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BRITAIN’S NEW LEFT-WING PARTY MAY BE DEVASTATING FOR LABOUR  
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David Broder
August 1, 2025
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ The new party announced by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana shows
that Gaza has become a key fault line in British politics. Keir
Starmer’s Labour Party can no longer rely on silencing the Left. _

Jeremy Corbyn speaking during a Palestine Solidarity Campaign rally
in central London on September 11, 2024. , Lucy North / PA Images via
Getty Images

 

This week, Keir Starmer announced
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that Britain would recognize a Palestinian state in September, _if_
Israel doesn’t agree to a cease-fire first. Starmer’s arrogant
posture — teasing the idea that the former colonial power _might_
acknowledge Palestinian self-determination — was matched only by its
triviality. While Britain still arms Israel’s destruction of Gaza,
Starmer avoided mention of how a Palestinian state will come into
being or what its rightful borders would be. This PR stunt, designed
only to draw a bashful distance from Israel, was breathtaking in its
cynicism.

 

While some right-wing outlets mocked
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Starmer for capitulating to criticism from Labour MPs, his comments
hardly suggested a change of heart. He made no apology for his
government’s role in arming Israel and failed to criticize its
criminal actions, instead relying on agencyless phrases like talk of a
“catastrophic failure of aid.” In a year in government,
Starmer’s Labour Party has surely underestimated public anger at
Israeli crimes. Under pressure from the pro-Palestine movement, and a
rather belated media outcry, it is now opportunistically changing its
tone. Still, few will forget Starmer’s line up until now.

Gaza is sure to have blowback on British politics. The obvious
comparison is the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq. Tony Blair’s
staunch stand alongside George W. Bush likewise fused government
dishonesty, the demonization of critics, and an ultimate but vague
admission of official “mistakes.” Even this bloodbath only slowly
had effects on party politics, and alternative left-wing forces
achieved only sporadic local breakthroughs. But eventually, the
destruction of trust did deeply undermine New Labour. The legacy of
the antiwar movement played a crucial role in lifting Jeremy Corbyn to
the Labour leadership in 2015.

Today it seems that Gaza will have a far more immediate effect.
Voters’ party affiliations are less certain than in 2003, and
Starmer never had a genuinely strong mandate. If in the July 2024
election Labour won a large parliamentary majority over the decrepit
Tories — taking 411 of 650 seats in the House of Commons — it
rallied a low vote total: just 33.7 percent support on a poor, sub-60
percent turnout. If Labour’s polling has kept falling over the last
year, the announcement that Corbyn and Zarah Sultana are to found a
new left-wing party is set to blow a further hole in its support. The
Starmer government’s pigheaded authoritarianism — on immigration,
disability benefits, and even its treatment of its own dissident MPs
— is spurring an organized response.

Details about the new party remain scant. Announced as a website
called Your Party, it is to decide its name through a
still-unspecified democratic process. Six hundred thousand people
signed up for its email list within just days. These are not
_members_. But this interest made a mockery of self-styled
“sensible-centrist” pundits’ attempts to ridicule the project:
for it revealed the more important truth that _very many people_,
indeed more than Labour’s own total membership, feel such a party is
necessary. This is not a rerun of past “radical-left-party”
projects based on small revolutionary groups: it starts from a large
base of people who identify as potential activists.

 

All political parties are coalitions of social interests and ideas.
The initial group of MPs associated with this party, if broadly
left-wing, has above all been united by Gaza: it was on that basis
that five independents won election last July, an unusually high count
given Britain’s electoral system. Surely Palestine is no mere
“single issue” outside of domestic politics proper: it
crystallizes millions of people’s perceptions of Britain’s role in
the world, the boundaries of political discussion, and the policing of
Muslims. This new party also couldn’t have taken off without Corbyn,
whose name recognition
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is among the highest of all British politicians. If only a minority of
Brits admire him, most people know already what he stands for.

Still, this leaves fundamental questions about what this party is
really meant to do. Many online debates have revolved around the idea
of electoral pacts with the Greens, whose possible next leader is the
progressive Zack Polanski. But does this party aspire to lead the
national government after the next general election? Does it aim to
_replace_ Labour, to recreate something like a trade-union-based party
with a better platform? Perhaps it’s a permanent party of
opposition, base-building locally in order to empower working-class
people and move politics away from Westminster? Without some agreement
on this longer-term agenda — its outward-facing orientation to a
mass base — it will be difficult to stop those who are today signing
up from splintering over all manner of issues.

When Corbyn was Labour leader, he adopted better policies than his
predecessors, but the party never distributed power beyond
Westminster. Its failure to create more rooted structures, and its
fear of conflictual, mass politics
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— including on heated issues like Brexit — ensured that it was
continually blown around by media attacks and the attempt to adjust to
and appease them. While in recent decades parliament has become ever
more dominated by professionals, and the local structures of the labor
movement have withered, the 2015–20 instance of “Corbynism” did
poorly in changing this imbalance. Yes, it stood atop a mostly hostile
Labour Party machine. But this had to be a call to do things
differently rather than a mere alibi.

Many doubts about the new party refer to its still-opaque process: Who
decides what comes next? It surely doesn’t want to create a
Labour-style structure dominated by bureaucratic maneuverers and
masters of rulebook jargon. Yet not everything about Labour’s
history should be dispensed with. Its roots in the trade unions,
however withered, grant it a residual activist base in touch with a
broad array of working-class feeling, not all of it left-wing. Labour
is today losing these connections to nurses and ex-mining communities
and out-of-town industrial estates, and a party of progressive
_opinion _like the Greens seems unlikely to pick them up; but it is
something that a party oriented to the social majority surely needs.

Can this be created anew, or better, in a manner more suited to this
century than the last? One approach
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build institutions — social clubs, advice centers — not directed
toward narrowly electoral ends or even political campaigning as such.
A project for collective change will surely struggle to “sell” its
promise in an atomized society just by using the right messaging on TV
or social media. This party might moreover think about ensuring it
diversifies its public faces, also in terms of class background and
education — a party led not by political science grads or NGO staff
or those ever-eager to put themselves forward but also voices now more
absent from political life.

Polls today suggest that Reform UK has a real chance of winning the
next general election despite its own messy internal affairs: its
leader, Nigel Farage, has the charismatic authority to make him the
face of an array of grievances. Corbyn or Sultana or any other
left-winger would never be able to play such a role, and not just
because of any failings on their part. Socialist change is about
changing the power relations in society: it relies on mobilizing
people in moral indignation but also the stout defense of their own
interests. Left-wing parties need an activist core, today likely
tilted toward the higher-educated and downwardly mobile, but this
cannot be enough.

Faced with a dim-witted imperial bureaucrat like Starmer, a left-wing
party has every chance of rallying 10 or 15 percent of the electorate
even in a short time frame. This will likely split the Labour vote,
and Starmer will have scant grounds to complain. Feeble attempts
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to invoke the higher need for unity against Farage are as cynical as
the belated “recognition” of Palestine. Only two years ago,
Starmer had told his critics: “If you don’t like the changes that
we’ve made, you can leave.” Now, many will. The Labour Party will
not last forever, and Starmer is bringing it closer to a French
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or Italian
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demise. What remains unclear is whether a new party can build
something stronger on the ruins.

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David Broder is Jacobin’s Europe editor and a historian of French
and Italian communism.

* United Kingdom; New UK Party; Labour Party; Jeremy Corbyn; Zarah
Sultana;
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