From the meteoric rise of grassroots activism during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership to Labour’s catastrophic defeat in the 2019 election, the author of Chavs and The Establishment offers an unprecedented insider’s view into the rise and fall of the Left.
The No.1 bestselling author of Chavs and The Establishment returns with an urgent, revelatory account of where the Left - and Britain - goes next
On 12th December 2019, the Left died. That at least was the view of much of Britain's media and political establishment, who saw the electoral defeat of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party as the damning repudiation of everything it stood for.
Yet, just over four years previously, the election of Corbyn as Labour leader seemed like a sea-change in politics: reanimating not just a party in apparently terminal decline but a country adrift, with a transformative vision based on a more just, more equal society and economy.
In this revelatory new book, Owen Jones explores how these ideas took hold, how they promised to change the nature of British politics - and how everything then went profoundly, catastrophically wrong. Why did the Left fail so badly? Where, in this most critical of times, does that failure leave its values and ideas? Where does it leave Britain itself?
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 9780141994390
Number of pages: 368
Weight: 269 g
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 21 mm
Owen Jones has managed to produce a whodunnit political page-turner and a surprisingly fair account (given that Jones was a player in the Corbyn project) of both an inspiring and tortuous period of Labour history. - Melissa Benn, New Statesman
An absorbing, nuanced account of the making of electoral disaster. - Gaby Hinsliff, Guardian
Very, very powerful ... you will not come away from reading This Land without your understanding of what happened to the Labour Party over the last five years massively enhanced. - James O'Brien
For Owen Jones, the drama of these years is almost Shakespearean... Where Jones is strongest, and impressively so, is when he turns his analytical gaze on his own side. His dissection of the anti-Semitism issue is heartfelt and intelligent. His account of the infighting and weakness of the leader's team rings true... He correctly observes that Brexit left Labour on a hook. - Robert Shrimsley, Financial Times
Jones has [a hard] task: to assess the failure of a project he championed, in which he was a significant player, and which depended on the work and was damaged by the flaws of people he is close to. It is a far more honest account of those difficulties than is ever given by journalists of the political centre, or the right ... Jones has made a serious attempt to understand the left's weaknesses as something other than the fault of the party's right ... Jones is making a brutal assessment, of the sort too often lacking in the past few years, of what is possible. - James Butler, London Review of Books
Owen Jones is a phenomenon of our time - The Times Literary Supplement
The best political book I have read for a long while, all the better for Jones's unashamed participant observation. - Rod Liddle, The Spectator
This Land examines the rise of Corbynism after a long period of Tory government with its focus on austerity, and charts the rise and ultimately, the demise, of what could have been a new dawn in politics. Owen Jones... More
Owen Jones' third book is an excellent overview of the Corbynist project, and pulls no punches!
I was somewhat surprised, and pleased, at how one of the leading exponents of Corbynism was able to so honest in...
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I was surprised by just how much I enjoyed this book. I was, and still am, a supporter of the Corbyn project so the content was always going to appeal to me but I also found Jones's style incredibly engaging and... More
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