How the Momentum moment came and went

Emelia Hamilton | Issue 2 | Magazine

From the Archive

This Land: The Story of a Movement, by Owen Jones, reviewed by Emelia Wild

Owen Jones’s latest book, This Land: The Story of a Movement, is both an apologia for Corbyn and a mournful post-mortem of the Momentum movement’s ‘slow-motion collapse’ in 2019. In it, Jones casts himself as both an insider and an observer of the Corbyn years. While many may take exception to this – after all, the book is written with a veneer of journalistic detachment – the fact that Jones was actually there adds intrigue and veracity, even if it does mean that value judgements must be taken with a pinch of salt. Jones is certainly not afraid to take sides, lambasting Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s director of communications and strategy, by transcribing a letter where Andrew Fisher accuses Milne of a “lack of professionalism, competence and human decency”. It is clear where Jones’s sympathies lie, having written earlier that he was ‘struck, intimidated even, by Fisher’s competence’. Jones also praises John McDonnell as the best Labour Prime Minister that never was and takes great delight ...

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