Your Corbyn/Sultana Party - Discussion thread

[fromorbit]

The new left party is going to have significant implications for gender and sex discussions on the left in the UK and in wider political debate as well. Lets talk about it.

Four of its prospective MPs are Gaza independents whose votes and comments in the Commons indicate a social conservative background . One of them Adnan Hussain has already got into a row on X with prospective members over his social conservatism.

The hilarious breakdown of the Islamo-left alliance
The progressive left has suddenly noticed that most British Muslims are not exactly woke.
This uneasy marriage got a reality check last week when a Green Party councillor and practising Muslim, Mothin Ali, appeared reluctant to sign a set of ‘pledges’ on behalf of the LGBTQIA+ Greens, Feminist Greens and other similar groups. The MP for Blackburn, ‘Gaza Independent’ Adnan Hussain, then waded into the debate. ‘It’s no secret that Muslims tend to be socially conservative’, Hussain said. ‘Is there a space on the left to create a broad enough church to allow Muslims an authentic space, just as it does other minority groups?’
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/04/the-hilarious-breakdown-of-the-islamo-left-alliance/

The initial statement for Your Party focuses on poverty, fighting the system and Gaza, but makes no mention of progressive social issues, . This already signals something significant.
https://www.yourparty.uk/statement

Zarah Sultana on the other hand has already signaled out trans rights as a key principal in a recent interview which has received push back from others. Discussion here:

The Elephant in the Room for Zara Sultana’s “Your Party”
https://labourheartlands.com/the-elephant-in-the-room/
But here’s the rub. Sultana also pledged to “resolutely” advocate for a pro-trans socialist programme. She insists these discussions must happen openly and democratically.

That sounds fine in theory. In practice, the left has already shown itself utterly incapable of having this conversation without collapsing into authoritarian cancel culture.

Can the Left Have an Honest Trans Debate Without Cancelling Women?

For years, women who raise legitimate questions about the impact of gender self-ID on female-only spaces, or about the safeguarding implications highlighted by the Cass Review, have been branded as bigots and driven out of the movement. “Demonising trans people” is often code for “asking difficult but necessary questions.” If Your Party repeats this mistake, it will bleed support from countless socialist women before it even begins.

The truth is, many women will not get involved in this project precisely because of the Corbyn–Sultana line on trans issues. Others may hope the problem quietly goes away. It won’t. Nor is this a side issue: women’s rights are not negotiable add-ons to socialism; they are foundational. To ignore them is to build on sand.

TAs online and who are planning to join are already girding up for war, it is looking messy.

I can see a number of factions inside the new party who are going to make things complicated:

Muslim social conservatives - as mentioned they will be a major part of the party's voting bloc.

Old school Marxists who regard gender ideology as neo liberal capitalist identity politics and a distraction from class.

Realists who will see gender stuff as a marginal issue which needs to be sidelined because it is so toxic and unpopular with the general public.

Last but certainly not least actual left wing feminists who see through gender nonsense and are not going to be quiet about it !!

I expect fireworks over gender at the the party's initial conference supposedly to be held in November. TAs will attempt to make genderism a key principal of the party and will face resistance. Whether it happens or not it will be another nail in the TAs attempt to pretend the left inherently back neoliberal capitalist ideas like genderism. The big terfy mother elephant is going to be at the conference because women keep doing awkward things like existing and saying things.

Corbyn's position is going to be a focus in this because for all his occasional signalling on trans issues like stating pronouns and saying mantras it is not a core issue for him, and moreover he doesn't believe in it narrowly . His circles have long contained gender critical people who he has refused to cancel, because Corbyn for all his faults believes in open debate. So I think this could be a wedge issue between those around Sultana and Corbyn. There are already signs of disagreements between them over other issues like antisemitism:
Sultana: Corbyn 'capitulated' on antisemitism definition
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c79lr40rqelo

I think the claim that these parties have only talked about immigration is interesting, I'm not sure of it's true.

Half the freak outs about the US seem to relate to other things Trump seems to be trying to do with the economy, protectionist measures in some cases, devaluing the dollar. Whether or not you think this stuff will work, it's major structural stuff.

Immigration is more emotive because other kinds of things aren't as directly impactful to people, it's very noticeable when people can't get a doctor, can't get a flat and it's massively expensive if they do, and so on.

I'm not sure that NF has any bigger plans but some European leaders seem to be doing some differernt things.

It is not so much about race as about cultural ethnicity.

What @ArabellaSaurus said. I know people who are planning to vote Reform. They only didn’t in the last council elections because there weren’t any in their area.

🤣

I don't want my politicians spending more time shouting about Gaza than they do about the crap happening here.
My own local council managed to have a huge Gaza row and meltdown this week. They'll reconvene next week apparently but these flipping arseholes need to concentrate on local government. Just as the MPs need to represent our people and do the best for them.

Sultana is now accused by Ummah bro activist the socially conservative Roshan Salih of stoking Islamophobia

https://nitter.net/Maomentum_/status/1969122317746745392#m

Indeed and there is a big class component. Like it or not working class Brits are angry. The left had a chance to get their support instead they spoke down to them and despised them and acted like a bunch of clowns. Gaza focus is a huge symbol of that. As is the implosion of Your Party over whether Islam is dodgy and sexist which was supposedly something only rightwing Nazis think .

Everyone knows Farage is a twat, but he is more honest in it. He will get his chance, but if he doesn't deliver they will look elsewhere.

If the left wants to stop him they need to grow up and unite with Lib Dems, Greens, Labour and even the Tories. You might think that is impossible, but the fact that none of the parties will do it shows the stakes are not the difference between dictatorship and democracy.

Every time that has been the real threat British people have managed to unite without a problem.

At this point its possible she's sueing a future version of herself, to get ahead of the game.

As with Brexit. And still the politicians don't learn.

Over and over, the gentry left underestimate working class voters. The assumptions they make are not only patronising but very inaccurate. Blinded by their distaste and snobbery, they can't even spend ten minutes asking themselves why people are angry. Such ineffectual thinking. They are happy to accept 'racism' as a catch all explanation, which boils down to 'baddies', which boils down to lazy tribalism.

See assuming people who voted Trump did so because they think he's a great guy. Being poor doesn't mean people are incapable of tactical voting.

I know, its immensely frustrating to see it play out over and over.

The left keeps destroying itself and seems incapable of ever asking why, and wondering how it might stop.

So it's 11:35, Zarah Sultana is an islamophobe and Jeremy Corbyn is a Mossad agent. I give it till 12 o' clock for one or more of the Gaza MPs to be a trans woman.

I don't love Nate Silver, but sometimes he has a great insight. He compared Trump to a billboard lawyer. It's not a UK thing, but in America - especially around airports for some reason - there are all these billboards with lawyers advertising their services.

Billboard lawyers aren't lovely people. They're generally sleazy assholes. But if you have a problem that needs fixing - a personal injury claim, an unfair dismissal, a messy divorce - maybe a sleazy asshole is exactly what you need.

Farage is not the fringe character he used to be. He's pretty normalised now. But as Matt Goodwin points out from his polling, he's still quite divisive - maybe 15% of voters love him and are extremely loyal to him personally, but with Reform hitting 35% in some polls, there's something else going on.

I think what's going on is that the regime parties have rotted from the inside and can't solve anything. We kicked out a useless Tory government last year and replaced it with an even more useless Labour government.

I keep an eye on council by-elections to spot trends. Labour were defending four seats last Thursday and lost three. They held one, in Leamington Spa of all places, by 13 votes over the Lib Dems. The losses weren't at all close. One in Brighton to the Greens, one in Cardiff to Reform, and one in Newham to the local Muslim independent group who bang on about Gaza, but also bang on about how Labour have run Newham forever and it still has terrible social outcomes.

That's the landscape. I think ideas of "the left" uniting to keep out "the right" miss the bigger picture.

I dont think Westminster politicians realise how left behind some towns feel. They are treated as safe seats or unwinnable seats and therefore just ignored.

The difference between affluent areas and poor areas is becoming starker. Theres fewer good work opportunities and amenities in lots of areas.

Its pointless saying immigration/asylum isnt a problem to people who feel that their town has become a dumping ground for asylum hotels. Westminster saying the solution is legalising these people doesn't feel like the best solution to people already competing for work and housing.

All Westminster are doing is saying this isnt the real problem, but then not identifying of doing anything to solve the problems.

Reform are actively campaigning in these areas and listening to people. Whether can do anything to solve it is anothet matter.

Omg it’s like a comedy sketch. Lucky for Sultana that Labour haven’t yet made “islamophobia” a hate crime or she might have ended up with the police at her door!

No purity spiral would be complete without a condemnathon!

Now Andrew Feinstein (team sultana, one of the directors of the private org that collected the money from the membership thing on Thursday) issues a statement stating he is "incredibly disappointed" in everything but "your donations are safe" and the money is simply being held by them as custodians

https://x.com/andrewfeinstein/status/1969349077117571570?t=MtaZpXaXKNPwQRBEhdxFNg&s=19

Inevitably it's like 'the money was merely resting in my account ' from Father Ted

Much as I don’t like Sultana or what she stands for, and much as I think there’s a level of humour in this situation, I do think it’s a bit reckless to accuse Sultana of stirring up islamophobia. There are plenty of nutters out there and this could put her at risk in the real world.

I may be wrong, but from my limited knowledge of the Gaza independents, they're not exactly hardcore ummah bros. I think the Douglas Murray types are off the mark when they complain about Islamist MPs. These guys seem to me to be quite similar to the old school Irish/Scottish Catholics who used to run Labour politics in many northern towns.

So they're fairly socially conservative, and there might well be a bit of low key sexism there. Though I think the culture clash also comes from them being hyperlocal politicians focused on their working class constituencies, and Sultana's student union politics is a bad fit.

On the other hand Sultana is a sort of clone of Ash Sarkar - Muslim background but not known for being at all religious; American-influenced hyper-liberal politics; married out of the community. The difference is that Ash is smarter and more self-aware and would have tried to build alliances.

And that's where the personality aspect comes in - Sultana has never been close to Corbyn, and I think he's discovering independently what Labour people have been saying for ages, that she's just impossible to work with. Corbyn can sometimes be a bit of a jelly, but he's easy to get along with. He doesn't demand total conformity to his way of doing things.

Who is Sultana married to?

An FBU official called Craig Lloyd. This raised eyebrows when she lobbied for FBU demands without declaring an interest.

PressReader.com - Digital Newspaper & Magazine Subscriptions

OK, there's something in that.

So to reframe my position: What happens when a large part of the electorate are so pissed off with how their living standards are falling that they're willing to vote for an overtly racist party whose policies will make their living standards fall even further, just as a "fuck you" . . .

And then, OMG what a surprise, their living standards fall even further?

@SionnachRuadh I agree. And 'old school' Labour was built on Quakerism, as well as the Trades Union movement, and Irish Catholicism always had a large part in it. Both Islam and Catholicism are socially conservative etc. In fact Islam even more so when it comes to the segregation of women etc. The Middle Class atheistic Marxist Socialists have a contempt for religion, and their contempt is exclusively aimed at Christianity ( not sure why, but I suspect they see Brown Muslims as just not educated enough to understand that God doesn't exist) ignoring the fact that Islam is a religion and has more in common with Christianity as an Abrahamic religion than it does with Marxist Socialism. They have been patronising Muslims, thinking they will suddenly come round to atheistic Socialism just because the Socialists supported them over Gaza, As they did after the Iranian revolution, they will find out that they wont.
I think you are too generous to the laughable Ask Sarkar though! Especially after her book where she blamed everyone else for alienating the working class when her and her buddy Owen Jones were the loudest and most patronising of the lot, and did that almost on their own.

Are you sure you're not really asking 'if Reform are elected and my standard of living falls, what happens to me?"

Maybe the reason why people are willing to risk voting for reform is that they know they haven't anything to lose.

Edit: that was in response to TruckDiver

Groan. Too close to the bone...