“Persistence,” writes Andy Beckett, “is without doubt one of the left’s qualities that its enemies like least.” These hair-shirted zealots spend numerous hours assembly, rallying, consciousness-raising, drumming up meagre assist for seemingly misplaced causes. Whereas he was the Higher London Council chief, Ken Livingstone lived alone in a scholar bedsit, the centrepiece of his room a quarter-sized snooker desk on which he would practise pictures after a 14-hour working day. Such obsessiveness appears baffling to the unbeliever. Why, they marvel, doesn’t the left simply surrender?
This e-book affords a solution. “Leftwing politics,” Beckett claims, “isn’t the lifeless finish its enemies would adore it to be.” He begins in 1968, with Tony Benn’s conversion from an on-message cupboard minister right into a standard-bearer for radicalism. Benn’s reawakening coincided roughly with the approaching to political age of 4 a lot youthful figures – Livingstone, Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott – who went on to forge a brand new left with him. Beckett has talked to all 5, and is broadly a sympathiser, however his account of their venture, whereas vividly detailed and infrequently gripping, is as prone to reveal the left’s vanities and shortcomings.
A good-minded evaluation is significant as a result of, as Beckett says, a lot of what we learn about these politicians is filtered by way of the hostile vested pursuits, from hedge fund house owners to landlords, of the vastly unequal nation that Britain has change into. From Benn’s billing as “essentially the most harmful man in Britain” within the 70s to the racism and misogyny meted out to Abbott, leftwing politicians are all the time judged by totally different requirements. Abuse and dying threats are the ambient noise of their lives. The brand new left these 5 constructed collectively drew on numerous influences: the unconventional sects that emerged from the English civil warfare, Salvador Allende’s Chilean socialist experiment, even the philosophy of Pope John XXIII. It valued democratic participation as a lot as equality, and it thrived in unwelcoming habitats: Thatcherite and New Labourite London and Britain within the years after the Brexit vote. Its success lay, Beckett argues, in “its attentiveness to social, financial and cultural developments, to how Britons had been truly dwelling”.
The Corbyn that emerges right here – affable, listener, a diligent Islington MP – is difficult to sq. with the cussed, querulous persona he offered in interviews as Labour chief. Beckett addresses the case in opposition to his tenure – the chaotic social gathering organisation, the lukewarm campaigning for stay, the failure to sort out antisemitism – completely and pretty. Ultimately, essentially the most damning impression this e-book leaves is that Corbyn didn’t particularly wish to be chief, and was unprepared to make even minor tonal changes to handle the unconverted. Earlier than the 2015 management election, Corbyn’s son Seb informed McDonnell that his dad was “apprehensive that he would possibly win”.
The 5 politicians appear cut up between these ready to construct alliances and make compromises to achieve energy (Livingstone, McDonnell) and people taking part in a for much longer sport who see electoral victory virtually as a facet difficulty (Benn, Corbyn, Abbott). “Elections are a platform,” Benn stated on Desert Island Discs in 1989. “Folks see elections a lot an excessive amount of when it comes to the result.” He informed his supporters that his slender loss to Denis Healey in Labour’s deputy management contest in 1981 was “an unlimited victory”. Corbyn, equally, spent months after the catastrophic 2019 common election defeat insisting that his arguments had been vindicated.
With caveats, Beckett subscribes to this Bennite view that politics is as a lot about altering methods of seeing and pondering as vote-counting. The left, he argues, has received many invisible, incremental battles, from funding in public transport in London to shifts in cultural attitudes. Immediately, pamphlets on range issued by Livingstone’s GLC “learn like commonplace memos from human assets”. True sufficient, though how a lot this has to do with the GLC, and even the left, is debatable.
Benn’s remaining appearances on this e-book discover him on a talking tour. Carrying a cardigan and sipping from a flask of tea on stage, he affords his already transformed viewers the reassuring sense that they’re on the facet of the angels. Surveying Benn’s transformation into different nationwide treasure, hero-worshipped into harmlessness, one is compelled to conclude that the result of elections is, in truth, fairly necessary.
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