UK: Can the Left Turn the Tide?

Owen Walsh

Zarah Sultana, a Labour MP, resigned and announced her support for the formation of a new party.

THE LEFT IN Britain is in the midst of what could be the most important party formation since Labour was established in 1900. The process is proving slow and difficult, though the need could scarcely be more urgent.

The far right have gone from strength to strength over the past two years, and the Labour government are tailing them with less shame (and less electoral reward) than ever before. With the two-party system in an unprecedented crisis, the UK is on a treacherous path to a hard-right government, but there are exciting opportunities for the Left to turn the tide.

Saturday, September 13, 2025 was a red-letter day for British fascists. By many accounts, it was their biggest mobilization ever on British soil, with more than 100,000 on the streets of London. The demonstration was headed by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (alter ego: Tommy Robinson). A well-known fascist leader, “Robinson” has been convicted of various assaults and frauds, and was flanked by failed actor Laurence Fox and failed media personality Katie Hopkins. The event was addressed via livestream by billionaire white-supremacist Elon Musk.

Anti-fascists mobilized in response and were humiliated. A meagre turnout meant that they were outnumbered by roughly 10:1. Disastrously incompetent (and possible malicious) policing enabled the fascists to surround the counter-demonstration. The result was a demoralizing encirclement of the anti-fascist forces, leaving the fascists to drinking, harass and attack people with impunity.

The Stakes

The so-called Unite the Kingdom demonstration was the culmination of a second summer of far-right dominance on Britain’s streets. In 2024, this took the form of pogromist riots. This summer, the most visible element has been a viral campaign to display the Union and St. George’s flags on houses and lamp posts.

The success of the flag-raising campaign has been matched by large demonstrations outside hotels and other residences where asylum seekers are housed. A majority of the British electorate now support sending people claiming asylum to “prison camps,” largely due to a media-fuelled panic about their mythologized sexual threat to women and children.

The Unite the Kingdom demonstration was not officially supported by any political party, though its size was symptomatic, above all, of the threat posed by Reform UK. This is the new organizational form taken on by the populist Right (historically represented by UKIP, then the Leave campaign, then the Brexit Party).

They have long been led by Nigel Farage, a friend of Donald Trump who harbors ambitions to replicate his mass deportations and anti-democratic attacks. With the Conservative Party slumping into third-place in most polls, and lacking any ideas other than aping Farage, Reform UK is on course to form the next government.

Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer has raised some muted objections to the fascists’ illegal excesses, but has voiced support for the flag-raising efforts of the far-right. Meanwhile, Starmer’s response to Reform’s meteoric rise has been one-note: copy them in both the form and content of Labour policy.

Having won a “loveless landslide” in the 2024 general election, the Labour leadership have spent their first year in office proving their adeptness at wasting an advantage. Despite a massive parliamentary majority, ruthless discipline over the party machine, a favorable relationship with the mass media, and the low expectations of the electorate, Starmer has led an incompetent and unpopular government.

Over-eager to prove his credentials as a reliable capitalist politician, Starmer has unveiled a disastrously unappealing legislative agenda. The signal policies of the Labour government thus far have been the removal of a winter fuel allowance from millions of pensioners who are vulnerable to fuel poverty; the gutting of Personal Independence Payments, a government benefit intended to grant disabled people a minimum of independent living; and retention of a two-child cap on benefit claimants that has seriously exacerbated child poverty.

These have been served with side-dishes of Trump brown-nosing, genocide apologism, and transphobia. Starmer’s expertise is in delivering such Farageist policies with a technocratic blandness that excites no one.

Starmer’s injurious policies have been accompanied by insult. Within months of taking office, Starmer and his ministers were embroiled in scandal for having accepted a record-setting quantity of freebies from private business. While Labour are now being forced into U-turns on their most unpopular announcements, this only compounds the sense that Starmer leads an inept and directionless government.

Support for the Labour Party has collapsed, perhaps as low as 15%. In short order, Starmer has turned a landslide victory into one of the most despised governments in living memory.

Despite their massive majority and the totalitarian disciplining of the parliamentary party, Labour has not achieved a single major legislative victory, while its most ambitious proposal has been to legalize euthanasia! A more precise summary of their political messaging could hardly be imagined.

The Left: Your Party

In the streets and at the ballot box, the Left in Britain have spent six years in retreat. The defeat in 2019 of the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party shortly led to a rout.

The Palestine movement has nevertheless re-energized the Left, having brought record-breaking crowds out on numerous occasions. At its largest, the movement was mobilizing close to a million people.

Through this mass intervention, and thanks to Starmer’s belligerent hounding, Jeremy Corbyn has been finally forced to accept the need to lead the formation of a new party. His hope is to revive the progressive insurgency that drove his Labour leadership between 2015 and 2019.

The party formation process was announced, however, by his young colleague, Zarah Sultana, who grew impatient with the dithering, rumours, and backroom maneuvering by Corbyn’s associates.

On 24 July, Sultana announced — seemingly without the knowledge of Corbyn — her resignation from the Labour Party and her support for the formation of a new party. Corbyn was peculiarly slow to issue his welcoming response. Corbyn and Sultana never­theless agreed that the name and policy of the party will be determined by its members. In the interim, it is being called Your Party.

Having been teased for months about the likely new party, the grassroots Left met Sultana’s announcement with an explosive response. Eight hundred thousand people registered their interest, the possible membership of the new party several times bigger than any of the other parties in the UK. Most of these signups came in the space of a single weekend, with scarcely a finger having been lifted to build support following Sultana’s social media post.

Since then, developments have been slow and, at times, genuinely alarming. The hugely valuable data gathered in the sign­up process (essentially, the contact details of the whole UK Left) was not shared with any local organizers. Only in mid-September were the signups given an update on the plan. That was:

In September, the opening of formal membership and the beginning of a consultation process on a Political Statement, Constitution, Rules, and Organizational Strategy. This continues through October, alongside an ambitious series of regional assemblies and a vote on the party’s name. Finally, a founding conference will convene in late November with delegates selected by sortition (random selection). Parallel to this rush of activity will be a mass door-knocking campaign to ensure the party is formed from the widest possible mass base.

Much of this is good news, though views remain divided on the organizational mechanisms such as delegation by sortition.

Shortly after this announcement, however, the project was pitched into a seemingly-existential crisis. As part of behind-the-scenes power struggles that had seen Sultana and other leading figures marginalized by the Corbyn clique, Zarah Sultana’s office sought to regain their position — and defend their more democratic view of the formation process — by launching a membership system without approval from Corbyn and the Independent MPs.

In a devastating 24-hour period, this was met by a rapid and hostile response from Corbyn’s camp, with legal threats issued both by Corbyn and Sultana.

Mediation has since calmed the splits among the leadership, who are now presenting a united front, but the damage to the project’s momentum will be harder to recover, and the need for grassroots control is now impossible to deny. If the party is to work, the grassroots must seize control of the party and make it their own.

Factions

Jermy Corbyn champions a federated structure for the new party.

This dispute reflects a set of tensions that have been evident from the start. In the statement that launched the process, Sultana claimed that she would be “co-leading” it as Corbyn’s equal partner. In defiance of some senior Corbynistas, this wording was adopted as a statement of opposition to the crowning of Corbyn as sole leader of a personalist party.

In reality, Sultana has been the more visible, dynamic, and militant face of the emergent party. She has unambiguously communicated her vision of a member-led, socialist party that makes no concessions on somewhat divisive issues such as trans rights. She has also been openly critical of the Left’s mistakes during the Corbyn era. Sultana, far more than Corbyn, has toured rallies organized by the semi-official Your Party groups that sprung up over the summer.

Sultana therefore appears as a key voice for the grassroots Left. Her energetic entrance into national leadership alongside Corbyn is a promising indication of what the new party might be, and how it might depart from his “kind, gentle” style, which in the past has permitted timidity in the face of right-wing attacks, and has relied on bureaucratic management by his staffers.

Sultana’s combative and clear-sighted interventions have been especially important given the motley nature of the party-in-formation. The victory of four new Independent parliamentary candidates in the 2024 general election demonstrated the prospects for a left-of-Labour challenge. Each of these candidates campaigned in working-class constituencies on pro-Palestine platforms, winning support especially from Asian communities. These Independent MPs have since operated in alliance with Corbyn.

But the politics of the Independents are very mixed. Beyond a liberal pro-Palestine advocacy and an anti-austerity agenda, they agree on little. They have no roots in the Left or the labor movement. Most notably, one of them, Adnan Hussain, has advocated for concessions to transphobes and to a religiously- informed “social conservatism.”

The Left has been quick to condemn such concessions, and correctly so. The Independent MPs will be in a position of real power in the new party but are among its least reliable elements. It remains to be seen whether they will accept the political discipline required to remain inside a socialist party.

While it’s necessary to maintain a hard line against such figures as Hussain, though, the Left will also need to consider how to keep constituencies of the kind he represents onside. Building an organization that can bridge the mostly city-based Left with workers in towns, including some who are heavily influenced by religious leadership, is a long-term project. It will require political skill and patience to transcend the polarized political geography that has largely prevailed since the Brexit referendum.

The political diversity of the party is also manifested in various local vehicles built around individuals like Luftur Rahman (leader of the Aspire group in Tower Hamlets, London) and Jamie Driscoll (leader of Majority, a party to Labour’s left in the North-east of England). Neither of these are firmly socialist in their politics, though both have established effective organizations that have scored impressive electoral performances with a left-populist agenda.

The place of such organizations in the new party raises not only political but organizational questions. Corbyn, for instance, has championed a federated structure for the new party, with a view that this would enable it to be as broad a coalition as possible. Such a structure is also preferred by some sections of the revolutionary Left, though for rather different reasons: they prefer to affiliate as blocs while maintaining their organizational independence. One danger, however, is that a federal structure might lead the new party to replicate rather than overcome the “broad church” social democracy that has long characterized the Labour Party.

On the other hand, Sultana has come out in support of a one-member-one-vote (OMOV) structure, which she sees as necessary to ensure a democratic and ideologically firm party of the Left. (Sultana wants the party to be called The Left). The OMOV model is also supported by individuals who differ from Sultana either on issues of policy, party management, or the question of “co-leadership.” Some versions of this model would in fact mean that, in place of an activist democracy, the party is run through atomized member “consultations” that would weaken its Left.

So, views on organizational structure divide the party’s constituencies in non-linear ways. Those disagreements are compounded by personal clashes.

In sum, the announcement of the party was made in a messy set of circumstances, and with no coherent plan or united vision of what the party ought to look like, what the timeline for its formation ought to be, or what structures it should adopt. The responsibility for working these out has been on an unelected and opaque network of individuals with their own agendas — some political, some personal.

It is essential going forward that the clique-based leadership — mainly drawn from parliamentary staffers and trade union leaders — is replaced by a thoroughgoing democracy that represents the political perspective of the party grassroots, as well as its regional, racial and gender diversity.

Perspectives

While the formation process has proved frustrating, the cogs are now in motion, and prospects for the Left need not remain so dire as they presently appear. The right-wing consensus that governs all the main parties is papering over a far more complex picture.

Popular support for Palestine, for widespread nationalizations, and for taxes on the wealthy provide a firm basis for a socialist political project. Meanwhile the widespread rejection of the political establishment ought to open the field for not just a “populist” political style, but for a program of democratic transformation on a working-class basis.

Alongside the Your Party process, the Left has also established its dominance in the Green Party in England and Wales. The Greens have recently elected a new leader, Zach Polanski, who is determined to transform them into an “eco-populist” vehicle championing progressive reforms and communicating in combative language.

The Greens second-place finish in around 40 Labour constituencies makes them well positioned to add an important force to the left-of-Labour challenge, and talk is already afoot of a Red-Green alliance. Such a formation would have its challenges and problems (the Greens are not a socialist party), but if approached in a principled manner it could yield fruit.

Outside of England, the picture is additionally complicated by constitutional questions that are most pressing in Scotland. There, the Scottish National Party look set to capitalize on Labour’s decline, though their progressive and anti-establishment credentials have hollowed significantly, and Reform are on the rise. A Left party in Scotland, given substantial autonomy, effective leadership and a class program, might produce a much-needed shakeup in the pro-independence camp.

Opportunities abound for a militant, mass-membership, socialist politics, if it is approached in the right way. Any degree of success would result in the ruling class placing immense pressure on its leadership to participate in coalitions. As such, it is essential that the party proceeds from a place of firm political clarity and purpose.

The interventions of revolutionary socialists should cohere around three points:

1. The party must have a thoroughgoing grassroots democracy, with full transparency from leaders who are elected and recallable.

2. Membership, affiliation, and especially candidature, should be based on agreement around non-negotiable programmatic commitments, including defence of minority rights (trans, migrants, etc).

3. The party exists to implement its program in full, and is committed to the socialist transformation of society as the only way to avoid a future of capitalist barbarism and environmental collapse. Electoral alliances with pro-capitalist forces are, under any circumstances, impermissible.

Revolutionary socialists will play an urgently important role in the new party. By coordinating across sectarian and other divisions we can form a counterweight against pressures to accommodate to reactionary prejudices, British capital, and the U.S.-led imperialist bloc.

Only a party of this kind will represent a true break from the treacherous history of Labourism.

November-December 2025, ATC 239