This article is based loosely on a presentation given at a Consistent Democrats discussion forum on May 10th, along with another on Trump and Netanyahu’s failed war against Iran.
by Ian Donovan
The results are very serious for Starmer’s Labour leadership, though not yet terminal for the Labour Party as a whole, in my view. Though such termination is on the agenda. Labour lost 1239 seats. Major gains were made by Reform – 1384 seats. Significant gains were made by the Greens (403 seats). Also, the Tories lost 426 seats
For Labour, this is similar to the kind of rout that the Tories suffered with the end of Johnson and Truss. They are heading for a much bigger crisis, but not there yet. The losses to Reform are very significant, of the order of the collapse of the so-called Red Wall, but a significant number of these losses were to the Greens, not Reform. A significant proportion of Reform’s gains were at the expense of the Tories, not Labour. Both of the major parties are therefore in retreat. If anything, Labour ought to have suffered more – some of its losses to Reform, which were considerable but not overwhelming, could have gone to a working-class alternative if one had been standing. Unfortunately, in most cases that was not true.
The reason this did not happen is because the Greens are not a proper working-class alternative – they are a petty-bourgeois radical party. Even though they have picked up a large layer of socialist militants who are disappointed by the sabotage of YP, the core of the party is middle class. Though it is making a show of formulating a ‘workers charter’ etc, it is not the real thing. Zack Polanski is well spoken and articulate, and that has provoked a storm of ruling class libels and hysteria against him – they don’t like being contradicted. He should be defended – in fact I think his radicalisation over the Gaza genocide and his anti-Zionist position is genuine. But he still does not appear as a working class, socialist leader. The Greens therefore have very limited ability to appeal to the more angry and demoralised sections of the working class who are being driven to Reform.
The absence of the sabotaged Zarah Sultana party initiative is telling. It was wilfully and maliciously sabotaged by Corbyn and the group around him. Your Party’s interventions in the Local Elections were few and far between. 25 candidates in the whole country under the YP ticket – many of them got derisory votes. The best that I know of was Mel Mullings in Thornton Heath, Croydon – she got 327 votes when the winning Labour candidates got over 1000, and so did the losing Greens.That was hard fought by a genuinely activist, and socialist, branch, with SWP, SP, ACR and CD supporters involved, with some minor dissention. It was difficult to cut through a conflict between Labour and Greens. Elsewhere, YP’s refusal to run candidates many has meant independent campaigns have run outside of the YP banner, but supported by YP (in some cases). They have varied in their politics enormously:
From overtly socialist and left-wing groupings such as Southwark Independent Socialists, or Haringey Socialist Alliance, or the Independent Socialists in Coventry including Grace Lewis, backed by Zarah Sultana. And then there are the likes of the Redbridge Independents backed by Corbyn, whose demands are simply for ‘clean politics’; and don’t mention socialism hardly at all. Left populism. Though to be fair, Corbyn did visit the Haringey Socialist Alliance, while refusing to support YP candidates in his own borough, Islington, running under a similar ticket. It seems his trip to Haringey was an attempt to deflect criticism.
None of this is accidental. It is clear from the sequence of events that Corbyn had been dissembling against calls for a new party for several years since he was deprived of the Labour whip in late 2020. He had five years to get something on the road, and it was always clear that he would have had mass support if he had done so. But he never did. He left it until the very last minute before deciding to stand as an independent in the 2024 General Election. He won, and it was always obvious that he would. As an independent, he was part of a broader phenomenon of independents who stood and won over Gaza. There were five. But his tardiness was always because he hoped to get the Labour whip back. And having a new party would be a huge obstacle to that. It still is. This is why he still describes himself as an Independent in parliament.
When Zarah Sultana resigned from Labour with the express aim of founding a new left party, after much hesitation he agreed. For fear of being marginalised if he had refused and it had gone on without him. When it was mooted publicly, and people were given the chance to express support for the idea, 800,000 did so in August 2025. Corbyn and co were clearly frightened by the size of the response, and saw it as a threatening monster. He also named it Your Party, supposedly as a placeholder name. So much for that! They delayed and deflected from trying to recruit these masses.
There was a vote at a meeting of the founding groups in early Sept in favour of co-leadership, as opposed to Corbyn simply being leader, which Corbyn lost. So, he withdrew from the committee that was organising the founding, and went back to his independent group of MPs. Then Zarah Sultana launched the portal to implement what had been promised. It signed up over 20,000 members in two hours – a growth rate of over 10,000 members per hour. That was remarkable, and it is clear in hindsight that this was the historic opportunity to turn the 800,000 initial signups into a coherent mass party. If left to run, it would have signed up 100,000 in a day, likely half a million in a week. But after two hours, it was sabotaged, by an email signed by Corbyn and his independents claiming the portal was fraudulent. It was not – their email was fraudulent and libellous. This was, in hindsight, a major bureaucratic crime against the working class in Britain and the deliberate squandering of the opportunity to build a new mass party, which Sultana, to her great credit, saw clearly and tried to run with.
Having this sabotaged the mass party, the Corbyn clique launched another membership portal at the end of Sept, under the control of Corbyn’s ‘Peace and Justice’ non-socialist pressure group. It was a power and data grab, to exclude Zarah Sultana from real influence over the process. But this massively stunted the growth of the membership, the original sabotage was a massive blow to the party itself. By the time of the initial conference at the end of November, the membership was only 55,000. It is entirely conceivable that without the sabotage of Zarah Sultana’s membership portal, it could have been half a million or more. At the time we wrote this:
“The email sent out to members to sign up as members on Thursday 18th September was genuine – the second email that was sent out a couple of hours later intimating that it was a scam was false, as the money was being paid into the account for membership subscriptions that had previously been agreed by both of the broad groupings that make up the precursors of the new party. It does appear that agreements were broken, and an attempt was made by the group around Corbyn to exclude Zarah Sultana from bodies that were previously agreed as supposed to be inclusive and gender-balanced by both sides. The glacial nature of the group around Corbyn, that resisted for as long as possible the call for a new party, is evident, as Corbyn was pushed into belatedly agreeing to Sultana’s call for them to co-lead a new mass party at the beginning of July. Those around Corbyn appeared to have been resisting equally the creation of a mass membership party…” (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/cd-statement-whither-your-party/)
We also criticised some on the left for their response to this event thus:
“This is not a ‘shitshow’ as opportunists like the Weekly Worker and the Spartacist League are saying, but an important fight being waged in the process of this new party’s formation. It is crucial that anti-Zionism prevails. In that spirit, we are endorsing the ‘our party’ appeal, which calls for a handover team to organise a mass membership drive and an election among supporters for a Founding Stewards Committee (effectively a Conference Arrangements Committee), which will in turn organise a democratic conference to elect a new leadership. This demand was publicly supported by Zarah Sultana as well as several creditable comrades in the proto-party. We need basic democratic norms to be upheld, in the party that is being created, at all levels, not least to allow the debate necessary for the movement to develop programmatically beyond left reformism, to enable a genuinely socialist, revolutionary politics and programme to take root.” (ibid)
This was correct, but really if anything we were too slow to realise the historic import of the betrayal by Corbyn that took place over the portal. This deliberate puncturing of the evidently fragile but massive sentiment for a new party was a historic crime against the British working class in the context of the threatening rise of the far-right Reform. It may well turn out to have been every bit as consequential as Kinnock’s betrayal of the 1984-5 miners’ strike. But that is with the benefit of several months’ hindsight. We got it substantially right, but could have been sharper and more clear-sighted about the implications of what happened.
Zarah Sultana made clear she envisaged a party of the whole left, including Marxist groups. She criticised Corbyn’s capitulation to Zionism. She spoke up for opposition to NATO, to Zionism, to transphobia, to the monarchy, for a policy of class war, for widespread nationalisations, for workers control.
Corbyn’s bureaucracy did everything to rig the conference and the subsequent CEC election against these left-wing policies, in favour of tepid populism. But they lost crucial votes at the conference in spite of the bureaucratic framework, over a public commitment of the party to socialism and the working class, over dual membership of socialist groups, over collective leadership
The nominations process prior to the CEC election gave an indication of the sympathies of the active membership – these took place on a regional basis, and were in many places won by the Grassroots Left slate candidates. The Corbynites’ response was to use the monopoly of data they had seized to rig the actual CEC vote, using that monopoly over the 55,000 membership to bombard tens of thousands of members with Corbyniite email propaganda that the Grassroots Left (the left-wing slate headed by Zarah Sultana), and independent candidates for that matter, had no access to. A trade union leadership that did something similar with the membership data in its possession would be prosecuted by the Certification Officer for election-rigging. They won the CEC elections by these fraudulent means, 14 seats to 8.
In response to these cumulative events, activists created the Members Charter in March – with over 600 signatures, which- gave an ultimatum to the CEC to open up and democratise YP, or a conference will be called. The TM led CEC’s response was to ram through extensive bans on dual membership. The Members Charter called two Zoom meetings each attended by over 100 activists, where it was decided to call a preconference on 31st May, leading to a conference of something (to be decided by a democratic process – possibility a socialist federation) – in September. Not a call for a split, but it is possible the bureaucracy may attempt to expel the supporters of whatever is formed. A body aiming to put things right, by whatever means. Not seeking a new party, but if forced to, that is what will happen.
There are over 100 “proto-branches” around the country, and they have all been treated appallingly, deprived of the data that the Corbynites seized by fraudulent means in September 2025. Many are very active, and many activists are very angry at Corbyn. There is a conference of YP connections on 6th June, in Sheffield. Which is not the same thing – YP Connections is a practical network of horizontal communication between branches of YP which have no official status – because the bureaucracy doesn’t want active self-organised branches. But it may dovetail with that initiative, as the proto-branches, which the bureaucracy around Corbyn abhor, are the party on the ground. The point of all this being to draw in those numerous activists into something viable.
YP has become a laughing stock and the many dedicated activists on the ground who have built it despite the sabotage and bureaucratic abuse won’t just walk away without a determined attempt to salvage it.
