Preparations for the founding conference of Britain’s new socialist party – provisionally named ‘Your Party’ – are underway. More than 800,000 people have registered as supporters. Local groups, proto-branches and incipient caucuses are already springing up across the country, sparking a lively debate about how the project’s democratic structures and political programme should be configured. One topic of discussion is the historical experience of Corbynism and the lessons it might yield: how to recapture its insurgent energy, while avoiding any repetition of the bitter defeat of 2019.
Alex Nunns is an author and activist who worked as Jeremy Corbyn’s speechwriter from 2018 to 2020. He has chronicled the ups and downs of the British left over the past decade for publications such as Jacobin and Red Pepper, as well as editing books by Julian Assange and Norman Finkelstein among others. His book The Candidate (2017) was widely acclaimed as the definitive account of Corbyn’s rise to the top of the Labour Party and the broader conditions that enabled it. In his forthcoming work, Sabotage (2026), he analyses the establishment campaign that eventually toppled the socialist leadership, allowing Keir Starmer to reclaim the party for the right.
Nunns spoke to Oliver Eagleton about why an accurate understanding of Corbynism – especially the structural and contingent reasons for its decline, from the national balance of forces to the conflicts within the Labour apparatus – is essential to develop a coherent strategy for Britain’s new left party.
This series of interviews on the prospects for Your Party will be collected as a book, to be published by Verso ahead of the conference, with contributions from other key figures involved in the party’s formation.
Oliver Eagleton: Why is the Corbyn project of 2015-19 relevant to the new left party?
Alex Nunns: Your Party is being created against the backdrop of the Corbyn phenomenon. It’s safe to assume most of the people who have signed up as supporters were shaped politically by the experience of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour. The lucky ones may even have made it though without lasting post-traumatic stress disorders. It was an intense and often bewildering period, and to learn its lessons we need a well-grounded understanding of what happened.
After the 2019 election, when Labour’s defeat was fresh, the constraints that Jeremy and the movement had operated under could still be felt, and the overwhelming forces that had vanquished us remained visible. Some of that has since been forgotten. More recently, a simplistic reading of history has gained ground, which suggests that the defeat of the Corbyn project was self-inflicted through cowardice and timidity, including that of individual advisers or the leader himself.
This line of thinking has a certain ironic affinity with the view of the Corbyn years presented in journalistic accounts like Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire’s Left Out and Owen Jones’s This Land, which place a comparable emphasis on office politics at the top of Labour. But whereas in those books the leadership tends to be characterised as too intransigent or radical to run an effective opposition, in this new reading the focus on key personalities is the same but the argument is inverted: Corbyn and his advisers were not defiant or radical enough. The fatal flaw in the Corbyn project, it’s claimed, was the political weakness of its leading figures, who gave way instead of standing their ground.
This gets the story of Corbyn’s Labour wrong. It ignores the larger structural factors that actually shape history, and so neglects vital insights into what happens when a left party comes close to gaining power. The reality is that Corbyn and those around him spent five years fighting tooth-and-nail against far more powerful opponents, while being hampered throughout by a sabotage operation of unprecedented scale and intensity. They didn’t surrender; they lost.
That said, the historically remarkable thing was not that Corbynism was defeated in 2019, but that it wasn’t defeated until then. It vastly exceeded expectations on multiple fronts. It made austerity a dirty word, forced the Conservative government back on key policies, pushed the political conversation to the left, galvanised a movement, transformed Labour into the biggest left party in Europe, and gave people hope. In the 2017 election Labour surged to 40% of the vote, recording the biggest increase in vote share of any party since 1945. It won 12.9 million votes for a left platform – still Labour’s second highest tally since 1966 – and gained seats for the first time in twenty years, depriving the Conservatives of their majority. The establishment wants to erase that from history. Let’s not help them by rewriting the story as one of unremitting failure. There were mistakes and shortcomings, to be sure, but the new party can only learn from them if they are properly diagnosed.
OE: You mentioned a sabotage operation. How did that work?
AN: There were two distinct waves of sabotage. The first lasted from 2015-17 and was about who controlled the party. The second, from 2017-19, was about who controlled the country. To understand the first wave, bear in mind that the outer wall of the British establishment ran through the middle of the Labour Party. On one side were foot soldiers of the state and capital, who dominated the party’s elected representatives and staff; on the other were socialists and radicals who had been kept out of positions of influence for most of Labour’s history. When Jeremy won the leadership, he wasn’t just taking the helm of a democratic party, he was storming one of the establishment’s fortresses. The response was predictably fierce. Labour bureaucrats and parliamentarians undermined the leadership at every turn. Right-wing staff in Labour’s HQ refined the art of bureaucratic obstruction and leaked to the press continuously. Meanwhile, MPs volunteered their services to the media to denounce virtually everything the leadership did, meaning that no matter what the issue was, the headlines were dominated by ‘Labour division’. The Parliamentary Labour Party – the collective term for Labour MPs – made itself ungovernable.
This climaxed in the coup of 2016, when MPs attempted to force Jeremy to resign with coordinated resignations and a vote of no confidence. When he refused, making his opponents challenge him in a leadership election, the party bureaucracy tried to exclude him from the ballot but was foiled by the trade unions. It didn’t stop there. In the 2017 election, Labour staff ran a secret parallel campaign, diverting party resources to their allies in safe seats in defiance of the ambitious offensive strategy agreed by the party’s official Campaign Committee. In the end, the result was so close in crucial seats that it’s possible to argue that if those resources had been allocated to the right constituencies, it could have toppled the Conservative government.
During this first wave of sabotage, the British establishment mostly relied on its allies in the Labour Party to neutralise the Corbyn leadership. It effectively said: ‘You’ve landed yourself with this left-wing leader; it’s your job to get rid of him. We’ll leave it to you.’ Happily, this kind of sabotage won’t recur in the new party, at least not initially, because it won’t have the same place in the British governing system. It will be entirely outside the fortress.
When Jeremy confounded everyone and came close to power in 2017, he became the biggest domestic threat to the British establishment since the aftermath of the First World War. This triggered the second wave of sabotage. Jeremy was unassailable as Labour leader, so a more sophisticated operation, involving a wider cast of characters, was now needed to stop him becoming prime minister. This effort was mostly channelled through two long-running controversies – the ‘Labour antisemitism crisis’ and Brexit. Both deepened divisions within the party, including within the leadership itself, and discredited it more widely. There are more lessons for the new party here.
OE: It’s worth looking at these two controversies more closely. How was the antisemitism crisis concocted?
AN: When Jeremy became Leader of the Opposition, Britain had, for the first time, a potential prime minister who was unequivocally committed to Palestinian rights. This alone mobilised a coalition of Israel supporters against him. What followed was a concerted campaign that seized on allegations of antisemitism against Labour members and Jeremy himself to inflict maximum political damage on the Corbyn leadership. This coalition encompassed the Labour right, an Atlanticist tendency for whom support for Israel had become a bizarrely prominent part of its identity, and the associated Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel; outside the party it extended to all the pro-Israel Jewish communal organisations, such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council, plus the Jewish communal press; the full breadth of the British establishment; and international actors including the state of Israel itself, whose prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly condemned Corbyn, and the US, whose secretary of state Mike Pompeo told Jewish leaders in New York that Washington would do its ‘level best’ to ‘push back’ against a Corbyn government. This was a hugely powerful bloc. Most of its campaigning was channelled through a complicit media – including the BBC and the Guardian – which devoted credulous and disproportionate coverage to antisemitism claims while showing an unshakable lack of interest in the political agendas behind them.
While there evidently were some cases of Labour members making antisemitic comments, usually online, it’s beyond doubt that, as Jeremy later put it, ‘the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents’. Morgan McSweeney, who’s now Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, was at the time trawling pro-Corbyn Facebook groups for antisemitic comments from random members of the public and feeding them to the Sunday Times. Yet despite his efforts, and those of a network of people doing similar work, only a tiny fraction of the membership was ever the subject of a complaint. But that was never really the point. The idea being pushed by those orchestrating the campaign was that the party leadership, its mass base and even left-wing ideas themselves were fundamentally and pervasively antisemitic. This was wholly false.
The story behind the infamous BBC Panorama documentary ‘Is Labour Antisemitic?’, broadcast just months before the 2019 general election, illustrates how this campaign worked. Initially, staff working in the party’s complaints unit, who were hostile to the leadership, were extremely slow to process even clear-cut cases of antisemitism such as Holocaust denial – perhaps because they wanted the blame to fall on Jeremy, or perhaps because they were bafflingly incompetent bureaucrats. Some examples of these cases found their way into the press. Labour MPs demanded: ‘Why won’t Corbyn intervene?’ A narrative was spun that Jeremy was failing to act on antisemitism.
By spring 2018 the left was finally strong enough to oust the right-wing general secretary of the party, Iain McNicol, and, during a hiatus of a few weeks before his successor took over, the staff in the complaints unit decided to ask the Leader’s Office for advice on individual cases. These requests were generally met with encouragement to take action, with the exception of a handful of cases involving anti-Zionist Jewish members. The email exchanges, whose content was entirely uncontroversial, were later leaked to the media and ultimately formed the crux of the Panorama documentary by journalist John Ware, who had previously denounced Corbyn as ‘stimulated by disdain for the West [and] appeasement of extremism’. His documentary suggested Labour staff had been hampered in dealing with antisemitism complaints due to interference from the Leader’s Office.
The MPs now realised they had been saying the wrong thing. Instead of ‘Why won’t Corbyn intervene?’ the call became: ‘How dare Corbyn interfere!’ After the Equality and Human Rights Commission – an arm’s-length body of the state, run by government appointees – launched an investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party, these same allegations became one of the central planks of its report. The fanfare around the report’s release in 2020 created a false impression that Jeremy had interfered to protect antisemites. The fact the evidence pointed the other way was politely ignored by all, and an attempt by Jeremy to push back even mildly against the fictitious notion that Labour had been overrun by antisemitism earned him suspension and ultimately exclusion from the party at the hands of his successor, Keir Starmer. So there you have it: a sequence of events in which different parts of the establishment were effectively working in concert. Party bureaucrats associated with the Labour right engage in inadvertent or deliberate obstruction; this gives ammunition to right-wing Labour MPs to attack the leadership; the claims get amplified by a hostile media, and are ultimately weaponised by the state.
OE: So how does this analysis relate to the new party? What can it learn, including negatively, from the Corbyn leadership’s response to the smear campaign?
AN: The campaign I’ve described obviously couldn’t recur in the same form in the new party. One of the features that made it so difficult to respond to was the fact that much of it emanated from within the Labour Party itself, involving staff and MPs, many of whom had been engaged in the wider sabotage operation since 2015. Another feature of the campaign was its mobilisation of an identity politics that was then reaching its zenith on the left, making it very hard for left-wingers to dispute what people described as their ‘lived experience’ of racism.
Of course, the rest of that enormous coalition of powerful forces ranged against Corbyn’s Labour will also mobilise against Your Party, especially if it comes close to power. So it’s understandable that some people would call for Your Party to be defiant and robust from the outset, in supposed contrast to the Corbyn leadership which is accused of having given too much ground. This was reflected by Zarah Sultana in her Sidecar interview, when she said Corbynism ‘capitulated’ to the IHRA definition of antisemitism. But Jeremy didn’t capitulate: on the contrary, he and his team held out to the bitter end in an attempt to resist the adoption by Labour’s National Executive Committee of the most problematic examples that accompany the IHRA definition – some of which have been used to clamp down on pro-Palestinian speech and Palestinians’ right to describe their own dispossession. Jeremy endured hell throughout the summer of 2018 for making this stand; no other part of the Labour movement represented on the NEC stuck by him. Right down to the wire, at the NEC meeting in September 2018 when the examples were adopted in full, Jeremy tabled a statement arguing that it ‘should not be regarded as antisemitic to describe Israel, its policies or the circumstances around its foundation as racist because of their discriminatory impact, or to support another settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict’ (i.e. one state). There wasn’t enough support to put it to a vote. There was no magic lever Jeremy or his team could pull to change that situation. The Labour Party is a byzantine organisation with multiple power centres; being the leader doesn’t mean you can always get your way.
A more valid criticism of Corbynism would be that the organised parts of the project – including the leadership and the left-wing campaign group Momentum – didn’t sufficiently shield grassroots members from the antisemitism firestorm. The mechanisms for two-way engagement with the broader movement were lacking. Some members who were wrongly accused of antisemitism suffered hugely traumatic experiences that changed their lives. It’s easy to forget how suffocating the atmosphere was. It demoralised the movement. At the top level, while it’s naïve to imagine that defiant statements from the leader would have stopped this concerted campaign, there could have been a greater effort, especially early on, to emphasise Jeremy’s support for Palestinian rights as an explanation for the furore, which otherwise appeared baffling. If the same events were to occur today, that connection would be more obvious to people because of the genocide in Gaza. We’re in a different context now.
OE: And Brexit?
AN: It’s interesting that the antisemitism crisis now looms larger than Brexit in many people’s minds, but it wasn’t the cause of Corbynism’s defeat. At the apex of the antisemitism crisis, in summer 2018, Labour remained at 40% in the polls. The collapse only happened in 2019, especially around the European elections in May, by which time Brexit had become a political black hole, engulfing every other issue.
The dynamic of the sabotage in this case was different. Of course, Brexit was always going to split Labour’s support base to some extent, but those divisions were deliberately exacerbated to harm the leadership. In the 2017 election an overwhelming majority had voted for parties committed to respecting the referendum vote to leave the European Union. But it wasn’t long before the campaign for a second referendum – to overturn the first – was making inroads. Many supporters of the ‘People’s Vote’ campaign and likeminded groups were earnest and passionate Remainers, but there was no mistaking that the organisations themselves tended to be steered by a kind of Blairite revival theatre troupe, including disgraced figures like Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, with Tony Blair himself lurking backstage. Remainerism gave these washed-up actors a fresh audience and a new lease of life. They may have railed against a Tory Brexit, but the real target of their campaign was Corbyn’s Labour: they saw an opportunity to drive a wedge between a leadership mindful that a majority of Labour constituencies had voted to Leave, and a party membership that mostly wanted to Remain. Much the same group of saboteur MPs who had tried to overrule the members’ choice for leader a few years earlier now found themselves aligned with the members on an issue they could use to undermine the leadership.
This campaign crept up through the Parliamentary Labour Party like rising damp. It could be seen early on in performative amendments in parliament. A small but telling example in November 2017 was an amendment to the Customs Bill to keep the UK in the EU single market and customs union, voted for by a core group of hostile right-wing Labour MPs. The amendment was economically ‘illiterate’, according to Labour’s trade secretary Barry Gardiner, because it would have prevented the UK placing tariffs on any goods from anywhere in the world, but that didn’t matter because the purpose was simply for the MPs to brief journalists like Robert Peston that Labour’s frontbench had shamefully voted with the Tories and betrayed the cause. Gradually, the number of parliamentarians involved in such operations grew, until the damp climbed to the level of the shadow cabinet. Starmer, then Corbyn’s Brexit secretary, became the central figure, using media interviews and speeches to consistently and incrementally exceed the bounds of the leadership’s position, most dramatically at the 2018 party conference, when he added an unapproved line to his speech announcing that Remain would not be ruled out as an option in a future referendum. It’s plain from journalistic accounts that he was positioning himself to succeed Jeremy, and the fact he abandoned all his Remainer convictions as soon as he became leader gives an indication of how genuinely he held them.
By 2019, this damp had even reached the Leader’s Office and Jeremy’s inner circle. The leadership team became divided, with some of Jeremy’s closest allies urging a more Remain position, including John McDonnell, Diane Abbott and policy director Andrew Fisher, while others like Karie Murphy, Seumas Milne, Jon Trickett and Ian Lavery argued that Labour could not afford to abandon Leave voters. This was a disagreement about electoral strategy – John and co were not saboteurs; I’m sure they genuinely feared Labour would suffer catastrophic electoral consequences if it alienated Remain voters and its own activists. But with their view in the ascendant, the sabotage operation achieved its goal of manoeuvring the leadership into a hopeless position that split its coalition. Just as importantly, by swerving towards Remain Jeremy no longer appeared as an insurgent outsider, but rather another politician defending the status quo, on the same side as the bulk of the establishment.
OE: In your account, then, the problem with Corbynism was not internal weakness but external pressure. But are these two things incompatible? Wasn’t it the case that, as a result of the sabotage operation, certain politicians and advisers ended up taking compromise positions – most notably on Brexit – which turned out to be strategically disastrous?
AN: You have to take it issue by issue. On Brexit it wasn’t the weakness of politicians and advisers but rather a split between them over strategy. The matter was never really resolved: the Brexit policy that the party ended up with at the 2019 election was a fudge that reflected the balance of forces. A significant factor was that Jeremy is a genuine democrat, who was subject to countervailing democratic pressures. He wanted to honour the popular vote for Leave, and he also cared that most Labour members and voters were demanding a second referendum. His efforts to reflect these different democratic demands goes some way towards explaining the party’s final policy.
OE: But isn’t it fair to characterise the Brexit debacle as a situation in which some of the prime movers of Corbynism – at different points in time and to varying degrees – buckled under establishment pressure and made concessions that undermined the project? If this is the case, then Sultana’s argument that the new left party needs to avoid the mistakes of the past by taking a more combative stance towards its class enemies would seem potentially useful. Or, to put it another way, if Corbynism was always beset by the contradiction between an antagonistic strategy (‘for the many not the few’) and a more pacifist one (‘kinder, gentler politics’), the proposal that Your Party should now choose the first over the second could have a galvanising effect on its members. By contrast, your emphasis on the ‘balance of forces’ as the explanation for Corbynism’s unhappy ending might come across as defeatist, since that balance has hardly tilted in our favour in 2025. It might suggest that there’s nothing we can do to change this vast power asymmetry.
AN: Not capitulating to class enemies is a very good idea. Your Party should be antagonistic towards them. But I don’t think we should console ourselves with a false history that says that if only Corbyn had been more combative then things would have turned out well. It’s true that the Corbyn leadership was beset by the contradiction you outline: trying to practise left-populism while also presiding over one of the two established Westminster parties. Corbynism worked best when it was a disruptive outside force, as it was in 2017, and it’s worth criticising certain tactics that strayed from that approach. But that isn’t the only lesson we should draw.
Working in the Labour Party was both a blessing and a curse. For most of the 2015-19 period, wrestling for control of the party meant we had to fight on two fronts, but it also imposed a certain discipline on the movement. Everyone pulled together to take on the internal enemy, the Labour right. The new movement, with its own party, won’t have that glue to bind it. What’s more, in the Labour years Downing Street looked like a prize that was almost within reach. Running a ‘party of government’ meant we had to develop a broad left platform that would appeal to a wide swathe of the population.
The removal of the constraints imposed by working in the Labour Party will be hugely liberating for the left in the years to come, but it will also create a different set of problems. I don’t think there’s much danger of the new party being too conciliatory or weak-willed. On the contrary, it’s more likely to be susceptible to demand inflation – where the most radical demands win, leading to competition over who can be most radical, until an effective class-based programme with mass appeal is subsumed by political positions which, though sincerely and passionately held, divide our movement and reduce our potential support. This is where leadership plays an important role. Leaders can have a strategic overview of where the party should position itself to succeed, and convince the members to follow them. But if Jeremy or Zarah or any other leading figure were to play into the demand-inflation spiral, then the party could be overrun by internecine conflict before it’s even founded.
We have to set our ambitions high. We should be aiming to replace the Labour Party and ultimately take power. The crises we’re facing, which are only going to intensify, require nothing less. So we need to put forward a popular programme that can win power, without compromising our principles. In 2017 Corbyn’s Labour did very well on a class-based ‘for the many not the few’ platform. In 2019 it was defeated when Brexit, a cross-class issue, cut our coalition and our movement in two. That’s an example to keep in mind.
OE: The new party is still going to come under vicious attack, from without if not necessarily from within. How do you think this will differ from the Corbyn period?
AN: Any left party that makes serious gains will face a backlash from capital, the state and the media. But it won’t take the same form as last time. On the upside, it’s much easier to deal with purely external attacks that don’t involve internal sabotage or division. Remember the Sun’s claim in 2018 that Jeremy had been a communist spy working for Czechoslovakia? They really thought it was going to finish him. But the story didn’t rely on the Labour right, nor did they make much use of it. The leadership was able to bat it away in straightforward populist terms, casting Jeremy as an underdog, a victim of smears by the powerful. It helped that he’s a very implausible spy. If Your Party could choose the attacks it receives, it would choose this kind, where they can be turned around to illustrate the party’s anti-establishment credentials.
In most of the world, throughout most of history, the path to power for left parties has been blocked by obstacles that turned out to be insurmountable: the imbalance of resources, the hostility of institutions and so on. The new party will have to contend with those head on. One advantage of being in the Labour Party was that we were already halfway over those hurdles: we had resources, our relevance was not in question, and parts of the British power structure had to at least contemplate coming to terms with us, in case we became the government. On the other hand, being in the Labour Party mandated a heavy focus on electoralism rather than movement politics, which is an area where the new project might have more success – although building power outside parliament is bound to be a slow and difficult process.
OE: You say that the priority at this moment is to manage internal party conflicts and form a majoritarian programme. Is this compatible with full, member-led democracy? And is it achievable without a wider political culture of mass popular participation? The lack of that culture is surely part of the reason why Corbynism struggled to fight back against sabotage.
AN: It’s very hard to see how this new party could be set up without inclusive democratic structures. That’s what Jeremy believes in, and always has done given his Bennite influences. It’s also what Zarah believes in. And it’s what the huge numbers who have signed up to Your Party expect. That’s something to be excited about. To make this work, the nascent party needs to nurture a culture of pluralistic debate where divisive issues can be negotiated, especially while the party is in its infancy. When it comes to crafting a programme that can appeal to a majority, I suspect the more people involved the better.
As for the broader question about Britain’s political culture, you’re right that Corbynism as a whole didn’t have the depth and strength it needed to weather the onslaught. When Jeremy was Labour leader, the long-term erosion of the party’s organic roots in the working class – not just the trade unions but all the social bases of working-class politics – was a cause of despair. Ironically, the acceleration of that process makes it far more plausible that Starmer’s Labour – now languishing at around 20% in the polls, having failed to win as many votes as Jeremy did in 2017 or 2019 – could be swept away, allowing a new force on the left to replace it. The task then will be to make sure Your Party sets down roots of its own, to avoid being swept away in turn. That is the goal. The opportunity is there.
Read on: Daniel Finn, ‘Crosscurrents’, NLR 118.