In less than a week, more than 500,000 people in Britain have put in their details to get involved in the formation of a new left party, after it was announced by former Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana on July 24.
Corbyn and Sultana’s announcement has left open the party’s governance and leadership structures, policy, alliances, election tactics, and even name for a forthcoming members conference, due within months, to decide.
Corbyn has argued for principled progressive politics as a veteran parliamentarian, and an unexpected Labour Party leader from 2015 to 2020. But his leadership was thoroughly white-anted by Labour MPs and the party’s apparatus, including from the current Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Soon afterwards, Corbyn was forced out of the Labour Party, but he re-won his Islington North seat last year as an independent backing Palestine solidarity.
Sultana had become a community organiser for Labour under Corbyn’s leadership before, at 25, being elected in 2019 in a Coventry seat. She soon made a name for herself for her anti-capitalist politics, but was suspended from Labor parliamentary membership last year after opposition to welfare cuts. She remained suspended as she hammered the Labour government for its complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
In early July, after the government tried and failed to cut disability support payments and then banned direct action group Palestine Action, Sultana resigned from Labour and previewed the new party’s formation.
Corbyn and Sultana had then, among other activities, taken part in a July 21 Zoom meeting of more than 1000 active unionists, which discussed the prospects for a new party.
Sultana spoke at length about the party announcement in a July 28 interview with independent news outlet Novara Media.
Sultana said she sees a “sheer appetite and desire for something new”.
“[Labour] in the year that it has been in power [has] seen a return to austerity,” she said. “They are worse than the Tories when it comes to arming a genocide.”
“Being able to take half a million people and more … on this journey to shape something truly transformative is so important [and] exciting.”
Sultana suggested a “rattled” establishment media have “never seen anything like this … we’re saying this is a member-led party … and they’re going to shape everything that we do”.
Sultana was asked about taking on the poll-leading far-right Reform Party. Don’t mimic them, she said, which is “what the Labour Party have done”.
“I don’t think the right has a monopoly on working-class anger. I think we need to harness that anger and show … that we can win in our communities up and down the country.”
“We have to provide a real alternative. We need to show that we will defend migrants’ rights and we will address people’s material concerns.”
“To me, the Labour Party is dead. It’s dead morally. It's dead politically and it’s dead electorally as well.”
“We’re going to take all the left and we’re going to win.”
Sultana discussed that the party “is not just an electoral project”, but will build “power in our communities”. She highlighted increasing union organising, rental campaigns, fighting food poverty and organising against domestic violence and sexual violence.
“Arguments have been won around nationalisation, public ownership of utilities, around mass building of council homes, around wealth taxes … The majority already support them.
“What we’ve also seen is a mass movement of millions of people who look at this Labour government and see complicity in genocide in Gaza … so there is no turning back from that point.”