In the early days of the Comintern, during the so-called “Third Period” of the late Twenties and early Thirties, the pro-Soviet revolutionary Left adopted what became known as the “class against class” line. Mainstream social-democratic parties and unions were not to be trusted. Cooperation was shunned: the mainstream Left were dismissed as “social fascists” on a rough par with the burgeoning movement of actual fascists in Germany. According to Moscow’s “class against class” mandates, only the purest of Left-wing vanguards had a legitimate role to play. It was to be militant Marxism-Leninism — or it was to be nothing.
Zarah Sultana, co-founder alongside Jeremy Corbyn of Your Party, seems to have taken this history to heart. A “fascist” threat, she says, is “growling at the door”. But the real venom is reserved for enemies and rivals on the Left, with the Green Party coming in for particular ire. The traditional standard-bearers for environmental politics are not sufficiently “anti-Zionist”, says the Coventry South MP: they support boycotts and sanctions against Israel, but not, as Sultana does, a complete cut of diplomatic ties. What’s more, she adds, they’re not a “class-based” socialist party.
It’s difficult to know whether Sultana is aware that her own “class base” is an incredibly niche subset of post-graduate activists, plus an ageing cohort of hard-Left retirees who still define their politics according to categories dreamt up in Bolshevik Russia around the death of Lenin. Indeed, to bolster her already-weak position in a party struggling even before its founding conference plumps on a name, Sultana is actively courting the extremities of British Trotskyism, adopting a series of maximalist positions couched in Marxian language. Forget Israel — we should also leave Nato. Nor is nationalising a few industries enough; true socialism would require “the fucking lot”, the whole “means of production” tout court. Sultana has also emphasised her rhetorical commitment to a “member-led democracy”, which would allow all manner of malcontents to exercise their influence over Your Party. Despite the ultra-democratic promises to leave policy to members, she has been content to pre-define Your Party’s politics on the hoof, recently chucking “climate reparations” for Jamaica into the mix. This, she contends, is just the start of a “10, 20, 30-year project” to “run government”.
As a result of these statements, a coterie of bizarre political groupings has flocked to Sultana’s embattled wing of Your Party: the Socialist Worker Party; the Socialist Party; the Revolutionary Communist Party; the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty; and Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (rs21). Each presents their own idiosyncratic and fantastical vision of leading a proletarian revolution. This is all while a real revolution of the actually-existing working class takes place in provincial, post-industrial Britain, where “C2DE” voters flock to Nigel Farage. In this context, the inter-party warfare that has broken out on the Left, and indeed the conflicts inside Your Party between Corbyn and Sultana, feel like fiddling while progressive Britain burns.
Sultana entered parliament at the 2019 election, at the age of 26, and was immediately spoken of as a future standard bearer of the Left, just as Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott approached their twilight years. She has been encouraged in this view by her husband, Craig Lloyd, a former trade-union official who, according to several sources I spoke to, has taken to telling anyone who’ll listen that he’ll eventually become general secretary of Your Party, storming the complacent establishment alongside his co-leader wife. This is in spite of Lloyd having no senior management experience in any of his previous professional positions. No matter: the pair are modelling themselves as the Left’s new power couple — British socialism’s answer to the Clintons.
“The pair are modelling themselves as the Left’s new power couple — British socialism’s answer to the Clintons.”
After Corbynism as an organised political force was swept away by Boris Johnson’s brief experiment with Brexity, big-tent Tory populism, the recriminations began almost immediately, with the defeated Left soon resembling rats in a sack. Within the simple “Corbynite” masthead sat a messy mixture of competing ideological strands: old-school trade unionists grappled for dominance with the traditional hard-Left, while a younger crowd of Millennial socialists, steeped in the language of online progressivism, attempted to build something they called a “social movement” — pointedly not a traditional political party — from below. Sultana, a young, dynamic, non-white woman, exhibiting all the radical, aggressive certainty of any good student union-dweller, was perhaps the best-placed talisman of that latter tendency. Rather than the antiquated politics of 20th-century socialism, all brass bands and closed factories, this youthful contingent would push for Green New Deals, Universal Basic Income, four-day weeks and “fully-automated luxury communism”.
In the early 2020s, that crowd became synonymous with the increasingly dogmatic and pernickety assertions of identity politics and cancel culture, earning them a reputation for political pedantry and humourlessness on an epic scale. A case in point is Sultana’s broadsides against a cartoonist for depicting her on a box of raisins (the same newspaper spent years depicting David Cameron as a human condom and George Osborne as his pliant gimp).
This particular brand of progressivism was a departure from the Old Left’s, but, under Labour’s ossified structures, a semblance of unity between the more orthodox and more experimental groupings was possible. Now that these structures have gone, Corbyn himself has demonstrated neither the communicative abilities nor the political dexterity to join these competing factions together.
Keir Starmer’s authoritarian approach to party management has therefore birthed a monster, his wave of suspensions and expulsions repeatedly splitting Labour’s formerly broad church. Like a North London Stalin, he has enforced an iron discipline on the emasculated Corbynite wing of the Parliamentary Labour Party, removing the whip for the most minor of infractions. When it became clear that Sultana was unlikely to be readmitted after her suspension for voting against the two-child benefit cap, rumours of the founding of an alternative picked up pace. For readers unfamiliar with Sultana’s role in Your Party’s chaotic foundation, and indeed with the surreal, schismatic culture of the British hard-Left in general, the story of internecine factionalism hits first as tragedy then as farce.
In an attempt to bounce the perennially dithering Corbyn into announcing her in a leadership role, Sultana announced the party’s launch without the agreement of her fellow organisers. She then did something similar for Your Party’s membership portal. This second action triggered civil war within Your Party, as well as legal squabbling over the future of the substantial monies collected on Sultana’s watch. A truce, of sorts, has now been tentatively agreed.
Either way, Your Party’s descent into Leftist self-parody has destroyed Sultana’s reputation, confirming her as a serious liability. The general public sees Your Party as po-faced, hectoring, lacking in self-awareness and obsessed with arcane minutiae; Sultana certainly seems determined to prove them right. And yet despite repeated setbacks, she retains the confident air of someone convinced that her substantial social-media following, shadowed by that growing Trotskyist fan club, will be enough to retain the backing of comrades eyeing Zack Polanski’s Greens with envy.
There’s an extent to which our cynical, fractious politics might suit the abrasive invective of tubthumpers like Sultana. But that righteous anger needs to be accompanied by a positive emollience, a self-deprecation, a relatability — none of which are present in the beleaguered parliamentarian. There’s an ironic air to a figure like Lee Anderson or even Farage himself. Everything is said with a nudge and a wink; they’re their own best satirists, inviting you to laugh alongside them. In contrast, the Left’s default tone is bitter rage and oblique, holier-than-thou screeds against anyone and everyone. With honourable expectations, they exude ideological zealotry.
“The revolution”, said a condemned Georges Danton in revolutionary France, will “like Saturn, devour its children”. And so it goes again. Sultana will likely lose Your Party’s ongoing factional struggle — unlike Corbyn, she lacks a solid base in her constituency, and unlike the pro-Gaza independents, she lacks the grassroots voter networks, built through local mosques and community groups, that propelled four MPs to the Commons last year. Her TikTok game won’t be enough to defeat the phalanx of battle-hardened, former trade-union organisers stacked up behind her prime rival.
If she is ousted from the upper echelons of Your Party’s structures, Sultana might be tempted to try her luck with the Greens. But would Polanski ever give prominence to someone who has demonstrated only an aptitude for scorched-earth politics, and who has shown repeatedly that being queen of the Leftist graveyard will always take precedence over the collective reputation of the labour movement? Indeed if Sultana’s uncompromising approach to politics has to an extent proved useful in making a name for herself — notwithstanding her attacks against her own colleagues for their views on transgenderism — it’s increasingly clear that it’s little help when it comes to the painstaking but necessary work of coalition-building. Even critics who may otherwise back Sultana, but increasingly feel that broad Left unity is required to combat Reform, are condemned for “middle-class entitlement” and using “angry/irrational brown woman tropes”.
When the Comintern eventually abandoned their “class-against-class” line in 1933, they performed a speedy about-turn, calling for “Popular Fronts” with liberals and social democrats to defeat fascism. Hitler had assumed the Chancellery. Rearmament was underway. It was too late. The damage had been done by years of over-enthusiastic sectarianism. Despite Sultana’s protestations, Reform are not a “fascist” threat. But the fragmentation on a Left obliviously revelling in its own demise will presage Britain’s own shift to the Right. As ever, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.
