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Morning Call: The insurgent left
Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn’s potential new party should be taken seriously by Keir Starmer.
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Good morning, it’s Megan.
Emmanuel Macron will touch down in London this afternoon for a state visit. The French president can expect a banquet with the royals and, less glamorously, discussions about small boats with the Prime Minister.
Meanwhile, this morning I have delved into the behind-the-scenes chaos that engulfed the left last week, after it seems Zarah Sultana announced the formation of a new party without the permission of her co-leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
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Pat McFadden made an exciting announcement this morning: in two months’ time, the national emergency alert system will be tested. On 7 September, the nation’s phones will light up and vibrate, even if they are set to silent: you have been warned.
Last week, Westminster was captivated by another test run. All eyes were on the left this weekend after Sultana’s announcement on Thursday evening that she had quit the Labour party to co-lead the founding of a new left-wing party alongside Jeremy Corbyn. Except Sultana’s big launch didn’t quite go to plan. Corbyn responded the following afternoon; in the meantime journalists were being briefed that the former Labour leader had not given his audacious colleague the green light and was furious at how her announcement had been handled. When he did respond, Corbyn was equivocal. He praised Sultana for her “principled decision” to leave the Labour Party but did not confirm or deny her claim that the pair would co-lead a new party.
There have been rumblings of a new left-wing movement for a long time. There were murmurs even before last year’s general election. The most logical starting point is the moment it became clear Corbyn would not be allowed back into the Labour Party following his expulsion in 2020. More than 300,000 people who were members of Labour five years ago, have also left, frustrated with the policy regime being followed by Keir Starmer and the government’s attitude to the conflict in Gaza. Smaller movements have already sprung up across the country. One example is Jamie Driscoll, the former Mayor of the North of Tyne who quit the party after he was blocked from re-standing as a Labour candidate. He has since formed his own left-wing alternative party, Majority. But nothing nationally coherent has materialised yet.
But agitation for change has been building. Frustration over the government’s perceived lack of action on Gaza, removing the whip from seven MPs who voted to remove the two-child benefit cap, and most recently the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist group, have further galvanised those who feel that Labour is no longer the answer.
As is often the case with the left, however, process and personalities brought further delays. The latest mechanism to try to force a change was a committee meeting (which has no name, constitution or official status) held over Zoom on Thursday afternoon, at which a vote was taken on the kind of leadership this new movement should take. Some of those involved didn’t vote; Corbyn didn’t want to vote. It was through this process that the joint Sultana-Corbyn model was informally decided. No plans for launch were put in place, nor was it an official decision. Sultana made her statement reportedly just ten minutes after the meeting had ended.
To some insiders, Sultana’s statement jumped the gun. To others, her immediate decision to quit Labour was surprising. At the moment of her announcement, Sultana had remained without the Labour whip for almost a year, after voting to remove the two-child benefit cap alongside her colleagues John McDonnell and Apsana Begum. There were insider rumblings that of the three, Sultana was the most likely to have the whip restored (although as one insider noted, she wasn’t making much effort to make this happen). Even so, a Sultana defection was always likely. Zack Polanski, the insurgent candidate to lead the Green Party, said at the end of May he would “roll out the red carpet” if Sultana wanted to join the party. In fact, Sultana had been discussing this possibility with the Green Party until recently. She clearly wanted to make a bold, public move or statement; the events of last Thursday were intended to be just that.
So what happens now? While relations between Corbyn and Sultana are not unsalvageable, trust between the pair has been somewhat damaged. But the creation of a new left-wing party now appears increasingly inevitable. There are a lot of former Labour activists, staffers and now politicians who are angry with the direction Starmer has taken the party in; the Prime Minister and his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney are also seen as responsible for excluding a very large part of Labour’s left-wing base.
The shape it will take though is still up for debate. Some question whether Corbyn is the right person to lead a new movement. If the left is looking for an answer to Nigel Farage’s Reform, Corbyn is unlikely to be the right man for the job. The MP for Islington North doesn’t want to be a charismatic leader but is known to favour alliance and cooperation instead. This was perhaps why the co-leadership model was so appealing; this new movement could bolster its profile with two popular left-wing leaders at the helm. Still, whether Sultana and Corbyn are the right pairing is still up for debate.
This test-run has alerted the political ecosystem that a serious force on the left may be about to emerge. The government should be worried. Such a force could do serious damage to Labour’s base (polling by More in Common has a Corbyn-led party taking 10 per cent of the vote). The question now is whether the left can get their act together to formally create something capable of taking on the challenge. Or will they spend the next four years fighting between themselves?
Megan’s picks
The return of the century – George Eaton was in the crowd for the opening night of the Oasis reunion tour.
Why will the public will keep gambling on Nigel Farage? David Gauke has the answer.
Members of the New Statesman team explore why Send will be Labour’s next backbench battle on yesterday’s episode of our podcast.
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