2020 Analysis

I’m going to try to collate some (most, hopefully) of the substantial political analysis I published in 2020. This is just stuff relating directly to the general political situation in the UK and (to a lesser extent) the US. If you want more theory, music, culture or whatever oriented content, well…it’s easy enough to find.

Labour’s Defeat and the Triumph of Johnsonism
(My Massive Post-Mortem of Corbynism)

This is from January 2020. This, and the long follow-up article published the following September, basically amounts to a shortish book. In fact, the inestimable Dan Hind wanted to publish it as an e-book, but the the pandemic happened, and I had to spend a year teaching my kids maths and helping them not go insane, and I never had time to engage with that idea.

This is published in 6 parts on that wonderful web-site open Democracy. Because they have better things to do, they’ve never got around to updating the set links on the pages for the first 5 parts, so most people have thought it was a 5-part series. Which is a shame because the final part is the longest and widest in scope.

Anyway here are the links:

part 1: It was the centrist dads who lost it

part 2: Corbyn was intensely moral, but never a working class hero

part 3: Labour should have argued against the last 40 years, not just the last ten

part 4: Labour let the right shape both sides of the Brexit debate

part 5: To take on the right wing media, we need to build a political movement

part 6: History is clear: Labour must lead an alliance for democratic reform

And this is the long follow-up from September 2020, which pays a lot of attention to the US situation, after the end of the Bernie campaign:

We lost because we weren’t big enough: Where now for Anglo-American socialism?

Here are the shorter pieces I published in the Guardian in 2020:

This is an article arguing that the defeat of Corbynism represents yet another defeat for Labourism

This is an article written just after the 2020 US Presidential election arguing that the UK has an even worse electoral system than the US and that this is one reason why factions that hate each other so much are forced to constantly fight it out with each other inside the Labour Party

Politics Theory Other Interview

Here’s an interview I did with the excellent Politics Theory Other podcast. There is a part two to this which was only available to patrons of the show. I also did a much more recent interview about the current situation for Labour (like, just a few days ago at the time when I’m posting this), but that’s easy enough to find if you want it.

The Aftermath of Defeat: A Conversation with Anna Minton and Richard Seymour

I recorded this conversation with Anna and Richard for the Culture, Power, Politics feed in April 2020.