Movin’ on up?

Review of Richard Seymour’s Corbyn: the Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics

For much of my life, I have had this vague, unconfirmed memory of my parents, standing in the kitchen of our old flat, displaying relief and even slight jubilation at the election of Tony Blair as the British Prime Minister. Until last year, I have always wondered why the fuck they were so chuffed.

Even worse, roughly eighteen years after Tony Blair’s first general election victory, I woke up early in the morning, on May 8^th, for a Job Seekers appointment. Only to, adding insult to injury, turn on the news and find out that Cameron’s Tories had won an electoral majority. Walking to the job centre had never felt so grim. That feeling of grimness had nothing to do with any hope or illusion in the prospects of Ed Miliband delivering one for ‘the class’. Far from it. The party he led to defeat sparked almost no connection to notions of ‘solidarity’ or ‘the left’ to me growing up. They almost always sparked thoughts of ‘war’, ‘ASBOs’, ‘immigrants and Muslims’, and that is not even to imply those words were filtered through to me with progressive connotations. Growing up, more often than not, we settled for Dizzee Rascal’s assertion: “I’m a problem for Anthony Blair.”ⁱ

The grimness I felt waking up that morning was so far removed from how I felt, sat in a Highbury pub four and half months later, watching a video on Facebook, of Jeremy Corbyn, elected leader of the Labour Party only hours beforehand, speaking at a 90,000-strong demonstration in London, in support of refugees. It’s that story, its challenges, its future and ultimately its limitations that makes Richard Seymour’s recent book amongst one of the best things written on Corbynism and a must-read for militants inside and outside the Labour Party.