Five years since Jeremy Corbyn resigned as Labour leader, the British left is in a difficult place. Keir Starmer’s remodeling of the Labour Party, purging or suspending MPs and large numbers of ordinary activists, has worked to stamp out the legacy of the Corbyn era, and his new government’s policies on everything from welfare to foreign policy have emphasized continuity rather than a sharp break with past Tory administrations.

Anti-migrant and anti-Muslim riots last summer, the rise of the hard-right Reform UK party, and Labour’s already sinking poll ratings point to a reactionary wave rolling through British politics. There surely is some pushback on the Left: a smattering of left-wing independents including Corbyn — now expelled from Labour — won seats at last July’s general election, also because of the impact of the Palestine solidarity movement on British electoral politics. But the left-populist surge of the late 2010s has today largely dissipated.

One of the leading figures in Corbyn’s team was Andrew Murray, picked as an adviser to the Labour leader in early 2018. Formerly a leading member of Britain’s Communist Party, the longtime Stop the War Coalition chair and Unite the Union official Murray is also the author of one of the most incisive post-mortems on the failure of the Corbyn project: his 2022 book Is Socialism Possible in Britain? In an interview with Stathis Kouvelakis, Murray discusses the lessons of the Corbyn era, the current state of the British left, and the possibilities of rebuilding.