When Jeremy Corbyn was first elected Labour leader I was editing the New Statesman’s rolling politics blog, and had a small stable of semi-regular writers whom I had found – or who had found me – during the era of Ed Miliband. A few of them slotted well into the new era, writing supportively about the Corbyn project, but the vast majority turned out to be Corbynsceptics with little time for the Labour party’s new direction.
There’s nothing wrong with Corbynscepticism, but it had an outsized presence among my writers compared with the balance of opinion on the left more generally, so I knew I needed to widen the net and commission new voices who would better reflect the changed, post-Corbyn world.
Liam Young was one of those voices. I can’t claim to have discovered him because he was already writing for the Independent, and would in any case have done well without writing for the New Statesman. He had all the non-glamorous ingredients for success: he wrote punctually, to the correct word length, accepted edits courteously, and was honest in his dealings. (These ought not to be distinguishing features in the editor-writer relationship, but unfortunately they often are.)
As well as being reliable professionally, he was reliable politically. Most of the pro-Corbyn commentariat found themselves busily rewriting history following Labour’s unexpected success in 2017 (having gone wobbly on the project by the time of the election and as likely as anyone else to write critically about the Labour leader). But Young had stayed loyal, vocally so. As a result, he is now basking in the afterglow from having “called it right” when so many others did not. Rise, his first book, is an attempt to explain why Corbyn did so well and what both Young – and the young in general – saw in the Labour leader.
Or is it? One of the problems with Rise is that it is not entirely clear what the book is trying to do. Is it a memoir? The sections on Young’s early life – he recounts being allowed to build a den in front of the television to stay up and watch the 2005 election aged eight – suggest so. But these accounts are brief and lack any particular cohesion.
Is it an inside look at Corbyn’s 2017 general election campaign, or his leadership bids in 2015 or 2016? Again, there are occasional flashes of this, but they are frustratingly brief and partial. One revealing passage includes an interview with Ben Sellers, the founder of the Red Labour Twitter account, which lambasts the party’s official digital strategy for being insufficiently pro-Corbyn, leading to the party doing less well in the election than it should have. It is true that Labour party headquarters has a large number of staffers who were at best agnostic about the Corbyn project. That is not true of its digital team, whose staff have impeccable pro-Corbyn credentials.
Is it a scholarly attempt to find out who voted for Corbyn and why? There is a lot of data on display, but it is very much a book in which cherrypicked facts are marshalled in support of the conclusion. British Election Study data, a far more reliable metric than ordinary polling, is compared with day-to-day polling when it suits the Corbynite case, but discarded when it does not.
Many of the claims in the book are simply untrue. He describes Corbyn’s victory in the 2015 leadership election as one “largely powered by young people”. The average age of a Labour party member is 53, 13 years older than the national average. Corbyn’s great success in 2015 was appealing to the largely middle-class, public sector workers who make up the crucial election-winning bloc in internal Labour elections. No mean feat, but not one that can plausibly or fairly be said to have been “powered by young people”.
It’s a shame, because Young is one of a handful of people who can write revealingly about the priorities of the inner circle and his experiences as part of that small group of loyalist commentators. The problem is, I can’t help feeling that the answer to the question, “What is Rise?” is that it’s a cash grab by Simon & Schuster, who are keen to get a share of the Corbyn dollar and have snapped up one of its most prominent advocates to do so. But they have little idea what they want out of this book or its author. As a result, Rise tries to do a little bit of everything, and largely fails.
Stephen Bush is special correspondent for the New Statesman.
• Rise by Liam Young is published by Simon & Schuster (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
