These are the prepared notes for the presentation today’s forum (14th September 2025). A recording of the presentation and discussion is here.
We are living through the biggest split in the Labour Party’s history, though it is happening in a long-drawn-out and novel manner. This is the continuation of a struggle that has been going on for many years, a continuation of the conflicts in the Labour Party and the labour movement more broadly since Corbyn’s election as leader in 2015, the tumultuous years of Corbynism, the witchhunts, the near victory in the general election in 2017, the sabotaged election campaign of 2019, and then the forcing out of Corbyn. And in turn, these have continuity with the conflict over the Cold War in the 1980s, the miners’ strike of 1984-5, and the defeats of the unions under Thatcher and since with support from traitorous neoliberal Labour leaders like Kinnock, Blair, Brown and now Starmer.
The artificial, engineered defeat of Corbyn meant that the mass base that it had generated never dissipated – rather it went into abeyance in a state of seething resentment at the Zionist-led wrecking operation. So around a million have now signed up for the project, through the Your Party website, and an earlier one set up by Zarah Sultant in July – ‘Team Zarah’. Branches are beginning to hold their first events, at least public meetings, though it has been very uneven in the way things have worked. There are public meetings going on around the country in various places, but the creation of working branches has so far been more sluggish.
There is the problem of what is to be done about the huge dataset from the websites, and who is going to collate, distribute, and organise it given the signing up of many hundreds of thousands of people on a website by its very nature, contains a contradiction. Such an enormous dataset representing individual socialists or aspiring socialists obviously represents a collective endeavour, as they all signed on to create a mass party opposing this govt from the left. But filling in a form on a website is an atomised, individual act. As opposed to joining an already existing local organisation. Someone among the many who signed up must have the time and energy to create such local organisations. But sorting out who is who is a very sizeable task indeed. We should not underestimate the complexity of it. Thus, the new party needs an apparatus of some sort to begin doing that work. At the same time the political character of that apparatus is a highly sensitive issue.
There are a bunch of people around Corbyn in particular, who are probably the only group likely to get a handle on such a task in the immediate period. Some of these are not popular. Because the later Corbyn leadership was dysfunctional for the left and ran for cover in the face of the Zionist offensive that was aimed at driving out many of Corbyn’s most outspoken supporters, as a means to an end of destroying Corbyn’s leadership. The problem is that the Corbyn leadership was not up to this confrontation this at the time. The political reason was liberal guilt on the Jewish question. That’s where the throwing in the towel came from. The belief that past persecution, and the Nazi genocide in the 20th Century, ennobled Jews as a whole, and made it mandatory for the most racist Jewish trends to be treated as legitimate parts of a supposedly progressive, working-class party.
Corbyn laid out the terms of his capitulation in a video and article in July 2019, which put forward some concepts that are simply indefensible, particularly in the light of today’s genocide. He said:
“…opposition to the Israeli government must never use antisemitic ideas, such as attributing its injustices to Jewish identity, demanding that Jews in Britain or elsewhere answer for its conduct, or comparing Israel to the Nazis. Many Jews view calls for Israel to cease to exist as calls for expulsion or genocide. Arguing for one state with rights for all Israelis and Palestinians is not antisemitic, but calling for the removal of Jews from the region is. Anti-Zionism is not in itself antisemitic and some Jews are not Zionists. Labour is a political home for Zionists and anti-Zionists. Neither Zionism nor anti-Zionism is in itself racism.
(https://labourheartlands.com/jeremy-corbyn-unequivocally-condemns-any-form-of-antisemitism/)
The idea that Israel is capable of a genocide, of course, necessarily involves ‘comparing Israel to the Nazis’. The Nazis are known above all for their genocide. This is clear evidence of guilty liberalism, not really socialism, being the driving force of Corbyn’s errors in 2019 and earlier. And denial that Zionism is racism, is terrible. The equation of Zionism with anti-Zionism amounts to equating the ideology of the oppressor with the opposition to it of the oppressed. Recall we are talking about political Zionism, whose foundation was always the creation of a Jewish state through the dispossession of the Arab people. And the operative bit is where he says that “Labour is a political home for Zionists and anti-Zionists”.
That is totally untenable today. It led straight to the massive witchhunt of anti-Zionists in the Labour Party, which Corbyn capitulated to, and logically could not oppose. Because the most basic tenet of any analysis of reality with any grip on the real world, had to be that Zionism was not just any old form of racism, but a form that achieved its aims through brutal ethnic cleansing and genocide. It cannot be tolerated in any genuine working-class party, on pain of extinction. Zarah Sultana’s criticism of the record of Corbyn’s leadership on this is therefore quite appropriate and correct. At a festival in Devon on 17th August, Zarah made her views very clear when she said:
“I am an anti-Zionist, I always have been… Anyone who visits the occupied West Bank, anyone who sees the genocide happening in Gaza, anyone who understands what settler-colonialism is will find themselves also identifying as an anti-Zionist.”
And when asked about the Corbyn period, she replied:
“One of the things that we have to be honest about is some of the mistakes that were made under the Corbyn period. And adopting the IHRA [definition] was a mistake. Conflating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism was a mistake.”
Speaking to Matt Kennard, she later said:
“It shouldn’t have happened this way …. There should have been robust challenge when the political establishment, the media establishment … attacked the Corbyn project, there should have been a more robust challenge to that.”
In another earlier interview, she said:
“We have to build on the strengths of Corbynism – its energy, mass appeal and bold policy platform – and we also have to recognize its limitations. It capitulated to the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism…”
“When it came under attack from the state and the media, [Corbynism] should have fought back, recognising that these are our class enemies. But instead it was frightened and far too conciliatory. This was a serious mistake … You cannot give these people an inch”
(Citations from Asa Winstantley’s article, Will Corbyn allow Zionists to sabotage him again?, https://electronicintifada.net/content/will-corbyn-allow-zionists-sabotage-him-again/50914)
Later, the same article quotes Corbyn’s eventual response to Zarah’s criticisms, in an interview with Middle East Eye:
“’I think it wasn’t really necessary for her to bring all that up in the interview, but that’s what she decided to do …’
“He explained that he had been ‘under a great deal of pressure to adopt the IHRA’ by some of his closest supporters, ‘and that was duly done.’
He was indeed put under such pressure, particularly by the UNITE bureaucracy under Len McCluskey’s leadership. A number of his leading entourage today, including James Schneider and Karie Murphy, are part of a group of Corbyn supporters from the same UNITE bureaucracy who are known to have briefed against Zarah Sultana, and others close to her, to the right-wing media. It appears also true, as the account in the Electronic Intifada makes clear, that Corbyn was not initially supportive of Zarah Sultana’s call for a new party, and her proposal that they co-lead it. But he was eventually forced to capitulate to her initiative and give it his support, setting up the ‘Your Party’ website as a vehicle to garner the mass support that was becoming irresistible.
This is often how organisations and parties in the real world come into existence, through contradictions and the antagonistic collaboration/interaction of differing trends. There is nothing surprising about this.
Zahra Sultana has her contradictions. As a strong anti-Zionist, and logically anti-imperialist, she has so far nevertheless accepted much of the imperialist position on the NATO proxy war in Ukraine. She was one of 11 Labour MP’s who signed, and then under threat from Starmer, withdrew their names from a 2022 Stop the War statement criticising some aspects of NATO’s activities in Ukraine. She was also falsely accused of being pro-Russia and pro-Putin by Tory jingoes in the aftermath of the beginning of the Special Military operation a year or so later. And she put out a statement then, which there is no reason to believe that she does not still stand on, that said:
“I deplore Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which has unleashed horrific death and destruction across the country.” (https://coventrycityofpeace.uk/statement-on-war-in-ukraine-by-zarah-sultana-mp-for-coventry-south/)
Which is completely devoid of any understanding of the “horrific death and destruction” that had been “unleashed” across the Donbass and other Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine since the US-backed far right Maidan coup in 2014, which resulted in a genocidal war against Russian speakers ever since. The 2022 SMO was a defensive move in the face of the attempt by the NATO powers to instigate the ethnic cleansing or even genocide of the Russian-speaking population of Donbass and Crimea, which inevitably led to armed conflict, as part of a stratagem to defeat and partition Russia itself. Which is really a continuation of the imperialist bourgeoisie’s crusade ever since 1917 to tear down all remaining gains of the Russian revolution. So, though ZS evidently moved strongly to the left under the impact of the Zionist genocide, she reflects the lack of understanding of the Ukraine war that is characteristic of social democracy in the West.
Some figures whose roots are in British Labourism have moved beyond that anti-Soviet and anti-Russian prejudice. Examples being George Galloway and Chris Wiliamson of the Workers Party of Britain, which also seeks affiliation to the larger Zahra Sultana/Jeremy Corbyn led initiative. Here we have another example of the dialectic of working-class politics in Britain – and not just here – One step forward is often accompanied by two steps back. Meaning that the Galloway-Williamson party has, at the same time as adopting something close to a correct anti-imperialist position on the Ukraine war as well as on Zionism, has at the same time dabbled in reactionary chauvinism over immigration, has at times implied climate scepticism, and has joined in the bourgeoisie’s reactionary offensive under populist banners against transsexuals, and to a degree gays.
To their credit, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana have been outspoken against the ruling class anti-trans bigotry and have spoken out strongly against the recent evidently Trump-influenced UK Supreme Court Judgement that effectively abolished many basic rights of trans people. Indeed, Zarah has been particularly outspoken over this issue, and recently made a very confrontational speech saying that there is “no place” for transphobia and bigotry in the new party. She has been somewhat contradicted by the independent MP for Blackburn, who is also in practice effectively a Your Party MP, Adnan Hussein, who made clear his disagreement with the right of transexuals not to be legally treated as being of their birth sex. So there is what could be said to be a healthy debate on some of these vital programmatic questions. As Marxists, consistent anti-imperialists, and those who aim to lead the workers movement to become a tribune of the oppressed, we welcome that some vital programmatic questions are getting an airing.
We certainly give a degree of critical support to Zarah Sultana over the question of Zionism against Corbyn and his liberal softness of Zionism. We refute and combat the criticism, coming from some ‘blue Labour’ elements influenced by GG and CW, that her outspoken hostility to transphobia is in some way liberal. On this question, she is criticising the transphobes from the left. At the same time, some of those same transphobes are correct against her and Corbyn over Ukraine. These complementary errors are the product at bottom of the differential, complementary problems bequeathed to the working-class movement by Stalinism and left-social democracy, which have all sort of complementary interactions. As revolutionary Marxists of the Bolshevik tradition, we seek to inject correct positions into these debates and transcend both in favour of a genuinely revolutionary programme.
