At first, the recent collapse of Your Party—a new British grouping of socialists, progressives, and opponents of the war in Gaza—brings to mind a classic Onion headline: “Left-Wing Group Too Disorganized for FBI Agents to Infiltrate.” But Your Party’s descent into infighting and recrimination offers an insight into the challenges faced by the left on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Although the fledgling organization was designed to challenge the ruling Labour Party from the left, its troubles began even before it had a name: The sign-up page referred to “Your Party,” but journalists who referred to it as such were told that this was merely an interim description. In the best tradition of left-wing grassroots democracy, its members would decide the final name. Sadly, no one knows what this is yet.
Before its official launch, the two co-founders of Your Party fell out, with one accused of hijacking the mailing list and the other of running a “sexist boys’ club.” The future of the organization—which has claimed more than 800,000 sign-ups—is now in doubt.
Many of the party’s struggles are uniquely British. But the larger tension that has paralyzed Your Party will be familiar to watchers of American politics. In both countries, the political left has been caught flat-footed by the rise of an insurgent populist right that the center-left establishment has proved inept at resisting. As the rest of the left plots its resurgence, how big should the tent be? What matters most—foreign policy, social issues, or economic populism? Who should be prepared to compromise on their beliefs for the sake of cohesion?
In the United States, these tensions often play out within the Democratic Party, where the opinions of its most vocal supporters—predominantly white, professional liberals—frequently diverge from those of organized labor and socially conservative minority voters. In Britain, though, the parliamentary system means that smaller parties, even single-issue parties, can actually win seats and seek leverage by acting as a spoiler. With the center-left Labour government deeply unpopular—and Nigel Farage’s populist-right party, Reform, leading in the polls—the political left has sensed an opportunity. If, that is, its members can avoid falling out with one another long enough to seize it.
Your Party exists because of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Currently, the pro-Palestine cause is one of the biggest protest movements in Britain, not least because popular opinion here—as in the United States—is well to the left of the main center-left party. Since October 2023, opposition to the war in Gaza has brought young, social-justice-minded progressives together with British Muslims, who are more socially conservative than the general population and have traditionally leaned toward voting Labour. (Muslims make up about 6 percent of the British population.) Both groups are opposed to what they see as Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. But beyond that particular issue, the alliance of “rainbow and crescent”—as the historian James Orr, a friend of J. D. Vance, has described it—is extremely fragile. Gay marriage, abortion, and transgender rights are obvious flash points, but other issues can be equally divisive. For instance, many British Muslims support fee-paying schools, which can offer students a more religious curriculum than government-run institutions. The traditional left-wing position, however, is that private schools are engines of privilege and should be abolished. Can these groups happily coexist in a left-wing movement in the long term? The experience of Your Party suggests not.
One of its two leaders is the 76-year-old Jeremy Corbyn, a lifelong anti-war, anti-colonialist leftist who was unexpectedly elevated to lead Labour in 2015. Corbyn performed above expectations in the 2017 general election but flamed out spectacularly in 2019, when his Conservative opponent, Boris Johnson, managed to turn the vote into a referendum on “getting Brexit done.”
His successor as Labour leader, Keir Starmer, initially presented himself as part of the Corbynite tradition, but he pivoted soon after winning the leadership into attacking the party’s hard left and taking the party to the center. In 2020, Labour suspended Corbyn for refusing to acknowledge the extent of anti-Semitism within the party under his watch. He was later expelled altogether. Since then, Corbyn has sat in Parliament as an independent, and last year he began working closely with the “Gaza independents,” a group of four men elected in 2024 in constituencies with significant Muslim populations: Shockat Adam, Adnan Hussain, Ayoub Khan, and Iqbal Mohamed.
The other prospective co-leader of Your Party is 31-year-old Zarah Sultana, who is also a former Labour member of Parliament. Her politics are anti-austerity, pro-Palestinian, and—here comes the tricky part—socially progressive. (The closest analogue in the U.S. would be Zohran Mamdani.) “The rollback of LGBT rights—especially trans rights—is global, bankrolled by billionaires and the far-right,” she wrote on X in April. When the boxer Imane Khelif competed in the female category at the Olympics last year amid questions about her eligibility, Sultana posted a picture of Khelif on Facebook with the caption: “If you come for the Queen, you best not miss!” (Boxing authorities have instituted new requirements for sex testing, which Khelif has challenged. She has not competed professionally since they took effect.) With 490,000 followers, Sultana is said to be the second-most-followed British politician on TikTok, after Nigel Farage.
Sultana speaks for a large section of the youthful British left, for whom gay marriage is a settled issue and gender self-identification is a human right. Corbyn, on the other hand, has always cared principally about foreign policy. He vocally opposed apartheid in South Africa and George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. As Labour leader, he gamely announced his pronouns—he/him—and supported gender self-ID rules, but he never gave any sense of being deeply motivated by the issue.
Sultana was the one to announce the formation of the new party on July 3, with a post on X that implored disaffected Labour supporters to “join us.” Behind the scenes, Corbyn was reportedly furious—he did not want to be a co-leader with someone else and felt that he had been forced into a decision. The Times of London printed WhatsApp messages showing his longtime fixer, Karie Murphy, removing dissenters from the group chat organizing the new party’s launch. Corbyn eventually welcomed the creation of the new party in public, albeit grudgingly.
A month later, the split between the social progressives and those focused on foreign policy—the gender leftists and the Gaza leftists—became impossible to deny. In August, Hussain, one of the independent members of Parliament, posted an announcement for a Your Party event with Corbyn on X. A commenter who endorsed a “material analysis of sex” urged the new left-wing party not to “parrot the same neoliberal idea of gender ideology.” Hussain replied: “I agree, women’s rights and safe spaces should not be encroached upon. Safe third spaces should be an alternative option.” After all, he went on to say, trans women were “not biologically women.”
This ignited, if not a firestorm, then certainly a small but lively conflagration. Sultana gave an interview saying that it was “really important that, from the outset, we are loud and proud about the values that we have” and there was “no space for transphobia” in Your Party.
In public, the issue then simmered down for a month, until last week, when Corbyn posted a message on X warning supporters that “an unauthorised email” trying to convince them to pay a £55 annual fee to join Your Party had been sent to the mailing list. The email had come from allies of Sultana. A further statement referred to Sultana’s “unilateral launch” of the party.
That is not how Sultana saw it. She said that she launched the membership portal after being “sidelined” by Corbyn’s allies. She also attacked the “sexist boys’ club” whom she said had “refused to allow any other women with voting rights on the Working Group.” On September 19, a third faction arose, demanding that all six independents step back from leadership roles because “the people should take things forward from here.”
Again, the Onion headline comes to mind.
Those on the left who are dismayed by the turmoil inside Your Party have been consoling themselves with the fact that another left-wing party exists—the Greens. “Maybe that’s the vehicle that will take off as a result of this,” one of Corbyn’s former aides, Andrew Fisher, told the BBC.
Unfortunately, the same struggle for precedence among foreign policy, economic populism, and social justice is also present in the Greens. Ostensibly an environmentalist party, the Greens are also socially progressive and economically left wing. When the Scottish branch was a minority coalition partner in the Scottish government, its politicians pushed hard for gender self-identification; last year, a conference motion rejected the findings of the Cass report, which described the evidence for youth gender medicine as shaky.
The Greens also believe that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, and the new leader of the party in England and Wales, Zack Polanski, called for Israeli President Isaac Herzog to be arrested on his visit to Britain as a “potential war criminal.” The second signatory on that statement was one of Polanski’s deputy leaders, Mothin Ali, a local councilor for a northern English suburb and a devout Muslim. (He described his election as a councilor as a “win for the people of Gaza” before shouting “God is the greatest” in Arabic.) His statement condemned the decision to let Israeli weapons manufacturers exhibit their wares at an arms fair in London.
On the subject of Israel, the Greens are unified. But Ali’s candidacy for the deputy leadership over the summer was nearly derailed by his refusal to sign a pro-LGBTQ pledge. (He said that he was not signing any pledges, because they can “create pressure, turn allyship into performance politics, and even exclude those who are already doing the work.”) In an interview with a transgender activist within the party, Ali was asked if he believed that “trans women are women,” and he gave a classic politician’s nonanswer. He spoke about how both Muslims and trans people, as marginalized groups, were targeted by the far right. He suggested that before colonialism, “Eastern cultures” were much more sympathetic to transgender and intersex people. Notably, he did not say “yes” or “no.” This strategic ambiguity appears to have served him well, because Ali won the deputy leadership on September 2.
Theoretically, the Greens could be the big winners from the meltdown in Your Party. If so, either Ali will have to maintain his policy of sticking to vague generalities about his social views, or his progressive comrades will have to expand the range of acceptable beliefs within the party.
The trouble here is that the British left—the part beyond the Democrats and Labour—has two shibboleths that potential leaders are required to utter. The first is that Israel is committing a genocide. The second is that “trans women are women.” But the groups that hold these two positions do not neatly overlap.
For the moment, when bombing and starvation in Gaza is regularly in the news, that doesn’t always matter. But the experience of Your Party suggests that, in the longer term, the British left and its U.S. counterpart will have to decide how broad their coalition can be. Which faction—the progressives or the moderates—will give ground in the service of an effective movement? That answer will define the fight against the ascendancy of the populist right.
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