On Thursday night, Zarah Sultana – the MP for Coventry South, who lost the whip nearly a year ago after defying the government by voting to scrap the two-child benefit cap – announced that she would not be returning to the Labour Party. Instead, she posted on Twitter that she would be co-leading “a new party, with other Independent MPs, campaigners and activists”, to oppose the governing party from the anti-war left. The other leader would be Jeremy Corbyn.
Or would it? An hour later, the Sunday Times‘ Gabriel Pogrund claimed the former Labour leader was “furious and bewildered” at Sultana for launching the party without him. The next day Corbyn released his own statement promising “real change is coming” but not confirming the co-leadership plans. Cue the jokes about the left’s inability to organise its way to a piss-up in a brewery from one side, and questions of about the reliability of Pogrund’s sources from the other. For those of us who wasted the 2010s hanging out on UK politics Twitter, it felt just like old times.
This has not been the only opportunity for the softer, soggier and more centrist progressives to poke fun at the left. The Green Party is having a leadership election, you see. And, for the past two years the party has had two leaders. The upside of this is that they can appeal to two constituencies at once: the rural conservationist bit of their coalition (represented by Adrian Ramsay) and the more radical urban half (represented by Carla Denyer). The unfortunate downside of this is that neither leader has any name recognition outside of the party. Now the membership faces a choice between a Ramsay/Ellie Chowns ticket, or Zack Polanski running alone.
Given the obvious problems with having two leaders but this time from the same wing of the party, you’d think Polanski would be a shoo-in – and to be fair he is very good at viral social media comms. The problem is that he, too, brings forth a certain amount of sniggering, because he once gave an interview to a Sun journalist, in which he claimed that he could – there’s no easy way of saying this – enlarge women’s breasts through the power of hypnosis. He’s since clarified that he didn’t actually believe this.
Polanski’s myriad and vocal online supporters argue that this is a stupid thing to focus on at a time when the planet is on fire and “fascists are on the march”, and they’re not entirely wrong. The problem is that people are not going to stop focusing on it, because it is extremely funny; and because as the Greens increase their profile from a low base, there will always be new people to hear it. So, again, on the political internet: LOL. LMAO, even.
All this is all very enjoyable. Try to follow politics without laughing at it, after all, and you’ll go mad, plus some of the main characters and habits of the left can genuinely tend towards the ridiculous. What worries me is the suspicion that those running the Labour party might be laughing along. I’m not sure they should be doing that.
There is, after all, a lot of rage right now: about the cost of living, or the decline of public services; about continuing economic stagnation; about the welfare bill, the “island of strangers” speech, or Gaza. There are a lot of reasons for voters with left-wing instincts to be disappointed with the government. They have a lot of reasons to look elsewhere.
Not least among these is Labour’s strategy of focusing its campaigning on those voters who might jump ship to Reform. This is a worry – there are dozens of seats where the Farageists are a threat – but the decision to fight such defections by trying to appeal directly to Reform voters risks alienating those who are temperamentally more naturally Labour. There is polling, after all, that most voters defecting from Labour are not going to Reform, but to the LibDems or Greens.
And you don’t have to look far back into history to find evidence of a governing party – the Tories in the Blue Wall in 2024; Labour in Scotland in 2015, or the Red Wall in 2017-9 – losing the voters it assumed were its base. Next year will see council elections in London and other metropolitan areas. It seems entirely plausible that Labour loses councillors in the urban heartlands it held even in the 1980s and 2010s.
“Worry about the centre, the left have nowhere else to go” may have been a viable strategy when the left did have nowhere else to go. But British politics has been fragmenting for a long time: even last year’s Labour landslide brought a record number of Green MPs and a dozen anti-war independents. Neither a new left party nor the rising Greens need take that many votes from Labour to put large number of seats at risk. And a more fragmented left could well hand more seats to Reform. It might be time to stop laughing.
[See more: The welfare bill that pleases no one]
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