Mike Phipps reviews This Is Only the Beginning: The Making of a New Left, from Anti-Austerity to the Fall of Corbyn, by Michael Chessum, published by Bloomsbury

Michael Chessum’s book is “the story of how the British left came to life again in the 2010s: of a generation that exploded in revolt when no one thought they were capable of doing so, a mass movement that broke the austerity consensus and an electoral project that transformed politics. It is also the story of what went wrong: the institutional failures, the lack of pluralism and democracy, the culture of loyalism and the failure to successfully confront the rise of right-wing nationalism.”

He writes as a participator, a student and anti-austerity activist, who was elected to the first Steering Committee of Momentum, the left wing movement set up after Jeremy Corbyn’s election to the leadership of the Labour Party. His book is replete with insights from other key figures in the anti-austerity movement and the Labour left, from PCS General Secretary Mark Serwotka to former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell MP to journalist Ash Sarkar.

The key lesson that Chessum draws from his experiences is that the left lacks – not policy ideas, which it has aplenty – but “the means of cohering a genuinely thriving, democratic movement which can mobilize outside of election periods.” Despite the promise of opening up the Labour Party and building relationships with outside movements, “the official leadership of the new Labour left seemed curiously allergic to devolving power to their own activists.” Instead, as with social movements elsewhere, it became almost wholly focused on elections.

Chessum traces the origins of the Corbyn movement to developments earlier in the decade: the anti-fees protests – in which the author played a central part and many activists were radicalised by the shocking levels of police violence and repression against students; the many strands of the broader anti-austerity movement; the rise in industrial militancy, reflected in the emergence of a new wave of union leaders; the Occupy movement.

By 2015, millions of workers had taken strike action, hundreds of thousands had repeatedly marched through London and tens of thousands had taken direct action. If the anti-austerity movement failed, it was because key leaders – Chessum singles out those of the National Union of Students and Unison in particular – repeatedly squandered opportunities. Meanwhile Labour’s leadership undermined the strikes and supported much of the government’s austerity agenda.

The anti-austerity movement’s anti-Establishment impulse was vital to the momentum generated around Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership bid. But his success fundamentally changed the central political priority into trying to win elections and take control of a political party, in which “the vast majority of the new recruits had no collective understanding of the task at hand beyond supporting the new leadership.”

Nor was there much of a pre-existing framework to do this, given the long stagnation of the traditional Labour left. A contradiction would open and widen between the new grassroots influx and the requirements of conventional political leadership.

Counter-balancing the new movements were the other pillars of Corbynism, the Labour left, long in decline since the zenith of Bennism, and key trade union leaderships. The latter’s presence in the alliance was crucial to its success, but also had a profound effect on the evolution of the project in their search for patronage and control. Unite’s leadership was especially influential, with key allies of then General Secretary Len McCluskey occupying powerful positions in the Corbyn leadership.

Struggling to reconcile the contradictions within an organisational framework was Momentum. Divisions over its structure and orientation dominated its early internal life, dissipating much of its potential and energy. Chessum had his own experiences of chaotic Momentum meetings, as did I: London Regional Committee meetings dominated by left groups proposing detailed policy motions, divorced from any discussion about campaigning or capacity-building.

This kind of misbehaviour helps explain why grassroots autonomy lost out to centralised control. Chessum is scathing about the closing down of Momentum’s internal structures in 2016 and sees it as a turning-point. Although I agree that this was a mis-step, it was clear that continuing with the existing arrangements was wasting energy and alienating the majority of activists who were not tied to a particular faction.

A more significant factor in the drive to centralisation was the colossal pressure the Corbyn project was under – above all from within the Labour Party itself. A vehement, vicious campaign to destroy Corbyn personally and attack his support base began on the day of his leadership election. As we now know, the Party’s own apparatus, paid for by membership fees of hundreds of thousands of new members, was central to the campaign to undermine the democratic will of the grassroots.

The Parliamentary Party were equally hostile, boycotting the front bench’s questions and debates and then organising an attempted coup against Corbyn one year into his leadership. Yet Chessum is right to see the bigger picture: what isolated the Corbyn movement above all and pushed it in the direction of orthodox politics was an absence of major industrial or social struggle. The mass movement that had helped create Corbyn’s success declined after 2015.

Meanwhile the political terrain was shifting beneath the movement’s feet. Chessum believes the Corbyn leadership saw Brexit as merely an “inconvenience”, and “the high of the 2017 general election result” was “an intoxication from which Corbynism never sobered up.” He is candid about laying the culpability for failings on this issue at the door of Brexiteers in Corbyn’s office and horse-trading within the trade union bureaucracy – which many will find a welcome balance to the pro-Brexit post-mortems of this era that have appeared in recent months.

It was also trade union bureaucrats – from within the Corbyn project – who killed off the policy of Open Selections for Labour candidates. The same top-down approach created an atmosphere where you either totally supported the leadership or were seen as a potential traitor, as attitudes on Brexit increasingly underlined.

There’s a lot of truth in Chessum’s version of events, but the ‘elitism versus grassroots democracy’ narrative is based on an important omission: policy. The contradictions within the Corbyn project were not just over methods; there were real political differences too. Those most wedded to the traditional way of doing things, especially the union leaderships, were invariably more conservative on policy issues, especially defence and the environment. No account of this period is complete without this dimension. Neglecting it risks overlooking the very positive way that Corbynism moved the political agenda leftwards and widened the Overton window of what is possible.

Perhaps his tendency to minimise this is what leads Chessum to his conclusion that “the Labour Party needs to split.” Of course, it’s clear that Keir Starmer represents a very different politics to Jeremy Corbny’s and the regime he has imposed on the Labour Party is authoritarian and factional. But it comes with a risk: in the increasingly unlikely event that he loses the next election, he would rightly be blamed for devaluing the input of grassroots members and dividing the Party. The first question that would be asked of any would-be successor would be: what will you do to restore Party morale and unity?

It’s more probable, and preferable, that Starmer will win, in which case we won’t have that debate. Instead, the conversation will focus on what needs to be done to fix the country and – in conditions of the worst economic prospects an incoming Labour government has inherited in 60 years – how will Labour’s policies be paid for? The policy ideas in Labour’s 2017 manifesto may well come in useful at that point. A Labour split would not.

Mike Phipps’ new book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.