Michael Chessum’s history of the left over the past decade swims against the tide of political analysis. Its central assertion is that the resurgence in radical politics is not over, and its starting point was not Jeremy Corbyn’s success in Labour’s leadership election, but the student protests five years before it. Its moments of drama are not in parliament but in Parliament Square, and its sense of potential derives not from polls or trends but from granular analysis of how leftwing arguments re-entered the mainstream.
Full disclosure: I observed and sometimes worked closely with Chessum as part of Another Europe Is Possible (AEIP), what he and ultimately all of us came to describe as a “hard left, hard remain” pressure group. I watched him pursue what was, in the end, the only meaningful attempt to change Corbyn’s policy on Brexit. When, in 2018, an unprecedented number of constituency Labour parties arrived at conference with a motion backing remain, which the leadership then had to adopt, it was because of AEIP. Others, such as the People’s Vote group, tried to take credit for it. I saw journalists accept that story without question, which bugged me but didn’t seem to bug Chessum. I’m part of the chronicling class, not the activist class, and who did what remains important.
