-knuckle of an afternoon, dine on a mountain of boiled mutton, roast beef, plum duff and cheddar cheese, washed down by ale and claret, and top it off with a bottle of brandy: a man who proclaimed one Englishman worth 10 scurvy foreigners. For Ian Botham read John Bull.”

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Even Margaret Thatcher, so often seen as a Victorian Gradgrind, had her Georgian side. When she moved into 10 Downing Street, she specifically requested paintings of Nelson, Wellington and George II. At a reception in the autumn of 1982, she gave the journalist Hugo Young a tour of the new paintings, proudly pointing out George I, Sir Robert Walpole, William Pitt the Younger and “other admirals and soldiers”. And when, in her memoirs, she discusses the moment she became Prime Minister, whom does she quote? Not Churchill, but Pitt the Elder: “I know that I can save this country and that no one else can.”

Perhaps it was no wonder, then, that the Falklands War felt like an eighteenth-century throwback. In a country shorn of its imperial pretensions, struggling to find a new place in the world, it revived the image of a buccaneering, free-trading, maritime people, sometimes boorish, often vulgar, but always staunch in the defence of freedom. Here was the Britishness — or perhaps more accurately, the Englishness — of Rule Britannia, of James Wolfe at Quebec and H. Jones at Goose Green, swashbuckling martyrs in the national cause. It was cynical and sentimental, ruthless and romantic, fervently patriotic and often aggressively populist. Some people hated it. But deep down, most felt its emotional pull.

For almost two centuries it had been buried beneath a veneer of Victorianism, but it had never disappeared. “It must have always been there,” wrote the columnist George Gale on the day of victory, “for we have seen it flooding back.” Britain, agreed Margaret Thatcher, “has re-kindled that spirit which has fired her for generations past and which today has begun to burn as brightly as before.”

But it was an even more controversial politician who put it best. “A change has come about in Britain,” wrote Enoch Powell. “We are ourselves again.”

Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland discuss the Falklands War in The Rest is History.

His critics countered that he has not only severed all connections with Left-wing outlets but attacks them with vindictive ferocity, and can now be seen regularly on Carlson’s show, where they get along famously. I interpreted Bump’s description as a deadpan provocation, challenging the idea that Greenwald’s long-running identification with the Left matters more than what he now says and does. A bigger question, not new but intensified by the Ukraine crisis, is whether “Left” and “Right” are remotely adequate descriptions of the current political landscape.

I’m bemused by the idea of “the Left” as a unified, monolithic entity. (For this reason I don’t capitalise “Left” or “Right” except when it is a publication’s house style.) History supplies no evidence to support this notion of homogeneity. The Labour Party, for example, often feels like a marriage of convenience between people who hate each other. No Conservative can needle a Corbynite as much as a Blairite can, and vice versa. When I read some publications, “the Left” encompasses everyone from Joe Biden to a bearded millennial with a hammer-and-sickle in his Twitter handle, but then I turn to Twitter and see Owen Jones denouncing Paul Mason, an actual loud-and-proud Marxist, as a “neo-McCarthyite” and remember that the Left is diverse and fractious.

Responses to the invasion of Ukraine have been educational. Few western commentators are stupid enough to be explicitly pro-Putin but a significant number, including Greenwald and Carlson, are anti-anti-Putin. You can identify them by their obsession with Nato, “legitimate security concerns”, “poking the Russian bear”, the Azov battalion, and hypothetical biological warfare laboratories, all of which are popular Kremlin talking points. Their arguments usually begin with some throat-clearing variation on: “The invasion of Ukraine is abhorrent but…”

Some of them were once associated with the Left but now occupy a more chaotic space: former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, former Labour MP George Galloway, former comedian Russell Brand and former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi. (This is the world of the former.) Some, like Carlson, JD Vance, Nigel Farage and Steve Bannon, are clearly on the Right, if not the far-Right.

Some appear to be nothing more than contrarian narcissists who trade as “free-thinkers”. Others, who can be found in varying proportions in organisations such as the Stop the War Coalition, Democratic Socialists of America and Young Labour, come to anti-anti-Putinism via the far-Left. It will not surprise you to learn that many of the above made regular appearances on the now-banned Russian television channel RT.

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Owen Jones gets into trouble because he insists on describing marginal groups as “the Left” and springing up to defend their honour. When the Labour leadership demanded that 11 MPs withdraw their signatures from a Stop the War statement, Jones decried it as “an excuse to purge the Left” — even though those 11 constituted about 5% of the PLP and one-third of the Socialist Campaign Group. Either the Left is a major political force with popular support for its policies, or it is a fringe of the fringe. Which is it?

The idea of a Left-Right spectrum originated with a seating arrangement. After the French Revolution, members of the new National Assembly who supported the king gathered to the president’s right and revolutionaries to the left. “Left” and “Right” caught on in Britain during the Spanish Civil War, which at the very same time exposed how inadequate those definitions were. Writers such as George Orwell and Franz Borkenau observed with horror that Stalinists in Spain murdered and defamed socialists and anarchists, employing tactics similar to those of the fascists they were fighting. The study of totalitarianism developed from those early efforts to explain the puzzling kinship between mortal enemies on the far-Left and the far-Right.

During the Forties, the likes of Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Andre Gide and Albert Camus became known as the “Non-Communist Left”. To them, the difference between Stalinism and democratic socialism was night and day — Clement Attlee suspended five Labour MPs for pro-Soviet sympathies — but this fundamental divide in the Left often confused conservatives. When the Duchess of Atholl, impressed by the anticommunism of Animal Farm, invited Orwell to address the Right-wing League for European Freedom, he wrote back: “I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence on this country.” In the early Sixties, rejection of Soviet communism was one of the founding principles of the New Left, even if many of its members went on to mimic the error by lionising Mao.

Despite these major fractures, Left and Right were useful labels so long as economics and class interest dominated politics. Party policies on tax and welfare may still cleave that way but voting behaviour does not. People regularly vote against their class interests, prioritising cultural values and identity over economics. If you hadn’t noticed before 2016 that parties of the Left were becoming, relatively speaking, more middle-class and parties of the Right more working-class, then Brexit and Trump made it unignorable. In the UK, while Labour broadly leaned towards Remain and the Tories towards Brexit, there were enough Thatcherite Remainers and socialist Leavers to create unlikely new alliances. (Then again, in the Seventies, the two most prominent Eurosceptic MPs were Tony Benn and Enoch Powell. Europe has that effect.)

Strange bedfellows have been a growing feature of the past decade in what we generally call populist movements even when they’re not popular. When it comes to anti-vaxxers, the gilets jaunes in France, or people who spread conspiracy theories about the White Helmets in Syria, it can be almost impossible to tell whether the person talking is on the far-Left, far-Right or has no coherent ideology at all. The rise of identity politics has fractured the Left, too. There are Marxists who reject it outright and socialists who gravitate towards the socially conservative Blue Labour. The language of politics has not yet caught up.

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The anti-anti-Putin Left are most usefully described as “campists”, whose geopolitical philosophy is summed up by the phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. America is the font of all evil, therefore its opponents must have something going for them.

The British-Syrian writer Leila Al-Shami calls this “the anti-imperialism of idiots”: “This pro-fascist Left seems blind to any form of imperialism that is non-western in origin. It combines identity politics with egoism. Everything that happens is viewed through the prism of what it means for westerners — only white men have the power to make history.” Russia’s unprovoked war of imperialist aggression is as inconvenient to campists as China’s oppression of the Uyghurs. Either they must find a way to blame America after all or they must downplay the issue. Left-wing support for corrupt authoritarians such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega is disappointing enough, but sympathy with Vladimir Putin, Bashir al-Assad and Xi Jinping is symptomatic of a morally broken worldview.

At the risk of sounding like Walter in The Big Lebowski — “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos” — old-fashioned Stalinism had a certain logic. The USSR was for a long time the world’s only socialist country, and many people believed that if socialism failed there, it would fail completely. So they shut their eyes and ears to the show trials, the purges, the gulags, the Holodomor and so on, until the denial became intolerable. Malcolm Muggeridge compared the British human-rights activists who whitewashed Stalin’s Russia to “vegetarians undertaking a pious pilgrimage to a slaughter-house because it displayed a notice recommending nut cutlets”.

Campists don’t even need the advertisement for nut cutlets, because they do not know what they stand for, only what they oppose. This is how you end up making excuses for dictators who bomb hospitals while demonising the people who pull the bodies from the rubble as terrorists and/or CIA assets. This is how people who define themselves by their opposition to the US invasion of Iraq find themselves claiming that Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine. It is obscene.

The French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye popularised the Horseshoe Theory, which argues that the extremes of Left and Right curve towards one another rather than sitting at opposite ends of a straight line. Hotly disputed by people who consider it a “smear” on the Left, it has the drawbacks of simplicity as well as the benefits. It does not mean that the far-Left are no different from fascists, any more than Stalin was a Nazi. I see it as an observation rather than an ironclad prescription. I know people far to my Left whose moral and intellectual integrity is unimpeachable, but I’ve also encountered antisemites, Assadists and Putin apologists who claim to be socialists. Another term for this, again harking back to the Thirties, is “red-brown alliance”.

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Back in 2009, Michelle Goldberg observed that Infowars host Alex Jones occupied “the shadowy territory where the far-Right curves around and meets the far-Left”. The invasion of Ukraine has made the existence of this tendency undeniable. Last week, Iranian state television broadcast a conversation between suspended Labour MP Chris Williamson, sacked university professor David Miller and prominent Stop the War member Lowkey about alleged Zionist influence in Ukraine. However that confederation of ghouls might define itself, it does not represent any Left that I identify with. Yet you can see for yourself how many influential people on the Left rallied to the defence of Williamson and Miller over allegations of antisemitism not so long ago.

In Britain, Left-wing writers such as Paul Mason, George Monbiot and Daniel Randall have long been fierce critics of campism. In recent weeks, Leftists from Ukraine and Syria have denounced it, too, while the Polish group Left Together has withdrawn from Yanis Varoufakis’s DiEM25 and the dubiously named Progressive International for their both-sides framing of the invasion. “You, decades after the Eastern European version of communism collapsed and Russia turned into a turbocapitalist, authoritarian regime, are still claiming that the man in charge of it is some kind of ‘anti-imperialist’ hero, despite him doing pretty much all he can to assure his stated aim of rebuilding the Russian empire and beyond,” wrote Zosia Brom in a furious piece called “Fuck leftist westplaining”. They have had enough of this nonsense, and who can blame them?

We are currently experiencing a moment of rare political unity on the subject of Putin and Ukraine, which makes the spectrum-scrambling dynamics of anti-anti-Putinism brutally clear. The Left-Right axis became popular because it helped to clarify existing political positions but now it obscures reality so frequently that I wonder we are so addicted to an archaic binary. Whether someone describes themselves as Left-wing or Right-wing no longer interests me. The only thing that matters is what they’re actually saying.

Putin needs a buffer in Ukraine, said one on Twitter. Would you be a buffer, was one reply, and the tweet was duly taken down. The far Left’s most pleasing character trait is its cowardice. It collapses easily. Nato expansion is de rigueur in eastern Europe for countries seeking to join the EU, said a woman at a Stop the War meeting, as if national sovereignty — which she is blessed to have — is something trivial for those defending it in Ukraine.

Stop the War says we shouldn’t arm Ukraine or impose sanctions: it will only encourage Putin. Such is their determination, a man with a Ukrainian flag was escorted from a meeting this weekend as he cried, “Shame!” I would have listened to him but that is not part of their culture: not when they are met with opposition, which they do not like, and to hear them now praise “diplomacy” — as they did — is bizarre because it involves listening. During the meeting they congratulated themselves on their courage for speaking as they do, among friends — the media were barred for immorality even as independent media is fleeing Russia — and inside a liberal democracy.  Such is their toxicity now, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell pulled out of a Stop the War rally.

They may be a pottage of vanity, self-deception, and rage, but they have been clear on Ukraine, even before the hammer and the sickle appeared at a rally in London this week. “In [the] game of great power politics, if we have to pick a side over Crimea let it be Russia,” they said in 2014, when Jeremy Corbyn was their chair. “Some of us have never supported Putin,” he says now, a coward among cowards.

The willingness to understand Putin was obvious, again in 2014, when Corbyn’s spin doctor Seumas Milne, a rich Communist sympathiser, appeared with Putin at PR junket alongside leaders of the European far Right. A surprising number of far Left leaders are rich as if they, who don’t really need politics, can afford uniquely unserious ones. If you are rich, it doesn’t matter if the Socialist Utopia never comes. Dreaming, to steal their language, is a privilege.

For George Galloway, an original sponsor of Stop the War, closeness to tyranny seems to be a soothing and instinctive need. His address to Saddam Hussein in 1994 is infamous: “I still meet families who are calling their newborn sons Saddam. Sir, I salute your courage, your strength and your indefatigability and I want you to know that we are with you until victory, until victory in Jerusalem.” Another sponsor was Andrew Murray, a rich Communist sympathiser; yet another is Jeremy Corbyn himself. Plenty of them failed to oppose Bashar al-Assad, even as Muslim activists begged them to. They didn’t support aid convoys to Aleppo — too imperialist — or the White Helmets pulling bodies out of Russian-bombed rubble in Syria. They are only anti-war when the West is the aggressor. There are no just wars when the West fights them is their reasoning, if we are calling it that; but every war against the West is, if not just, then at least understandable.

But this isn’t pacifism, however they may brand it. It is Occidentalism: hatred of the West, and, with that comes hatred of parliamentary democracy too, because it is disappointing and hard work.

What real — rather than self-serving and performative — sympathy do they have for those beyond themselves? Who have they really helped beyond themselves? I often wonder what would happen if they threw themselves behind moderate Labour with all their fury as an experiment in real politics — if they acknowledged, for instance, that a Socialist Utopia is unlikely in a country that is also a monarchy. But this kind of self-reflection and generosity is not in their nature.

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Consider their brutal anti-Semitism. Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t know he is an anti-Semite, but that doesn’t make him any less of one. Much can be laid at the door of their idiocy; like idiots, their world is binary. They do not think the West can be saved, and they will not help others save it.

I sensed the anti-democratic tendencies of the far Left when I first met Corbyn’s Labour Party in 2015. It was obvious in the way they spoke about their enemies, which they define as anyone who has ever disagreed with them. Tory Right or soft Left: to the far Left there is no difference. Every day they say so on social media: Liberals and Centrists are bemused to find themselves called far Right. It’s poison on the doorstep. It made former miners vote Tory in 2019 because if soft Left is far Right, why not? The violence of their language offered a creeping kind of dehumanisation of the enemy who is also — crucially — a voter: someone to be seduced by a serious politician is, for them, only someone to be despised.

Violence was always acceptable if it was against your enemy: the rhetoric itself made it necessary. I heard many far Left cheerleaders call the throwing of milkshakes and eggs acceptable if they landed on the wrong kind of politician, and what comes after that? Quite recently a far Left journalist celebrated a policewoman being knocked off her horse. I saw a journalist attacked at a far Left meeting last autumn; they applauded when the victim left the room. At the last campaign rally in 2019, a Jew was physically attacked for carrying an anti-Corbyn banner. I concluded that they do not believe in parliamentary democracy, because they do not believe in the legitimacy of opposition. It’s a defect that makes a nonsense of any good within them. It isn’t a whimsical thing. It’s a structural fault.

So, their kindness to Putin this last week — their willingness to see the world from his point of view, even as he destabilises it — is no accident. It is, consciously or not, a recognition of similar desires.