Of political parties claiming socialism to be their aim, the Labour Party has always been one of the most dogmatic — not about socialism, but about the parliamentary system.” That’s how Ralph Miliband opened his classic 1961 text Parliamentary Socialism, a critical analysis of the party that most of the British left wanted to capture.

Miliband was skeptical of that plan, as was his later collaborator Leo Panitch. But during the great upsurges of the early 1980s — which saw the growth of a radical Labour left represented by Tony Benn and others, as well as the miners’ strike of 1984–85 — both thinkers resisted the “new revisionism” of intellectuals like Eric Hobsbawm and Stuart Hall who viewed the “Bennites” and Trotskyist entryists rather than a staid leadership as the source of Labour’s problems.

However, that supposed realism would win the day, eventually ushering in New Labour and the further rightward drift of the party — the backdrop for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership campaign.