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.
