What Corbyn’s far left has in common with Trump and the Brexit right

Even though Jeremy Corbyn and the men and women who support him are often shabby and occasionally reactionary figures, the rarest criticism you hear of them is criticism from the left. Political commentary in Britain runs like water through pipes. Conventional opinion holds that if you are left wing, you support the Labour leadership, and if you are not, you don’t. Even though there is an essential left case to be made against the degeneration of Labour into conspiracy theory and personality cults, authors who make it are ignored because they do not fit into the familiar pattern. More than any formal censorship, this control of thinking is the most effective way of shutting out new arguments. Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts’ Corbynism: A critical approach is a rare left-wing critique by authors who are virtual Marxists. Inevitably, it has been all but ignored, which is a fault that needs remedying as this rich and urgent work deserves better than that.

I and many others have argued for years that ‘the left’, or to be fair the voices that dominate the far left in politics and culture, became a regressive force after the Cold War. Its leaders allied with and excused regimes that were the enemies of socialism, feminism and liberalism: Iran, Saddam’s Iraq, Milosevic’s Serbia, Putin’s Russia, and Hamas and other clerical fascist versions of Islam. Why its supporters did not care, or even notice, is a question with many answers. Bolton and Pitts’ are worth reading because theirs is an explanation not just of the Corbyn Labour party but of the post-crash West.

Since 2008, the most strikingly successful political movements have evaded the world as it is by blaming voters’ troubles on a simple enemy. David Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg said that the disaster was the result of overspending rather than the collapse of the financial system.