Corbynism should have died a little past 3am on 13 December, 2019. Jeremy Corbyn delivered the eulogy himself at his general election count, declaring he would not lead the Labour Party into any future campaigns. “We will forever continue the cause for socialism, for social justice, and for a society based on the needs of all,” he said. “Those ideas and those principles are eternal.” Set against the backdrop of a demolished Red Wall, it was less a battle cry than a death rattle.
A year into Keir Starmer’s government, however, and Corbynism’s corpse is rising. On Thursday evening, Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana announced that she was resigning from Labour in order to set up a new party with the old leader, alongside various other independent MPs, campaigners and activists. Citing the welfare reforms, which were torturously voted through last week following an internal rebellion, she wrote that “the Government wants to make disabled people suffer; they just can’t decide how much”. She also accused Starmer’s ministry of being “an active participant in genocide” in Gaza.
Whether this new force on the Left will hold together is another matter. Corbyn was reportedly “furious and bewildered” that the fledgling party was launched before he agreed to join. “Zarah jumped the gun a bit with that,” a source close to the project admits. Corbyn has since declared that “discussions are ongoing” and “the democratic foundations of a new kind of political party will soon take shape” — hardly as emphatic a launch as Sultana’s the previous night.
Still, the conditions are ripe for a Left-wing insurgency. The Prime Minister may have passed his welfare bill, but even the staunchest Starmerite would be hard-pressed to claim this as a success. Reforms which were set to save £5 billion will now cost the Treasury up to £6 billion, and No. 10’s authority is in tatters.
While the 49 MPs who rebelled against the welfare bill — not to mention the 126 who backed an amendment several days earlier — reach across the Labour spectrum, the group set to gain most from these humiliating concessions is the much-maligned Left of the party. Shortly after the vote, Labour MP Richard Burgon accused the Government of trying “to balance the books on the backs of disabled people”; his colleague Diane Abbott, meanwhile, said she opposed the bill “on moral, legal and political grounds”.
This perceived shift to the Right, not just on welfare cuts but also on issues such as winter fuel payments and war in the Middle East, has fuelled a jumbled but nonetheless potent coalition of old-school socialists, environmentalists, and Palestine advocates. For all Starmer’s fears of a Faragist insurgency, the threat from his Left could be just as damaging.
Corbyn first signalled that there might be life left in his old dog last September, when he established a parliamentary alliance — alongside four other independent, pro-Gaza MPs — to challenge Labour, mirroring the politics of disaffection so cannily grasped by Farage. Where Reform has targeted Labour over “two-tier” justice proposals and Net Zero policy, the Gaza independents latched onto other issues that have public cut-through, such as welfare reform and alleviating the cost-of-living crisis. A prospective Left-wing party could harness these Labour weaknesses to great effect. Particularly if it yokes in other members of the difficult crew, including the Socialist Campaign Group which counts 26 members including Sultana and fellow suspended MPs John McDonnell and Apsana Begum. McDonnell, in particular, has proved a particular irritant for Labour, this week claiming that Starmer has “a sheer lack of understanding of what the Labour party exists for”, and suggesting that MPs are already competing to succeed the Prime Minister. Back in May, he was urging fellow radicals to “take back control of our party — before it’s too late”.
Meanwhile, the Corbyn coalition spies weakness and knows their strength. Starmer was, after all, elected Labour leader in 2020 on an essentially Corbynite platform. Starmer himself cited the party’s 2017 manifesto as the “foundational document” for his campaign, pledging to abolish tuition fees and increase income tax for the top 5% of earners — both of which have since been left by the wayside.
By running as Continuity Corbyn, minus the antisemitism scandals and Punch-and-Judy factionalism, Starmer recognised that the 2019 election was a defeat not of socialism, but instead of a particular leader’s political intransigence. Corbyn’s policies on tax, public ownership and public services were popular back then, and are even more so today. So as Starmer rows back on everything he said he stood for, could this new Corbynite coalition capitalise on the continued popularity of its key ideas? Certainly, some of the Labour rebels were reflecting wider views: after all, a plurality of British voters disagreed with the proposed cuts before Starmer’s U-turn.
“Could this new Corbynite coalition capitalise on the continued popularity of its key ideas?”
But as Starmer falters, there’s another awkward squad on the move. The Greens’ deputy leader, Zack Polanski, has launched a bid for the top job, defining his platform as one of “eco-populism”, challenging Labour on Net Zero and what he sees as Starmer’s surrender to big business. He is out to prove that the Green message isn’t monoglot, and reckons his party can win over Reform voters. “We need to grow faster,” Polanski says of this nascent Left-populist movement. “The Right didn’t mess around with creating little different parties or independent groups; the Right just got on with it.”
While much of Polanski’s language mimics the cadences of Corbynism, he is not a straightforward disciple. In 2018, he suggested that his own Jewish faith was a reason why he couldn’t vote for Labour, and that Corbyn’s “complicity” in antisemitism within the party was an “existential threat” to British Jews. Two years earlier, he heckled Corbyn over Labour’s muddled position on European Union membership.
Polanski has since retreated from his stance on Corbyn’s alleged antisemitism. This disavowal may well be genuine, but it’s also true that, with the war in Gaza, the growing anti-Labour Left has found both a unifying cause and an easy stick with which to beat Starmer. In the weeks following Hamas’s attacks on October 7, the then-leader of the opposition pointedly opposed a ceasefire and proceeded to sack several frontbenchers who called for an immediate end to the fighting. Following a series of incremental shifts, he then adopted the same view which got those shadow ministers fired, albeit without acknowledging that they might have been correct after all.
One Labour source told me that the Prime Minister’s “total lack of accountability” for his previous support of Israeli military action was “shameless”. Yet that the party has now moved closer to the core plank of Corbyn’s planned party is, if not a vindication of Sultana and the Gaza independents, at least a signal that their politics should not be dismissed. Problematically, though, some of Corbyn’s fellow independents campaigned on platforms which weren’t just pro-Gaza but explicitly catered towards the significant British Muslim populations in their constituencies. Their politics are sectarian, not socialist, and might therefore be unpalatable to a wider audience.
So can any of the dissidents form a cohesive platform? The economist James Meadway has called for a “Red-Green alliance, modelled on France’s New Popular Front”. That’s the Polanski model: a Left-wing message couched in Right-populist methods. And one that he would use, should he become leader, to target between 30 and 50 seats at the next election. This would factor in defections from other parties, including, ambitiously, an attempt to entice Corbyn to go Green. I’m told, too, that Sultana was involved in discussions to join, before deciding to press ahead with the prospective Corbyn-led party.
Yet Corbyn was always unlikely to join a Polanski-led Green Party. He thrives on protest and grassroots energy, not the everyday jostling that comes with being a member of a parliamentary party. Even after surviving the Owen Smith putsch of 2016, his greatest threat as Labour leader always came from his own MPs, among whom he never commanded broad support. As Andrew Fisher, Corbyn’s former director of policy, wrote several months after Starmer ascended to the leadership, “the Corbyn project was an attempt to build the car while driving it and learning to drive at the same time, while fighting over the steering wheel.”
Perhaps this irony pertains to the radical Left as a whole. Labour’s Pasokification may have enabled the rise of the Corbynites, but Starmer’s triumph last year killed the idea that they were the Left’s best shot at winning power post-Blairism. This new movement is at once profoundly different from the giddy optimism which defined the early days of the Corbyn project, and a fruitless effort to recapture the magic of 2017.
For while sectarians, socialists and environmentalists share some goals which are born from political convenience, their aims are ultimately distinct; even the Socialist Campaign Group is too divided to make the most of its enduring influence. Yet these factions will damage Starmer by splitting the Left-wing vote. More in Common polling last month showed that a Corbyn-led party would capture 10% of the vote, trimming Labour’s total by three points — and the Greens’ by four. Starmer would be left thrashing in Farage’s slipstream, level with the Tories.
For Corbyn, though, that could be enough: to play spoiler, rather than claim the spoils. Even his supporters acknowledge that, initially at least, he had no intention of winning the 2015 Labour leadership contest. His goal, then and now, was to change the parameters of mainstream Leftist debate, to end the party’s subjugation to New Labour, and take it back towards its socialist roots. His statement on Friday pledged to “create something that is desperately missing from our political system: hope”. And that may well be his best weapon against a Labour Party which increasingly appears directionless, thoughtless and, indeed, hopeless.
Revolutionaries were never meant to master the Rube Goldberg machine of Britain’s governing apparatus. But with the British Left having dealt another blow to Starmer’s authority, they could still be the force that finishes off this government. Corbyn, belatedly, may have his revenge.
