Your Party is a positive initiative, there is no doubt about that, but it reflects the problems of the organisation it came out of: the Labour Party. Particularly in the Corbyn period. The announcement of a new party was evidently driven by Zarah Sultana, MP for Coventry South, when she resigned from Labour at the beginning of July after having been deprived of the Labour whip last year for voting against the two-child benefit cap, introduced by the Tories, which Starmer was determined to keep. Jeremy Corbyn, having defeated the Starmer Labour Party in his own seat of Islington North in the July 2024 General Election, joined up with four other independent MPs who won seats last July: left-wing Muslims who campaigned particularly over the Gaza genocide: Shockat Adam (Leicester South), Adnan Hussain (Blackburn), Ayoub Khan (Birmingham Perry Barr) and Iqbal Mohammad (Dewsbury and Batley). They formed the Independent Alliance after the election. When Zarah Sultana resigned from Labour, she joined the independent Alliance, more of less concurrently with announcing the creation of a new party.
Effectively, though not formally since it is not properly founded yet, and the name is to be voted on at a proper conference towards the end of 2025, the new party already has six MPs, and it is most fitting that it should be heavily Muslim, as reflecting particularly the oppression of, and the anger of, that section of the working class of Muslim immigrant origin, mostly in this country with their origins on the Indian subcontinent, Pakistan and Bangladesh, who have become targets both from nativist islamophobes and Zionists active in British politics. This leads to an implicit division and even factional situation in Your Party even as it is forming up, as Zarah Sultana has openly and prominently declared herself an anti-Zionist since she joined the Independent Alliance. Whereas Corbyn is much shakier, and his record as leader of Labour is in stark contradiction to that. When leader he endorsed a terrible position that Zionists and anti-Zionists could, and should, coexist in the same party. Of course, neither Zionists nor anti-Zionists could possibly accept this and given the relationship of forces within the Labour political bureaucracy at the time, the Zionists were emboldened to ram through the IHRA fake definition of anti-Semitism. Corbyn vainly attempted to dilute it but then acquiesced. The witchhunt simply intensified overseen by Corbyn’s nominated Labour General Secretary, Jenny Formby – the expulsions of anti-Zionists on her watch accelerated compared to that of her right-wing predecessor, Iain McNichol. Zarah Sultana has criticised the record of Corbynism on this, rightly saying that Corbynism ‘capitulated’ to Zionism. On this she clearly merits critical support, whatever problems with her wrong positions on Syria previously, or her hostility to the progressive Russian intervention in the Donbass.
When challenged recently (by a left-wing, anti-Zionist activist) about whether he agreed with Zarah Sultana’s anti-Zionism, he looked acutely embarrassed and refused to answer. Corbyn had been earlier better politically when he stood on the platforms of Deir Yassin Remembered with Paul Eisen over several years before 2015. Eisen is a British Jew who out of disgust with the exploitation by Zionists of the past suffering of Jews to justify genocidal treatment of Palestinians, mistakenly concluded that the Nazi genocide was a hoax (though he conceded he may have been mistaken about that). Even though Eisen was wrong about this, his mistaken motives were honourable, and he should have been defended despite this mistake, as a sincere defender of Palestine. Corbyn’s later position, that Zionists and anti-Zionists should work together, in the context of today’s Gaza holocaust, is a far worse mistake than standing on platforms with Paul Eisen. Given the current context, this mistake is worse than Eisen’s – confusion about a genocide that happened before Eisen was born because of Zionist exploitation of that terrible event, is not equivalent to refusing to declare oneself an anti-Zionist today, in the context of the Zionist holocaust in Gaza which is visible to the whole world!
So, there are major political tensions within the project and at least rumours of a degree of factional warfare behind the scenes. This is obviously the result of the above contradictions. Corbyn is still a two-statist over Palestine, but that position is completely unviable today. There needs to be thoroughgoing debate and post-mortem of the previous failures within Labour in the lead up to the founding conference of the party later in the year, so these questions can be fully and openly aired and a balance-sheet drawn. The IHRA should be branded as what it clearly is: a truly sinister document that prepared the Labour Party under Starmer to support Israel’s genocide. The last thing the new party needs is subterranean factional warfare – far better an open discussion, if necessary, with the creation of separate platforms on this question, with the different trends visible to all. This is the only way to neutralise the potential for destructive attacks from the Zionists and other enemies aimed at the shipwreck of the entire project.
On the other hand, Your Party have instigated a consultation on the name for the new party, which all who have signed up have been given the opportunity to both suggest a name and submit a substantial motivation for it. Also positive is that both Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn have come out firmly in support of the rights of transexuals. There are some questions where the more ‘labourite’ trends within this are right. It is not all a one-way street. We need militant anti-Zionism and anti-imperialism in defence of Russia, China, Cuba, the DPRK, Iran, Venezuela etc. against imperialism, defence of women’s rights, particularly abortion rights, and defence of oppressed minorities, LGBT etc, under the banner of a revived workers movement fighting for unity of the working class and the oppressed against capitalism. No capitulation to Zionism, imperialism or the social backwardness of some of imperialism’s opponents.
I have to say that this his analysis is shallow. It dodges critical issues and is punch-pulling. Corbyn’s position is pro-Zionist, which because he is pro-imperialist. On a personal level, Corbyn quite possibly finds Zionism pathetic and repulsive, however as imperialism is utterly dependent on the IDF, the Israeli secret services and their top-quality intell, Corbyn sees the objective need to defend Zionism, for without Zionism there is no IDF etc, thus hugely reduced military capacity to safeguard super-profits extraction by imperialist multinational corporations across the region, likewise to eventially retrieve Iran and its oil/gas fields for imperialism.
As Biden emphatically stated in his address to a Democratic Party public gathering last summer, “…if Israel didn’t exist, we would have to invent it!…” This, Corbyn is fully cognizant of.
Sultana is fully aware of this basis of his shamefaced support of Zionism, along with all his fence-sitting and incessant semi-statement on the issue. However, she will not point out the fact, nor the issue of imperialism’s only real interest in Israel being the absolute need of the IDF.
Consequently, Sultana’s anti-Zionism actually obscures her wider position. As all bourgeois politicians she stands for imperialism, in general, just not where Palestine is concerned.
What the YP Organisers are constructing is a social democratic party, of the left variety. Stating the obvious, the function of social democracy in class society is to defend and advance the interests of capitalism. Most critical to this is the absolute need to keep the working class under control. The tried and tested means for this, over the past century or more for social democracy, has been to construct a bureaucratic apparatus, constitution, and barriers to open debate. It is the intense endeavors in this social democratic sine qua non that have been the source of the intense wrankles amongst the organisers over the past month or more. The other source is as to who gets to be leader, which also means just which retinue gets the jobs in the eventual apparatus.
Therefore it seeems three factions are fighting this out. Essentially Corbyn”s, Feinstein’s, Sultana’s. Sultana’s would be decidedly the smallest.
Following the November Conference the real fun and games will start. The “hard-left” have been incredibly slow in responding to the bureaucratic stitch-up taking place before our eyes. They should by now have held a national meeting of the determined, experienced left on these matters, ie internal democracy, constitution, programme and most critically as to just what type of party it should be.
Corbyn and the rest wish in reality an electoralist party, of the type soft-left LP MKII. The “hard-left” would in the main prefer some kind of workers’ party of action, but though with a proportionate focus on elections.
This now critical prevarication is utterly typical of the LP “hard-left” and centrists (Cliffites, post-Grantites…). It means that the incipient bureaucracy will be streaks ahead of the “hard-left”, making it still more difficult to establish a substantial extent of internal democracy. Consequently the “hard-left” needs to fight for a real Conference in 4-5 months’ time — not 12 months.
To achieve these necessary goals, first and foremost there needs to be a national meeting of the hard-left, soon. But who will stick their neck out to get on with it?
Traditionally too many amongst the LP hard-left were prepared to truly fight the Party bureaucracy, in particular its left section.
In various ways, it is this that made the witch-hunt so damn easy for the City-instructed Right, who had spent six months preparing it, not just amongst the PLP but likewise meticulously so amongst the Right in every CLP.
That history has unfortunately not evaporated. The most critical issue now, therefore, is that of committed individuals coming together to rectify this issue and get a national meeting of the determined left assembled; soon.
PS all the mentioned centrist outfits will in actuality, in various ways, be playing the role of centrist wrecking balls, most especially as buffers or left shields for the left-bureaucracy against militancy from the ranks. Overwhelmingly, in general they will by nature block amiliant proposals and actions. Viz Trotsky on centrism in the 30s, of which there was masses written.
Im not even very interested in this diatribe from someone who, eventually when questioned, revealed he is on the other side of the barricades over the Ukraine war and defends NATO’s Nazi Ukraine puppets’s right to ‘self-determination’ against the people of Donbass etc. I dont really consider such people to be on the ‘hard left’ anyway. The criticisms above are trivial. There are plenty of people fighting for internal democracy in the Your Party movement, and a limited bloc with such people is perfectly principled – we have been involved in such things through the Socialist Labour Network and now the Democratic Socialist Network. We also endorsed the ‘Our Party’ initiative purely on the question of seeking a democratic conference. We wouldn’t call such blocs ‘hard left’, they are heterogenous politically. They dont have a revolutionary programme and dont pretend to. Nor does the above writer.