Will Britain's new left party be crazed or boring? And who gets to rig the votes?
The politics behind the Life Of Brian-style bust up between Corbyn and Sultana
[I took a break from Conflict & Democracy for the past couple of weeks. I am writing something big on the National Security Strategy, and will finish it in in the next few days. However…]
There’s been some hilarity in Westminster over leaked WhatsApp messages showing the instant row between supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, following the Coventry South MP’s surprise announcement that she is forming a new left-wing party.
But there are serious issues at stake – not just for the warring factions of British neo-Stalinism but for UK democratic resilience.
Corbyn’s supporters have been prevaricating for months over whether to launch a new party, for the following reasons:
Once you form a party, as opposed to an alliance of independent MPs and councillors, your finances become much easier to probe. Corbyn’s main vehicle is Peace & Justice Project, a limited company whose accounts are limited to a statement assets/liabilities, as with most small firms. Even a party like ASPIRE, which controls Tower Hamlets council, is exempt from quarterly election and transaction returns.
The “independent” label also means that crazed statements and reputation damaging encounters with corruption and organised crime only affect the candidate concerned, not the entire party, so nobody has to get vetted for the kind of anti-Semitism that took down Corbynism.
Much of the “horizontalist” milieu that was once in Momentum/TheWorldTransformed has already launched an entry tactic on the Green Party of England and Wales, where it is pushing for Zack Polanski to take control. This followed a series of meetings in East London labelled “Party Time” at which it became clear to them that Corbyn’s intended vehicle – Justice Collective Ltd – would have zero internal democracy.
A party has to have a programme: Corbyn’s allies in the Independent Alliance are Muslim social conservatives who, for example, oppose VAT on private schools. In Burnley, a Muslim independent was elected to Lancashire County Council on a programme of public gender segregation. In Birmingham, Corbyn ally Ayoub Khan MP actually called for troops to be deployed to break the refuse workers’s strike! With parts of the Stalinist left also hostile to trans rights, supportive of Brexit, and dismissive of Net Zero and “identity politics”, any new party would have to steer clear of the very issues that are front and centre for young progressive people.
The new party will rightly be accused of splitting the Labour vote at a time when that could facilitate a Reform government, and Reform control of local councils and mayorships.
The leaked WhatsApp messages reveal that the team around Corbyn is dominated by the group that ran LOTO until 2019 and oversaw Labour’s most spectacular electoral collapse since 1935: Amy Jackson, Karie Murphy, Andrew Murray and Len McCluskey.
What they appear to want is a social-democratic-seeming left party, which the unions can use as a pressure point on a Labour government. Neither Palestine, nor even Murray’s obsession, the validity of Russian territorial claims on Ukraine, really floats their boat. They will want to remain part of the broader labour movement.
However last Thursday, on a Zoom call, Sultana’s allies - the former ANC MP Andrew Feinstein and former Respect leader Salma Yaqoob - tried to bounce Corbyn in to the immediate formation of a party, with Sultana as co-leader. This group is prone to much stronger rhetoric on Palestine, and to giving moral support to the various “Actionist” groups. It has little sympathy for, nor base in, the wider labour movement.
Once Yaqoob forced the Zoom call participants into a vote on declaring the party (which Corbyn and his allies boycotted) and its formation was then announced online here’s, what happened next according to The Times:
“Corbyn smouldered as the post exploded online, fruitlessly demanding it be taken down. Just as horrified was Murphy, his former chief aide, who responded by launching a purge on Collective’s WhatsApp group, of which several members of the rival tendency had, at least until then, been part, including Yaqoob and Feinstein.”
Steve Freeman, as self-described “republican communist” in the group summarised what’s at stake organisationally in an ironic WhatsApp message:
“There are leaders, activists and masses. It has been suggested that the activists shut up because all major issues will be decided by the masses at the Great Democratic Conference. The activists must not interfere with the masses and force them to think anything. While being [gagged emoji] we are now [injured emoji]”
Anyone with experience of how Britain’s Leninist re-enactment groups operate will understand what lies ahead.
There is to be a big launch conference, at which anyone who joins can vote, and it will be presented with a pre-prepared statement drawn up by Team Jeremy. No amendments will be allowed. The left groups chosen to be the enforcers – both at this conference and in the new party’s branches – will make sure of that.
But what is at stake politically? Basically, whether the new party will adopt the line of “Third Period” Stalinism (1928-34), which claimed that social democracy is the same as fascism, and that defeating it is a higher good than preventing an actual fascist or far right government.
Translated into modern conditions, that would lead you to the kind of rhetoric that has become common in the pro-Palestinian far left: claims that Labour is actively perpetrating genocide in Gaza; attacks not just on Israeli arms firms but on all firms and universities involved in the defence sector; claims that Labour is imposing austerity (following its £20bn cash injection into the NHS!); claims that Starmer is a Tory, or is a sleeper agent for the CIA/Mossad, or under Israeli control, and that “the Rothschilds were responsible for Grenfell”.
Once your brain adapts to this left equivalent of QAnon, the conclusion becomes that it makes no odds whether the Tories, Labour or Reform are in power, locally or nationally. Politics becomes a succession of emotive public events, attempts to coerce or harass Labour MPs etc. Voting becomes just an expression of your feelings. For the Corbyn/former Unite inner circle however, this kind of politics is anathema.
There are, in short, four rival projects under way in England to organise a left alternative to Labour:
Galloway’s Workers Party, which is outright pro-Russian and socially reactionary, and has collaborated with some of the Muslim independent groups associated with the solicitor Akhmed Yakoob (who has pleaded not guilty to a charge of money laundering and is due to appear at Southwark Crown Court next week)…
The GPEW – recently joined by high-profile left economist Grace Blakeley and some of the Climate Camp activists who were in TWT…
Collective – which is Corbyn’s chosen vehicle, but just lost control both of the narrative and potentially the bureaucratic stitch up process…
And Sultana’s as-yet-unnamed vehicle, which left critics have dubbed “Bewegung Zarah Sultana” – after the Wagenknecht movement, which scored a spectacular nul points in the German election.
A fifth left/social conservative party, ASPIRE, is for now limited in its focus to Tower Hamlets, where it runs the council (yet again under direct supervision from Whitehall following an official report that described its management culture as “toxic”.)
At time of writing, Sultana’s site has more than 40,000 sign-ups. If Collective and the Zarah Party do tie up, I predict they will have to do so by remaining a loose alliance – because their differences over both politics, internal democracy and attitude to the Labour-affiliated unions are too great to be contained in a single legal entity, even if its is tightly policed by activists from Counterfire and the SWP. That’s what the Times leak amply reveals.
Interestingly, the SWP appears to be advocating this. They’ve written:
“At this stage, we believe an “umbrella” organisation, with real roots and high-profile support, would be the best way forward. Candidates would sign up to principles such as no to austerity and cuts, refugees welcome, fight racism, women’s and LGBT+ liberation, welfare not warfare, free Palestine and real action on climate change.”
Candidates would accept these, but could go further than them if they wanted to. Such a “filter” of basic socialist principles would bring together the fragmented groups of independents. We would be prepared to offer our members as candidates in such a grouping.
However, that doesn't get you around the problem of electoral registration, funding rules and collective responsibility. And how might other candidates feel when the SWP’s candidates come out with stuff like this on the doorstep?:
[And yes, that is what the SWP wrote just two days after the 7 October atrocity.]
It looks like the ex-Militant group The Revolutionary Communist Party will also try to join the new party, and have demanded Corbyn and Sultana commit to a full programme of proletarian dictatorship.
The former SWP leaders who run Counterfire and StopTheWar have been more cautious, welcoming the development but pointing out that it would probably be best to sort out whether the MPs are in favour of deploying troops as strikebreakers before agreeing to go on the knocker with them.
The Socialist Party - the sensiblist wing of the ex-Militant fractions - are also cautious: they want the new party to adopt a federal structure so that unions can affiliate.
The Morning Star, meanwhile, is even more cautious. Its editorial following Sultana’s move states:
“Nor can such a project be seen, as some predecessors hoped to be, as a refounded or replacement Labour. Trade union interest in electoral challenges to Labour is even weaker than under Tony Blair: this will not be a mass party of the organised working class in that image. Rather it should be seen in the context of a fragmenting two-party system and the more complex electoral landscape that creates.”
There is, in short, too much valuable left real estate in the unions to squander on a party that puts up candidates who want to deploy squaddies to break strikes. And with Labour reeling from a revolt by its backbench MPs that stymied attempts at welfare cuts, you can’t exactly say there’s nothing to play for inside the party itself.
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Apart from GPEW, all the constituent parts of the proposed party have demonstrably terrible positions on current threats to UK national security. Galloway openly repeats Russian propaganda on Ukraine - for example denying the Bucha massacre. Murray wrote an entire book justifying Russia’s claim on Ukrainian territory. And Sultana tried to end her Parliamentary speech last week by shouting the slogan “We are all Palestine Action”, hours before its proscription as a terrorist group, before the Deputy Speaker stopped her.
Sultana and Corbyn also on the council of the Progressive International - an international alliance fronted by Yanis Varoufakis, whose affiliates include the Qiao Collective - a group of anonymous “scholars” who have whitewashed both the Tiananmen Square massacre and the Xinjiang genocide. The Qiao group describes its politics as:
“Marxism-Leninism, anti-imperialism, internationalism, and …support for the Communist Party of China”.
It can be seen from this that, no matter what the intentions of the founders, the new party will be wide open to manipulation by Britain’s foreign adversaries, just as Reform is. It will inject division and hysteria into politics, which will be amplified online by Russian and Chinese bot farms. And - if it succeeds - it will open the route to a Reform government, which is exactly what those who want British democracy to collapse desire. That’s why no other Labour MP, even those on the left, will be prepared to join it.
Labour, obviously, must be concerned that the proposed Corbyn party is polling 10% without even existing – and must come up with a strong offer to young people and those disgusted at Israel’s criminal actions in Gaza. It also needs to scrap its fiscal rules and no-tax rise pledges, in order to create the fiscal headroom to fund the investment programme needed to start delivering to those who voted for it, and get people off welfare into work.
But those unfamiliar with the British far-left must remember one golden rule: British Stalinism – unlike some of its global south and European counterparts – has a unique quality, as demonstrated by the Corbyn fiasco in 2019: it invariably destroys anything it gains control of.
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