Brexit exposes the limits of Jeremy Corbyn’s radicalism

The left middle class is filled with anger as it sees the right, and, in its terms, the far right, triumph. Every time I write about Brexit I feel its fury pulsating around me. Brexit threatens the left’s core beliefs in international cooperation and anti-racism, while making its dream of ending austerity by reviving the economy unattainable. It must be resisted. Yet in a classic struggle against nationalist conservatism, Jeremy Corbyn, supposedly the most left-wing Labour leader ever, is at best an irrelevance and at worst an enemy when it comes to Brexit.

His supporters sound like supporters of Tony Blair in the 1990s as they say Labour members must hold their noses and accept a policy they regard as immoral and economically disastrous out of electoral necessity. If you wished to be kind, you could say left-wing politics consisted of trying to change the world, not in accepting the world as it is.