It is a month since Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn confirmed their intention to co-found a new left-wing party. And yet, no one is any wiser as to the exact form this party will take. Who will lead it? How will policy be decided? And, most importantly, what will it actually be called? These questions are to be answered at the party’s inaugural conference, the date and location of which is still tbc (though insiders tell me they expect it to take place in November).
Behind the scenes, progress is being made gradually. The grassroots momentum is clearly there: the party’s website has had more than 800,000 sign-ups in the past month. But as Roger Hallam – the founder of Extinction Rebellion, who is involved in the new party – told me last week: Sultana and Corbyn need to be “quick” or come September their supporters may think “enough is enough” and begin to tail off.
Though Your Party has not hosted an official event yet, various rallies and hustings have begun to take place across the country linked to the party’s organisation and development. Corbyn and Sultana have spoken separately in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Bristol. More events are coming up in Newcastle and Blackburn. These are intended to encourage conversations as to what direction the new party should take – a call for name ideas, to be chosen democratically, was sent this morning.
But the incoherence has left an information vacuum which the various factions involved in the new movement have been keen to fill. On the one hand, there are those who have been close to Corbyn for some time (many of whom worked alongside him while he was leader of the Labour Party). The former executive director of the leader of the opposition office, Karie Murphy, and Pamela Fitzpatrick, the company director of Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project and an independent parliamentary candidate in 2024, have for a long time been trying to encourage the former Labour leader to take the leap and start a new movement. (There was confusion this weekend when Fitpatrick announced the launch of Arise, a new Harrow-based independent party which does not seem to be formally linked to Your Party. Corbyn is a guest speaker at the party’s launch.)
Both Fitzpatrick and Murphy are involved in Collective, the organisation that is driving a lot of Your Party’s communications and development, alongside the Independent Alliance of six MPs (which includes Sultana and Corbyn) in parliament. It was Murphy who first organised a steering group to discuss the potential for a new left-wing party more than a year ago, and she has been involved in setting up the working group to fine-tune the details of Your Party’s upcoming conference. In Collective’s view, the best way forward is to establish the party first and think about how it will operate on a grassroots level later. There is some opposition from within towards the idea of a co-leadership model of Corbyn alongside Sultana (though this seems to have subsided somewhat in recent weeks).
In a slightly different camp are existing grassroots organisers such as Jamie Driscoll, the former mayor of the North of Tyne, and the independent candidate, Andrew Feinstein, who posed a credible challenge to Keir Starmer’s Holborn and St Pancras majority last year. In their view, Your Party should take a more federal approach, drawing together the range of grassroots left-wing movements that exist in the UK already (such as Driscoll’s north-east based Majority party, which he founded in December 2024). They are in favour of taking a bottom-up approach, hosting citizens assemblies and community discussions to develop Your Party’s direction. Driscoll has been working to do this in the north-east through Majority, and wants to win the leadership of Newcastle City Council next year. Sultana is more closely linked to this group, and will speak alongside Driscoll in Newcastle on 6 September. (Although Roger Hallam is keen not to choose a side, his blueprint for successful community organising fits neatly into this camp.)
From the outside it would be easy to align Corbyn with the Collective faction; it includes some of his closest allies and involves the Peace and Justice Project which he founded. However, insiders tell me that the former Labour leader’s ideas for how Your Party should operate are more closely aligned to Driscoll and Feinstein, with Sultana favouring the party-first approach advocated for by Fitzpatrick and Murphy. The two co-founders remain firm allies (despite Sultana’s recent criticism of the way Corbyn dealt with anti-Semitism while Labour leader).
Though it is happening slowly – and much of it privately – the creation of Your Party is happening. But Hallam’s words should act as a warning: left-wing activists are anxiously waiting for something – anything – concrete to emerge. If Corbyn and Sultana are too slow to act, they may soon find the left is unwilling to wait.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: Rachel Reeves will never get serious on tax]
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