This Land: The Struggle for the Left

Description

#1 Bestselling author of Chavs and The Establishment returns with an urgent analysis of where the Left - and Britain - goes next We live in an age of upheaval. The global crisis of Covid-19 has laid bare the deep social and economic inequalities which were the toxic legacy of austerity. These revolutionary times are an opportunity for a radical rethink of Britain as we know it, as the politically impossible suddenly becomes imaginable. And yet, the Left's last attempt to upend the established order and transform millions of lives came to a crashing halt on 12th December 2019, when Jeremy Corbyn led the Labour party to its worst electoral defeat since 1935. In This Land, Owen Jones provides an insider's honest and unflinching appraisal of a movement- how it promised to change everything, why it went so badly wrong, where this failure leaves its values and ideas, and where the Left goes next in the new world we find ourselves in. He takes us on a compelling, page-turning journey through a tumultuous decade in British politics, gaining unprecedented access to key figures across the political spectrum. It is a tale of high hopes and hubris, dysfunction and disillusionment. There is, Jones urges, no future for any progressive project that does not face up to and learn from its errors. We have the opportunity to build a fairer country and a more equal world, but if our time is to come, then we must learn from our past.

Owen Jones was born in Sheffield, grew up in Stockport and studied history at Oxford. His first book, the international bestseller Chavs, was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and chosen as one of The New York Times top 10 non-fiction books of 2011. In 2013 he won Young Writer of the Year at the Political Book Awards. His second book was the bestselling The Establishment- and How They Get Away With It, an expose of Britain's powerful elites. He is a columnist for the Guardian and a frequent broadcaster.

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 *