The World Transformed have just launched a new report A New Cycle of Struggle: The British Left Post-Corbyn, by Amardeep Singh Dhillon. Mike Phipps takes a look.

This new Report looks at the period opened by the 2019 election defeat of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, which began a new era for the British Left, as the fragile coalitions which had cohered around the hope of a left wing Labour government shattered.

“The British left was wholly and disastrously unprepared for the scale of the 2019 defeat and the speed with which the left ecologies cohered around Corbynism splintered,” suggests the Report.

This is undeniable. But, despite its disorientation, the strength of the left was such that Keir Starmer could win the leadership only by pledging continuity with the his predecessor – even if those commitments would quickly be broken.

While the Report puts a rather optimistic gloss on the internal struggles within Momentum after 2019, it would be fair to say that these too were part of a wider fracturing within the left which left it less able to dominate political events. It struggled to be heard above the national consensus around the Covid pandemic and was taken by surprise by the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

But it’s a strength of this Report that it recognises the significance of this movement. It also underlines the increase in trade unionism in 2020 and the progress made in internal union elections.

This was in stark contrast to the lurch to the right in the Labour Party, with the removal of left wingers from the front bench and the withdrawal of the parliamentary whip from the Party’s former leader, a move that was banned from even being discussed within the Party by its apparatus. “Over the next two years,” notes the Report, “swathes of socialist councillors would be blocked from restanding as Labour candidates ahead of local elections in 2021 and 2022, with new candidates not aligned to the Party’s right wing similarly blocked from standing.”

While the Labour leadership prosecuted its internal war against the left, the Johnson government was getting away with passing unamended a mass of reactionary legislation through Parliament by a large majority. Yet Labour’s equal best ever result in the Welsh Senedd elections in 2021 underlined Labour’s popularity when it did propose a clear alternative to the Tories’ right wing agenda.

As the left reoriented itself within Labour, trade unions and social movements, the Report argues, “seismic events including the pandemic, increased state and police repression, and the so-called cost of living crisis presented challenges as well as opportunities for new modes of organisation.”

The last year particularly underlines that. Repeated governmental crisis has been accompanied by increasing signs of a fight back against the new round of austerity being forced onto those least able to afford it.

“With levels of industrial militancy not seen in a generation, and glimpses of new organisational infrastructures having developed, among others, around COP, Kill the Bill and the cost of living crisis, there is evidence of a proactive, collective reorientation of the left beyond the defeat of Corbynism,” the Report suggests.

Well, let’s hope so. “The links between the labour movement and the extra-parliamentary movement left will need to be developed through new and existing organisational structures and campaigns irrespective of who wins the next election,” concludes the Report.

That’s certainly true. The new industrial militancy can be expected to keep the pressure on the next government, which is probably going to be Labour. But that pressure also needs to be maintained within the Party too, holding MPs and Party spokespeople to account through our branches, CLPs, affiliated unions, regional and nationally elected bodies and Conference.

Something not much covered here is the significant advance made by the left in local government. For that, and a more detailed assessment of the whole period since 2019, I recommend my book!

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

Image: TWT, https://theworldtransformed.org/news/welcome-to-our-new-website/