By Dave Stockton
The potential for the new party is obviously the 800,000 people who signed up to the idea and the flurry of local meetings. But the leadership in waiting for this party with no name has been in disarray.
Sultana’s public announcement took the proto-party grouping Collective by surprise. Social media was soon buzzing and Sunday Times correspondent Gabriel Pogrund tweeted: ‘EXCLUSIVE: I understand Jeremy Corbyn has not agreed to join the new left party with Zarah Sultana yet. He is furious and bewildered at the way it has been launched without consultation.’
Corbyn saw it as gazumping his campaign to persuade independent councillors, MPs and recent candidates with strong local profiles to form an electoral umbrella group. Its politics would be determined by these representatives and candidates; it would be a federation; and it would not necessarily be formed until after the May 2026 election.
Sultana on the other hand criticised ‘Corbynism’ (though not the man, she claims) in her interview in New Left Review for capitulating on fake antisemitism, Brexit and not deselecting right wing MPs. Her vision was for a party, with branches, conferences and local campaigns around strikes and migrant support. She prefers an early launch.
But Sultana jumped the gun. At an ‘organising committee’ of some 30 ‘notables’ selected by Karie Murphy, Corbyn’s former Chief of Staff, Andrew Feinstein and others, the chair Salma Yaqoob put it to a vote and received 20 for with 10 abstentions. The abstainers then denounced the vote as illegitimate and undemocratic—a bit of a joke since the secret, unelected committee could hardly claim any democratic legitimacy.
What this unseemly spat shows is that Sultana, Corbyn and their fractious entourages should not be regarded as its appointed leaders. Yes, they have an important role to play in turning the online sign-ups first into real mass audiences at rallies, but then into branches.
Without this, the ‘founding conference’ in the Albert Hall, with its galaxy of political, cultural and media celebrities and a necessarily passive audience of tens of thousands online, will be more redolent of populism than the launch of a working class party.
Far left shed more darkness
The Socialist Party is the only far left organisation with someone, Dave Nellist, on the inside track. They have focused on convening online meetings of trade unionists, aiming for a Labour Party model with affiliated trade unions. Programmatically, they still call for a ‘socialist government’ to nationalise the top 100 monopolies, which they equate with socialism: the same schema they have promoted for 50 years.
They proudly say the RMT had a bloc vote in TUSC from 2012 to 2022. What they fail to advertise is that the RMT then left TUSC, having never mobilised any of its members for the electoral project. Such a model may bring in money, but would privilege the bureaucratic leaders over union militants.
The SWP are attempting to make themselves useful to Sultana, but what they are doing on the ground is building rallies with celebrities and avoiding any contact with the rest of the left. They support Sultana and Feinstein’s proposals for a delegate conference and for some kind of minimum programme.
But they clearly see the party as little more than a vehicle for elections, not as a potential move towards revolutionary socialism. They say, ‘strikes and social movements will have more credibility within the electoral initiative’ (19.08.25), rather than seeing the new party as a future strategist for winning these struggles.
Finally, Counterfire have landed some telling punches on the likes of left populist James Schneider and clearly favour a working class, not a people’s party. Like the SWP, they highlight the importance of the social movements, saying vaguely that councillors should acts ‘as tribunes for their communities’, rather than posing the concrete need to involve trade unions and working class communities in drawing up ‘needs budgets’, and then fight for the necessary funding.
Their record on Preston Council, both as Independents and previously as Respect, exposes the problem with this approach. Counterfire’s Michael Lavalette promoted outsourcing services to local businesses as the answer to logistics giants Serco and Compass, rather than bringing the contracts in-house. This type of ‘managing capitalism’ is the last thing a new socialist party should do.
Against this backdrop of confusion, with equal dangers of sectarianism and opportunism, our answer is simple. Widely advertise and form local branches. Intervene in the class struggle and elect a provisional leadership. Hook up with other local groups. Discuss ideas for the party’s programme and pressure the centre to call a proper democratic delegate conference.
