How the British Left triumphed and failed

Last week, the global Right descended upon London for ARC, bringing with it a fascinatingly diverse cast of characters. The conference was filled with young Americans pairing ill-fitting suits with cowboy hats, priests in full clerical splendour, Avant-garde thinkers decked in leather bomber jackets, and much more. Yet there was something missing: protesters. Not even The Guardian labelling the conference an “alt-right heaven” was enough to convince leftist shock troops to descend on the venue and harass attendees. The most resistance that could be mustered up was an online campaign to shut down “DARC”, an unofficial conference afterparty, which only succeeded in moving the party to a far swankier venue in Piccadilly. Some victory!

So what has happened to the British Left? How have they become so demoralised that they cannot even bring themselves to oppose a conference of their favourite villains? How is it that all remains of the last decade’s British Left is a rag-tag group of geriatric millennials with declining YouTube channels, financially surviving by being ritually humiliated on GB News, and expending all their energy on denouncing the excesses of their own movement? Major figures like Ash Sarkar now spend their days condemning victim narratives — the same talking points one could get from philosophical heavyweights like Dave Rubin a decade ago. At this point, does Britain even have a Left?

The paradoxical problem facing the remnants of the British Left is their simultaneous complete victory and complete failure. The failure is the most obvious aspect. From 2015, there was a serious, organised, and genuinely popular Left under Jeremey Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. A whole ecosystem emerged around it, including various new media organisations and personalities, as well as the vanguard political movement Momentum. This was a time where the likes of Owen Jones were treated as serious national figures whose opinions were worth listening to. What became dubbed “millennial socialism” was in the ascendancy, and for a time it offered a genuinely alternative and unapologetically Left politics that, with the surprisingly good result at the 2017 general election, seemed like it would actually transform Britain.

The electoral defeat of Corbynism in 2019 was immediately followed by “Peak Woke” into the 2020s

But the popularity of Corbynism diminished precipitously, dogged by accusations of anti-Semitism, an inability to come to a coherent stance on Brexit, and a self-defeating tendency to onboard almost every policy that floated around Left circles. By the 2019 general election the momentum had gone, Corbyn’s program for government no longer seemed an optimistic alternative but an unachievable laundry list, and “millennial socialism” was emphatically crushed at the ballot box by the British people. Electorally, the Left was thus cast back into total political obscurity, their movement repudiated, and their legacy one of catastrophic failure.

Yet despite this crushing defeat, the Left’s social and institutional sway has never been greater. The electoral defeat of Corbynism in 2019 was immediately followed by “Peak Woke” into the 2020s. Once obscure leftist doctrines like critical race theory and gender deconstructivism were now everywhere and had become, to borrow from leftist parlance, the hegemonic ideology. Everyone was forced to become aware of “white privilege” as various arms of the state (which was then run by a Conservative government) lined up to declare themselves “institutionally racist”. Statues were overthrown, buildings and monuments defaced and renamed, and long-dead national heroes dethroned for the crime of having had views that did not match present-day sensibilities. Most sinisterly, those accused of having politically incorrect ideas found themselves hounded out of their jobs for wrongthink.

What occurred was nothing short of a social revolution and a complete reorientation of social mores by the Left. Yet it was a revolution the Left could never truly own, for it was done under a government nominally hostile to their interests, and carried out in large part by their supposed enemies: global corporations. A movement that stood for the abolition of billionaires and taking the fight to global capital suddenly found their social ideas enforced by the likes of Amazon, Nike, and Bank of America, where HR harridans would lecture the Gordon Gekkos of our time about the importance of “checking your privilege” and “being a good ally”.

The social transformation wrought by the Boriswave is inescapable across Britain

On another key shibboleth of the Left — that migration makes Britain stronger — they were equally wrongfooted by events. Following 2019, the Left found itself with the most unlikely of allies on immigration: Boris Johnson. The man spuriously labelled as a dangerous far-right populist ended up with an immigration regime far laxer than anything Jeremy Corbyn would have even imagined. No politician did more to increase Britain’s population of “black and brown bodies”, to use the leftist lexicon, than the former Conservative Prime Minister. The social transformation wrought by the Boriswave is inescapable across Britain, yet it is one no one is willing to own, not least the Left. For instead of being the panacea it was promised to be, immigration has stagnated wages, accelerated housing cost growth, worsened pressure on services, and coarsened public life. The multicultural dream of interesting cuisines and enriching cultural exchange has materialised as endless Turkish barbers and town centres full of foreign men who can but mutter a few words of English, each sporting the garish colours of their food courier employer. The Boriswave has not created a Britain of quaint European bakeries, as one of the Left’s most prominent geriatric millennials would have us believe, but a bizarre and alienating social landscape that seems certain to make Britain far poorer. 

For a brief period at the end of 2023, it seemed like a new cause had emerged that could galvanise the Left into once again forming a unified political force. Following the Hamas attack on October 7th, the veteran leftist cause of Palestinian liberation jumped back into political prominence. The scattered millennial socialists had an issue they could own, and one in which they were all in broad agreement. Yet Britain’s new demographics meant that the Palestinian cause was no longer the hobby horse of committed international socialists, attracted by their distaste of neo-colonialism and devotion to third world liberation. Instead, the cause quickly became dominated by the explicitly sectarian politics of Muslims who saw in Palestine their co-religionist brothers and sisters under attack. 

The Left had no answer to these new trends; could they really ally themselves with religious reactionaries who were at best disinterested in the leftist project as a whole, and at worst actively hostile to many of its core elements? Instead of providing a new lease of life for the Left, the Palestinian issue gave rise to the “Gaza independents”, four Muslim MPs elected on a pro-Gaza ticket, plus the politically lonesome Jeremey Corbyn.

On all three issues — identity politics, immigration, Palestine — the Left found its causes carried by otherwise hostile agents they could find no conciliation with. The success of these causes has been to the Left’s detriment, for the inevitable backlash to their respective failures still fall on the Left, regardless of who their real agents were. The current backlash against “Woke”, against the incessant hectoring and anti-white bigotry, is now landing squarely at the Left, hence their current zeal in dissociating themselves from the movement, despite being some of its most ardent original perpetrators (see Ash “no more oppression olympics” Sarkar’s previous work, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Brexit”. Unbearable indeed).

Though it was Boris Johnson who engineered the mass migration explosion, it is still the Left who are associated with the politics of mass migration. They may well claim that “this isn’t real mass migration”, that under their governorship the importation of millions of people into Britain would somehow lead to better outcomes for all, but it is now impossible to avoid the very obvious harms that this migratory politics leads to. The split is between those honest enough to notice, and those too enthralled to ideology to admit that mass migration is not, as it happens, intrinsically a strength.

This is most starkly shown on the issue of Palestine, where past and current migratory waves have combined to craft a toxic new sectarian politics, completely at odds with Britain’s political history. Instead of offering a chance for a Left political revival, Britain’s current demographics mean the Palestinian cause’s addition to British political life has been a handful of gormless MPs whose most notable Parliamentary contribution was a defence of cousin marriage.

The millennial socialists of yesteryear are unable to face up to the confluence of events that have swept them by. There is no place for them in British politics anymore, their ideas having already been tested to the extreme, and the deeply undesirable outcomes now clear for all to see. So the Left is forced to retreat inwards, disengaging from the realities of Britain today, instead preferring to fight the views they held just ten minutes ago. Perhaps identity politics has gone too far! Maybe this Woke stuff is a bit silly! Could it have been the Left who were the real racists? Really boundary pushing stuff! As the British Left is consigned to the dustbin of history, let’s ensure its unoriginally tedious protagonists face the same fate.