Ten Years In The Death Of The Labour Party

For the first eighteen months of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Labour MPs were in open revolt. The party seemed to be heading back to the early 1980s, when old-school Marxists tried and failed to take over the party, at a shocking electoral cost. The snap general election called by Theresa May for 8 June 2017 looked set to consign Labour to the history books. But the best-laid plans of mice and men... How long can the uneasy peace between moderate, anti-Corbyn MPs and the leader’s loyal grassroots activists last? What does Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party have in common with the Labour Party of Attlee, Wilson and Blair? Is there even a future for either version of ‘democratic socialism’ in the twenty-first century? Or is the Labour Party, as generations of voters have known it, finally coming to the end of its useful life? The seeds of Labour’s travails and its hostile takeover by the hard left were sown years earlier, during the turbulent, chaotic last years of the Labour government. In Ten Years in the Death of the Labour Party, columnist and former Labour MP Tom Harris turns the spotlight on the decisions that doomed the party’s fortunes and the people who made them.