Jeremy Muddles Through

Your Party fiasco betrays Corbyn/Sultana's fundamental lack of seriousness

There are bigger things to write about than Corbynism right now - including the Russian ingress to Polish and Estonian airspace and Trump’s withdrawal of aid to the Baltics… I’ll be writing more on this soon, but for now - here’s the latests on the Your Party fiasco. Think of it as public service journalism because I’m one of the few people outside this milieu who actually understands what’s going on…

The Morning Star writer Chelley Ryan this week published an anecdote that sums up the problem with Jeremy Corbyn and his already-fractious new party:

“I spoke to Jeremy Corbyn last night in the pub. I just said ‘solidarity Jeremy, I know this has been a tough week’ and he just said, ‘thank you, we will make it work, we will find a way. We always do.’ I’ve never spoken to him before but he really does have such a lovely aura…”

“We will find a way; we always do,” is a summary of Corbyn’s approach to all political problems.

Anyone who thinks it would be a good idea to put him in charge of the country – without the guard-rails that existed when he was Labour leader – is off their rocker.

But I don’t think that’s the intention of Your Party. The more I listen to the angst of his supporters, as Zarah Sultana’s antics effectively disrupt the project, the more it becomes clear that its primary purpose is to make them feel good.

For some it’s a Schadenfreude project, whose effect would be to hand power to Farage, the probable collapse of the Labour Party and after that our democracy. Others just want to be in a party that expresses facile “demands” rather than adopts policies that could actually work. Others just want to be in a place where they are respected and not factionally excluded by the Labour right.

But none of it adds up to a project either for power or enacting radical change. Because if you’re not actively trying to destroy Labour (as Sultana is), or pursuing a path to “revolution” and “expropriation” as the deranged Leninist re-enactment groups are, the path to radical change lies through a parliamentary party with fiscal and governmental competence.

And that’s where the word “we” in Jeremy’s whimsical “find a way” theory of change becomes the problem.

Corbyn is a political figure with a big following, but he is no political strategist. So to “find a way” he relies on a select group of people he trusts because he has worked with them for years, or even decades.

They include the inner core of the old Unite bureaucracy; anti-Zionist Jews from his constituency; his wife Laura Alvarez; James Schneider, his former comms chief; the staff of P&JP; plus whoever decides to insert themselves into his immediate periphery at any given time.

But when it came to launching the new party, the “we” could not cohere. Because “we” has expanded to include four socially conservative Muslim MPs who ran on sectarian tickets in the general election, plus Zarah Sultana– whose mercurial behaviour has precipitated the party’s crisis at its pre-launch phase.

I won’t go into the deep detail of how the crisis unfolded. The short summary of the contending forces is:

• Sultana wants to be co-leader and wants a membership-led launch, with “anti-Zionism” as part of the brand identity and youth/identitarian politics at the heart of the project. Jamie Driscoll and Feinstein are supporting this.

• The four Muslim MPs want to defend private schools and are in some cases negative on trans rights and even picket lines.

• The old tankies from Unite just want a lever they can use to pressure the Labour Party.

• Those former Momentum/Occupy/TWTW activists who have stuck with Corbyn instead of entering the Green Party want a networked/horizontalist approach and see the party only as one part of their long-term strategy.

• The Trotskyist groups (RCP, Counterfire, SWP), want a front they can enter, manipulate and recruit from.

• A group inspired by the “actionist” strategy of Roger Hallam, called Assemble, is pushing to build the party from below by calling regional people’s assembles. It has launched a drive to raise £150k to train ten “organisers” who will then convene regional assemblies to launch the new party from below.

• The outright Russian, Iranian and PRC proxies are pressuring the party towards “anti-Zionism” and demanding the exclusion of Schneider and others whose political antennae and organisational competence would stand in the way of manipulating the party for hybrid warfare against the UK.

Corbyn understands enough about politics to know that getting all of the above into a room to vote on policies and leadership, before either have been rigged in advance, would likely bounce him into a series of ultra-left positions he does not hold, and quite possibly vote for a “one state solution” policy that would legitimise the destruction of Israel.

Actually, that’s the best-case scenario. At worst, once the new party names its local leaders and candidates, and becomes responsible for their actions and words, it will end up straight back were all this started – at the EHRC - because of the unrestrained antisemitism of a minority of the people Corbyn attracts.

For all the factional heat generated, nobody has explained what this party is supposed to achieve (other than becoming a hospitable talking shop for people who think you can wish away capitalism with “demands”.)

Andrew Murray, usually close to Corbyn but clearly disgruntled over the shenanegans, made an interesting comment this week about Jeremy’s decision to report Sultana to the Information Commissioner’s Office, over the way she used the party’s email list to make her pre-emptive appeal for funds. He writes:

“…turning Sultana in to the ICO, an arm of the state eager to crush her as they did Corbyn’s Labour leadership, is a very bad look indeed.”

The ICO is, in fact, the part of the state that guards our information privacy. It’s what makes sure organisations cannot exploit our personal data for reasons they were not intended.

But if Murray is against co-operating with “the state”, that implies an attitude to the rule of law that no MP could share, since they are bound by a code that says “no member is above the law”.

In fact, this hostile attitude to “the state” is the tell for something deeper.

This is a party that has no chance of forming a government and does not want to – because then it would have to run not only the ICO but agencies like MI5, the armed forces, the prison system and Border Control (aka “the state”).

[When I was on the inside with Corbynism, it was obvious to me that its leadership had no intention of governing, because they made no consideration - even at a private level - of how they would run Downing Street, the Cabinet Office etc. The comparison with Starmer, whose shadow cabinet and advisers spent years preparing for power, and have still struggled, is glaring.]

When Corbyn was Labour leader, he was restrained by the party’s policies – which are decided at its NPF –by its rulebook and by the collective willpower of tens of thousands of activists, councillors and trade union officials with a common political understanding.

Without those guardrails, the way becomes open for people to redefine Corbyn’s politics – which is essentially left social democracy combined with existential sympathy for the CRINK countries – in a much more radical direction.

Fiona Lali, for example, of the ex-Militant tendency group RCP wants the party to “expropriate” the bourgeoisie without compensation (violating among other things the Human Rights Act, the Trade Co-operation Agreement with the EU and the rules of the WTO).

What the whole project ignores is the reality of politics. Real politics is hard: you have combine with people you don’t agree with, and make compromises to get things done. Instead of simply demanding stuff or pronouncing glib slogans (like “welfare not warfare”) you have – as Nye Bevan famously told the Labour Party Conference in 1949 – to make “the language of priorities the religion of socialism”.

Sultana and Corbyn’s inability to communicate, collaborate and compromise over the simple compromises needed to from the party show that they don’t possess even a basic comprehension of what they would do in government.

Corbyn will be 80 years old in 2029. The idea of him being prime minister is ludicrous. Sultana seems to have zero organisational skills and no political principles (she stood on Labour’s manifesto in 2024, a party whose position on Gaza in 2023 she now calls “genocidal”. The party has no programme – not even on the things that matter to them, like welfare, defence etc – and neither does the P&JP.

The fundamental question for those involved in the party is: what effect do you intend to achieve.

I can see the point of the Plan C/movementist project: create a networked movement focused on identity politics and the economic problems of graduates.

I can see the logic of Leninist re-enactment – though I disagree with it.

I cannot see the logic of forming an electoral party that unites these projects with lunatics who think “Keir Starmer is controlled by Israel” and the people who brought us Just Stop Oil.

You might ask: why don’t they just join the Greens? Some prominent ex-Corbynistas have – but those still involved with Your Party have a variety of reasons. If all of the tendencies outlined above were allowed to join the GPEW they would blow it apart just as they’re blowing themselves apart now.

Ultimately, the political forces around Sultana, the Islamists, the Putinists and the Xi Jin Ping verstehers, are fissile material. Corbyn’s natural base consists of left trade unionists and the ex Momentum crew. Every seasoned activist from that core group knows that, the moment a party exists, it will be haunted by the same spectre that dragged the original project into the gutter: cranks, desperate for a meeting room or zoom call on which they can vent their obsessive “anti-Zionism”.

If that’s the room you want to sit in, you’re welcome. For those determined to enact real change – in England and Wales at least – there’s only Labour.

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