Not much more than two years before, Labour had achieved its biggest increase in vote share since 1945, and the summer’s great cultural moment had been the massed singing of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” at Glastonbury; now, amid the darkness and rain of winter, a great domino-chain of supposed Labour heartlands fell to the Conservatives. There's a problem loading this menu right now. And yet, the Left's last attempt to upend the established order and transform millions of lives came to a crashing halt on 12th December 2019, when Jeremy Corbyn led the Labour party to its worst electoral defeat since 1935. But for any casual reader, its main problem will be a surfeit of characters who have since slipped into irrelevance – from the Guardian columnist turned “director of strategy and communications” Seumas Milne, through Corbyn’s evidently fearsome chief of staff Karie Murphy, to an array of minor players who bounce in and out of the text. Free UK p&p over £15. If this item isn't available to be reserved nearby. Does this book contain quality or formatting issues? It is a tale of high hopes and hubris, dysfunction and disillusionment. Number 10”. The Guardian Bookshop is the online bookshop for The Guardian and The Observer. This Land: The Story of a Movement - Kindle edition by Jones, Owen. In This Land, Owen Jones provides an insider's honest and unflinching appraisal of a movement: how it promised to change everything, why it went so badly wrong, where this failure leaves its values and ideas, and where the Left goes next in the new world we find ourselves in. Owen Jones is not a reliable narrator on a subject that's so close to his heart: the Corbyn "project" and the left-wing Labour attempt to seize control of the Labour party and the country, a project he's dedicated every second of the last four years of his personal and professional life to achieve. Fascinating amounts of detail and a lot of insight. In the office of John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, an adviser was seemingly so enraged that he kicked a waste bin, and then let rip: “That’s fucking going to cost us the election! All Rights Reserved. Please select a reason for reporting this review: We have recently updated our Privacy Policy. This provides an excellent blow by blow account of British politics in the past five years, especially how the failures of New Labour brought to rise a Corbynite left, and how despite its own weaknesses it did far better than expected in the 2017 general election, only to become completely undone in the failure of Labour to be able to develop a coherent position on Brexit amidst controversies over antisemitism. Today could be the day your whole life changes. We live in an age of upheaval. This is a brilliant, smart and timely look at what can only be described as some of the most hopeful, promising and catastrophic years for the left in Britain in my lifetime. Topics. An incisive insider account with an impressive amount of self-awareness. As the authors put it, he “was not a politician for the Brexit age. We have the opportunity to build a fairer country and a more equal world, but if our time is to come, then we must learn from our past. On occasion, Jones’s emphasis on personal rather than political matters makes his criticism seem superficial, something made worse by the nagging sense of someone recasting small but important aspects of history, the key failing of his long and tortuous chapter on antisemitism. We live in an age of upheaval. Who the fuck does stuff like that?”. Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn by Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire (Bodley Head, £18.99) This Land: The Story of a Movement by Owen Jones (Allen Lane, £20) On March 1st 2017, the week after Labour lost the Copeland by-election, Owen Jones published a column in the Guardian with the headline: 'Jeremy Corbyn says he's staying. Available in shop from just two hours, subject to availability. There was a problem loading your book clubs. One of these was a deferential view of Vladimir Putin, partly traceable to Milne and the close Corbyn aide Andrew Murray’s backgrounds in British communism, and their affinity with the old Soviet Union. A week before the general election of 2019, Jeremy Corbyn’s private secretary furnished his aides and closest allies with an itinerary. We have the opportunity to build a fairer country and a more equal world, but if our time is to come, then we must learn from our past. He takes us on a compelling, page-turning journey through a tumultuous decade in British politics, gaining unprecedented access to key figures across the political spectrum. [email protected], Tuesday to Saturday: 11 am – 5 pm He takes us on a compelling, page-turning journey through a tumultuous decade in British politics, gaining unprecedented access to key figures across the political spectrum. Soon after, McDonnell offered him a role as an “unofficial adviser”, which struck Jones as “a violation of journalistic ethics”. In This Land, Owen Jones provides an insider's honest and unflinching appraisal of a movement: how it promised to change everything, why it went so badly wrong, where this failure leaves its values and ideas, and where the Left goes next in the new world we find ourselves in. A Jeremy Corbyn supporter at a Labour event in London last year. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. And yet, the Left’s last attempt to upend the established order and transform millions of lives came to a crashing halt on 12th December 2019, when Jeremy Corbyn led the Labour party to its worst electoral defeat since 1935. ISBN: 9780241470947 Discover your next best read, hand-picked from our bookshelves by our expert team. After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. The sheer volume of people who have contributed make it a rich, thick and live endeavour. In 2013 he won Young Writer of the Year at the Political Book Awards. The other key story linked to the ugly underbelly of far-left politics was that of antisemitism: its presence among a nasty, credulous element of the party’s new membership, the leadership’s apparent tolerance of it, and past occasions when Corbyn had either shared the company of antisemites, or come dangerously close to apparently voicing age-old prejudices (witness the occasion when, in 2013, he took issue with unnamed “Zionists” who “having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, don’t understand English irony” – on the face of it, a classic view of Jews as an eternally alien presence). It just won’t happen!” But it did. For his first 30-odd pages, he sticks to this brief, exploring such trailblazing political initiatives as the anti-tax avoidance campaign UK Uncut, and the spectacular student protests of 2010, which set the stage for a surge of interest in the politics of the left. Left Out is a meticulous and even-handed telling of Labour’s descent from 2017 to 2019, transparently modelled on the recent bestsellers All Out War and Fall Out by the Sunday Times’s political editor Tim Shipman – but where those books centred on Tory dramas of power and political success, this one is all about failure. Ultimately, this is a pick-me-up book; one that finds hope and direction from defeat.