UK

New Left party, new vision, new culture?

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Mike Phipps considers some strategic questions facing the Corbyn-Sultana project.

The announcement of a new party of the left headed by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana is, as former top Corbyn advisor Andrew Fisher said recently, “potentially very significant for British politics.” Despite predictable sneering from the mainstream media, over 700,000 people have signed up to the idea and pollsters estimate it could win between 10 and 15% at a general election.

Teething troubles

Of course, there will always be any number of teething troubles with the launch of any new formation. How far should it be a standard vote-winning party as opposed to a social movement? To what extent should it rely on traditional organisational methods rather than embodying a new way of doing politics? Should it adopt a delegate structure for policy decision-making or something more innovative, for example grassroots assemblies? These vital issues were raised by David Osland in a recent article on this site and they will all need to be resolved – but they don’t detract for one moment from the enormous appetite that exists for a new political formation to the left of the Labour Party.

To maximise this potential, it’s important that the new party gets things right, not just in terms of policy, but its culture. There is already tension between some of the ‘leading’ individuals at the centre of the project and those out in the country who have more of a local base and mandate. Then there were the unfortunate leaks to the Murdoch press of messages in a private Whatsapp group at the time of Zarah Sultana’s perhaps premature declaration that she was leaving Labour to lead a new party with Jeremy Corbyn  – leaks which did not augur well for ongoing mutually trusting relationships among those involved.

One major strategic question facing a new organisation of the left will be what relationship it will have with other existing parties. Compass, among others, have talked for years about the need for a progressive alliance – but the problem is how progressive should that be and who should be included or excluded?

 Should a new party of the left enter into some kind of electoral alliance with the Greens, for example? A lot may depend on who wins the Green Party leadership. If it’s Zack Polanski, generally touted as the most progressive of the current contenders, the party is likely to move in a more left wing direction. It will also continue to attract young radical activists and may find itself in competition with the new Corbyn-Sultana party in doing so.

Is Labour dead?

A more pressing question might concern the new outfit’s relationship with the Labour Party out of which the new leadership emerged. Notwithstanding the understandable anger that many feel over the treatment of Corbyn, Sultana and others who have lost the Labour whip for opposing unpopular austerity policies for which the government has no mandate, it’s important to be objective in appraising the current state of affairs.

In a recent interview, Zarah Sultana said: “The Labour Party is dead. It has destroyed its principles and its popularity. Some Labour MPs who consider themselves on the left are still clinging to its corpse. They say that by staying in they’ll be able to retain their political influence. My response is simple: you haven’t been able to stop disability cuts, you haven’t been able to stop the flow of arms to a genocidal apartheid state, so where is this influence you’re talking about?”

This is true, but it’s not the whole picture. One might also complain that the newly elected Independents have not proved particularly effective – some voted against removing tax breaks for private schools, for example.

But the Labour Party cannot be so easily written off, in my view. It still has more socialist MPs than any other party. Furthermore, if Keir Starmer is still as deeply unpopular in two years’ time as he is now, he is unlikely to remain unchallenged as leader. Out of self-preservation alone, Labour MPs will demand first a change of course – that is already happening – and failing that, a change of leader. True, it is unlikely that a Jeremy Corbyn-type figure will get another opportunity, but that does not exclude the possibility of a softer left candidate, backed by the affiliated unions, having s strong chance. And while someone like Andy Burnham may not be to the taste of many on the socialist left, that’s not a reason for minimising the very real differences between that wing of the Labour Party and the current Starmer leadership.

Talking of the unions, any discussion of their role seems curiously absent in the calculations around the new party’s prospects of success. Another leading figure who worked for Jeremy Corbyn, Andrew Murray, recently said in an interview: “In the short term I don’t see the trade unions, as collective bodies, having a formal relationship to the new party.”

This seems odd. If Labour has really ceased to speak for the working class and progressive opinion, then surely a campaign to win over the key affiliated unions that fund with its members’ subscriptions an apparently bankrupt, “dead” party should be a central priority. Or are the unions also “dead”?

This could be what Labour needs…

In his recent article in the i paper, Andrew Fisher welcomed the new party, arguing it could have a positive effect on Labour.  He believes it could bring about a leftward shift on Labour policy, which “might prove more popular with the public as polling shows support for wider public ownership, redistributive taxation, and policies like rent controls, which have been backed by Scottish Labour and English mayors, including Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham.

“This new party could therefore force Labour towards a more populist left stance and stop alienating its own supporters on issues like welfare and immigration. If Corbyn and Sultana start mobilising support, it puts pressure on Labour to stem the loss of voters on its left flank.”

He adds: “External pressure mobilised by this new party, alongside campaigning from unions, members, MPs, and mayors within the party, could force the Starmer government into more radical stances. This internal coalition, combined with public pressure, has already forced significant partial U-turns of two of the Starmer government’s least popular policies: scrapping winter fuel payments and cutting disability benefits.”

I agree with this analysis: there is still a lot to play for in Labour. While those who have had the Labour whip withdrawn may be tempted to join the new formation, other socialist Labour MPs will agree with Clive Lewis MP who argues that the recent “U-turn on cuts to personal independence payments and the role progressive MPs in the PLP played in making that happen, showed exactly why that presence matters.”

It may be too early to say whether the new party can be more than a pressure group forcing Labour to the left, or whether there is a realistic chance of it wielding real power. Current UK politics is in an unprecedentedly volatile phase, as the Reform surge underlines. One thing is clear: many of those signing up to the new project will be disappointed if it takes the route of being an anti-imperialist pressure group while leaving the big domestic cost of living issues to an undisturbed Labour-trade union partnership.

Think big

To succeed on its own terms, the new party will also need to liberate itself from any sense of hurt – worse, ‘betrayal’ – in relation to the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party. When Zarah Sultana itemised some of the failings of that epoch, the mainstream media pounced on her suggestion that Corbynism “capitulated to the IHRA definition of antisemitism”. The last thing the new project needs is a resurrection of that discussion.

It will need to think big, too. Zarah’s idea that the new party should be called The Left falls short in this respect. Responding to this, Ash Sarkar was right to say that many people don’t have a strong sense of political or ideological identity, so left versus right may not have much meaning for them. There’s a lot more to be won, she argues – and she’s correct. Calling the new party The Left implies it is only for the already ideologically left wing, as opposed to the mass of the working class, the 99%, the overwhelming majority of people. Reform UK would never be so self-confining as to call itself the ‘Right’ party: it claims – spuriously – to be the party of all Brits. Socialists need a similarly ambitious vision.

For the sake of all those looking for a clear political alternative, it is important that the new party overcomes its early difficulties – particularly the aforementioned factional antics at the moment of its birth – gets off to a strong start and embodies a democratic, outward-looking and community-oriented spirit. Like Andrew Fisher, I shall look forward to it exerting a positive influence on the Labour Party where I shall be staying along with a good number of other principled socialists.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jeremy_Corbyn_-_reflections_(51982235668).jpg Source: Jeremy Corbyn – reflections. Author: Alisdare Hickson from Woolwich, United Kingdom, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.