Your Party's Infantile Disorder

What happened to Britain's new left-wing party?

“Today, after 14 years, I’m resigning from the Labour Party”. So said Zarah Sultana on the evening of July 3rd 2025. She continued: “Jeremy Corbyn and I will co-lead the founding of a new party, with other Independent MPs, campaigners and activists across the country.”

The public soon learned that Corbyn hadn’t agreed to co-lead a new party with Sultana and had no forewarning of her announcement. But the historic opportunity to build a mass left-of-Labour party could not be missed. While clearly hurt by her attempt to force his hand, shortly afterwards Corbyn and Sultana announced the launch of Your Party. In a matter of days, 750,000 people had signed up as supporters.

Six months on, the early hope for the party has all but evaporated. That first fateful step sparked a bitter feud that rages to this day. While Team Corbyn and Team Sultana battle for control of the embryonic party, a direct head-to-head has been avoided by the membership’s vote for collective leadership. Instead, they face each other in a proxy war, with their allies jostling for position in the inaugural election of the party’s Central Executive Committee (CEC).

At its heart, it is a power struggle, but through this struggle stark political divisions have emerged, corresponding to different visions for the party. For Corbyn, the party should be a broad coalition, united on a progressive platform best described as left social democracy, with a socialist horizon beyond it. For Sultana, the party should be ideologically narrower, offering a more undiluted form of socialism, less open to compromise, and less concerned about building that broad coalition.

The belief – once widely held on the Left – that little separates Corbyn and Sultana now seems markedly misguided. The divide is so stark that their respective allies believe a victory for the other spells an end to the fledgling party. Team Sultana claim Corbyn’s victory would amount to Your Party becoming nothing more than a left-wing Labour Party – “Labour 2.0”, they disparagingly call it – controlled by a shadowy and unaccountable bureaucracy. Team Corbyn say Sultana’s triumph would amount to Your Party being a mere umbrella group of far-left sects, scrapping on the margins, and falling to the same sectarianism that has seen countless left-of-Labour parties come to nothing. For both sides, the contest has become existential, a dispute more akin to a battle between enemies than a disagreement between comrades.

How did we get here? Why has this schism emerged? And if, as it seems, Sultana wishes to replace Corbyn as the Left’s leading parliamentary figure, does she have the leadership qualities to take the party – and the Left – forward?

I

The appeal of Corbyn and Sultana founding a new party was clear. Corbyn is the best known and most popular left-wing politician in Britain, whose leadership of the Labour Party posed the greatest threat Britain’s ruling class has faced in decades. With the Left’s notorious capacity for splits, Corbyn alone had the authority to unite differing factions to found a new party.

Sultana, meanwhile, was his heir-apparent, long believed to be the likely inheritor of his legacy. As far back as 2021, Karie Murphy, Corbyn’s former Chief-of-Staff, named Sultana as a “socialist leader” with the potential to one day take the helm. It wasn’t hard to see why.

Since her election to Parliament in December 2019, Sultana had made a name for herself as a champion for socialism and anti-imperialism. She wasted no time upon entering Westminster. Whilst convention dictates that MPs use their maiden speeches to avoid politics and instead demonstrate their submission to the parliamentarian ethos of politics-as-sport – where “honourable members” may argue in the chamber, but only insofar as they can still enjoy a drink together in Parliament’s bar afterwards – Sultana flouted the rules, condemning “40 years of Thatcherism” and pledging her commitment to “internationlism” and “socialism”.

She quickly defied Keir Starmer and broke the Labour whip, unafraid to use Parliament to be a tribune of the oppressed. Following Israel’s barbarous response to the 2021 Unity Intifada, for example, she confronted Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the Commons, showing him a photo of three Palestinian children murdered by Israel and demanding he say if British-made weapons had been used in their slaughter.

As her profile rose on the Left, so too did Islamophobic abuse directed at her from the far-right, a subject she again spoke bravely about. “I have discovered that to be a Muslim woman,” she told a parliamentary debate in 2021, “to be outspoken and to be left-wing, is to be subject to a barrage of racism and hate. It’s to be treated by some as if I were an enemy of the country I was born in.”

Her continued principle and courage won mounting plaudits. After the Labour conference that year, the press said she had been “anointed as the next great hope of the Labour Left”. The following year, the New Statesman ran an interview with her titled “Can Zarah Sultana save the Labour left?” That task was perhaps too great for any one individual, but by the 2024 General Election she was the new generation’s leading parliamentary figure and a consistent thorn in Keir Starmer’s side, particularly for his complicity in Israel’s genocide. Shortly before polling day, the Guardian ran a profile piece titled “Zarah Sultana: the Labour MP taking on the Tories, and her own party, over Gaza”.

Just weeks after that election, Sultana was suspended from the Labour Party. Her crime was voting to scrap the two-child benefit cap, a Tory policy that locks more than 300,000 children in poverty. A year later, her departure from Labour was made permanent with her portentous announcement to co-lead a new party with Corbyn.

II

That summer, Sultana set out her aims and expectations of political leaders. Standing alongside Corbyn outside the High Court – where the Government was defending its right to arm the genocidal Israeli state – Sultana declared “nothing is more important than stopping genocide, no one’s political career [is more important].” That resolute attitude was repeatedly echoed over the following months. She insisted that “we are not here to beg for crumbs off the table. We are here to take the lot.” She reiterated this uncompromising stance again in an interview with the New Left Review, where she said “if we’re contesting state power, we’re going to face a major backlash… You cannot give these people an inch”, a line she now similarly repeats.

In that same interview, Sultana seemingly condemned her comrade for failing that test, telling her interviewer “[Corbynism] capitulated to the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which famously equates it with anti-Zionism”. That accusation was widely reported to mean Corbyn’s capitulation – not just Corbynism’s – an interpretation Sultana did nothing to dispel, despite the obvious consternation it caused her comrade.

The tenor with which Sultana has made these pronouncements suggests a confidence in being compared against them. Perhaps for that reason, rarely have such comparisons been made. But an effort to do that tells a different story. It is a story of opportunistic posturing, with each move – however hypocritical or irrational as it might otherwise seem – made with the aim of winning control of Your Party. This logic runs throughout the interventions she has made since last summer, defining her engagement with Your Party. The IHRA definition is itself a striking example.

Almost six years before Sultana condemned “Corbynism’s capitulation on the IHRA”, and just days after the 2019 General Election, along with all other MPs Sultana was asked by the All Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism if she accepted the IHRA definition. She said she accepted it, reportedly without equivocation.

This was no one-off. Sultana’s candidacy in the 2019 General Election had been rocked by opponents handing a sample of her past social media posts to the press, using them in the manufactured hysteria about antisemitism within Corbyn’s Labour Party. Fearing deselection as the Labour candidate, Sultana released a statement clarifying her views: “I accept Labour’s position of pursuing a two-state solution… For many Jewish people, Zionism represents Jewish people’s right to a nation state, and right to safety after the Holocaust and the centuries of oppression and persecution preceding it.”

That whitewashing of Zionism and embrace of the IHRA definition may have been justified in its own terms – that of protecting her candidacy and saving herself from further controversy – but it is hardly consistent with her claim “not to give an inch” or her condemnation of “Corbynism’s capitulation”. But the intervening years had shifted her incentive structure and last summer condemning Corbyn served a purpose: To portray herself as more radical than him, cleaving off his support and bolstering her leadership bid. This theme of opportunistic posturing is apparent time and again as Sultana has sought to win the faction fight.

As for Corbyn, after the British establishment had relentlessly campaigned for Labour to adopt the IHRA definition, one-by-one his allies gave in to the pressure, leaving Corbyn isolated in resistance. But even in Labour’s decisive National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting, Corbyn proposed a statement clarifying that robust criticism of Israel “cannot be considered racist”. Such was the intensity of the campaign against the Left and Palestinian rights, even that markedly mild clarification was not accepted by the NEC. Corbyn hadn’t “capitulated”, he had been defeated.

Sultana’s hypocrisy extends to her response to the Gaza genocide, which has otherwise been exemplary. After Israel unleashed its onslaught following the Al Aqsa Flood, Sultana made no public statement for five days. When the Labour leadership warned its MPs against speaking at pro-Palestinian demonstrations, she didn’t speak at the first or second national protests, only attending the third after her Labour colleague, Apsana Begum MP, had broken ranks and spoken at the previous one.

Corbyn, in contrast, spoke out on October 7, calling for an immediate ceasefire and an end to Israel’s illegal occupation. He joined the first national demonstration against the genocide the following weekend, having already warned that “our political leaders have given the green light for the annihalation of Gaza”.

A fair-minded assessment might put these choices in the context of their different freedom for manoeuvre, given Sultana’s future was still at the whims of an authoritarian Labour leadership only too eager to find an excuse to strike down a rebellious left-winger, while Corbyn had no such concerns. However fair that assessment may be, it is hardly consistent with Sultana’s recent utterances. “No one’s political career”, she said last summer, “is more important” than stopping the genocide.

This pattern isn’t confined to Palestine. In February 2022, following decades of NATO’s eastward expansion and Moscow’s fears of US military might on its doorstep, Britain’s ruling class readied the country for war. Sultana, along with 10 other Labour MPs – and Corbyn, who had lost the Labour whip 18 months prior – signed a statement from the Stop the War Coalition criticising the Government’s “sabre-rattling”. When Russia invaded Ukraine the following week, eager to burnish his imperialist credentials and discipline the Labour Left, Keir Starmer gave his MPs a choice: Remove your names from the statement or lose the Labour whip. The 11 Labour MPs – Sultana included – removed their names within hours. Corbyn, meanwhile, held firm.

This again may have been strategic: It is plausible that Sultana’s parliamentary career would have ended in 2024 had she not been the Labour candidate. But again her recent posturing allows for no such subtleties. “You don’t give these people an inch” she now says – just at the moment she thinks it serves her interests to say so, having previously given away many inches.

It doesn’t end there. Discounting the repudiated Stop the War statement, up until last summer Sultana seems to have never publicly criticised NATO (though she had stood on two Labour manifestos committing Britain to its membership). Since vying for control of Your Party, however, Sultana has struck a very different note. “We must withdraw [from NATO] immediately”, she proclaimed in October. The following month, she told The World Transformed that the Green Party’s major flaw is its reluctance to adopt that position. “The socialist position”, she explained, “is that we must leave NATO immediately” – a demand she considers so urgent and so non-negotiable that she spent six years as an MP before mentioning it and twice ran for election on manifestos contradicting it.

Hypocritical criticism of the Greens is another theme that has emerged in Sultana’s recent posturing, reaching bizarre heights last month when she picked a fight with the co-leader of the Scottish Green. “How many Holyrood budgets”, she asked Ross Greer MSP on X, “did you and the Scottish Greens vote for that funded arms companies complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza?” Even if her question had merit, social media users were quick to point out that Sultana was hardly the person to ask it: Little more than a year earlier, and while British spy flights continued to hand Israel real-time information on the decimation of Gaza, she voted for Keir Starmer’s Labour budget, including its £32 billion for the Ministry of Defence.

Whilst undoubtedly shameless, the left posturing typifying Sultana’s recent statements is no mystery. It follows a consistent logic: It is part of a crude but clear strategy to win power in Your Party. Since joining the project in the summer of 2025, Sultana has made a pitch for leadership, attempting to appeal to the party’s most engaged activist base by embracing maximalist positions, seemingly believing that members can be won from Corbyn by positioning to his left. Looking one step ahead and no further, Sultana has relentlessly pursued this strategy, with scant regard for the impact it has on the party or the wider Left.

This was initially done by demanding co-leadership on conditions Corbyn would never accept, namely that he ditch Karie Murphy, one of his longest standing allies. When co-leadership was no longer an option, Sultana pivoted to supporting collective leadership, seemingly not liking her odds in a head-to-head with Corbyn. But almost as soon as the party’s membership voted for collective leadership, Sultana made a mockery of it, announcing on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg that she would run to be the party’s “Parliamentary Spokesperson” – a role that didn’t exist in the party’s recently ratified constitution, but which would amount to de facto party leader.

This reckless short-termism, however, has already started to come unstuck. In September, to the whoops and cheers of the watching audience, Sultana told a podcast “there is no room for socially conservative views in a socialist left wing party. Period.” She made this categorical pronouncement – seemingly believing it would be lapped-up by the party’s membership – in opposition to her Independent Alliance colleague Adnan Hussain MP, who had previously said that he and many Muslims hold such views.

This social media-mediated rift largely focused on trans rights and Muslim communities, and has threatened to be one of the most consequential developments of Your Party, jeopardising the historic alliance between the organised Left and Muslim communities. As a Morning Star editorial said, the dispute risks “rupturing the alliances which have underpinned the anti-war and pro-Palestinian movements over the last quarter century.”

Even here Sultana’s hypocrisy is evident. Against factional rivals such as Hussain, Sultana has said their views on trans rights mean they have no place in the party, but factional allies who hold similar views – such as the former General Secretary of PCS Union, Mark Serwotka – appear to be no cause for concern, as she happily holds party events with them.

This is a rare instance where Sultana’s posturing has resulted in pushback from within the Left, undermining her own short-termist strategy. In an interview with the Morning Star, Sultana was challenged on her definitive declaration rejecting anyone with socially conservative views from the party. Fearing the consequences of her actions, she gave an inch: “A party with a broad base will have different views among its voters”, she was “anxious” to clarify. “I didn’t mean to deny that.”

III

This explanation of Sultana’s behaviour – that she is hyper-focused on winning the party leadership, with scant regard for the consequences – isn’t just seen in her litany of hypocrisies, but also in her extraordinary manoeuvres within the party.

That began last summer with her scarcely-believable announcement that – without Corbyn’s agreement or knowledge – she was going to co-lead a new party with him (for good measure, Sultana’s statement directed social media users to her own mailing list and donation webpage, resources she is now using in the CEC elections). That shockingly reckless announcement destroyed any trust between the two, setting in train the battle that has raged ever since. But this was only the opening gambit in a series of power-plays that would make even the most hardened left-wing faction-fighter blush, the most extraordinary of which was her attempted membership coup.

In the autumn, Sultana created a website designed to look like the Your Party site, where supporters could “join Your Party”; she gained access to the party’s mailing list, despite having agreed for data to be held by Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project; and with the mailing list, she emailed the party’s supporters, directing them to her newly created website, taking money and data from people who were told this was Your Party’s membership launch.

The problem? It wasn’t Your Party’s membership launch. Corbyn and the other Independent Alliance MPs, who Corbyn and Sultana had jointly agreed to bring in to oversee the party’s founding process, knew nothing of it. When doubts quickly surfaced online, astonishingly Sultana dismissed this as the work of “right-wing bad faith actors”.

Having been badly burnt by Sultana’s unilateral actions before, this time Corbyn and the other Independent Alliance MPs hit back, publicly disavowing Sultana’s move. She responded in turn, accusing her colleagues of running a “sexist boys club”, singling out Karie Murphy for her ire, seemingly identifying her as the ringleader of the boys club. Sultana threatened legal action only to back down, but the matter is far from settled: The Information Commissioner’s Office has said Sultana’s attempted membership coup may have amounted to “serious criminal activity” and should be referred to the police.

This calamity, however, didn’t dissuade Sultana from further erratic manoeuvres for control, even when that again came at great expense to the party.

At the first day of its much anticipated founding conference in Liverpool – the party’s first real opportunity to introduce itself to the country – Sultana immediately threw the weekend into disarray, walking to the conference entrance, only to tell the journalists she had assembled that she was boycotting it. This was lapped up by the media, creating the news story that defined the conference.

The grounds Sultana gave for boycotting was that allies of hers had been unfairly denied entry to the conference. The truth was less straightforward.

The main reason she gave was that members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) had been denied admission. Long shunned by much of the Left for its cover-up of rape allegations and its parasitic approach to campaigns, on the eve of the conference SWP members were expelled from Your Party on the grounds that the party’s rules forbade members from belonging to other political parties (as was stated on the membership sign up form). Whatever the wisdom of the timing, it is hardly controversial for political parties to ban members from belonging to other parties – indeed, the SWP themselves forbid it.

The other reason Sultana gave was that she had been allocated five conference passes for her entourage, but wanted six. The aide denied a pass, James Giles, quickly gave interviews outside the conference centre expressing his dismay at this grave injustice.

Giles was a curious choice for Sultana to tie herself to. He had been the campaign manager for George Galloway in both his 2021 and 2024 by-election campaigns and had then worked for Galloway in Parliament, before standing for Galloway’s party in the 2024 General Election. Throughout that time, Galloway was ostracised by much of the Left for his strident anti-LGBT and anti-migrant views. This included his complaints about “transmania” and saying he didn’t want his children taught gay relationships were “normal”, as well as his party going into the 2024 General Election – with Giles as an enthusiastic candidate – on a pledge to put “British warships [in the Channel] to stop migrants”.

But Giles’ own opportunistic manoeuvres seem to be nothing new. Before his association with Galloway, Giles founded a political party with a former Tory councillor. That was in 2017, the year Corbyn most threatened Britain’s ruling class and won 13 million votes for left social democracy. (Giles, incidentally, is reported to be the “Head of Communications” for Sultana’s “Left” slate in the CEC elections and was recently appointed as Sultana’s “Senior Communications Advisor”.)

But for Sultana, the barring of these allies was enough to throw the conference into turmoil. As she boycotted the conference, she hit out at the “nameless, faceless bureaucrats” she said were responsible, a punching bag she has incessantly returned to both before and since. This reached farcical heights during the Christmas period, when she complained that “unelected bureaucrats” had put a vote to the membership to accommodate the conference’s conflicting decisions. The problem she identified with doing that? Sultana said it was because the vote was “time-limited”, appearing to believe that votes should run forever, with no time limit – or perhaps believing contrived criticism of “bureaucrats” helps her de facto leadership bid, no matter the damage it does to the party.

One bureaucrat Sultana doesn’t seem to mind is her husband, Craig Lloyd. Until recently a trade union bureaucrat, Lloyd now works for Sultana and has been eager to insert himself in Your Party affairs, though with questionable results. One party insider said his involvement made them see the wisdom in “the Communist Party policy of forcing members to divorce their spouses owing to ‘poor political behaviour’”.

But Lloyd seems undeterred, reportedly “telling anyone who’ll listen that he’ll eventually become general secretary of Your Party”. For the moment, he has had to settle for the role of “Campaign Director” of Sultana’s CEC election slate. Is hypocrisy found here too? In recent months, Sultana has repeatedly said there must be no “jobs for mates”. “Jobs for husbands”, however, are apparently fine.

None of this is to suggest that Corbyn and his side is free from error. Far from it. But the Left isn’t currently in danger of understating his faults and overstating his virtues.

IV

This slow motion car crash has repelled most of the party’s potential supporters, but not everyone has been equally repelled. As the number of supporters has drastically shrunk, the proportion of the membership belonging to far-left groups has significantly increased. This has suited Sultana, who has gone out of her way to court Trotskyist groups.

In September, for example, she spoke at the annual conference of the Socialist Party, the remnant of Militant Tendency, a minor force on the Left – but perhaps good for a thousand votes. Her summer tour of Your Party meetings saw her frequently invite Lewis Nielsen, the National Secretary of the SWP, onto her platform, a party renowned for the commitment of its 2,500-odd members. For good measure, she gave their newspaper an exclusive interview ahead of the founding conference.

At her eve-of-conference rally, which again had the SWP’s National Secretary speaking at, Sultana gave her fan-base the red-meat she thought it wanted, pledging to “nationalise the entire economy.” If that was too subtle, she has started to explicitly quote Lenin in speeches to Your Party’s “Left” factions, and even echoed one of his most famous demands: “All power to the branches” she said, seemingly seriously.

It is little wonder that she has won support not just of the SWP and the Socialist Party, but Socialist Alternative, the Revolutionary Communist Group, Workers Power, and a raft of other far-left groups.

Whilst support from these groups might help Sultana win control of the party, it is unlikely to help win support in the country. After all, far-left parties like this occasionally test their appeal at the ballot box, only to find the public are not yet in a revolutionary mood. At the last General Election, for example, a handful of avowedly anti-capitalist parties ran candidates. They received a combined total of 22,300 votes, 0.08% of the national vote share.

But in her bid for Your Party leadership, Sultana has tied herself to this marginal and minoritarian brand of leftism. This a far cry from the mass politics that established Sultana as the Left’s leading hope for the future, and which similarly made the prospect of her joining Corbyn in establishing a new party so exciting.

It is also a far cry from the Sultana of just a year ago, who told The Big Issue she would “absolutely” go back to the Labour benches if they would have her. A few months later, in the spring of 2025, she wrote to Momentum members saying: “A transformed, democratic Labour Party is our only hope of bringing about real, meaningful change in Britain.”

Several months later, Sultana took a very different path, trying her chances with Corbyn and launching her bid for Your Parry’s leadership, a move that has driven her further and further to the margins of British politics.

Today, it is hard to recall the excitement Your Party generated last summer. In tandum with the party’s diminishing prospects, enthusiasm for Your Party has all but vanished. The combined efforts detailed above and Zack Polanski’s Green Party have seen to that. But Your Party might still have a future. If it does, its membership should remember the warnings of Sultana’s new-found hero.

“To reject compromises ‘on principle’,” Lenin said, “no matter of what kind, is childishness, which it is difficult even to consider seriously.” He was likewise scathing about those who “fence themselves off from the masses with artificial and childishly ‘Left’ slogans.”

Lenin had a name for this brand of ultra-leftism. It is, he said, “an infantile disorder”.