 Jeremy Corbyn, 251,000. After nearly five years of political upset, parliamentary dysfunction and media blitzkrieg, the Corbyn project met its end with defeat at the ballot box and the rise of Keir Starmer. But was Corbynism always doomed to meet this sticky end? That's the question posed by Owen Jones in his new book, This Land, The Story of a Movement, and he's with me at an appropriate social distance, of course, to discuss all this and more. Owen, welcome. Hey, how you doing? You alright? I just scared my cat by doing that really loudly. So just to jump right in, the subtitle of your book is The Story of a Movement, but the focus lays us in pretty quickly to the parliamentary Labour Party and the Labour Party staff. Why? I think, I mean, so what the book does, it spends obviously the first part looking at the movements which laid the foundations for Corbynism, whether it be the anti-war movement, climate justice, the student movements where I first met you, political constituency was created, parties were by austerity in the way it hit younger people in particular, and it was just there. There was this constituency that felt it didn't have representation and it felt alienated and it latched onto the very unlikely figure ahead of Jeremy Corbyn. And I do look at obviously in the first leadership campaign, how it tapped into that and that swept it into the leadership of Labour. But I think if we're going to be brutally honest, the reason is a lot of what Corbynism became actually was very much centred in Westminster. It became into some nine struggles and fights within the House of Parliament. And particularly, I mean at the end of, if I just bring it up now, I'm going to quote James, I've got a cat as you can see climbing all over it. He's very excited. So at the end of the chapter on the 2017 general election campaign, I quote James Schneider, who is a friend of ours, but worked as a spokesperson and in strategy for Jeremy Corbyn. And this was because of a hung parliament, Seamus Milne told, he was the executive director of strategy and communications, told James Schneider, parliament will be a great, sorry, one second. No. Sorry, that's a cat. He's just standing on another computer. Seamus Milne, the executive director of communications strategy, told James Schneider, parliament will be a real struggle. And I wrote fearing that such attritional Westminster politics would sat the energies of Corbyn's insurgent movement, indeed, went against everything it stood for, Schneider could not suppress a mounting fear of any other sense of an ease, fucking hell he thought we are done for. It did get sucked into parliament, particularly because of Brexit, where instead of being an insurgent movement for the many against the few, it became about Brexit, you know, the internal struggles of parliament and the hung parliament centered the struggles very much there. So actually, whilst you did get this mass movement that, you know, which brought together these other various movements that have been building for a long time, one of the weaknesses is, and it was partly due to the fact that the left had been exiled for a generation, was that you didn't actually have this strong independent movement of itself out in the country. And you can see that because, to be honest, since the general election, wherever that movement was has fragmented a big chunk of that of Corbyn's support went on to support Keir Starmer, which is why Keir Starmer became leader of the Labour Party. So to be honest, you know, I could have spent more time looking at kind of a movement as it was, but whilst there were struggles within CL constituency Labour parties and so on, a lot of the energy, the extra parliamentary movements of the pre-Corbyn era got sucked into the Labour Party, but within the Labour Party a lot of it became about internal parliamentary struggles. And ultimately, the internal struggles of Corbynism itself took place in the leader's office specifically in the houses of parliament. I mean, I want to just play on this theme a little bit more because the basic thesis of the book is that this movement sprang into life. Nobody was really expecting it to happen, least of all Jeremy Corbyn. And the problem, and what did it in ultimately, is that you had leaders who couldn't lead, managers who couldn't manage and the movement was never able to reach its full potential and hold together this very fractious electoral coalition. And in the book, you explicitly say the reason why it's so important to look at this question of leaders who couldn't lead and managers who couldn't manage is because without that, a narrative of fatalism will set in and the left will go, all right, well, any radical or redistributive project is doomed to be defeated by the aligned forces of capital in the establishment. As a provocation, I'm going to offer to you that there is mismanagement and incompetence in every single political operation, including the successful election-winning ones. I don't think anyone looks at Boris Johnson and goes, that is an operation marked by competence and being across detail. So I wonder if the argument that it's the incompetence that did Jeremy in has an attendant risk of putting the left of the scent of doing the really hard intellectual and organizational work of strategizing how you take on the political clout of those vested interests and win? You're quite right. The whole point of the book was to avoid a fatalistic conclusion, which is any transformative project is inherently doomed by internal subversion and external attack. And the point I also made in the book, firstly, if you look back at the 70s, you did have a much bigger labor movement. You had the mass shop stewards movement. You had, in 1979, the trade union movement peaked at about half the workforce. And if you look at collective bargaining, the large majority of the British workforce were covered by collective bargaining. So you have this much bigger organized working class movement in the 1970s. And the point in terms of what happened this time is you not only didn't have that, you had a lot of the trade unions obliterated by mass unemployment, anti-trade union laws, and also the defeats of key sections of the British working class like the miners in particular in the 1980s were seen as the vanguard of the labor movement. But also the left had been consigned to political exile for so long that you did lack people with management experience and strategy. And you didn't just have that, but you had those catapulted into political turmoil, the biggest political turmoil in this country has had since World War II. I take your point about the Conservatives, but as Matt Zarkozyn and Jeremy Corbyn's former spokesperson pointed out, the Tories can play politics in easy mode, because the Tories have the support, the active parties and support of a large majority of the media. I do think the likes of Dominic Cummings clearly, I do think it would be, I mean, as a campaigner, as a campaigning operator, I think he is self-evidently formidable as the EU referendum and the 2019 general election, I think both underscore. So you're right about Boris Johnson himself, although Boris Johnson did win the mayoralty in London twice, and London is now very much a labour city. Admittedly, only minority people would vote in the mayoral election, and he was seen at the time as a kind of, the mayoralty has no real power, and he is a bit of a comic character, doesn't really matter. But you know, I wouldn't under direct, you know, just because he's a bumbling, foppish character, he's a long-proven political operator himself, who was London mayor, you know, do nothing London mayor, actually as it turns out, but he was London mayor and did have some experience, and he did have an experienced city hall team around him, and actually his operation combines both the old city hall lot and the vote leave lot. So he did actually have quite, those are quite two formidable apparatuses who formed together, and I think did have huge experience of running administration and of campaigning in a successful way. So I wouldn't underestimate that at all, and I think the problem with the Corbyn project is clearly, you know, for the left, you're not playing on easy mode. You've got almost the entire media ranged against you. That's inherent. That's just an systemic problem you have to deal with. That's not the political damage that does. You know, I mean, you know, those who go, you know, change the record, go and bark at some thunder. Obviously, a media which polices the acceptable parameters of political debate in this country, and on a daily basis monsters the leadership of a political party that's going to have an impact. And the people who run the British media are fully aware of that. But it is obviously the case that you didn't have, obviously, in the same way Boris Johnson did two sets in his case of formidable teams who came together. You did actually originally, to be fair, have some from Ken Livingston's tenure as mayor of London, notably Simon Fletcher and Annalise Midgety. But you didn't, you know, throughout the whole period, you had, you know, the Corbyn project was, you know, was trying to build a cut, build a plane, which was which was already taking off. But you did it's just self evidently the case and people who worked in that and what, you know, what I did is interview the whole team felt it was just an extremely dysfunctional operation. And it was dysfunctional for a variety of reasons, which we can explore, that the fact is you have the combined problem of, you know, a leader of the opposition with unprecedented hostility from his parliamentary Labour Party, unprecedented hostility from within his party machine, unprecedented hostility from the media, and on operation, which is often dysfunctional, bereft of strategy. And putting those things together as one is a problem. And it was a problem in the way that Boris Johnson, who's got most media on his side, and does have quite a formidable team of political operators who were not his prowess, I would never understand, looking at 2019 and the referendum itself. He did clearly have, you know, a far more functional operation plus the support, the cheerleading of most of the media. I mean, let's zero in on Jeremy Corbyn and his operation then, because that forms a really huge part of this book. And the Jeremy of this land comes across as principled, amiable, kind, has longstanding commitment to causes and ideas from when they were unfashionable to when they unexpectedly gained, you know, much wider political currency. And he also is someone who comes across as pathologically conflict averse, unreliable, unable to play the game of politics for fear of being perceived as a sellout. And there are lots of people, particularly on the left who look at that, and think that that picture of Corbyn, jars against the Corbyn who was, you know, tireless campaigner against establishment interests, the man who faced down the unearing hostility of the press for five years, someone who dealt with, you know, various knives from the front and the back from his own party. So how do you reconcile the Corbyn of the book with the Corbyn that much of the left knows? So Jeremy Corbyn's conflict averse within his own side, within his own parameters, if you like. I mean, it was absolutely the case that the reason he got on the ballot paper in 2015, and John McDonald couldn't get on the ballot paper in 2015, was because he had at the time no real enemies in the parliamentary Labour Party, and John McDonald did. John McDonald was seen as somebody who worked for John McDonald for three years and tried to get him on the ballot paper along with my colleague, Andrew Fisher. And he was someone who, you know, had contempt John McDonald for a fellow Labour MPs who would abandon what principles they had, had no backbone and would tow the party line to vote for pretty much anything if the whip, the parliamentary whips got to them or their careers were imperiled or anything like that. And that contempt was reciprocated. You know, John McDonald was seen as this rude, aggressive, sectarian, ultra left. That's how they saw him. They were never going to get him on. He was never getting on the ballot paper. He tried twice in 2007, in 2010, obviously, dynamic on in 2010. But in 2015, the threshold was actually higher than it was in 2010, in 2007, it being increased. So it's actually harder to get on the ballot. And, you know, the reason Journey Corbyn could do it was lots of MPs who obviously never thought he was going to become leader of the Labour Party, but thought he's a nice guy, always got on well with him. A lot of my members say they want to debate. So, you know, he'll get 5% and humiliate the left. And that'll be the end of it. And, you know, you know, as, as Mark's always put it, individuals make history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing. And, you know, it is absolutely the case that, you know, I think whatever Corbyn is involved or something like that was going to happen, that clearly, sometimes in history, you do get moments where, you know, something slightly different had happened, then the course of history would be very different. And it, it wasn't automatic that Journey Corbyn was going to get on the ballot paper. And John McDonald was really believed he wasn't. It was only at the last minute he did get on the ballot paper. It was very close indeed. But he could get on the ballot paper because of, because of that fact. And you're absolutely right. Because of his amount of principle, he's, he will never give up on his beliefs and his principles. And that allowed him, you know, his resilience. I mean, that's what we're talking about. He's got a huge resilience that I think very few people would have survived the onslaught that he suffered from within his own party and from externally. But when it comes to conflict in terms of making decisions where there is a disagreement within his own operation, in particular, on his own side, then he is just pathologically unable to do that. And I don't really think there's any whatever camp they ended up in. And bear in mind, Journey Corbyn's operation essentially disintegrated by 2019 into war in camps with huge hostility. Unlike the 2017 election, we had a very unified campaign. And that meant, so as the country, for example, polarized on Brexit, an issue Journey Corbyn had a very little interest in, which I can more than relate to. But, you know, as his operation, it wasn't, you know, the parliamentary Labour Party polarized, his, the voter base polarized, his own party, local party was at him. He had, he was being bombarded by thousands of Islington North constituents, his constituency, demanding his support for evoking Brexit, let alone another referendum. And he also had Unite and others who were very much against any move towards a second referendum. And he couldn't deal with that. He just could not deal with that level of conflict. It's the same with anti-Semitism. He has a group of longstanding, trusted Jewish comrades who founded Jewish Voice for Labor, who are obviously a valid part of Jewish opinion. But objectively, you know, even many Corbyn supporting Jews like John Lansman, Rhea Wolfson, Rachel Shabby or Michael Seglov had a very different perspective from those Jewish people. And you'd end up with, you know, John McDonald saying one thing on anti-Semitism. So don't suspect, I don't know, during the whole crisis, for example, on Margaret Hodge, after she called him a racist and anti-Semite, and there was this debate, should she be suspended or not. He just couldn't, the conflict that broke up, he found it possible to do. He'd go AWOL. He wouldn't answer his phone at crucial moments. So I think there's a difference between saying he has huge resilience, which he does, and that resilience comes from a sense of principle, a sense of here is what is right and what is wrong, which comes for him from a very emotional place because the difference between him and John McDonald is Jeremy's politics aren't about, you know, he doesn't wander around with, you know, parliamentary socialism by Ralph Miliband whilst John McDonald does. He's not some big ideologue. He has this instinct, he's got socialism, which is a revulsion against injustice. John McDonald's far more, you know, he, you know, even though he's a working class autodidact socialist, John McDonald, don't forget that. He went to night school and that's how he got his degree, for example. But he's someone who very much is a working class intellectual who has a sense of here's what society should look like and here's how we get there. And with, you know, so you've got, in a sense, a stubbornness and a resilience, which only Corbyn, that that served him well against those attacks. But as conflicts opened up within his own side, he was simply unable to deal with that. And within his natural coalition, we have Corbyn supporters, loudly demanding a new referendum, another Corbyn supporters who were adamantly against another referendum. And he was not able to provide a form of leadership that could, that could bridge those divides. He just, he just couldn't do it. I really, I really want to get onto the issues of Brexit and systemicism, because those two chapters I think are some of the most important for the book in outlying, both being in a bind and an impossible one, but also strategic errors and missteps within it. So I want to give them the time that they deserve. But the thing that I want to perhaps come back on is actually there's something interesting quite early in the book where it's suggested by an anonymous Labour Party aide, that part of the reason why so much internal power was able to be accrued by Seamus Milne was because of a deeply held intellectual insecurity that Jeremy Corbyn had on the part of, but because he didn't have a university degree. And so lots of the kind of strategic thinking had been outsourced. It wasn't coming from Jeremy Corbyn, it was coming from Seamus Milne. Yeah, I mean, to be fair, something that's often put to me is politicians generally are not very strategic people anyway, and they're often quite short-term. I think it's just the nature of the job, dividing a constituency operation and dealing with Westminster politics. And often it falls into quite a week-to-week kind of mentality. But it is absolutely, look, the thing with Seamus that made, Seamus Milne that made him, you know, he's the lodestone for Jeremy Corbyn, you know, and both him and Carrie Murphy serve very different functions because Seamus Milne, you know, had a lot of the same interest politically with Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy Corbyn was seen as the foreign secretary of the left before he became leader. His priorities were obviously famously people often zoning a Palestine that, you know, he had an abundance of international interest, whether Latin American struggles for justice there, whether it be the Kurdish struggle, the struggle of the Tamils in Sri Lanka. I mean, he has such a rate, you know, all the Chagos Islands, of course, the Chagos Islanders, you know, and Seamus Milne as well, you know, those are some of his big burning interests. It's what you would call, I suppose, anti-imperialism being very much the heart of their shared politics. And that made, you know, Jeremy had total trust in Seamus Milne. He was called TGM, the Great Milne for sure. And he would defer to him whenever articles or speeches were written, how Seamus seen this, what does Seamus think. So I think it's, you know, because no one would, I don't think anyone would argue that, you know, Jeremy is the, you know, he's not, and this is often an asset because often intellectuals in politics, they don't necessarily always go together to be really honest. And, you know, Seamus is very much a profound intellectual and a lot of the thinking, you know, the intellectual kind of basis of a lot of the stuff they talked about, Jeremy Corbyn had unquestioning trust and loyalty towards Seamus Milne, who was able, you know, who became very dominant. Now, after the 2017 election, Andrew Murray, who's Chief of Staff at United also served as an advisor to Corbyn, suggested that Seamus Milne's operation needed to be separated into communications and strategy. To be honest, even someone who's very experienced, I mean, you know, Seamus is someone who's like me, a columnist where you pick your own issues. And in the case of Seamus, you know, he wasn't like the 24-7 user cycle was his thing. And suddenly he had to do all of that. And even the most experienced person was struggle to do that and strategy. So Andrew Murray suggested separating that and Seamus pushed back on that. He felt that would be a public demotion. And I think the point that I learned- I mean, he was perhaps right in that, because that role of the hybrid comms officer political strategist, it was something which was pioneered by Alistair Campbell, Damien McBride. Isn't there a sense that Seamus Milne was trying to fulfill that role? But as a socialist, it would have been a demotion. Yeah, I mean, I just, you know, operationally just didn't work with Seamus. There's not really, look, I feel very guilty about this whole element because Seamus was, you know, I saw of a mentor, he's someone on a personal level who everyone defends. You know, he's not, you know, he's demonised in the most disgraceful way possible by much of the media is this Dower, Stalinist and Putin, and all these other actually just defamatory stuff, which is just untrue. But, you know, wherever people stand, the people in the operation who were very, very emphatic that they shared his politics, who did not believe that it was suited to that role and actually it would have been better if he was a trusted, Jeremy Corbyn's trusted senior advisor specialising in strategy, whilst communications should have been done by somebody else. And I think that would have made a big impact, to be honest, because it wasn't a fun, that was just a dysfunctional part of the operation. You know, it's stuff like, you know, even stuff like, you know, the grid where you get Jeremy Corbyn sent out across the country to do events that ended up that ended up not being run by strategies in will send them to X or YC. And because we've got this announcement or this approach or something we want to declare, where are we going to send him and why? Instead it was, he's going to Ash, he's going to Ashfield or Mansfield, let's work backwards from there. And it was events who had to run that. That's not how a functioning operation should work. So those events were often completely, you know, it was a complete waste of his time a lot of the time. He went in to go and meet some local canvases who were already signed up. There's nothing to announce. Fine, got a load of selfies. It just, you know, I think having, it wasn't to do with Seamus' lack of ability. Seamus is one of the most able people on the left. It was about where he was pop. And I think that was a big problem of the dysfunction of the operation. He was in the wrong place when actually he should have specialized in strategy. But obviously, you know, he had, the reason he, you know, Seamus played an important part in that operation. And he made some very, very important contributions was precisely because unlike, I can't really think of anybody in that position who could have done it, as a senior advisor on strategy, who had that level of trust and loyalty from Jeremy Corbyn, because politically they gelled in quite a unique way. I mean, moving on to someone else who has another very long standing relationship with Jeremy Corbyn is, of course, John McDonnell. And when they were both back benches, they were each other's most reliable allies. And they were this kind of double act of John McDonnell's relentless focus on domestic economic policy and Jeremy Corbyn's aforementioned interest in geopolitics and the international dimension. But by, you know, summer of 2019, they're barely on speaking terms. So what happened there? I wouldn't go that far. I mean, basically in 2018, particularly because of, for example, the episode over Margaret Hodge, their relationship definitely softened. John McDonnell's view is, if he's pursuing action against Margaret Hodge is going to cause a huge amount of political damage with absolutely nothing to speak for it. It looks bad. Why are we doing this? That was his perspective. And that definitely brought tensions on their relationships. They did stay on speaking terms. I think it's important to emphasise this. But John McDonnell's relationship with the leader's office did collapse. And for many months, completely disengaged. And it is interesting that because, you know, it's often said that the shadow chancellor and leader role or chancellor and lead, that relationship can fracture. And actually, I think George Osborne and Tony George Osborne, David Cameron, are quite unique in the sense that actually their relationship didn't didn't really come under the enormous pressures that, for example, famously Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the co-architects of New Labour very much did. And clearly, there were huge tensions in their relationship. There's just no question about it. And of course, what happened in the end is, is true John McDonnell's relationship with the leader's office did collapse, though he stayed on speaking terms with Jeremy Corbyn. No relationship did come under stress, but it remained intact. But obviously, John McDonnell in the end, when the operation was collapsing into disarray, Jeremy Corbyn went back to rely on his longest standing ally. And just before the election of 2019, Carrie Murphy, the chief of staff, was effectively, well, got rid of. And John McDonnell took charge of the operation. But the tensions came because I would say this, this is how I understand it, you know, is John McDonnell, who was actually often seen as the most radical for the pair. I mean, that's, you know, he's the hard man of Corbynism, and, you know, that's how people often refer to him. Armed John McDonnell, do you remember that being a big meme for quite a while? I do remember. I remember John becoming less and less comfortable with that chant at the RMT conference as the years went on. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure D-Dally kind of likes it. No, I mean, after he became Shadow Chancellor, after he became Shadow Chancellor. I mean, I think the thing with John, the way I would look at John McDonnell is he thought we are so close to power that actually finally, there could be a socialist government which could create a new political settlement and could transform the economy and redistribute wealth and power. And in the same way as Atley and Thatcher create a new political settlement that can prevail for a generation or more. That's how we saw it. And it's like, this is within striking distance. And if he had these red lines, and he made these very clear red lines, the economic agenda, transformative agenda, you know, public ownership, higher tax on the rich, invest in the economy, scratch tuition fees, this is all within reach. And his view was self-defeat, like a self-defeating, needless, self-inflicted errors were preventing that from happening. And he saw his role as keeping the show on the road, protecting Jeremy Corbyn, I think partly from himself, I'm sure, you know, he would never say that. His loyalty to Jeremy Corbyn personally is very striking and unshakable. He has quite an emotional loyalty to Jeremy Corbyn. But he clearly saw the project being needlessly damaged by needless battles, needless mistakes. And I think felt that there, this once in a generation chance of taking power was being scoppered by them. And that opened up, that undoubtedly opened up very, very considerable tensions, which led to John McDonald, as I said, completely, for a long period, completely breaking up relations with the leader's office. So John, in the book, you call him a lost leader. And there is the sense of what could have been. Had he been able to make it onto the ballot in 2015, maybe he'd have been the totem for the left. He'd have been a leader who would be more disciplined, more ruthless, better at picking his battles. But there's another bit of the left that would say that maybe John McDonald gets off a bit too lightly. And one area would be with regards to Brexit, because there are lots of people both close to Corbyn and still part of the Labour left who think that the decisive error was shifting towards a second referendum position. And John McDonald was a big part of that. What do you make of that? The way of stopping that is to go back to a time machine after the 2017 election, and Labour set out a very clearly defied Brexit, closed the door permanently to a referendum and campaign on the terms of that Brexit, that soft Brexit. They didn't do that. They left a vacuum. That vacuum was filled by the People's Vote movement. We didn't succeed in winning over Leave Voters, but succeeded in making the existing Remain supporters more angry about Brexit, and less accepting of the referendum result. And the longer the deadlock went on, a growing pervasive sense of actually, we don't have to settle for soft Brexit, we could just reverse this all together. And obviously that succeeded in winning over the membership. And Corbynism, its signature theme was being the Tribune of the Labour membership. So I think the problem, you know, there's a lot I think of revising of history of what actually happened, which is, you know, there was a vindicated faction that held out on a second referendum. And my question that I always don't think is answerable, you know, this idea of let's blame, let's blame John McDonald, let's blame, I don't know, people like me who opposed the second referendum until the European elections and wrote a column saying Labour has no choice after, as it happens, Jeremy Corbyn privately had already accepted, you know, there's a second referendum to show down in the week before the European elections where Jeremy Corbyn said, we've pushed the membership as far as we're going to go, we have to support another referendum and Carrie Murphy, loudly decried. This is a betrayal of the working class, a betrayal of the working class. The problem that I don't think is resolvable by 2019, which is what John McDonald's position was dictated by, and Diane Abbott. Diane Abbott, I find completely erased from all this, by the way, but it absolutely bizarre. I think there were different reasons she's erased from this. Diane Abbott is the closest personally of any MP to Jeremy Corbyn. People forget that, closer than John McDonald. They go back longer, they have a closer relationship. And her position was that the Brexit process, as is, was inherently imbued with racism and anti-migrant prejudice and bigotry in particular, and that Labour was losing its, sorry, that Jeremy Corbyn's only base that really mattered, above all else, was the membership. And if he lost the membership, then he was nothing, he was gone. And that was the position they had in 2019, but that was just an observable reality. The polling by YouGov, which has been very accurate in every leadership election, every single one, very accurate, 2015, 2016 and 2020, showed that after the open elections, the vast majority of the Labour membership demanded another referendum. They were going to impose it at conference. It wasn't just the CLPs, the two of the three biggest unions, Unison and GMB, backed that position. Conference was going to impose it. So you aren't ready to go. And this was the recurring problem with a lot of the period. You either go, we can see where we're going to end up. So we're going to have to accept this now and make the best of it and plan ahead, or you get dragged there kicking and screaming. And that was their choice. And the only way of preventing the 2019, you know, for those of us who didn't want, you know, I had more scars of centrist dads than pretty much any other political battle and FBPE for constantly, throughout 2019, Labour should deal with the Tories, Norway lost, soft Brexit now, a referendum's disastrous. I wrote a column about how ultra-remainers were self-destructive and by not voting Labour. And, you know, it was a waste of time because by then people had shift, you know, the culture war had dragged Labour's base in two different directions, and the membership on most of Labour's voters were remainers. So the only way of preventing that in 2017, I'm afraid, and this is uncomfortable to say, those we now call the lexity faction of the Labour leadership, resisted Labour defining a Brexit. They didn't want Labour to support the customs union, which Labour only did in February 2018. They said we shouldn't define our Brexit at all because that's a hostage to fortune, stick to the 2017 ambiguous position and just don't define it. That was a really fatal mistake because Labour should have defined its Brexit deal and that would have prevented the drift towards remain. I want to put something to you, which is a really interesting thing that I think Ian Lavery says in the book. When he's talking about this divide between Labour's membership and the bits of its electorate that are needed to hold on to in those Red Bull seats, he says, well, look, this is the double-edged sword of a huge expansion in membership numbers. It was something that was seen as the core of Jeremy's support, which is you've got all these young people, diverse cohort of people, mostly based around big cities. But in terms of values, in terms of priorities, in terms of the issues which motivate them to vote, it puts them at odds with their most volatile voter demographic. And do you think that maybe there's some truth in that? That there was an existential problem at the heart of Corbynism and it was this mismatch between the membership and the bits of the electorate it desperately needed to hold on to in a first-pastler post system? Well, again, this comes back to the big existential challenge of Labour in general, not just specific to Corbynism, which is uncomfortable for those who believe in class politics, which is that a big divide, a big generational divide, has opened up in politics. Obviously, people impose a class dynamic on the Brexit referendum, which there is an element of it. There's no question. But equally, if we use what I think is the flawed methodology of pollsters, which is ABC1 is middle class and C2D is working class, which I'm not going to go into why that's problematic, but we'll just stick with that for now. A majority of working class people under 35 voted to remain. A majority of middle class people over 65 voted to leave. It was complicated. And the problem is, if you look at what Labour did in 2017 and 2019, is the younger you were, the more likely you were to support Labour and the more likely you were to support remain. The older you were, the more likely you would support Conservative and also the more likely you were to vote leave. So I don't think it was a surprise that the most enthusiastic support for Corbyn also coincided with an opposition to Brexit. And I think James Schneider actually put it very well, which is on the left, those who would be politically engaged on the left and join the Labour Party, for older people, you got because in the 1970s, and I went into the history of Labour's relationship with the EU from the 60s onwards, and well, before that, but the problem was that because of factorism in the 80s, you've got this big speech in 1988 where Jacques Delors, the head of the EU commission, does this speech that you see in talks about social Europe. And a few days later, Margaret Thatcher says, at speech in Bruges, we did not roll back the frontiers of the state in Britain to have them reimposed at European level. So among that kind of older cohort of people who were like in their 20s and 30s then, it almost seemed that, you know, that all your skepticism gave way to a sense of, well, maybe actually, this is a lifeline in the ICCs of factorism, all of a sudden. They saw the EU as something different. They looked at the social side of it, and increasingly didn't maybe turn the blind out to the neoliberal elements of it. For younger people, every time they saw Brexit here on TV, it was Nigel Farage, it was Boris Johnson, it was the right wing of the Conservatives, it was about immigration. So they saw it as inextricably mixed up with racism and hostility to migrants' rights. And those two sections, those people, whether you're in your teens or your 20s, or whether you're someone who was in the Labour Party or on the left, you know, who's now in your 50s or 60s, for those reasons, you came to see Brexit as an innately reactionary project if you were politically engaged enough to join the Labour Party. And often those older voters who did support Labour in those so-called red wall seats, they would be in trade unions often, and they did, they'd been united and so on, but they often did not join the Labour Party. So you did have that problem, there's no question, but I think it's inevitable. You know, most Labour voters did vote to remain in the European Union, and it's not a surprise that the most enthusiastic of those tended to be Corbyn supporters who back remain for that reason. But there was still a problem, and I totally empathise with what Ian Labour is saying, and John Trickett others, which is, because the problem we have is if you go to the big urban centres, take Hornsey and Woodgreen. Hornsey and Woodgreen, I don't know how big their membership is now, but at one point, one in 14 members of the local constituency were members of the Labour Party, one in 14 voters in Hornsey and Woodgreen had joined the Labour Party, and that's obviously a big urban, younger, diverse seat, remaining seat, and if you go to places that Labour represented in places like, you know, in places in the north, like Bolton, you'd have constituency Labour Party to about 300 members, and that's absolutely true. There was a crisis of representation where a lot of older working class voters in those seats did not join the Labour Party, but the problem with it was that is the only membership Corbynism had, and it's absolutely right to say that, that being a problem, but you can't simultaneously, this became the fatal problem in the end, you can't position yourself as the very basis of your project in two leadership elections as the tribune of the membership against the hostile parliamentary Labour Party, and then when the membership go on the biggest issue of the day, we want another referendum, there's only so long you can keep that back, and that became the problem in the end. So I want to move on to another really, I think the most emotionally challenging and difficult part of the book to read, especially for me, and that was on anti-Semitism, and I think the reason why it was so emotionally difficult was both you and I have a shared experience of being really crucified by both polarised sides of the debate, on the one hand doing media appearances and being seen as, you know, the living embodiment of vicious vitriolic and semitism, then on the other hand, certain sections of the left decrine you as a traitor for saying more needs to be done, or maybe they should be handled in this way, or maybe it's not all a smear, and that there are these things that need to be dealt with. So I think as a chapter it's very emotionally painful. Before I get to the bits where I think I maybe disagree with you a little bit, I want you to have a chance to set out your store before I go in with my pickaxe. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I mean, yeah, that was always giving me the most painful and difficult chapter, and this has been sent to myself because I think, you know, whatever, however you think Labour handled anti-Semitism, it was a very traumatic period for Jewish people of a range of political opinions. And that psychologically, for me, I was found it kind of a very surreal, very surreal that on the one hand, I had people basically demarcating me angrily as an apologist for calling an anti-Semitism, and on the other that I was part of the anti-Semitic, the smear campaign against the Labour leadership. And that that remains my timeline today on Twitter, certainly. I think my view was that the, you know, I always framed it as walk and chew gum, which is the vast majority of the Labour membership are poor anti-Semitism, that minority are anti-Semitic, that a broader group of people are in denial about that fact in a way that has caused hurt and distress to Jewish people, that the leadership is not anti-Semitic, but it did fail to deal with anti-Semitism swiftly enough, and not just in terms of process, and it wasn't because the old party machine, which was hostile to Corbynism politically, has huge questions, which I go into the book about their failures in dealing with anti-Semitism, but also politically, and that there's a lack of emotional intelligence. And the way I always see this is, and look, I mean, this is difficult, because obviously, you know, my qualifications and the sense to talk about this, you know, as a white guy is a big caveat. But I do, I would say that I do think it's true that what the London Labour left did, which Jeremy Corbyn was part of, was partly revolt against an old left, which was seen as class reductionist, it reduced everything to class without integrating the struggles of gay people for their rights, women's liberation, and of course, anti-Semitism. And the understanding correctly of racism was structural. It was, it is, who is stopped and searched by the police, who is incarcerated disproportionately, who is disproportionately targeted by the war with drugs, who is disproportionately poor, who is disproportionately homeless and in poor quality housing, who is disproportionately degraded in popular culture. And obviously, centering on the sense of whiteness, which isn't static, because whiteness has always evolved throughout the ages in terms of who is classed as white and who isn't. And for Jewish people, for a very long time in a class, there's very much not white. And then I think for some, there was this ambiguous relationship between are Jews white or not? And I think what happened, I think after World War II, because remember back on Cable Street, for example, the 1930s was in the then Jewish working class of the East End, it was a sense of that became very dominant, despite the last anti-Jewish riots were actually 1947 in this country, that Jews had been absorbed into whiteness and didn't suffer structural discrimination, structural racism in the same way that black people and then later Muslims did. And I think the problem has been, among sections of the left, a lack of a failure to engage with a very, very deep-rooted collective trauma on the part of the Jewish people, which is over 2000 years of persecution, blood libel, pogroms, you know, deportations, expulsions, death, culminating with the attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe, succeeded in killing two-thirds within living memory. And a sense of prior history, it seemed like they were times of acceptance, which very quickly the winds changed and they had to flee as their ancestors have always had to do. That is just real, that's how Jewish people feel. It is raw, it is profound, it is deep, and I think a lot of people did not engage with that properly. You know that there are still people alive today who have tattooed into their arms the camp numbers from Auschwitz Birkenau, who can still remember SS guards and who can still smell the smoke coming out of chimneys, from burned bodies in extermination camps. And that is just real. And that's why, you know, I looked at Israel, it's very complicated Israel in a sense, because, you know, Israel originally was supported by the left in a problematic way, as it turns out, both by the official communist movement at the Soviet Union and also the labour left, Tony Ben Naibeth and Jenny Lee, Ian Mccardo, Eric Heffer, who famously walked off the stage when Neil Kinnock denounced militant in 1985. And they supported it on the basis of its, you know, this was a minority who had suffered centuries of persecution and just suffered genocide. And there was a socialist ethos to the original Zionist project in terms of how it presented itself. And there was a disregard actually for the Mecca, in which three quarters of a million Palestinians were kicked out of their homes and were faced mass ethnic cleansing. Many died in the process were killed, murdered. And hundreds of villages were raised to the ground. And what changed in the 1960s, of course, where you have the struggles of the Vietnamese against the French, then the Americans, the Algerians against the French, is after the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, the Palestinians became seen as part of a general global anti-colonial struggle, where Israel was increasingly seen like the same European-style colonizers elsewhere. And that accelerated more and more, particularly in the 80s, you had Lebanon, you had the massacre of Shabren Shatia, and Israel increasingly just, you know, cast off in the same trajectory as elsewhere. You know, it's socialist presentation in favour of neoliberalism, privatisation, the Kibbutz were privatised. And by the 90s, it was just seen unambiguously, Israel is a colonial oppressor armed and backed by the West, which is colonising the land of the Palestinians and the ways that happened, for example, in Africa, with the European colonial settler states. And all I'd say is, it's the way that so many Jews see Israel, it cannot be divorced from how we see this, because obviously stand normal colonial projects are Europeans planting their flag, planting the British flag in Rhodesia and claiming it for Britain and there. And obviously, there's a, you know, Rhodesia was not founded by survivors of genocide. And Israel partly was, and they saw themselves as fleeing persecution and genocide. And therefore, Israel to lots of Jews, even when they oppose the occupation, is seen as a refuge of last resort. And it is both a state that is seen by many Jews as a refuge of last resort and a state which clearly has colonial style and increasingly familiar to the likes of apartheid South Africa, in terms of its brutal and illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and outright enshrined racism, which we saw recently with the nation state law passed in Israel. But it's complicated because you can't not engage with how many Jews genuinely see it, including those on the left, as well as accepting its colonial style manifestations. Those are the things I try to explore, but it's fucking complicated as I've just waffled. No, it is really complicated. And also, don't envy the task that you had set for yourself, because regardless of what it is you want to do, you do have to engage with the geopolitics of it, and you do have to engage with the trauma of it, and you do have to make an attempt to see it through the eyes of a Palestinian as well. It's really challenging undertaking in terms of writing the chapter of a book. And so before I get into the bits where I have some, I think, relatively modest departures from what you think, I'll start with where I feel I've learned and things that I've had to examine my own position on and change on a bit. Because I think I thought that I understood a lot about anti-Semitism because I understood from my own experience and from my political education racism. And I do understand my own experience racism, and I do understand from my political education racism. But there was a lot that I didn't understand about anti-Semitism. And it took a friend of mine who's an organizer with the DSA in the States to really pull me up on it. And one of the things that he said is like, Ash, but you've got to understand that anti-Semitism is cyclical. And it is just at that time at which you feel the most integrated into an existing social order, the most economically well-off, the most socially validated, that that's when the pop grom comes, that's when the rise of fascism comes. And all of that is taken away from you. You have that with the so-called Dreyfus Affair in France at the end of the 19th century, early 20th century, when there was an attempt to scapegoat a French soldier who was imprisoned. And you got this, you know, French Jews were made to feel we are French, we are, you know, all citizens of the French Republic. And then suddenly it shifted. And who was the most integrated seemingly Jewish population in Europe and into war Europe? It was the German Jews. And that's something which is, which is very distinctive about anti-Semitism from Islamophobia and anti-blackness and forms of racism, which have, you know, targeted, you know, Roma and Traveller communities, right? That is something which is really different. And that's something which it took me an embarrassingly long time to get my head around. And I don't think it came in time for me to deal adequately with the labour anti-Semitism crisis, I'm ashamed to say. And I think that that's something which, when you're in the heat of a political moment like that, it's a hard time to do your learning because you're completely consumed with a sense of precarity of the political project that you fervently believe in and you want to succeed. So I think that there was a lot of that going on. And I think it prevented me from seeing certain things clearly. But where I depart from what's done in your book is that this is my problem with the walking chew gum imperative, which is, it's actually not that simple. It's not that simple to walk into gum because however you approach it, you're being drawn into these contested questions of geopolitics and history, where in order to make it seem simple, you've got to resolve contradictions and contested experiences down into something that's very simple. So for instance, the account of 1948 to present day Israel, there's a lot that you establish as just a fact. Whereas for many Palestinian historians, for many people come from a different point of view, that isn't just a fact. And I think that this becomes animated or rendered as theater in the moment where you see Jeremy Corbyn and Seamus Milne in a meeting with the board of deputies. And it is a fort meeting because Corbyn and Milne enter the meeting unwilling to make any concessions in terms of their own internal processes. And there are questions being put to them about left anti-semitism, particularly to do with the state of Israel. There are two things in particular which I sort of said to them. One is, if I remember it correctly, imploring Jeremy Corbyn say something positive about the state of Israel, why doesn't he celebrate, for instance, the hospitals that treat both Palestinians and Israelis, and then one which is addressed to Seamus Milne, which is a lot of the left has never gotten over the fact that it was established in the first place, to which Milne replies it wasn't the establishment of the state of Israel that was the problem, it was the ethnic cleansing that followed. And your sense is like, well, this is deeply unhelpful in this meeting, which is supposed to be about dealing with anti-semitism. For me, it's not about what's helpful and what's not, because I think obviously if you go into that meeting with certain strategic goals, that's not how you speak if you want to achieve them. But what it illustrates to me is that even when you try and walk into gum, there's always an imperative that you spit out your take on the geopolitics of it, shall we say? Yeah, I mean, as I discussed in the book itself, and I looked at, for example, the IRA, Definition Anti-Semitism, which no one objected to, but then the examples in which people did object specifically to two of the examples of one and a half, really, and about how Palestinian voices had been sidelined from that. And I interviewed extensively a British Palestinian lawyer and also quoted from the Palestinian ambassador to Britain, who talked about how talking about a racist endeavor, we're talking about the Nakba, that's where the Palestinians were expelled and driven from their villages and their homes at the foundation of Israel in 1948, how that was a racist endeavor and so on. The point I made about the meeting with the British Board of Deputies, and I actually think, I mean, Corbyn's own allies at the time, just felt that it just wasn't helpful to end up being driven, being the discussion being taken into a position of just having a big debate about, for example, the foundation of Israel at that point. It just wasn't a constructive thing to whoever started it, and it wasn't James Milne actually started that discussion, actually to just stay completely focused on the issue of dealing with anti-Semitism and to disentangle it from the issue of Israel. Obviously, it's completely unreasonable to expect Jeremy Corbyn to issue a statement celebrating Israeli hospitals, treating different citizens as though this is something anyone should be lauded for, and we know that Israeli Arabs suffer discriminatory, suffer widespread extensive discrimination within Israel without even talking about Palestinians in the occupied territories in the West Bank, but it was just the case of, you know, that was just a kind of side kind of, it was always going to be a very difficult meeting, and actually Laura Murray, who for a long time served as Jeremy Corbyn's stakeholder manager within Lotto, had come up with a series of compromise suggestions to pop to the Board of Deputies that they didn't take along with them to submit to the Board of Deputies, and that was a mistake, and instead then that vacuum ends up partly filled with the discussion on the foundation of Israel and the expulsion of Palestinian people from their homes, and that was the problem, but actually if they, you know, there could have been what was always going to be a difficult situation, they could have staked out a position which wasn't just signing up to everything the Board of Deputies said, you know, and just because, you know, communal organizations can speak, can, you know, every communal organization can speak to an extent for large that, you know, and they are seen by most Jews in this country as the most representative organization, that's just a fact, and that doesn't mean every demand has to be agreed to, but there should at least be a dialogue where the leadership can at least try and address many of those logistic concerns that did exist amongst many Jewish people in this country, but as I said, instead a lot of that meeting got sidelined into talking about the foundation of Israel which wasn't a helpful thing to do. I'm not saying yet abandon that debate by the way, obviously we should talk about, as I talked about in the book, about how Israel was founded and the consequences of that, which the left failed to do at the time, it's interesting the left only talked about that in the mainstream quite long after it actually happened, the Palestinians, because at the time it was seen as, you know, a socialist progressive new Jewish state and Arab nationalism was irredeemably reactionary, that's how it was seen at the time, where, you know, the Arab monarchies were united to crush this nascent progressive state founded by refugees, that's how it was seen by the left, and it was belatedly, the left spoke about that, and of course we need to talk about that, and we should unreservedly champion the rights of the Palestinian people, and I'd say the twin failure of the Labour leadership was not to make, at the beginning, a strong enough argument against anti-Semitism, an emotional case against conspiracism, which the left always attracts, where people don't believe in seeing capitalism as a series of power relations, but rather as shadowy individuals pulling strings which always lends itself to anti-Semitism, they should have made a passionate, polemical, you know, case against anti-Semitism, the evil of anti-Semitism, they should have rolled up political education at the start, it would have always been difficult because the, you know, Jewish support for Labour actually collapsed before Jeremy Corbyn became leader, collapsed under Ed Miliband, who was actually the third Jewish leader of the Labour Party, but it was always going to be difficult and fought, but they could have done that, and actually made a more passionate, vigorous case and support of Palestinian rights, they didn't really do that, it wasn't like I wouldn't look back and go, there were various reasons for that, you know, Emily Thornbury on foreign policy issues diverged quite significantly on lots of things from the leadership, and that was Jeremy Corbyn's big thing, it wasn't like they advanced the cause of the Palestinian people and Palestinian rights in that period, actually because of, you know, because of what's happened, that's been set back, and actually they could have done both things, I'm not saying that would have solved it, it's still to be fucking hard and difficult, and someone from Jeremy Corbyn's political tradition was always going, you know, lots of Jewish people in this country because of a sincere view they have about Israel and how they've grown up to see it as a refuge, a last, you know, the last possible refuge when everything goes wrong, which their ancestors didn't have and therefore got slaughtered, that's how they see it, that was always going to be a difficult thing to navigate because it's a very emotional war thing for many Jews in this country and elsewhere, but they could have reassured many Jews, we're not going to agree on everything on Israel, I'm afraid, but we're going to take anti-Semitism fucking seriously and we're not going to abide by it, your British Jews who have suffered terrible and continued to suffer terrible bigotry prejudice, we're not standing for it, we're going to fight for you, we've got your back and we're also separately going to fight for Palestinian rights, bad faith actors would still have jumped in but they would have had a lot less to go on and that was the mistake they made. Well now we're in the home straight of this interview Owen and you'll be relieved to know we're moving on from anti-Semitism, onto the existential crisis facing the Labour Party, yeah sorry you wrote a really difficult book so it wasn't going to be like okay and so who would win in a fight, Ariana Grande or do you want a little bit better? Write the book for the interview you want my friends, that's my tip to you. Okay so I mean really this is my final question but it is a fucking big one and it is we can go over the internal workings of the Corbyn office looking for mistakes, we could even go back a bit further and look at what went wrong for Miliband with his Scottish strategy or lack thereof and in the present day we can debate whether Starmer is seen as strong enough in national security to win back the Red War. But are we just arguing over who should captain the Titanic after it's already smacked into the iceberg and the real fact is that the Labour Party is facing an existential crisis because organised labour is facing an existential crisis so working days lost to strike action are at a historic low, ditto the number of people involved in ongoing labour disputes, unionisation as you point out in the book is very weak across the retail and service sector which took the place of heavy industry which was smashed to bits across the 1980s and 1990s. So the question is does the political constituency that could sustain a powerful labour left even exist anymore? Is 2017 as close as we're ever going to get? No, I mean you're absolutely right this you know because of the defeat suffered by the left and the labour movement the atomisation that's you know because you before you had a working class without being de-eyed about this because this was often very male dominated, whites, women forced to do vast amounts of unpaid labour often whilst having to do paid labour as well but you did have communities obviously based around workplaces people did the same job often for life that bread and often a more organic sense of solidarity and when you have a service sector with a big turnover of workers jumping from job to job things are far more fragmented the trade unions obviously are far weaker partly because of that but also the anti-union laws and the legacy of mass unemployment in the 80s and but then again you know you did see in 2017 a left led labour party come closer to power than it's ever done so you know clearly it's not you know we shouldn't again be fatalistic about these things even if we accept the challenges and I think the real problem we have and we've got to confront this in a way that is uncomfortable for our politics because I applaud generational politics I read an article after article against generational politics we have 1.9 million pensioners in this country living in poverty we also have younger people who have that least fund and go to private school and have their deposit booked down for them by their parents and can afford to do unpaid internships that said there is an unprecedented generational divide that has opened up when labour got absolutely smashed in 1983 that's when the youth vote by a landslide there wasn't a big generational divide even in 1987 there was a one-point difference amongst 18 to 24 years whether they voted Tory or Labour so this divide is very very new in terms of being a kind of feature of the political map and what's happened is over 60 you know older people who represent a big section of the electorate and also the most motivated to vote their living standards have rightly been protected by the triple lock since the crash home ownership has gone up their house prices have gone up partly because of quantitative easing so then they are better off than they were before the crash if you're over 65 you're better off and at the same time that age group doubled their wealth in the decade following the financial crisis it's astonishing it's absolutely huge and it could include equity and so on in that as well I mean it's a huge huge increase compared to the rest of the population and they tend to be more socially conservative you know on issues like immigration multiculturalism Islam LGBTQ rights feminism the polling is very very very clear they have a very different view of the world than younger people do and then you have a working age population that suffered the worst squeeze in wages of any industrialised country other than Greece the longest squeeze since the Napoleonic War and that is more acute the younger you get where home ownership collapsed in favour of a private unregulated sector with rip-off rents and a lack of security where the half of young people who go to university are saddled with debt which is a permanent ball of chain of the living standards where their youth services got decimated where a lot of public services they rely on got decimated where social security they disproportionately rely on has been absolutely battered you know I mean you know just this absolute multi-pronged attack on their living standards and security you know a lack of secure well-paid jobs even if you get saddled with debt you often end up with a low paid insecure job at the end of it you know a bogus self-employment the looked-in part-time work gig economy you name it and you're likely to have progressive social values more likely much more likely than older Britons immigration LGBTQ rights multiculturalism Islam feminism they live I mean that gap that divide is so unprecedented there's no basis in in democratic history in this country for that divide it's not by the way we shouldn't climb up and there's nothing innate to young people behaving like this because if you look to Hungary and Turkey young people are even more reactionary than older people so it's nothing innate but in Spain the United States and Britain that divide is very very striking and there was no easy answer to it there's not an easy answer to it because um you know what that you know as I said in the book the success and failure of Corbynism can be summed up in one sentence it amassed unprecedented support from younger people and an unprecedented lack of support from older people and that crosses the our traditional understanding of class it's complicated because you get homoaning ex skilled workers who are voting conservative and then you get university educated young precarious workers who vote like a neighbor and obviously you get you wrote a very interesting very good piece during the election challenging the esteemed pollster John Curtis by saying labor is no longer a part of the working class it's a part of the young because though young and working class are discrete entities obviously young people who don't own capital own homes and have insecure jobs you know are selling their labor in order to live and nothing else are working class whether they went to university or not whether their parents such a middle class or not however we define middle class but it is still the case we can't ignore the fact because there was a very flawed piece of research which I saw some people on the left sharing which said well actually the Tories won low earners for the first time in history that's only including pensioners and obviously pensioners their income is lower but they that's not the only source of wealth I mean they have wealth their property but if you exclude pensioners obviously labor won low earners as you'd expect I don't know how we square that generational divide it's not easy it's a direct challenge to our politics and that is that has become entrenched in the way we've never faced and that remains Kier Starmer's challenge as much as it was Jeremy Corbyn's. Well on that note of looking towards the future and the challenges ahead I'm going to liberate you from this Skype prison Owen thank you so much for joining thank you lots of love