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

There's been litigation on that from Labour members in NI, which is a strange story going back decades involving former Maoists who became Unionists and, in alliance with NI's then minuscule gay rights movement, ran a campaign to get mainland parties to organise in NI.

The Conservatives run candidates there, with minimal success. The local Lib Dems invariably have dual membership in Alliance.

Labour used to argue that their sister party was the SDLP, and I believe SDLP MPs still take the Labour whip, but nobody's ever taken that link too seriously.

No, the issue for YP members in NI is that their members are probably already in one of two Trot electoral fronts, either People Before Profit (SWP) or Cross Community Labour Alternative (SPNI/former Militant), while most YP members in mainland Britain probably back SF in the sentimental illusion that SF is socialist.

"WHY IS @owenjonesjourno DEFENDING ISRAEL THE PEEDO CAPITAL OF THE WORLD ? This is all about defending Israel. You will see that Owen Jones and @NovaraMedia (What people think are left wing Media) are going all out to discredit @thisisyourparty and present to the Greens as socialist party. Why because the Greens have promised to be best friends with Israel and Your Party has promised to cut all tiers with the terrorist state of Israel. Proving that . Owen Jones has always been Israels agent I predict that the Greens will be no different to the Tories or Labour and Zac Polanski will be Keir Starmer 2.0 and People like Owen Jones will deny discrediting Your Party to indirectly promote the green"

Has the Left (Yet again) eaten itself? Have they lost their minds because gasp Zack Polanski is Jewish?

I don't know where that quote comes from but it's gobbledigook. I can't even work out what it means. Have you SEEN Novara's coverage on Israel?

It was from the Max Shanly x/twitter (via nitter) tweet:

https://nitter.net/InacioVieira/status/1996462171241545815#m

It probably says something about YP's chances of attracting voters that about half the members now view Corbyn as a centrist dad character, and a large proportion of them take the view that one of Corbyn's biggest mistakes as Labour leader was being too soft on the Jews.

LOL I dont know how Ask Sarkar has the audacity to say 'Left wing people come to us with their set of priorities and let us know we're not their priority' when she has been all in on this. Just because she is Brown doesn't make her less of a middle class intellectual and it doesnt make her an 'us' rather than a 'them'. And yes, Roger Hallam clearly hasn't been 'listening' if neither of them understand what those people were saying- that actually, Palestine is less important to them than having the local drug dealers dealt with, their bins being emptied and some decent local services. You know, boring stuff that local councillors are elected to do.

Yes it's quickly turning onto somewhere people who find The Greens too Right wing go. Corbyn is having done to him what he did in Labour- trying to stop SWP/Militant etc being expelled, dissenting constantly, doing his own thing (talking to Sinn Fein, Hamas etc) while being a Labour member of Parliament etc. Now the shoe is on the other foot and he's being called an agent of Israel!

Looks like people who signed up in a Sultanate rush are now finding they can't cancel their membership unless they sign up again with another payment

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/dec/08/your-party-membership-portal-jeremy-corbyn-zarah-sultana

Sultana was on hated Laura Kuenssberg show yesterday. The faithful are convinced she was brilliant Nd finally got one over on their BBC nemesis

I imagine that’s illegal, no?

The two websites not communicating and punters being stuck with subs they can't cancel seems to sum the whole thing up.

Corbyn can be a difficult man to deal with. He's a shocking ditherer, but once he's made his mind up he's the most stubborn man in the world.

People in his close circle, like Karie Murphy and Seumas Milne, have worked out how to get around that by quietly setting up a fait accompli and then convincing him that it was his idea all along. Of course this only works if you're in his close circle, which is very cliquish and resented by those outside it.

But Zarah's approach of "I'll just announce something unilaterally and Jeremy will sign it off later" doesn't seem to have accomplished much except getting right up his nose.

My legal ken is out of date, so don't trust me on this, but...

It's an interesting question. The Fraud Act 2006 lays out that the elements of fraud are to do something dishonestly with the intention of causing a gain to yourself or a loss to someone else.

I'm not sure if it's possible to accidentally commit fraud. But the whole thing looks very dodgy from a consumer protection point of view.

Oh dear..

Corbyn could be forced to drop Your Party name
Title could be confusing on ballot papers, according to complaint made to elections watchdog
https://archive.is/rks8w#

Good article on the conflict between socialism and trans stuff

Trans Liberation or Socialism: You Can’t Have Both

https://labourheartlands.com/trans-liberation-or-socialism-you-cant-have-both/

Thats an excellent article. I hope Your Party are declaring loud and clear to their members that this is exactly what they voted for and is now what they stand for.

"Ultra-liberalism elevates the individual above the collective, personal identity above material reality, and feelings above facts. It is the logical endpoint of consumer capitalism applied to the self: you can be whatever you choose to be, reality be damned, and anyone who refuses to affirm your self-conception is oppressing you. Socialism, by contrast, is about collective struggle rooted in material conditions. It recognises that our liberation comes not from declaring ourselves into new categories, but from organising together based on our shared relationship to capital and labour. Where ultra-liberalism says “I define my own reality,” socialism says “our reality is shaped by who owns what, who works for whom, and who profits from our exploitation.” These are incompatible worldviews. One is about the self. The other is about the class. One demands that society validate individual identity. The other demands that society be restructured to serve collective need. You can build a political movement on one or the other. You cannot build it on both.

Gender ideology asks: do you validate my internal sense of self? It replaces class solidarity with identity performance. It turns comrades into enemies over pronouns. It fractures the working class along lines of cultural purity rather than uniting them around shared economic interests. And the ruling class loves it. They can keep looting the country while the left, infiltrated by ultra-liberals, argues about who can use which toilet"

I've always maintained that trans ideology is the apotheosis of American style liberalism and individualism, combined with a huge pinch of big pharma - nothing to do with traditional european left wing values. The U.S has never had a true socialist party or movement...instead they came up with the politics of identity and intersectionalism - which then spawned gender identity theory.

Agreed to some extent. I think definitely the post-2000 push was spearheaded by US first?

The U.S has never had a true socialist party or movement- this unfair. People like Eugene Debs were socialists. The early, stronger trade unions, the New Deal and movements like Dorothy Day's Catholic Workers were all socialist, or in the case of the New Deal, did have strong roots in that.

We don't have to have a neo-liberal economy where everything including us is marketised. Before Thatcher and Reagan et al pushed neo-liberalism we had social democracy and a social contract. This made most lives better, involved some price controls and the state running of utilities - in which there can be no 'market' since we have no choice but to have water and energy, for example - and a well-regulated private sector. Regulation does not have to stifle entrepreneuship, unless you think it's okay to have products and working practices that are dangerous or that people can lose their job just on an employer's whim or because they belong to a union or are pregnant. We don't need a command economy (though the Town and Country Planning Acts were intended to both direct where industry would grow and provide the infrastructure and educational opportunities that would enable such industry) because they don't work very well, just one that doesn't make everything a sellable object and thus ruins everything. Women especially are damaged by neo-liberalism in that it sees our bodies as items to profit from and drives prostitution and pornography as enterprises like any other.

O.k.yes, socialist workers' movements and so on, but the Democrats have never really been a socialist party.

That's right. It did originally have more of a labour base, but arguably the Southern base then (shifted Republican in Nixon's famous Southern Strategy)prevented this from being very strong. Eg. Farm workers were exempt from New Deal union and strike protections due to farmers' lobby (which was what Cesar Chavez's movement was about).

Great post. I would also argue that strikes were out of control in the 70s (due to people like Scargill and Derek Robinson 'Red Robbo' wanted to overturn capitalism entirely), but Thatcher's changes to unions were too much.

Owen Jones an agent of Israel - what??

Israel the paedo capital of the world? This is medieval level anti Semitism. There are some very nasty distortions of the Talmud floating around claiming it allows child abuse (it does NOT) .

If they mean the allegations claiming Lapid or Barak are the unnamed politician who abused Virginia Giuffre, we have no idea. If hypothetically it were one of them, that's clearly not because they're Jewish.

I do think both Epstein & Robert Maxwell may have been agents for Mossad, but Israel is by no means the only government who would potentially go that far to enable abuse - US & UK governments are both heavily mixed in the Epstein inner circle.

I wasn't trying to make an argument on whether neoliberalism itself was good or bad, but rather whether anyone was offering an alternative to it. I mentioned in another comment on this thread, that in the 70s Tony Benn did indeed present a coherent alternative to neoliberalsm. It was a very far reaching proposal to totally reshape the UK economy and you could argue its pros and cons and contrast it with the neoliberal system.

With respect to your points, in a neoliberal framework it's understood that that safety nets are necessary, that situations arise where you have a tragedy of the commons and those situations must be mitigated in a non-market way, that some services are natural monopolies and therefor you can't have pure competitive markets for them (like utilities), that various aspects of business need to be regulated and in particular the labour market need to be regulated. The extent and degree of these measures are what new-labour and the Conservatives fight over. But arguing for higher taxes, extended maternity leave, putting utilities under public ownership rather then being highly regulated private industries, is not arguing against neoliberalsm, it's arguing for a slightly different policy configuration of neoliberalism. And, importantly, if the bond market says: nope. Then those policies are off.

You did mention price controls and regional investment. Those aren't strictly speaking necessary components of neoliberalism but they are broadly compatible (at least in the way they were implemented in the UK) and subject to the same tyranny of international capital (the bond markets) from which Benn was trying to free Britain.

One litmus test of whether a proposed realignment is really post neoliberalism is whether it frees you from the constraints of the bond market. Nothing that's on offer from any of the political parties (and would be political parties) or that's being talked about broaches that. Without a coherent system that avoids the constraints of neoliberalism, neoliberalism remains the only game in town.

I agree. I genuinely dont know h I w some people manage to come up with such rubbish and seem to genuinely believe it, but they are probably the Left wing MAGA. Finnily enough demonstrating the horsehoe theory again that if you go far enough to the Left or Right you pretty much meet in the middle.

I tend to agree, however - good luck getting the left today to reject identity politics.

That Labour Heartlands article is very good, thanks for the link.