John Newsinger on Owen Jones

Guardian columnist Owen Jones was recently described by comedian Russell Brand as 'Our generation's Orwell' in an endorsement for Jones's new bestselling book The Establishment. It is therefore perhaps only fitting that John Newsinger, author of Orwell's Politics and a general authority on Orwell was asked to review Jones's book in the latest Socialist Review. The review itself is well worth reading and a good analysis of Jones's politics - check it out here. My personal wish with respect for Owen Jones is for him to at some point explain to the rest of us exactly how he sees the transition to socialism coming about through Ed Miliband's Labour Party, given its history as - in the words of Ed's dad Ralph - being at best 'a party of modest social reform in a capitalist system within whose confines it is ever more firmly and by now irrevocably rooted' and Ralph Miliband's argument that 'the belief in the effective transformation of the Labour Party into an instrument of socialist policies is the most crippling of all illusions to which socialists in Britain have been prone' ...

Edited to add: Another review of Jones's book by Paul Blackledge in Marx and Philosophy Review of Books