The Prodigious Incompetence of Britain’s Would-Be Left Party

Corbyn, following Sultana’s announcement, stayed conspicuously quiet for way too long, refusing to publicly commit to a project that he was ostensibly helping to lead. Rumors began to spread that he’d been caught off guard by Sultana’s announcement, and that he was “furious” about it. It looked bad. A day too late, he broke his silence and—gingerly—committed to the project, which, before long, adopted the mercifully temporary name of “Your Party.” A real name, as well as all the other details, would be decided “democratically” in due course. Sporadic, unspectacular updates about the party were then issued to supporters over the following weeks.

As Your Party trundled along in the political background throughout August and September, the eco-socialist Zack Polanski’s successful takeover of the Green Party was completed. This was good news. A wider left-wing movement, at last, seemed to be cohering into a solid electoral bloc, with Polanski’s Greens on one side and Corbyn and Sultana’s Your Party, even though it didn’t really exist yet, on the other. This was a prospective coalition with the potential to push back against Reform and Labour. The mood was cautious, but optimistic—until last Thursday.

An email that morning appeared in the inboxes of the 800,000 people who’d signed up for Your Party’s mailing list. Its message, on the surface, seemed promising: a membership portal was open at last, meaning supporters could finally sign up to become paid members of the party. So far so good. Things were moving. Excitement was bubbling. Online, Sultana was swiftly celebrating the fact that 20,000 people had joined the party within the first couple of hours. These were heady, heady times. But then came the next email, a few hours after the first, and this one was labeled “URGENT,” in big, scary caps. “This morning,” it read, “an unauthorized email was sent to all yourparty.uk supporters with details of a supposed membership portal hosted in a new domain name. Legal advice is being taken. That email should be ignored by all supporters. If any direct debits have been set up, they should be immediately cancelled.” Right.

That email was signed off by Jeremy Corbyn, as well the other independent MPs who had committed themselves to the founding of the party: Ayoub Khan, Adnan Hussain, Iqbal Mohamed, and Shockat Adam. The notable omission: Zarah Sultana. A shitstorm was evidently brewing here, and, sure enough, it soon made landfall.

Sultana, admitting that she was responsible for opening the membership portal, took to X to denounce the “sexist boys’ club” within Your Party that was trying to freeze her out, which apparently, to her mind, justified her hasty actions. It didn’t seem to occur to her that, maybe, taking a huge amount of money from people without the agreement of her colleagues might, actually, not be such a great idea. But hey-ho. At least she was getting things moving.

Corbyn’s side were up next with their own statement, stating that they planned to report Sultana to the Information Commissioner’s Office, a state body—an act that is hardly in the spirit of comradeship—which, in turn, led Sultana to announce that she was consulting a defamation lawyer. She has thankfully since rolled back on that idea, but, in general, this whole thing devolved into a clusterfuck of claims and counterclaims and even legal threats that unnecessarily played out before the eyes of the watching public. The party, clearly, has been badly, badly damaged by this, and it is unclear if it will ever recover.

Writing this summary of events, it is striking how boring it all is. This is not some great ideological debate—that, presumably, will come later, as identity politics inevitably sets in on the party and causes ruptures—but it rather appears to be a power dispute within an organization that doesn’t even really exist yet. Corbyn’s side have revealed themselves to be stubborn, slow-moving, and very plausibly sexist, while Sultana’s side appears impulsive, immature and stubborn in its own way. Both sides look weak, idiotic and petty, with each faction vying for power over the other. It’s as if they’ve purposely crafted the very insults that will be slung at them by the right-wing press in the years to come.

There is no time for this. Britain’s largest ever far-right rally took place two weekends ago, with up to 150,000 people marching through London, spewing racist bile and conspiratorial nonsense, while Nigel Farage and his far-right Reform party look increasingly likely to sweep to power when the next election rolls around. Even if Reform doesn’t win, this iteration of the Labour party literally supports genocide and is restricting civil rights at home to a remarkably extreme extent. The country needs a functioning Left now, but some of the most important people claiming to represent it seem too blinded by their own egos to detect how dangerous a moment this truly is.

But all is not yet lost. Polanski has been doing an excellent job of running the Greens so far, and, while caution must be exercised about them—this sorry debacle with Your Party surely teaches us that we can’t solely rely on political parties and cults of personality—they do appear to be forming a genuine opposition to this government and the rising Reform. But the Greens cannot do it alone, and Your Party, or some version of it, needs to be in play, too. Sultana and Corbyn must make up or get out of the way. They have both now indicated that they will seek to make amends, but organizers within the party have demanded that they relinquish control. Should either or both of them be sidelined, the party would lose its most recognizable faces, so would the project even be viable at that stage? It is difficult to say. 

At the time of writing, a new membership portal has just opened up. It is entirely unclear if the issues at the heart of the party have been resolved. For the time being, it remains an act of faith to become a paying member of Your Party, and its leaders have given people very little reason to hold onto that faith. Clarity is needed. Corbyn and Sultana’s respective factions are both giving the impression that they take support for this project for granted. Unless they get their shit together, communicate with clarity and actually pull the party together, they may find they were wrong to do so.