Review of "This Land: The Story of a Movement" by Owen Jones

Owen Jones's take on the Corbyn years, and it makes for grim reading. I'm one of those who rejoined the Labour Party after many years outside, inspired by the fact of a leader who seemed to care about the same things that I did and inhabit the same moral universe as me. At the December election I stood on a cold and wet night in a park in west London, in the shadow of Grenfell Tower, listening to Owen Jones rousing a crowd of young people to go out and canvas in what was a key marginal. He was great, and we went and knocked on doors with renewed enthusiasm.

I now know that as we speaking Jones was actually deeply disillusioned about Corbyn - about his lack of leadership and managerial skills, his personality defects, and his failure to develop or even require a political strategy for the 2019 election. The team around him had been chosen for loyalty rather than competence, and the most competent individuals were unable to make a difference in a toxic and dysfunctional organisational culture. Even a team of geniuses would have had trouble leading Labour in the context of the Brexit election, and this was not such a team.

There's a chapter on the antisemitism story that is mainly good, though I think it understates the extent to which the Labour Right, and actual Zionists of various stripes, set out to pin the anti-Jewish label on Corbyn  - whatever the consequences for Jews in Britain. Some were concerned that Corbyn really was anti-Zionist and thought that they were standing up for Israel, others couldn't care much about Israel but saw an opportunity to undermine the left. Of course this doesn't mean that all accusations about antisemitism were a smear, but some of them definitely were.

It's nice that Jones finishes the book with a reminder about why Corbyn was an inspiration despite his personal and organisational failings. One of my take-aways is that the left needs to understand that not all of our opponents within the Labour movement are the same - there are actual neoliberals, but there are others who are just pessimistic social democrats. These latter represent a real constituency, unlike the neoliberals, who just represent themselves and capital, and we do need to find ways of working with them and winning them over.