The activist and political commentator on writing his new book about Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s antisemitism crisis and reading for escapism
Owen Jones was born in Sheffield and raised in Stockport. He describes himself as “a fourth-generation socialist” and worked as a trade union and parliamentary researcher before becoming an author, broadcaster and political columnist for the Guardian. His first book, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, was published in 2011 and followed in 2014 by The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It. His new book, This Land: The Story of a Movement, is an insider’s account of the rise and fall of the Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party.
This Land is written from the point of view of “an observer and a participant”. Did you write it essentially as an attempt to make sense of the scale of Corbyn’s election defeat?
When I started, I didn’t really have an agenda other than I am a man of the left and I always write from that perspective. I wanted to avoid political fatalism and defeatism, the notion that any transformative agenda for Labour is inherently doomed to defeat. I don’t think that. I think it’s achievable, but that the only way you can continue with the project is by accepting the mistakes and learning from them. The point of the book is to defend the idea that leftwing politics is viable.
