Whose party?
Some brief reactions to whatever just happened
There’s an anecdote oft-repeated by politicos about a Westminster bar brawl that changed history, by igniting a chain of events that precipitated Jeremy Corbyn’s 2015 Labour leadership win.
A decade on, one can take a broader view: left and right insurgencies blossomed internationally in the wreckage of the 2008 crash. The left’s coalition grew, mainly on the backs of downwardly-mobile millennials and urban proletarians, but ultimately insufficiently to prevent setbacks from Athens to Washington.
Both readings are true; history is at once deterministic and contingent, predictable and chaotic. The British left is once again in a moment where this confluence matters. Objective conditions are ripe for a left electoral project. The manifold failures of Starmerism, Reform’s displacement of the Conservatives as Britain’s natural party of government and concurrent grenade through the Overton window, alongside Liberal, Green, and Scottish nationalist resurgence have swiftly built multiparty politics redolent of mainland Europe. This is even accounting for the majoritarian handbrake of Britain’s electoral system. Contingently, however, the left’s bid to exploit this weather is being steered by captains who threaten to capsize it before launch. These two things are not coincidental.
The “Your Party” project, intended to incubate a revival of the electoral left, launched chaotically — after a public announcement from leftist MP Zarah Sultana forced the hand of those who counselled waiting. This pattern has now reprised itself albeit with higher stakes, as Sultana’s announcement of a membership system sparked a furious and alarmingly litigious exchange which has pushed the nascent organisation to breaking point. The journey to a promised founding conference now seems in peril. This crisis has a number of interlocking features. What follows is an attempt to categorise them, and to answer an intuitive question in a roundabout way: what is happening?
The first feature is historical and psychological. Personnel at the heart of the project underwent formative and often traumatic years in the battlefield of Labour during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. That experience covers a multitude of vantage points with competing conclusions that all hold elements of truth, which in spite of much spilled ink there has never been a comprehensive accounting for. But it also contains difficult memories and a desire to rationalise defeat by assigning blame; which can divert serious discussion of lessons learned into caprice.
The second feature is objective disagreements between Your Party’s proto-factions. One is over pace; what one camp sees as necessary rupturing of inertia, another sees as reckless and individualistic freelancing. Another is over the role of the other members of the Independent Alliance of MPs in which Corbyn sits, elected in 2024 on a pro-Palestine slate, in shaping the project. This has become a proxy for three different conversations: how much power elected officials should have in the new party, how far party members (elected or otherwise) should be permitted to publicly demur from agreed red lines, and what those red lines should be. Having these conversations simultaneously seems unhelpful for the resolution of any of them.
However, the interpersonal refusals of individuals close to leaders to work together seem to largely outweigh concrete political divides. Internally, there is broad consensus in principle around a party democracy that avoids both the Scylla of control-freakery, and the Charybdis of anarchic “democracy” that quickly becomes a tyranny of those optimised for endless meetings. Externally, there is consensus around an aggressively redistributive economic programme, an ethical foreign policy, and a strident response to the radical right; even if there are differing views on what constitutes all the above. This alone is a clearer basis for a party than, say, Reform — or for that matter, Labour.
The third feature is how observers frame these disputes. They have by nature been labyrinthine and behind closed doors. This is not necessarily inherently problematic, but becomes frustrating when one trades transparency for businesslike expediency and receives neither. What followed was factionalism without factions; neither “side” has seriously attempted to expand their camp within Your Party’s 800,000 putative members. This has guaranteed the proliferation of essentially vibes-based interpretations. The Sultana camp is seen to reflect yearnings for a project unburdened by Corbyn-era compromises, represent perspectives marginalised in those years or entirely new ones, and to be radically democratic and freewheeling. The Corbyn camp is seen to represent nervousness about green and untested propositions, take the view that experience as well as enthusiasm is needed, that perhaps not all marginal perspectives during the Corbyn years were useful ones, and that majoritarian appeal should not be sacrificed upon the altar of leftist nostrums. These generalised interpretations overdetermine the more specific and abstruse disputes, but stories exert greater determining power than facts.
The fourth feature is the inherent difficulty in building something sui generis. There is no ready-made structure seeking parliamentary expression, as unions once built through Labour. There is no strong tradition of independent left electoral practice in Britain, and various foreign models from the DSA to the PTB to Die Linke do not map neatly onto Britain. Choices, from the rights and responsibilities conferred on members to the strategic and political orientation of the party, are yet to be made. As former Corbyn speechwriter Alex Nunns pointed out, a left party freed from Labour may appear an Arcadia to wounded activists, but its shine will fade with proximity (One might add that so far it is not fulfilling the wishes of those who wanted out of Labour in order to avoid exhausting factional warfare). Its base; ranging from unaligned left-liberals to trade unionists to loyal Corbynistas to organised communists to single-issue protesters to camps that probably have yet to be identified, has yet to accrete into a cohered left. Perhaps not to this extent, but messiness was inevitable.
The fifth feature worth noting is the emergence of this force through a new and explosive conjuncture. The 2008 crash was era-changing, but the 2010s left still saw itself as capable of attenuating crisis; engaging in moderate borrowing-funded investment that could produce sustainable growth capable of addressing low wage growth, poor infrastructure, inequality, social division, and environmental challenges. Somewhat ironically, the radicals were capitalism’s last chance to save itself.
That is history. Borrowing costs and the scale of deprivation now require heavy redistribution to address, (meaning class conflict-inducing measures such as wealth taxes and sooner than not the fundamental retooling of British capitalism). Technology transitions have transformed both our relations to production and to each other. The liberal order is in ruins, genocide is openly tolerated and abetted, and globalised neoliberalism threatens to collapse into a militarised capitalism of regional power blocs. Polarisation around immigration has reached fever pitch, and the far right is no longer moderated by institutions in the way that it was during Donald Trump’s first term. Climate change is not a potential threat but an existing multiplier of all the above crises. The left’s path to power now involves reframing itself as a vehicle for the collective management of complex crises — which, without wishing to be too waspish about the past days, begins with closing its credibility gap.
So to abuse Gramsci, the old is dying, the new is yet to be born, and in the interregnum people threaten to report their comrades to the Information Commissioner. Nor is Your Party the only game in town. A bold new Green leadership is also returning the left to the political stage; and potentially laying the groundwork for a Red-Green Alliance of the kind that is making strides in Italy and Denmark, and together with a social-democratic rump, provides Europe’s best hope of a left government via Paris. The Mainstream soft-left group is on manoeuvres to supplant Keir Starmer, and the soothing tones of Andy Burnham may feel more attractive than the new party’s chaos to soul-searching left Labourites. The Liberal Democrats (who are replaying their Iraq War-era gambit of seducing Labour liberals disenchanted by the party’s authoritarianism) and Reform (whose Labour defectors’ views lean economically leftist and rate Jeremy Corbyn above Keir Starmer) may also absorb some of Your Party’s notional base.
In this fraught assessment, is there a route for Your Party’s salvation? Some form of urgent mediation is needed, perhaps assisted by neutral facilitation from the British left’s international allies. Grassroots input beyond the two proto-factions at the table are needed; a new project called Our Party demands this, but will need to avoid being seen as simply another faction. The left’s therapeutic-posting habit of hashing out disputes in the combat-rewarding gladiatorial arena of social media may also inflame tensions. Such tendencies are in turn fuelled by impotence arising from an information deficit, beyond what leaks from closed rooms into gossip or negative press briefings.
And yet beyond the intrigue, a rich and textured discussion on the new project and its possibilities has been underway. The “Party Time” series of debates has provided shaping discussions on the many potential purposes of a left electoral project. The NLR’s Oliver Eagleton has pushed the party’s proto-grandees to articulate their strategic perspectives in a carefully curated series. Novara has offered a useful debate on whether party-led movement-building contributes to or risks electoral success, whilst activist Max Shanly has even provided a template constitution.
There are also insufficiently explored questions; for instance around the immigration debate, around media strategy, and around squaring potentially competing demands in our climate, economic, and international agendas. More propositional contributions would be productive; for example, Starmer’s Israel policy may spark outrage, but what does the left think Britain’s role in the world should look like? More engagement with data and opinion research to strengthen conclusions based in political theory would also be welcome. A final unresolved question is what this unborn party is. If it survives, it will mature either into primarily a German-style minority party of the left, an industrially-rooted party of workers aiming to supplant Labour’s historic role, or a populist party attempting to capture the mood of “the people” with a left-wing imaginary. Such debates must be had swiftly; the far-right is not waiting on their outcome. Nor will all those who signed up desperately hoping to fashion a new instrument of change, and are now anxious and baffled by the affray.
There are many conflicts to be had. That is no bad thing; conflict is oxygenating, its suppression suffocates organisations. Britain’s left, however, must find a way to conduct conflict in a healthy and constructive way as it navigates the difficult fault line between external forces and its own agency.
In these difficult, draining times, movements owe themselves that much.
