At the Holiday Inn in Bristol, Zarah Sultana is holding the first of her two rallies before the inaugural Your Party conference today. Her co-founder Jeremy Corbyn isn’t here, because, like the Monty Python sketch made flesh, Your Party has already split.
There are five female speakers at the Holiday Inn and just one man: an extension of her politics. Sultana, born in Birmingham to Muslim parents of Pakistani descent, is one of four sisters. She knows how to fight for herself.
She has toured Britain in the last six months preparing for Liverpool. She says she wants to unite the Left: Corbyn, ever an unwilling saviour, tends to hide in his allotment. But he did emerge yesterday for his own pre-conference rally: for his Your Party. Rumours fly. Corbyn’s people brief the media that Sultana-allied Leftists banned from Your Party — the Revolutionary Communist Group, the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) and the Socialist Party (SP) — may try to disrupt Conference. It was counter-briefed that Corbyn attended a Marxist festival this year. Extra security guards have been hired.
If Sultana does kick Corbyn into the sea when collective leadership is passed this weekend — he prefers the single leadership model — she will assume de facto leadership of the hard Left, in the sense that they have leaders. She is, after all, Your Party’s only MP: Corbyn now sits as an independent. If she learnt singularity from the querulous king of Islington North, she might surpass him now. She is the second most followed British politician on TikTok, after her enemy Nigel Farage.
“Her rally represents an incoherence, and she knows it.”
Corbyn’s allies called her undiplomatic, which is funny, considering what he is. And at the rally, she is defensive: polished and hurt. “We’re not here for fiefdoms and coronations and jobs for mates, and we’re definitely not here for a toxic culture that witch hunts people on the eve of conference and treats people like absolute shit.” Scores of Socialist Workers were expelled from Your Party yesterday. Though 18% of people were interested in voting Your Party in summer, it then slid to 12%. She doesn’t mention the lost 6%.
The Holiday Inn and Your Party are an odd fit. The hotel is aspirational, made for Thatcherites, and styled to repress the world outside — we might plausibly be in John Lewis — but the revolution they yearn for, or think they yearn for, is not here yet. So, they plot, like people waiting to re-wallpaper a country. Speakers from Bristol Apartheid Free Zone, Stand up to Racism, the National Education Union and Borderlands, a refugee charity, discuss the rise of Reform, the fears of people of colour and migrants, and small victories against the boss class. If the hard Left is usually energised by struggle, these are the most defeated I have met. They speak in whispers, and, in the break, strangers do not talk. It is as if they are exhausted, before the battle has even begun. Meanwhile, at Corbyn’s rally, there were squabbles and four people were evicted. Splitters.
The hard Left exists for its contradictions. It constantly debates and it does not debate at all; it needs systems, but it does not trust them; it calls itself progressive, but it never changes. It fights with itself, constantly. It has always housed the same people, city to city. There are ancient revolutionaries, always white, seeking a shared renewal to mirror the one they want for themselves. Every few years a charismatic leader emerges, and they cling to that. Before it was Corbyn. Now it is Sultana.
So today, the revolutionaries include young women of colour, energised by Sultana’s rage. Candi Williams, the Your Party organiser for Bristol, tells Sultana with tears in her eyes: “This time last year, last August, I boarded up my windows because we were scared that racists were going to break in.” Her fear is rational, of course, but I fear the hard Left response won’t be. Sultana talks about bussing people in from all over the country to combat far-Right rallies. But this will only feed the anger: all extremists meet themselves in the looking glass of battle. On making Britain safer, and more prosperous — anathema to all extremists — she has nothing beyond a call to abolish capitalism. The country — the working-class — Sultana wants to renew may as well be Plasticine.
She recites the credo effortlessly, like a comic at the end of a tour: tax the rich; nationalise water and energy; free public transport; fight climate change; Trans rights. She will abolish the monarchy, Zionism, and leave NATO: “Every penny that we spend on tanks, missiles and bombs is money stolen from our homes, our hospitals and our schools”. No one mentions Ukraine.
The real enemy is the Labour Party. She says that Lord Mandelson, “the Dark Lord, alongside his minion, Morgan McSweeney, has created a dark government”, and she will not rest until, “Keir Starmer, David Lammy, Shabana Mahmood and the rest of them are in the docks of The Hague because [the] blood [of Palestine] is on their hands”. This sounds absurd in the John Lewis Holiday Inn — overthrow the government from here? — and people listen with only moderate enthusiasm.
Her rally represents an incoherence, and she knows it. People ask her: “What’s the point of Your Party? You should just join the Greens.” Instead, she says, she is going to reach out to Reform voters. “One third of Reform voters actually blame the super-rich for the problems in this country,” she says. “We know that the work has to be done by listening to [them], understanding their grievances and going on a journey.” Success, she claims, is about talking to those communities, speaking to the “left behind… knocking on doors and yes, some people are going to slam those doors in your face and tell you to fuck off. And that’s fine. People are really angry. But the Right does not have a monopoly on working class anger.”
These voters, she says, “blame the wrong people for the misery that’s been caused in their life”. But how will she stop them? The talk of reaching out is a feint, mere vanity. No one asks her a hard question here, as the great new Left party is being born. That would be a heresy. She does admit, though, that “often in Left-wing spaces we just say things, and not everyone is always on the same page, and we’re all in different parts of our political journey”. But she knows, she says, that the people are, “watching, they’re waiting. They’re ready to join and fight.”
The line is, then: the proletariat will save us! Perhaps Sultana has read 1984. But I can’t see how the proletariat can save us. They are barely here. This is still a bourgeois movement and, Sultana, the grammar-school educated daughter of an accountant, is no more working-class than I am. That’s the incoherence.
The event ends when she’s asked how she navigated politics as a Muslim woman in the western world. “I really don’t want to start crying,” she says. “This is why I go to therapy”. This may be a joke, because she adds, “In all seriousness, it has been really difficult… you are constantly told to be grateful.” But another party member, a young woman, is truly grateful to Sultana: “seeing you gave me so much hope that we could achieve something better”. And that’s the heartbreak: promising revolution in a constitutional monarchy will not work. Hard Leftist politics are a drug, and the comedown will be gruesome.
Your Party will choose its name this weekend from a shortlist: Your Party, Our Party, Popular Alliance, For the Many. Sultana’s choice — The Left — did not make the shortlist. It’s a good name, and very like her: brief, and made for TikTok.
Corbyn said yesterday, “we’re going to get through this weekend,” which is barely the rhetoric of hope. Monty Python was right.
