Michael Chessum’s history of the left over the past decade swims against the tide of political analysis. Its central assertion is that the resurgence in radical politics is not over, and its starting point was not Jeremy Corbyn’s success in Labour’s leadership election, but the student protests five years before it. Its moments of drama are not in parliament but in Parliament Square, and its sense of potential derives not from polls or trends but from granular analysis of how leftwing arguments re-entered the mainstream.
Full disclosure: I observed and sometimes worked closely with Chessum as part of Another Europe Is Possible (AEIP), what he and ultimately all of us came to describe as a “hard left, hard remain” pressure group. I watched him pursue what was, in the end, the only meaningful attempt to change Corbyn’s policy on Brexit. When, in 2018, an unprecedented number of constituency Labour parties arrived at conference with a motion backing remain, which the leadership then had to adopt, it was because of AEIP. Others, such as the People’s Vote group, tried to take credit for it. I saw journalists accept that story without question, which bugged me but didn’t seem to bug Chessum. I’m part of the chronicling class, not the activist class, and who did what remains important.
All that matters not just for the sake of accuracy, but because it illustrates one of Chessum’s central points: there is a deliberate and persistent failure in mainstream narratives to engage with leftwing movements, to interrogate their aims and to acknowledge their impact. This book aims to redress the balance, showing that “without understanding the organised left and the relationship of the wider movement to it, you simply cannot speak with any clarity about the social movements that laid the ground for Corbynism”.
Indeed, to understand Corbyn’s rise, you have to go back to the “explosion of social movements and industrial struggle which opened in late 2010 and peaked in 2011”. I was initially sceptical; even without any of those actions, Corbyn’s effortless seizure of the leadership made perfect sense if you knew any Labour members, older socialists who’d been completely disgruntled since 1994. Chessum does allow, later on, the view from Paul Mason, that “Corbynism was always the networked generation plus the defeated baby boomer generation”. But the author’s account, wh detailich begins with the student protests in such pin-sharp, often funny, did actually move me closer to his analysis rather than Mason’s.
It may have been a coalition of old and young, but the high points of Corbyn’s leadership – the Glastonbury crowds singing “Oh Jeremy Corbyn”; the people standing on wheelie bins outside his public meetings; his unexpected success in 2017’s general election – were the direct result of the solidarity both he and John McDonnell had shown to students – tens of thousands of whom joined a protest in November 2010 against rising tuition fees – as well as to other groups whose protests came to define 2011 such as Counterfire and the Socialist Workers’ party.
Chessum quotes Hattie Craig, who would go on to become a big noise in Momentum, but in 2010 was a student activist. She describes a steward saying: “‘That way is the demo, behind me is the riot.’ Well, we obviously wanted to go to the riot.” Students were breaking away, not just from traditional, machine politics, which arguably they’d broken away from decades before, but even from traditional, machine protest, in which you stay polite and don’t break anything. The crux of this argument, and what makes sense of the title – This Is Only the Beginning – is that the energy of activists breathed life into the Labour party, which then suffocated itself again through its own internecine rivalries. The conditions that bore that energy have not gone away, however, and nor have the activists.
The book ends with a number of prescriptions for the future, of which the most controversial is that the Labour party needs to split. “In no circumstances other than a first past the post electoral system would it make sense for the advocates of private finance initiatives in the NHS and the Iraq war to share a political project with Marxists and anti-war activists.”
In a pleasing final irony, the Labour party conference recently passed a motion for proportional representation – which is the only way those two factions could coexist and find electoral success without constantly trying to obliterate each other – and which came about by exactly the same means as that anti-Brexit motion of four years ago, organised by people who observed the latter process at close quarters. The legacy of the last decade is greater than “energy”, an amorphous concept at the best of times – it’s visible in alliances, expertise, ambition and a new sense of purpose on the left. I’ve rarely read anything so deliberately un‑Pollyanna-ish – pacey but sober, witty but often very stark – that nevertheless left me feeling so optimistic.
• This Is Only the Beginning by Michael Chessum is published by Bloomsbury (£20). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
