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'm going to guess that many of these impressive sounding bodies are actually just members of RS21, Workers Power and whatever Socialist Resistance are calling themselves these days, wearing a variety of funny hats.

The original point was not the number of conflicts but the number of aggressions - those started by the country in question attacking another country.

I'd be interested to see your list of Russia and the USSR's 40 as that seems high to me (although contrary to your claim I never actually expressed an opinion about how aggressive a power they were - only that they have been less so than the USA). But at any rate, is your problem the fact that I said the USA were responsible for "a far greater number of military aggressions...", whereas according to your numbers they are only responsible for "a considerably greater number"? 😄

Or is it that I'm not paying sufficient attention to all the clandestine "not well documented" ones, which would obviously tip the balance in the other direction since USA foreign policy since WWII has been so scrupulously clean and above board that they would never countenance such activities? 😆

There was an established brand. Brand Corbyn. In 2020. With popular support, and obvious difference between it and then-Labour. The years of perceived coasting since then have left them almost starting from scratch against years of worsening odds. Too little, too late.

I think one of them is this Archie Woodrow who has already denounced the Your Party as a totalitarian force and has called for a party that is not within the restrictive definitions as set out by The State, and how the British working class need to overthrow capitalist class like now, and ...

Well it's rather epic. But maybe not in the way he'd think

https://nitter.net/femsocialist/status/1977455073975222719#m

Comment below: "He wants to build a resistance within the resistance so that they can build another resistance to the secondary resistance that is a resistance to the initial resistance & hopefully the far right will be in gov by the time they’ve finished so they can start work on resisting that"

Archie is a clever lad, but the political current he's a part of is... well, let's just say eccentric. I could bore on at length about RS21, but anyone who checks out their website will get a good dose of "this is your brain on Queer Theory".

The latest big MRP poll takes account of YP, and allots it 13 seats (as opposed to 7 for the Greens): MRP Poll October 2025

When you drill down into the data, those 13 seats are:

• Islington North, where Corbyn has a very strong personal following
• The four seats won by Gaza independents last year
• Eight more seats with very large Muslim populations

That lends weight to the Corbyn/Muslim side of the party as opposed to the Sultana/Trot side.

It's a very similar pattern to the results we saw last year for Galloway's Workers Party, which got very big votes (including a few near misses) in heavily Muslim areas, and in most other places was polling the standard 2% or so that far left candidates usually get.

That suggests:

• Outside of very heavily Muslim areas, the main effect of YP will be to shave a couple of points off Labour's share
• The suggested YP victories in the constituency breakdown aren't overwhelming - they're suggesting wins on 30% so of the vote, with Labour/Reform not far behind
• There isn't much overlap with areas where the Greens might do well (though the Trot element of the YP membership is likely to be heavily concentrated in those areas)
• Generally the trend in the polls has been to amplify what we saw last year, not many safe seats and a lot of slender majorities, so a lot of potential victories (for any party) will rely on them avoiding things like unprofessional organisation or dingbat candidates

I call bollocks (on this and any other poll right now) given that (a) Your Party isn't even established yet and we have no idea what its precise set of policies will be, (b) we have no idea which constituencies it will field candidates in, and (c) we have no idea what the nature of its relationship to the Greens (formal coalition, electoral non-aggression pact, whatever but everybody in it is talking about it being something) will be.

Anyone attempting a poll is basically asking people "how do you feel right now about the current government, Reform, Tories, Environmental issues and leftwingness generally?"

More fun with databases.

There are 3, and the people who signed up in August for the mailing list seem to be the ones who are treated as "primary" interest?

If you signed up and paid fees in September via the sultana portal link you now have to prove you joined (ie paid) before you get details of the regional assemblies . I think that's what the latest is?

https://nitter.net/Tom_Gann/status/1978410387088236598#m

Mansell
https://nitter.net/charliemansell/status/1978461295050371393#m

"Where's our money?"

https://nitter.net/NAJ562/status/1978179802398904428#m

Well TruckDriver, you can believe what you want. I was very sceptical of polls in the summer purporting to show YP at 15%, because they were hypothetically asking voters if they were open to voting for a Corbyn-led party. They will become more reliable as it takes shape.

As far as its ideological/policy profile is concerned, you're the one making grand statements about it being a party based on class struggle and internationalism. I have my own suspicions about what its priorities will be.

Yes I was sceptical of those too.

I'm not aware of having made any grand statements. It's simply too early to commit to any opinions of how the party will look yet.

A leadership contest. And leaders (or co leaders) will be elected by March 2026, alongside a 21 strong central executive committee.

Then they'll STORM the local elections just 2 months later.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/oct/17/your-party-constitution-leadership-contest-jeremy-corbyn-zarah-sultana

The document introduces a digital democracy process, encouraging individual members to submit edits and suggestions online, with the text evolving “iteratively” over several weeks.

Developing policy by Google Doc is an... interesting idea.

Sympathetic organisers concede a tension remains between Sultana’s democratic idealism and the administrative realities of party-building.

"Democratic idealism" is an imaginative way of describing her tendency to go off on a solo run when she thinks she might not get her own way.

More seriously, I wish more people on the left knew right wing lore, because they might learn something. When Alan Sked founded Ukip he wrote a constitution closely based on Labour but more democratic (I think Alan was trying to create an ideal party constitution rather than a workable one), so the party was very much member-led, anyone could turn up at conference, you didn't need many signatures to force a vote, and the NEC was formally more powerful than the leader.

This did not result in a party that was well run. It resulted in a party that was a factional mess. Farage could just about hold it together with his unique personal charisma, which is why they kept asking him to come back every time he retired as leader. But when he wasn't, they were going through leaders every two months, because every time a new leader was elected, a clique would form on the NEC to launch a coup against them.

That's why Reform has been run in such a top-down way - nobody wants to replicate the Ukip experience, so the plan has always been to build up the membership and structures and only then think about democratising the party.

Meanwhile the far left has hundreds if not thousands of cut-price Alan Skeds all with their own ideas for the ideally democratic party structure, plus all the undemocratic behind the scenes deals that have been necessary to keep this project on the road. It's going to be a bloodbath.

That will go well! endless prevaricating and deleting edits made by other people and adding 50,000 different opinions. Have they not met any Left wingers?

Imagine the track changes

It would at least show the bigwigs of the movement being honest about what they think of each other

"Jeremy Corbyn is a poopy head old git"

"Zarah Sultana is a bag of broken biscuits"

Cover story in this week's Spectator

The Ultras: meet Britain’s new Islamo-socialist alliance | The Spectator

Ayoub Khan the Gaza MP is mentioned in this account of the 1st in the Your Party meetings in that hotbed of socialist Revolution, Norwich

https://borderland.co.uk/assemble-dissemble-the-your-party-norwich-assembly-19-10-25-by-larry-ohara-21-10-25/

"In case the above interpretation be considered unduly alarmist, I draw attention to Birmingham IA MP Ayoub Khan, currently rightly hero of the hour for spearheading the campaign to prevent genocide-supporting Maccabi Haifa football thugs polluting Birmingham with their presence as they did Amsterdam last year, when their team plays Aston Villa. However, it has been suggested (and the council website seems to confirm this) he is still a Lib Dem councillor, campaigning with Lib Dem councillors in his ward and supposedly favouring a recent Tory candidate who helped him get elected, to be the Your Party candidate in Lozells. This may, or may not, be true, but not only is he not to my knowledge socialist, can we realistically trust the IA ‘stewards’ in charge of YP to fully investigate this matter? Is the YP to merely become, like Respect did in Tower Hamlets in the end, a flag of convenience for careerists with no socialist allegiance?"

The Bangladeshi Respect councillors in Tower Hamlets, in case it's forgotten, all defected to the conservatives

https://conservativehome.com/2008/10/14/why-i-defected/

Sultana's new best friends at the Socialist Worker indulging in a bit of grooming gang denialism:

Starmer’s ‘grooming gangs inquiry’ rocked by survivors’ resignations

The writer has this astonishing sentence:

Starmer launched the inquiry in June after capitulating to the far right, which seized on the CSE scandals in England to push a racist agenda.

This is what's known in America as the "Republicans pounce" formula, where when a Republican does something awful the story is the awful thing the Republican did, but when a Democrat does something awful the story is the Republicans "pouncing" on the Democrat's unfortunate faux pas.

Note to Arthur Townend, if you see this: "pounce" is a better verb than "seize".

ANYWAY, Socialist Worker is also running a screaming denunciation of the establishment protecting Prince Andrew, while maintaining a line on grooming gangs that there's nothing to see here ("racist lies"!). Gotta love the far left's double standards, without them they'd have no standards at all.

I also wonder if Arthur Townend has any insight into institutions that cover up sexual abuse, since the SWP took over 10 years to issue a mealy-mouthed apology for the single rape scandal that they were bang to rights on, which is the tip of the iceberg of that group's history.

Gotta love the far left's double standards, without them they'd have no standards at all.

Ouch.

ANYWAY, Socialist Worker is also running a screaming denunciation of the establishment protecting Prince Andrew, while maintaining a line on grooming gangs that there's nothing to see here ("racist lies"!). Gotta love the far left's double standards, without them they'd have no standards at all.
Clearly grooming gangs made up of taxi drivers that lure poor vulnerable girls away by plying them with cigarettes and cheap alcohol are absolutely fine but grooming gangs made up of millionnaires that lure vulnerable girls away by plying them with money and holidays on luxury islands are not because the wealth of the perpetrators is the worst thing about it trafficking and sex abuse, obvs!

Filed under anti racism, labour, women's liberation🤡

They're hustling for votes. They've done the calculations in their heads and have concluded that taxi drivers, drug dealers and kebab shop workers are the oppressed ones here.

So an organisation who's stated aim is dedicated to ending the exploitation of the working class can't comprehend the mass scale abuse of actual working class women by another "oppressed" class because they do not believe racism from a group they see as oppressed against a group they perceive as advantaged by a modicum of (and they don't mention it here but it's on the tip of their tongue) white privelidge is actually possible.

I've seen the initial meetings of Your Party online (this is the Norwich one. ) It's abundantly obvious that they cannot bring themselves to discuss this except in a half hearted "solidarity sisters" Owen Jones sort of way.

Too awkward. And I don't think they realise that the reason the far right took this and ran with it is precisely because they had nothing to say. This issue has absolute"cut through " as it were.

Some Scottish Greens have decided the party's not committed enough to batshittery, and are defecting to YourParty.

www.heraldscotland.com/news/25568174.glasgow-scottish-green-councillors-defect-corbyns-party/

Good grief! I suppose this tells us something about YP if it's attracting people who think Ross Greer is too sane and rational.

The SGP have pledged to abolish landlords, but apparently are still too in thrall to capitalism for these brave new pioneers of whatever the fuck kind of politics this is now.