Chapter 5 - A New Politics From the Left: The Distinctive Experience of Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the British Labour Party

Summary

Writing as I have been – first in the middle and then at the end of an election campaign in which I feel some engagement – I have had to exert self-discipline and resist the temptation to chase fast moving events. I found the advice of writer Italo Calvino useful. He says: “I reject the role of the person chasing events. I prefer the person who continues his discourse, waiting for it to become topical again, like all things that have a sound basis”. It’s not for me to judge whether my discourse has a sound basis, but I will argue the case on the assumption that it does. And so, tempting as it is, I will not chase the events leading up to election day, 8 June 2017, or the consequent repercussions for the Labour Party, for Jeremy Corbyn, and for the movement that his campaign to be and then to remain leader of the Labour Party – though I do intend to reflect on the movement’s prospects, the new openings since the electoral successes of Corbynled Labour, the obstacles it still faces and the pitfalls it needs to avoid, drawing on lessons from the experience of Syriza.

My discourse in this chapter concerns “a new politics from the left”, in particular, the importance as a foundation of this politics of an understanding of power learnt from social movements of the past half-century; and related to this, a distinct understanding of knowledge and what kinds and sources of knowledge matter in public decision-making. My argument will focus on the incubation of this new politics, and its underlying understandings of power and knowledge, in the movements of the late-1960s and 1970s; and their re-emergence after decades of neoliberalism in the twenty-first century – with the movements of the squares in Southern Europe followed by Syriza and Podemos (though with scattered, regionally specific, antecedents in the 1980s). I also will explore the understandings of power and knowledge that underpin the “old politics” historically associated in the UK with the Labour Party.