In the general election of 1983 the Labour Party, under the leadership of Michael Foot, suffered its worst defeat since 1918. Its manifesto that year – famously dubbed “the longest suicide note in history” by the Labour MP Gerald Kaufman – offered a programme of renationalization, nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from the European Community. In that election three future Labour Party leaders were first elected to parliament: Tony Blair for the Durham constituency of Sedgefield, Gordon Brown for the Scottish constituency of Dunfermline East and Jeremy Corbyn for the London constituency of Islington North. Labour's electoral defeat in 1983, and subsequent defeats in 1987 and 1992, were crucial in driving the party towards the centre in the late 1980s and the 1990s. But the political failures and battles of the early 1980s also shaped the political identity and strategy of the left of the Labour Party and would inform both its successes and its failures under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership between 2015 and 2019.

During and after Corbyn's time as Labour leader, he and his supporters were frequently portrayed as taking Britain “back to the 1970s” for their manifesto promises to renationalize rail and other services, raise taxes on business and higher earners, return more power to trade unions and increase worker control over industry. This account accused the Labour Party under Corbyn's leadership of a nostalgic and dysfunctional politics not fit for the modern world, and invoked the industrial strife of the Wilson and Callaghan Labour governments. After the 2019 election another media narrative emerged: that of a Labour Party that had forgotten its working-class roots and “Labour heartlands” in the North of England, and become a party dominated by, as Home Secretary Priti Patel put it at the 2019 Conservative Party conference, a “North London metropolitan elite”. Corbynism was portrayed alternately as a movement of an outdated politics of nationalization and labour militancy, and as a movement which appealed primarily to an out of touch urban elite. How, if at all, do we reconcile these visions?