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Lessons from the past for the Labour left
ANDREW MURRAY welcomes a sympathetic history of two waves of left advance within Labour and the contest between the support they could mobilise and the forces ranged against them
searchers

The Searchers
Andy Beckett, Allen Lane, £30

 


IT is impossible to read this book without a certain sense of pathos. Five years ago, three of its subjects — Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell — were on the verge of acceding to the highest offices in the land should Labour secure election victory.

Today, one struggles for re-election as an independent against his old party, another has just emerged from a 13-month suspension and brief barring from standing for Labour, and all three are marginalised within party and Parliament.

Guardian writer Andy Beckett ties their stories together with their contemporary Ken Livingstone and their predecessor Tony Benn in a collective quasi-biography that ambitiously aims to tell the story of the Labour left over the last 50 years or so.

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