This weekend, at a community garden centre in Hulme, south Manchester, a patchwork coalition of the left assembled. Keffiyehs, sloganed t-shirts and Palestine flags were the order of the day. Jeremy Corbyn – a keen gardener – could be seen admiring the products on offer, surrounded by a procession of excitable attendees all hoping to get a moment with Islington North’s Independent MP. Zarah Sultana and Zack Polanski – who were also in attendance – were swamped by punters keen for a selfie.
Welcome to The World Transformed (TWT). This left-wing festival – which held its inaugural gathering in 2016 – was back this month after a year-long hiatus. Over three days, attendees enjoyed panel events, deliberative assemblies, pub quizzes and musical performances all with the intention of sharpening analysis, strengthening organisation, forging networks of solidarity and shaping the future of left strategy.
This year was unusual. For the first time in TWT history, the festival took place separately from Labour Party conference. Up until 2023, Labour members on the left of the party, after descending on Liverpool or Brighton for the party’s annual conference, could sneak off to TWT to get involved in more radical, grassroots organising. The conference’s origins are closely tied to Momentum, the grassroots left-wing organisation within the Labour Party, which played a big role during Corbyn’s leadership.
Yet, as Labour has made a gradual trudge to the right, the crossover between party members and TWT punters has minimised. The expulsion of Corbyn and alienation of Sultana hasn’t helped to endear the party to its left-wing members, nor has Keir Starmer’s stance on the war in Gaza. Instead, many disillusioned left-wing activists and organisers have begun to look elsewhere. Sultana and Corbyn’s new force, temporarily named ‘Your Party’, is intended to offer these voters a new home. And in more recent weeks, so too is the Green Party, following the election of Polanski. It is no surprise, then, that these three politicians were the festival’s top billed speakers. The queues to get into events in which Sultana, Corbyn or Polanski were speaking stretched around the block.
This marked one of the first times Corbyn and Sultana have been seen together publicly since Your Party’s public spat over the launch of its membership portal. Though the pair have clearly now made up, things looked on the verge of becoming very serious in mid-September when Sultana launched the party’s membership portal without authorisation from Corbyn and the other MPs in the Independent Alliance. After Corbyn, Adnan Hussain, Shockat Adam, Ayoub Khan and Iqbal Mohamed shared a statement saying they had referred Your Party to the Information Commissioners Office, Sultana said she had got lawyers involved in order to counter misinformation about her, saying she had been the subject of negative briefing by a “sexist boys club”.
Both Sultana and Corbyn appeared on Thursday night at the launch of Your Party Liverpool, in which they both acknowledged hiccups in the founding of their new left-wing movement. Speaking on Friday, the pair reiterated this unity. Corbyn said Your Party must “face outwards on the issues that matter to people” not “inwards on itself”. He said the party will offer a direct counter for those unhappy with the direction the Labour party has taken, and was deeply critical of Starmer. “What has happened to our humanity”, he said “when we blame refugees – the victims of war – rather than those who caused these wars in the first place?” Sultana similarly recognised the tribulations which have come before in Your Party’s founding. She said the “show is back on the road” before comparing herself and Corbyn to the Gallagher brothers. “If Liam and Noel can do it, so can we,” Sultana said. (An insider later told the New Statesman that some in the party considered putting this comparison out in a press release.)
Indeed, while Sultana was keen to assert that she is united with her co-founder, the MP for Coventry South has set her sights on drawing lines of contrast with another potential ally: the Green Party. Speaking at an event on Saturday, in Hulme’s lofty Ascension Church, Sultana repeated claims about the Greens which she had been keen to relate the following afternoon. Before the event, Sultana could be seen locked in conversation with her fellow panellist Polanski, but shortly after proceedings began, the dividing lines were being drawn. “I see the Green Party as an ally in the fight against the far right,” Sultana said, “and so going into the next election, there will have to be cooperation between Your Party and the Green Party.”
But she added that the two parties don’t have identical voter bases, describing that fact as important. “I have massive respect for Zack, for Mothin [Ali] and for Rachel [Millward]. But we come from very different political traditions,” Sultana said. As a key point of difference, Sultana pointed to the Green Party’s lack of a whipping system: “For example, the whipping system in the Greens is something that people are very proud of, that MPs are able to vote with their conscience… but in a genuinely democratic party, MPs have a duty to uphold the decisions by members held at a sovereign conference.” She added: “What’s the point of conference motions if MPs can just ignore them?”. (Several Green Party attendees could be seen squirming in their seats and raising their eyebrows in response).
Another dividing line drawn by Sultana between Your Party and the Greens was on anti-imperialism. “On the Green Party’s own website, it says it recognises that Nato has an important role, ensuring that its member states can respond to threats to their security,” Sultana said, “I’m sorry, you cannot greenwash Nato, the socialist position is that we must leave Nato immediately.”
Polanski was keen to fight back. “Our MPs are absolutely accountable to the membership and the decisions they make,” he said, pointing to the fact that the party has mandatory re-selection. On Nato, the Green Party leader added: “I want a world without nuclear weapons, so I definitely do not support Nato, who are an organisation around a nuclear alliance. I just want to be really clear about that”. Holding out the olive branch to Sultana, Polanski said, perhaps provocatively: “I’d love it if Zarah would just join the Green Party”.
Sultana has not been followed by her co-founder in her strident opposition to the Greens. Following her comments at TWT, Corbyn told the New Statesman, “There are many good people in the Green Party. Your Party will have its own identity as a mass community-based movement. Where we agree on issues of social and environmental justice, we will absolutely work together and cooperate. United, there is nothing our movement cannot achieve.” But on questions of Your Party policy and how it might differ from the Greens, Corbyn made clear nothing has been decided yet. “This party belongs to its members. They will decide their party’s policies and how we organise to win,” he said, “When political parties are democratically accountable to their members, you get policies that people want and need: wealth taxes, public ownership, and an ethical foreign policy based on human rights, peace and self-determination.”
So why has Sultana redefined herself so clearly in opposition to the Greens? Some have speculated it is because of the similarity of hers and Polanski’s voter base: young, left-wing and popular. Following Your Party’s membership debacle, the Greens have become the fourth largest political party in the UK – overtaking the Liberal Democrats and almost breaching 100,000 members. As one Green Party insider put it, losing votes to the Greens shouldn’t be a speculative “worry” for Sultana and Your Party, it’s “actively happening”.
Though Corbyn, Sultana and Your Party were certainly the most talked about story – in whispers around the Garden Centre and questions to panellists – Polanski’s Green Party is not far behind. (Following a panel Polanski did on rent controls, one riled-up attendee could be heard telling their friends “that’s it – I’m joining the Green Party”). There are still at least four years more years until the next election – and even a week is a long time in politics. Everything discussed this weekend could yet change. But as punters head home from Manchester on Sunday, one thing is clear: TWT won’t be renewing its ties to the Labour party any time soon.
[Further reading: Labour and the Tories are trapped in a tax hole]
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