In early September, Zarah Sultana made a bold announcement. “Labour is dead,” the 31-year-old socialist member of Parliament told a crowd of hundreds gathered in Newcastle. She had left Britain’s ruling party only in July, pledging to “co-lead” a new left-wing party with Jeremy Corbyn, a former Labour leader who was expelled last year. More than 700,000 Britons have signed up to the mailing list of the provisionally titled Your Party. Among the party’s goals are redistributing wealth, taxing the very rich, making rail and energy publicly owned, standing up to fossil-fuel giants, and ending arms sales to Israel.
Sultana was perhaps too quick to declare Labour’s demise, but she had reasons to forecast it. Although he won a landslide victory last year, the Labour leader Keir Starmer has already disappointed many supporters. In polls, he has fallen behind the right-wing Reform UK of Nigel Farage. As progressives have done with center-left leaders elsewhere, many would-be supporters have deemed him to be insufficiently pro-Palestine. Additionally, he has cut welfare benefits and centralized control of the party. Dozens of councilors around the country have left Labour since last year. In Newcastle, Sultana shared the stage with Jamie Driscoll, a popular regional mayor who left the party in 2023 after Labour passed him over as a candidate for mayor of the North East.
And yet, for all the buoyancy onstage, Sultana’s party was already riven with deep divisions and suffering from self-defeating impulses familiar to observers of the American progressive left. If Your Party means to empower the British left rather than delivering elections to Labour’s rivals to the right, it has some soul-searching to do.
The rifts within the new party were present from the start, but on September 18, they became embarrassingly public. That morning, an email went out to Your Party’s mailing list, asking those interested to sign up as members by paying a monthly fee of five pounds (or an annual fee of 55 pounds). Sultana soon declared on social media that more than 20,000 members had paid up within hours. The long wait appeared over. The new party was up and running—and then all hell broke loose.
About half an hour after Sultana’s announcement, Corbyn sent an “urgent message” to the party’s supporters, declaring that the earlier email they had received was “unauthorized” and asking supporters to ignore it and cancel any payment they had made. Corbyn’s message was signed by nearly all the members of a group he’d co-founded, called the Independent Alliance and consisting of Corbyn, Sultana, and four other MPs, all of whom are Muslim men of South Asian descent who ran Gaza-focused campaigns. Sultana, who is also of Pakistani Muslim background, joined it only in July and was the only member not to sign. Corbyn and his allies are now clearly shunning her.
Sultana hit back, complaining that a “sexist boys’ club” was interfering with her vision for an “open, democratic and member-led organization.” The public meltdown devolved into legal threats and recriminations on both sides. Upping the ante, Sultana swiftly introduced a bill banning landlords from serving as MPs. This appeared to be a jab at Adnan Hussain, an ally of Corbyn’s who runs real-estate companies. Hussein has espoused socially conservative views, including on trans people, and voted against decriminalizing abortion after 24 weeks and for taxing private schools, all stances controversial on the left.
The kerfuffle within Your Party has spawned endless jokes, memes, and obvious schadenfreude among its rivals. And the civil war shows little sign of abating. On X, two prominent Your Party supporters in Wales said they were “appalled” by the infighting and attempted to distance themselves from both sides. A group of two dozen activists called Our Party have made a bid to take over Your Party from both Corbyn and Sultana. “It’s time to hand over the reins,” the group has said, demanding the MPs give way to the members. Corbyn has since reopened the online membership drive; the party’s outlets declared that those who had signed up before will also count as members. Sultana has tepidly supported this bid but been conspicuously absent from Your Party’s recent social-media posts.
The episode reflects poorly on Your Party’s leadership, but that’s not the only obstacle the project is up against. Britain’s first-past-the-post system makes any nationwide third party difficult to muster. Back in the 1920s, even the Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin called on his British supporters to affiliate with the Labour Party instead of fighting it. Most Marxist groups in Britain have spent at least some years inside the Labour Party, hoping to change it from within.
Conversely, history is littered with failed leftist attempts to oust Labour as the main party of the British working class. In 1996, Arthur Scargill, the leader of the mine workers’ union, left Labour to establish the Socialist Labour Party. It never got more than 0.2 percent of the vote. In 2004, the opposition to the war in Iraq, together with Trotskyists and Muslim community leaders, formed the Respect Party. Former Labour MP George Galloway won an East London seat on that party’s ticket in 2005, with the enthusiastic support of much of the British far left. But Respect never gained another seat, and its Trotskyist and Muslim-focused wings soon split apart (the Respect leader and former Birmingham councilor Salma Yaqoob is now a key Sultana ally). Several other efforts before and since have had similar results.
Your Party suffers from some of the same problems that doomed its predecessors. One is that basing a new party on a single foreign-policy issue is a mistake—whether the Iraq War in 2004 or Palestine now. British workers are unlikely to break century-long ties to Labour over the Middle East. The wrong basis of unity also makes clashes inevitable. This is evident in the Independent Alliance. Despite a shared position on Gaza, many of its founding members have no background in Labour or on the left. One worked with a Muslim advocacy group contesting LGBTQ themes in school textbooks. Another is a former Liberal Democrat who called for troops to break a sanitary workers’ strike in Birmingham.
The conflicts within Your Party have something to do with egos and personalities, but they are also rooted in differing political and organizational visions among the party’s leaders and those in their orbits. The former Corbyn staffer James Schneider has said that he wants a party of “asset-poor workers, downwardly mobile graduates and racialized people.” The penchant for identity politics has become passé on the left and subject to critique. Andrew Murray, a former Communist trade unionist and Corbyn adviser, has decried Schneider’s formula as promoting the “political fragmentation of the working class.”
An even more crucial disagreement is over the party’s relationship to electoral politics. Sultana, Schneider, and others talk of placing the new party at the core of grassroots institutions meant to radicalize British society from below and bring societal change. Sultana has said that the new party shouldn’t limit itself to “just electoralism” and has pledged to “change politics forever,” bringing about a “politics of fun and joy … embedding itself in mass culture.” Schneider has said that the main task of the party should be to “construct more institutions” and to be “a catalyst for popular organizing and a lever for popular mobilization.”
These airy promises suggest an activist mentality that is alien to politics in a parliamentary democracy like Britain’s. Running a political party requires flexibility and compromise. As one former Corbyn staffer has argued, “direct engagement in building grassroots institutions … could distract from this larger, electoral aim.”
In fact, a perennial problem for any new leftist party will be its saturation with activists, who have a penchant for lost causes, kooky foreign-policy positions, and narcissisms of small differences. Sultana loves to emphasize how democratic Britain’s new party will be. But unless it also has strong leadership around a firm program, all of its energies will be spent on herding the leftist cats who share little besides their disdain for Labour.
Sultana claims that the rise of “fascism” gives her project urgency. She points to the recent enormous far-right rally in London and to the chances of Farage coming to power. But much of her rhetoric, and that of her supporters, attacks “Labourism” and the Labour Party instead. She has called for Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy to be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court, even though the Labour government he is a part of has recognized the State of Palestine.
Your Party could be a gift to Farage if it succeeds in stealing votes from rivals on the left. These include not just Labour but also the Green Party, which recently elected the self-described eco-populist Zack Polanski as leader. Polanski has attracted a number of Labour activists from the Corbyn era, such as the best-selling Marxist author Grace Blakeley and the former Corbyn spokesperson Matt Zarb-Cousin. Unless Labour, the Greens, and Your Party come to an electoral understanding, their candidates will have to compete with one another, and with other parties, over every seat, dividing the left-leaning vote and potentially allowing Reform or the Conservatives to come out on top. Fearful of such an outcome, even those who support Your Party’s policies might prefer to vote for Labour as the best shot for defeating the right.
Your Party could avoid paving Farage’s path to power if it lowered its ambitions from replacing the Labour Party to being a potential ally to its left. This would mean forging an understanding with Labour, the Greens, or both. The new party might have to limit itself to running only for seats that neither Reform nor the Conservatives could possibly win, for example. But more important, the party would have to stop demonizing Labour and focus its ire on the right-wing parties instead.
Britain’s Communist Party adopted such a strategy for most of the 20th century. In Europe, too, many left-wing parties treat center-left parties as potential coalition partners rather than primary adversaries. Murray has encouraged Your Party to learn from this approach rather than seek to replace Labour, given that it won’t have “the strength that comes from being a part of the political fabric for 120 years, nor the historic roots and power bases” of the Labour Party.
But convincing activists that their nascent party should commit to being a junior partner in a Labour government will be a daunting task. A writer for the leftist flagship New Left Review has already warned against “a liberal popular-front model that implicitly commits the left to propping up a Labour government, which would be moral and political suicide.”
Sultana recently visited New York City, hosted by the local branch of the Democratic Socialists of America, perhaps hoping to learn from the success of the mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. A prominent Sultana supporter has even suggested that Your Party should emulate DSA. But as inspiring as Mamdani’s rise has been, DSA’s shambolic life on the national level should be a cautionary tale for the British leftists. A loose federation of local clubs with no discernible national strategy, DSA has been ineffective on a broad scale. If Your Party wants to avoid a similar fate, it would be well advised to be disciplined and electorally oriented—and to drop single-issue activism, hostility to Labour, and inept, baggage-laden figures such as Corbyn. Only then can it effectively pursue its goals.
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