Like the Gallagher brothers, setting out on a tour with a setlist that doesn’t include a song younger than 30 years, Jeremy Corbyn is back. Like the Gallagher brothers, he hasn’t changed at all. Jeremy Corbyn who, in 2022, called for the UK to stop arming Ukraine against Putin’s invasion, is back. Jeremy Corbyn who, in 2023, provoked astonishment in a Piers Morgan Talk TV interview with his Denial Of Peter-esque inability to refer to Hamas as a terrorist organisation, is back. Labour and Keir Starmer have given him this foothold, failing to meaningfully address the horrors of the war in Gaza.
Many on the left have never spent a moment since 2019 reflecting on why Labour found so little electoral success with Corbyn as leader. Instead, they chose a stab-in-the-back narrative of internal sabotage. There has been plenty of online abuse of opponents, but never an earnest attempt to come to terms with the ex-leader’s failings. Now there will never need to be.
Aversion to introspection is usually a recipe for irrelevance in politics. However, with Labour struggling in the polls, Corbyn’s brand of small-tent socialism could provide a coup-de-grâce to the government just by drawing away a few hundred thousand votes. A mutually assured destruction pact of the kind Stop The War, the group part-founded by Corbyn in 2001, usually claims to disavow.
Whether the party can reach the 10 per cent polling that More In Common have suggested it can achieve seems unlikely. There was a sense of nostalgia for the 2010s in the briefing and counter-briefing surrounding the party’s unofficial launch.
Those of us who were there on the ground remember Corbynism’s uneasy alliance of age cohorts. Students with blue hair and seven-syllable sociology vocabulary and their much more politically ruthless fellow travellers: creaky Trotskyite millionaires, white-haired, nursing a sense of disappointment over how their side lost the Cold War.
Smoke signals emanating from the new party suggest the latter will win out as it did before, with “co-leader” Zarah Sultana finding her allies removed from the old guard’s Collective project. Her crime? the cardinal sin of trying to get Jeremy to break a lifetime habit and make a decision on something.
Once the Corbyn-Sultana project is established, Labour will find the challenge of governing for the good of the country as a whole becomes more difficult. The party’s time in government has already begun to feel like watching a tired elephant stumbling around, being dragged down by hyenas on every flank.
Kier Starmer and Rachel Reeves have spent their first year struggling to adapt the social democratic values of yore to a post-Covid era of bond market scepticism, demographic crisis and stagnating growth – Labour’s programme clearly underestimated just how difficult this inheritance was. They now have to deal with a rear guard action in once-safe seats in ethnically diverse cities and satellite towns and try to hold onto another set of once-safe seats in the North and Midlands.
The decision of choosing to prioritise one over the other hasn’t ever been settled, but the former is where the party’s power base and membership lie. These metropolitan boroughs will surely begin to lose their nerve as their councillors are cannibalised in the coming years. The question will become whether Labour wants to try and win an election outright in 2029 or should work to stem losses and hope for a coalition.
There are senior strategists in Labour that see the Corbyn-Sultana party forming as valuable for clarifying electoral choice. A formal political party will nullify the useful fiction of “independence” that has seen Labour losing seats and councillors to a consortium of defectors. These groups will now be tied to the Last Chance At Reason foreign policy of Stop The War and their instinctive distrust of NATO and anything the West does. It will be tied to the politics of local government and parliamentary candidates that talk about gender-segregating gyms, defend cousin marriage or claim that Israel “allowed” the October 7th attacks.
It might be unfair to tar the whole movement by association to its extremes, but there is a contrast between the single-generation integration process celebrated in classic Brit cinema like East Is East and the sentiments powering the Corbyn-Sultana party – something multiculturalism’s enemies use as ammunition. Extreme ideas are too common in grassroots pro-Palestine activism to be hidden. Anyone who has been involved (as I have) in the left’s marches for a ceasefire in Gaza knows that there is an ambivalence to what might charitably be called “conspiratorial” sentiment there. The extremes are ignored – so long as they come from people on the right side. There’s no evidence that a new party will try to manoeuvre these extreme elements out.
Elements within Labour think this emergent party identity will focus minds and bring back voters instinctively against anything that gives a vague whiff of sectarianism. I am less hopeful.
There is no bigger gift to Reform than polling that suggests a coalition government and the ability to declare “vote Labour, get Jeremy”. Both the Greens and the new Corbyn-Sultana party know that they will only grow in a scenario where Reform win a landslide mandate to annihilate the state and net Zzero. Neither appear to care.
Scorned Corbyn-era bigwigs have been scrabbling about for a model of politics that doesn’t require submitting to Starmer. There is another successful European hard-left project led by a curmudgeonly pensioner with an eccentric outlook on international politics: La France Insoumise (LFI), led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. LFI have climbed up the French proportional representation system to become the third largest party in the Assemblée Nationale. How have they done so? By creating a racialised, left-populist defensive counterweight to National Rally’s racialised, right-populism. In France, LFI have utterly capitalised on Muslim and South Asian voting in a manner that has no precedent in the country.
In Britain, the rough analogue to this would be the branch of left-aligned political culture that prioritises a politics of notional (in reality, conditional) anti-imperialist internationalism and a focus on racial identity. It’s this tendency, comfortable waving the Palestinian flag at Labour conference but with an obvious dislike of the flags of England and The United Kingdom, that has been so alienating to Labour’s traditional working-class vote. There is a tension there that would be still more prominent in the British political system.
Red wall voters have a finely tuned bullshit alarm: they’ve been sold a lot of falsehoods over the years. Like the rural Russian farm workers that threw out Narodnik communist missionaries in the 19th century, they epitomise the ability to sniff out the lack of common values and purpose that the left, to this day, puts down to false consciousness. This strand of leftism sees prioritising a local neighbourhood over international events as slightly tragic. Those that do are people needing to be guided, Pygmalion- style, into the light, with little offered in return.
The Corbyn-Sultana party is now unburdened by any pretence of having to create a political project for all of Britain that crosses these cultural lines. It can follow Mélenchon’s party in forming an extreme niche. The British political map is well prepared to accommodate them. Where LFI have benefitted from the French proportional electoral system, the Corbyn-Sultana party, if it were to formalise and expand the “Gaza Independent”’ voting bloc, will benefit hugely from First Past The Post. Targeting seats with large Muslim communities could bring down big Labour names like Wes Streeting and Jess Phillips.
The acolytes of the progressive left and the radical right are itching for an election that can be presented as a referendum on multiculturalism. The progressive left: for the opportunity to yell racism at everything Labour does and further cannibalise the party, even if it means a Reform landslide. The radical right: for the opportunity to highlight the lack of integration in some migrant communities and to force an election with immigration front and centre, rather than their unhinged economic policies. A parliament and election campaign dominated by rows about the burqa will make it almost impossible to talk about economic reform.
What can Labour do? Social democracy was designed in a different era of Britain. It isn’t clear how it can adapt to a world where a left government can be ousted based on its citizens’ allegiances in an international conflict. Were the politics of racial patronage to take hold in Britain – a national party in the vein of Respect or Aspire in Tower Hamlets – what’s to stop the same with other ethnic groups, or with white supremacists? How does a nation develop tax and spend proposals where voters choose who to support based on their ethnic identity as much or more so than their ideology?
It isn’t clear what is behind the door being opened by Corbyn and Sultana. The more Britain’s political milieu becomes like mainland Europe, riven between far right and far left blocs, the less likely it seems that the government can bring a consenting population together at a time when taxes must rise for the state to not collapse.
Labour has been complacent and ground is shifting quickly around the party. Its large parliamentary majority gave its strategists the impression they could govern for two or three terms and decide policy in a fairly serene atmosphere. It no longer has that luxury. Most of all, it no longer has the luxury of grey technocratic politics divorced from an understandable set of values and morals.
In 2026 Labour faces a local election campaign that is almost entirely defensive. It is guaranteed to lose dozens of councillors. When the party loses seats to the Greens and Corbyn-Sultana in London and towns like Bradford, the knives will be sharpened for Starmer and his team.
But the Andy Burnham-endorsed “progressive alliance” project is now surely dead, too, destroyed by the electoral mathematics that will tie any coalition to the Corbyn-Sultana project. Instead, Labour has been bounced into the direction it should have taken long ago: focused on the Red Wall and the working class. It must ignore the infuriated Greens and Corbynistas the way a fighter feints to absorb a blow and land a harder one; after all, they have pushed Labour into this scenario.
The party needs to govern now knowing that it might be given only a single term. This tightening of the electoral map has given it a chance to tell a story about Britain that will be instinctively understood by Red Wall voters. It no longer has to spin its wheels trying to satisfy every extremity of a party with too large a landslide to keep happy.
The story should be obvious: North vs South. Regional inequality. The beneficiaries of globalisation vs its discontents. The centralisation of power and money in London and the South East, worse than at any time since the Norman Conquest – it could all be upended, with a bit of vision and purpose. The Greens and the Corbyn project can’t do this, as they represent the disgruntled beneficiaries of globalisation.
The battlefield of the next election is depressed towns full of voters that want immigration to be lower. Labour can now position itself as a sensible choice between the open-border Greens and the Net Zero Immigration Reform Party, but it needs to create a new consensus on immigration that is in keeping with the socialist tradition. Migration needs to be linked to training of Britain’s workforce that leaves public services less reliant on foreign labour. It needs to be linked to the delivery of houses, hospitals, schools so that migration policy can be separated from landlordism. No houses: no migration.
Labour must also finally raise taxes. In doing so it can detonate the Green Party’s middle-class tax evader myth that “Other People” can pay for the state. There is a reasonable argument for taxing the wealth of the super-rich, but that is a multi-year, multi-nation project, something that would need to disprove every tenet of game theory and bring together a Babel-defying coalition of OECD nations. There are quicker wins on the table that the party can start tomorrow: changing the council tax and property rules that perpetuate massive economic inequality and result in people living in million-pound townhouses posing as left-wing solely through culture and signalling: nobly denigrating the depressed North and patting themselves on the back for the epic achievement of not being a racist. Paying their real share of council tax would see London’s Green voters howling in anger.
Labour can’t afford to be timid. It needs to start moving serious money from the well-off parts of the country to the poor. It will be called naïve from framing their mission in such a manner, but every action has to continue emphasising the shared bonds of everyone living in Britain and our duty to one another. It must find ways to close the loopholes by which so many, left and right, find ways to evade integration into and contribution to public life. An early target could be free schools, the Cameron era-abomination that has proved an engine for atavistic values and behaviour. Watch the supposedly left wing Corbyn-Sultana group find excuses to vote against such a measure the way they did for the introduction of VAT to private schools.
In her statement as to why she was leaving Labour, Sultana invoked Rosa Luxembourg’s call to arms, “Socialism or Barbarism” as the choice in 2029 – a quote in the English socialist tradition, so often neglected by the hard left, probably wasn’t on the cards.
Another hypocrisy lies behind this old cliché quote, a long-standing favourite of Trotskyites. The reality is this: barbarism has found a new place at the table. It will be barbarism on the way to the next election, as racial difference becomes ever more the focus of political life. It will be barbarism when Reform wins a landslide. It will be barbarism as the left tears itself to shreds watching Nigel’s gang occupy the government benches. There will be a further serving of barbarism when this new alliance finds itself continuing its various members’ unchanged foreign policy tradition of speaking up for Russian war interests, Assadism and brutally repressive and socially illiberal regimes throughout the world.
Labour still has time to develop a programme that brings the country together and that shows that the party still has a set of values that are relevant to modern Britain. What’s also clear is that it doesn’t have much longer to do so.
[Further reading: Welfare cuts could bury Labour]
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