If you like this, please support my work.
For a brief and shining moment, many of us on the left—as in, the actual left, those who believe that a world without inequality and suffering is not just possible but absolutely necessary to the survival of the planet—looked to the fledgling Your Party as a symbol of hope. Even those of us who did not live in the UK saw its sudden rise and popularity as a sign that, contrary to what most pundits and politicians believe, there is a great thirst among voters for a real left alternative. And then, just as suddenly, all our hopes seemed to fizzle and die as key figures began hurling accusations at each other.
What went wrong, and can we on the left still hope for a vibrant new political entity that takes left politics seriously? Could that still be Your Party?
Some context for the many whose heads might still be spinning: Your Party was formed two months ago, on the 24th of July, when former Labour Members of Parliament (MPs), Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana announced plans for a new left-wing party, an alternative to the moribund Labour Party which has strayed far from anything approaching a left agenda. Historically, the Labour Party’s rightward drift was particularly marked by the advent of “New Labour” under Tony Blair, whose flashy grin and seemingly younger, more hip politics (remember “Cool Brittania?”) masked the spread of neoliberal policies like the greater privatisation of resources, more deference to big business and a tightening of the social welfare system. After Labour’s Harold Brown, who succeeded Blair, the UK had an unbroken run of Conservative Prime Ministers (PMs), all the way up to Rishi Sunak, who replaced Liz Truss after her ignominously short period as PM where she was outlasted by a dying head of lettuce.
While Labour under Starmer won a resounding victory, voters were mostly registering their anger at the Tories. Soon, it became evident that the new PM, instead of offering equally new policies and politics, was determined to look backwards and capitulate to the worst rightward instincts. In one unsettling example, he made a speech on immigration that used the phrase “island of strangers,” suggesting that this was where the country was headed with its current state of migration. The phrase came in a statement that also declared that Dead Labour (let us call it what it is) would help “take back control of our borders and close the book on a squalid chapter for our politics, our economy, and our country.”
Unfortunately for Starmer, British political and cultural memory is longer than that of many other nations, and the words reminded many of the divisive and racist 1968 “rivers of blood” speech by the conservative and racist politician Enoch Powell who believed that England’s very nature (its whiteness, to be clear) was threatened by waves of migration.
If you like this, please support my work.
As Alex Skopic explains further in Current Affairs:
Since taking power, Starmer has pursued a policy agenda that’s barely distinguishable from that of his Tory predecessors. He’s scrapped almost every genuinely progressive idea the Labour Party had to offer, hastened the creeping privatization of the National Health Service, waged a campaign of financial austerity against poor and sick people, endorsed anti-trans bigotry, authorized inhumane “raids” against immigrants, pursued a variety of “tough-on-crime” crackdowns, and cozied up to right-wing media baron Rupert Murdoch, all while purging principled leftists from the Labour bench and installing former Tories. Words are cheap, but actions reveal a politician’s true character. With every passing day, Starmer has proven that the Conservatives’ rule over Britain never really ended at all. Because in every way that matters, Keir Starmer is a Tory himself.
Given this context, it was not surprising that the announcement of a new party, even one without a name (“Your Party” has so far been a placeholder), should have been greeted with so much enthusiasm. And then, like a cake left out in the rain, it suddenly began to collapse into itself, riven by some extraordinarily petty shows of disorganisation within the ranks.
From the start, there were red flags about dissension in the ranks: on July 3, Sultana announced on Twitter that she was resigning from the Labour Party and co-founding a new party with Corbyn. The big glitch was that Corbyn, by his and others’ accounts, had not signed off on the announcement, and had even asked Sultana to delete her post after it went up. Eventually, both factions patched up matters, it seemed, and Your Party (technically not yet a party, but an entity with a list of 800,000 subscribers by September) seemed to be garnering attention and support. Publicly, both Corbyn and Sultana expressed more radical politics than had been seen for a while in the broad left: Corby spoke out on immigration and Sultana on Gaza. In August, Sultana criticised “Corbynism” by saying, in an interview with New Left Review, that it had “capitulated to the IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] definition of antisemitism, which famously equates it with anti-Zionism, and which even its lead author Kenneth Stern has now publicly criticised.” She is correct on this score, but the interview and the attention to the quote give the impression that there was some raging discussion on the matter within the nascent party. (To be clear: there should be clarity on the issue as the party moves forward.)
Elsewhere, she has spoken up on trans issues, after Adnan Husain, also an MP and a prominent member of Your Party, made transphobic remarks online. Here, Sultana’s instinct to affirm trans rights was the correct one, and in response to something said publicly: any party claiming to be on the left needs to be unequivocally for trans inclusion and rights. As with the matter of IHRA, this needs to be a position hashed out within the organisation.
On September 18, Sultana once again made a significant announcement on Twitter, claiming that Your Party now had 20,000 dues-paying members. At £55 a person, that meant Your Party had presumably now amassed over a million pounds. On the heels of Sultana’s announcement, which came with a link to a dues portal, came a singular statement from Corbyn and his allies in Your Party warning people that the payments were “unauthorised” and should all be cancelled. Following this, Sultana accused Corbyn and others of running a “sexist boys’ club.” Both sides raised the possibility of legal retaliations.
As I write this, things appear to have calmed down somewhat, and the Your Party website makes no mention of the fracas. It appears that YP is still scheduled to go forward with its big November conference, where delegates will be chosen via lottery.
Those of us in the UK and more tied to a party that offers hope for an alternative to Dead Labour’s useless turn to the right will have a different stake in the developments in this story than those of us elsewhere. But even for those at a distance, the issues evident in the couple of months of YP’s existence serve as both a cautionary tale and, even, perhaps a note of hope.
The primary lesson to take away from all this is one that applies to anyone hoping to start a meaningful movement or organisation: Don’t use social media for anything other than announcements. Twitter is not where you hash out your fundamental ideological principles as a group.
Sultana has been criticised by some for jumping the gun with her announcements on Twitter, but the issue may lie with a possible generational difference: millennials are more apt to resolve key matters online than either Gen Xers or Boomers.
Given that Sultana has now twice taken to Twitter to make deeply important announcements, though, it’s not hard to surmise that there was a degree of manipulation involved. Anyone involved in organising has encountered a particular kind of organiser: someone who attempts to force a dissenting or opposing faction to cede ground on an issue by presenting the matter to the larger group and claiming to have obtained consensus or agreement. Years ago, I had what was very clearly defined as an informational meeting with a fellow activist: we were meeting to hash out how to move forward on an issue. When I got back to my office, I was surprised to find that they, and a fellow of theirs on the “other side,” had sent out emails purporting to thank me for a productive meeting and welcoming a strategy that had never been agreed upon or even discussed (and which surprised my own colleagues who were taken aback at the news). I had to act quickly, and sent out emails bluntly pointing out that no such agreement had been arrived at and that we still had a way to go. That was in an era before social media: reeling back the deceitful messaging would have been much more difficult today. Successful organisations, the ones that actually get work done, agree that Twitter and Facebook, among others, are never to be used to “engage” anyone: the accounts should only be used for announcements.
Sultana is no stranger to social media: she knew perfectly well what it meant to announce the formation of Your Party and then the membership portal on Twitter/X without having discussed it fully with others, and without a collective agreement. Certainly, left organisations tend to move with the speed of a glacier at the height of the ice age, and it can be difficult and tedious to get a particularly large group to agree even on anything as simple as a meeting time, and who is to take minutes, or will there even be minutes? But there is still no justification for a unilateral decision on matters as critical as dues or, really, the founding of an organisation. As for airing ideological differences: the matter of the IHRA definition is both critical and complicated enough that it bears ample discussion amongst members. Corbyn himself was eventually ousted on what has now been revealed to be spurious claims of anti-semitism, but Asa Winstanley, author of Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn, has written about his earlier capitulation (and that of the Labour Party) on IHRA and the damage it did in 2018.
The matter is hardly in doubt, but is it being used by Sultana to wield a particular kind of influence? There has been no evidence so far that the IHRA definition was a stumbling block this time around, seven years later when the entire planet has shifted quite a distance leftwards on the matter. What was the point of bringing it up in public rather than submitting it to a wider discussion within the group if this was not actually an issue needing resolution right away? Surely something like the IHRA definition requires considered and more thoughtful discussion. What would have been other ways to return to that moment without simply creating social media flashpoints on Twitter and in New Left Review?
All of these matters are enormously complicated, but the key point here is that there is a huge difference between mobilising and organising, as Jane McAlvey and countless activists and organisers have always emphasised. Social media can play a limited role in the former, but it cannot and should not be a substitute for the actual work of producing change. 800,000 people signed up to “join” YP, but only 20,000 wanted to become dues-paying members when the time came (the portal was closed for a while but has now been re-opened). The 20,000 generated a large amount of money but the difference between the two sets of numbers also indicates the difference between people who would like to be kept abreast of information about a new political entity for any number of reasons and those who are willing to contribute towards and actually work on the everyday trials of getting a new operation off the ground. It’s the difference between, for instance, Andrew Cuomo’s fake populism as he zips around New York in his enormous Dodge Charger and lives in an apartment he rented expressly for the appearance of being a New Yorker, and Zohran Mamdani’s tens of thousands of volunteers knocking on doors to talk to strangers about his candidacy.
As it is, the Twitter fracas only ended up making the key players look like angry roommates, sulking over texts to their other roomies that if “If A. wants to hash this out, they can meet me in the kitchen” or, “B. needs to first agree to stop nibbling on my cheese.”1Many thanks to JW for this bit. The difference, again, is not generational: it is about a left party needing to cohere and come together on how it organises itself. Mobilising is not the problem: it has been proven that hundreds of thousands can be quickly mobilised in support. But to move forward and create genuine change, there can no longer be these ridiculous social media dustups: if people cannot come to any agreement on an issue, they should form parties of their own. That’s not as ridiculous as it sounds: it’s far more ridiculous to periodically create social media storms that do little more than create more fodder for those already contemptuous of the left’s ability to actually organise a revolution. The other beneficiaries in all this? Countless media personalities, including many on the left (yes, I include myself) for whom this becomes yet another opportunity to generate clickbait. While many on the left were happy to take up the New Left Review interview and highlight Sultana’s point about IHRA, no one took note of the fact that this did not reflect, to the best of their knowledge, any current fracture in the party. And yet, the clickbaity attention paid to the quote gave at least a faint impression that this was the case.
Will Your Party survive? More critically, should it? The differences between Sultana and Corbyn are not and should not be what matter most, but Your Party matters enormously for the left worldwide. The problem with the left, such as it is, is not that people don’t want leftist politics but that it has taken the strange path of refusing to actually be the left. It has ceded ground on any number of issues like immigration — witness both Dead Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the US offering nothing but the punitive, prison-building tactics of the right on that matter. But we have ample evidence everywhere that people worldwide—Mexico, Brazil, New York, Chicago, and the UK — long for a way out and away from the exploitative, anti-environment, and misery-inducing policies of the right. We can sense and see a desire for change. No party anywhere is or ever will be perfect, but the time to move away towards better, alternative futures is always now.
See also:
Rishi Sunak Is the Face of Empire
Son, You Lie: Harry Windsor Is Exploiting His Mother’s Death
Kate Middleton or, Abolish the Monarchy
The NYT, Meghan Markle, and the State of Media
Her Royal Hymen: Kate Middleton Drops Top, Finds Modesty, Helps Brand Britain
For more on the current debacle, see Josh White’s “Undermining the British Left: The Corbyn-Sultana Drama.”
Jeremy Corbyn has addressed the matter here.
Image: Agnes Martin, Blue Flower, 1962
If you like this, please support my work.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. I make a point of citing people and publications all the time: it’s not that hard to mention me in your work, and to refuse to do so and simply assimilate my work is plagiarism. You don’t have to agree with me to cite me properly; be an ethical grownup, and don’t make excuses for your plagiarism. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
