Academic literature on the topic 'Corbyn, Jeremy (1949-....)'

Then UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s attendance at a Passover Seder organised by the radical leftist group, Jewdas, in April 2018, led to a brief but vitriolic controversy involving Anglo-Jewish umbrella organisations concerning who qualifies to speak as a Jew. This article uses this controversy to engage with Judith Butler’s attempt to address this question, suggesting that in decentring Zionist claims to Jewish subjectivity she fails to take account of how different Jewish subjectivities are formed, and thus ends up proposing a ‘good Jew/bad Jew’ binary that dissolves Jewishness into universal humanism. Drawing on the work of the German-Jewish mystical anarchist Gustav Landauer (1870–1919), the article proposes a different way of understanding subjectivity that retains ontological inherency as a plausible precondition for ethical solidarity. As such, the article’s argument has implications not merely for a reworked understanding of Jewish subjectivity but for the politics of subject formation more broadly.

Cette thèse étudie les recompositions du travaillisme britannique qui se sont produites entre 2015 et 2020, lorsque Jeremy Corbyn dirigeait le Parti travailliste. Durant cette période, de nombreux militants socialisés à l’engagement politique dans les mobilisations du début des années 2010 ont convergé vers le Parti travailliste et ses marges afin de soutenir Jeremy Corbyn. Ce travail s’interroge sur les effets produits sur le parti et son environnement par ce phénomène collectif de reconversion militante, formulant l’hypothèse de la formation d’un milieu partisan protestataire. Il vise également à comprendre les différentes façons dont ces militants se sont adaptés – ou non – à un nouveau cadre d’engagement très institutionnalisé. Pour explorer ces questions, cette thèse s’appuie sur un corpus de données principalement qualitatives composé de 46 entretiens semi-directifs, d’observations réalisées dans le cadre de séjours ethnographiques à Londres, Oxford et Manchester, et de documents récoltés sur le terrain d’enquête. En se penchant sur les processus et les entrepreneurs de la fabrique organisationnelle, ce travail analyse la genèse de structures hybrides au sein du système d’organisations travailliste. Il montre les formes d’engagement et de mobilisation atypiques que ces organisations ont fait émerger. Étudiant leur rapport au Parti travailliste, il montre également que les contraintes institutionnelles exercées par le parti sur l’ensemble de son environnement ont eu tendance à faire converger ces organisations vers sa propre culture, ou à les contraindre à la marginalité si elles résistaient à cette conversion. Analysant les trajectoires individuelles et collectives des militants protestataires reconvertis à l’engagement partisan, il montre que ces acteurs étaient également confrontés à ces contraintes institutionnelles, qui fonctionnaient comme un cadre socialisateur. Dès lors, les militants les moins disposés à interagir avec le parti ne sont parvenus qu’à l’influencer de façon très limitée, tandis que ceux qui parvenaient à s’y acculturer avaient tendance à y perdre leurs dispositions protestataires. Cette thèse soutient alors que les recompositions du travaillisme engagées par des militants de culture protestataire ont été pour l’essentiel marginales et contrariées. Elle souligne néanmoins que ce constat n’amoindrit pas le caractère original et remarquable des organisations, des pratiques et des trajectoires qu’elles ont impliquées
This thesis studies reconfigurations within and around the British Labour Party which occurred between 2015 and 2020, while Jeremy Corbyn was leading the Labour Party. During this period, many activists whose political socialisation took place in the movements of the early 2010s converged towards the Labour Party and its fringes to support Corbyn. This research examines the effects induced on Labour and its environment by this collective movement towards the party, hypothesizing the formation of an activist ‘partisan milieu’. It also aims to understand the different ways in which these activists adapted – or did not – to a new, highly institutionalised, framework of political participation. In the aim of this enquiry, the thesis relies on a set of primarily qualitative data consisting of 46 semi-structured interviews, observations conducted during ethnographic stays in London, Oxford, and Manchester, and documents collected in the field. By examining the processes and entrepreneurs of organisational production, this research analyses the genesis of hybrid structures within Labour’s system of organizations. It brings into relief the novel forms of activism and mobilisation that these organisations brought into being. Studying their relationship with the Labour Party, it also shows that the institutional constraints imposed by the party on its entire environment tended to make these organizations converge towards its own partisan culture, or to compel them into marginality if they resisted this conversion. Analysing the individual and collective trajectories of protest activists who have transitioned to partisan mobilisation, the research shows that these actors were also confronted with these institutional constraints, that operated as a socialising framework. Therefore, the activists least inclined to interact with the party only managed to influence it in a very limited way, while those who managed to acculturate themselves tended to lose their activist dispositions.This thesis argues that the reconfigurations of the Labour Party initiated by activists with a culture rooted in social movements have been largely marginal and thwarted. It nevertheless emphasizes that this observation does not diminish the original and remarkable nature of the organizations, practices, and trajectories which they involved

Abstract This book demonstrates that, since 1945, politicians from Rab Butler to Tony Blair, Michael Foot to Nick Clegg, and Winston Churchill to Jeremy Corbyn have, at some stage, asked themselves the question of whether cooperation with another party is a worthwhile strategy to pursue in the British party system. Finally, we bring together the seven cases of mooted co-operation outlined in this book to draw out the key lessons and explain the institutional and strategic factors that make cross-party alliance so difficult in the Westminster system. There are two core lessons. The first is that politicians have long-term temporal horizons, and broadly speaking are driven by a desire to use cross-party politics to either defend or disrupt the institutional settlement of British politics, depending on whether their party benefits from the status quo. This second is that a nebulous, persistent, and permeating narrative about how power can and should operate in British politics determines what happens when cross-party politics is attempted.

This chapter analyses dissent within the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) during the post-war period. It examines the frequency, depth and extent of parliamentary rebellions and the policy issues which generated these divisions. In addition, the PLP’s role in destabilising party leaders and the willingness of dissidents to resign the whip and defect to other parties are reviewed. The chapter then examines the contribution of parliamentary factions in organising this dissent, finding that their role is easily exaggerated. The strategies available to the party’s leaders in managing parliamentary dissent are considered before the focus shifts to the PLP’s relations with the extra-parliamentary party and the circumstances in which it has compromised its legitimacy with grassroots members. The chapter concludes by arguing that these patterns of dissent, factionalism and party management can be understood as a sequence of three regimes before offering a preliminary assessment of findings of the chapter as they relate to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

The years immediately after the 2015 general election were dominated by another vote, held in 2016. In 2013, the electoral challenge from UKIP had forced David Cameron to promise an in–out referendum on the EU should his party win the next general election. Cameron fulfilled his promise, after negotiations with the EU which only partially addressed the grievances of Eurosceptics in UKIP and within his own party. The chapter discusses the narrow victory for ‘Leave’ in the 2016 referendum, arising from divisions within the UK which cut across previous party allegiances and introduced a new element of volatility in an electorate which was already barely recognizable from that of 1964. The situation was complicated further by the election of the radical left-wing MP Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader after his party’s 2015 defeat. By contrast, when David Cameron resigned as Conservative leader and Prime Minister after the referendum he was succeeded by Theresa May, who was regarded as a pragmatic centre-right politician who could negotiate a compromise ‘Brexit’ deal with the EU. The chapter examines May’s failure to carry out this promise, marked in particular by her inept attempt to secure a convincing parliamentary majority in the 2017 general election. When May was forced from office in 2019 she was succeeded by Boris Johnson, a far more controversial and divisive character who nevertheless was able to lead the Conservatives to a comfortable electoral victory, not least because their pro-European opponents were hopelessly divided. However, the victorious Conservatives had no reason to feel complacent; even if Johnson’s government could deliver the favourable Brexit deal which it had promised, over the years since 1964 the British electorate had become far more fickle and parties were increasingly vulnerable to events outside their control. Within a few months of the 2019 election, party competition in Britain, which had seemed so stable back in 1964, was exposed to a new and deadly source of disturbance—the outbreak in China of the Covid-19 virus—which presented the most serious challenge faced by any UK government since 1945.