We have taken no pleasure in writing this book. For years we debated whether it was worth writing at all. The political dimension of our adult lives has been filled with frustration, sadness and occasional anger as we watched the British left endure serial defeats and celebrate its own fragmentation. However, until quite recently we were pulled back from dark desolation by the hope that someday soon the left’s comedy of errors would come to an end as a new generation of political and intellectual leaders emerged to drive it forward with vision and purpose.

It was not to be. Since 1979, the British left seems to have grown comfortable with electoral failure. The Labour governments of Blair and Brown achieved success only by conforming to the core demands of neoliberalism’s global economic project. In the United States, Obama’s presidency carried considerable symbolic importance, but he achieved absolutely nothing in terms of overcoming the economic orthodoxies that pushed so many Americans into poverty and insecurity. This pattern was replicated across all developed and developing nations. In or out of government, ostensibly leftwing parties busied themselves advocating neoliberal economic policies that harmed the very people they were supposed to defend. The left won elections only when it accepted the rules of the global market. Even formerly Maoist China joined the club.

The left has clearly undergone fundamental change. It no longer offers a genuine alternative to the existing order of things, whether reformist or revolutionary. Now, as we move further into the twenty-first century, the left seems to have discarded its traditional identity as a mass movement intent on achieving political power. It displays little interest in protecting – let alone improving – the prosperity and security of multi-ethnic working populations. Centre-left political projects of the past – such as Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s or the British Labour Party’s programme of economic restructuring after 1945 – achieved electoral success on the back of a compelling range of policy initiatives made comprehensible to their electorates. Electorates continue to yearn for the genuine kind of economic change that would provide a platform of material security.