Book review: Is Socialism Possible in Britain? By Andrew Murray

With his most recent book, Is Socialism Possible in Britain, former Jeremy Corbyn advisor Andrew Murray has done fine work for future historians of the Labour Party. Murray was in all the rooms where it happened during the Corbyn years, and gives insider accounts of the decisions taken – or not taken – at the top of the party under the last leader. I am not, however, a future historian of the Labour Party. I am a book reviewer, and I cannot particularly recommend you read this book. What Murray’s book offers is an account of how it all went wrong, from the perspective of someone who has little idea of why and, worse, doesn’t particularly seem to care.

Murray has the clean prose of someone who spent years as a newspaper reporter (he was the Morning Star’s political correspondent); his book is neatly readable, and the things he was witness to will be of interest to anyone who pays attention to the contemporary Labour Party. He offers a particularly thorough timeline of the party’s fight to determine a position on Brexit, detailing how a special Brexit strategy committee was formed. This, he writes, often involved conflict between “John Trickett and Ian Lavery, supported by myself, and the north London Remain bloc of Starmer, Thornberry and Diane Abbott”.

Murray – a Lexiter – describes how his own proposals for Labour’s approach to the second referendum question were “shot down primarily due to the intransigent and colourfully expressed opposition of Diane Abbott”. He writes that for Abbott “the fact that [Brexit] was championed by racists and xenophobes and had become a right wing project”, was the key consideration, overruling “the Bennite position on the EU to which she had once adhered”.

Despite his outwardly graceful description of Abbott’s position, Murray’s subtext here is (as it is so often throughout the book): it is a shame that other people are wrong, stymied by their small concerns, or led astray by malign forces, while I am always right. His view on John McDonnell’s eventual support of a second referendum takes a similar tone. He writes that it was a “sad irony” given McDonnell’s previous positions on the EU-UK relationship, but that “liaising closely with Alastair Campbell and Starmer”, McDonnell ultimately “shifted Jeremy himself, somewhat against the latter’s better judgement”.

Fundamentally, however, McDonnell and Abbott are elected officials who have worked for thankless years within the party, and people I very much admire. Murray is an unelected Unite official and was a Communist Party member until 2016. He begins his book with a long discussion of how we need to retrieve the Clement Attlee government from nostalgia and view it as a “normal capitalist government”. There are many legitimate criticisms to be made of the Attlee government, particularly on Korea, but Murray’s cool attitude to some of Labour’s greatest achievements is telling. Beyond an admiration for Tony Benn, Murray seems to have little positive to say about, and certainly no loyalty to, the party he was nominally helping to run.

Murray’s discussion of the antisemitism scandal could also be termed superficially graceful but almost totally hollow. For many – even those who wished to defend the former Labour leader – the defence of an unambiguously antisemitic mural remains as irrefutable evidence that the former leader, whatever else positive he might have done, was not without quite a serious blind spot. Murray, however, simply lists “the mural” as one part of the case against Corbyn on this topic, saying that it is “not necessary to engage in a point by point rebuttal”. He asks the reader to consider Corbyn’s broader record (which undoubtedly contains many positives) concluding, unconvincingly, that it is “amazing that the question of Corbyn’s alleged antisemitism should even be asked”.

Foreign policy, and the creation of an anti-imperialist foreign policy, is probably Murray’s driving concern. It’s a laudable ambition; given that Murray is banned from entering Ukraine, I would guess that our definitions of anti-imperialism differ.

Murray’s book was seemingly written at the end of 2021 (the Batley and Spen by-election is the last electoral challenge recorded), and as such his critique of Starmerism and its “indifferent” polling has aged poorly indeed. What comes off even worse is his sardonic description of Keir Starmer’s Labour as a force that will act “in the famous national interest”. Murray is presumably thinking of foreign policy as he writes this – but, given that he gives no time at all to the potential improvements a Labour government could make in people’s lives, sneering at the concept of the national interest is not a great look.

I probably read more Corbynite post mortems than most people; Murray’s was my fourth of the summer. Like Murray, Ali Milani, James Schneider and Michael Chessum all lay claim on the ‘Corbynite insider’ perspective. Their books describe a view of politics that is positive, imbued with ambition, hope and animation. Murray’s is a joyless exercise in score settling written by a man who is fundamentally disinterested in the Labour Party.