Two-front wars seldom have happy endings for the combatant in the middle. But Keir Starmer’s beleaguered government is now fighting one, following the announcement of the impending arrival of the Corbyn-Sultana party on the left.
The emerging, and as yet unnamed new force, secured more than 245,000 sign-ups within twenty-four hours of the announcement by the two former Labour MPs, one of them Starmer’s immediate predecessor as Labour leader. Supporters registered at a rate of 200 a minute, with forty donations a minute too; by the weekend’s end, the new party’s membership totalled half a million. One poll declared the party at level-pegging with Labour.
Early days, only polls, etc. But it should be clear that Reform UK is now not the only insurgent force that Downing Street chief strategist Morgan McSweeney needs to worry about. Indeed, it is likely that the Corbyn-Sultana party (CSP here on in) will prove more attractive to more Labour voters than the Farageists, very few of whom will ever switch to Starmer according to polling evidence.
“The electorate has twice given its verdict on a Jeremy Corbyn-led party” was the only response from a Labour source to the news. OK, let’s go there. The Corbyn-led Labour Party polled three million more votes in 2017 than Starmer managed last year. Indeed, Starmer’s Labour even undershot, in vote numbers, the more miserable haul Corbyn’s Labour secured in 2019.
So the electorate may not be exactly where Downing Street imagines it is. One thing is certain – Starmer’s five years as Labour leader, and one year in government, have opened up enormous space to the party’s left.
The birth of CSP has been a long time coming. The meandering road to this week’s announcement can be traced back to the hundreds of thousands of people who joined Corbyn’s Labour, often engaging in politics for the first time, and have since quit. Long marginalised, socialism was back within the Overton Window of the politically-conceivable. The fuse was then lit by Starmer’s suspension of Corbyn from Labour in October 2020, and his subsequent exclusion as a Labour candidate. Corbyn himself was long sceptical about the merits of a left-of-Labour electoral challenge, and could point to the wreckage of previous such initiatives – Socialist Labour, Respect, Left Unity and on and on – in his support.
The game-changer was Gaza and the enormous movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people which developed after October 2023. That movement turned much of its anger against Labour, then in opposition, because of Starmer’s blundering endorsement of Israeli war crimes in an LBC radio interview, a position it took him nine days to walk back out of.
British Muslim opinion in particular proved to be irreconcilable, and Labour parted company with one of its staunchest voting blocs. Four independents were elected as MPs alongside Corbyn last year, above all on the Palestine issue. That is more than the aggregate of MPs elected to the left of Labour in all general elections since the Second World War.
The general election outcome also showed that Labour, beneath its puffed-up first-past-the-post Commons majority, is far more vulnerable to challenge than at any other time since its emergence as a governing force in the aftermath of the First World War.
The party won over 40 per cent of the vote, whether winning or losing, in all eight elections up to and including 1970. It has reached that benchmark just three times in 14 elections since – twice under Blair (charisma) and once under Corbyn (authenticity). Its electorate is fragmenting in all directions.
We can be sure it will not see 40 per cent, or likely even 30, again under Starmer. After a year in office, Labour’s polling is underwater, with resistance to the economic and social strategy of Rachel Reeves joining Gaza as a recruiting sergeant for the left.
Now the CSP could become Britain’s second biggest party in terms of membership. Its main asset at this stage is not just the sense that its two leaders say what they mean and mean what they say – it is enthusiasm.
Reform may be cornering the market in anger, channelling the hyperventilating tabloid/GB News agenda, itself fuelled by decades of complacent establishment support for capitalist globalisation.
But anger isn’t the only emotion available. Hope and excitement get a look-in too. Where was the political enthusiasm in the generally enervating election campaign last year?
Such as that I came across in a church hall in Chingford, where Faiza Shaheen launched her independent campaign after being shamefully axed as Labour candidate on McSweeney’s orders after the election had been called. And on the streets of neighbouring Ilford North, as charismatic British-Palestinian woman Leanne Mohamad came within a few hundred votes of ending Wes Streeting’s political career, and in a garden in Bristol where Green canvassers massed to send their co-leader Carla Denyer to Westminster.
In Islington North too, of course, where a national mobilisation of the left helped return Corbyn for an eleventh term as their local MP, despite both Peter Mandelson and Paul Mason putting in appearances to try to get Labour over the line.
Enthusiasm is not really the Prime Minister’s thing, and to be fair he has never pretended otherwise. But he did promise “Corbynism with competence” – the nod to his predecessor’s policy agenda has long been discarded, and the last year has shredded whatever reputation he had for the latter.
Nevertheless, the Corbyn years at Labour’s helm have shown the limitations of enthusiasm alone. Can the CSP defy history and make a lasting impact?
One prerequisite for doing so must be reaching some form of electoral agreement with the Green Party, themselves presently choosing a new leader, with Zack Polanski’s campaign drawing significant “Corbynista” support. It is clear that in competition the two parties will simply eat each others’ votes to a significant extent. United, it is easy to see seats tumbling to a red-green alliance all over the country. The Greens could sweep Bristol and the CSP half of Birmingham. Together, they could defeat Labour almost everywhere in east London. Bye bye, Health Secretary.
Moreover, such an alliance would mark the birth of five-party politics across England, and six-party in Scotland and Wales. Given the prevailing rules, that could see MPs being elected on 30 per cent of their constituency vote in many seats.
At that point, predicting the outcome in a particular constituency becomes a lottery. In every seat there could be three or more possible winners. So the non-Labour left could be a significant force in the next House of Commons.
But that is very far from certain. Several things could go wrong. One, entirely in the new party’s own hands, is that the perennial habit of left-wing Pythonesque factionalism. Splits could manifest.
It is an open secret that Corbyn was surprised by the decision of the committee then organising the new party to vote for a co-leadership arrangement between him and Sultana, and even more by her subsequent public announcement of it. Nor is it news that Corbyn’s own leadership style has its detractors.
Unity has been restored – Corbyn and Sultana get on well together and are almost perfectly complementary in every personal characteristic and quality.
But there are certainly different perspectives on how the new party should be organised, as well as its political strategy. Its promised founding conference will bear a heavy load. Then there is the possibility that Labour could shoot the CSP fox by actually addressing left-wing concerns. For a moment, after the U-turn on the welfare benefit cuts under backbench pressure, it had seemed that might be possible.
The suspension of four MPs from the parliamentary whip punctured that bubble tout suite. The authoritarianism of the Starmer leadership, directed exclusively against the left, looks like remaining its hallmark.
No 10 is determined to foreclose any possibility of a revival of the left within Labour. Previous regimes within the party, of the left or far more often the right, always allowed the other wing of the party to hope for a turn of the wheel in the future. That is not the McSweeney way, and it is certainly one factor powering recruits to the CSP.
Securing the support of more Labour MPs and official trade union backing for the CSP will be challenging in the short term. But if the new party looks popular and properly run a couple of years down the line, and the government continues on its dismal way, that could very well change.
The government is imprisoned both by its commitments – to the electorate, to the City, to Trump – and its prejudices. It hopes that the possibility of Lee Anderson as Home Secretary will drive voters back into its arms in 2029.
It also recycles the arguments that I, and others, used in 2019, when pressing against a commitment to hold a second referendum on EU membership – Labour can lose votes to the Liberal Democrats and Greens in many areas without endangering seats. The margin for error in the “red wall” is next to non-existent.
So it proved. But does the argument hold true today? Labour’s strategists claim that in 2024 they consciously allowed for a fall in support in safe big city seats in order to make gains where they were needed, in the red wall inter alia.
This plan only half worked at the time. The metropolitan support indeed dropped – in Starmer’s Camden constituency he lost half his personal vote, something little remarked on since – but there was no return to voting Labour in seats which had been its traditional strongholds. It elected MPs entirely because of a split in the right.
Today, those urban strongholds are not so strong. The day after Sultana’s initial announcement that she was quitting Labour, I spoke at a Palestine demonstration in Kentish Town, the heart of Starmer’s own seat.
Every mention of her and the 2024 independent challenger against the Labour leader, Andrew Feinstein, was cheered to the echo. Downing Street will have to listen.
Andrew Murray is political correspondent of the Morning Star, a former advisor to Jeremy Corbyn and the author of “The Fall and Rise of the British Left and Is Socialism Possible in Britain – Reflections on the Corbyn Years” (both Verso).
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