Corbyn’s new party

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Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana have confirmed the launch of a new hard-Left party to fight Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour.

The former Labour leader and his fellow now-independent MP said it was “time for a new kind of political party” in a statement on Thursday.

The pair have invited voters to sign up to the Left-wing faction via the website yourparty.uk, although The Telegraph understands the new project will not be called Your Party and that its name is to be confirmed.

Will this split the Labour vote? What do we all think?

I didn’t mean that the far-left were in power, just that communist representatives in parliaments and assemblies at different levels are much more common than here.

The Popular Front in France won the election. They are very left wing. Communists in Spain and Italy are strongly represented at national and local levels. And so on.

Of course, governments in Europe tend to coalitions more than the UK because of the electoral systems. But there is certainly a stronger far-left component in continental politics than here.

Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Greece and Portugal all returned MEPs under the communist banner. And there are more who are far-left but don’t go by the label ‘communist’.

That's more to do with the voting systems in those countries than any real underlying communist ethos. The far right is much.more heavily represented in national government across Europe and is on the ascendency in ways that are unprecedented in the post war era.
There's also a pattern of left leaning (not communist) governments across Europe being in unstable positions, not least because of the resurgence of the authoritarian/fascist far right. Sanchez in Spain took a real gamble to win the 2023 election and as a result Spain is now politically divided with the two main right wing parties snapping at his heels. The AfD came second in Germany's recent elections. Hungary is ruled by the authoritarian dictator Orban. France's NR (right wing fascist party) came third in their last elections, ensuring a heavily right wing biased cabinet. Italy has Meloni. Eastern Europe is unstable right now because of the threat of invasion by Russia. Geert Wilders caused chaos in the Netherlands when he collapsed his far right government and now the right wing authoritarian Party for Freedom is ahead in the polls for the autumn election there. The trend is very definitely towards the far right; it's misleading to say that either Europe or the EU is heavily influenced by communism and doing so really minimises the danger Europe currently faces from the revival of the kind of fascistic thought that was never supposed to happen again.

I don’t disagree with that at all. But it’s a different - and very significant - issue.

European politics tends to be more extreme than ours in all respects, frankly. Only a handful of countries, most notably Germany, have really had settled centrist politics for a long period. And, as you say, that’s under attack by the far-right now.

After WWII Italy and Greece were considered a hair’s breadth away from becoming fully fledged communist states. And of course far-left violence - the Baader-Meinhof Group, Red Brigades etc - threatened European governments for years, until as recently as 1998.

I wonder if that's a result of their different voting systems? I'd like to see PR in the UK; I think FPTP is utterly ridiculous in this era of multi party politics in the UK. But we'd have to have very strict checks and balances to prevent extremist politics becoming the norm. On the other hand if Mr Starmer continues to do nothing, we risk extremist government under the current system also, at the next election.

I’m tempted to join his party simply for same reason I temporarily joined the Labour party for a fiver, or whatever it was, to vote for him in the leadership race to ensure Labour wouldn’t get in in the ensuing GE. If he has a big momentum, splitting the Left vote, we won’t have to endure another term of them, even with their desperate attempt to gerrymander by giving votes to 16yo.