Jeremy Corbyn

Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party
by David Kogan
Published 17 Apr 2019

19 Falkirk and Collins 20 The Road to 2015 21 The 2015 General Election part six: The Four Summers of Jeremy Corbyn; The Summer of Love 22 The Establishment 23 The Insurgents 24 Throwing it Away part seven: The Four Summers of Jeremy Corbyn; The Summer of Redemption 25 From Swarm to Momentum 26 Learning on the Job 27 The Referendum 28 The Chicken Coup 29 The Importance of 2016 part eight: The Four Summers of Jeremy Corbyn; The Summer of Fun 30 The Apotheosis – The 2017 General Election 31 Consolidation part nine: The Four Summers of Jeremy Corbyn; The Long, Hot Summer 32 The Baggage of the Past 33 The Dialogue of the Deaf 34 The Wheel Turns part ten: Brexit and Beyond 35 The Shadow of Brexit 36 The Fault Lines Exposed 37 Epilogue Acknowledgements Index Plates Preface In May 2015, Ed Miliband became the latest in a long line of Labour party leaders to lose a general election.

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This would become more obvious at the party conference in September, but in March it would be overtaken by a much bigger set of issues that would occupy the NEC, LOTO and Jeremy Corbyn for the next six months. The challenge now came from Corbyn’s own past. part nine The Four Summers of Jeremy Corbyn: The Long, Hot Summer ‘Jeremy Corbyn; Labour is not a threat to Jewish life in Britain’ Guardian, 2018 32 The Baggage of the Past After three years of success, there was bound to be a rebound. From the euphoria of winning the leadership, beating off the 2016 attempt to remove him and the surprise of the 2017 general election, Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters could afford to focus on solidifying their position within the party and prepare their appeal to the wider electorate.

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Like David Cameron, she could use a public vote to reinforce discipline within her own party. She could get a mandate to push forward her version of Brexit and then establish a government in her image. On 18 April she announced a general election for 8 June 2017. part eight The Four Summers of Jeremy Corbyn: The Summer of Fun ‘Ohhh, Jeremy Corbyn’ Glastonbury Crowd, 2017 30 The Apotheosis; The 2017 General Election Jeremy Corbyn had won every fight since 2015. The introduction of OMOV, the impact of social media and the disorganisation and failures of his opponents in the PLP had combined to give him an unassailable position as leader. In normal times he would be facing three years before a general election in which to develop a style and leadership qualities within the House of Commons.

Corbyn
by Richard Seymour

, Telegraph, 19 April 2017. 43Graeme Demianyk, ‘Jeremy Corbyn was NOT “dancing a jig” before Remembrance Sunday service’, Huffington Post, 13 November 2016. 44Jon Craig, ‘Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn denies supporting or meeting IRA’, Sky News, 26 May 2017 45Andrew Gilligan, ‘Revealed: Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell’s close IRA links’, Telegraph, 10 October 2015; Claire Newell, Hayley Dixon, Luke Heighton, and Harry Yorke, ‘Exclusive: MI5 opened file on Jeremy Corbyn amid concerns over his IRA links’, Telegraph, 19 May 2017; Laura Hughes and Edward Malnick, ‘Revealed: Jeremy Corbyn’s three decades of blocking terror legislation’, Telegraph, 26 May 2017; Richard Dearlove, ‘Corbyn would not be allowed into security services, so he’s not fit for No 10’, Telegraph, 8 June 2017. 46Sean O’Callaghan, ‘Jeremy Corbyn might not have planted a bomb but he made it easier for those who did, says former IRA man’, Sun, 22 May 2017; Tom Newton Dunn, ‘Jeremy Corbyn boosted morale of IRA killers with his support and prolonged the violence leading to more deaths, IRA killer reveals’, Sun, 22 May 2017; Sean O’Callaghan, ‘Finucane should not have been killed – but he was in the IRA’, Telegraph, 18 April 2013; Cory Collusion Inquiry Report: Patrick Finucane, House of Commons, April 2004. 47David Trayner, ‘Claims Jeremy Corbyn funded “IRA bomber” turn out to be 30 years old – and inaccurate’, Independent, 20 September 2015. 48‘Jeremy Corbyn quizzed over IRA comments’, ITV News, 21 May 2017; Jessica Elgot, ‘Johnson accuses Corbyn of siding with UK’s enemies in fight on terror’, Guardian, 6 June 2017; Robert Booth, Martin Belam, and Maeve McClenaghan, ‘Tory attack ad misrepresents Corbyn views on IRA, says Labour’, Guardian, 2 June 2017. 49Kate Devlin, ‘Labour MPs urge Smith to attack Corbyn over IRA’, Evening Times, 18 August 2016; Kate McCann, ‘Labour’s Stoke candidate branded Jeremy Corbyn “IRA supporting friend of Hamas” and criticised Brexit’, Telegraph, 27 January 2017. 50James Forsythe, ‘Jeremy Corbyn always blames Britain first’, Spectator, 28 May 2017; Simon Heffer, ‘Jeremy Corbyn has long hated Britain’, Telegraph, 28 May 2017; editorial, ‘Jeremy Corbyn’s intervention on terror is tasteless and wrong’, Telegraph, 26 May 2017; Steve Hawkes, ‘RED FLAG: outrage as it’s revealed Jeremy Corbyn will claim Britain’s war on terror is to blame for Manchester terror attack’, Sun, 25 May 2017; editorial, ‘An important speech from Jeremy Corbyn – but made at the wrong time’, Independent, 26 May 2017; Matthew Smith, ‘Jeremy Corbyn is on the right side of public opinion on foreign policy: except for the Falklands’, YouGov, 30 May 2017. 51Tom Batchelor, ‘British voters overwhelmingly back Labour’s manifesto policies, poll finds’, Independent, 11 May 2017. 52Will Dahlgren, ‘Voters choose greater equality over greater wealth’, YouGov, 30 April 2014; Will Dahlgren, ‘Nationalise energy and rail companies, say public’, YouGov, 4 November 2013; Patrick Butler, ‘UK survey finds huge support for ending austerity’, Guardian, 28 June 2017. 53Editorial, ‘The Guardian view on the Labour election manifesto: widening the bounds of the thinkable’, Guardian, 16 May 2017; editorial, ‘The Observer’s view on the Labour manifesto’, Observer, 14 May 2017; Andrew Grice, ‘Labour’s manifesto will be popular, but this election is about trust, not policies’, Independent, 16 May 2017; Nick Robinson, ‘No one should be surprised …’, Twitter.com, 20 May 2017; Jeremy Culley, ‘REVEALED: Labour plans to “TREBLE Council Tax plunging people into negative equity”’, Daily Star, 30 May 2017; Gordon Rayner, ‘Tax on homes “to treble under Labour plans for Land Value Tax”’, Telegraph, 29 May 2017; Jon Stone, ‘Labour looks to replace Council Tax with a Land Value Tax’, Independent, 16 May 2017. 54Macer Hall, ‘May’s plan for a Fairer Britain’, Daily Express, 18 May 2017; editorial, ‘DAILY MAIL COMMENT: as Mrs May unveils her manifesto, at last, we have a PM who is not afraid to be honest’, Daily Mail, 19 May 2017; editorial, ‘THE SUN SAYS: never in our history has a UK election thrown up such a clear-cut and obvious choice for Sun readers’, Sun, 19 May 2017; editorial, ‘The Guardian view on Theresa May’s manifesto: a new Toryism’, Guardian, 18 May 2017. 55Dawn Foster, ‘Theresa May’s manifesto shows that she is more right wing than Cameron ever dared to be’, Independent, 18 May 2017. 56Robert Booth, ‘Conservatives launch online offensive against Corbyn’, Guardian, 15 May 2017. 57Nicholas Cecil, ‘How Jeremy Corbyn beat Theresa May in the social media election war’, Evening Standard, 14 June 2017. 58Jim Waterson and Tom Phillips, ‘People on Facebook only want to share pro-Corbyn, anti-Tory news stories’, Buzzfeed, 7 May 2017; Ben Kentish, ‘Tories “spent more than £1m” on negative Facebook adverts attacking Jeremy Corbyn’, Independent, 11 June 2017; Giles Turner and Jeremy Kahn, ‘U.K.

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In Ruth Winstone, ed., The Best of Benn: Letters, Diaries, Speeches and Other Writings, London: Hutchinson, 2014, Kindle Loc. 621. 6Hilary Wainwright and Leo Panitch, ‘“What we’ve achieved so far”: an interview with Jeremy Corbyn’, Red Pepper, December 2015. 7Quoted in Nigel Cawthorne, Jeremy Corbyn: Leading from the Left, London: Endeavour Press Ltd, 2015, Kindle Loc. 180. 8Rosa Prince, Comrade Corbyn: A Very Unlikely Coup: How Jeremy Corbyn Stormed to the Labour Leadership, London: Biteback Publishing, 2016. 9Jessica Elgot, ‘Jeremy Corbyn caught looking gloomy on night bus’, Guardian, 1 August 2015. 10Quoted in Nigel Cawthorne, Jeremy Corbyn: Leading from the Left, London: Endeavour Press Ltd, 2015, Kindle Loc. 238. 11Jeremy Corbyn, ‘Building the Social Movement’, in Tom Unterrainer, ed., Corbyn’s Campaign, Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 2016. 12Hilary Wainwright and Leo Panitch, ‘“What we’ve achieved so far”: an interview with Jeremy Corbyn’, Red Pepper, December 2015. 13Phil Burton-Cartledge, interview with the author, 19 February 2016. 14Hardeep Matharu, ‘Britain could be more left-wing than people assume, study finds’, The Independent, 15 January 2016. 15Sam Webb, ‘Jeremy Corbyn gets hero’s welcome at refugee rally on day he becomes Labour leader’, Mirror, 12 September 2015. 16Larry Elliott, ‘OECD calls for less austerity and more public investment’, Guardian, 18 February 2016. 17Will Dahlgreen, ‘British people keener on socialism than capitalism’, YouGov, 23 February 2016. 1.

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Two Years Before the Mast: Corbyn’s Subaltern Leadership 1Jane Merrick and Mark Leftly, ‘Jeremy Corbyn: Labour MPs are plotting a coup against the potential leader if he is elected’, Independent, 18 July 2015; Christopher Hope, ‘Jeremy Corbyn could face Labour MPs’ coup “within days of being elected leader”’, Telegraph, 20 August 2015; Adam Bienkov, ‘Labour MPs plotting coup against Jeremy Corbyn “on day one”’, Politics.co.uk, 12 August 2015. 2Tim Ross and Emily Gosden, ‘Jeremy Corbyn faces coup plot if he wins Labour leadership’, Telegraph, 27 July 2015. 3Alison Little, ‘Lord Mandelson implores Labour to delay coup against Jeremy Corbyn’, Express, 25 September 2015. 4Heather Stewart and Rowena Mason, ‘Leaked list of “hostile” Labour MPs lays bare party divisions’, Guardian, 23 March 2016; Anushka Asthana, ‘Labour MPs back call for Jeremy Corbyn to stand down’, Guardian, 25 March 2016. 5Jamie Stern-Weiner, ‘Jeremy Corbyn hasn’t got an “antisemitism problem”.

This Land: The Struggle for the Left
by Owen Jones
Published 23 Sep 2020

v=JaxApp3kkVI 9. https://twitter.com/lukeakehurst/status/606154157318356993 10. http://islingtonrefugeeforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IRF-Refugee-Week-June-15-Report-Final-docx.pdf 11. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/15/labour-leftwinger-jeremy-corbyn-wins-place-on-ballot-for-leadership 12. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/social-media-could-blow-apart-labours-race-qhhz8360fx3 13. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11745648/Labour-behaving-like-a-petulant-child-warns-Chuka-Umunna.html 14. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2015/jul/22/tony-blair-jeremy-corbyn-labour-leadership-video 15. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11741861/How-you-can-help-Jeremy-Corbyn-win-and-destroy-the-Labour-Party.html 16. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/politics-blog/11680016/Why-Tories-should-join-Labour-and-back-Jeremy-Corbyn.html 17. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11776925/A-Corbyn-victory-in-the-Labour-leadership-battle-would-be-a-disaster.html 18. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11767152/Tories-dont-vote-for-Jeremy-Corbyn.-It-wont-end-well.html CHAPTER 3 1. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/heres-what-jeremy-corbyn-really-6438877 2. https://pressgazette.co.uk/sun-and-mail-online-both-take-down-stories-claiming-jeremy-corbyn-was-dancing-a-jig-on-way-to-cenotaph/ 3. https://www.businessinsider.com/the-ridiculous-ways-the-media-misrepresents-jeremy-corbyn-2015-12 4. http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/assets/documents/research/projects/corbyn/Cobyn-Report.pdf 5. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/12/bbc-bias-labour-sir-michael-lyons 6. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/were-labours-antisemitism-failures-really-corbyns-fault/ 7. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/diane-abbott-abuse-female-mps-trolling-racism-sexism-almost-half-total-amnesty-poll-a7931126.html 8. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11764159/Jeremy-Corbyn-faces-coup-plot-if-he-wins-Labour-leadership.html 9. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/plot-to-oust-corbyn-on-day-one-2jk7cw8rrkn 10. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/20/jeremy-corbyns-honeymoon-period-will-last-until-local-elections 11. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/08/owen-jones-right-are-mocking-jeremy-corbyn-because-secretly-they-fear-him 12. https://twitter.com/shamindernahal/status/644214378296905728 13. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/temporary-nationalisation-of-threatened-tata-steel-plants-is-an-option-minister-confirms-a6959201.html 14. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/23/poll-junior-doctors-support 15. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/Jeremy_Corbyn/12021973/Jeremy-Corbyn-faces-humiliation-as-more-than-100-Labour-MPs-plan-to-defy-leader-over-Syria-air-strikes.html 16. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/saudi-arabia-yemen-labour-mps-debate-bombing-intervention-woodcock-a7382706.html 17. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/30/pmqs-jeremy-corbyn-takes-theresa-may-as-conservatives-edge-towards/ 18. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2016/06/30/labour-members-corbyn-post-brexit 19. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/jeremy-corbyn-parliamentary-labour-party-plp-meeting-told-to-quit-margaret-hodge-alan-johnson_uk_5771819ee4b08d2c5639bfc0 20. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/29/labour-mps-vs-corbyn-war-party-members-tories-brexit 21. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/thousands-of-jeremy-corbyn-supporters-march-on-parliament-against-labour-party-leadership-challenge-a7106511.html 22. https://twitter.com/aliceperryuk/status/753663563546451969 23. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/20/owen-smith-i-have-never-advocated-privatisation-of-the-nhs 24. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/listen-moment-owen-smith-made-8759470 25. https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/0cpa7iw5l7/TimesResults_160830_LabourSelectorate.pdf CHAPTER 4 1. https://news.sky.com/story/corbyns-cabinet-chaos-the-inside-story-10346377 2. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/29/counterweight-us-power-global-necessity-conflicts-spread 3. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/apr/14/labour-and-tories-level-corbyn-popularity-wanes-poll 4. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/john-mcdonnell-defends-jeremy-corbyn-russia-response-nerve-agent-a8261946.html 5. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/mar/11/labour-mps-should-not-appear-on-russia-today-says-john-mcdonnell 6. https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2017/jan/18/theresa-mays-brexit-speech-what-the-national-newspapers-say 7. https://medium.com/@OwenJones84/questions-all-jeremy-corbyn-supporters-need-to-answer-b3e82ace7ed3 8. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/01/corbyn-staying-not-good-enough 9. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/09/clive-lewis-sounds-support-challenge-jeremy-corbyn-labour-leader/ 10. https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/69w7np/glastonbury-dispatches-tom-watson-mp CHAPTER 5 1. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/tories-open-up-24-point-10259681 2. http://www.politico.eu/article/jeremy-corbyn-less-popular-than-donald-trump-poll/?

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-It-wont-end-well.html CHAPTER 3 1. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/heres-what-jeremy-corbyn-really-6438877 2. https://pressgazette.co.uk/sun-and-mail-online-both-take-down-stories-claiming-jeremy-corbyn-was-dancing-a-jig-on-way-to-cenotaph/ 3. https://www.businessinsider.com/the-ridiculous-ways-the-media-misrepresents-jeremy-corbyn-2015-12 4. http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/assets/documents/research/projects/corbyn/Cobyn-Report.pdf 5. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/12/bbc-bias-labour-sir-michael-lyons 6. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/were-labours-antisemitism-failures-really-corbyns-fault/ 7. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/diane-abbott-abuse-female-mps-trolling-racism-sexism-almost-half-total-amnesty-poll-a7931126.html 8. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11764159/Jeremy-Corbyn-faces-coup-plot-if-he-wins-Labour-leadership.html 9. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/plot-to-oust-corbyn-on-day-one-2jk7cw8rrkn 10. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/20/jeremy-corbyns-honeymoon-period-will-last-until-local-elections 11. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/08/owen-jones-right-are-mocking-jeremy-corbyn-because-secretly-they-fear-him 12. https://twitter.com/shamindernahal/status/644214378296905728 13. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/temporary-nationalisation-of-threatened-tata-steel-plants-is-an-option-minister-confirms-a6959201.html 14. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/23/poll-junior-doctors-support 15. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/Jeremy_Corbyn/12021973/Jeremy-Corbyn-faces-humiliation-as-more-than-100-Labour-MPs-plan-to-defy-leader-over-Syria-air-strikes.html 16. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/saudi-arabia-yemen-labour-mps-debate-bombing-intervention-woodcock-a7382706.html 17. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/30/pmqs-jeremy-corbyn-takes-theresa-may-as-conservatives-edge-towards/ 18. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2016/06/30/labour-members-corbyn-post-brexit 19. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/jeremy-corbyn-parliamentary-labour-party-plp-meeting-told-to-quit-margaret-hodge-alan-johnson_uk_5771819ee4b08d2c5639bfc0 20. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/29/labour-mps-vs-corbyn-war-party-members-tories-brexit 21. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/thousands-of-jeremy-corbyn-supporters-march-on-parliament-against-labour-party-leadership-challenge-a7106511.html 22. https://twitter.com/aliceperryuk/status/753663563546451969 23. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/20/owen-smith-i-have-never-advocated-privatisation-of-the-nhs 24. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/listen-moment-owen-smith-made-8759470 25. https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/0cpa7iw5l7/TimesResults_160830_LabourSelectorate.pdf CHAPTER 4 1. https://news.sky.com/story/corbyns-cabinet-chaos-the-inside-story-10346377 2. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/29/counterweight-us-power-global-necessity-conflicts-spread 3. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/apr/14/labour-and-tories-level-corbyn-popularity-wanes-poll 4. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/john-mcdonnell-defends-jeremy-corbyn-russia-response-nerve-agent-a8261946.html 5. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/mar/11/labour-mps-should-not-appear-on-russia-today-says-john-mcdonnell 6. https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2017/jan/18/theresa-mays-brexit-speech-what-the-national-newspapers-say 7. https://medium.com/@OwenJones84/questions-all-jeremy-corbyn-supporters-need-to-answer-b3e82ace7ed3 8. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/01/corbyn-staying-not-good-enough 9. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/09/clive-lewis-sounds-support-challenge-jeremy-corbyn-labour-leader/ 10. https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/69w7np/glastonbury-dispatches-tom-watson-mp CHAPTER 5 1. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/tories-open-up-24-point-10259681 2. http://www.politico.eu/article/jeremy-corbyn-less-popular-than-donald-trump-poll/?

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v=JaxApp3kkVI 9. https://twitter.com/lukeakehurst/status/606154157318356993 10. http://islingtonrefugeeforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IRF-Refugee-Week-June-15-Report-Final-docx.pdf 11. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/15/labour-leftwinger-jeremy-corbyn-wins-place-on-ballot-for-leadership 12. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/social-media-could-blow-apart-labours-race-qhhz8360fx3 13. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11745648/Labour-behaving-like-a-petulant-child-warns-Chuka-Umunna.html 14. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2015/jul/22/tony-blair-jeremy-corbyn-labour-leadership-video 15. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11741861/How-you-can-help-Jeremy-Corbyn-win-and-destroy-the-Labour-Party.html 16. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/politics-blog/11680016/Why-Tories-should-join-Labour-and-back-Jeremy-Corbyn.html 17. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11776925/A-Corbyn-victory-in-the-Labour-leadership-battle-would-be-a-disaster.html 18. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11767152/Tories-dont-vote-for-Jeremy-Corbyn.

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem
by Tim Shipman
Published 30 Nov 2017

Consequently, her Twitter account had just 300,000 followers, compared with 1.2 million for Jeremy Corbyn. By the end of the campaign, Corbyn’s 120,000 Instagram followers approached ten times May’s reach. Conservative campaigners looked with envy at Corbyn, eight years May’s senior but light years ahead of her as a social media campaigner. ‘They’re good at it, he likes it,’ a Tory official said. ‘They’re not afraid to take a few risks. They did a few good stunts.’ Corbyn’s best coup came on 15 May, when he ambushed a ‘Facebook live’ interview with May conducted by ITV’s political editor, Robert Peston. The Labour leader posted a question as ‘Jeremy Corbyn of Islington’, asking May, ‘Do you not think the British people deserve to see us debate, live and on TV?’

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The collapse of Ukip and Farron’s ‘gaygate’ distractions ensured that if protest voters were looking for a home, or if Theresa May faltered, Jeremy Corbyn had political space to offer working-class Brexiteers and metropolitan Liberals something different to believe in. It was an opportunity Labour was to seize with both hands. 17 Manifesto Destiny The general election of 2017 was turned on its head on the evening of Wednesday, 10 May, when James Schneider, one of Jeremy Corbyn’s media spokesmen, took two calls that sent shockwaves through Westminster. The first was from Jack Blanchard, the political editor of the Daily Mirror, one of the few papers sympathetic to Labour.

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While the Tories began the blame game over a victory that seemed like a defeat, Labour were consumed with recriminations over why a defeat that tasted like victory had not been the real thing. After a brief nap at home, Jeremy Corbyn went to Labour headquarters at 7.45 a.m. on the Friday morning, where he was greeted by a small crowd of supporters. The leader had a spring in his step. In the war room, LOTO staff on one side of the horseshoe office in their red Jeremy Corbyn T-shirts, Southsiders in dishevelled suits on the other, Corbyn addressed the assembled staff, making a gracious speech about their efforts in the campaign. ‘Nobody expected us to do well,’ he said.

Antisemitism: Here and Now
by Deborah E. Lipstadt
Published 29 Jan 2019

Johnny Paul, “Dutch Court Fines Muslim Group for Holocaust-Denial Cartoon,” Jerusalem Post, August 28, 2010. 33. Matt Dathan, “Jeremy Corbyn Denies Links to Lebanese ‘Extremist’ Dyab Abou Jahjah—as Picture Emerges of the Two Sharing a Stage,” Independent, August 19, 2015. 34. “Corbyn Agrees BBC Are ‘Zionist Liars,’ ” Guy News, April 29, 2016, https://order-order.com/​2016/​04/​29/​corbyn-agrees-bbc-are-zionist-liars/; Henry Zeffman, “Jeremy Corbyn Hosted Event Likening Israel to Nazis,” Times (London), August 1, 2018; Yair Rosenberg, “Jeremy Corbyn’s Holocaust Memorial Day Statement Leaves Out the Jews,” Tablet, January 25, 2018. 35.

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Gabriel Pogrund, Jon Ungoed-Thomas, and Richard Kerbaj, “Vitriol and Threats of Violence: The Ugly Face of Jeremy Corbyn’s Cabal,” Times (London), April 1, 2018; Gabriel Pogrund, Jon Ungoed-Thomas, Richard Kerbaj, and Tim Shipman, “Exposed: Jeremy Corbyn’s Hate Factory,” Times (London), April 1, 2018. 42. Verity Bowman and Pippa Crerar, “Corbyn Ally Says ‘Jewish Trump Supporters Making Up’ Antisemitic Charges,” Guardian, July 31, 2018; “Jeremy Corbyn Endorses BDS Movement in 2015 Footage,” Haaretz and JTA, August 19, 2018. 43. Lee Harpin, “Anger as Diane Abbott Repeatedly Dismisses Labour’s Antisemitism Crisis as ‘a Smear Campaign,’ ” Jewish Chronicle, March 29, 2018. 44. Benjamin Kentish, “Thousands of Jeremy Corbyn Supporters Endorse Letter Saying Jewish-Organised Antisemitism Protest Was the Work of ‘Very Powerful Special Interest Group,’ ” Independent, March 29, 2018; Michael Savage, “Major Jewish Private Donor Ditches Labour over Antisemitism,” Observer, April 1, 2018. 45.

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But he has let these reprehensible genies out of the bottle. They are convinced that they have his imprimatur. And he has not disabused them of that notion. Once they are out, it will be very difficult to get them back in. In my next letter I will deal with Jeremy Corbyn, the British Member of Parliament and head of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom. Yours, DEL Dear Oxford Students: Jeremy Corbyn’s record in politics is not only far more extensive than Trump’s, it’s also more deeply rooted in firmly held ideological beliefs. As the Brits among you well know, Corbyn has been part of Britain’s labor and trade-union movement since the beginning of his political career.

How to Stop Brexit (And Make Britain Great Again)
by Nick Clegg
Published 11 Oct 2017

Turnout amongst 18–24-year-olds soared in the election on 8th June 2017 to its highest point in a quarter of a century, with more than 60 per cent of that age bracket casting their vote for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.74 It isn’t hard to see why. Tired of Conservative austerity (which has been pursued since the election of 2015 in a far more regressive manner than the approach adopted by the Coalition government) and alarmed by Theresa May’s pitch for a hard Brexit, they sought a change of direction for this country and liked what they saw in Mr Corbyn. Serving up a buffet of something-for-everyone where no one pays the bill, Labour’s manifesto caught the imagination and, it seemed, everyone agreed with Jeremy Corbyn. In the run-up to the 2010 election I briefly experienced being the political flavour of the month.

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This is the party’s official policy-making process, and (in theory at least) all submissions on Brexit will be seen by the members of the International Policy Commission, which includes the Shadow Brexit Secretary and Shadow Foreign Secretary. Throughout his tenure as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn has repeatedly stated that it is the membership that should shape party policy at conference – so start doing it. A one-day pass costs £29, access to the conference hall is £51. Learn the mechanisms and start pushing for policy change. Fourth, keep reminding Jeremy Corbyn why you voted for him. If Labour members and voters were all to put pen to paper and write to the Labour leader with their concerns about Brexit, then Corbyn could hardly complain.

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Recent polling shows that eight out of ten Labour Party members support keeping Britain in the Single Market and the Customs Union – not temporarily, as espoused by the party, but permanently – while more than half would back a referendum on the final deal.75 Crucially, the issue that perhaps animates the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn the most – austerity – is inextricably linked to Brexit. Corbyn refuses to come clean about the crippling contradiction in his own approach: he can try to end austerity by ending Brexit too, but he hasn’t the slightest chance of ending austerity if he refuses to challenge Brexit. Labour’s support for a ‘soft’ Brexit transition, in which Britain temporarily remains inside both the Single Market and the Customs Union, is of little consequence if it is merely succeeded by a hard Brexit.

Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval
by Jason Cowley
Published 15 Nov 2018

If you think of the world your son is growing up in and the world my grandfather grew up in, if you think what he’s going to have and what my father had, I mean, come on! There’s a lot to celebrate. There is absolutely no reason to be pessimistic about the human condition.’ (2016) The Time of the Rebel: Jeremy Corbyn One day in June 2016, as the ‘coup’ to oust Jeremy Corbyn gathered momentum in the immediate aftermath of the vote for Brexit, Owen Smith visited the Labour leader in his office at Portcullis House, Westminster. A vote of no confidence had been tabled against Corbyn and shadow ministers were, at choreographed intervals, resigning in protest at what was perceived to be his failed leadership.

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Cowley is fascinated by the men and women who are creating the history of our era as well as those who document it. He has met and interviewed nearly all the major political players shaping and changing the way we live today. The book features fascinating, wide-ranging explorations of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, Jeremy Corbyn, Alex Salmond, Nigel Farage, David Cameron, George Osborne and Theresa May. Cowley is unusual in having access to party leaders and prime ministers on both the left and right. The book also features important surveys of George Orwell, John le Carré, Kazuo Insiguro, and Ian McEwan; biographical portraits of cultural figures; an investigation into the so-called Brexit Murder; and a striking conversation with the political philosopher Michael Sandel.

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The New Statesman – where I have worked as editor since autumn 2008 – began in 1913 as a weekly review of politics and literature. So, it has existed for more than a century – through two world wars – and yet by any measure the present era is remarkable: Trump, Brexit, the Scottish independence referendum, the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader and the rise of the radical left, the crises in Europe, the rise and fall of Islamic State, a mini world war in Syria, an unprecedented shift in power from the West to the East – these are turbulent and volatile new times. Our world is defined by entrenched wealth inequality, the mass movement of people – including free movement within the European Union – and astounding technological innovation and disruption.

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain
by William Davies
Published 28 Sep 2020

Brexit voters, the vast majority of whom were born before 1965, were likely to hold the kind of ‘authoritarian values’ associated with support for capital punishment, traditional gender hierarchies and tougher treatment of children.1 Conservative Party members, who had the task of electing a new prime minister in summer 2019, were found to be 71 per cent male, 38 per cent over the age of sixty-six, and so obsessed with Brexit that they considered it worth sacrificing economic prosperity, the Union and even the Conservative Party for.2 Among this primarily white, male, ageing section of English society, Islamophobia is simple common sense. At the same time, this period witnessed the unprecedented exposure and recognition of political injustices, further contributing to the demolition of the liberal centre. The shock of Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral surge in the summer of 2017, which deprived May of her parliamentary majority and set the stage for the political gridlock of the following two years, represented an overdue public affirmation that austerity was socially and politically unsustainable. It was followed immediately afterwards by the horror of the Grenfell Tower fire, which offered the most harrowing demonstration of just how unequal individual lives had become.

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The sentiment that society is ‘broken’ and that the guilty go unpunished, which is so eagerly encouraged and exploited by nationalists, received no greater endorsement than during 2008–9. Plenty of lines can be drawn between 2008 and the political upheavals of 2016.7 The financial crisis also played a decisive role in politicising a younger generation on the left, who made an important contribution to Jeremy Corbyn’s unexpected electoral surge in 2017.8 The effect of tech platforms on liberal democracies has been feverishly discussed. Following Britain’s 2016 referendum and Trump’s election victory, liberals fixated on the malign power of Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, Russian ‘troll farms’ and Vladimir Putin to sway election outcomes by planting ‘fake news’ in front of the eyeballs of easily persuaded swing voters.

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The Conservative right is about to discover that, for multinational corporations located in Britain, there is one thing worse than being regulated by Brussels, and that is not being regulated by Brussels. Secondly, there are those uber-elite individuals who still dwell in Blair’s fin de siècle bubble of a single open global society, including Blair himself. Blair has said that he cannot understand the rise of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.8 Presumably he is even more flummoxed by the Brexit vote, and especially by how it sucked in quasi-Blairites such as Michael Gove. Blair’s myopia has many possible explanations. But one is that people like him do genuinely now inhabit a borderless global space, in which laws, regulations and policies are only ever things to be viewed from above, and never things one is forced into accepting.

Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016
by Stewart Lee
Published 1 Aug 2016

* * * “… ‘on which some of the songs are co-written by a lesbian’ – My God, a lesbian??? Should they be allowed out in public, or to interact with other people, what next? Gay men on TV? Transgender Olympians?” Alexander Simon “Champagne socialism comes in many vintages.” IvorD Jeremy Corbyn and I are the new Christs Observer, 6 September 2015 Apparently, the Labour Party leadership contest frontrunner, Jeremy Corbyn, wants to dredge the decomposing corpse of Osama bin Laden from the seabed and then marry it. And he wants to live with the dead body of Bin Laden in Islington, as if it were his gay-zombie husband, in a sick left-wing pantomime of the heterosexual Christian wedding ceremony.

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Moir’s article was swiftly withdrawn from the paper’s website, presumably when it became clear that my patented Jan Moir trap, baited with the stinking cheese of assumed outrage, had worked like a dream. But apart from me and Jeremy Corbyn, there was another man, wasn’t there, long long ago, whose wise words were often shorn of context by stupid fools and used against him. And perhaps that man had a beard, and maybe he wore sandals too. And perhaps he too came to lead his lost followers away from false idols towards the promised land. And this lowly man, would he have gone among the people in fine Raja Daswani shirts like Tony Blair? No, he would have dressed like me, in an XXL T-shirt he got free from an indie band; or like Jeremy Corbyn, in a pair of itchy alpaca wool underpants knitted for him by his mother as a gesture of solidarity with the Sandinistas.

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I hope that “new Christs” bit isn’t the attention-grabbing phrase that the Observer elects to pull out of this column. Nobody on Twitter or “Comment Is Free” reads to the end of the pieces they are complaining about. And a headline like “Jeremy Corbyn and I Are the New Christs” will only serve to convince the Conservative content-provider Tim Montgomerie that Guardian newspapers have finally lost the plot, and send Baron Daniel Finkelstein OBE into a tail-chasing tailspin of baronic confusion. What’s the point? But in such moments of despair I think to myself, WWJCD? What would Jeremy Corbyn do? And the sadness just fades away. * * * “‘The ‘new Christs’ bit is in bad taste and the author knows it. Why does he think he is, or even deserves, such a title?

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain
by Robert Verkaik
Published 14 Apr 2018

mhq5j=e3; http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/greedy-george-osborne-facing-furious-10049285 51 https://www.byline.com/column/67/article/2049 11 Boys’ Own Brexit 1 Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, 26 May 2014. 2 http://www.dulwich.org.uk/college/about/history 3 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ukip/11291050/Nigel-Farage-and-Enoch-Powell-the-full-story-of-Ukips-links-with-the-Rivers-of-Blood-politician.html 4 https://www.channel4.com/news/nigel-farage-ukip-letter-school-concerns-racism-fascism 5 Michael Crick, Channel 4 News, 19 September 2013. 6 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nigel-farage-open-letter-schoolfriend-brexit-poster-nazi-song-dulwich-college-gas-them-all-a7185336.html 7 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nigel-farage-fascist-nazi-song-gas-them-all-ukip-brexit-schoolfriend-dulwich-college-a7185236.html 8 Interview with the author at Dulwich College, 12 January 2018. 9 www.facebook.com/myiannopuolos, accessed 24 January 2018. 10 https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-farage-85b406b2; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/nigel-farage/11467039/Nigel-Farage-My-public-school-had-a-real-social-mix-but-now-only-the-mega-rich-can-afford-the-fees.html 11 Simon Kupar, Financial Times, 7 July 2016. 12 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/05/project-fear-brexit-predictions-flawed-partisan-new-study-says/; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/25/how-project-fear-failed-to-keep-britain-in-the-eu--and-the-signs/ 13 Odey declined to be interviewed. 14 Sunday Times, 23 April 2017, p. 4; http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-leave-eu-campaign-arron-banks-jeremy-hosking-five-uk-richest-businessmen-peter-hargreaves-a7699046.html 15 https://inews.co.uk/news/technology/cambridge-analytica-facebook-data-protection/ 16 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43581892 17 https://inews.co.uk/news/technology/cambridge-analytica-facebook-data-protection/ 18 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-cambridge-analytica-leave-eu/what-are-the-links-between-cambridge-analytica-and-a-brexit-campaign-group-idUSKBN1GX2IO 19 https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/24/aggregateiq-data-firm-link-raises-leave-group-questions https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/government-economy/brexit-campaigners-breached-uk-vote-rules-lawyers-say 20 https://dominiccummings.com/2016/10/29/on-the-referendum-20-the-campaign-physics-and-data-science-vote-leaves-voter-intention-collection-system-vics-now-available-for-all/ 21 A Very British Coup, BBC2, 22 Sepptember 2016. 22 http://www.standard.co.uk/business/business-focus-the-billionaire-hedge-fund-winners-who-braved-the-brexit-rollercoaster-a3284101.html 23 http://fortune.com/2014/12/03/heineken-charlene-de-carvalho-self-made-heiress/ 24 http://www.cityam.com/262239/david-camerons-ex-adviser-daniel-korski-launches-major 25 Tim Shipman, All Out War: Brexit and the Sinking of Britain’s Political Class (London: William Collins, 2017), p. 610. 12 For the Few, Not the Many 1 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/Jeremy_Corbyn/11818744/Jeremy-Corbyn-the-boy-to-the-manor-born.html 2 http://www.castlehouseschool.co.uk/about-the-school/fees/ 3 Rosa Prince, Comrade Corbyn: A Very Unlikely Coup (London: Biteback Publishing, 2017), p. 29. Castle House is a leading institution among the private school movement. Its former headmaster, Richard Walden, is former chairman of the Independent Schools Association. 4 In the 1960s it was still being run as a voluntary aided school which received state and private fee funding.

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The central tenet of Winchester’s own charter proclaimed the rights of ‘the many poor scholars engaged in scholastic disciplines, who suffering from deficiency, penury and indigence, lack and will lack in the future the proper means for continuing and advancing in the aforesaid art of grammar’.11 Winchester’s system of professional schooling secured such strong ecclesiastical and academic results that many of Oxford’s brightest scholars were drawn from its ranks. Today Winchester College continues in this tradition of enrolling bright and influential students. Two of Jeremy Corbyn’s closest advisers, Seumas Milne and James Schneider, are Wykehamists who went on to Oxford. The success at Winchester spurred on other medieval philanthropists. Education was suddenly the new charity of choice for independently minded movers and shakers of the medieval period. The establishment of the first public schools gathered pace with Eton (1440), St Paul’s (1509) and Westminster (1560).

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Indeed, despite the low number of privately educated ministers in the 1945 cabinet, Attlee’s government soon returned to the Old School Tie order. Attlee had been educated at Northaw School, a boys’ preparatory school near Pluckley in Kent, and then Haileybury College, a public school in Hertfordshire (and alma mater of Rudyard Kipling, Group Captain Peter Townsend, Quentin Letts, Stephen Mangan, Dom Joly and key aide to Jeremy Corbyn, Barry Gardiner MP. It was while working at Haileybury House, a charity run by his old school to help East End children, that he underwent his conversion to socialism. The shock of how desperate and pathetic life was for so many ordinary people living in London convinced him that the state must be used to help redistribute the nation’s wealth.

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire
by Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson
Published 15 Jan 2019

, The Independent, 17 July, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/brexit-latest-news-owen-paterson-eu-single-market-access-pay-tariff-barriers-trade-goods-services-a7845776.html 36 Espinoza, J. (2016) ‘Nigerian officials have made plans to travel to Britain to collect a controversial bronze statue’, Daily Telegraph, 9 March, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/12189194/Nigerian-officials-have-made-plans-to-travel-to-Britain-to-collect-a-controversial-bronze-statue.html 37 Hope, C. (2018) ‘Jeremy Corbyn says schools should teach children about the “grave injustices” of the British empire’, Daily Telegraph, 11 October, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/10/10/jeremy-corbyn-says-schools-should-teach-children-grave-injustices/ 38 Winder, R. (2013) Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain, London: Abacus. 39 Brennan, Z. (2002) ‘What are the Patten girls up to?’, London Evening Standard, 7 August, https://www.standard.co.uk/news/what-are-the-patten-girls-up-to-6302164.html 40 Stembridge, J.

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Next in Europe comes Finland, then the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria, Ireland, and Germany in Europe’s top ten, The UK ranked 19th in the world, 13th in Europe in 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report#2017_report 54 Gregory, A., Smith, M. and Bartlett, N. (2018) ‘Immigration cap on doctors and nurses to be axed IMMEDIATELY in humiliating U-turn for Theresa May’, Daily Mirror, 18 June, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/immigration-cap-doctors-nurses-axed-12704643 55 Cowburn, A. (2018) ‘Jeremy Corbyn to say there is “mounting evidence austerity is killing people”’, The Independent, 1 July, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-mounting-evidence-austerity-is-killing-people-government-cuts-labour-welfare-a8424381.html 56 BBC (2018) ‘NHS plan in case of no-deal Brexit, Simon Stevens says’, BBC News, 1 July, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-44672873 57 Which former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has recently hinted he has doubts about.

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In 1927, the biologist Raymond Pearl, one of the earliest critics of the eugenic movement, wrote that: ‘I frankly do not see the usually alleged cause for eugenic alarm, for the reason that history demonstrates, I believe, that the superior people of the world have always been recruited from the masses, intellectually speaking, in far greater numbers than they have been reproduced by the upper classes’.79 As the geneticist Eric Turkheimer has pointed out, if ‘all other sources of variation between people are accounted for then everything is heritable’.80 But of course other sources of variation have huge impact and so we are left with very little that is heritable, and what is inherited is the result of the random mixing of two sets of genes producing a pretty random outcome. In fact, it is an almost completely random outcome.81 What matters most to the vast majority of people is how they are treated after they are born (and also during their development in the womb), not their particular genetic makeup. For instance, his genes may have possibly made Jeremy Corbyn an unusually kind man, one not predisposed to be greedy, but it was events around him that propelled him to become leader of the Labour Party, not his innate ability. Corbyn is not an especially gifted public speaker; he was not born with a trait for great charisma, or an innate flair for getting others to trust him when perhaps they shouldn’t.

March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019
by Stewart Lee
Published 2 Sep 2019

She agreed that when Nigel Farage, earlier that week, had threatened to unleash a pussy-grabbing Trump sex-attack robot on Theresa May, it had been a bit much.5 Suzanne Evans from the Ukips was wearing a giant Remembrance Day poppy made of cloth. Jeremy Corbyn came on TV wearing a tiny badge of a poppy. I said, ‘Your poppy’s massive, isn’t it, Suzanne? Jeremy Corbyn’s is tiny. He’s a traitor, isn’t he?’ Suzanne Evans from the Ukips didn’t say much, and I worried that she had my card marked for being one of the liberal comedians that dominate all comedy now, to little or no effect in real terms. Perhaps she thought I was trying to generate material for a funny column.

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It is appropriate to describe Boris Johnson with pure witless swearing, for that is all he deserves. He is of a political class where any insult, no matter how vicious, is acceptable, if it is delivered with the rhetorical flourishes and classical allusions of the public-school debating society. Hence, Cameron can scornfully sneer at Jeremy Corbyn and describe Dennis Skinner as a dinosaur, yet the venerable beast himself is dismissed from the house when he calls Cameron merely ‘dodgy’. The problem for the pro-Europe voter currently is that while obviously despising Cameron as both a person and a politician, one nonetheless wants him to prevail over Johnson, Gove, Iain Duncan Smith and the Brexit camp.

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Consider, for example, this convincingly odd submission from General Dreedle: ‘Russia is very well doing without your Opra Winfrey western pornography and youre decadent music. More lies about Ukraine which was only the size of a biscuit before transsexual won.’ Whether the supposed Observer contributor General Dreedle is real or not, the fact is Putin’s Russia has taken political propaganda to the next level, motherfuckers! Meanwhile, here at home, Jeremy Corbyn is filmed sitting on the floor of a train. There is a long tradition of essentially dishonest photo opportunities being used by politicians to cement policy in the public mind. Consider Margaret Thatcher in that tank in 1986; or Michael Dukakis in that tank in 1988; or John Major on that tank in 1991.

The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way
by Steve Richards
Published 14 Jun 2017

In Spain and Portugal left-wing parties appeared from nowhere and shook up the political landscape. In the UK general election in 2015 the SNP (Scottish National Party) won virtually every seat in Scotland, nearly wiping out the once-dominant Labour Party. And in its leadership contest in 2015 the UK’s Labour Party elected the left-wing rebel, Jeremy Corbyn, to be its new leader. The veteran Corbyn won a landslide. In the same year Marine Le Pen’s Front National made huge gains in local elections, coming first in six of France’s thirteen regions. In 2016 the UK voted to leave the European Union, against the advice of the prime minister, all living former prime ministers, the leader of the Opposition and President Obama.

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Even in northern Europe, once a model for vibrant self-confident social democracy, there are right-wing parties that worry the mainstream. The left-wing outsiders are part of the pattern, too, although they struggle to make up much of the fabric. Syriza rules in Greece, and the Left Bloc is part of a coalition in Portugal. Jeremy Corbyn is leader of the UK’s Labour Party – a left-wing rebel when Tony Blair was its determinedly centrist and timidly expedient leader. In Spain charismatic left-wing leaders, hailed like rock stars, move erratically a little closer to government and then further away again. Support for once-mighty mainstream parties is fracturing and they are becoming less coherent.

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Quite often, in their radical distinctiveness, they bring the cautious mainstream left to a semblance of political life. Hillary Clinton might have lost the US presidential campaign more decisively, if Bernie Sanders had not forced her to become a little more daring. And the UK’s Labour Party risked dying of boredom, before Jeremy Corbyn’s candidacy in 2015 brought a soporific leadership contest to life. In Greece and Spain mainstream left parties were languishing, before movements to the left of them forced a rethink of sorts. While they spark distinctively, the left-wing outsiders have one significant connection with the right-wing alternative: not only do they speak of the levers they will pull to transform the lives of voters, but they imply a power to act unilaterally that does not exist any more.

Why We Get the Wrong Politicians
by Isabel Hardman
Published 14 Jun 2018

The Hansard Society, which studies Parliament in detail, found that only 21 per cent of MPs’ time is spent in the Chamber, with constituency casework taking up the most time (28 per cent), followed by constituency meetings and events (21 per cent).3 What the hell am I doing? An MP can choose what policy issues they focus on, and what sort of politician they want to be too. When I interviewed a charmingly eccentric Labour backbencher called Jeremy Corbyn in 2011, he told me, while wearing a curious pea-green sweatshirt from his local community centre, that all he cared about was his constituency work. Other MPs see themselves as campaigners, coming into Parliament to ensure that very specific injustices are corrected. But an experience common to all MPs when they arrive is disorientation about how on earth to go about doing what they want to do; and for many, that confusion extends to what exactly it is that they want to do too.

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When Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell, who was often considered too old to do the job, stood up in 2006 to ask a question about pensions, Tory MP Eric Forth shouted loudly, ‘Declare your interest!’ Responding to David Cameron’s statement on his renegotiation with European leaders of Britain’s relationship with the EU in February 2016, Jeremy Corbyn started talking about meetings he himself had been holding: ‘Last week – like him – I was in Brussels, meeting with heads of government and leaders of European socialist parties, one of whom said to me . . .’ As Corbyn very briefly caught his breath, Tory backbencher Chris Pincher shouted into the silence, ‘WHO ARE YOU?’

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The most interesting response was that 23 per cent of people claimed it had put them off politics – even though they were already sufficiently engaged to turn the TV on to watch the session in the first place. Voters’ attitudes had largely hardened since the previous poll, in 2015, just after Jeremy Corbyn had tried to change the culture of PMQs by crowd-sourcing all his questions to members of the public (a practice that fizzled out). In that poll,12 conducted for the Hansard Society, a greater proportion of voters had either seen the whole session or watched clips on the news (47 per cent in total), and 46 per cent felt there was too much political point-scoring.

Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care About Inequality
by Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell
Published 23 May 2023

Maria, similarly, votes tactically either for Labour or the Liberal Democrats without belonging to either: Maria: Interviewer: Maria: I have been a member of a political party. I’ve been a member of Labour so I could vote for Jeremy Corbyn not to win. So you’re not a member anymore? Yes I left. I felt quite bad because I’m between LibDem and Labour, so I thought I’m not going to keep it up in case I want to join the LibDems in the future. Caught in the middle Many respondents felt that political parties had been moving away from the typical centre ground. That comment was mostly levelled at the Conservatives, but similar views were expressed about Labour under Jeremy Corbyn. Many who had voted for Labour in the past felt it was no longer for them; it had veered towards socialism, a ‘dirty’ word for many.

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When asked during the first round of interviews whether she thought inequality had had an impact on British politics in recent years, Louise, a 44-year-old sales consultant living in London with a top 1% income, replies: “Yeah, absolutely. Brexit is the stand-out one. The fact that people like Jeremy Corbyn are still leaders. No one ever thought originally that he would stay so long. Maybe that’s due to, in part, the inequality across the nation. Yes, it’s definitely played a part.” Ben, 39, an IT consultant in the top 3%, also commented on inequality and polarisation: “There’s more polarisation in politics, perhaps because of inequality. You become not so happy with how things are organised and you either follow Jeremy Corbyn or the Green Party route, or you blame it on foreigners and get into UKIP.” Our research spanned Brexit, the governments of Theresa May and Boris Johnson, the pandemic, and the beginning of the post-pandemic recession.

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Our own relationship with the top 10% is, therefore, both potentially transformative (we have unique access) but also dangerous (it may reproduce current frames of thinking). Conducting interviews with high-income earners, we were struck by the seeming familiarity of many of their views. Most were to the right of Jeremy Corbyn and to the left of Boris Johnson (or at least of his post-Brexit version). Those closer to the right (a majority, but not an overwhelming one), tended to have the kind of ‘pro-austerity’ views that are prevalent in the media and gave meritocratic explanations and values to justify their opposition to greater redistribution.

Politics on the Edge: The Instant #1 Sunday Times Bestseller From the Host of Hit Podcast the Rest Is Politics
by Rory Stewart
Published 13 Sep 2023

As my colleagues were quick to point out, he seemed to find it difficult to avoid association with terrorist-sympathisers and anti-Semites. But Labour under Jeremy Corbyn also found a freshness and energy I had not encountered in my first five years in Parliament. Party membership tripled – making Labour suddenly by far the largest political party in the country. While the ‘big beasts’ of the Conservative Party could hardly expect to attract 400 people for a political rally, Jeremy Corbyn could mobilise thousands – and his supporters were young, diverse and passionate. Corbyn embraced the idea that the financial crash of 2008 had been the categorical refutation of the capitalist model, and proclaimed the necessity of a different economic system.

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‘No, your campaign,’ he said, picking up a napkin and writing on it, ‘should have only this slogan: get Brexit done, beat Jeremy Corbyn, unify the country.’ After lunch we walked back along Piccadilly talking about the other candidates. He said that he would not be endorsing anyone but I was relieved that someone so associated with the Brexit right still seemed willing to engage, and I was more relieved that he seemed to share my total contempt for Boris Johnson. I was impressed by the bracing tricolon, which he had handed me. The next time I did an interview I said that I wanted to get Brexit done, beat Jeremy Corbyn, unify the country. Two days later, Sajid Javid announced his bid and said that he would ‘get Brexit done, beat Jeremy Corbyn, unify the country’.

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The show began with the presenter trying to list our places of birth to show where we were ‘from’: Aberdeen, Rochdale … They skipped me, presumably because they didn’t know how to say I was ‘from Hong Kong’. The format was questions from the audience. The first question was, ‘How could we defeat Jeremy Corbyn?’ Here Michael Gove began. He sounded stiff, and a little nervous, like a schoolboy at a debating championship, who was experimenting with a fighting talk, slightly at odds with a geekier manner. ‘I,’ he said, ‘was able to take Jeremy Corbyn comprehensively to pieces. That’s what we need in a leader …’ ‘How would you get Brexit done, Michael Gove?’ ‘I have delivered, in the three jobs that I have done, I have shown I can do the impossible … who’s the person Corbyn’s most terrified of facing?

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles
by Fintan O'Toole
Published 5 Mar 2020

But the party has no chance at all of winning a majority and it could well suffer catastrophic losses in its own traditional heartlands. A large part of this failure can be named in advance: Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn is relentlessly vilified by the Tory press and there is no doubt that this is a huge factor in the election. But talk to anyone on the ground in those crucial areas of the Midlands and the North, including those who want Labour to win, and they will tell you that traditional Labour voters are, as perhaps the best journalistic diviner of the popular mood in Britain, John Harris, puts it, ‘bitterly dismissive of Jeremy Corbyn’. Polling bears this out. Corbyn is regarded favourably in YouGov’s large-scale surveys by 21 per cent of voters and unfavourably by 61 per cent.

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They have to imply the opposite of what they used to suggest – not that Ireland is enclosed but that it is open; not that we have a monolithic religious and ethnic identity but that we are enthusiastically pluralist; not that we look inwards but that we look outwards; not that we think we can revert to a nineteenth-century nationalism but that we assert our national independence through solidarity and co-operation; not that we are in thrall to dreams but that we understand our own and the world’s realities. It is as absurd as it is sad that we’ve reached a point where these qualities would make Ireland so radically unEnglish. 6 June 2017 The British election – or at least the English election – is saturated with nostalgia. Both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn are appealing to notions of how things used to be. Corbyn has had a better election than May because his version of the past has more reality, and more nobility, than hers. The centrality of nostalgia is not hard to understand. General elections are usually about the short- to medium-term future: here’s what we say we will do in the next four or five years.

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A constitution based on crude majoritarianism and fascistic denunciations of ‘saboteurs’ and ‘enemies of the people’ is not a recipe for stability. Both of these impulses have been firmly rejected. The British looked at the prospect of a virtual Tory one-party state and recoiled from it. And the hysterical smearing of Jeremy Corbyn and his Labour allies by the Mail and the rest of the Tory press failed. Corbyn, the ‘unelectable’, terrorist-loving loony, garnered more votes for Labour than Tony Blair did in two of his three election victories. The idea that Labour can be a force only if it abandons its social-democratic roots has been overturned.

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy
by Paolo Gerbaudo
Published 19 Jul 2018

The formation has used the political software NationBuilder to gather supporters and has developed its own dedicated platform to make decisions on policies and strategy and has resorted to social media, YouTube videos and even video games as propaganda tools. A similar spirit of organisational innovation has been displayed by Momentum, a left-wing political organisation that was initially founded by Jon Lansman, Adam Klug, Emma Rees and James Schneider after Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in the autumn of 2015. It self-describes as an organisation that wants to ‘build on the energy and enthusiasm from the Jeremy Corbyn for Labour Leader campaign, to increase participatory democracy, solidarity, and grassroots power and help Labour become the transformative governing party of the 21st century’.7 Momentum has been widely applauded for its effective use of social media, and has recently established My Momentum, an online platform that allows members to participate in discussions and make decisions.

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This tendency is also seen beyond digital parties proper, and in particular in post-crash left formations and candidates that have in fact also experienced a spectacular growth in the young vote. In the 2017 French presidential elections, Jean Luc Mélenchon was by far the most popular candidate among young people, with 30 per cent of those between ages 18 and 24 turning to him. Jeremy Corbyn’s impressive performance in the 2017 UK general elections was propelled by an avalanche of youth vote. In a post-election survey conducted by YouGov,113 it was found that Labour share of votes was inversely proportional to voters’ age. Labour scored 66 per cent among those ages 18–19; it only had 19 per cent of support among those aged over 70.

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Similar measures have been adopted by Podemos, which has a salary restitution programme called Impulsa financing social and community projects, and which publishes all its budgetary information on the party’s website. Many of these demands and policies that are part of the ‘digital freedoms’ platform have by now transcended the confines of digital parties. This is seen in governmental initiatives such as the Digital Bill of Rights proposed in the United Kingdom by Jeremy Corbyn or Brazil’s Internet Bill of Rights (Marco Civil da Internet) which propose to update rights and freedoms to the digital condition. It may thus be said that whereas the early defining issue of digital parties – digital rights – has been progressively absorbed by mainstream politics, digital parties, including the Pirate Parties that were most strongly single-issue in their original design, have progressively come to encompass a greater variety of issues, starting from the question of updating democracy to the digital condition.

Brexit Unfolded: How No One Got What They Want (And Why They Were Never Going To)
by Chris Grey
Published 22 Jun 2021

In any case, even had there been an argument for a parliamentary vote to accept or reject the referendum result, there was no political pressure for one (I am not referring here to the different issue of a vote on triggering Article 50, which is discussed in the next chapter). Such pressure would have required, at a minimum, a demand from Labour, the official opposition party. Not only did this not come, but Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s leader, far from seeking a parliamentary vote on the referendum result, had on the day after the result called for the government to immediately issue an Article 50 notification so as to commence exit proceedings (though a few weeks later he claimed to have been misunderstood).11 Labour and Brexit The story of Brexit is to some large extent the story of the internal politics of the Tory Party, but in the post-referendum years the role of Labour under Corbyn was also important.

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That this happened was a truly shameful dereliction of duty on the part of those many MPs who believed that Brexit would be deeply damaging to Britain but still voted to enact it. It arose at least in part because of the hysterical mood that the Mail’s headline had both expressed and exacerbated. The size of the majority also reflected Jeremy Corbyn’s decision to impose a three-line whip on Labour MPs to support the government. One important consequence of this vote was that just as it strengthened May’s hand, conversely, it meant that all those MPs who voted for it, and the Labour leadership, were complicit in the consequences. Indeed, as events progressed they were frequently taunted, by the very Brexiters who had been so adamantly opposed to a vote, for having agreed to Brexit and, supposedly, for having endorsed whatever outcome the Article 50 process might have, including that of there being no agreement on withdrawal terms (i.e.

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But it had been gifted to Brexiters by Labour’s electoral stance, just as Labour support for triggering Article 50 had also been a gift to Brexiters. Yet perhaps it contained a glimmer of truth as regards how MPs might vote, since when Labour MP Chuka Umunna tabled an amendment to the Queen’s Speech to the new parliament, calling for continued single market membership, Jeremy Corbyn ordered his MPs to abstain and sacked those Labour frontbenchers who supported it. It was one of many ways in which Corbyn acted as the Brexiters’ enabler, as demonstrated by Nigel Farage’s endorsement of his actions for ‘showing his true Brexit colours’.63 THE ROW OF THE SUMMER Though some of the events just mentioned came a few days later, it was against this general background that the Article 50 talks belatedly started in the middle of June 2017.

Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe
by Denis MacShane
Published 14 Jul 2017

The Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party is very right-wing on issues like gay and women’s rights or climate change but its voters base is in Northern Ireland’s farming community which depends on there being no border or customs clearing between Northern Ireland in the UK and Ireland in the EU. Jeremy Corbyn, the leftist Labour leader, has saved his honour and his focus on domestic issues like austerity, cuts to public services like health care and the police found an echo especially among young voters. Mrs May and the pro-Brexit press in Britain tried to portray Corbyn as a friend of terrorists, a leftwing extremist living in an imagined left-wing 1970s past.

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It sounded and looked like the elite establishment of globalisation’s chattering class. It might have been helped if the opposition parties had commanding leaders. After Paddy Ashdown, Charles Kennedy and Nick Clegg, the Lib Dems were led by an affable but little-known MP. Labour was far worse. It had elected as leader Jeremy Corbyn, a leftist from the 1970s who had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing since that era. He was not pro-Brexit but equally had never shown any enthusiasm for the EU. He wanted a socialist Europe in which trade unions were strong, while open market trading arrangements and enforced competition rules were suspect.

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The New Statesman could find seven pages to profile in gushing prose the anti-immigrant Dutch politician Geert Wilders as the coming man in Europe shortly before Wilders was soundly beaten in the Dutch election of March 2017, but the paper regularly over many years turned down articles that were positive about Europe and EU membership. To blame the inability of Jeremy Corbyn to make a pro-EU case for the Leave victory is ahistorical. It was the result of the long Labour years of 1997–2010 when Labour, the liberal-left intelligentsia and the media lost both voice and a coherent message on Europe. Neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown invested any of their leadership and communication skills in explaining the benefits of the EU to the nation.

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
by Bhaskar Sunkara
Published 1 Feb 2019

Ralph Miliband, “The New Revisionism in Britain,” New Left Review (March/April 1985); Stuart Hall, “Faith, Hope or Clarity,” Marxism Today (January 1985): 16. 26. Patrick Wintour and Sarah Hall, “Labour Membership Halved,” Guardian, August 3, 2004, theguardian.com/politics/2004/aug/03/uk.labour. 27. Robin Blackburn, “From Ed Miliband to Jeremy Corbyn,” Jacobin, November 12, 2015, jacobinmag.com/2015/11/from-ed-miliband-to-jeremy-corbyn. 28. Sanchez Manning, “Take Me Out? No, Jeremy Liked a Night in Eating Cold Beans with His Cat Called Harold Wilson, Corbyn’s First Wife Reveals,” Daily Mail, August 15, 2015. Chapter Nine: How We Win 1. Sam Gindin, “Building a Mass Socialist Party,” Jacobin, December 20, 2016, jacobinmag.com/2016/12/socialist-party-bernie-sanders-labor-capitalism. 2.

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But while not rejecting all forms of technocratic expertise, the democratic socialist knows that it will take mass struggle from below and messy disruptions to bring about a more durable and radical sort of change. In the second part of this book, I discuss the world today and why there are new opportunities for this better sort of socialism to take root. As we’ll see, Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn and the United States’ Bernie Sanders have pursued a “class struggle” social democracy, unleashing popular energy that has revitalized the Left as a whole. I offer a tentative strategy for taking advantage of this unexpected second chance and explain why the working class can still be an agent of social transformation.

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Democracy prevents capitalism from returning to its “war against all” worst. But for those still aspiring to an age of abundance and solidarity, defending existing victories or negotiating terms of defeat isn’t enough. As we will see, the emergence of the movement around British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and to a lesser extent that of Bernie Sanders in the United States, represents a surprising challenge to the Third Way. What makes Corbyn, in particular, so remarkable is that he doesn’t just offer a return to twentieth-century Labourism but rather wants a new “class struggle social democracy” in which the party meeting, union hall, and electoral rally are far from the only acceptable places to practice politics.

Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories From the Frontline
by Steven K. Kapp
Published 19 Nov 2019

In September of 2015, there had been a shuffle in leadership in the political parties and suddenly many in the ND groups were talking about wanting to reach out to one person. That person was Jeremy Corbyn Member of Parliament (MP), the newly elected Leader of the Labour Party (then and at the time of writing in early 2019, the main opposition party in the UK). In the autumn of 2015 individuals from all the ND groups were talking about how Corbyn seemed different, how if anyone was going to understand our plight it would be him. This intrigued me as it was coming from people who claimed to have lost faith in our political system, from supporters of other political parties as well as from Labour supporters. Jeremy Corbyn seemed to be appealing to many within the different ND communities, because he seemed to be approaching politics differently, so I addressed an open letter to him.

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In the open letter I spoke about the emergence of an online-based neurodivergent community and stated that: Although we are isolated within our geographical communities we have found others like us and formed huge communities on the internet. We gain support from each other and find ways to overcome hurdles together. [4] 19 Changing Paradigms: The Emergence … 267 I congratulated Jeremy Corbyn for his appointment of a Shadow Minister for Mental Health and asked: Jeremy Corbyn, you have created a Minister for Mental Health and I applaud you for that, it truly is an immensely important post in this era. Can we ask that you also consider appointing a Minister for NeuroDiversity to work closely with the Minister for Mental Health?

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The open letter received hundreds of comments in support in every ND group I shared it in. The ND community then seemed to take ownership of it and started sharing and retweeting it to their own contacts. It wasn’t long before the letter had gone viral. I wanted as many comments as possible from members of the different neurodivergent communities before sending it to Jeremy Corbyn MP. It was essential to me that he sees it was the community speaking and not just me. Between publishing the letter, coming out that I was autistic, my own general incompetence at promoting my paid work, the exploitative nature of the autism world, and my focus having turned to campaigning, I had not been able to make a success of my business.

Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism
by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart
Published 31 Dec 2018

Libertarian populists combine support for socially liberal policies with a sweeping critique of the failure of mainstream parties to address corporate greed, economic inequalities, global capitalism, and social injustice. Campaigning as outsiders, this appeal is likely to mobilize Labour Party members favoring Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders supporters in Democratic primaries, voters for Jean-­Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, the Five Star Movement in Rome, and community activists engaged in Pablo Iglesias’ Podemos in Spain.28 Political parties usually attract older voters, but by adopting digital tools, some like the Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy, have succeeded in attracting a relatively young membership.29 At the same time, levels of youthful enthusiasm are rarely translated into equivalent levels of voting turnout at the ballot box.30 The Millennial generation in the US and Europe are more likely than their elders to participate in direct protest politics, community volunteering, new social 44 The Cultural Backlash Theory movements, and online activism, but they are usually far less engaged through conventional electoral channels such as voting.31 Libertarian-­ Populist parties seeking the support of younger, college-­educated voters therefore face stiff competition from social movements championing the progressive agenda on issues such as environmental protection and climate change, LGBTQ rights, gender equality, Black Lives Matter, the ‘Me-­too’ movement against sexual harassment, gun control, immigration rights, human rights and democracy, international development, and social justice.

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This combination is particularly common in Latin America.7 Thus, Chavez railed against ‘predatory’ political elites, economic austerity measures, and the neo-­ colonial foreign policies of the United States, while inspiring a socialist revolution in Venezuela.8 Studies comparing the Americas, Central and Eastern Europe, and Asia have identified many populist parties and leaders that favor state economic management, wealth redistribution, and social justice, policies which can be classified as part of the ‘populist left.’9 Similarly, there are several left-­ wing populist parties in Western Europe, including Podemos in Spain and the Five-­Star Movement in Italy. It has also become fairly common for left-­wing parties and politicians like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders to use populist rhetoric when criticizing financial elites and the power of multinational corporations and big business. The discourse of radical left parties in Europe, traditionally communist and socialist, have been found to have become more populist in recent years, making broad claims about ‘the good people’ not just appealing to the working class.10 Part III From Values to Votes 219 In the United States, as well, populism is associated historically with the left.

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But in practice, party labels can disguise deep ideological divisions, such as those between neo-­classical laissez faire liberals and social liberals. Moreover, identical party labels have been adopted by parties with very different platforms and ideologies. The same name can also mask major ideological shifts over time within a party, such as the British Labour Party experienced under the leadership of Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn. Similarly, Trump mounted a hostile take-­over of the GOP, so that the policies of the party under his leadership diverged sharply from the Republican Party of George W. Bush, such as the contrasts between the international promotion of democracy in the Middle East by the Neo-­Cons and the ‘American First’ withdrawal from this role in Rex Tillerson’s State Department.

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 12 Jun 2017

In a 2015 report into why the Labour Party lost the general election that year, Jon Cruddas suggested the party was now really only appealing to those who are at home in ‘metropolitan modernity’, who ‘value openness, creativity, self-fulfilment and self-determination’. ‘Public opinion in the European Union’, Eurobarometer 83. 50. Jonathan Walker, ‘Jeremy Corbyn joins opposition to Pegida-UK’s Birmingham march’, Birmingham Mail, 4 February 2016, http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/jeremy-corbyn-joins-opposition-pegida-10835496. 51. Hilary Pilkington, Loud and Proud: Passion and Politics in the English Defence League (Manchester University Press, 2016); also see the excellent work from the academic Joel Busher, who spent sixteen months with the EDL, Joel Busher, ‘Understanding the English Defence League’, London School of Economics and Political Science blog, 2 December 2015, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/understanding-the-english-defence-league-life-on-the-front-line-of-an-imagined-clash-of-civilisations/. 52.

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As a result, billionaire right-wing politicians with economic policies that won’t help them, like Donald Trump, can attract millions of working-class voters who feel forgotten with the right language and identity-based promises. That a billionaire has been able to successfully position himself as a man of the people should shame liberals. It’s an indictment of their stunning failure. Left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn joined the anti-Pegida-UK demonstration on 6 February, marching under the banner ‘We Chose Hope.’ He was joined by local Labour MP Liam Byrne who said ‘We don’t want our [community] threatened by racists.’50 Jess Phillips MP called Tommy’s plans a ‘costly hate rally’. Racists. Idiots. Not a frustrated group of people who find, in the flag-waving and chanting, some reclamation of power in a system that ignores them.

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.* Following their workshop they sat on the steps in front of the building, smoking roll-up cigarettes and practising their latest song, ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ with repurposed anti-fracking lyrics: In this world where we live There should be re-new-a-bles Bring me sunshine Bring me tidal Bring me lo-ve! A fresh-faced Momentum organiser suddenly burst out of the building and ushered us all inside the main hall for a surprise announcement. This turned out to be by Jeremy Corbyn, who the day before had been re-elected as leader of the Labour Party. After his speech—in which he spoke about the unpopular but ultimately vindicated struggle of the activist—one of the Nanas, Amy, snuck past Corbyn’s security team and into his car as he was putting on his seat belt. ‘Can I give you this from the Lancashire Nanas?’

Planes, Trains and Toilet Doors: 50 Places That Changed British Politics
by Matt Chorley
Published 8 Feb 2024

Quite the raconteur. It might have been better if she had done more reading and less thinking on her previous holiday earlier that year. Packing her bags for Snowdonia in early April, May was riding high in the polls. Really high. The latest YouGov survey had the Conservatives on 42 per cent, while Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party was on 25 per cent. That was landslide territory. As she and husband Philip checked into Penmaenuchaf Hall Hotel, at the foot of Cadair Idris, the highest peak in southern Snowdonia, she knew it was Labour who had a mountain to climb. She was considering a snap general election. Not that the Mays didn’t get to enjoy the sort of holiday you might expect of a couple in their late fifties (albeit with a couple of security guards in tow).

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That June weekend in 2000 I basked in glorious sunshine, the air thick with the doobie and rumours about how many people (including, it transpired, my old French teacher) had scaled, demolished or otherwise overcome the fence. I was being paid to watch Cypress Hill, Reef, Semisonic, Brand New Heavies, Jools Holland, Burt Bacharach and, late on Sunday, with the ice-cream bike packed away, David Bowie. That is who the crowds were here for. Not me and my range of artisan flavours. Seventeen years later, Jeremy Corbyn did not learn this lesson. Tens of thousands of people flooded into the Pyramid field for a victory rally for the man who had lost. On 8 June he had deprived Theresa May of a majority in the general election (though she would remain as prime minister for another two years). A fortnight later, just after 4 o’clock on a warm Saturday afternoon, sandwiched between rapper Craig David and hip-hop duo Run The Jewels, Corbyn took to the stage of the festival born of the same alternative, hippie, pro-CND politics of the early 1970s which was, and remained, his lodestar.

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‘Racism is wrong, evil and divisive in our society,’ Corbyn said. They cheered even louder. Nobody thought about the small issue of anti-Semitism in Labour. All that was yet to come. Instead they waved placards declaring ‘JC HOPE’ and ‘Jezz you’re the one’. Many wore T-shirts with his face on. Chants of ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn!’, to the tune of The White Stripes’ ‘Seven Nation Army’ rang out for hours as the crowds dispersed, pumped up by his passionate, if rambling, peroration: ‘Let us be together and recognise another world is possible, if we come together to understand that, understand the power we’ve got, and achieve that decent, better society where everybody matters and those poverty stricken people are enriched in their lives and the rest of us are made secure by their enrichment, thank you very much Glastonbury, thank you inviting me here today, I’m proud to be here, thank you very much Glastonbury.’

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats
by Maya Goodfellow
Published 5 Nov 2019

Conservative Party, Forward, Together: Our Plan for a Stronger Britain and a Prosperous Future, London: Conservative Party, p. 54. 7. Labour Party, For the Many Not the Few: The Labour Party Manifesto 2017, London: Labour Party, 2017, p. 28. 8. ‘Jeremy Corbyn: I’ve Not Changed my Mind on Immigration’, BBC News, 10 January 2017. 9. Helen Lewis, ‘Jeremy Corbyn: “Wholesale” EU Immigration Has Destroyed Conditions for British Workers’, New Statesman, 23 July 2017. 10. Mehreen Khan, ‘Posted Worker Problems’, Financial Times, 24 October 2017. 11. Gareth Dale, ‘Leaving the Fortresses: Between Class Internationalism and Nativist Social Democracy’, Viewpoint Magazine, 30 November 2017. 12.

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Then Labour leader Ed Miliband attacked the government for failing to meet their net migration target, the party abstained on the 2014 Immigration Bill, effectively waiving it through; and they went into the 2015 Election selling Labour Party mugs that promised they would put ‘Controls on Immigration’. But there was some Parliamentary resistance. Sixteen MPs voted against the 2014 bill, six of them from Labour, including three of the people who would go on to lead the party a year later: Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell. When an inter-ministerial ‘Hostile Environment Group’ was set up so government departments could coordinate their efforts to make migrants’ lives more difficult, then Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather, together with some of her colleagues, tried to make its existence and its name public knowledge through a Freedom of Information request.

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In the process, they’ve encouraged and cleared the way for politicians who have already indulged in racism and xenophobia to follow them, if not right to the edge of this anti-migrant cliff, then close enough. Conversely, there’s a dearth of voices with a sizeable platform from which to counter the prevailing discourse. Until Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader, the only significant players who were even arguing that immigration is not an issue were the Scottish National Party (SNP) and the Greens, relatively small parties and new to the subject. This was the context of the EU referendum, whereby even though people like Corbyn refused to give in to anti-migrant messaging, there were far fewer voices defending migrants than there were politicians clamouring over one another to attack them.

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain
by Sathnam Sanghera
Published 28 Jan 2021

mobileUi=0 Williams, Luke G., Richmond Unchained: The Biography of the World’s First Black Sporting Superstar, Amberley, 2015 Williams, Robert, A., Loaded Like a Weapon: The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights, and the Legal History of Racism in America, University of Minnesota Press, 2005 Wilson, Jon, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire, Simon & Schuster, 2017 Winder, Robert, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain, Abacus, 2013 Winks, Robin W., Historiography, Oxford University Press, 1999 Wintle, Claire, Colonial Collecting and Display: Encounters with Material Culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Berghahn Books, 2013 Woerkens, Martine van, The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India, University of Chicago Press, 2002 Wolfe, Patrick, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, Verso, 2015 Wolmar, Christian, Railways & the Raj: How the Age of Steam Transformed India, Atlantic Books, 2018 Wood, James, ‘These Etonians’, London Review of Books 2019, 41:13, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n13/james-wood/diary Woolcock, Nicola, ‘To say grammar schools are full of rich white pupils is lazy and wrong, says Townley Grammar head teacher’, The Times, 7/12/2019, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/to-say-grammar-schools-are-full-of-rich-white-pupils-is-lazy-and-wrong-says-townley-grammar-head-teacher-jr6f7djrm ‘The World’s Top Travelling Nations’, GetGoingInsurance, 2020, https://getgoinginsurance.co.uk/big-travel-spenders/ Yanni, Carla, Nature’s Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display, Athlone, 1999 Yeo, Colin, Welcome to Britain: Fixing our Broken Immigration System, Biteback, 2020 Yorke, Harry, ‘Jeremy Corbyn promises children will be taught about evils of British Empire’, Telegraph, 25/11/2019, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/11/25/jeremy-corbyn-promises-children-will-taught-evils-british-empire/ Young, Robert J. C., Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Wiley-Blackwell, 2001 Young, Toby, ‘Britain needs Boris, the extraordinary man I’ve known for 35 years’, Spectator, 11/04/2020, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/britain-needs-boris-the-extraordinary-man-ive-known-for-35-years Younge, Gary, ‘Ambalavaner Sivanandan obituary’, Guardian, 7/02/2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/07/ambalavaner-sivanandan Yule, Henry, and Burnell, A.

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In the meantime, local relationships were shaped by other and different influences.’ 10 Tony Little, ‘Remember the Rights of the Savage’, Liberal History, 20/05/2012, https://liberalhistory.org.uk/history/remember-the-rights-of-the-savage/. 11 Harry Yorke, ‘Jeremy Corbyn promises children will be taught about evils of British Empire’, Telegraph, 25/11/2019, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/11/25/jeremy-corbyn-promises-children-will-taught-evils-british-empire/. 12 Andy Brown, Political Languages of Race and the Politics of Exclusion, Ashgate, 1999; Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe!, Cambridge University Press, 2018, p. 267. 13 MacKenzie proceeds, on p. 179 of Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960, Manchester University Press, 1984, to quote the German G.

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Or to put it another way, empire is yet another of those topics, alongside trans rights, Brexit, the merits of Dyson vacuum cleaners over Henrys, that has become a locum of tension in the culture wars. You can’t explore the issue casually, or express curiosity, or admit ignorance: you need to take sides. It extends even to party politics, with former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn announcing in the run-up to a general election that under his party children would be taught about the ‘historical injustice’ and ‘colonialism’ as part of the national curriculum,11 while Michael Gove announced early in his tenure as Secretary of State for Education that history lessons in schools needed to ‘celebrate’ the legacy of the British empire.

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain
by Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Published 3 Mar 2020

Had Labour won there would have been no referendum on Europe. Part of the story after 2010 was Labour’s ineffectiveness as the principal opposition party at Westminster, and in Scotland, the SNP becoming what the Tories had forever been in England: the natural party of government. Labour lost in 2015 and made only marginal gains in 2017, followed by Jeremy Corbyn’s failure to seize the initiative during the national crisis over Brexit. Writers scratched national itches but were curiously out of the loop. In All Together Now? Mike Carter tramped the land, angry at what England now was but also upset with himself for letting ‘it’ happen. Blame the anti-collective turn, the politicians who pushed it (and the people who voted them in) – or should that be the amorphous forces of globalisation and finance capitalism?

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That did not stop Cameron practising government by school chum. His resignation honours list was ‘so full of cronies it would embarrass a medieval court’, said Tim Farron. Jeremy Hunt, head boy of Charterhouse, slugged it out with Bullingdon Johnson to lead the party. It wasn’t just the Tories. Jeremy Corbyn attended the kind of prep school where, as a former pupil put it, a boy could be flogged for ‘having your cap at a rakish angle’; Momentum media strategist James Schneider was privately educated, as were Labour apparatchiks Seumas Milne and Jon Lansman. Author Robert Verkaik said these schools produced inflated egos with ‘an innate sense of entitlement and … an almost pathological willingness to risk everything’, which explained much in recent politics.

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Joining enjoyed a fair measure of popular assent in 1972, which was formalised in 1975, when Margaret Thatcher wore that fetching Euro-jumper. Harold Wilson’s use of the referendum device created the bad precedent of taking decisions of national import away from parliament. He had used it as a way of dealing with his recalcitrants, especially Jeremy Corbyn’s mentor Tony Benn. Labour subsequently warmed to membership, while the Tories became sceptical, though not until after Thatcher enthusiastically endorsed the principle of a single market in goods and capital flows (and people). UK membership was never wholehearted; the practice and institutions of the union interested few minds and touched fewer hearts.

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 1 Sep 2020

That is not to dismiss the often heroic work of many public sector workers, but if there was ever a case of lions led by donkeys this was it. WEEKS LOST, LIVES LOST The lack of urgency was criminal. One of the many ways in which Sir Keir Starmer, the Labor Party’s new leader, has distinguished himself from Jeremy Corbyn has been to ask Boris Johnson different versions of the same blunderbuss question: why was he so slow? The same question could be put to many leaders across the West. By the end of February, two things were clear to any Western government that wasn’t asleep at the wheel. The first was that the virus had left China and was “going global” (a phrase that The Economist put on its cover on February 27).

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It may also allow some populists in democracies to grab some unjustified powers. But it will not convince the people of the West to give up on elections. The bigger question is what will those people now vote for—and we fear the answer is larger, more nationalist governments. THE EVEN GREATER SOCIETY The Coronavirus arrived just as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, the two most left-wing people in the Anglosphere’s recent history, were bowing off the political stage. Having seen their ideas comprehensively rejected by voters in Britain’s general election and the Democratic primaries, and knowing their parties had chosen pragmatic leaders, you might have imagined the old firebrands would be a bit downcast, even humbled.

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“Even someone like me, the most conservative and fiscally conscious senator in the country, is willing to spend federal dollars to help millions of workers,” announced Rand Paul, the libertarian champion in the Senate. For the populist wing of the right, there has been something close to enthusiasm. Johnson’s Conservatives won the British election in 2019 on a platform of spending more on just about everything (just less than Jeremy Corbyn). At the end of June, Johnson delivered a speech comparing himself to FDR in his desire to “build, build, build.” In America Trumpism rejected decades’ worth of Republican orthodoxy on free trade and small government. Steve Bannon, the mastermind of Trump’s election victory, has long thought limited-government conservatism is old hat.16 For him the idea that you can remain dependent on China for vital goods like medical supplies while pushing back against that country’s geo-strategic ambitions is absurd.

The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times
by Lionel Barber
Published 5 Nov 2020

Where does Mr Barber stand on ‘golden moment’, ‘golden age’ or ‘golden era’? I don’t like any of them. On balance, golden era is the best of an overhyped bunch. Just do not assume, I tell the Chinese delegation, that the next government will feel bound by the phrase. Who knows, it might be led by newly elected Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. TUESDAY, 20 OCTOBER The queen is shorter close-up than I imagined, President Xi nowhere near the towering presence projected on camera. I’m standing in the reception line at Buckingham Palace, a commoner in pressed white tie relatively low in the international pecking order. ‘Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times,’ bellows the royal flunkey.

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WEDNESDAY, 31 MAY The FT faces a wretched choice in the UK election. Theresa May has been a massive disappointment, robotic on the campaign trail and curiously brittle. The Conservative manifesto is an unreadable hodge-podge where pledges on better conditions in slaughterhouses vie with improved living standards for the ‘just about managing’. Labour under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is even worse. Corbyn is a pacifist relic from the 1970s, in hock to the unions. He’s spent his entire life in opposition – to his own party leadership – and he’s been wrong on most of the important issues, starting with the Cold War. On Brexit, both parties have engaged in a conspiracy of silence.

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After the botched election, May’s position is almost hopeless. She has to rely on the Democratic Unionist party in Ulster who resemble a group of Bible Belt preachers: literal, implacable, but maybe open to a bribe, electorally speaking of course. I can’t see how May secures a majority in the House of Commons. Jeremy Corbyn is a closet Brexiter who won’t lift a finger. May could pull her vote and plead with Brussels for concessions, but these will be minimal. May did indeed pull the vote three days later. The Brexit hardliners declared a partial victory, invoking the spirit of Dunkirk. They conveniently forgot that Dunkirk in 1940 was a defeat leading to a humiliating retreat.

How Democracy Ends
by David Runciman
Published 9 May 2018

Of course, the public has its suspicions, but the public always has its suspicions. The drama of democratic life absorbs the evidence without anyone being any the wiser. Freedland’s novel is closer to home for now because the election of a President Rightist came to pass. Mullin was a would-be Labour MP on the left of the party in the 1980s and an ally of the young Jeremy Corbyn. It is unlikely that Mullin ever imagined Corbyn would be the person who might put his fiction to the test. Both men were acolytes of Tony Benn, who was for many years the British left’s best hope. Benn never came that close to becoming prime minister. As I write, the prospect of a Corbyn prime ministership is very real.

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Mass participation coincided with the ratcheting up of nuclear tensions between the superpowers – it happened in the early 1960s, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and again in the early 1980s, when the Reagan administration was trying to win the arms race. It hasn’t happened since. Today, CND is a shell of what it was, with only a few thousand members and almost no public profile. The irony is that one of its most committed supporters, Jeremy Corbyn, was elected leader of the Labour Party in 2015 and could yet find himself as British prime minister. Nuclear disarmament still animates Corbyn, but it barely resonates with his supporters from a younger generation, who have little memory of the Cold War. Corbyn was obliged to run in the 2017 British general election on a manifesto that committed the UK to retaining its Trident nuclear deterrent.

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In Britain, the Labour Party has bucked the trend of other declining social democratic parties in Europe by recasting itself as a social movement. Offering those who join a voice that can be used against the party’s representatives in parliament, it has revived its mass membership. Its present leader, Jeremy Corbyn, repeatedly insists that the members are not there to be used by the MPs but the other way round. In the United States, Trump won the presidency by running his own political movement against the Republican Party elite. Sanders almost did the same by running against the Democratic Party establishment.

England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country – and How to Set Them Straight
by Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears
Published 24 Apr 2024

Multiplying global problems – the so-called ‘polycrisis’ of pandemics, mass migration, war and climate change – have pushed voters this way and that with many of them losing faith in politics to make any difference. It was in this context that England became fertile territory for myth-makers of all kinds and particularly for an angry kind of politics. And, while some of that heat might seem to have dissipated with the departure of polarising figureheads like Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn, there is little reason to suppose it has gone away entirely – and plenty to suggest it will come back soon. Even the remarkable success of the 2024 TV drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, can be seen as once again demonstrating the potency of a particular idea of England – the opening episode shows Jo Hamilton running into her Hampshire village sub-post office with a tray of fresh baked scones – which has been betrayed by a remote politics and unfeeling globalised institutions.

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Of course, had even half of these 2.2 million voters backed Remain, the result of the referendum would be different. But to suggest that the Leave vote was dominated by working-class Labour supporters is simply untrue.’ None of which is to deny that Labour lost a lot of votes in Red Wall constituencies, and its stance on issues like immigration or Brexit, as well as the left-wing leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, played a big part. An influential book on the 2019 election, Beyond the Red Wall, written by Deborah Mattinson, who later became Labour’s strategy director, analysed why they switched. Based on focus groups she conducted in traditionally Labour constituencies across the North and Midlands, she described how people saw the party as being for ‘losers and scroungers’ or filled with ‘naïve and idealistic middle-class students – arrogant kids boasting degrees but lacking experience, young people who looked down on people like them’.58 Political parties spend much of their time dissecting − or ‘segmenting’ − the component parts of the electorate, which was why Mattinson restricted membership of her focus groups to working-class people with a ‘spread of ages from the late 30s up to the mid-70s’, and ‘asked for everyone to be past Labour voters who had switched to the Conservatives at the 2019 election’.59 And, inevitably in a political system where the MP for each constituency is determined through a first-past-the-post election, some voters matter more than others.

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Turnout among the under-twenty-fours fell from around two-thirds in 1992 to below half less than a decade later and has bumped along at similar levels ever since. Even the so-called ‘youth quake’ in 2017, when it was claimed lots of young people had flocked to the polling stations inspired by Jeremy Corbyn, turned out to be a data error. Discontent and disillusionment were not confined to any one group in those Brexit years. In 2014, a poll asked whether the country had changed for the worse in the past thirty years. Overall, 59 per cent of people agreed, twice the proportion of those who disagreed.

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It
by Stuart Maconie
Published 5 Mar 2020

I’m not wild about fannish cults surrounding politicians. I’d rather have the hard-working, principled, slightly dull Clem Attlee over sordid ‘characters’ like Boris Johnson any day. But if we’re going to have cults, let’s reserve them for people like Nye. When I have winced behind splayed fingers as Jeremy Corbyn has scuttled in disdain and fear from journalists’ perfectly reasonable questions, flanked by minders who bleat about him being ‘hassled’, I wonder what Nye would have done. I think I know the answer. He would have wrestled the mike from them, jumped on the nearest table, dealt with any questions and still be talking now.

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That week in spring, the public institutions of this corner of Manchester have had two famous visitors. Prime Minister Theresa May, flanked by armed police outriders in a thundering motorcade, visited a local junior school. Here she met awkwardly with children who were specially selected and vetted by staff and instructed not to mention any recent political events or Jeremy Corbyn. More significantly for the people of the area, Sir Alex Ferguson had been admitted to Salford Royal with a suspected bleed on the brain. (‘We’re nearer,’ smiles Julie, ‘but they’re a centre of excellence. He’s absolutely in the right place.’) While I’m at Trafford General, the visitors come and go, less famous but no less welcome.

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The former were encouraged by one of their braying leaders ‘not to attack any BBC journalists … just for today’, while one of the latter told me, ‘We know who you are,’ after I’d expressed my lack of sympathy for their cause. On another occasion, a screaming man with a frankly unnecessary loudhailer berated me for the BBC’s beastliness to Jeremy Corbyn and, by extension, the oppressed peoples of the world. Depending on my mood on the day, I sometimes think that making enemies of these people, less different from each other than they would like to think, shows that ‘we’ are doing the right thing and are on the side of the angels. Other times I just want to go to their place of work with a badly drawn placard and shout garbage through their windows all day, harassing them and their colleagues.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

The difference compared to 1938, the last year in full peacetime footing when GDP per capita was $9,797 was 63.2%. 12 “Baromètre Politique”, Ipsos / Le Point, https://www.ipsos.com/fr-fr/barometre-politique 13 Payne, S., Hughes, L., and Pickard, J., “How Change UK crashed and burned”, Financial Times, 5 Jun. 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/f33596da-87a2-11e9-a028-86cea8523dc2 14 “His approval rating was just 16% versus a disapproval rating of 76%. Jeremy Corbyn has lowest leadership satisfaction rating for any opposition leader since 1977”, Ipsos MORI, 20 Sep. 2019, https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/jeremy-corbyn-has-lowest-leadership-satisfaction-rating-any-opposition-leader-1977. 15 Douthat, R., “The Rise of Woke Capital”, New York Times, 28 Feb. 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/corporate-america-activism.html 16 Bain, M., “Nike’s Kaepernick ad is what happens when capitalism and activism collide”, Quartz, 29 Sep. 2018, https://qz.com/1400583/modern-corporate-social-activism-looks-like-nikes-kaepernick-ad/ 17 “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be”, Gillette, 13 Jan. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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Contrary to what the advocates of market liberalization would predict, the Bretton Woods system provided the most stable period in the history of capitalism and also its fastest growing. Source: Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff (2009). What has changed since the crisis is the opposition to capitalism. Whether it comes in the form of grassroots movements like Occupy Wall Street, the rise of the populist left through figures like Bernie Sanders in the US or Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, or the anti-globalization backlash from the supporters of Brexit and Trump, there is a growing sense that the last four decades of Western history under liberal capitalism have been a disappointment. Particularly since many of the laissez-faire policies applied during this period promised to “democratize” the economy by reigning in the state and offering opportunity and choice But it is fortunate for the defenders of laissez-faire that an alternative to capitalism has remained elusive in mainstream discourse.

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Much like the North Koreans, the defenders of liberal capitalism have threatened their critics that any major systemic changes to the economic status quo will result in unbearable economic dislocation and massive destruction of wealth for rich and poor alike. Not a day seemingly goes by without the right-wing and centrist media reminding its viewers that the economic policies espoused by “radical” left politicians like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or Jeremy Corbyn will inevitably turn their countries into Venezuela. Or that socialist and redistributive policies may work in countries like the Nordics but, for unexplained reasons, not in countries like the US (universal healthcare being the most egregious example). These arguments preclude an honest comparative discussion of economic models in mainstream discourse, which further reinforces the fear factor when policies that go against the prevailing orthodoxy are proposed.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics
by Peter Geoghegan
Published 2 Jan 2020

It will be so much worse in the future. And we haven’t been able to do anything about it so far.” In the brave new world of digital politics, truth and falsehood have become malleable concepts. Anything goes. During a TV debate ahead of the 2019 British general election between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, the Conservative Party renamed its Twitter account factcheckUK, and then used it to push out partisan messages designed to look like independent verification. When called out, the Conservatives doubled down. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said that voters “don’t give a toss” about what happens online.

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Created just five weeks before the vote and closely linked to Brexit Party MEP Brian Monteith, Capitalist Worker spent almost £40,000 on Facebook ads that predominantly targeted men aged between 18 and 34. The adverts were most frequently viewed in a number of working-class Labour ‘red wall’ seats that were key to the Conservatives’ election strategy.58 Another new Facebook page spent more than £55,000 on adverts attacking Jeremy Corbyn’s housing policy, warning that “landlords will lose their livelihood overnight”.59 The ads were bought in the name of Jennifer Powers, the lobbyist who worked for Shanker Singham’s private consultancy and had been a member of the Alternative Arrangements Commission alongside the Institute of Economic Affairs’ trade advisor.

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As Peter Pomerantsev notes, “In an age in which all the old ideologies have vanished and there is no competition over coherent political ideas, the aim becomes to lasso together disparate groups around a new notion of the people, an amorphous but powerful emotion that each can interpret in their own way, and then seal it by conjuring up phantom enemies who threaten to undermine it.”82 The technological revolution in politics is more likely to speed up than slow down. A few weeks before the 2019 British general election, a video showing Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn endorsing each other for prime minister spread online. It was obviously a fake – created in an attempt to demonstrate the potential for ‘deepfake’ videos to undermine democracy – but it was real enough to show what could soon be available to unscrupulous and well-funded operators. Britain faces “a perfect storm” of digital disruption and weak rules, Louise Edwards told me as we sat in a nondescript meeting room in the Electoral Commission’s offices.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

Like the Trump campaign they ran many different versions, testing them in an interactive feedback loop.*15 The evolution never stops. In the 2017 UK general election, the Labour Party took a different approach, although the overall aim – to change the information environment – was the same.16 Rather than sponsored ads, Jeremy Corbyn’s fans produced huge volumes of ‘organic’ content themselves and shared it in tightly networked groups, meaning their messages – real things written by real people – reached far more people and were more believable than they would otherwise have been. There was also an ecosystem of left-wing ‘alternative news’ outlets that churned out widely shared and hyper-partisan pro-Corbyn stories.

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Several pilot schemes, including Oakland, California and Finland, are examining the idea (although it’s too early to say how well they are working yet), and a number of serious thinkers and writers believe it is worth further investigation. In other words, UBI has become very fashionable. For some people on the political right, it is a way to keep capitalism ticking over in times of economic uncertainty. For some on the left, including a handful of radicals in the UK circling Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, it represents a way to redistribute wealth more fairly. And for the utopians, it would allow people to do more meaningful things with their lives than monotonous labour.* Sam doesn’t think anyone is ready for AI. ‘We are going to need to have new distribution, new social safety nets,’ he told me in his Y Combinator office.

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One of Facebook’s most useful services is called ‘Lookalike Audiences’ – it allows an advertiser to provide Facebook with a small group of known supporters, and ask Facebook to expand it out. Facebook can create groups of people who are similar to the initial group and then target them. 21 Helen Lewis, ‘How Jeremy Corbyn won Facebook’, www.newstatesman.com, 20 July 2016. 22 J. Baldwin-Philippi (2017), ‘The myths of data-driven campaigning’, Political Communication, 34(4), 627-633. 23 Tamsin Shaw, ‘Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind’, New York Review of Books, 20 April 2017. 24 Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay, (Profile, 2014). 25 Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Vote Leave donations: the dark ads, the mystery “letter” – and Brexit’s online guru’, www.theguardian.com, 25 November 2017. 26 Tom Hamburger, ‘Cruz campaign credits psychological data and analytics for its rising success’, www.washingtonpost.com, 13 December 2015. 27 Matea Gold and Frances Stead Sellers, ‘After working for Trump’s campaign, British data firm eyes new U.S. government contracts’, www.washingtonpost.com, 17 February 2017. 28 Carole Cadwalladr, ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warefare tool’, Observer, 18 March 2018. 29 Nina Burleigh, ibid. 30 Lucy Handley, ‘Personalized TV commercials are coming to a screen near you; US marketers to spend $3 billion on targeted ads’, www.cnbc.com, 15 August 2017. 31 E.

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties
by Paul Collier
Published 4 Dec 2018

Populism offers an alternative bypass: charismatic leaders with remedies so obvious that they can be grasped instantly. Often, the two fused, becoming yet more potent: once-discredited ideologies refurbished with impassioned leaders peddling enticing new remedies. Hail to the herald: from the radical left, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Mélenchon; from the nativists, Marine Le Pen and Norbert Hofer; from the secessionists, Nigel Farage, Alex Salmond and Carles Puigdemont; and from the world of celebrity entertainers, Beppe Grillo and Donald Trump. Currently, the political battlefield is seemingly characterized by alarmed and indignant Utilitarian and Rawlsian vanguards under assault from populist ideologues.

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Between the British elections of 2010 and 2017, the Labour Party changed its process of selecting a leader. In 2010, its archetypal Utilitarian social-democrat leader, Gordon Brown, had come to the leadership as the unopposed choice of Labour Members of Parliament. By 2017 the party was led by a Marxist populist, Jeremy Corbyn, who had minimal support from Labour MPs but had been elected by passionate young idealists who had been given the right to easy membership of the party.* This measure had almost completely changed the Labour Party’s composition. On the right, David Cameron, the centrist leader in 2010, had been replaced in 2016 by the unknown quantity of Teresa May, a desperate measure by Conservative MPs designed to avoid following the new constitution of the party, which required that the leader be elected by party members.

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This appeared likely to elect a maverick ideologue, as it had done when first used in 2001. Currently, Britain’s two main political parties have leadership selection systems that, if used, almost guarantee that the menu of political choices will consist of polarizing ideologues – vegan or veal, sir? In the 2017 election, Jeremy Corbyn pitched an ideological populism of the left, whereas Teresa May failed to articulate a coherent strategy, leaving voters bereft of choice and resulting in a hung parliament. Even in Germany, Chancellor Merkel’s brief flirtation with a curious blend of Rawlsian legalism and populism that opened Germany’s borders for a few months, was sufficient to drive one-in-eight voters to a new Nativist party in the 2017 election.

The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite
by Michael Lind
Published 20 Feb 2020

If the Russia Scare version of the establishment’s anti-populist story line is to be believed, the government of Russian president Vladimir Putin successfully used Western social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to hypnotize substantial numbers of citizens of North America and Europe into voting against their natural inclinations for Brexit or Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders in 2016. Even the French yellow vest protests and the gains made by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in the British general election of 2017 have been attributed to Russian machinations online.3 The “Russiagate” scandal began before Trump’s election as the Clinton campaign, some anti-Trump Republicans, elements in the Obama administration, and various members of the US law enforcement and national security establishments spread rumors of alleged links between Russia and the Trump campaign to the media, including the false story that Trump was being blackmailed by Moscow with a videotape of him consorting with Russian prostitutes.

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According to the regime, anyone who criticized communism literally had to be insane.49 If those in today’s West who oppose the dominant consensus of technocratic neoliberalism are in fact emotionally and mentally disturbed, to the point that their maladjustment makes it unsafe to allow them to vote, then to be consistent, neoliberals should support the involuntary confinement, hospitalization, and medication of Trump voters and Brexit voters and other populist voters for their own good, as well as the good of society. * * * — IN REALITY, POLITICS does not imitate sensational thriller fiction. US president Donald Trump and British prime minister Boris Johnson and Britain’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn are not Russian agents of influence installed by Moscow in pursuit of a sinister grand design to overthrow liberal democracy in the West and the world. Even so, the Russian government, like all major countries, employs intelligence operatives whose actions should be monitored and thwarted when they go beyond the low-level activities tolerated by both sides in modern great power relations.

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David Marcus, “Antifa Is Mostly Made Up of Privileged White Dudes,” The Federalist, July 1, 2019. 3. Carol Matlack and Robert Williams, “France to Probe Possible Russian Influence on Yellow Vest Riots,” Bloomberg, December 7, 2018; “Exposed: Russian Twitter Bots Tried to Swing General Election for Jeremy Corbyn,” Sunday Times, April 29, 2018. 4. Matt Taibbi, “As the Mueller Probe Ends, New Russiagate Myths Begin,” Rolling Stone, March 25, 2019. 5. Jeffrey M. Jones, “More in U.S. Favor Diplomacy Over Sanctions for Russia,” Gallup, August 20, 2018. 6. Aaron Mate, “New Studies Show Pundits Are Wrong About Russian Social-Media Involvement in US Politics,” The Nation, December 28, 2018. 7.

How to Be Right: In a World Gone Wrong
by James O'Brien
Published 2 Nov 2018

And because the cost of renting and living in the cities where the work is concentrated is becoming prohibitively expensive, she is too fearful of losing the work she has to complain about her conditions. Arthur gets to blame immigrants; middle-class young professionals in similar situations, albeit office as opposed to van-based, are too well educated to fall for that, but instead fondly imagine that the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, will somehow be able to deliver a brave new world. So these are the new ‘normals’: bosses get to do more or less what they want, while workers either blame their plight on immigration or ignore it altogether because the cost of simply staying afloat has become so high. Neither constituency routinely expects to become a homeowner anymore and so the most fundamental aim of capitalism – security through property – is increasingly debased.

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The younger sections of society, whose taxes will effectively subsidise the care of the ageing sections, are being required to work in circumstances and for wages vastly inferior to their predecessors’, without being offered any permanent stake in that society. The older sections, meanwhile, cling to the illusion that the travails of their children and grandchildren are largely self-inflicted. If nothing else, it unravels the riddle of Jeremy Corbyn’s popularity that still causes such bafflement in so many corners of the political and media establishment. He at least articulates the sense that things can’t go on like this, that the Scylla and Charybdis of demographics and economics will crush us all, unless drastic action is taken. Beyond Brexit and the existential threat it poses to the Union, determining what that action will be is surely the issue that will define the coming decades of UK politics.

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If that seems too uncomfortable a challenge, stop socialising with these people. Stop being friends with them outside the studio. Our job is to hold them to account, not to keep them sweet in the hope of a flattering quote on the cover of our next book. Make it crystal clear that, for example, Jeremy Corbyn could have a prime interview slot on any programme in the country any time he wanted. Drown out the democracy-defying hog-wash that he shouldn’t talk to the ‘mainstream media’ because it’s so biased against him, by making it clear that he can have all the time in the world to prove his fitness to govern after he has been asked a few questions that potential Labour voters want answers to.

Where We Are: The State of Britain Now
by Roger Scruton
Published 16 Nov 2017

We read that the young voted by two to one to remain in the European Union, even if a third of them did not bother to vote. Again, in the subsequent general election the young voted in unprecedented numbers, organizing through social media and university networks in support of the radical oikophobe, Jeremy Corbyn.1 How do we interpret these facts, and what lesson should we take for our policy now? If there is to be a positive story told on behalf of the course that our country has chosen, it must be told to the young and by the young, with some hope of engaging their sympathy. And it must begin from an understanding of the many things that have been subsumed under the concept of globalization.

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That kind of sovereignty is part of being a genuine ‘we’, a first-person plural of mutual commitment. And it is a real question whether young people see a place for it in a fully networked world. Of course, they can use their networks to influence parliamentary elections too, and undoubtedly this happened in the recent British general election, in which Jeremy Corbyn was able to capture the vote of the young, and to achieve the entirely unpredicted outcome of a hung Parliament. As with the original selection of Corbyn as leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party, the main factor behind his successful campaign was the Internet, and the ability of his young supporters to combine outside the meetings and committees of the old party machine.

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For many young people, especially in Britain and Germany, globalization is another name for ‘neo-liberalism’, itself the latest incarnation of international capitalism. And to resist capitalism, they suppose, we need a global system of control, so as to regulate the networks that pose the principal threat to those who have no say in the present scheme of things. The youth vote for Jeremy Corbyn was a vote against capitalism. It was emphatically not a vote for the nation, as the true counter to global networks. Likewise, the youth vote to remain in the European Union was a vote to control the capitalists, the financiers and those who had supposedly brought about the economic crisis of 2007–8.

Greater: Britain After the Storm
by Penny Mordaunt and Chris Lewis
Published 19 May 2021

There’s no doubt that both government and media were wrong-footed in recent years by unexpected outcomes that fundamentally changed both national and international politics. Leadership is simply no longer just about facts but about feelings as well. Three dolly-zoom, double-take shocks illustrate this. First, the candidate with the fewest nominations in the 2015 Labour Party leadership contest was Jeremy Corbyn. Very few expected him to follow Gordon Brown and Tony Blair as party leader: the betting odds were 100–1 against.1 Even fewer expected him to win by a landslide, taking 60 per cent of the votes in the first round. We love an underdog. Only up to a point, though: he fought two elections and lost both, the latter marking Labour’s worst defeat since 1935.2 Second, Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016.

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They were Margaret Thatcher in 1983 and 1987 and Tony Blair in 1997 and 2001.21 People seem to forget that it was for good reasons that Tony Blair was the first and only Labour Prime Minister ever to be returned to office after not one election but three in a row. It’s the only time it happened in one hundred years of the Labour movement. Just think about that for a second. All the way from Sidney and Beatrice Webb through Keir Hardie, Nye Bevan and Manny Shinwell to Barbara Castle, Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn. He was strong enough to fight the laziness of complacent thinking. It’s important to understand that when the Labour Party learns nothing, forgets nothing and offers nothing dressed up as something, the result lets down progressively minded members in both parties. THE DANGERS OF A LARGE MAJORITY An essential hallmark of democracy is that all change initially begins as minority dissent.

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Come polling day, our age will do a lot of work in explaining who we vote for.25 The dominant factor of age was illustrated by the 2019 election result: Discussing the election result in The Times on 17 December 2019, Matt Chorley said: The age at which voters are more likely to vote Tory than Labour dropped dramatically as younger people fell out of love with Jeremy Corbyn. In 2017, when Theresa May lost her majority, the crossover point at which people were more likely to be Conservatives occurred at age forty-seven. In [the 2019] election result this fell to thirty-nine. So, in 2019, the crossover happened earlier and the age skew was bigger still. The political irony may be that while youth is no advantage, all representatives need a positive, future-orientated narrative.

Are Chief Executives Overpaid?
by Deborah Hargreaves
Published 29 Nov 2018

The bill includes a deep cut to corporate taxes from 35 per cent to 21 per cent. Unions and campaigners have strongly argued for some of those tax breaks to be passed on to the workforce and a handful of companies have increased wages, but this has not been widespread. While higher rates of tax for top earners, such as that suggested by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 election campaign, are often lambasted by political rivals, they can be popular with the public. It is not radical to ask those with the deepest pockets to contribute more, especially as they have benefitted so much from the current economic set-up. Higher top rates of tax have got to be part of the overall solution to inequality but will not solve things on their own.

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It is at least a first step to require companies to publish their ratios. Procurement power While critics are quick to dismiss the publication of pay ratios as another meaningless figure, they can be used in interesting ways. They give national, state and local governments market power over companies seeking contracts with them. Jeremy Corbyn, Labour leader, has suggested that companies bidding for government contracts should be subject to a maximum wage cap – meeting a 20 to 1 pay ratio between top and bottom. At the beginning of 2017, Mr Corbyn said ‘A 20:1 ratio means someone earning the living wage, just over £16,000 a year, would permit an executive to be earning nearly £350,000.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason
by William Davies
Published 26 Feb 2019

The Occupy movement that emerged in 2011 to protest against the banks made public assembly its central political purpose, and took the cold, scientific language of statistics and turned it into a mobilizing identity with the famous slogan “we are the 99%.” Left-wing leaders, such as Alexis Tsipras in Greece, Pablo Iglesias in Spain and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, have placed renewed political emphasis on the ability to bring large numbers of people together in public spaces. Here too, the size of rallies stirs a range of emotions from both supporters and opponents: exuberance, scorn, empathy, misinformation, hope, and resentment. Corbyn’s rallies have frequently provoked complaints from his supporters that they are not being adequately covered by the mainstream media, despite their apparently vast scale.

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The global financial crisis began deep within the financial system itself, well beyond the purview of most members of the public, but soon revealed itself as an epic failure of numerical calculation on the part of credit-rating agencies and investment analysts. Opinion polling is another area of mathematical modeling that appears to have gone wrong in recent years, as it failed to adequately detect unexpected surges of support for Donald Trump and Brexit in 2016 and Jeremy Corbyn in 2017. Do numbers still tell the truth? Do they still adequately represent how things are? The answer depends heavily on how they are produced and by whom. The credibility of statistics and economics has profound political implications for how we achieve consensus on the government of society.

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Pollsters can look at previous rates of voter turnout among different sections of the population, but these can change in either direction. Political alienation manifests itself in non-voting, but if a leader or campaign can convert this into anger, it can swiftly be channeled into the electoral system. This is precisely what Trump and the Brexit campaigns did in 2016, and what Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party did in 2017, confounding predictions in the process. On the night of Britain’s EU referendum, the first sign that the Leave campaign was doing better than predicted were the reports of higher turnout: anti-EU sentiment is stronger than pro-EU sentiment, and this had led people to the polls who didn’t usually vote at all.

Revolting!: How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy and What They're Afraid Of
by Mick Hume
Published 23 Feb 2017

After all, the Remain campaign had marshalled every authority in the Western world to warn those British voters that a Leave vote would lead to economic ruination, a political descent into barbarism, world war and, worse, falling house prices. They had been told to vote Remain by the leaders of all Britain’s mainstream political parties, from Tory prime minister David Cameron to left-wing Labour opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn. They had been instructed that there was no realistic alternative to voting Remain by the governor of the Bank of England, the Chancellor of Germany, the President of the United States, a cross-section of leading lights from the arts and every imaginable celebrity from David Beckham to Johnny Rotten.

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The Remain campaign’s slogan might as well have been ‘You may not be EU-phoric about it – but Brexit means Brex-termination!’ The only semi-positive corollary of the negative case for Remain was the promise that the EU could be made to change for the better, especially if Britain fought for that change from the inside. In the words of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn (a long-standing radical opponent of the EU who abandoned his principle and joined the conformist Remain camp when it mattered), we should vote and campaign for ‘Remain and Reform’. The idea is apparently to fight to make Brussels fill in its ‘democratic deficit’, to make the EU more democratic and accountable from within.

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In the 1975 referendum on whether the UK should remain a member of what was then the ‘Common Market’, two of the most prominent supporters of the ‘No’ camp were the leading left-wing Labour MPs Tony Benn and Michael Foot, who later became party leader. These leaders of the Left were so committed to getting Britain out of the ‘capitalist club’ in Europe that they were unfazed by finding themselves on the same ‘No’ side as the anti-immigrant right-winger Enoch ‘rivers of blood’ Powell. Yet in 2016 left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn – a former acolyte of the late Tony Benn and long-term opponent of the EU – signed up to the Remain campaign, along with most of his party’s MPs, members and celebrity fans. What happened in the forty years between to explain this change? The shorthand version of what happened is that the Left in the UK and across Europe lost the political war at home, and so sought refuge in the EU.

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining
by James Meek
Published 5 Mar 2019

There aren’t many takers for absolute global freedom of movement. But to spell out the exact nature and justification of the consequent limits to absolute freedom provokes in liberals a fear of infection with the disease of racial exclusivity. The shudders that greeted Gordon Brown’s ‘British jobs for British workers’ comment, or Jeremy Corbyn’s complaint of ‘wholesale importation of underpaid workers from central Europe’, are proof enough. To the extent that there is a Remainer folk myth, it only underlines these liberal contradictions. One of the oddities of Britain’s new division is that the tags are the wrong way round: Leavers are really Remainers, in the sense they’re the ones who want to stay in an idealised version of a more ‘traditional’ Britain – they wish things had remained as they were, whenever that was; and Remainers are actually Leavers.

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Victoria Ayling was beaten into third place by the Conservatives. Nationally, David Cameron’s Conservatives won. The Liberal Democrats they’d reluctantly shared government with for the previous five years were annihilated at the polls. Ukip won a single seat. When Labour appointed as its new leader Jeremy Corbyn, a left-wing backbencher known, as far as he was known at all, for anti-militarism, defending the rights of Palestinians and Irish Republicans, rebelling against his own party and addressing protestors at demonstrations, it seemed to many establishment commentators that Cameron’s hold on power was secure.

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He takes from the rich to give to the poor. It’s a plan. Taking from the rich to give to the poor has been, is and should be the way forward for an exploited majority against remote, unaccountable concentrations of extreme wealth and power. One word for it is ‘redistribution’. Robin Hood is a programme of the left. Robin Hood is Jeremy Corbyn. He’s Bernie Saunders. He’s Yanis Varoufakis. So it used to seem. But a change has come about. The wealthiest and most powerful in Europe, Australasia and North America have turned the myth to their advantage. In this version of Robin Hood the traditional poor – the unemployed, the disabled, refugees – have been put into the conceptual box where the rich used to be.

A United Ireland: Why Unification Is Inevitable and How It Will Come About
by Kevin Meagher
Published 15 Nov 2016

The DUP knows only too well it would have got a better financial deal from Labour than the one it subsequently received from the Conservative–Lib Dem coalition government. Indeed, James Callaghan’s government was kept afloat in the late 1970s by bartering tactical deals with minority parties, including, back then, the Ulster Unionists. What of the contemporary party? Under Jeremy Corbyn and his shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, the party is now led by two of Parliament’s few, undiluted long-time supporters of Irish Republicanism. This has not gone unremarked, with taunts of ‘IRA sympathiser’ emanating from the usual suspects in the right-wing British media, the Conservative benches, and a good few barbs from his own colleagues in the Labour Party.

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So, in his first few weeks as Labour leader, Corbyn found himself refusing to condemn the Provisional IRA in a BBC interview and was even criticised for the fairly unremarkable act of sharing a coffee with Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland Martin McGuinness and Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams in a café in the Houses of Parliament. As a classic ‘campaigning backbencher’, Jeremy Corbyn holds radical views on a range of issues that sit outside the comfort zone of mainstream politics, particularly about the Israel–Palestine conflict and the broader Middle East. These are seen by his critics as emblematic of his naiveté about paramilitary organisations, raising questions about his suitability for high office.

Confronting Capitalism: How the World Works and How to Change It
by Vivek Chibber
Published 30 Aug 2022

The challenge for the Left today is to engineer a shift toward a scenario in which we have both a Labor Party and a Labor Movement. In the United States, this seems a very tall order. European labor movements at least have some semblance of Left parties that they can at least contemplate reforming—as in the case of Labour in Britain. Even though the party revolt led by Jeremy Corbyn has suffered a massive defeat, the Labour Left can in some measure envision taking hold of the Party and revitalizing its connection to the trade unions—there is a century of history and experience to build upon. And conversely, radical labor organizers can at any rate think about how to work with a reformed Labour Party to push through a progressive policy agenda.

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But, we might also ask, does this mean that, short of a mobilized labor movement, nothing can move the state in a more progressive direction? What about other forms of pressure, mass movements that are large, but in which labor might not be a central actor? This is an important question because in the recent past we’ve seen quite significant mobilizations around electoral campaigns—the Bernie Sanders phenomenon in the US and the Jeremy Corbyn campaign in the UK. These generated enormous enthusiasm and unleashed a great deal of energy, which wasn’t just confined to the narrow electoral arena. The answer is that these mobilizations do in fact have great potential in two ways. The first is that, even though they are not labor-based, they have to be reckoned with by political elites, because they can impose costs.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
by Meredith Broussard
Published 19 Apr 2018

IEEE Spectrum, June 1, 2008. http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/tech-luminaries-address-singularity. Isaac, Mike. “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide.” New York Times, March 3, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html. “Jeremy Corbyn, Entrepreneur.” Economist, June 15, 2017. http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21723426-labours-leader-has-disrupted-business-politics-jeremy-corbyn-entrepreneur. Kahan, Dan M., Donald Braman, John Gastil, Paul Slovic, and C. K. Mertz. “Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White-Male Effect in Risk Perception.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 4, no. 3 (November 2007): 465–505.

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Software development is primarily a craft, and like any other craft—woodworking, glassblowing—it takes a very long time (and a period of apprenticeship) to achieve competence at it. Engaging in and democratizing that development work might not look or sound as sexy as coming up with some earth-shattering tech idea, but it’s where the future lies. Notes 1. “Jeremy Corbyn, Entrepreneur.” 2. Terwiesch and Xu, “Innovation Contests, Open Innovation, and Multiagent Problem Solving.” 3. Morais, “The Unfunniest Joke in Technology.” 4. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. 5. Seife, Proofiness; Kovach and Rosenstiel, Blur. 11 Third-Wave AI In the book so far, we’ve looked at why AI doesn’t work as well as we might expect.

Operation Lighthouse: Reflections on Our Family's Devastating Story of Coercive Control and Domestic Homicide
by Luke Hart and Ryan Hart
Published 15 Jul 2018

In the words of the great Angela Davis, ‘I’m no longer accepting the things I cannot change, I’m changing the things I cannot accept’, and it is with this boldness that Luke and Ryan have used their own experience of domestic abuse to help others. They share their story so honestly because they, like me, believe that together we can change society. Jeremy Corbyn MP Preface This book was initially written by Luke for Ryan. It was intended to communicate pain too raw and unyielding for us to address in person, too deep and enduring to address in the shortness of spoken conversation. It grew into a collaborative conversation between the two of us.

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Chris Green OBE is the founder of White Ribbon UK, a campaign for men who have pledged never to commit, excuse or remain silent about male violence against women and girls. We strongly believe that men engaging in such campaigns is a crucial step to overcome the abuse that women and children suffer. Men must collectively take responsibility for domestic abuse; it is a crime carried out in our all of our names. Finally, we are deeply humbled by Jeremy Corbyn’s participation – we could never have expected so many influential individuals would wish to support us in our work. It is so important to have men and women’s voices side-by-side on an issue that exists as a consequence of the polarisation of gender. We hope our story can show how we had so much more in common with our mother and sister than our father.

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Jan 2017

The divisions can be seen in what we get angry about. When Nigel Farage complained about feeling uncomfortable in a train carriage with no English speakers in it, the outrage in Anywhere media reverberated for several days, but anecdotal evidence suggested that 60 or 70 per cent of the country thought what he said was just common sense. Or when Jeremy Corbyn did not sing the national anthem on one of his first outings as Labour leader, it was the Somewheres’ turn to be infuriated. Anywheres were more likely to think it was an amusing media confection. A free society has many conflicting values and strands of opinion, but if the value gulf becomes too deep—especially between the dominant class and the rest—we become vulnerable to shocks and backlashes like Brexit.

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This shrinkage means that most members and activists will be from similar backgrounds to the MPs and are likely to form an echo chamber around them. The Labour Party has, at least for now, reversed this long decline in party membership with a surge of mainly young leftists joining the party to support the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, which has taken membership back up to 515,000 (plus affiliated supporters). The Corbyn movement could be described as populist in economics but extreme Anywhere in most other respects. What it has not done is change the social composition of the party—about three quarters of Labour party members are middle class, about 60 per cent are graduates, and almost 40 per cent live in London and the South East.15 The decline of corporatism has also had a narrowing effect on politics.

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And back in 1970 it was 10 million to 2 million.35 (The working class in the occupational sense also declined sharply during that period, from outnumbering middle class voters two to one in the 1960s the workers are now in turn outnumbered four to three.) UKIP turned out to appeal just as much to working-class voters as middle-class ones and, along with the SNP, helped to undermine Labour in the 2015 election. Jeremy Corbyn’s version of old, statist Labour may appeal to some working class voters but his Anywhere/Global Villager values are profoundly alienating to most. In the 1980s, the Labour party’s problem was conveying its support for working class affluence and aspiration—a problem that New Labour emerged to answer.

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities
by Eric Kaufmann
Published 24 Oct 2018

For them, Brussels’ refusal to accept British control over the inflow from the continent was the last straw. Nevertheless, Britain’s exit from Europe was far from certain. National politics is highly visible, EU politics is not. So when national politicians who back the EU are popular, EU popularity rides high. Cameron enjoyed much higher approval than Labour’s new far-left leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Cameron’s popularity should have buoyed the case for Remain. On the other hand, when the party that people support bashes the EU and says leaving Europe is an important issue, many voters tune in to that issue and follow suit.90 UKIP played this role, raising anti-EU consciousness in the 2000s with its steady drumbeat of anti-EU soundbites and infomercials.

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Still, Harold Clarke, Matt Goodwin and Paul Whiteley show, using monthly survey data, that anti-EU sentiment was volatile after 2004: cresting at 54 per cent in 2011 before falling back to 37 per cent after Cameron’s election in 2015, then beginning to rise again, until the EU referendum.91 In February 2016, upon returning from Brussels, Cameron announced that the referendum would be held on 23 June. The Remain camp featured David Cameron and prominent Remain Conservative frontbenchers such as George Osborne. Theresa May, the future Prime Minister, was in the Remain camp, but kept a low profile. On the Labour side, Jeremy Corbyn backed Remain. However, as an unpopular figure among centrist Labour voters who had himself voted against staying in Europe in 1975, Corbyn was of limited use to the cause. Each of the parties ran its own campaign, hoping to leverage party loyalty to convince its base to back Remain and turn out to the polls.

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His resignation set in motion a fast-moving piece of political theatre in which leading candidates Boris Johnson and Michael Gove eliminated each other in a plot reminiscent of Julius Caesar. This led to the emergence of Theresa May as Prime Minister. May initially enjoyed an unprecedented advantage over Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn. By 18 April 2017, when May called a general election, polling aggregators showed her leading 42–26 over her Labour rival, with UKIP on 11 per cent. But in the ensuing six weeks the mood of the country changed. Many saw May’s gambit as an opportunistic attempt to increase the size of her majority.

London Review of Books
by London Review of Books
Published 14 Dec 2017

Then, as secretary of state for social security, Harman had wanted to refuse to make the cuts, but didn’t have the nerve, especially after Brown told her she’d be responsible for bringing down the government; now, when she had the power to make the decisions herself, she again lost her nerve: she left Northern Irish women with absolutely no abortion rights and enabled, and even backed, benefit cuts to a group she came into politics to help. Among the 48 Labour MPs who voted against the welfare bill was Jeremy Corbyn, soon to be elected as leader. He had tried for Harman’s Peckham seat (his brother, Piers, was leader of the local squatters) before being elected in Islington North in 1983, but although they had both been Labour MPs for London seats for more than thirty years she says she hardly knew him. Her book was written before this year’s general election and doesn’t anticipate Corbyn’s surprising success in it.

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His future prospects rest on the outcome of the gamble that underpins his entire project: that it is ultimately the politics of class and conflict, not nationality and consensus-building, which can win working-class Scots back to Labour. That outlook has been the object of derision for decades – but so was Jeremy Corbyn. * * * Out of Babel Michael Hofmann | 2076 words Collected Poems by Thomas Bernhard, translated by James Reidel Chicago, 459 pp., £25, June, ISBN: 978 0 85742 426 6 The posthumous progress in English of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is marked by deaths: those of his majoritarian and minoritarian translators David McLintock and Ewald Osers, in 2003 and 2011 respectively; and in 2015 that of Carol Brown Janeway, his publisher at Knopf, his unlikely champion over decades (because, for all his influence and cultishness, Bernhard in English never exactly sold), and the translator herself of the posthumous My Prizes , in an exquisitely bound volume from Notting Hill Editions, with a justly amused introduction by Frances Wilson: ‘Few writers have received more applause than Thomas Bernhard, Austrian novelist, playwright and enfant terrible , and few have bitten more sharply the hand that clapped.’

Ten Myths About Israel
by Ilan Pappe
Published 1 May 2017

The two-states solution, indirectly one should say, is based on the assumption that Israel and Judaism are the same. Thus, Israel insists that what it does, it does in the name of Judaism, and when its actions are rejected by people around the world the criticism is not only directed toward Israel but also towards Judaism. The leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, attracted of a lot of criticism when he explained, to my mind correctly, that blaming Judaism for Netanyahu’s policies is like blaming Islam for the actions of the Islamic State. This is a valid comparison, even if it rattled some people’s sensitivities.1 The two-states solution is like a corpse taken out in the morgue every now and then, dressed up nicely, and presented as a living thing.

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“WikiLeaks: Israel Aimed to Keep Gaza Economy on the Brink of Collapse,” Reuters, January 5, 2011. 33.Morrison, “The Israel-Hamas Ceasefire.” 34.See the B’Tselem report “Fatalities during Operation Cast Lead,” at btselem. org. 35.“Gaza Could Become Uninhabitable in Less Than Five Years Due to Ongoing ‘De-development’,” UN News Centre, September 1, 2015, at un.org. 10 The Two-States Solution Is the Only Way Forward 1.Daniel Clinton, “Jeremy Corbyn Appears to Compare Supporters of Israel with ISIS at Release of Anti-Semitism Report,” Jerusalem Post, June 30, 2016. 2.On the dictionary see Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe, On Palestine, London: Penguin, 2016. Index 1967 (Segev), 71, 161n3 Abbas, Mahmoud (Abu Mazen), 116–17, 119 Abdel-Shafi, Haidar, 98 Abu Dis, 99, 102 Acre, 6, 9, 37, 62 Adams, John, 13 al-Husayni, Hajj Amin, 47 al-Husseini, Faysal, 98 al-Mujama al-Islamiya (Islamic Society), 115–16 al-Qassam, Izz ad-Din, 46–7, 48 al-Rantisi, Abul Aziz, 121, 124 Alexander, Michael Solomon, 16 Ali, Mohamet (Muhammad), 15 Aliyahs, First and Second, 18 Alon, Yigal, 34, 35, 70, 78, 123 Alterman, Natan, 87 Altnueland (Herzl), 30 American Council of Judaism (ACJ), 26 Americans, see United States Amnesty International, 94–5 Apartheid (South Africa), 42, 146 Arab Higher Committee, 46, 58, 100 Arab League, 58, 100 Arafat, Yasser, 97, 98–9, 106–7, 109, 112, 116–17 Area A, 125 Area C, 106, 142 Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Gilbert), 39 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 23, 44 Balfour Declaration, 13, 19–20, 53 Barak, Ehud, 99, 102, 107 Bavli, Dan, 79 Begin, Menachem, 78 Beilin, Yossi, 102, 129 Beirut, 9 Ben-Gurion, David, 33, 34, 37, 40, 43–4, 51–2, 53, 55, 61–2, 69, 70–1, 72–3 Ben-Gurion airport, 127, 136 Benvenisiti, Meron, 105 Berlin to Jerusalem (Scholem), 25 The Bible and Colonialism (Prior), 35 The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Morris), 53 Blair, Tony, 120, 123 Blyth, George Francis Popham, 16 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 12 Boomerang (Shelah and Drucker), 108 Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, 95–6, 129, 144 Brightman, Thomas, 11 Britain, 8, 12, 13–14, 18–20, 28, 44–5, 53–4, 58 B’Tselem, 95, 130–1 Buber, Martin, 37 Bundists, 27–8 Bush, George H.

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk About It)
by Elizabeth S. Anderson
Published 22 May 2017

These Tanner lectures were presented shortly after “lovers of liberty and justice in Britain” used Rainborough’s words at Putney to inspire their opposition to a Global Law Summit denounced as “a shameless festival of corporate networking.”7 As the lectures were given, British activists, film-makers, songwriters, and historians were celebrating the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of John Lilburne, the most celebrated Leveller leader. Among these activists were Tariq Ali and Jeremy Corbyn, now the leader of the British Labour Party. John Lilburne is said to be the historical figure Corbyn most admires, while Tariq Ali, like Professor Anderson, has seen the agitation of the 1640s as a resource for thinking about present dilemmas, but he was prompted, not to a defense of market relations but to call for a new “Grand Remonstrance” that would demand the “nationalization” of the railways and public utilities (what British socialists used to call the commanding heights of the economy), returning them to public/state ownership.8 Mid-seventeenth-century English history can provide profoundly divergent legacies for our contemporary world.

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The organizers of the summit located it in the context of celebrations of the anniversary of Magna Carta: “Rally at Runnymede,” https://www.opendemocracy.net/rally-at-runnymede-and-join-opposition; Anthony Barnett, New Statesman, February 26, 2015, on the “spirit of Rainborough.” 8. Speakers at the “Lilburne 400 Conference” held on March 14, 2015, at the Bishopgate Institute in London included several historians who had written on the Levellers, alongside the radical lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, and the politicians Tariq Ali and Jeremy Corbyn MP. It was organized by the Leveller Association: www.leveller.org.uk. Corbyn attended the launch of John Rees’s book, Leveller Revolution, in November 2016, and see also the article by Edward Vallance in the Guardian, August 20, 2015, and for Ali, Guardian, February 20, 2015. The original Grand Remonstrance was a denunciation of the personal rule of Charles I produced by the House of Commons.

The New Snobbery
by David Skelton
Published 28 Jun 2021

This will mean ending the disproportionate power of capital over labour; restoring the dignity of work and the strength of vocation and manufacturing; and giving working people a voice in the as yet impenetrable cultural bastions. Notes 1 ‘It’s time for the elites to rise up against the ignorant masses’, Foreign Policy, 28 June 2016. 2 British Social Attitudes Survey 33, 2016. 3 Benjamin Butterworth, ‘Jeremy Corbyn “couldn’t lead the working class out of a paper bag”, Alan Johnson says after exit poll result’, i, 13 December 2019. 4 ‘Dawn Butler: “If anyone doesn’t hate Brexit – even if you voted for it – there’s something wrong with you”’, Turning Point UK, 13 December 2019. 5 Terry Christian, tweet, 10.16 a.m., 4 May 2021, https://twitter.com/terrychristian/status/1389509343222157312 6 Dan O’Hagan, tweet, 7.07 a.m., 7 May 2021, https://twitter.com/danohagan/status/1390548709537157121; Alex Green, tweet, 9.12 a.m., 7 May 2021, https://twitter.com/GlexAreen/status/1390580177378463745 CHAPTER ONE THE POLITICAL MARGINALISATION OF THE WORKING CLASS ‘These fat old racists won’t stop blaming the EU when their sh*t hits the fan … Absolute sh*tbag racist w*nkers.’

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Little wonder that a group of rank-and-file trade unionists have condemned their union leadership for ‘an obsession to run the Labour Party – rather than represent the millions of workers who pay their subs into [the Unite general secretary’s] union’s bank account’.23 This leftward shift has put trade union leadership at odds with the views of existing members, never mind the views of potential members. Almost 40 per cent of Unite members voted Conservative at the 2019 general election despite Unite being an architect of Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing political strategy. Only 12 per cent of the union’s members even voted in the last election for general secretary, illustrating how disengaged union members have become from the politics of its leadership. This deviation between union leaders and far-left activists is by no means a new thing.

Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence
by Kristen R. Ghodsee
Published 20 Nov 2018

But in the current political climate, it may be hard to fathom how a rivalry between superpowers could have sparked interest in the status of women.4 Today, socialist ideas are enjoying a renaissance as young people across countries such as the United States, France, Great Britain, Greece, and Germany find inspiration in politicians like Bernie Sanders, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Jeremy Corbyn, Yanis Varoufakis, and Sahra Wagenknecht. Citizens desire an alternative political path that would lead to a more egalitarian and sustainable future. To move forward, we must be able to discuss the past with no ideologically motivated attempts to whitewash or blackwash either our own history or the accomplishments of state socialism.

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I didn’t know that there could be an alternative.9 Mead argued that millennials embrace socialism because they are “tired of the unequal world they inherited.” Exactly six months later, Nation editor Sarah Leonard followed Mead’s piece with her own op-ed for the New York Times, “Why Are So Many Young Voters Falling for Old Socialists?” Reflecting on the popularity of senior white men like Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Leonard argued that the growing millennial support for socialism had less to do with the inherent radicalism of youth and more to do with the failures of traditional parties to rein in the worst excesses of capitalism: “Our politics have been shaped by an era of financial crisis and government complicity.

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle
by Jamie Woodcock
Published 17 Jun 2019

Besides these videogames about work, there are other examples of politically themed videogames. In the US there have been many variants of anti–Donald Trump games, like Punch the Trump. In the UK, a videogame called Corbyn Run was released to support the Labour Party, under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, in the 2017 election. The player takes on the role of a pixelated Jeremy Corbyn, running after the then prime minister Theresa May and another Conservative politician. There is a battle bus labeled “Lies,” referencing the additional money that the Brexit campaign leaders promised for the National Health Service and failed to deliver, as well as the ghost of Margaret Thatcher.

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World
by Neil Gibb
Published 15 Feb 2018

Putting the actual content aside, it is the same approach that Arctic Monkeys took to propel them to the top of the UK charts seemingly from nowhere, that Kevin Systrom and Mike Kreiger employed to build Instagram from a start-up to billionaire buy-out in under two years, and Simon Mottram used to create the phenomenon that is Rapha. It is also the approach that was employed by Jeremy Corbyn when he shook the UK political establishment to the core in the 2017 General Election – so it has nothing to do with political affiliations; Corbyn could not be further away from Trump in personality or political leanings. Crucially, as the hierarchical command-and-control model of leadership and organisation breaks down, it is the approach that is being used by the high-growth start-ups, disruptors and platform businesses that is changing the way the world works.

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“We are all in this together,” John would say. When I was with Putri and her friends as they played with Instagram in Indonesia. the word they used was ‘we’. We. Together. Us. ‘We’ was highly noticable when I spent time with Labour activists in the UK election in 2017 – when a movement whose leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was supposed to be unelectable, and, like Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, seemed to have the whole of the media against it, shook the political establishment to the core. It is hidden in plain sight in the name of WeWork. Neil Papworth’s simple Christmas hello message in 1992 may be one of the biggest gifts that has even been given to society – the means for people to deeply, authentically, and intimately connect with each other, to build communities of which they feel part. 3.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
by Brett Christophers
Published 17 Nov 2020

When Uber’s licence was again withdrawn in 2019, the Tory mayoral candidate, Shaun Bailey, was just one of the Conservatives to attack Khan, saying he was ‘going after Uber to be popular’.29 The Conservative-supporting right-wing Daily Telegraph was sufficiently exercised to write a leader article, editorializing that Khan’s was an ‘ideological clampdown on Uber’ and a ‘harbinger’ of what a Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn would be like: ‘insular, over-regulated, resistant to innovation, protective of vested interests and closed to global investment’.30 If you listen closely enough, you can just about hear Margaret Thatcher turning in her grave. The reason she abolished the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1986 was precisely to remove power over London and its economy from ‘socialist’ Labour upstarts – in the GLC’s case its leader, Ken Livingstone.

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Those ‘who own nothing’, to use Davies’s terms, have, as Mann says, ‘nothing to lose’.17 The wonder, rather, is that the UK’s new prime minister, Boris Johnson, having described the EU membership referendum as a ‘once-in-a-lifetime chance to vote for real change’, has, for all his impeccable Etonian and Oxbridge establishment credentials, managed to persuade people that support for him, as for Brexit, represents opposition to the establishment and the status quo – all the while that Jeremy Corbyn, the politician offering real change and Johnson’s vanquished rival in the 2019 general election, has been pilloried in Leave-voting regions as a representative of the ‘metropolitan elite’ liberal establishment. Thus, if there really is an ‘alliance’ in support of Brexit that we can usefully understand in terms of rentier capitalism, it is much more paradoxical than the one to which Davies refers.

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George Monbiot is thus wholly correct to insist that, in the UK, ‘the right will never break the power of patrimonial wealth, because the right exists to defend it’.75 The political movement to move the UK beyond rentierism must therefore come from the Left, which, Monbiot maintains, exists (‘when it remembers what it’s for’) to ‘confront’ patrimonialism.76 In this regard, there have been eminently hopeful signs from the current opposition. Under Jeremy Corbyn, its leader since 2015, Labour has been talking about plans for transformations in taxation, investment and ownership that align closely with those described above, and that derive from broadly similar concerns.77 Under existing policy proposals, a Labour government would, for example, aim to renationalize, at a minimum, water, energy and rail services, as well as to rebuild the UK’s denuded stock of public land by using revised compulsory purchase laws to enable the public sector to acquire sites from private owners at closer to existing-use value than is currently possible.78 A Labour government would also seek to instigate a ‘radically different approach to taxation’, one focused specifically on rentier wealth, including – through land-value taxation – rentier property wealth.79 And a Labour government would work to provide the UK with its own Green New Deal; in 2018, it unveiled plans for a programme of investment and transformation designed to achieve a 60 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030, while creating over 400,000 skilled jobs.80 All of this would be undertaken with a view to reducing inequality and poverty, and especially dishonourable poverty, ‘shifting the balance of power back towards workers [to] achieve decent wages, security and dignity at work’, and treating those out of work with the ‘dignity and respect’ they have been denied by governments of the Right.81 On the other hand, though it would give workers a voice on the CMA and other public bodies, Labour has no substantive plans for the fourth pillar of anti-rentierist political-economic transformation I outlined earlier – competition policy.

Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response
by Tony Connelly
Published 4 Oct 2017

Boris Johnson had been expected to stand for the leadership, but pulled out at the last minute when he learned that his ally, Michael Gove, was about to launch his own bid. Stephen Crabb, the Work and Pensions Secretary, dropped out of the race due to lack of support and within days was embroiled in a ‘sexting’ scandal. With the leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, clinging to office after a dismal referendum campaign and the financial markets in free fall, the country appeared in amateurish disarray. The Economist’s front cover showed a pair of Union Jack underpants halfway up a flagpole, under the headline ‘Anarchy in the UK’. The antics at Westminster were viewed with increasing alarm in the rest of Europe, and in Dublin.

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‘The EU side want them to be clear and organized and businesslike. The main motivation now is to get this bloody thing dealt with. It’s going to become adversarial from now on.’ Over seven weeks, May’s lead was whittled down by a poor campaign, a robotic style and a surprisingly good performance by the Labour Leader, Jeremy Corbyn. By the morning of 9 June, it was clear that her gamble had spectacularly backfired. Rather than extending her majority of 17, the Conservatives had lost 13 seats, and Labour gained 30. Britain was once again in turmoil. Facing a hung parliament with just 318 seats, the Tories turned to a party at the very centre of Ireland’s Brexit concerns.

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There was also a ‘commitment’ that London would match the EU cash payments to Northern Irish farmers under the CAP for the lifetime of the parliament. Both parties made it clear the agreement would not be subject to the Barnett Formula, a convention that held that any funding increases in one part of the UK would be matched in other parts. Jeremy Corbyn said it was ‘not in the national interest but in May’s party’s interest to help her cling to power’, while the outgoing Leader of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron, described it as a ‘shoddy little deal’ and added: ‘While our schools are crumbling and our NHS is in crisis, Theresa May chooses to throw cash at 10 MPs in a grubby attempt to keep her Cabinet squatting in Number 10.’

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency
by Vicky Spratt
Published 18 May 2022

During that period, it felt at times as though the country was, at once, imploding and exploding. While some British people saw their dream – independence from Eurocracy – realised, others felt that just over half of the country had voted for something they did not want but would have to live with. The Labour Party, beleaguered and led by Jeremy Corbyn (and subsequently Keir Starmer), struggled. The Conservatives, led by David Cameron, then Theresa May, then Boris Johnson, fought among themselves and yet continued not only to win elections, but win big. In the early hours of 13 December 2019, Johnson declared victory in an election which delivered the Conservatives their biggest majority since Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 win and the largest overall majority since Tony Blair’s landslide in 2001.

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Landlords make money from their buy-to-lets and so the onus should be on them to foot these running costs. I was not sure what to expect as I waited for Hollinrake. I sipped the tea and tried to understand his position. The time gave me the opportunity to re-read his biography on my phone. He was then – he is now – on the face of it, one of the ‘few’ who made up former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘many not the few’. And yet his own story is complex. The son of a milkman and a social worker, Hollinrake went to a state comprehensive school, Easingwold in North Yorkshire, which has since been turned into an academy. After that he went to Sheffield Hallam University (then a polytechnic), where he studied physics.

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Once these recognitions are not only made but internalised, you can lobby politicians and vote for those who genuinely want to challenge and change the status quo. That might mean not always voting in your own interests. We know that change occurs when there is political will. Coronavirus has shown us that. The Overton Window shifts, the needle moves. We may yet find the ‘radical’ ideas of the former leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn – a four-day working week, nationalised universal broadband – adopted by the centre right. Stranger things have happened. We have already seen an iteration of Universal Basic Income – it was called the furlough scheme. Under crisis, the politically impossible can very quickly become possible. The progressive can be conservative when it is necessary and politically expedient.

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives
by Danny Dorling and Kirsten McClure
Published 18 May 2020

However, if it is considered along with its Brexit-supporting allies (the Conservative Party, UKIP [UK Independence Party], and the Unionist Parties in Northern Ireland, all of which are to the right of mainstream European conservatives), then the Brexit cause had a combined loss of eleven seats in the European Parliament, or a massive 15 percent of total representation out of the seventy-three U.K. seats.45 The twenty-nine new MEPs (members of the European Parliament) of the U.K. Brexit Party found themselves in limbo, unable to find any allies in the European Parliament with whom to work: first they were a tragedy, and now they are a farce. Immediate commentary on political events quickly dates. By the time you read this, Jeremy Corbyn will certainly no longer be U.K. Labour Party leader. And if you live outside of the United Kingdom you may not have heard of him. If so, imagine that Bernie Sanders had become the U.S. Democratic Party presidential nominee. In the United Kingdom in 2017 this was said by political progressive outriders who supported Corbyn, whose unexpected electoral success denied the Conservatives a working majority: “Let’s face it, we’ve all been on a high but looking at the shifting Overton window shows that we’ve been hallucinating new possibilities into existence.

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(Data from a data set constructed by the author from many records, most recently of the Electoral Commission. See https://beta.ukdataservice.ac.uk/datacatalogue/studies/study?id=3061.) How did London, or at least a substantial number of Londoners, react to the recent rise of radicalism in the British Labour Party and the message of its leader Jeremy Corbyn in particular? We are lucky in the United Kingdom—we can go back to at least 1835 to consider voting trends, in this case in general elections. London in 1835 was anti-Conservative. The Whigs (who later became Liberals) secured proportionately more votes in London than they did in the country as a whole.

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The Whigs (who later became Liberals) secured proportionately more votes in London than they did in the country as a whole. After 1865, when Lord Palmerston won for the Liberals nationally, London began to swing toward the landed interest of the Tories. Palmerston was a warmonger, among much else. London then remained relatively pro-Tory, as shown in figure 59, until at least 2015, when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party. It was clear then that Londoners had become radical again. The radicalization began a little earlier when, against the wishes of the then Labour leadership, Ken Livingstone became the first radical London mayor in the year 2000. THE TRANSFORMATION OF A SPECIES The Anthropocene is not the end of our world.

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain
by Brett Christophers
Published 6 Nov 2018

‘Most of the properties in the most expensive part of the avenue’, it found, ‘are registered to companies in tax havens.’3 ‘[T]he global super rich’, thundered Labour MP Tessa Jowell the following year, ‘buy London homes like they are gold bars as assets to appreciate, rather than homes in which to live’.4 The existence in London of large numbers of such unoccupied or under-occupied properties took on a sickening quality in June 2017, in the wake of the appalling fire at Grenfell Tower. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour opposition leader, and others called on the government – without success – to requisition empty homes in the borough of Kensington in order to rehouse victims of the fire locally.1 By the terms that the government applies to public land, these and other unoccupied British homes are very much ‘surplus’, not being in use (except of course to store and accumulate wealth).

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The party’s April 2018 Green Paper on housing pledged that a Labour government would ‘end the “fire sale” of public land with no obligation to secure new genuinely affordable homes and ensure that new housing developments on public land include an appropriate amount of affordable housing’.1 But not only is ‘affordable’, as we have seen, an ambiguous and slippery concept; so too is the notion of ‘an appropriate amount’. As such, this ‘pledge’ is something of an empty vessel; it also assumes that the sale of public land is always justifiable if affordable housing is built on it, which is by no means unarguable. The only other recent statement of note is Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s comment to community activists in North London that he would like to reintroduce a meaningful right of first refusal for local authorities on land being sold by other public bodies. Alluding to the rights that were conferred by the Redundant Lands and Accommodation procedure – he is one of a dwindling number of sitting MPs in a position to still remember – prior to its termination in 1979 (see Chapter 4), Corbyn said: ‘I want to bring back that power.

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Booth, ‘Inside “Billionaires Row”: London’s Rotting, Derelict Mansions Worth £350m’, Guardian, 31 January 2014. 4 T. Jowell, ‘Housing in London Is Unfair When the Rich Buy Homes Like Gold Bars and Hundreds of Thousands Are on Housing Waiting Lists’, Independent, 20 January 2015. 1 A. Cowburn, ‘Grenfell Tower Fire: Jeremy Corbyn Suggests Using Empty Kensington Properties for Victims’, Independent, 15 June 2017. 2 The only action that the government has taken has been to enable local authorities since April 2013 to charge an ‘empty homes premium’ of up to 50 per cent of the Council Tax on vacant properties – increased to up to 100 per cent in November 2017’s budget (although at the time of this writing this increase remains only a proposal insofar as a legislative amendment is still required to enact it).

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus
by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott
Published 18 Mar 2021

Nonetheless, the next day Johnson was still missing when Cobra, the key national emergency committee, met to discuss the response to the crisis for a third time. There was no obvious reason for his absence as he was again in Westminster that day holding meetings with ministers and sparring with Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, during Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons. That afternoon he attended a video-linked Facebook Live event with members of the public, which took place in Downing Street just metres away from the Cobra summit rooms. It was a chance for Johnson to rattle on about Queen Elizabeth I and Shakespeare, whose portraits lined the walls around him in the Pillared Room.

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Five people had been killed, 400 homes were underwater, and hundreds of people were being evacuated. But water levels were still rising, threatening thousands more people’s homes. He was an easy target for the opposition, who questioned why he was refusing to quit his working break to take personal charge of the crisis or even to visit the affected areas. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, said: ‘In refusing to visit flood-hit communities, nowhere-to-be-seen Boris Johnson is showing his true colours by his absence.’ He went on: ‘Failing to convene Cobra to support flood-hit communities sends a very clear message: if the prime minister is not campaigning for votes in a general election he simply does not care about helping communities affected by flooding.’

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It was optimistic of Johnson to believe that he would be able to recover in time, but the letter was sent anyway as a political manoeuvre. That morning the results of the Labour Party leadership contest were announced and Keir Starmer, the former director of public prosecutions, was elected leader. The sharp lawyer was much more of a challenge to Johnson than his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn and the prime minister’s advisers felt it would be good to try to keep him onside with the government’s coronavirus policy. It was hoped that the call for unity in a national emergency might make the political jousting a little less torrid for Johnson when the Commons returned at the end of the month.

Basic Income And The Left
by henningmeyer
Published 16 May 2018

Second, technological developments imply that the number of jobs will be significantly reduced, Broad Constituency Of Support Lined up behind the idea are a large number of internationally renowned political philosophers, but also sections of many Green and left-wing political parties in Europe as well as a not insignificant number of internationally prominent politicians, such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn and, surprisingly, several high profile IT entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. The proposals about the size of this unconditional universal basic income vary, but if it is going to be at all possible to live on this income, suggestions of around £800 per month have been put forward: what you can get from a student loan to pay for living expenses .

Nine Crises: Fifty Years of Covering the British Economy From Devaluation to Brexit
by William Keegan
Published 24 Jan 2019

In fact, the former leader had long since repudiated his 1983 stance and become a passionate European, along with his successors Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (although it has to be admitted that Gordon went out of his way as Chancellor, when fighting his corner in Brussels, to disguise his pro-Europeanism). Yet, once again, when Cameron called the referendum that did not bring peace and quiet to the Tory ranks, a strain of Euroscepticism resurfaced in the Labour Party. And, unfortunately for the pro-European cause, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s support for Remain was lukewarm at best, with many long-time students of his career maintaining that he was and remained a Eurosceptic. Certainly, unlike Labour politicians in 1975, Corbyn declined to share a Remain platform with Conservative pro-Remainers. And according to one well-informed report, shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has explained that he and Corbyn found it impossible to throw their hearts into the 2016 Remain campaign, not because they saw the EU as a capitalist club but because they did not want to be seen as an ‘establishment cabal’.

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What I learned from Sharpe’s bulletins was that far more bets were being placed on Leave. This seemed to indicate the way the ‘non-elite’ were thinking, and it turned out they were right. Towards the end of the referendum campaign, there was panic in the ranks. I recall being telephoned by someone close to Cameron requesting the telephone number of Seumas Milne, Jeremy Corbyn’s powerful press chief and close adviser – a former colleague at the Guardian/Observer. Cameron needed help. But it has to be said that there did not seem to be much coming from the Labour side. Cameron’s luck had run out. Back to the Greek classics of my youth: arrogance followed by hubris. And, unfortunately, the rest of us were landed with the result.

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income
by Guy Standing
Published 3 May 2017

Such cryptocurrency schemes are in their infancy, and it is far too early to say whether they have a significant role to play as a secondary basic income scheme. But they should be watched with interest. In the Air Elsewhere By late 2016, political parties and movements in several countries were proposing basic income pilots. In Britain, following Jeremy Corbyn’s re-election as leader of the Labour Party, John McDonnell, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced at the 2016 party conference that Labour would consider advocating a basic income in its manifesto for the 2020 general election, with the proposal of a pilot as a first step. In Scotland, the governing Scottish National Party passed a motion supporting basic income, and councillors in Fife and Glasgow are discussing local pilots.

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These include the British and New Zealand Labour Parties, the Scottish National Party, the Greens in most countries, including Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway and the United States, and the Pirate parties where they exist, most notably Iceland. In Britain, although the Conservatives have shown no interest, both Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader, and Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, favour piloting the idea, as does Ed Miliband, Corbyn’s predecessor as leader. Canada’s governing Liberal Party has put basic income into its policy platform, and several provincial premiers have come out in support. As noted earlier, Finland’s Prime Minister has put money aside for a pilot in his country.

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist
by Alex Zevin
Published 12 Nov 2019

Emma Duncan, later deputy editor, recalled that Neil almost got her fired when she started at the paper in the early 1980s – ‘furious’ that she had failed to produce a piece that ‘said that every truck and every car in the British rail network ought to be sold off in one go’. Remarkably, Seumas Milne – much later to serve as chief of staff for Jeremy Corbyn – was on staff at the same time. He recalled editorial meetings between 1981 and 1984 in which Beedham expressed ‘suspicion of monetarism, neo-liberalism and the like’ because he ‘wanted the working class to stay strong and contented, if only to fight the Cold War’. But the most vocal critic of Thatcher at editorial meetings was Simon Jenkins, hired by Knight as the Economist’s political editor in 1979 after the Evening Standard fired him.

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Not only did these timid gestures ‘risk chasing away the most enterprising, particularly the footloose global talent that London attracts’, they betrayed an ‘ill-founded faith in the wisdom of government’.136 When a sincere leftist emerged to lead Labour after the defeat Miliband duly suffered at the polls, the Economist was caught between disbelief and disdain. Lost in a ‘political time-warp’, Jeremy Corbyn had ‘nothing to offer but the exhausted, hollow formulas which his predecessors abandoned for the very good reason that they failed’ – dooming Labour to ‘electoral oblivion’ until the day he quit, which was sure to be soon.137 Across the Atlantic, America looked more inspiring than ever – or at least its outgoing president did; in October 2016, Obama became the first one to contribute a signed piece to the Economist, showing how complete was the ideological marriage between them, in which he warned of the dangers of populism, declared capitalism ‘the greatest driver of prosperity and opportunity the world has ever known’, and pitched the upcoming election as a choice to ‘retreat into old, closed-off economies or press forward, acknowledging the inequality that can come with globalisation while committing ourselves to making the global economy work better for all people’.138 As the curtain descended on Obama’s time in office, the Economist signed off on his last military adventure abroad, the orchestration of Saudi Arabia’s assault on Yemen.

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In Britain, it welcomed the 2017 snap election called by the new prime minister, Theresa May, to ‘strengthen her hand’ as savvy – freeing her to pursue a softer Brexit, and to annihilate Labour, which opinion polls showed her trouncing by over 20 points in April. In lockstep with the rest of the British media, it was certain that Jeremy Corbyn – ‘witless’, a ‘loony leftist’, ‘soft’ on Putin, Chávez and terrorism – would suffer a crushing defeat, making way for a sensible Labour leader in the mould of Tony Blair. That left it to guess at the scale of the impending rout: more like 1983, when Labour won only 209 seats under its leftwing leader Michael Foot, or 1935, when it held just 154?

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History
by Stephen D. King
Published 22 May 2017

This leads, in turn, to the success of previously fringe movements – Syriza in Greece, the Five Star Movement in Italy – and to the hijacking of mainstream parties. Think of Donald Trump’s success in securing the Republican nomination for the 2016 US presidential election against the wishes of the party establishment, or Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party leadership victory in 2015, much to the discomfort of many sitting Labour MPs. It may also lead to the increased influence of fringe movements on mainstream political choices. It is difficult to imagine, for example, that David Cameron and his fellow Conservatives would have held a vote on the UK’s EU membership in June 2016 had it not been for the earlier rise of the UK Independence Party, its success based on its anti-EU and anti-immigration stance.

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POPULISTS AND RENEGADES Some argue that the problem represents no more than a growing divide between the traditional right and left. Yet a simple ‘right/left’ narrative does not work terribly well. Those on the left argue that the right thrives by exploiting divisions in society, yet the left itself is divided between those who support globalization (Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair) and those who do not (Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn).2 Meanwhile, those on the right too often misinterpret economic arguments in order to push their ‘free-market’ agendas. Ricardian comparative advantage, for example, works a lot less well in the modern era: contemporary globalization is driven more by the heightened cross-border movement of capital and labour than by trade flows.

We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent
by Nesrine Malik
Published 4 Sep 2019

We took the denial route. There was no wholesale appraisal of how we failed to do the one job we were tasked to do – report and explain the facts, as opposed to echoing back industry and political class conventional wisdom. The same thing happened in the British general election of 2017, when Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was derided by almost all mainstream pundits and columnists, only to perform wildly better than expected at the ballot box and rob the government of its majority. A few mea culpas were issued but, all in all, nothing changed. This is the norm, the myth of the reliable narrator. Plagiarism and falsification are red lines, but gullibility and lapses in moral judgement are par for the course.

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Friedman, ‘Saudi Arabia’s Arab Spring, at Last’ (New York Times, 23 November 2017), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/saudi-prince-mbs-arab-spring.html [accessed on 25 July 2019] 211 ‘The political class imparted as much to the media class’: Gary Younge, ‘We were told Corbyn was “unelectable”. Then came the surge’ (Guardian, 6 June 2017), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/06/jeremy-corbyn-unelectable-political-climate [accessed on 25 July 2019] 211 ‘… one of the most exclusive middle-class professions’: Patrick Wintour, ‘Student fees for those who live at home should be axed – report’ (Guardian, 19 July 2009), https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/jul/19/fees-home-students-axed [accessed on 25 July 2019] 211 ‘2016 research by the American Society of News Editors’: ASNE, ‘Table 0 – Employees By Minority Group’, https://www.asne.org/content.asp?

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider
Published 10 Sep 2018

So it appears also in struggles for racial justice; the Movement for Black Lives, for instance, uses cognates of cooperative forty-two times in the Economic Justice portion of its official platform, which insists on “collective ownership” of the economy, “not merely access.” Upstart politicians, such as Jeremy Corbyn of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party and Bernie Sanders in the United States, have put co-ops in their platforms as well.19 This isn’t new. The Scandinavian social democracies grew from the root of widespread co-ops and folk schools. The US civil rights struggle of the 1960s mobilized the self-sufficiency black farmers had already built through their co-ops.

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After Austin, Texas, required Uber and Lyft drivers to perform standard safety screenings, the companies pulled their services from the city in May 2015, and the city council aided in the formation of a new co-op taxi company and a nonprofit ride-sharing app; the replacements worked so well that Uber and Lyft paid millions of dollars in lobbying to force their way back before Austin became an example. Meanwhile, UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn issued a “Digital Democracy Manifesto” that included “platform cooperatives” among its eight planks.26 The challenge of such digital democracy goes beyond local tweaks. So must co-ops. When a platform serves the role of organizing and enabling the transactions throughout an entire sector of the economy, it should be regarded as a public service.

SEDATED: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis
by James. Davies
Published 15 Nov 2021

What I now wanted to know was whether Pūras, like Wilkinson (and, indeed, myself), agreed with something that the Guardian article strongly implied: that our current mental health crisis would remain unchanged until some core social policies of late capitalism were rejected. ‘Well, the Guardian piece certainly did a great job at highlighting the emotional harms of austerity, inequality, poverty and the damage caused by hyper-capitalism.’ He smiled. ‘So of course those on the left said, “Hey, look, he is with us!” and even Jeremy Corbyn began tweeting me. And yes, it is true I am with the left, but it is also true that there is another side of the argument that the article didn’t fully reflect.’ This other side, he then elaborated, was his rejection of the idea that communism, or pseudo-socialism, as he called it, was the only real panacea for mental illness.

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Reading the reports (each of which comprise around two pages of ‘all is good’ statements) is frustrating to say the least. 24 As one previous member of the Health Select Committee commented to me in confidence: ‘I simply did not have the same regard for him [Kevin] as I did for his successor.’ 25 Gibson, L. (2005), ‘UK government fails to tackle weaknesses in drug industry’, BMJ 331(7516):534. 26 As Hinchliffe said, ‘It would have been different under Jeremy Corbyn, had he been the leader, but not under Tony Blair. It was all light touch in regulation … Governments need the pharmaceutical industry and so they can’t upset it too much.’ 27 Adams, B. (2019), ‘UK looks to shake up trial, medicines regulations amid Brexit’, FierceBioTec, https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/u-k-looks-to-shake-up-trialmedicines-regulation-rules-amidbrexit (accessed Dec. 2019).

Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right
by Michael Brooks
Published 23 Apr 2020

Something as simple as Medicare for All, which has been on the books for decades in Canada—where it’s so popular that even conservative politicians have to at least pretend to support it—can do a lot to alleviate this unfreedom. Similar considerations apply to programs ranging from tuition-free public college to state-sponsored childcare schemes to reducing the workweek to 3 or 4 days. The recent reemergence of social movements around the world, from Haiti to Lebanon, Chile to Sudan and the noble effort of Jeremy Corbyn and the powerful force and potential election of Bernie Sanders to the presidency, attests to the widespread appeal of this vision. It’s important to emphasize, though, that while social democracy is an immensely valuable step in the right direction—especially in a world ravaged by decades of neoliberalism and US-led militarism—for two reasons it ultimately won’t be enough.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

De-Baathification produced anarchy. The opposition to the invasion proved remarkably tenacious. The democratization of Iraq released ethnic tensions that, however brutally, had been held in check by Saddam Hussein. In Britain, this disaster turned centrist Tony Blair’s reputation toxic and transformed Jeremy Corbyn from a marginal crank into the leader of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020. In America, the Iraq debacle helped to promote both the Democratic left and the nationalist right, energizing Bernie Sanders’s campaign, embarrassing Hillary Clinton’s and empowering the Trumpists. For all their faults, the neoconservatives had been the flagbearers of both intellectualism and global engagement in the Republican Party.

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All these scandals had one thing in common: they involved clever and well-connected people rigging the system for their own narrow benefit. THE ROOTS OF RAGE There is no doubting the force of the revolt against the cognitive elite. Hatred of ‘smarty-pants’ has trumped other forms of resentment, including class resentment. Cultural populism has trumped economic populism. Jeremy Corbyn, who tried to direct the fires of populism against the moneyed elite, is now on the backbenches. Boris Johnson, who directed it against the meritocratic elite, is in Downing Street. What lies behind all this fury? Most obviously, marginalization. One way to understand recent history is to think of a queue for coffee: you are heading to Starbucks in the morning, desperate for a cup of regular coffee before you start laying bricks, when a young person in LuluLemon yoga clothes cuts in front of you and orders a skinny no-foam extra-shot latte made with almond milk – for twenty people.

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Governments should generally avoid referenda, but if they must use them, they should apply very stringent criteria for passing far-reaching changes: Britain’s recent history would be very different if David Cameron had demanded a super-majority or instituted a two-stage process. Parties should wrest control from their members and hand it back to representatives who have to take into account broad constituencies rather than just the opinions of ideological activists: the British Labour Party would have escaped the nightmare of Jeremy Corbyn’s failed leadership, and might well be in power today, if members hadn’t been given the final say in choosing a leader. America should learn from Sweden’s example in finding wise men and women who can draw up plans to sort out its entitlement problem free from the hurly-burly of day-to-day politics.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing
Published 13 Jul 2016

We play into their hands if we ourselves say there are no choices and use that as a rationale for not joining political parties. We must assert that there is and always will be a realistic and desirable alternative. Sierakowski and others believe it is impossible to transform existing parties from within. What happens to the British Labour Party will be an interesting test. Jeremy Corbyn’s victory in the leadership election in September 2015, based largely on his appeal to the precariat, was mould-breaking; it put an end to New Labour as a realistic project. But infighting may dissipate energies and lead to electoral wilderness. As with all social democratic parties, Labour is trapped by its history.

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Garzarelli, ‘Central banks have safer options than a helicopter drop’, Financial Times, 27 April 2016. 19 M. Blyth and E. Lonergan, ‘Print less but transfer more: Why central banks should give money directly to the people’, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2014. 20 This is a point made by other economists, such as Anatole Kaletsky. It is also consistent with Jeremy Corbyn’s notion of QE for People, although he favours using the money for public infrastructure, which would not have as good distributional effects. 21 J. Sutter, ‘The argument for a basic income’, CNN Opinion, 10 March 2015. 22 S. Davala, R. Jhabvala, S. K. Mehta and G. Standing, Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India (London and New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2015). 23 Atkinson, 2015, op. cit., p. 219

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 May 2020

Alienation from the political mainstream today is resulting in strong support for far-left parties and candidates among youth in various high-income countries.44 In France’s presidential election of 2017, the former Trotskyite Jean-Luc Mélenchon won the under-24 vote, beating the more youthful Emmanuel Macron by almost two to one among that age group.45 In the United Kingdom, the Labour Party under the neo-Marxist Jeremy Corbyn in 2018 won more than 60 percent of the under-40 vote, while the Conservatives got just 23 percent.46 He won the youth vote similarly in 2020, even amidst a crushing electoral defeat. In Germany, the Green Party enjoys wide support among the young.47 A movement toward hard-left politics, particularly among the young, is also apparent in the United States, which historically has not been fertile ground for Marxism.48 In the 2016 primaries, the openly socialist Bernie Sanders easily outpolled Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump combined among under-30 voters.49 He also did very well among young people and Latinos in the early 2020 primaries, even as other elements of the Democratic Party rejected him decisively.50 Support for socialism, long anathema in America, has gained currency in the new generation.

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srnd=premium. 44 “Socialism ‘More Popular Than Capitalism’ With Brits, Germans, US Youth,” Sputnik News, February 24, 2016, https://sputniknews.com/europe/201602241035283984-socialism-popularity-britain-germany/. 45 Marco Damiani, “The transformation of Jean-Luc Mélenchon: From radical outsider to populist leader,” London School of Economics and Political Science, April 22, 2017, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2017/04/22/the-transformation-of-jean-luc-melenchon/. 46 Lucy Pasha-Robinson, “Election 2017: 61.5 per cent of under-40s voted for Labour, new poll finds,” Independent, June 14, 2017, https://www.independent. co.uk/news/uk/politics/election-2017-labour-youth-vote-under-40s-jeremy-corbyn-yougov-poll-a7789151.html; Jim Edwards, “Bernie Sanders and the youth vote: Stats and history suggest he may doom the Democrats,” Business Insider, March 4, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/how-bernie-sanders-reliance-on-youth-vote-could-doom-democrats-2020-3. 47 Ben Knight, “Why the German urban middle class is going Green,” New Statesman, July 17, 2019, https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/observations/2019/07/why-german-urban-middle-class-going-green. 48 Sohrab Ahmari, “Making the World Safe for Communism—Again,” Commentary, October 18, 2017, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/making-the-world-safe-for-communism-again/. 49 “More young people voted for Bernie Sanders than Trump and Clinton combined,” Washington Post, June 20, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/06/20/more-young-people-voted-for-bernie-sanders-than-trump-and-clinton-combined-by-a-lot/?

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth
by Noa Tishby
Published 5 Apr 2021

After thousands of conversations with highly educated people, I have come to realize that most don’t know what this word actually means, or when and why it came to be. That’s what we’re here for! In light of the rise in antisemitism in the United Kingdom at the time of the Labor Party’s five-year leadership under Jeremy Corbyn, Jonathan Freedland wrote a piece in the Guardian titled: “Jews Are the Canary in the Coalmine.” This expression dates back to the early 1900s, when coal miners would take canaries down into the tunnels with them as real-life carbon monoxide detectors. If the gas levels killed the canaries, the miners had early warning to abandon the tunnels ASAP.

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It’s a politically correct, highly sympathetic message, which is likely why the movement has gained support from some members of the US House of Representatives, including Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Not to mention former British Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn. In only about fifteen years or so, BDS managed to become pretty successful in altering the conversation about Israel, infiltrating liberal circles, and becoming a hip extracurricular activity for my friends in the woke crowd. BDS has had incredible success reaching young Americans, who then become extremely active on college campuses and later on, in all walks of life, convincing those young Americans (and Roger Waters) that they are only after justice for all.

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India
by Shashi Tharoor
Published 1 Feb 2018

That is what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did in 2016 when he apologized on behalf of Canada for the actions of his country’s authorities a century earlier in denying permission for the Indian immigrants on the Komagata Maru to land in Vancouver, thereby sending many of them to their deaths. Trudeau’s Willy Brandt moment needs to find its British echo. Indeed, the best form of atonement by the British might be, as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has suggested, to start teaching unromanticized colonial history in British schools. The British public is woefully ignorant of the realities of the British empire, and what it meant to its subject peoples. These days there appears to be a return in England to yearning for the Raj: the success of the television series Indian Summers, building upon earlier Anglo-nostalgic productions like The Far Pavilions and The Jewel in the Crown, epitomize what the British-domiciled Dutch writer Ian Buruma saw as an attempt to remind the English ‘of their collective dreams of Englishness, so glorious, so poignant, so bittersweet in the resentful seediness of contemporary little England.’

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According to a recent UN Population Division report: ‘World Population Ageing 1950–2050’ report, United Nations, www.un.org/esa/population/publications/worldageing19502050/pdf/90chapteriv.pdf. to start teaching unromanticized colonial history: Steven Swinford and Christopher Hope, ‘Children should be taught about suffering under the British Empire, Jeremy Corbyn says’, The Telegraph, 27 July 2015. what the British-domiciled Dutch writer Ian Buruma saw as an attempt to remind the English: Ian Buruma, Playing The Game, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991, p. 258. Buruma was, of course, echoing: Salman Rushdie, ‘Outside the Whale’, Granta, 1984, reproduced in Imaginary Homelands, New Delhi: Viking, 1993.

Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain
by Ed Husain
Published 9 Jun 2021

Something called the ‘Muslim Council of Britain’ seeks to be the face of this community and act as an intermediary with government. All too often these communal standards are enforced on those who wish to dissent, through social and family pressure, and sometimes through intimidation and violence. In the 2019 election, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party courted the vote of ‘the Muslim community’ because it was potentially five million-strong, and its ‘community leaders’ were seen as capable of controlling the election result in more than thirty constituencies. For many party strategists, the historical model of a secular state composed of individual British citizens who can lobby their parliamentary representatives on a range of causes is not politically advantageous.

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In 2018 and 2019, Ofcom again ruled that the broadcaster failed to comply with rules (https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/latest/bulletins/content-sanctions-adjudications/decision-islam-channel-limited). See Quilliam Foundation’s report Re-Programming British Muslims: A Study of the Islam Channel (2010) for further information. Between 2013 and 2015, Jeremy Corbyn made numerous appearances on the channel, and was the keynote speaker at one of its Gala dinners in 2019 (https://order-order.com/2019/12/03/corbyn-2019-keynote-speaker-islam-channel-censured-antisemitism-advocating-marital-rape/) 2Warren Dockter, Churchill and the Islamic world: Orientalism, Empire and Diplomacy in the Middle East, I.

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
by Timothy Snyder
Published 2 Apr 2018

In the invasion of Ukraine, the main Russian victories were in the minds of Europeans and Americans, not on the battlefields. Far-Right politicians spread Russia’s messages, and left-wing journalists helped to bring them to the center. One of the left-wing journalists then entered the corridors of power. In October 2015, Seumas Milne, having chaired Putin’s Valdai summit, became chief of communications for Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Britain’s Labour Party. With Milne as his chief press officer, Corbyn proved a poor advocate for EU membership. British voters chose to leave, and Moscow celebrated. In July 2016, not long after the Brexit referendum, Donald Trump said, “Putin is not going into Ukraine, you can mark it down.”

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Guardian associate editor Seumas Milne Quotations: Seumas Milne, “In Ukraine, fascists, oligarchs and western expansion are at the heart of the crisis,” TG, Jan. 29, 2014; Seumas Milne, “It’s not Russia that’s Pushed Ukraine to the Brink of War,” TG, April 30, 2014. See also “Projecting the Kremlin line,” Left Foot Forward, March 15, 2015. Enormous amounts of time Stephen Bush, “Jeremy Corbyn appoints Seumas Milne as head of strategy and communications,” New Statesman, Oct. 20, 2015; Laura Kuenssberg, “Corbyn office ‘sabotaged’ EU Remain campaign—sources,” BBC, June 26, 2016. On Russia and Brexit, see the discussion in chapter 3. In July 2016 Trump quotation: Melissa Chan, “Donald Trump Says Vladimir Putin Won’t ‘Go Into Ukraine,’ ” Time, July 31, 2016.

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook
by Extinction Rebellion
Published 12 Jun 2019

Things beyond the bounds of what even the most progressive elements in mainstream politics have been willing to contemplate, even on their best days, over the past thirty years. The less bad news, he went on, is that a lot of things have happened over the past decade that weren’t meant to be possible. He listed the banking crash, the Arab Spring, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and the election of Donald Trump. The point is not whether we would welcome these developments, whether they represent a move in the right direction, but what they tell us about the nature of the times in which we are living: these are times in which impossible things happen, things which all the sensible voices whose job it is to tell us how the world works were busy telling us couldn’t happen until they did, and in this there lies a dark vein of hope.

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
by Yascha Mounk
Published 15 Feb 2018

(There was also some conflicting evidence, suggesting that Le Pen only outperformed her overall vote share among the young by a much smaller margin.)46 In this, France is hardly an exception. On the contrary, polls have found similar results in countries as varied as Austria, Sweden, Greece, Finland, and Hungary.47 Even in Great Britain and the United States, the picture is rather less clear-cut than widely portrayed. Jeremy Corbyn, long regarded as a fringe figure, ascended to the leadership of the Labour Party and outperformed expectations in the 2017 general election in part because of his fervent support among young voters.48 Young people are more open to populist appeals than has widely been suggested in the United States as well.

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See Carla Bleiker, “Young People Vote Far-Right in Europe,” Deutsche Welle, December 14, 2015, http://www.dw.com/en/young-people-vote-far-right-in-europe/a-18917193; Benjamin Reuter, “‘Right-Wing Hipsters’ Increasingly Powerful in Austria,” WorldPost, May 20, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/right-wing-hipsters-increasingly-powerful-in-austria_us_573e0e07e4b0646cbeec7a07; “Populism in Europe: Sweden,” Demos, February 23, 2012, https://www.demos.co.uk/project/populism-in-europe-sweden/; Alexandros Sakellariou, “Golden Dawn and Its Appeal to Greek Youth,” Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, July 2015, http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/athen/11501.pdf; Veronika Czina, “The Rise of Extremism among the Youth of Europe: The Case of Hungary’s Jobbik Party,” Project for Democratic Union, November 29, 2013, http://www.democraticunion.eu/2013/11/popularity-extremism-among-youth-europe-case-hungarys-jobbik-party/; and Hillary Pilkington, “Are Young People Receptive to Populist and Radical Right Political Agendas?” MYPLACE Policy Forum, November 20, 2014, http://www.fp7-myplace.eu/documents/policy-forum/Policy%20Forum,%20Session%202%20presentation%20v.8.pdf. 48. Matthew Smith, “Theresa May Is Britain’s Most Popular Politician,” YouGov, August 15, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jun/10/jeremy-corbyn-youth-surge-votes-digital-activists. (Note, however, that later evidence suggests that the boost in youth turnout at the 2017 elections may have been significantly overstated in initial exit polls.) 49. Emma Fidel, “White People Voted to Elect Donald Trump,” Vice News, November 9, 2016, https://news.vice.com/story/white-people-voted-to-elect-donald-trump.

Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now?: The Facts About Britain's Bitter Divorce From Europe 2016
by Ian Dunt
Published 11 Apr 2017

Add it to the Remain vote and you have no mandate to end the free movement of people. So even here, in the one measure which is treated as unarguable, there is no clear mandate. But regardless of its objective legitimacy, the immigration mandate was the most common interpretation of the Brexit vote. It was accepted by most MPs in the main parties (although not by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership team) and enthusiastically embraced by anti-immigration tabloids. It has become received wisdom that something must be done about freedom of movement. It is a non-negotiable ‘red line’. The consequence is that Britain either has to convince its EU partners to reform the rules on freedom of movement or leave the single market.

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy
by Adam Tooze
Published 15 Nov 2021

They begged the question of power. If there was to be a new social contract, who would make it? There was a strange aftertaste to many of the calls for grand social reform in 2020. As the coronavirus crisis overtook us, the left wing on both sides of the Atlantic, at least that part that had been fired up by Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, was going down to defeat. The promise of a radicalized and reenergized left, organized around the idea of the Green New Deal, seemed to dissipate amid the pandemic. It fell to governments mainly of the center and the right to meet the crisis. They were a strange assortment.

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One obvious interpretation was that the monetization of giant stimulus spending was the belated and long overdue triumph of radical Keynesianism, a return to the logic of so-called functional finance first spelled out in World War II.55 The zealous new school of Modern Monetary Theory rode to prominence on the coattails of Bernie Sanders and his revival of the American left.56 In the UK, there was talk in the circles around Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party of “People’s QE” and radical experiments with helicopter money.57 If government spending, whether on welfare or tax cuts, was funded by issuing debt that was ultimately purchased by the central bank, why not cut out the financial sector and simply equip every citizen with a central bank account?

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back
by Guy Shrubsole
Published 1 May 2019

The middle classes ‘discovered’ allotments in the 1970s, when the BBC sitcom The Good Life popularised a new desire for self-sufficiency – and homemade wine – made suddenly urgent by the oil crisis, the three-day week and new-found fears of ecological collapse. Waiting lists lengthened hugely, as they did again three decades later when a fresh spike in oil prices, fears about climate change, and TV gardening programmes sparked a new drive for community gardens. Famously, of course, Jeremy Corbyn is a big fan of allotments. A Steve Bell cartoon depicts Corbyn out digging on his allotment in Islington. ‘Is this your allotment, mate?’ asks a passing journalist. ‘Well, it’s mine to work as I please,’ replies Corbyn, ‘but the land itself belongs to the wider community.’ ‘So it’s a communist plot, then?’

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almost 1.5 million Statistics cited in the Departmental Committee of Inquiry into Allotments (‘The Thorpe Report’) (October 1969), pp. 47–50. After the First World War, the number of allotment plots stood at 1,330,000 in 1920; during the Second, the number peaked in 1942 at 1,451,888. A Steve Bell cartoon Steve Bell’s If … cartoon strip, ‘Jedi Jeremy Corbyn gets down to earth’, Guardian, 25 January 2016. The 1908 Allotments Act For more on the complex legislation governing allotments, see this summary: https://www2.canterbury­.gov.uk/media­/892659­/The­-Law­-and-allotments-summary-Appendix-28.pdf; the House of Commons Library’s briefing on allotments, 21 March 2012, http://researchbriefings.parliament.uk­/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN00887­#fullreport­; National­ Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners’ webpage on the history of allotments, https://www.nsalg­.org.uk/allotment­-info­/brief­-history­-of-allotments/ 90,000 people https://www.nsalg­.org.uk/allotment­-info­/brief­-history­-of-allotments/; NSALG allotment waiting lists survey 2013, http://www.transitiontownwestkirby.org­.uk/files/ttwk_nsalg_survey_2013­.pdf­ Over 100,000 acres Departmental Committee of Inquiry into Allotments.

The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Half a Century of British Economic Decline
by Russell Jones
Published 15 Jan 2023

Its populist, anti-intellectualist approach, often grounded in rose-tinted English exceptionalist nostalgia, regularly spilled over into falsehoods, deceptions, prejudice and xenophobia, all of which were easily amplified by social media, and probably by the Russian secret service too. No caricature of Europe seemed to be too extreme. the return of project fear Osborne realised early on that the vote was anything but a foregone conclusion. The pro-EU campaign could expect to receive lukewarm support at best from the Labour Party. Under its new crypto-Marxist leader Jeremy Corbyn, the party had shifted much further to the left, and Corbyn had been a long-standing critic of the EU. He was to prove the most reluctant of Remainers. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats, who were ostensibly the most pro-EU major party, were in disarray after their electoral debacle. Osborne also felt that his position left him less constrained in his actions than Cameron, and he therefore determined to reprise the ‘Project Fear’ economic strategy he had employed during the Scottish independence referendum.

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May’s strategy backfired spectacularly, in the process revealing how capricious and divided the nation was. She also laid bare her questionable political judgement and the limited faith that her insular and robotic style of leadership was capable of inspiring. Despite facing a Labour Party that, under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, offered an unreconstructed socialist cocktail of high state spending and nationalization, the Conservatives lost their overall majority and became dependent on the politically blinkered Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party to rule. Part of the explanation for the Tories’ poor performance was no doubt the re-intensification of the squeeze on real incomes, but it also reflected a dreadful campaign waged by a maladroit prime minister who was frequently reduced to the staccato repetition of platitudinous stock phrases.

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics
by John B. Judis
Published 11 Sep 2016

After the election, Cameron set the referendum for June of 2016. Cameron was confident that he could keep Britain within the EU. He and his Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, joined by Britain’s top business leaders and major newspapers, warned repeatedly that a decision to leave the EU could have dire economic consequences. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn waged a halfhearted campaign for staying within the EU that probably failed to sway potential supporters among the “left-behinds” while further alienating what had once been Labour constituencies. UKIP led the campaign against the referendum along with two prominent Tories, former London Mayor Boris Johnson and former Cabinet member and MP Michael Gove.

Angrynomics
by Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth
Published 15 Jun 2020

What ideas there are tend back to the national state, and perhaps there is a reason for that. Consider that every time the system has a crash and reset, every time something really disrupts the system, the container of hopes becomes the nation state, for good or ill. When we sat together in London in the summer of 2016 we saw Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the UK’s Labour Party, giving a very weak-kneed defence of the EU during the Brexit campaign. The governing Conservatives had dealt themselves a post-Brexit political agenda that was all about taking back control – us against them – the national against the international. The 2019 British elections demonstrated this further, with both the major parties promising renewal centred around national control, although giving it quite different content (Brexit versus state ownership).

How to Read Numbers: A Guide to Statistics in the News (And Knowing When to Trust Them)
by Tom Chivers and David Chivers
Published 18 Mar 2021

Biased samples are pernicious in a way that small samples aren’t. At least with small but random samples, the more data you get, the closer you’ll get to the true answer. But with biased samples, getting more data doesn’t help and instead can make you more confident in your wrong answer. For instance, in the run-up to the 2019 UK general election, Jeremy Corbyn – then leader of the Labour Party – and Boris Johnson, the prime minister and Tory leader, held a televised debate. The political polling company YouGov polled viewers afterward and found that they were evenly split on who had ‘won’ the debate, with 48 per cent saying Johnson, 46 per cent Corbyn and 7 per cent saying they didn’t know.

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth
by Selina Todd
Published 11 Feb 2021

The early 2010s saw the election of several left-wing union leaders, including Len McCluskey, born in 1950, who failed his eleven-plus, became a dockworker, and in 2011 became leader of Unite – a successor of the TGWU and the second-largest trade union in Britain. Then, in 2015, the Labour Party held a leadership contest. Left-winger Jeremy Corbyn was the surprise winner, and Party membership rocketed to over half a million – making Labour the largest democratic party in Europe. Two years later, in the general election of 2017, Corbyn’s Labour Party defied all media predictions to destroy the Conservatives’ majority. Labour pledged to act ‘for the many, not the few’ by increasing public investment and treating education as a social benefit, not an individual choice or asset – notably by abolishing university tuition fees.

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In 2010, Labour’s manifesto had mentioned ‘social mobility’ five times and ‘aspiration’ six times. In 2017 ‘social mobility’ did not appear in Labour’s manifesto and ‘aspiration’ only once, to describe a collective desire for secure homes which was used to justify plans to increase council housing. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party didn’t promise great riches, but instead collective uplift – ‘a fairer’ Britain where ‘we will measure our economic success not by the number of billionaires but by the ability of our people to live richer lives … the creation of wealth is a collective endeavour’.99 Labour achieved the biggest electoral swing to the Labour Party since Attlee’s landslide victory in 1945.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism
by Ed West
Published 19 Mar 2020

Going to a couple of Tory get-togethers in north London, it also felt quite pleasant if a bit weird to be at a social event where everyone vaguely agreed with me politically; rather than being, not just the most Right-wing person in the room, but a freakish outlier. I got on well with some of the people but I’ve never felt being a Tory member a part of my identity, and couldn’t really understand the sentimental attachment the other side felt. During the Labour Party’s long meltdown following Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader, the emotional pain and anguish expressed by moderate members about their party were clearly heartfelt but to me just baffling. Some of the arguments people made for why they were staying in the party, because their great-grandfather joined it to fight for better wages in 1921 or something, just struck me as weird.

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The downside of this is that once you have a solid moral community then you’re probably more likely to feel hostility towards the outgroup. For fervent religious believers it’s often the case that their entire life is dominated by the faith, and they tend to develop quite a sectarian attitude to non-members. Jeremy Corbyn reportedly once said that he could not be friends with someone who isn’t Left-wing, which for a potential prime minister struck me a red, flashing, warning light; a similar opinion has been voiced by a couple of Corbynite MPs. There is certainly asymmetry of hatred. When the Tory party met in Manchester during the 2010s people entering the arena had to go through a baying mob shouting ‘Tory scum’, the protestors’ faces contorted with hatred.

The Craft: How Freemasons Made the Modern World
by John Dickie
Published 3 Aug 2020

Despite his lack of authority, and his book’s glaring shortcomings, The Brotherhood had a huge impact. As conspiracy theories began to circulate about Knight’s death, another journalist took up his work on Masonic scheming within the police. The same old refrain began: if the Freemasons are as innocent as they say, why all the secrecy? In June 1988, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party leader between 2015 and 2020 but then a back-bench MP, declared in parliament: Many of us are gravely suspicious about the influence of Freemasonry. I am utterly opposed to it and to the influence of other secret organisations because I believe them to be a deeply corrupting influence on society… Masonic influence is serious… Freemasonry is incompatible with being a police officer… I am suggesting that the power of a Masonic Lodge on any organisation is sinister and insidious.

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Prima edizione in ‘Serie Bianca’, novembre 1996. Prima edizione in ‘Universale Economica’, ottobre 1998. Angelo Longo Editore for permission to quote from Giordano Gamberini, Attualità della Massoneria. Contenti gli operai, Ravenna, Longo, 1978. Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0 for Jeremy Corbyn’s speech in Parliament in June 1988, https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/copyright-parliament/open-parliament-licence/. The Koori Mail for permission to quote from an interview with a member of the Victoria Museum’s Indigenous Advisory Committee, in the article ‘Remains “are not trophies”’, Koori Mail, 13 November 2002.

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
by Amitav Ghosh
Published 16 Jan 2018

In effect, the countries of the West are now in many senses ‘post-political spaces’ that are managed by apparatuses of various kinds. For many, this creates a haunting sense of loss that manifests itself in an ever-more-desperate yearning to recoup a genuinely participatory politics. This is in no small part the driving force behind such disparate figures as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, on the one hand, and Donald Trump, on the other. But the collapse of political alternatives, the accompanying disempowerment, and the ever-growing intrusion of the market have also produced responses of another kind—nihilistic forms of extremism that employ methods of spectacular violence.

Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain
by Fintan O'Toole
Published 22 Jan 2018

Brexit did have a leader of choice – but he was too incompetent to actually effect the transfer of power that this revolutionary moment needed. It is hard to overstate the degree to which Boris Johnson was the single greatest asset for the Leave side in the referendum. He was personally popular, with an average likability rating in pre-referendum polling of 4.5 on the 0–10 scale compared to 4.2 for Jeremy Corbyn, 3.5 for David Cameron and only 3.2 for Nigel Farage. Andrew Cooper, chief pollster for the Remain campaign, admitted that ‘during the referendum campaign it was clear from all our tracking research that Boris was having a big impact. This came through clearly in the focus groups and in our (weekly, twice-weekly, then daily) polling, Boris invariably came top on the question of which politician has made the most persuasive impact…’16 More importantly, how people felt about Johnson was a very close predicter of how they would vote in the referendum: ‘Feelings about Johnson had very strong effects on the probability of casting a Leave ballot.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism
by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski
Published 5 Mar 2019

Despite the persistent inequalities that stretch back to the Ancient World, there are nevertheless reasons for hope today, including the millions whose curiosity has been piqued by references to socialism by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential primary, and more recently by a series of contenders for political office across the United States. In the UK too, as of this writing, an unabashed socialist, Jeremy Corbyn, heads Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. As the political debate becomes more polarized, young people on the whole, even in the Anglo-American center of the capitalist order, now view socialism more favorably than they do capitalism. Across Europe, far-left parties that proffer a rhetoric that endorses socialism, or at least some other way of doing things than business-as-usual capitalism—from Syriza in Greece to Die Linke in Germany and Podemos in Spain—are chasing the traditional social democratic parties and in some places eclipsing them, albeit with a widely varying mixture of success.

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey
Published 17 Jun 2019

Though political parties often try to represent the interests of particular groups over time, it is also true that as the composition of the electorate shifts and new economic and societal issues arise, as do new political agendas. Politicians are autonomous actors who seek power by mobilizing voters through continuously shifting their agendas to reflect voters’ concerns, and one such concern these days is clearly automation. Consequently, in Britain, the leader of the Labor Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has pledged to tax robots to slow down the pace of automation, which he thinks threatens workers’ jobs.71 And in South Korea, President Moon Jae-in has already downsized tax breaks on investments into robotics and automation due to employment concerns.72 In America, Andrew Yang, who will make automation the key theme for his 2020 run for the White House, thinks it is hard to tax robots directly.

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Factories Reach into the Future,” New York Times, March 13. 69. Quoted in G. Allison, 2017, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), chapter 1, Kindle. 70. P. Druckerman, 2014, “The French Do Buy Books. Real Books,” New York Times, July 9. 71. G. Rayner, 2017, “Jeremy Corbyn Plans to ‘Tax Robots’ Because Automation Is a ‘Threat’ to Workers,” Daily Telegraph, September 26. 72. Y. Sung-won, 2017, “Korea Takes First Step to Introduce ‘Robot Tax,’ ” Korea Times, August 7. 73. B. Merchant, 2018, “The Presidential Candidate Bent on Beating the Robot Apocalypse Will Give Two Americans a $1,000-per-month Basic Income,” Motherboard, April 19. 74.

The Politics of Pain
by Fintan O'Toole
Published 2 Oct 2019

Brexit did have a leader of choice – but he was too incompetent to actually effect the transfer of power that this revolutionary moment needed. It is hard to overstate the degree to which Boris Johnson was the single greatest asset for the Leave side in the referendum. He was personally popular, with an average likability rating in pre-referendum polling of 4.5 on the 0–10 scale compared to 4.2 for Jeremy Corbyn, 3.5 for David Cameron and only 3.2 for Nigel Farage. Andrew Cooper, chief pollster for the Remain campaign, admitted that ‘during the referendum campaign it was clear from all our tracking research that Boris was having a big impact. This came through clearly in the focus groups and in our (weekly, twice-weekly, then daily) polling, Boris invariably came top on the question of which politician has made the most persuasive impact…’16 More importantly, how people felt about Johnson was a very close predicter of how they would vote in the referendum: ‘Feelings about Johnson had very strong effects on the probability of casting a Leave ballot.

The Joy of Tax
by Richard Murphy
Published 30 Sep 2015

Richard created the country-by-country reporting concept for multinational companies and has been credited with creating much of the debate on tax gaps in the UK and Europe. He also defined the term ‘secrecy jurisdictions’, now widely used in debates on offshore taxation. He has been described as the architect of ‘Corbynomics’ as part of Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for the Labour Party leadership. Richard is joint author of Tax Havens – The True Story of Globalisation and sole author of The Courageous State. In 2015, he became Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London. Also by Richard Murphy TAX HAVENS: HOW GLOBALIZATION REALLY WORKS (with Ronen Palan and Christian Chavagneux) THE COURAGEOUS STATE OVER HERE AND UNDERTAXED: MULTINATIONALS, TAX AVOIDANCE AND YOU For more information on Richard Murphy and his books, see his website at www.taxresearch.org.uk TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS 61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA www.transworldbooks.co.uk Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Bantam Press an imprint of Transworld Publishers Copyright © Richard Murphy 2015 Richard Murphy has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side
by Simon McCarthy-Jones
Published 12 Apr 2021

Ross, “Nigel Farage: Migrants Could Pose Sex Attack Threat to Britain,” The Telegraph, June 4, 2016, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/04/nigel-farage-migrants-could-pose-sex-attack-threat-to-britain/. 54. M. Dathan, “‘Brexit Campaigners Are EXTREMISTS!’ Labour’s EU Leader Alan Johnson Launches Extraordinary Attack on Vote Leave as Corbyn Launches the Party’s Red Battle Bus,” Daily Mail, May 10, 2016, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3582763/We-need-tent-protect-storm-soaked-embattled-Jeremy-Corbyn-mocks-Labour-critics-poor-election-results-launches-party-s-pro-EU-battle-bus-pouring-rain.html. 55. J. Daley, “Why Am I Considered a Bigot or an Idiot for Wanting Britain to Leave the EU?,” The Telegraph, March 5, 2016, www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2016/03/17/why-am-i-considered-a-bigot-or-an-idiot-for-wanting-britain-to-l/. 56.

The Breakup Monologues: The Unexpected Joy of Heartbreak
by Rosie Wilby
Published 26 May 2021

She was so dedicated to this cause that she gave up her ‘child-bearing years’. Her long-term relationship suffered and ultimately ended because her primary focus was the ‘us against the world’ energy that she discovered with her colleagues. But then the Labour Party changed very rapidly in 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn won a leadership election. Ayesha thought she would continue to work for the party, despite the changes. Yet she found herself being dumped, along with many others. Still sounding a little shaken by it, she says, ‘I am still a Labour Party member. But I was thinking at the time, “How can this happen?

Imperial Legacies
by Jeremy Black;
Published 14 Jul 2019

The following April, Churchill referred in a speech to the “regular, settled lines of English democratic development” underpinning the “free British Empire,”1 again without contradiction. As an imperial system, indeed, Britain was far less totalitarian than the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Ironically, when the Soviet Union collapsed, left-wing commentators safely at a distance, such as Jeremy Corbyn, then a markedly left-wing backbench Labour MP, and from 2015 the leader of Britain’s Labour party, regretted the damage done to the “anti-imperialist” cause, which is a richly and typically vague term, ready for the use of guilt by association. The criticisms visited on British imperialism are frequently ahistorical.

Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists
by Joan Smith
Published 5 Apr 2019

Nazir Afzal, then chief executive of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, wanted to put out a statement the following day, identifying it as a misogynistic attack, but he couldn’t get the agreement of his board. I was invited to talk about the bombing on Woman’s Hour, later in the same week, because the producers were puzzled by a widespread failure to connect it to ISIS’s well-known record of extreme misogyny. More than a year later, at the Labour Party conference in 2018, one of Jeremy Corbyn’s closest aides, Andrew Murray, linked the attack to ‘foreign policy’, claiming, ‘it has contributed to the environment in which these sort of atrocities continue to take place’.202 Murray, who is a former chair of the Stop the War Coalition, did not explain why the British government’s decision to take military action against Ramadan Abedi’s arch enemy, Colonel Gaddafi, had motivated his son to blow the limbs off young girls in the city that had given his family refuge.

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations
by David Pilling
Published 30 Jan 2018

Free university education, for example, might seem like an unaffordable economic sacrifice, but if you were measuring the stock of wealth rather than the flow, all those additional educated people might look like an increase in your nation’s wealth, not a diminishment of its growth. The same goes for investing in infrastructure, say high-speed rail, in anticipation of future returns on investment. How one accounts for these things matters. In the US independent senator Bernie Sanders and in the UK Jeremy Corbyn, the opposition Labour leader, both want to increase public funding and scrap student fees. Their policies look less radical—and therefore more plausible—from a wealth-accounting perspective. The second reason for counting assets is that today’s actions have an impact on future generations. Recording today’s national income offers no help whatsoever when making intergenerational decisions.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani
Published 10 Jun 2019

While the Troika would refuse to change their stance in the negotiations that followed, and the Greek government capitulated to their terms, a new reality had emerged: the corridors of power were no longer insulated from mass protest in the streets. In Britain, meanwhile, the Conservative Party won its first majority since 1992 as the right-wing UKIP attracted almost 4 million votes and the Scottish National Party took an astonishing forty seats from Labour in Scotland. A few months later, Jeremy Corbyn, who began his outsider bid at odds of 200–1, became Leader of the Labour Party – his supporters certain he could be powered by the same wave that had taken the likes of Syriza and Podemos so far in such a short space of time. It was 2016 which proved to be the decisive year, however, as a crisis that started eight years earlier found its most potent political expressions.

Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society
by Cordelia Fine
Published 13 Jan 2017

The colour of gender stereotyping. British Journal of Psychology, 102(3), 598–614. Quoted on p. 610. 68. See Roberts, Y. (September 13, 2015). Yet again men hold power. Why can’t Labour change? The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/13/women-politics-power-labour-leadership-jeremy-corbyn on September 14, 2015. INDEX Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text. Abramson, Paul, 66 adaptation: environment and, 186–87 evolution and, 184–88, 189 adaptation, human, 23, 98–99, 100, 180 developmental systems and, 186, 188–91 seen as fixed and typical, 188–90 social context and, 185–88 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 11 Adkins-Regan, Elizabeth, 128, 131–32, 135, 136, 138 adolescents, risk taking in, 165 adrenal glands, 134 African forest weaver birds, 95 aggression, 165 in females, 102–3, 132 as “masculine” trait, 102–3 testosterone and, 148 Ah-King, Malin, 44 Ahnesjö, Ingrid, 44 Akerlof, George, 159 androgen receptors, social information and expression, 142 androgens, 84, 85, 134, 181 social context and, 141, 143 Annis, Barbara, 18 Antechinus mouse, 41 “Ape That Thought It Was a Peacock, The” (Stewart-Williams and Thomas), 78–79 Arnold, Arthur, 89 aromatase, 136 Atlantic, 174 Attitude Interest Analysis Survey, 104 attractiveness, physical, mating strategies and, 71–72, 74, 75 Austen, Jane, 72 Australia, 126, 176, 192, 225n Austria, 125 Bair, Sheila, 152 Baker, Michael, Jr., 109–10 Balloon Analogue Risk Task, 157–58, 166, 244n Barnard College, 183 Bateman, Angus, 29, 31–32, 33–36, 39, 40, 42, 43, 48, 60, 61, 137, 177, 205n, 206n BBC Internet, 211n Beck, Glenn, 118 behavior: biosocial model of, 232n, 235n–36n flexibility in, 233n–34n hormones and, 133, 138–50 masculine-feminine polarity assumption in, 104–5 “masculine” vs.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat
Published 25 Feb 2020

By this, he meant not only that no new worldview had risen from the ashes of Communism to challenge the liberal democratic/capitalist consensus, but also that people increasingly didn’t even understand why anyone searched for alternatives to that consensus in the first place: “Try to convey the grand drama of political and intellectual life from 1789 to 1989 to young students today—American, European, even Chinese students—and you are left feeling like a blind poet singing of lost Atlantis.” That was five years ago; the question of our moment is whether his analysis still holds. Lilla wrote those words before Trump, before Brexit, before Jeremy Corbyn and Matteo Salvini, before China’s slide toward digital totalitarianism under Xi Jinping’s presidency-for-life, before it became commonplace to argue that the liberal order had entered into crisis. The consensus as I write is that this time may really be different—that unlike 2001 or 2008, the end of history might genuinely be over, that ideological alternatives are finally returning, that sterility and repetition is giving way to something at once more dangerous and more interesting, as the end of decadence would inevitably be.

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation
by Grace Blakeley
Published 9 Sep 2019

On the same day, one million students from all around the world took part in an international school strike to protest politicians’ inaction over climate change. Two thousand protests took place in 125 countries, with students from all corners of the globe demanding that their governments take action to protect their futures. Whilst commentators from the mainstream press jeered, students in the UK chanted “Oh Jeremy Corbyn” in support of the opposition leader, whilst holding up banners criticising the Conservative government. The British demonstrators had their own manifesto. Their rallying cry: “Change is needed, and it’s needed now!” These were not random, isolated events — they are symptoms of a decaying system.

The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour
Published 20 Aug 2019

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem. There are democratic potentials in the internet. Even if it is in essence a commercialized system of surveillance and controls, there have always been ways of writing against the grain. Radical movements, from Bernie Sanders’ campaign in the United States to the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party, have used professional social media campaigns to outflank and subvert the old media monopolies. Even in the People’s Republic of China, the spread of online communications technologies has created new enclaves outside of the state’s and companies’ control. While the regime harnesses computerization and big data to state surveillance and the disciplinary system of ‘social credit’, workers use popular social industry platforms such as QQ and Sina Weibo – Chinese equivalents of Facebook and Twitter – to organize walkouts, discuss strategies and collate demands.23 There may also be ways to fight the social industry, incrementally, for control of the social media platforms.

The Knife's Edge
by Stephen Westaby
Published 14 May 2019

Innovation, speculation, even the exploration of the planet and outer space – all depend on putting something you cherish on the line in the hope of greater rewards. Thus risk-taking is the world’s principal driver for progress, but it requires a particular character type, one defined by courage and daring, not reticence and prudence – Winston Churchill rather than Clement Attlee, Boris Johnson not Jeremy Corbyn. In 1925, when Henry Souttar first stuck a finger into the heart and tried to relieve mitral stenosis, it posed a risk to his reputation and livelihood. When Dwight Harken removed a piece of shrapnel from a soldier’s heart in the Cotswolds, it was a risk that went against all he’d learned from the medical textbooks of the day.

The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals Its Secrets
by Michael Blastland
Published 3 Apr 2019

Mansions of established wisdom have gone down like slum clearance lately. Take the many astounding events in politics: the elections of relative outsiders Donald Trump in the US and Emmanuel Macron in France; or the rise of a populist political right in many parts of Europe. Or consider the UK’s Brexit referendum, or the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, a left-wing Member of Parliament whose chances of the leadership of his party were rated zero by most observers, who then took firm control. Even democracy, some say, is suddenly in retreat.17 Political assumptions have fallen to the extent that one professor of politics wondered publicly if it was time she and colleagues tore up their lecture notes and started afresh.18 Then throw in economics and business, with their global banking and financial crises, deep recession, slow recovery and an enduring low-productivity puzzle in many OECD countries,19 plus a historically unprecedented stutter in the growth of average earnings in some leading economies – and all in all you have to wonder if this is a time for a large helping of what philosophers call epistemic humility (intellectual humble pie to the rest of us).

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 5 Oct 2020

In the years since, the Right has veered away from its devotion to markets, instead espousing protectionism, subsidies, immigration controls, and cultural nationalism—ideas championed by Trump in the United States, Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, and other populists around the world. On the left, meanwhile, two trendsetters have been Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, both self-described “socialists.” They have been joined by energetic newcomers on the political scene such as New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who seems just as comfortable with the label. And in several polls, Americans between eighteen and twenty-nine show significantly higher support for socialism than their elders.

The Skripal Files
by Mark Urban

From the start though the police cautioned against making any link with the Skripal affair. On the other side of the social-media battlefield there were many who had nothing to do with Russia expressing scepticism that Russia had targeted the Skripals. From the supporters of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn decrying the similarities with Britain’s journey to war in Iraq to those who could see some connection between Skripal and the Trump dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, many of those rubbishing the Whitehall version of what had happened were not following Kremlin talking points. Having said all that, there were clearly information strategies deployed by the opposing governments that fed into the wider arena, with lines even being used unwittingly by many who debated the issue.

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

The difference was that Chávez had control over the world’s largest oil reserves at a time when oil prices were soaring, so he received almost $1,000 billion that could keep that policy afloat for a little longer. That was enough for Chávez to be the left’s favourite demagogue for a while. Bernie Sanders said that the American dream was more alive in Venezuela than in the US. Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn praised Chávez for showing that ‘the poor matter and wealth can be shared’. Oxfam called Venezuela ‘Latin America’s inequality success story’. In an open letter to ‘Dear President Chávez’, luminaries of the Left such as Jesse Jackson, Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn and others state that they ‘see Venezuela not only as a model democracy but also as a model of how a country’s oil wealth can be used to benefit all of its people.’36 On paper, that $1,000 billion was enough to make every extremely poor individual in Venezuela a millionaire.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World
by James Ball
Published 19 Jul 2023

During the pandemic, Arcuri appeared to suggest that Johnson’s new wife, Carrie Johnson, was a Satanist, alongside others in government. Her feed suggested that vaccines were a ‘genocidal initiative’ and accused people promoting jabs as ‘paid for shills’.70 This is hardly a problem unique to the Conservative party. Piers Corbyn, the brother of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, had built a fringe career as something of a rogue weather forecaster and climate change conspiracist. But Covid-19 saw him pivot rapidly to anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown protest of an extreme sort. Corbyn shared photos of his supporters mobbing the current Labour leader Keir Starmer, calling him a ‘traitor’ who ‘protected paedophiles’.71 Corbyn has suggested vaccines are part of a ‘new world order’ agenda and claimed they are a ‘hoax’, while his supporters are often pictured with QAnon-related apparel, signs or slogans.72 These strange cross-political combinations were just as visible in the US conspiratorial anti-vaccine movements, with perhaps even stranger outcomes in their rallies.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 7 Nov 2017

The first is to increase government spending on R&D: spending more on university research, public research institutes, or research undertaken by businesses. Paying for research is one of the least ideologically controversial types of investment a government can make to promote growth: it is popular with Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders on the left, Peter Thiel on the right, and a significant number of politicians and pundits in between. The rationale harks back to one of our four S’s of intangibles: spillovers. Because returns on R&D are not always captured by the person or business investing in it, businesses do less R&D than is optimal for the economy as a whole, and therefore government has a legitimate role in stepping in, either funding research in universities or institutes or paying firms to do R&D with grants or tax breaks.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century
by Ryan Avent
Published 20 Sep 2016

And, in America, Donald Trump has mounted an insurgent campaign for the Republican nomination for the presidency on a platform of virulent anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric. The nationalist right is ascendant around the rich world. So, too, is a more radical left. This new left, however, has not yet enjoyed as much electoral success as the radical right. The hard-left Jeremy Corbyn shook the British establishment by taking control of Britain’s Labour party, but he has not been able to wrest control of the government from the Tories. Bernie Sanders, a long-time socialist senator from Vermont, mounted a surprisingly strong challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, yet ultimately fell short of the mark.

Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing
by John Boughton
Published 14 May 2018

They represent a small recalibration and a significant – though inadequate – recognition of the role local government can play in providing the decent homes our people so desperately need. It seemed in the 2017 general election that that recognition might extend across the major parties. A left-wing Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn pledged to suspend Right to Buy and build ‘at least 100,000 council and housing association homes a year for genuinely affordable rent or sale’.67 The Liberal Democrats promised to ‘directly build homes to fill the gap left by the market’ with the support of a ‘new government-backed British Housing and Infrastructure Development Bank’.68 And, most surprisingly, even the Conservatives conceded that ‘we will never achieve the numbers of new houses we require without the active participation of social and municipal housing providers’.

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America
by Alissa Quart
Published 25 Jun 2018

The dream is for tech-savvy co-ops to empower workers; otherwise, workers could dehumanizingly be ordered up like pizzas. As those suffering from unstable hours, precarious jobs, and low wages today include everyone from contract worker Uber drivers to document review lawyers to retail employees, platform cooperativism is now being mentioned by politicians—among them, the British Labour Party’s Jeremy Corbyn, who praised the “cooperative ownership of digital platforms”—as a way forward in an exploitative age. “If we are all producing value,” said Sean Ansanelli, a platform cooperativist app developer, explaining the philosophy behind it, “why shouldn’t we all share the benefits of that value?” There are also platforms for employee-run and employee-owned cooperatives for nannies and cleaners, like Beyond Care Childcare Cooperative, a child-care co-op in Brooklyn, New York, which is run by the nanny members themselves, with the guidance of the nonprofit Cooperative Development Program at the Center for Family Life (CFL).

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It
by Daniel Knowles
Published 27 Mar 2023

Over the past couple of years, LTNs have become a hot topic all over England. Across London you will see signs erected in people’s gardens that read “Stop the Road Closures.” Some of the planters have been tipped over, while cameras have been spray-painted. Piers Corbyn, the conspiracy theorist brother of Jeremy Corbyn, Britain’s former opposition leader, thinks that they are part of a “new normal” agenda intended to turn Britain into a dictatorship under the guise of a fake public health emergency. Or something like that anyway. Britain’s right-wing tabloids, in particular the Daily Mail, have made campaigning against LTNs an obsession.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition
by Jonathan Tepper
Published 20 Nov 2018

If Trump had not won, it might well have been Bernie Sanders, an antiestablishment candidate who beat Hillary Clinton in dozens of states. He was a socialist most of his career. In America, according to Gallup polls, being a socialist is right beneath atheism and Islam as a disqualifying trait in a political candidate. In Britain, the Labour Party had voted for a far-left-wing leader. They chose Jeremy Corbyn, a complete outsider and a throwback to a time when socialists called for nationalizing entire industries. He had once demanded the “complete rehabilitation” of Leon Trotsky, a Marxist revolutionary. Once Corbyn became Labor leader, he declared, “The people who run Britain have rigged the economy and business rules to line the pockets of their friends.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
by Eric Posner and E. Weyl
Published 14 May 2018

Conflict Given that leftists have long criticized “trickle-down economics,” it would be natural to expect a leftist populist backlash to stagnequality and a subsequent move to redistribute income. To some extent this prediction has been confirmed by recent events, as summarized in table I.1. Bernie Sanders nearly won the US Democratic primary despite identifying as a socialist earlier in his life and running for president as a social democrat. In the UK, Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is the most left-wing leader of Britain’s Labor Party with a serious chance of victory since World War II, and left-wing movements in France and Italy have achieved unusual political success. However, history has shown that fascist or ultranationalist movements have come to power when the social fabric is fraying.

Legacy: Gangsters, Corruption and the London Olympics
by Michael Gillard
Published 24 Jul 2019

Fiaz was elected a councillor for Custom House that year and publicly paid lip service to the mayor while secretly building a democratic socialist alternative to his administration. The split mirrored a wider division in the UK Labour party and growing discontent with Blairism and his brand of unfettered capitalism, especially after the disastrous interventions in the Middle East and the global financial crisis. Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader of the Labour party in 2015 boosted the Newham plotters’ confidence, as did the election of Sadiq Khan, a friend of Fiaz, who became Labour mayor of London one year later. By 2017, Sir Robin became aware that Fiaz, whose father called her his ‘little lion’, was going to mount a challenge as Labour candidate in the May 2018 mayoral election.

Welcome to Britain: Fixing Our Broken Immigration System
by Colin Yeo;
Published 15 Feb 2020

The organisation Humanism UK wrote to then Home Secretary Amber Rudd to point out that neither Plato nor Aristotle were actually humanists.16 Likewise, those claiming to be political activists might be asked obscure questions on the details of policies in a party’s last election manifesto, or the names of party officials. Imagine if supporters of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn were persecuted; if quizzed, how many would be able to explain the details of specific policies or personnel within the party? Similarly, many fervent Brexit supporters would likely be unable to describe exactly how Brexit will make Britain great again. Politics is often about general direction, sentiment and trust, but an asylum seeker’s case will usually turn on obscure and seemingly insignificant details.

Inheritance
by Leo Hollis

It also includes a variety of alternative forms of ownership that range from increased access of the right to roam, to the encouragement of community land trusts. This might make it easier for a community to own and manage property for the benefit of the group: a modern framework for the idea of the commons. Anecdotally, many landowners read this report and feared for their future. But with the defeat of the Jeremy Corbyn project in the General Election of December 2019, these progressive debates about the future of the ground beneath our feet are unlikely to be revived any time soon. And so, for the moment, the interest of land wins. It is what drives the modern city, and without addressing the question of land itself, the city cannot change.

The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money
by Frederik Obermaier
Published 17 Jun 2016

He sold them for £31,500 just before becoming prime minister in 2010. Cameron was reluctant to acknowledge what was obvious: that his family’s fortune – legally of course – came from privileged offshore wealth. It’s too early to say whether the Panama Papers will usher in a new era of transparency. The G20 has promised to act. Cameron, George Osborne and Jeremy Corbyn all published their tax returns – a start. But as US president Barack Obama noted, tax avoidance is a huge global problem. It’s made worse, Obama said correctly, by the fact that using offshore structures is perfectly legal. Still, the past few months have seen a victory of sorts for those of us, the little people, who do pay our taxes.

Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism
by Richard Brooks
Published 23 Apr 2018

A 2013 report by lobbying watchdog Spinwatch found that at least fifty people had been seconded to government departments by the Big Four firms in three years.44 Most were in the Cabinet Office, the Treasury and the Department for Business, the centres of power where policies governing everything from corporate taxes and financial markets to industry and the shape of public services themselves are determined. Other bean counters from PwC were providing free assistance to several of the Labour Party opposition teams (until Jeremy Corbyn’s less consultant-friendly regime brought the arrangement to a close). ARMED CONFLICT When formulating their advice, whether as secondees into government, across a restaurant table or through a formal contract, the major accountancy firms are fundamentally conflicted. Certain outcomes – fragmenting services, outsourcing others, expensive procurement – provide them with their future paydays.

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age
by Roger Bootle
Published 4 Sep 2019

It has announced a limit on the tax incentives applicable to investment in automated machines. In France, the Socialist Party candidate in the 2017 presidential election, Benôit Hamon, campaigned on the idea. (Admittedly, he didn’t win. Or even get close.) And, in the UK, the idea of a robot tax has been endorsed by Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party. He told the Labour Party Conference that “We need urgently to face the challenge of automation – robotics that could make so much of contemporary work redundant.” He has developed a plan to tax robots and artificial intelligence in order to fund adult education.7 Moreover, a robot tax was proposed in the EU Parliament, on the grounds that “levying tax on the work performed by a robot or a fee for using and maintaining a robot should be examined in the context of funding the support and retraining of unemployed workers whose jobs have been reduced or eliminated.”8 The proposal was rejected.

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages
by Annelise Orleck
Published 27 Feb 2018

Half of African American workers did.3 With so many working people living at, or just above, the poverty line, the speed with which the living-wage movement caught fire in the 2010s should not have surprised anyone. Nor should the growing appeal of populist politicians from Bernie Sanders, Walden Bello, and Jeremy Corbyn on the left to Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen on the right. Bleu Rainer and Keegan Shepard insist that broad coalition-building represents the only real solution. For we are all fast-food workers now. CHAPTER 14 DAYS OF DISRUPTION, 2016 NOVEMBER 29, 2016: Picketers appeared with the first light.

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 26 Nov 2020

A subsequent three-year State Department investigation found no criminal wrongdoing in Clinton’s email practices. By which time many members of the Trump administration were using similarly lax email procedures. Blue passports. Some newspapers – notably the Express – made a campaign to reinstate blue passports a central pillar of their Brexit coverage. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn being unable to recognise a photograph of TV presenters Ant and Dec during a leadership debate in 2016. Barack Obama’s tan suit. It was a hot day in August 2014. The president wore a lightweight tan suit during a press conference about increasing the US military response against the Islamic State in Syria.

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics
by Tim Harford
Published 2 Feb 2021

These false stories quickly became much less of a problem, as social media websites woke up to the threat.16 But the idea of “fake news” became a powerful one—an excuse to dismiss any inconvenient claim from any source, a modern version of the cynical aphorism about “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Mr. Trump, with his twisted talent for turning a complex issue into a political cudgel, deployed the term to demonize regular journalists. So did many other politicians, including Theresa May, then prime minister of the UK, and her opposite number, the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. “Fake news” resonated because it tapped into an unfortunate truth: there is plenty of slapdash journalism even in mainstream outlets, as we shall see. But there are also serious and responsible journalists who carefully source their claims, and they found themselves being tossed into the same mental trash can as the pope-endorses-Trump merchants.

Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way)
by Rachel Slade
Published 9 Jan 2024

In 2021, Chileans boast the highest income inequality in the world; the top 1 percent owns nearly 59 percent of the nation’s wealth. (For reference, the top 1 percent of Americans own 19 percent of the wealth. In France, that figure is closer to 10 percent.) Reflecting on the capitalist coup fifty years later, the British Parliamentarian Jeremy Corbyn, who had spent time in Chile before the coup, observed, “Understand that the power of international capital and global corporations…will be used against any progressive government. The only way forward is to have strong labor movements, and a strong cultural movement goes with it. That unites people in the…expectation that we don’t have to live in a world of global inequality

Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World
by Brett Chistophers
Published 25 Apr 2023

Furthermore, even in those Global North countries where the idea has gained most traction, the window of opportunity for the GND as a programme of investment in publicly funded and controlled infrastructure, after having briefly opened, seems already to have been slammed shut. The UK and US cases are exemplary. In the former, the GND sketched by Labour Party policy architects in 2019, on which the Jeremy Corbyn–led party campaigned in the general election of December that year, was explicitly based on decommodification and public ownership of all relevant infrastructures, ranging from energy to water and rail. But Corbyn lost, and, while his successor as leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, remains committed in principle to the GND, he has publicly distanced himself from the pivotal, broad-ranging public-ownership elements embedded in the original Labour vision, meaning that what is left of the latter is but a shrivelled husk.

Britain's Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation
by Brendan Simms
Published 27 Apr 2016

Mr Cameron’s stated hope is that he will be able to renegotiate Britain’s position in the EU, or even ‘reform’ the EU as a whole, in such a way that he can recommend a ‘yes’ vote. In order to make this strategy work, the prime minister needs the prospect of withdrawal to be credible, and, judging by his rhetoric, the mood of his party8 and the general drift of British public opinion, he is not bluffing.9 Moreover, the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader has put somebody at the helm of the main opposition party whose recorded views on the European Union are more negative than any of his predecessors before the 1950s. A ‘Brexit’ in 2016 is therefore perfectly possible.10 At the same time, the British Question is being posed in a different way by the campaign for Scottish independence.11 The long period of Tory government under Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s opened a divide between the more conservative English and the supposedly more socialist Scots (much magnified by the first-past-the-post electoral system).

The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged
by Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison
Published 28 Jan 2019

This is a classic debate, going back at least to Davis and Moore’s (1945) ‘Some principles of stratification’ and Tumin’s (1953) ‘Critical analysis’ response. Goldthorpe and Jackson (2007). In the US this is, of course, encapsulated in the belief in the ‘American Dream’. Wilkinson and Pickett (2009). Piketty (2014). Dorling (2014). IMF (2017). The World Bank (2016). Jeremy Corbyn, for example, the leader of the UK Labour Party, has recently revived the issue of class inequality. As he noted in a speech at Unite in 2018: ‘For 30 years, the media and the establishment tried to tell us the class doesn’t matter anymore and that we should ditch any idea of representing and advancing the interests of the working-class’ while ‘a tiny minority at the top of society have become ever more wealthy’ (Corbyn, 2018).

On Her Majesty's Nuclear Service
by Eric Thompson
Published 18 Apr 2018

Harold Wilson, for example, had been openly opposed to nuclear weapons – it was in his Labour Party manifesto – and some suspected him of having Soviet sympathies. He could not refuse to shoulder his Prime Ministerial responsibilities for national security but he could have selected ‘Do not retaliate’ in his Letter of Last Resort. In 2015, Jeremy Corbyn, a lifelong nuclear activist and one time Vice Chairman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, became leader of the Labour Party. Were he to be elected as Prime Minister, he could, hypothetically, select the ‘Do not retaliate’ option. If a potential aggressor were to be aware of this, our Independent Deterrent would have lost all credibility.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
by Harsha Walia
Published 9 Feb 2021

A prevailing assumption, even among some progressives, is that while blatant immigration restrictions are racist, too much immigration would “taint” cultural values and “flood” labor markets. This is apparent in the founding of Aufstehen, a German leftist organization opposed to open border policies, as well as the surge of Blue Labour during and after the 2019 UK election calling for “conservative socialism” in opposition to Jeremy Corbyn’s migration platform. But borders do not protect labor; the border is a bundle of relations and mode of governance acting as a spatial fix for capital to segment labor and buffer against the retrenchment of universal social programs. Simply put, borders manufacture divisions within the international working class.

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future
by Noreena Hertz
Published 13 May 2020

Conservatives taking this line include Roger Scruton and Mary Eberstadt; see, respectively, Roger Scruton, ‘Identity, family, marriage: our core conservative values have been betrayed,’ Guardian, 11 May 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/11/identity-family-marriage-conservative-values-betrayed; Mary Eberstadt, Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics (Templeton Press, 2019). Jeremy Corbyn would be an example of a voice on the left who holds the all-responsibility-is-with-the-state point of view. As would political theorists such as Neil Vallelly. Note too that there are thinkers on the ‘left’ like Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory [University of Notre Dame Press, 1981]) or Christopher Lasch (The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics [W.W.

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom
by Grace Blakeley
Published 11 Mar 2024

The networks that emerged out of the Occupy movement also provided the foundation for the revival of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and for Bernie Sanders’s bid for the presidency. Those involved in the UK’s smaller Occupy movement were also involved in the anti-austerity movement from 2010, out of which emerged a network of activists who became involved in the campaign for Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for leadership of the Labour Party. These bids for state power did, of course, end in failure—both as a result of issues with their internal organization and due to coordinated campaigns to crush them. Yet both these campaigns, and the movements that emerged from them, shifted the conversation on issues ranging from inequality to climate breakdown, as well as leading to new organizations that endure to this day.

When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World – and Why We Need Them
by Philip Collins
Published 4 Oct 2017

Ibárruri was the voice of justice when the alternative was the military fascism of General Franco. She was the voice of a desire for liberation which, as we shall see, can easily lead in the opposite direction from the one intended: away from progress. This is a battle within the Left that continues until the present day. The Labour Party fought the 2017 general election with a leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and an organisational faction, Momentum, both of whom preferred doctrinal purity to piecemeal progress. It would be wrong, though, to suppose that questions of justice and equality have been the sole preserve of the political Left. Indeed, One Nation Conservatism was defined by Benjamin Disraeli, in a speech in 1872 in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, a short walk from where Blair spoke in 2006.

The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet
by Brett Christophers
Published 12 Mar 2024

The state should build, own and control wind and solar farms, purveyors of this argument propose, precisely because this is putatively a highly profitable activity – and not because, in fact, it is not. To take a recent instructive example, consider the proposal by the UK Labour Party – the leadership of which has passed from Jeremy Corbyn to the more centrist Keir Starmer since the GND-inspired 2019 election campaign – to launch a publicly owned renewable energy generation company, called Great British Energy (GBE), if it were to win power. GBE, Labour has said, would enable the UK government to reduce household electricity bills because the profits presently being siphoned off by private renewables generators would be socialized instead.

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?
by David G. Blanchflower
Published 12 Apr 2021

What if Macron can’t turn the French economy around as Hollande, Sarkozy, and Mitterrand were unable to do? What happens if the American, French, and British economies slow? Maybe the riots will no longer be silent? Le Pen isn’t going away. Will the move to right-wing populism expand into other EU countries? Will the markets turn on Jeremy Corbyn if he becomes prime minister? A YouGov poll of 3,380 UK adults on June 7, 2018, found that 46 percent of respondents said that they expected Brexit to go badly and it has; 27 percent said they thought it would go well and it hasn’t.55 Brexit negotiations are going badly, and there is growing talk of a second referendum after 700,000 demonstrated peacefully in London.

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century
by Fiona Hill
Published 4 Oct 2021

Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020). welcome guest: Matthew Weaver, “Timeline: Donald Trump’s feud with Sadiq Khan,” Guardian, June 15, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/03/timeline-donald-trump-feud-with-sadiq-khan. the president’s UK “nasty list”: Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon, the Queen’s grandson Prince Harry’s wife, Megan, and numerous others were also on Trump’s “nasty list” in the UK. See Blake, “ ‘Nasty’ is Trump’s insult of choice.” prince’s points: “Trump says ‘climate change goes both ways,” BBC, June 5, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48531019.

Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom
by Norman Finkelstein
Published 9 Jan 2018

In the United Kingdom, the anti-Semitism bogey was additionally conjured in 2016 to discredit the elected, insurgent leadership of the Labour Party. Despite the paucity of substantiating evidence, the allegations against Labour received ubiquitous and uncritical media coverage. See Jamie Stern-Weiner, “Jeremy Corbyn Hasn’t Got an ‘Antisemitism Problem.’ His Opponents Do,” openDemocracy (27 April 2016); Norman G. Finkelstein and Jamie Stern-Weiner, “The American Jewish Scholar behind Labour’s ‘Antisemitism’ Scandal Breaks His Silence,” openDemocracy (3 May 2016); Jamie Stern-Weiner, “Labour Antisemitism Witch-Hunt Turns on Leading Anti-racist Campaigner,” jamiesternweiner.wordpress.com (9 May 2016). 121.

Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy
by Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght
Published 20 Mar 2017

It included a specific partial-basic-Â�income proposal.71 Commenting on the report, the Â�Labour Party’s shadow finance minister John McDonnell declared that basic income “is an idea Â�Labour Â�will be closely looking at over the next few years” and seems to have convinced the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn to look into it. In September 2016, the Labour MPs debated the idea in public for the first time.72 The only other major social-Â�democratic party that took the idea of basic income seriously was the Dutch Â�labor party, Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA), which participated in many national governments Â�after World War II and headed several of them.

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017
by Ian Kershaw
Published 29 Aug 2018

The arguments pushed in the same direction. Only a handful of Labour politicians actively favoured leaving the European Union. But the ‘Remainers’ in the party often trod warily, well aware that many of their constituents were ‘Leave’ supporters. And a major weakness in Labour’s campaign was that the party leader, Jeremy Corbyn – for many years at best lukewarm about the European Union – was distinctly unenthusiastic, if not silent, in his support for ‘Remain’. The mood in the country was fairly evenly split. The ‘Remain’ side posited almost everything on the likely negative economic effects of leaving the European Union, and the consequences this would have for the living standards of ordinary citizens.

The Rough Guide to England
by Rough Guides
Published 29 Mar 2018

However, it soon became obvious that Brexit negotiations with the EU would both strain the resources of the British government and sharpen divisions within the Tory Party about the speed of leaving the EU – and what, exactly, leaving actually meant. Still, the Tories thought, they were in no electoral danger as the unexpected new leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn (b.1949), was far too left-wing to gain any traction – and many more right-wing Labour MPs agreed, whispering away in order to plot Corbyn’s downfall. And so it was that May called the general election of June 2017, which she presumed would be a romp. It wasn’t. May’s campaign was extraordinarily inept, but rather more surprisingly a fair chunk of the population warmed to the much-maligned Labour leader – social media buzzed with photos of a young Corbyn being arrested for protesting South Africa’s apartheid policies.