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 was just thinking of journalism, which these days is more of a gig job, not the steady union job it was in the Fleet Street days.

But that's also shifted, because while you always had a sprinkling of Boris Johnson types, it used to be a job where bright working class kids could start in the provincial papers and then move up to the nationals. Nowadays the provincial papers are dying, that old career path is gone, it's a graduate job, the BBC is the behemoth that employs most of the profession, and good luck getting into the BBC if you don't have a Russell Group degree.

You can see the difference with the old school journos, say aged 50 and up, who came in the old way. They usually have much better instincts.

I knew Gloria De Piero in a previous life, and am still fond of her, and I thought it was very revealing that she never made the impact as an MP that she should have. Because I think Labour just conceptualised her as "that glamorous woman from breakfast TV", and she is a great communicator, but it was more important that she'd grown up poor in Bradford, from a second generation immigrant background, and that never left her and she was very much about representing her working class Red Wall constituents. My theory is that the PLP had become so gentrified they literally didn't know what to do with her.

Quite interesting to ask seriously whether utopia-driven so-called 'progressive' movements are lacking in a clear vision of where that utopia lies and how it works.

The SNP became 'Westminster Bad' and we have had a good run of Labour being 'Tories bad'. If your movement is driven by an idealist vision, is that vision realistic? Does it require a vision of hell to move away from? Is a movement based on reactive condemnation of the Other more of a counterculture?

I still don't really understand how we can rely on infinite 'growth' on a planet with finite resources. When money is untethered to those resources, but those resources are still ploughed into the service of money, which has now become theoretically limitless, there will be a crunch point, surely, at which point humanity can no longer cash its cheques.

Sidetrack, but I so admire your facility with remembering names, Sionnach. I'm fucked if I can remember my own on a good day.

My hairdresser is a working class woman who has done very well for herself and lives a very confortable life. She is a very skilled and talented stylist; works hard and has a good business brain. She owns her own salon |( the actual building, not just a lease), employs staff and gives training opportunities to young girls who have just left school. She owns her own home and takes multiple foreign and domestic trips every year.

Her partner is an ex plumber who now does bitcoin and currency trading full time. They aim to buy a holiday home in Europe ( something I as a teacher could only ever dream of).

I also know of other working class families who have started their own business running a chain of child day care nurseries, for example), or a tatoo equipment supply company..or a motor mechanic business....who are now really quite wealthy....living in very desirable homes in leafy suburbs and who have lifestyles not available to many who have been to university and are now working in the gig economy, or in low paid service jobs.

Someone seems to have reported a post of mine. I cannot for the life of me inagine why?

BT and the old utility companies also used to be an excellent way for the working class to be trained for a good career.

These companies arent the employers they once were, and they tend to employ graduate rather than school leavers. But given so many people have degrees, i dont know if they are employing different people, if that makes sense. The school leavers they trained 30 or 40 years ago have degrees now.

The job market has changed so much now. Both the companies and the workforce, and having a degree isnt an indication of class.

I think working/middle class is a combination of somewheres/anywheres and how tied someone is to minimum pay work.

You can report your own post and ask MN to explain.

Agree with you.

People have had enough of the 'uniparty', and the policies that are common to all of the parties. Politics seem to be stuck in different shades of Blairite policies, so the ectorate really haven't had that much of a chance to chose a different path.

So, on the surface, reform are offering something new. But they are caught in a trap - all new MP have no track record and are a risk, have defectors from other parties with experience and its looks like the uniparty.

Also, i dont think Farage understands the issues that much, he's just quicker to read the room than Starmer or Badenoch. That means that he can say what the problems are, but is no closer to a solution.

I think the underlying issue with "what is the wc stuff is that when push comes to shove, Marxist analysis is a bit shit. And I don't mean because of "I have wc cultural roots so I feel wc" I am not talking about culture but economics.

One issue is that to a significant extent, 20th century movements to improve conditions of the wc were pretty effective, and many of those people are effectivly now "middle class" which is a differernt thing, neither properly wc nor capitalists/owners, but actually both. Yes, most sell their labour and work for employers, but they also have pensions, investments, even access to government benefits, all of which are tied to the market. This looks a little differernt depending on what country you live in, but it's consistently the case across the west. So these people in some ways can be at the mercy of exploitation from employers but also have a real interest in capital doing well. Minimum wage laws or rules about sector negotiations etc also are part of this. Interests are not so divided as they were in the 18th century.

There is still a sector of people like many waiters, gig workers, shop workers, etc, who typically do not have investments through a job, usually can't afford them, don't own significant assets like a home, and don't have labour representation. This people seem to count for nothing in the union movement which is now pretty "professional" and mostly looks out for the interests of professional people - see covid for examples.

The other factor, concretely, is that Marxism has been an utter and massive failure wherever it was attempted. Resulting in what I think we could all agree is much worse outcomes for workers, including outright slavery where it was for "the good of the state". Where have attempts at this worked - not Russia. Not China. Not South or Central America. Precisely, nowhere. All places where many people defect(ed) to the west when they can.

I know some will say these weren't real attempts at Marxism because they all involve peasant populations, but that in itself is telling. Why don't we see Marxist history happening in industrialised nations as predicted? I'll tell you why, because his vision of history came right out of his ass and is a load of shit.

I actually don't think to be on the left you need to be a Marxist. There are other leftist movements that were not - you have a huge tradition of leftist Catholic thought for example which includes the social encyclicals, the Antigonish Movement, the Catholic Workers Movement, and the kind of small producer based approaches of people like Chesterton (which would not have called themselves left but were looking at the problem of domination of workers by huge powerful interests, be they capital or "the state".)

The reason a lot of people who think of themselves as the radical left have now become wedded to identity politics is because they see these groups, who they believe to be outcasts "equity seeking groups" are the new proletariat as it were, the people who need structural changes to society in order to create equatable social and economic benefits. If that means giving people jobs or scholarships or social advantages based on these characteristics, that is no differernt in their minds than progressive taxation. Fundamentally though that points to a kind or reification in the way they see these groups, which is why it tends to gender essentialism, race essetialism, and so on.

@TempestTost I typed out a massive thing that disappeared, and by the time I had time to re look at this thread, you've explained it much better than me!

Education inflation has been ultimatly terrible for lower income and poor peopel, not great for anone else, bad for universities, and I think a huge productivity suck. Though possibly the main purpose was to keep large numbers of young people out of the workforce.

Making higher education attainable for talented kids from all backgrounds is a great goal and way to offer a small number of people a leg up - making it so every job requires a degree, no matter whether it's actually useful, does the exact opposite. As we see with journalism, or a lot of these jobs people used to go into and be trained within the workplace.

I am sure not much better, but thanks for the compliment, I was thinking it might just be a bunch of blather!

Agree with this.

A lot of the move to Reform is the same was what happened in the US. If you keep voting, and none of the parties do anything differernt, and there is no substantive change in your circumstances, you will often vote for those who will shake things up.

Maybe you won't even think they will be effective. But the hope is that Labour and the Tories will feel shocked enough to pay attention.

Telling people making that choice that Reform won't be very good, or they are letting down the side, is completely ineffective because it doesn't even touch on their motives for the vote. If anything it's just more evidence that parties that don't serve them (and in the case of Labour despise them) think they are own their votes no matter what they do.

Partly this is called by education inflation ( although comparable countries also have approx the same amount of graduates as we do, and grads, over their lifetime still earn more than non grads) but it's partly too do with another thing that the ' working class' if we are still using that term are berated for- immigration. We have workplaces ( even more so since Brexit and Boris's points based immigration system) who can just get skilled and trained staff from abroad, which may be expensive but it's not as cost or time intensive as taking a young person, offering them a work placement or apprenticeship and training them up. Young people who's dads didn't go to school with someone high up in the media or the arts or banking etc needs a job opportunity and training. Apprenticeships are increasingly difficult to get. The Apprenticeship levy was designed to force large companies to put aside a budget to take on apprentices. Huge swathes of them used it as a tax write off, or to pay for existing older staff to do degrees, many while also applying for overseas work visas. This is the kind of disconnect between people who don't have to worry about being arrested on a march about somethingorother because Dad will have a word with his mate in Deloitte about a job and people who don't have that option, no matter how comfortable they are in a financial sense.

Currently an interesting discussion on Radio 4 about exactly this issue. Graduates who just cannot get an interview; let alone a job in an industry they are passionate about. Plus the fact that it is white collar, professional, digital type jobs which are now most threatened by AI...not traditional blue collar jobs or trades.

Kier Starmer has just delivered what I think was probably the best speech of his career...and in it he has suggested that the target of 50% of all children going to university is no longer appropriate for our current times; and instead the new target will be for two-thirds of children to either go to university or to be placed on a " gold star" apprenticeship.He talked of how his father always felt his skilled manual job was not respected.

Good speech, I wonder, though, how succesfully it will be delivered.

I often think it would be a good idea for many types of work to have a very hard look at what training is really best for their sector.

I have a lawyer friend who is convinced that there was a lot to be said for the days when lawyers were largely trained in law within a firm. My daughter is currently training as a legal assistant within a firm - they have had such poor luck with the ones coming out of training programs they rarely take them on now.

My mother, who was a nurse, is convinced that the move from nursing schools to universities produces much worse nurses.

I wonder what the universities will think of that? A lot of them are very over-extended.

It seems inevitable that some of the newer universities will fail. Probably not immediately feasible but returning to the old polytechnic model of vocational courses might be a way forward?

Yes, and there would be little point in churning out young people trained in technical or vocational skills that have no jobs to step into.

Not just nursing, I'm not convinced that the quality of solicitors and accountants is better now that they're graduate professions than it was when they mostly learned on the job. And as I say, I'm convinced the quality of journalists has gone down.

For a lot of young people, compulsory school until 18 followed by three years' uni is just extending adolescence. It works for some, but I'm not sure it's healthy for society for it to be universal.

I've been paying attention for some years to Ben Houchen (maybe the last popular Tory in the country) and it's partly for this reason - his big push to make Hartlepool the apprenticeships capital of England.

By that definition a surgeon is working class!

I don't think they are overextended so much as underfunded. They are desperate for students, as there is such an oversupply, and a reduction in international students.

I don't much like the control freakery in the Labour Party - which seems to be a thing no matter who is leader - but LOJ being barred from conference is very funny

Labour kick Owen Jones out of conference | The Spectator