What’s going on in Your Party is a faction-fight against Zarah Sultana MP for her strong and seemingly strengthening anti-Zionist views, by the other MP’s in the Independent Group in parliament, working with the soft-Zionist apparatchiks around Jeremy Corbyn – James Schneider, Karie Murphy and co. These latter group, it will be recalled, were closely associated with Len McCluskey’s leadership of UNITE, who in 2018 used their built-in NEC votes, in the face of a Zionist campaign, to impose the IHRA fake definition of anti-Semitism on the Labour Party. These people around Corbyn were in the LOTO (Office of the Leader of the Opposition). After this, far from being neutralised, as McCluskey forlornly hoped, the Zionists went on a huge offensive against supporters of the Palestinians in Labour – the rate of expulsions of leftists for ‘anti-semitism’ was far greater under the pro-Corbyn General Secretaryship of UNITE’s Jenny Formby that it was under the openly reactionary Iain McNichol.
These semi-Zionists are working with the second group, the non-socialist Muslim petty-bourgeois MPs. So Zarah, the only woman MP, and the only Muslim who is an avowed socialist, associated with the Independent group of MPs, and the only declared anti-Zionist, found herself being denounced in an email implying that the membership drive was some kind of scam. This was signed by all the other independent MP’s, including Adnan Hussein, who voted against the decriminalisation of abortion, Ayoub Khan, who called for the military to break the Birmingham garbage collectors’ strike, and Shockat Adam, who worried aloud in the New Statesman against “polarising every landlord as ‘evil’” over the issue of tenants’ rights. These independents won victories in the General Election based on the single issue of Gaza, and obviously their candidacy played a progressive role in challenging a Labour Party that is up to its neck in supporting genocide, but these backward, non-socialist elements should not be hounding comrades who are clearly to their left.
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. So, Sultana and her close associates, such as Andrew Feinstein, Jamie Driscoll and Beth Winters – took matters into their own hands and set up the infrastructure to create that mass membership, only for it to be sabotaged.
Zarah Sultana, having been outrageously smeared, issued a statement saying she had consulted defamation lawyers and intended to take legal action over the smears. But it appears that some kind of conciliation/mediation took place over the succeeding three days, and ZS late on Sunday 21st September issued another statement saying there has been an agreement to work together with Corbyn to salvage the situation, and the party, and she would hold off from pursuing the action for defamation. Nevertheless, the situation obviously remains uncertain. The membership drive needs to be resumed – and the preparation for a properly democratic founding conference.
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.
