Is Corbynism back? Six years after Jeremy Corbyn’s cataclysmic defeat in the 2019 election, there are signs that the British Left is finally emerging from a depressive morass.
The chaotic announcement of a new party co-led with Zarah Sultana, one of the few surviving Corbynist MPs, arrived swiftly on the heels of a major Left-led Parliamentary rebellion against the Government’s welfare reforms. The potential significance of a Left revival is reflected in Keir Starmer’s latest attempt to reassert his authority via another round of suspensions from the Parliamentary Labour Party, including Diane Abbott.
The only real surprise is how long it took for Corbynism 2.0 to get its act together: for all the shortcomings of the first version, the ideas that drove the movement have subsequently become common sense across an increasingly postliberal political spectrum. On all sides, it is now assumed that the purpose of the state is to protect a national community of producers from a parasitic globalism, and that social problems can be reduced to populist oppositions between the “many” and the “few”.
Corbyn’s much mocked post-election claim that he “won the argument” is, to an extent, true. He was, as it turns out, on the “right side of history” — albeit not, perhaps, in the way his supporters like to think.
Somewhat awkwardly, given the anti-capitalist pretensions of Corbynism, its history is that of capitalist development itself. After the 2008 crisis instigated the unravelling of neoliberalism, the consensus across global and political divides today seems to be that only a more state-driven economy — with greater barriers to the movement of goods and people — can keep the capitalist show on the road. In retrospect, it is clear that Corbynism was rubbing with the grain rather than against it.
But if Corbynism 1.0 failed to capitalise on this prescience, will it do any better second time round? As in 2015, any new party’s success depends on whether it is able to keep together the disparate, at times contradictory, elements of its support long enough to exploit the possibilities opened up by a rapidly fragmenting electoral system.
“The contradictory character of the array of actors that Sultana-Corbynism seeks to bring together could actually act as an advantage.”
Corbynism was never politically coherent. As we charted in 2018, it emerged from a diverse mix of ideological and organisational elements, each raging in their own way against the End of History. This spanned two sets of struggles straddling the financial crisis. From the pre-2008 period, vague liberal-Left anti-Iraq war and pro-Second Intifada sentiment combined with a sectarianism that was variously Leninist and, in certain localities, Islamist. Post-2008, meanwhile, saw a newer, younger Left opposed to austerity and welfare cuts led initially by the horizontalist likes of Occupy and the student movement, before being co-opted by the trade union machine in the Miliband era.
Back then, the fractious components of the Corbyn coalition could only be glued together by the persona of “Jezza” himself. Whereas other figureheads would have been too precise about their worldview to please the motley crew the movement assembled, Corbyn’s moralistic platitudes about peace and justice seemed to create a common, if vague, cause.
A superficially Marxist friend-enemy distinction buttressed this worldview: the idea that society was divided between the 99% and the 1%. Crossed with a crude anti-imperialism fixated on the malevolent power of “the hand of Israel”, this Manicheanism created a favourable environment for the antisemitism found within parts of the movement. But it also gave Corbynism momentum, propagating a Left-wing version of Brexit based on state aid and protectionist barriers to the movement of capital, goods and people.
The difficulty this Lexit iteration of Corbynism faced was that the political divides it dealt in were exploited with much greater dynamism by an equally populist Right, which had a clearer path for how to put some of the same policy principles into practice. By the time of the 2019 election, voters could get what they really wanted elsewhere, red in tooth and claw on issues — principally borders and national security — that the Left were squeamish about confronting.
The election defeat was followed by Starmer’s ruthless programme of de-Corbynisation which left its remnants cowed and adrift. Populist without being popular, Leftist intellectuals and policy thinkers rooted around for a new friend-enemy distinction around which to anchor Corbynism without Corbyn.
A listless Left turned inwards, seeking divides within and between the people that incorporated an ever-smaller part of the population on the “right side of history”. After the Brighton-based Northern Independence Party’s farcical attempt to pit ferret-wielding Northerners against the bowler-hatted South, some Corbynites landed on a cleavage between young urban graduates, radicalised by the novel experience of renting and precarious work, and their more conservative parents in the countryside, on whom the young waited for intergenerational transfers of wealth.
But a political gambit based on the fleeting social demobility of a young middle class, only an inheritance away from growing old in suburbia, was always set to be transient. It never had a chance to prove itself anyway. Labour’s landslide in 2024 proved the political efficiency of seeking votes from across these apparent rural-urban divides.
Starmer’s victory effectively banished Corbynism back to its primordial pre-2015 state — a disconnected mess in search of a cohering force. It was possible, however, to make out its future form in a handful of highly localised harbingers: victories of various independent candidates, the not-insignificant challenges faced by Wes Streeting and Starmer himself in their own constituencies, and Corbyn holding onto his Islington seat.
The current wave of post-Corbyn Corbynism emerged from the Left’s response to Hamas’s October 7 attacks and Israel’s subsequent brutal war in Gaza, with Palestine increasingly seen as the centripetal force around which the future of the planet is organised.
Just as the mythology of Corbyn’s career — singlehandedly overturning apartheid and bringing peace to Northern Ireland — had political utility in the past, so does the Left’s enchanted image of Palestine bring shape to the same chaos of incompatible interests today — ranging from religious sectarians to social justice campaigners. Amid reports of creative differences with Corbyn over the timing and structure of any new party, Zarah Sultana’s gamble seems to be that “Gaza” might replace “Jezza” as the conceptual glue of the Left’s coming political coalition, with Sultana becoming the new bearer of the “right side of history”. Instead of vague homilies to peace and justice, Sultana offers a more precise and direct appeal: “We are all Palestine Action”. The aim is no longer to rally a mass movement, but sharpen the wedge and activate a vanguard that can meet the low bar set for electoral success now that leadership of a major social democratic party is safely out of bounds.
We’ve seen some of these electoral experiments before, from “Respect” to the “People’s Alliance of the Left”. They tend to be led by people who, despite seeing themselves as Trotsky-style strategic geniuses, draw upon little experience of political success and operate in a state of militant obscurity happily disconnected from public opinion. The legacy of Corbyn’s leadership of one of the country’s traditional parties of government, however, means the current provisional committee for a new party begins with a pool of existing MPs and muscle memory of steering a mass movement. Beyond this, precisely which social and political divides this iteration of Corbynism seeks to exploit is unclear. Without any capacity to convincingly call upon a “people” or “many” as its core constituency, the Left has little to say on the national stage other than “nobody likes us and we don’t care”.
And yet, the contradictory character of the array of actors that Sultana-Corbynism seeks to bring together could actually act as an advantage in a multi-party electoral geography. As mass politics crumbles except possibly among the populist Right, the eking out of small victories in specific localities shaped by particular demographic dynamics could still make heavy political weather.
The new Left tendencies within UK politics would not need to take votes from Labour in every constituency to pose a problem to a disoriented governing party and sway debates in their direction. Local challengers would place further pressure on a new crop of Labour MPs often reluctant to support government positions unpopular with their constituents, for example on welfare or foreign policy.
Despite attempts by Starmer to instil collective discipline, the threat of a Left party would provide cover for breaking with Government over decisions MPs would rather not have to make. These would concern issues that Corbynism presents as being merely a matter of political will: legal and illegal migration, the deprioritisation of some budgets to make way for defence and security commitments, and the development of a leaner, meaner public sector.
In these respects, then, perhaps a rebooted version of Corbynism has the opportunity to prosper in ways it could not before precisely by reducing its reliance on the figure of Corbyn himself and dispensing with a belief in mass social and political dividing lines that typically bear little electoral fruit.
The issue is that there is a very fragile potential coalition to hold together. It is set to include socially conservative Gaza independents with whom Corbyn sits in Parliament, Leninist organisers and operators with whom he has long surrounded himself, plus socially liberal young Leftists who likely feel the pull of the Green Party under a potential Zack Polanski leadership. In the intense social media heat of how views are aired and policed on the Left today — something Corbynism 1.0 did not have to reckon with in 2015 — even the magnetic pull of Palestine may not prevent this coalition from crumbling.
And so while the new Left party is unlikely to pose any immediate threat to the Starmer government, it does raise the question of how, buffeted between threats from Right and Left, the governing party should deal with the potential split in its ranks.
Labour, too, casts about for its own friend-enemy divisions in anticipation of a Farage- or Jenrick-led surge towards 2029. Half the trouble here is that the Government finds it hard to say precisely who is going to lose from the policies they announce. Who will sit out the retooling of the state? Which sectors of economic activity will have to make way for defence reindustrialisation? Understandably occupied with pacifying an election-winning coalition drawn from across the country’s fissured service-driven economy, few in Labour seem prepared to spell it out.
Pragmatically, the best bet might be to identify an enemy without, rather than an enemy within, in the shape of geopolitical rivals in Russia and elsewhere. The Government can plausibly point to the inability of the populist Left and Right alike to offer anything other than dividing lines within our own society rather than a story that can unify against a common threat. Indeed, the rise of a new Left party may enable Labour to link the dividing line without to a dividing line within, pointing to its rivals’ refusal to take seriously national security and their discomfort about any obvious commitment to the protection of liberal democracy.
Ironically, translating this rhetorical pitch into practice requires the Government to advance a radical political-economic offer itself reminiscent of the productivist and protectionist policies the party espoused, at points, under Corbyn and his Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell. The difference is that now such policies are driven not by the belief that they will overturn democratic capitalism but by the necessity of its defence.
Back in 2018, we were sceptical about claims from those such as Jonathan Rutherford and Maurice Glasman that the only alternative to Corbynism was Blue Labour. We argued that there was still a viable soft-Left path to the preservation of a global liberal order based on rule of law and international openness — a politics with which Starmer himself is sometimes now associated. Although an avenue may be opening with the first stirrings of post-Brexit European solidarity in the face of Russian aggression, such a route has been largely foreclosed by a global experience of defeat.
Today, for a lack of other options, the future of the Left once again appears to face a choice between Corbynism and Blue Labour — but on different terms. Last time around, the two tendencies represented rival attempts to reconstruct the same postwar social and economic compromise, based on the production of physical goods rooted in particular places rather than the distribution of the revenues of services generated anywhere in the world. Today, Corbynism, with or without Corbyn, is ceding this common ground precisely at the time when geopolitical circumstances make it most vital. Instead, it busies itself with building a minor political vision confined to selective social and foreign policy issues.
Some former Corbynites, however, have adjusted themselves to the new reality by retaining a radical vision for political economy while putting it in service of a new seriousness on national security — the journalist Paul Mason, for example. Recovering Corbynite MP Dan Carden, meanwhile, has become among the most powerful proponents of Blue Labour’s postliberal politics of production in the Parliamentary Labour Party. His transition from “Red” Labour to “Blue” is less surprising than it seems to some once the performative politics are stripped away for the substantive policies.
Such voices on Left and Right alike today advance a similar vision of state-led reindustrialisation focused on bringing jobs back within the UK’s borders to places battered by a relentless Treasury fixation on abstract economic growth concentrated in cities. In the long run, this increasingly hegemonic vision of a state-led national economy of producers may well be as chimerical as the fantastical images that have held Corbynism together. But, in the world as it is, rather than the world as we would like it to be, this is the contested terrain upon which Labour now has to fight.
The recent Industrial Strategy, Strategic Defence Review and National Security Strategy documents do some of this work, on the policy side at least. But without a truly political component, political economy is just plain old economics. These policies must be framed within an active argument about the future of the country and its place in the world for Labour to play the field and win from a position of incumbency. To navigate the hegemony of a postliberal moment, Labour must make the case for why what remains of liberal society must be defended against a populist challenge posed not only from the Right, but from the Left, as well.
While tacking to the progressive soft-Left may be easier to stomach, Labour forgets at its peril the need to compete with the Right on concerns around civil order and economic protection. In this sense the leftwards pressure of Sultana-Corbynism, whatever form it eventually takes and however low the bar is set for success, may not bring about the return of the Left so much as the defeat of the centre by a resurgent Right. If history always progresses on its bad side — as Marx and Engels suggested — then, as in 2019, Corbynism may well find itself on the “Right” side of a wrong history once again.
