Your Corbyn/Sultana Party - Discussion thread - Part 2

[fromorbit]

The YP starting conference is in the ACC in Liverpool between 29-30 November so only three weeks off. With competing factions involving Islamic conservatives, every variety of Marxist/Communist, former Labour members, trade union activists, entryists from SWP and SPEW, splitters from the Scottish Greens, trans activists and actual left wing feminists [not the nice kind] it is difficult to underplay how much controversy there is likely to be. So we will need a second thread in advance.

Thus far following the internal drama of the UKs newest left party has taken a whole thread. It has been a wild ride and the party still does not have a name.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5394557-your-corbynsultana-party-discussion-thread

Lived gender Shirley

It will be interesting watching how YP reconcile trans rights on the one side with the socially conservative candidates on the other. Just cannot see this mish mash of ideas and personalities merging into anything coherent.

In fact, I strongly doubt many have actually studied socialism in any depth or learned the lessons from failed socialist govts.

though maybe we could consider the European-style healthcare reforms.

We would not get European style reforms, we would get American style reforms. These companies are already here and are pushing for more.

Indeed, as I posted on the tail end of the old thread there are suggestions that the Gaza MPs combined with Corbyn's close allies are rigging the party conference to get their preferred outcomes. The use of sortation with party elites being able to skip it gives the pre organised people huge power to set the agenda. Their preferred outcome would leave the Gaza faction in control in regional areas without having to go along with stuff they don't like.

The thing is not only many of them social conservatives they are not that left wing in economics either.

The TAs would want a constitution that denies biology as a core principle. I don't know if they can achieve that.

We will see what comes out. The thing for YP is that if the Gaza MPs walk they have huge problems developing a functional party.

A Corbyn/Gaza party has its own lane, the more Sultana style party is too close to the Greens I would think.

Sultana herself is indicating that her vision of the party is facing serious obstacles.

Will Zarah Sultana ever lead Your Party?
She predicts “people” will place “obstacles” in the path of her candidacy
Implicitly referencing the turbulence that has engulfed Your Party up until this point, Sultana said: “I genuinely think that given all the crap that we’ve seen, there might be obstacles to block me from doing that.” She added that any attempts to block a Sultana candidacy would not come from her co-founder, Jeremy Corbyn, but from “people who are organising conference, who are organising the party or organising the rallies, who are drafting these documents”.
Sultana said that while members may opt for a single leadership model, her preference is “co-leadership”. She added: “I’m going to keep going, but I’m just saying that it’s very hard for me in the conditions that are placed before us.”

https://archive.is/jxzf7

A key point is this if Sultana's fears are realised this justifies fears expressed by feminists, some of the left and the right about deep issues concerning sexist sectarian immigrant communities. These are fears that Sultana refuses to acknowledge. There is a conflict here.

More analysis ;

Your Party’s factional warfare: The real issue for workers is reform or revolution

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/11/11/lqhk-n11.html

I would not say China is a good example of markets and central planning being effective.

China is having big problems with it's economy just now.

It had great GDP numbers for many years, much of it on the back of construction. Now the state owned developers are effectively bankrupt. They are being propped up by the state, and the state owned banks, while the developers keep building. There is a massive over supply of housing and buildings in general, but the model was for property prices to rise. They can't let prices drop, they can't take the hit to unemployment if they wind construction down, and they can't take the GDP hit if the supply chain collapses. So with massive oversupply, central control just says build build build.

A mate of mine works in an industry that supplies construction, and the developers can't pay their bills. They are trying to barter unfinished apartments instead.

Electric cars (EVs) are another example. Again, state owned car makers, state capitalism loans for investment that appear near unlimited, and massive over production. They can't sell the Evs they make. Even with the full might of the Party fighting against tarrifs etc.

The EV situation is mad. The makers get a government subsidy per car sold ( and remember, these are state owned makers), the makers can't sell them, so they are doing what is called zero miles used cars in the Chinese market. The makers buy their own cars, store them, and claim the subsidy. Then to try to make up the loss, they try to sell the stored cars second hand super cheap.

The industry is propped up by the guv. And also, because so many makers now depend on the government subsidy, they cut costs on the EVs. After all, loads of them are just going to be stored in fields.

And now it is AI and robots being given the same treatment.

The state owned jet airliner is not selling either. A state owned company makes it, the state owned airlines are told to buy it, financed by the state owned banks, and they have delivered about 25 or so. And from my understanding, the planes are too expensive for the airlines to fly.

Of course, all media is state controlled too, so the PRC economy is fantastic. At least the reports are.

A Corbyn/Gaza party has its own lane, the more Sultana style party is too close to the Greens I would think.

Interesting analysis @fromorbit and it won’t be surprising to see just a Corbyn/Gaza party as the final version and we’ll have to wait and see what kind of policies are developed. Though Sultana as a sitting MP has value for them so they might want to keep her on in some capacity but I can’t see her having any influence.

Fascinating insight @RedTagAlan .

The glut of construction materials and capital is then what ends up being exported across the planet, depressing other countries ' domestic industries . Eg the reason steel or solar panel manufacturers cannot compete

Yup. And that glut, or dumping, is a major error of the CPC in my opinion.

The Party have put too much dependence on exports. They have tried time and time again to change the PRC into a consumer society, but they have failed on that because they have not put any effort into building any sort of welfare safety net. A population with no security is not spending. .So they need to sell their excess production abroad to keep their crony state capitalism alive.

In the Hu era, there was an optimism that came from talk of change. There was a feeling that the old communist ways would fade.

But then Xi came along, and he threw the old soviet style blanket over it all. He went back to " the Party is always correct, and can do no wrong"

And given that China is a top down system, I don't actually think he is very good there. He is conservative, and any meaningful positive change has gone.

So yeah, just my opinion, but I don't think anyone should be admiring the Chinese system. Apart from authoritarians of course.

I think the shoddieness is also true with the building as well, from what I've heard. Awful terribly built stuff just thrown up, because no one cares about apartments, and in fact whole neighbourhoods, that no one will live in.

That's for sure. Tofu construction. Just throw it up. Meet the targets and tick the box. Meeting the plan is number 1.

And there is no free press to report it. To criticize anything in China is akin to insulting the Party. Complaints have to be approved by the Party, before complaints can be made. I mean in the media of course.

Ha ha, I am a leftie, a democratic socialist I suppose, but if I hear any western politician praise the CPC, instant turn off.

At the same time of course, they could validly plead ignorance, because after all. the Party controls information so tightly that it is difficult to know anything about how the Party works 100%.. But, should they really be praising something they do not really understand ?

There was a bridge collapse just yesterday, but that's part of their epic geo engineering and is being attributed to the stability of the mountainside it was on faltering. However there are concerns about the strength of the concrete mixes being used and the suspicion of corners being cut to chisel off profits. This also applies to the Belt and Road projects they are bestowing across the global south.

I read in passing an essay on the mad construction boom in China. The top tier of the CCP are all trained in engineering . Even in the US with MAGA, like in Western Europe with liberals in decision making positios in government, they are overwhelmingly from an arts/ Humanities background. So they're very good at snarling up decision making with points of order on legal matters but not in actually translation into actual Things Getting Done

Back on topic. Am trying to imagine general secretary Corbyn overseeing mass housebuilding projects. He just wouldn't. There'd be concerns over the impact on Newts (this, and bats, genuinely do affect planning permissions. Obviously nature is a Good Thing. The engineers solution is something like the infamous Bat Tunnel for HS2).

And it turns out he has other NIMBY tendencies

https://www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/24686840.jeremy-corbyn-among-opponents-new-archway-tower-block/

Re the bridge, well yeah, the top tier of the CPC are engineers.

That's in partial jest. I doubt any of the top tier ever actually done engineering as a job. They are all princelings. Their engineering time would have been spent in Party meetings, not in the design office or factory floor.

I have never been keen on Corbyn as a leader. Superb back bencher and constituent MP, but for me, he spends too much time on the small stuff that does not matter in the overall plan. His job as leader, I reckon, should be building a team to hammer out proposals to remove the need for foodbanks, not being stood in the food bank packing tins of beans.

I reckon that means he is the exact opposite of the CPC elite. When they were supposedly meant to working out the best way to assemble a circuit board into a telly, they were actually doing their smokey room politics. If Corbyn had been in their position, he would likely have been testing the hardness of the toilet paper in the bogs so he could complain about it.

I should point out that I think that it's fair for an opposition party, especially a small one to not set out a complete alternative plan, e.g. for the Greens to say we must halt global warming even if it's costly - without specifying exactly how to pay for it. But I don't think it's legitimate to say that neoliberalism, that is our entire economic system, must be replaced, without specifying what to to replace it with.

Arguably China does present an alternative to neoliberalism - it's problematic because it's a highly complex and opaque system so it's difficult to describe what its nature actually is - undoubtedly there are some neoliberal, market elements.

And we can debate whether it's a success or failure. But my complaint is that YP, the Greens and Reform and the commentary around their phenomena, presuppose a post-neoliberal world, in fact say that world is already upon us. But don't specify what that actually means. If the Greens were to say: we will build an economy like China's - then we could discuss whether that's feasible and what the benefits and detriments of such a system would be.

Reiterating my point. There is no alternative to the UK raising money on the bond market, so those constraints stay in place. There's no alternative to managing currency except for the central bank, so we have to assume that institution and its levers stays in place - albeit, perhaps under direct government control. There is no means to acquires iphones, jet aircraft or software services - to name just a few industries that the UK couldn't possible domesticate in their entirety - except through imports, so Britain must still sell something on the international market in order to acquire currency to purchase them. There's no alternative to the allocation of raw materials, labour and capital goods except through internal market mechanisms. These describe the basic features of the neoliberal economy. Going back to the Chinese example, China has all of these things.

The problem is not a technicality of not winning a debate because no counter plan was presented, it's that there's not hint that an acceptable alternative could even exist.

The claim that the Green's degrowth perspective is anti-neoliberal actually illustrates my point. Neoliberalism lays out what the precursors of real economic growth are. It accepts that sometimes tradeoffs of growth for greater societal good is necessary, just as it accepts that some government regulation of markets is necessary for them to function in an orderly and efficient manner. In fact it's perfectly possible to achieve zero growth through high-enough taxation within the neoliberal framework and that's exactly what the Greens propose.

I would accept that perhaps it's the problem with the term 'neoliberal' itself. That when people say that the neoliberal consensus has broken down, what they really mean is that certain features of our current consensus, such as that assumption that economic growth is good, has broken down. So, at the heart of this is a genuine question and not a blanket polemic against the left.

This is the fundamental problem. The fact that China is now the industrial workshop of the world now is the fundamental reality all parties have to face. Things are changing in as much China faces competition fro other East Asian countries doing the same thing.

China has huge internal issues sure, but the world's consumer model continues to churn along and no one has a solution.

We know what Green parties do when they have power. The Greens in Germany and other places, the Scottish Greens in Scotland. They don't have a systematic plan for things to improve and work on vibes. The German Greens actions saw a huge increase in Germany using coal. The Scottish Greens had little positive impact and wrecked a bottle recycling scheme. This all ignores that STUFF is the heart of our economies, yes we are moving more onto digital stuff but even digital stuff requires huge physical data centres and power supplies.

Destroying manufacturing in the west is not a good plan. The lure of cheap goods though is huge.

Zarah Sultana is on Question Time tonight, with Tory Grandee Ken Clarke and ex Tory turned Reform thinker 🤡 Danny Kruger

nitter.net/bbcquestiontime/status/1988687882694037671#m

All excellent points, and radical thinking is missing in many policies, esp green.

I remember, just before the election that Corbyn lost, he came out and said he would buy X thousand electric cars (EVs), and set up a share scheme. Or something like that.

The greens want all electric.

Everybody is worried about China cornering the EV manufacturing market, loss of UK manufacturing etc.

The mainstream parties talk of attracting investment from car makers, talk of incentives, but they usually fall over at the last minute.

My totally mad, and probably unworkable idea, would be to set up an EV factory ourselves, as in state owned. Make cheap basic EVs for the domestic market. They can't be exported of course, because of subsidy rules.

Yes, we could put our heads together and write a book on why that is a bad idea, but at the same time, if political minds started a conversation about it, we do have the talent in this country to write a book on how it is a good idea.

“Actual left wing feminists. Not the nice kind”.

Wow. I thought FWR had been hijacked by the right wing. Seems pretty clear here.

Zack Polanski will be the most powerful man on the left
And Your Party only have themselves to blame

https://archive.is/3NimS

You've misunderstood, I think.

I took it as meaning women who are left wing and actual feminists i.e. whose concerns are actual women, not women who claim to be left wing and progressive but who mouth "be kind" and prioritise privilege for men who claim to be women above the rights and interests of actual women.

Ah , I see.

"My totally mad, and probably unworkable idea, would be to set up an EV factory ourselves, as in state owned. Make cheap basic EVs for the domestic market. They can't be exported of course, because of subsidy rules."

@RedTagAlan not mad. There was BritishVolt, but it collapsed into administration after the conservative government declined to intervene

www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64303149

BritishVolt was supposed to produce batteries for the automotive industry rather than vehicles.

But it did indeed tank.

Yeah. I was thinking of the battery thing when I wrote my post.

TBH, I am not sure if that was not vapourware. You know, when raising the funds, organizing studies etc is the actual project.

But yes, seems to me an example of where tweeking around the edges in the name of saving money, still ends up costing a lot of public money, and no result in the end.

British steel is maybe a good example. Was a national industry, fragmented, sold, changed hands blah blah, and in the end a tiny part, the last bit, Scunthorpe ,has been re-nationalized again. Because the Chinese state owned company that owns it was demanding a billion quid or so of UK government investment.

Back to British Volt. Yup, that could be an ideal thing for the government to totally own.

Megan Kenyon from New Statesman reporting the first 200k has been transferred from Sultana to YP.

Only 600k to go

Yes that was what I was saying. I don't think huge numbers are joining YP. A few are though.

Corbyn and the Gaza MPs have now dropped a rather damning statement on the day Sultana is on Question Time.

“Your Party’s founding purpose is to stand for the many against the few who hold the wealth and power in our country. Thousands of ordinary people have given their time and money to build a real alternative to endless cuts and endless war.
“A dedicated team of volunteers has been working on a shoestring budget to deliver a founding conference at the end of the month. Their efforts are heroic, but without funding Your Party’s capacity has been severely restricted. Hundreds of thousands of pounds were donated to the party by supporters in good faith, but have since remained beyond its reach. This has been extremely frustrating and disheartening.
“A small portion of these funds was today transferred to Your Party. This is insufficient. We will continue to pursue the immediate transfer of all the money that was donated by supporters to get a new party off the ground, alongside a resolution to outstanding legal issues.
“Building a democratic party from the ground up was never going to be smooth sailing. Some of the difficulties we have faced were inevitable, but others were deliberate acts.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/nov/13/your-party-receives-small-portion-of-withheld-supporters-donations

Implication here ZS has been kicked out

Sienna Rodgers

This is a statement from “the Independent Alliance of MPs”

A source close to Sultana says she wasn’t informed she was being kicked out & thought she was a member til seeing this

“She never resigned from the Independent Alliance”

Meanwhile a YP source claims she quit in Sept

Thoughtful Times book review of the book on YP we mentioned in the old thread.

They were the future once… how Your Party became a dud
Oliver Eagleton’s thoughtful book makes the case for Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s new left-wing party — but self-destructive factionalism has sunk its chances

https://archive.is/Rlhwg