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6:15 pm, July 30th, 2025 - 17 comments
Categories: accountability, campaigning, community democracy, democratic participation, elections, First Past the Post, genocide, israel, jacinda ardern, Jeremy Corbyn, leadership, Left, MMP, political alternatives, Politics, socialism, uk politics, uncategorized, vision, Zionism -
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Zarah Sultana for one – she’s a star. Gaza for another – anti-zionism/semitism won’t work this time. 500,000 signed up in a week for a new political party is impressive.
Ten years ago when Jeremy Corbyn was unexpectedly added to the list of candidates for Labour’s leadership, we had seen the meeting notice, and expected to find 50 people in a back room. Instead I stood with my wife for over an hour in a queue around the Camden Town Hall waiting to hear him. He filled two halls, and addressed another 3,000 outside from the top of a fire engine.
I remember talking to a public service union senior organiser who was desperate for political change. Corbyn wasn’t the most impressive speaker, those were Ken Livingstone and Owen Jones, who has also signed up to Your Party. But as a political organiser, I was impressed.
The rest, as they say is history. Except that this time it’s not. The word has changed so much that old certainties have gone out the window. History may not repeat itself.
We can expect the usual disparagement from the “adults in the room,” already out in force pointing to Corbyn’s defeat in the 2019 election. He can’t win elections they say. This ignores the fact that in 2017 he achieved the largest swing to UK Labour for many years. His spectacular rise in that election mirrored that of Ardern-led Labour in Aotearoa – the difference was that under MMP Jacinda Ardern was installed as Prime Minister and under FPP Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t, as Theresa May crept back in in a minority government.
There are at least three other things that are very different now. The Forde report details how in 2019 the UK Labour Party was actively working against its candidate Corbyn. Your Party will build its organisation from scratch.
Secondly the Mossad-led antisemitism smear will not work a second time around. Too many people have seen the results of official Israeli depravity in Gaza on their cellphones.
Third Zarah Sultana is a star, and the bridge to the future that Jeremy never had. Watch her first interview here
It was Ed Miliband’s decision to allow OMOV that made Corbyn’s leadership victory possible in 2015. As co-founder Zarah Sultana says in this impressive video interview Your Party’s shape and purpose will be decided by its members. They won’t have the baggage of the “grown-ups.”
What is so far promised is some rallies. They were also critical to Corbyn’s leadership victories. Who knows, next year’s Glastonbury festival may ring out again with “Oh Jeremy Corbyn” – oh and with “Oh Zarah Sultana.”
The mirror of Reform if done well.
Unfortunately, not really. Unlike traditional political parties which are effectively unincorporated associations, Reform is a private limited company, which gives Farage and his leadership cronies complete control. The first thing we need to address is this "500,000 signed up" business for this new party. This is just a mailing list. No membership fees, no request for volunteers, no union funding. Sure, if 10% sign up that is a great start but it is still not a lot.
This new party appears to be beginning from a position of forgetting nothing and learning nothing from the anarchic "Occupy Wall Street" movement era.
My hopes for this new party fell considerably reading the interview with James Schneider in the New Left Review – https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/building-the-party – and I have been reading the social media stuff of Sultana and Corbyn. Schneider, a major player in creating Momentum and as solidly left wing as you can get, seems to imagine the party as some sort of Momentum 2.0 – a bottom up, member driven organisation that seeks policy platforms entirely informed by the popular acclamation of the membership. To me Schneider is confusing being popular with your base with being populist, which is a different fish altogether. This impression has only been reinforced by reading the Guardian piece from Corbyn, watching Sultana's Novara interview and reading their social media feeds.
Fundamentally Momentum was a ginger group, not a political party. Political parties are not inchoate agglomerations of grievances and issues de jour of a non-representative lumpen mass. They are projects tightly focused on power to enact ideologically coherent policies that favour the redistribution of resources to an identified constituency. They require hierarchies to impose discipline, provide leadership and keep the party on message. This new party, if it is Corbyn's Labour redux, will simply be eaten alive in the political marketplace.
We need to remember Corbynism ultimately failed and Corbyn's time has passed. Corbyn's old-fashioned cold war rhetoric – unilateral disarmament, pro-Russia, appeasement – is completely at odds with British sentiment on issues like Ukraine. The UK public has moved on, and Sultana and Corbyn now have to compete with the likes of prospective Green leader Jack Polanski whose electoral appeal is going to be wildly more saleable than a warmed over, geriatric Corbyn.
If the new party was able to get as a launch leader, say, the recently retired Mick Lynch and bring on-board someone like Gary Stevenson and relentless stay on message around wealth inequality and taxing wealth not work then they'd have a royal chance. But if they are trying to re-create the failed political structures of the 2000s and 2010s then the new party will be a fiasco.
Left parties always start as movements. Labour NZ took 20 years to figure out, same as the Greens via Anderton.
No one can stop the UK electorate fracturing. To have the critical second term Starmer is going to need either the Lib Dems or whatever Corbyn can get + Greens if they get anything.
As a comparator, Bernie also got close to the ring of power, but AOC could get even closer. The rpessing question is not to me party leadership but whether Corbyn can gain enough money to beat the algorithms.
I hope they do well! I suspect though the Corbyn moment has passed.
When change occurs, it actually happen very quickly – to use a relatable timescale, the Liberals won the the general election and were the government in 2012, were the official oppostion until 2026 and had vanished by 2027.
To put it another way, imagine if none of the political parties that will contest the 2026 election even existed in 2002!
Politics being a numbers game, his prospects seem to lie with the alienated youth vote:
Given that Corbyn lacks media savvy, his move has to attract clued-up younger generations to get traction. Marketing will be the test of feasibility, and the writer quoted above makes a useful point here:
Hegemony in a state of failure is an opportunity. We know that bleating about how nasty a hegemon is doesn't work – everyone stands around muttering "Shit, I've known that for how many years already??" You have to provide a positive alternative. Corbyn & Sanders both seemed to believe that they had it in their head, but were unable to tell anyone what it actually was. Has he learnt how yet??
If only Jeremy Corbyn had folowed your advice, Dennis, where might he be now
Provide free lunches for school students eh – what an idea.
Policy wins are valid evidence of nous, I agree. Just not marketing pizzazz – insofar as generating a political brand is the essence of political positioning. When you see the media framing his oldster/youngster blend with a trendy tag, the requisite meme may appear in the aftermath…
Splitter versus Tankie redux
Excellent framing, but I confess to becoming more of a Starmer fan after reading his biography. I ought to compile a list of credits from the photocopies I made.
I mean, the guy is authentic, clever and resolute. That triad is hard to beat. The split will soften his effect, sure, and he needs to visibly get runs on the board.
If I get a moment I will put up a summary of what Starmer has achieved already. I always go with the one with the delivery track record.
The resurrection is real. JC is back.
I remember the football crowds chanting" Oh Jeremy Corbyn"
He was hugely popular , but his policies were too left wing for the neolib wankers and he was brought down by a compliant media.The charges of anti semitism were a total fraud
Oh, the negativity and defeatism from some here. It is not about Jeremy personally, rather the staunch internationalist and pro working class platform he promotes. Not too many Labour leaders have been threatened by the Brit military establishment with a coup if they ever became PM as Mr Corbyn was!
Past mistakes matter little when the class position is…”For the many not the few”-essentially an anti capitalist programme. Your Party will chart its own course and be part of a new politics.
It’s…not funny, but…if Labour hadn’t deposed him with such a spiteful hatchet job there wouldn’t be much here to grow.
British politics is weird. Labour gets nothing when it’s popular, and running a popular manifesto. When it’s despised and boring, facing a clear RW majority in the electorate, it gets 5 years. I’m sure the absolute fickleness of its electoral system contributes greatly to the national character of the UK.
Given the strong external powers who support fractured and fractious electorates in the big two of the Anglosphere, can anyone turn the tanker around?
Is there any kind of positive way to run the AI/crypto economy? There’s even suggestions part of the reason Trump was popular was the number of Americans who hold crypto portfolios.
It feels like nothing that held the status quo from the 90s onwards is reliable and solid and where the next moment to stop for a ‘cup of tea’ might be is not likely to be one of living wages and home ownership for most.
I guess we'll see what happens. Either the movement will fail because it lacks the internal capability and public approval it needs, or it will be cut down because it looks like it doesn't lack those things.
If the latter scenario applies, it will be interesting to observe the methods used to stop it. The antisemitism canard that was used to destroy Corbynism last time is off the table as an option – it's a dead duck (!) because we are all 'antisemitic' now, including Keir Starmer for threatening to recognise Palestinian statehood.
Zarah Sultana has explicitly said that the name of the party will not be "Your Party". It's probably best to just refer to it with phrase like "Corbyn and Sultana's new party".