This Land

This Land

The Struggle for the Left

Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

The No.1 bestselling author of Chavs and The Establishment returns with an urgent, revelatory account of where the Left - and Britain - goes next

On 12th December 2019, the Left died. That at least was the view of much of Britain's media and political establishment, who saw the electoral defeat of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party as the damning repudiation of everything it stood for.

Yet, just over four years previously, the election of Corbyn as Labour leader seemed like a sea-change in politics: reanimating not just a party in apparently terminal decline but a country adrift, with a transformative vision based on a more just, more equal society and economy.

In this revelatory new book, Owen Jones explores how these ideas took hold, how they promised to change the nature of British politics - and how everything then went profoundly, catastrophically wrong. Why did the Left fail so badly? Where, in this most critical of times, does that failure leave its values and ideas? Where does it leave Britain itself?

© Owen Jones 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Reviews

  • 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

About the author

Owen Jones

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 exposé of Britain's powerful elites. He is a columnist for the Guardian and a frequent broadcaster.
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