Corbyn and Sultana aim for a new left party. BRING IT ON! ASAP!

The main questions: WILL it be: OUR party? A REAL alternative ... or merely a choice on the ballot paper? And WILL IT LAST?

Cover photo: MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, both formerly Labour.

Starmer in a squeeeze. ( A cartoon in The Daily Telegraph, 5 July)

By Alan Story

I'm sure you have heard the good - or at least potentially good- news.

Two leading left-wing MPs - both formerly Labour - Jeremy Corbyn (expelled in 2024) and Zarah Sultana (quit two days ago) say they will work together to launch a new party of the left.

Mind you, there have been a few embarrassing bumps over the past two days. On Thursday evening, Coventry South MP Sultana, 31, announced she was resigning from the Labour Party and said “ Jeremy Corbyn and I will co-lead the founding of a new party…” (See her full statement below.)

Note: NOT be the leaders, but lead the campaign to establish a new left-of-Labour party. More than five million people reportedly read Sultana’s Tweet with this announcement. On Instagram, her message got an amazing 200,000 likes.

Then there were 18 hours of “dead air” during which Corbyn did not confirm nor deny Sultana’s perhaps unexpected social media announcement. That allowed the right wing press to wheel out the usual put-down references to “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” Perhaps former Labour leader Corbyn, 76 and MP for Islington North since 1983, was caught off guard.

But on Friday afternoon he released his own statement congratulating Sultana for her decision to quit Labour and saying that “the democratic foundations of a new kind of political party will soon take shape.” (See Corbyn’s statement below.)

DOWN TO GROWING PAINS?

Let's be charitable and put these events of the past few days down to growing pains.

The previous issue of THE LEFT LANE reproduced documents stating that an official announcement would be made on 22 July. Corbyn set to launch a new political organisation of the left in July 2025 .

It cannot be confirmed, however, whether “soon” means 22 July.

We can say that these recent announcements have a “on the one hand” and “on the other hand” quality to them. This is not the time to over-optimistically proclaim “onwards and upwards” as some have done. The stakes are too high.

To be clear: the new party has no name, no programme, no official structure, no elected leader (s), and no confirmed launch date. There is a lot at play.

The 3 July statement of MP Zarah Sultana reportedly viewed by more than five million people.

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The 4 July statement by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

SO ON THE ONE HAND…

1)The announcements by Corbyn and Sultana have not come a day too soon. Both domestically and on the international scene, this Starmer Labour government is, day by day, becoming increasingly right wing and a “Trump symp” regime. ( Am cannot be the only one who finds it disgusting that sycophantic Starmer says he and the US megalomaniac share the same family values?) This domestic-global linkage was symbolised by the government’s proscribing - that is, making illegal – the direct action protest group Palestine Action on Friday and declaring it a “terrorist group”. As well-respected journalist Jonathon Cook reminds us: “ The real crimes are taking place in Gaza, not at Glastonbury or Brize Norton.”

2) The urgent need for a new party is also symbolised by this QUOTE OF THE WEEK.

“There is nobody more right wing than Rachel.”

The words of a Labour official responding to the idea that Keir Starmer might want to replace Rachel Reeves with a more right-wing chancellor so as to placate the City. (The Financial Times.)

Millions of us are sick to death of right wingism, of dog-eat-dogism, of ignoring climate change, of arming for war, of attacks on disabled people. And we don’t care if it comes from those wearing red or dark blue/light blue rosettes.

3) This new party has a good chance to be quite popular. To claim, as Morning Star columnist and former Corbyn aide Andrew Murray did, that this new party “would immediately get 100,000 members and 10% in the polls with more to come as an election approached” does seem a bit OTT. Yet, we live in turbulent times. An almost total outsider, Ugandan-born Muslim and democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, has just won the Democratic Party nomination to be the next mayor of New York City. So who knows about what might happen here? Underestimating the anger of the masses is a mugs game.

38,936 ACTIVISTS HAVE SIGNED UP TO “TEAM ZARAH”

4) Further on this point: as of 7:00 a.m. on Sunday, a total of 38,936 activists had signed onto the “JOIN TEAM ZARAH” site. It seems to be operating as an ad hoc recruiting point for those who want to contribute and build this new party.

On social media, there has a digital torrent of responses. Here is one I read a few hours ago:

“It's an embryo of hope. Of course the right-wing are seizing on Sultana apparently jumping the gun before making her announcement, and of course they'll play that up, but it was understandable if she was getting impatient and wanted to make a move out of the LP. Corbyn obviously wanted everything to be just right before announcing a launch of anything but it can come across as dithering. He's also right to be reluctant to be a leader again, but it'll totally work if he's simply the soul of the movement anyway, the guy who can pull in the crowds and inspire people again. Goodness knows how much that is needed right now.”

NOT STUCK IN LABOURISM

Added a mate of mine on social media while I was writing this piece:

This new party “can’t be a personality cult. Not that it ever was, it was just a man to coalesce around. Hopefully many more to join before long. The main question for me is collaboration, proportional representation, and all those constructive things, or will they be stuck in Labourism.”

Wrote a third activist: “The one thing we don’t want is Labour 2.0.”

On and on the mostly upbeat and optimistic messages flood forth.

5) On a far smaller scale but as another sign of the political temperature of our times, the previous issue of THE LEFT LANE titled “Corbyn set to launch a new political organisation of the left in July 2025” was the most-read of 81 columns posted since we launched in January 2024 and we added 55 new subscriptions, even a few paid ones. (Apologies: there are a few minor inaccuracies in this last piece, due principally to the fact that the lower-level organisers (behind Corbyn) of this “new left party” effort refused two weeks ago what was about our seventh request for an interview.)

And while we are talking about this publication, it's good to see that Zarah Sultana is, ha! ha! one of our readers. An issue in mid-May 2025 was headed: “ZARAH: The working class needs leaders like you...but not as a member of the Labour Party / An open letter calling on MP Zarah Sultana to resign from Keir Starmer's Tory-lite party of capitalist managers and Netanyahu apologists.”

So LOTS OF POTENTIAL for this proposed new party. Can it be realised?

BUT ON THE OTHER HAND…

Since late September 2024, THE LEFT LANE has written more than 10,000 words in at least 8 news and analytical articles on the attempts by this same group (not including Sultana) to build what they call “a new party of the left”; those pieces can be found HERE.

Now that this effort has stepped up a notch, a few key points should be emphasised:

1) There needs to be a virtual “cultural revolution” in how the organising group behind this new party - and here speaking principally about “Collective” – operates. For ten months, it has been closed and secretive and exclusive, considered itself above criticism, hierarchical, and operating, to be charitable, on the theoretical (and comradely) level of a gnat. Egos have reigned supreme, as has favouritism.

Groups containing many experienced activists have been shut out completely from participating in the party building process. (See previous issues of THE LEFT LANE for examples). With my own eyes I have seen working class activists subjected to rituals of humiliation by experienced political operators (formerly “players” in Labour, it should be added.) In recent weeks there have been reports of strong dissent from inside Collective. I've been involved in many socialist groups in three countries since the mid-1960s and it ranks near the bottom.

In more ways than one, the process of building a new left party has been saved by Zarah’s “outburst” on Thursday eve and by her “springing one” on this tired old group of Labourites. So thanks a great deal, Zarah, for “acting out of turn” so to speak. It is most appreciated by some of us.

There is now an opening to build a party in a whole new way in the coming weeks and months. We MUST use it.

IT MUST BE OUR PARTY

2) If there is one phrase that must direct our actions, it is this: either this new party will be “OUR PARTY” or it will be nothing … and just a retread of what has gone before.

Building a mass left OR a socialist party - it remains uncertain which this will be- is a mass project. And it is a transparent project that socialists and working-class activists must take ownership from at the very start. Will this happen?

Nothing is more important than democratic structures operating under democratic ideology and within a democratic culture. Yes, the programme of such a party may not be perfect at the start, but at least with a democratic structure, such a programme can be altered.

3) Corbyn has said he aims to build “the democratic foundations of a new kind of party.” As yet, there is no content to amplify this statement. Many of us will want to debate and vote on the basics of these new “foundations” fully before any new structures are established. I do hope you agree, Jeremy.

Tony Benn (circa 1970). Photo by David Neville-Smith

4) One of Corbyn’s main political mentors was the long-time Labour MP Tony Benn who died in 2014.

Very effectively, Benn used to ask these five questions about a number of Conservative governments (and, I believe, about Labour governments as well) :

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Tony Benn: Five Questions About Power

1) What Power Have You Got?

2) Where Did You Get It From?

3) In Whose Interests Do You Exercise It?

4) To Whom Are You Accountable?

5) How Can We Get Rid Of You?

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In coming weeks and months, they would be very useful questions to ask of any groups or individuals setting up the structures and other aspects of this new party.

5) On Friday evening a group of us were discussing this new party in a spur-of-the-moment Zoom call. One fear expressed was that the programme of this party will not be significantly different from those propagated by the six or so mainstream parties already in existence in the UK.

We don't yet know the programme yet of this new party. As with the proposed structure, organisation, and constitution, this will be a seminal document needing wide debate.

The basic programmatic question for this new left party is this:

Will it be a typical centrist social democratic programme? Or will it be that of a mass socialist party that is explicitly anti-capitalist?

It may take a while to get a clear answer on this question. But to repeat the comment I saw on Facebook a few hours ago: “The one thing we don’t want is Labour 2.0.” And the word “socialist need to be defined. After all, Starmer calls himself one.

6) Some of us also worry that there is new party will be an almost exclusively electoral party. What we might call the building of “people's power” and of institutions directly controlled by communities and their residents will be of little interest to its leaders.

This question also ties into the politics of the programme that this new party creates. Given the level of political consciousness across the UK today, you don't have to be a political scientist to realise it is far more difficult to get elected on a fully anti-capitalist programme.

Based on this truism, there may be a lot of pressure in this new party to put forward a very reformist and toned-down election manifesto that does not challenge the basic structures of capitalism.

Yet all around us, capitalism is in crisis and as Sultana wrote in her brief document: “in 2029, the choice will be stark: socialism or barbarism.”

This is a quote from the revolutionary Polish-German socialist Rosa Luxemburg. Among other things, she was a staunch opponent of reformism.

MUST BE A “REACH OUT” PARTY

7) This new party must be a “reach out” party that knows how to tap into the many talents across the UK of those who want it to succeed. The same old gang has been controlling the left in this country for far too long.

For example, want to develop a tax policy that is far more equitable than what exists in fast declining and increasingly inequitable Britain? Contact well-rewarded progressive accountant and retired professor Richard Murphy. As he said Friday in his “Funding the Future” blog in an item titled “New party? Maybe? “: “I think Zarah Sultana is very committed and able. I think there is potential support - maybe considerable available support - for a new party.” (I have omitted here what Murphy wrote right after this; I am trying to keep the tone here positive.)

Or it is obvious any new party will need a “shit hot” media team producing convincing and lively words, videos, music, and the rest. I can name at least ten people who have great talents in putting forward progressive words and videos in the UK and who might very well be willing to assist in the formation of an agitprop unit (as it used to be called) for a new party. Nigel Farage will never know what hit him! (Someone else can find musicians.)

7) Lots of parties talk about winning over and involving the young in politics. But few do it. Will this new party break the mould?

Three more points in this somewhat lengthy list.

Norwich South MP Clive Lewis. Still Labour.

8) Will more Labour MPs join this new party in time? They will need convincing. Norwich South MP Clive Lewis is certainly one possible. He's an excellent campaigner with lots of energy and has done much good work on important issues such as proportional representation voting and the need to bring our water resourceS S back under public ownership. He was also one of only nine Labour MPs to oppose the outlawing of Palestine Action.

9) This new party must obviously build up its organisationally capacity. Without such an organisational structure, the initial wave of enthusiasm among activists will dissipate rapidly. Remember the “Enough is Enough” campaign in the autumn of 2022? Within a few months, more than 800,000 people had signed up to join. And within another few month, it had dribbled to nothing. One serious problem, among several, was its pitiful lack of organisation.

10) Socialists who join this new party need to form their own socialist caucus.

Do you have views on what this new party should be all about? THE LEFT LANE intends to open its pages for a debate on the wide number of issues at stake.

Write us at theleftlanepolitics@gmail,com ASAP and tell us what in 75 words or so what you piece would be about.

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

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