Apparent Your party implosion leaves big political vacancy on the left

A repeated question for Zack Polanski since becoming Green leader has been about cooperating with Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn, and his answer has been consistent: it’s hard to know when their party doesn’t properly exist and can’t even agree on a name. Thursday’s events show such caution was merited.

It seems increasingly likely that Your party, as it was tentatively known, will not survive as originally billed, a joint enterprise between Corbyn, the former Labour leader, and Sultana, the leftwing Coventry MP, both of whom sit in the Commons as independents.

Creating a new party is always difficult, particularly under the UK’s first-past-the-post system. Even Nigel Farage, one of the most naturally gifted politicians the country has produced in recent history, took 30 years and three parties to even get into parliament.

Bumps in the road are inevitable and Corbyn and Sultana have managed to sort out some previous disagreements, such as when Sultana began seemingly unilateral moves to have people sign up to the new movement in July.

But the exchange of densely typed X statements on Thursday afternoon feels terminal, beginning with Corbyn saying he had taken legal advice about an “unauthorised email” sent to people who had registered interest in the new party.

Eleven minutes later came Sultana’s withering response. She launched a “membership portal” after claiming to being frozen out by Corbyn and what she called a “sexist boys’ club” – meaning the four independent MPs who co-signed Corbyn’s statement, all men elected last year after campaigns that focussed on Gaza.

“I have been treated appallingly and excluded completely,” she said, accusing Corbyn of reneging on a promise to have gender balance on the working group devising the organisation.

It is something of a political cliche that leftwing politicians are prone to splits, and not entirely without truth, even if this does ignore the Conservatives’ recent fondness for toppling leaders and forming themselves into increasingly atomised “tribes”.

But the seemingly irreconcilable split demonstrates that, much like a political right in which Conservatives MPs are defecting to Reform and some Reform MPs are quitting to go solo, the British left is less a coherent force than a semi-allied collection of micro-groups, often with competing interests.

On top of what might be called traditional Corbynism, with its left-tilted economics and populist tendencies, we now have the more explicitly Gaza-focused independents, an increasing threat to Labour fuelled by public disquiet about Israel’s actions.

It is within this changed paradigm that Sultana criticised Corbyn last month for, she said, having “capitulated” as Labour leader for agreeing to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism.

That said, it does appear that the current split is motivated less by ideology than personality. Much of the friction has been caused by the hugely energetic Sultana seemingly losing patience with the pace of decision-making by Corbyn and his allies.

The former Labour leader, meanwhile, is arguably similar to Farage in that both find it hard to share control.

What is certainly true is that even if Your party, or whatever it was to be called, has imploded, it leaves a sizeable political vacancy on the left, as shown by the 700,000-plus people who signed up to express interest in the Corbyn-Sultana vehicle. For now at least, it would seem they are still politically homeless.