As wars and revolutions sweep the globe, and life in Britain gets worse, millions of people are looking for a radical political answer. Starmer’s government is hated, but the only people filling the vacuum are right-wing demagogues like Farage and Robinson.
That’s why there was so much enthusiasm when independent MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana announced the formation of a new left-wing party earlier this year.
Corbyn and Sultana promised a party that would fight for the working class and promote policies of nationalisation of major industries, etc.
By the end of July, 800,000 people had signed up. Finally, after much foot-dragging, we seemed to be on the cusp of a major step forward.
Since then, however, there has been no fleshing out of that political programme, which initially inspired so many.
And yesterday, a breathtaking public exchange of manoeuvres and hostile statements between Corbyn and Sultana appears to have set things back, if not entirely scuppered them, before the new party has even got off the ground.
Many people are shocked and demoralised by this. Even those who support the new party – but with a healthy scepticism about the quality of its leaders – have been astonished by the conduct of Corbyn and Sultana.
What on earth is going on?
Petty bickering
As Corbyn and Sultana were trading blows on social media yesterday, one thing became very clear: neither was talking much about politics.
Sultana says Corbyn blocked her from the organising committees of the new party. Corbyn says Sultana is sending unauthorised emails. Corbyn says one thing was agreed in a backroom meeting; Sultana says it was something else.
Do you think someone who can’t afford their weekly shop cares about any of this? Is a family that can’t find a decent house to live in bothered who the Your Party data controller is? Is a migrant being harassed by racists worried about who gets to be on what committee?
Instead of spending time debating how to solve the problems facing working-class people, Corbyn and Sultana have been wasting everyone’s time bickering over petty organisational questions – each trying to out-manoeuvre the other.
Politics absent
The problem is that Corbyn and Sultana don’t really seem to fully agree with each other on the political solution to working-class problems. In fact, they aren’t very clear on what each of them actually think themselves.
Corbyn is all about ‘Peace and Justice’. He’s willing to ally himself with middle-class, socially-conservative landlords in the form of the Independent Alliance MPs, in order to build as broad a front as possible on the question of Palestine.
Urgent message to all https://t.co/IMsx47g0HE supporters pic.twitter.com/XrKVXTa7iD
— Your Party (@thisisyourparty) September 18, 2025
This is also why he’s been taking things excruciatingly slowly when it comes to forming the party. He’s trying not to scare off liberal, middle-class elements. This, incidentally, is exactly the same mistake he made when leader of the Labour Party from 2015-19.
But if an alliance with landlords is his strategy, where does that leave the new party’s policy on the housing crisis, for example?
Corbyn says he’s a socialist. But would his new middle-class allies support challenges to – or even the overthrow of – the capitalist system? Is that even what Corbyn means by socialism?
For Corbyn, having a couple more MPs’ names on his statements seems to be more important than what political ideas those statements contain.
Sultana’s political ideas seem more radical than Corbyn’s, at least verbally. And, reading between the lines, she is somewhat critical of his soft-left politics.
It’s her, not Corbyn, who has been trying to drive forward the creation of a new party to connect with the mood of radical anger in society.
But Sultana is not explaining her differences with Corbyn clearly and openly in political terms. Instead, she has simply tried to manoeuvre herself into a leadership position, pull a fast one with the new party’s membership lists, and – when called out on it – claimed that Corbyn is the ringleader of a “sexist boys club”.
My response: pic.twitter.com/pIWrzZ4MzB
— Zarah Sultana MP (@zarahsultana) September 18, 2025
The reality is that Sultana is not completely sure of her own ideas. Her words are sometimes quite radical. But this rhetoric is not matched by concrete suggestions for a programme or for action.
Rather, too often, Sultana substitutes this with backroom manoeuvres, and wallows in the morass of liberal identity politics.
What is urgently required is a clear programme to confront both the capitalist establishment and the right-wing demagogues with the unity of the working class. Instead, we get bickering behind the scenes among unelected and unaccountable cliques.
Debate the politics!
This refusal to confront the political mish-mash at the heart of the new party is the root cause of its problems. It has been present since the earliest meetings discussing the formation of a new party, over a year ago in the wake of the general election.
Is this a genuinely socialist party or not? Is socialism about reforming capitalism or overthrowing it? These are the central questions that must be answered.
The RCP had representatives at those early meetings. From the beginning, we said that unless these questions are answered unequivocally, with the new party established on the basis of a clear, anti-capitalist, revolutionary programme, it would ultimately fail.
Corbyn and Sultana are now under enormous pressure to patch things up. Who knows if they’ll be able to.
At the very least, we can say that any unity based on purely organisational compromise will never last.
The only way forward is for Corbyn, Sultana, and anyone else who wants to, to put forward their political programme for debate at a democratic founding conference of the new party, in which members can decide, on the basis of an informed discussion.
Everything else, including the organisational structure of the new party, must flow from this: the politics and programme.
For our part, the RCP will continue to build and organise the forces of communism around the country, with a special focus on university campuses at the moment. Millions of young people are wide open to revolutionary ideas – and we must find a way to reach them.
We will continue to engage with those who want a new left party, as we have from the beginning, by arguing for such a party to adopt revolutionary socialist policies as the only solution to working-class problems.
As long as Corbyn and Sultana are messing about with secondary organisational issues, while refusing to take the political questions seriously, their party will remain a mess.
If you want to fight capitalism, and are looking for a serious, politically-homogenous, radical-left organisation to join, make it the Revolutionary Communist Party.
