The mountain has moved. An avalanche is rumbling with unstoppable force. The political landscape will be forever changed. A new party is coming over the horizon. Cut!
It’s still too early to roll the credits on the thriller premiered by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. But creating an organised party that breaks the mould and offers a lasting electoral choice to millions of disenfranchised citizens has clearly been a far from straightforward task, to put it mildly.
Nonetheless, the narrative is bigger than the leadership of two fractious MPs. Amid all the mayhem and riotously inaccurate speculation about the new party of the Left, there is one inescapable truth. It was not an act of protest, a hiccup to be cleared when we’ve all taken and held a deep breath. It was an attempt to give leadership to a movement that is already out there, waiting for organisation and direction. To characterise it as mere protest, as many commentators have done, is to deliberately minimise the significance of the social forces on which it was to be built — a primarily positive, disparate movement, broadly united behind the need for a fairer, more just society against the background of Labour’s failure.
Transforming the expressed interest of more than 800,000 mailing list signees into a structured organisation with effective electoral clout was always going to be a daunting task. A formal launch, with a putative new name, was just the beginning. The potential scale of public support was, to say the least, massive. Capturing that eternally elusive holy grail of Left unity, and maintaining it, was as essential as it was unattainable. Then again, unity does not, and should not, impose uniformity. Managing healthy but containable differences is a sustaining discipline. It is what once gave the Labour Party its strength — one originally born of protest at inequality, but now corrupted by a governing party dedicated to the suppression of peaceful protest.
It remains to be seen where the new party goes from here. But despite its drawbacks, its emergence was a step forward of sorts for the Left, a rallying behind an ‘unapologetically socialist’ policy agenda that includes public ownership, climate action, fairer taxation of the wealthy, anti-racism, ethical foreign policy, an end to militarism, justice for Palestine, and housing justice; one promising wealth distribution, an end to an economic system which encourages a boom in billionaires alongside rising bills and plummeting living standards.
In this sense, it was an inevitability. With or without Corbyn as the most recognisable figurehead, some form of new party or organisation was always going to rise out of the despair and despondency of the UK’s nihilistic politics. In creating a yawning vacuum on the Left, Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, and Morgan McSweeney are unintentional midwives to new alternatives, while simultaneously acting as funeral directors for the Labour Party. Shamefully, they’re also paving the way to the door of Number 10 for Nigel Farage.
Labour’s official, but anonymous, response to the Corbyn/Sultana original announcement in July was dismissively arrogant: ‘The electorate has twice given its verdict on a Jeremy Corbyn led party.’ Yes, and twice, the electorate gave a Corbyn-led party more votes than Starmer – 2.5 million more in 2017 and 500,000 more in 2019. Such statistics should be endlessly repeated so long as Labour officials continue to lie, and to ignore the fact that Starmer won on the back of a discredited and broken electoral system that is no longer fit for purpose (not to mention a cynical campaigning strategy). No wonder such a large swathe of voters have leaned towards a fresh alternative, even before taking account of the calamitous betrayals that define Starmer’s government.
As a new activist base continues to coalesce, the questions continue to be asked. Will the Left succumb to terminal splintering? Should there be some form of alliance (or arrangement, or understanding, or a nod-and-a-wink deal) between a new party and the Greens, whose new leader, Zack Polanski, delivers powerful chorus lines from the same song sheet? Is a new party even the right way to maximise the energy out there? Some people close to early discussions on the formation of a new party urged caution over the imposition of a party structure too early, on the grounds that it risks being exclusory and institutionalising division. One, Andrew Feinstein who stood against Starmer last year, commented that it is important to ‘build from the local, from the grassroots up’. There’s every sign that Corbyn in particular understands and agrees with that view. But how loose can a federational coalition of groups be if it aims to be a cohesive force for real change?
The first big test of that comes in next year’s local elections, where the majority of council seats up for grabs will be in Labour’s traditional urban heartlands. In polling which makes a nonsense of Labour’s steely complacency, Ipsos found that 20 per cent of voters would ‘consider voting’ for a new party of the Left. The figure rises to 33 per cent among those who voted Labour last year, and is similar among younger voters aged 16-34. That’s the avalanche we can all hear. That’s the electoral plates shifting. A similar pattern has been reported in polling for the party-loyal LabourList website with two-thirds of members saying they’d like to see a shift to the left in government policies.
The force behind this shift is the deep and widening belief that the Labour leadership has abandoned its working class base, along with the values and policies aligned with their best interests; that it is kowtowing to the interests of business and capital; that it has lost any sight of its moral compass in foreign policy.
Members, including some MPs on the neutered Labour Left, look on in varying degrees of consternation, through meshed fingers, in either disbelief or hope against hope that it will get better. Many are simply waiting until they see the shape of a new organisation to decide whether to jump ship.
The role of the trade unions in all this is potentially crucial. Potentially, in that they would have to actually act — and act in concert — in order to affect sufficient change within Labour to ensure a radical change of direction (as in orchestrating a new leadership, or a defenestration of all those associated with the current one). Welcome to the land of fantasy. Labour remains the best chance of the labour movement’s influence over government policies and legislation, even though tensions stress the umbilical cord to the limit. The point at which they collectively decide enough is enough is not yet showing on any long-term forecast.
Less fanciful has been the notion that some unions, more likely those no longer affiliated to Labour, might get behind a putative new party. A panicked Starmer came out of the summer parliamentary recess with a plan to give Number 10 more control over economic policy, loosening government from the iron grip of its injurious, deluded chancellor before the Budget. As if the Prime Minister and his controllers have any better ideas. And as if it wasn’t already too late. That sound they can hear in the Cabinet room is the earth moving beneath their feet. New party or not.