Notes On Now

More Sectarianism

Since my student days, I have never joined a political party. But I am now one of the 800,000 who have signed up to explore the possibilities of ‘Your Party’.

Though I have no time for Jeremy Corbyn as a leader, I had a great deal of time for the ‘Corbyn wave’ of 2015. It was, to quote the Labour MP Clive Lewis in the foreword to the recently published The Starmer Symptom, edited by Mark Perryman, “a redefinition of the possible, a moment when grassroots activism, radical ideas, and the audacity of political hope took centre stage. It represented a demand for genuine democracy, pluralism, and transformative change”.

I’m baffled by how Corbyn continues to be indulged.

In his book This Land: The Struggle for the Left, Owen Jones – who has magnificently held the Starmer Government and the media to account on Gaza – produced a toe-curling shocker of an interview with Corbyn, emphasising that Corbynism should not be absolved from “its many failures in management, communications and, especially, strategy” and describing Corbyn as “chronically indecisive … sometimes directionless and rudderless”. At the very least, then, I expected Jones to ask Corbyn if he had learned anything from these “many failures”. Not at all!