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

As a member I don't really know any more than you. You'd need to ask someone personally connected to the people involved. There isn't any information in between what they know and what the general public knows from news reports, for the membership to be privy to.

Yes it's a shambles. My view is that it's really important who's actually in the wrong - did ZH break the law by setting up the membership portal without agreement? Was her willingness to force the initial announcement reasonable reaction to the others' dithering, or just an expression of her own ego? There doesn't seem to be enough information available to judge, although hopefully it will become clearer over time, for example as any legal action plays out. That doesn't stop a lot of people from believing what they want to believe though (on both sides).

Members seem pretty dismissive of the two MPs who have resigned, saying that "they weren't socialists anyway" (which to be fair is largely true, their common cause with Jeremy and Zarah seeming to start and end with Gaza). Some people calling them transphobes and siding with Zarah over TWAW, though it's difficult to say how large a proportion of the membership as non-TWAWs often tend to keep quiet, for obvious reasons.

It will be interesting to see what emerges out of conference next week. I'm just holding on to membership to give myself voting rights, and then if there isn't something at the end of it that makes some kind of sense, I'm out.

Members seem pretty dismissive of the two MPs who have resigned, saying that "they weren't socialists anyway" (which to be fair is largely true, their common cause with Jeremy and Zarah seeming to start and end with Gaza).
The thing is- well yes, they haven't suddenly sprung this on the members- that they are Muslims and not the Liberal 'Cultural' Muslims. But full blown religious faith based MP's elected on that ticket. It makes it even clearer that they were seen as nothing but 'NPC's' by many of the people involved in YP. They have courted people who are fairly religious, didn't really care about any of the other concerning things they stood for as a result of their religious belief (Cousin marriage, blasphemy laws etc) but then suddenly realised they weren't 'real socialists' when they have said things that did affect them like the whole TWAW issue.

I don't think anyone cares that they are muslims, and I don't think being a muslim, even a devout one, means that you can't also be a socialist.

It's more about the fact that Adnan Hussein is a landlord, that both he and Iqbal Mohamed voted against the VAT on private schools bill, and reactions to their voting record generally (which I haven't looked into so I can't say any more about). So nothing to do with religion, just good old fashioned Interests Of Capital vs Interests Of Labour.

I don't know where you're getting the stuff about them standing for blasphemy laws and cousin marriage. It's news to me and even if it's true, that's not been an issue anyone has raised upon their departure.

The only area where their faith could be seen as a factor is in their opposition to TWAW and insistance on sex-based rights which may be informed by concerns of the muslim women in their constituencies. But even there no-one (that I've seen) has framed it as a conflict between trans rights and Islam. The trans rights fanatics just see anyone who isn't 100% with them on every issue as a transphobe, and aren't particularly interested why they believe what they do (hence their unwillingness to enter into constructive dialogue about it).

And after all it's not like only muslims are opposed to TWAW. Indeed the exact same conflict has arisen in relation to Mark Serwotka, expressing his support for FiLiA in a context without any reference to religion whatsoever.

Funnily enough, the left's total opposition to buy-to-let landlords was never an issue when Lloyd Russell-Moyle was chair of the Campaign Group.

I mean I wouldn't like to assume that the far left are using a code word to be pejorative about a minority, because they've definitely never done that before.

There's basically 50/50 chance that after the next general election the UK will have a government formed by Labour and the fringe left parties. (and 50/50 of Tories + Reform, or less likely, Reform alone) That means that anyone who manages to lead one of the left parties represented in parliament, no matter how small, will likely get a cabinet position. So the stakes are really quite high. From a purely political perspective, Sultana has every incentive to factionalize YP in a way that she leads the rump of what's left or one of the the larger splinter groups.

Except that the relationship between the popular vote and representation in parliament is not linear: a party needs to get above a certain critical mass of support (and/or have that support centralised in particular geographical areas, like the SNP) before gaining any MPs at all.

Given that YP is new, has to fight the whole widespread scepticism about socialism generally and the power of billionaire-owned media to direct the national conversation about it, and seems to be doing everything in its power to give those forces ammunition, it's questionable whether it can reach that threshold even if it does manage to stay united and relatively (in socialist terms) "broad church".

If it splinters I can't see any of the emerging factions getting more than the odd one or two MPs here or there, like the single issue Gaza MPs did last time. More likely they'll just lose their deposits. Particularly if the Greens keep getting their shit together, providing a left alternative that appears much more credible in comparison.

Your Party is not the Labour party, that's the whole point. Plenty of Labour MPs are landlords, because Labour is a party that seeks to maintain and serve capitalism while hopefully focusing on the interests of workers and the majority within it. Labour is not an explicitly socialist party. Well, it still describes itself as democratic socialist in its aims and values but noone really believes that that means anything much.

Most Your Party members seem to be intending that the party WILL be explicitly socialist. There remain differing interpretations of what that actually means, but it will probably involve drawing a number of clear lines on issues where Labour has, at best, a vague group memory of good intentions diluted to near-extinction by decades of acquiescence to neoliberalism. For example nationalisation of essential public services, and opposition to imperialist wars abroad. For a lot of people who call themselves socialists, landlordism is one of those lines. I don't know how they managed that in relation to the socialist campaign group and LRM, if indeed they were Labour members at the time, as the party itself wasn't formulated on that basis.

I don't know what you mean about the last part - that all muslims are landlords? You seem to just be looking for a stick to beat the left with where there isn't one. Which is odd when they seem to be doing such a committed job of handing out real sticks to anybody who wants one.

I agree. The coalition is likely to be Labour/Lib Dem and possibly Green or Tory/Reform. I suspect YP will not exist by the next election. Corbyn is too old, Sultana is aligning herself with the Hard Left of the SWP, which will be highly unappetising to the majority of people and will probably lose her seat and the Greens are basically a Left Party pretending they still care about the environment.

I'm basically arguing from a maths perspective. Let's run a hypothetical scenario that Labour popularity continues to go somewhat lower and the Tories don't recover going into a general election. So we have 20% and 15% of the popular votes cast respectively. Even if both of them received twice as many MPs as their share of the vote, Labour would need to pull in approximately 1/3 of the remaining non-Labour, non-Tory MPs to form a government.

Since the large majority of those are likely to be Reform, that means picking up almost every single non Reform MP: YP + LD + Green + the odd independent + YP splinter-off. If Reform has more than 2/3 of the remaining MPs, i.e. approximately 20% of the over-all number of MPs, they would form a government with the Tories. This assumes the non-linearity that you mentioned and assumes Reform will far under perform its share of the popular vote (which I think is likely). It illustrates just how severe the collapse in popular sentiment is of the major parties really is at the moment.

Tabulated;

Labour: 260
Conservative: 195
Reform: 130 (need one more)
LD: 100
Green; ??? (need 15)
YP: ??? (need 15)
Faction: ??? (need 15)

The point isn't that the exact scenario above is likely; it's that forming the next government is likely to be quite chaotic, and being independent of the major parties is likely to give you disproportionate power if you're aligned as the leader of a party, even if that party has only a handful of sitting MPs (as long as you're one of the them.)

I don't know if Corbyn will be standing at the next election. He seems determined to go on, but he's getting to the age where he might have to think about retirement. Galloway, who is younger than Corbyn, is not planning to contest the next election.

On current polling, there could be a dozen or so independent MPs aligned to Operation Muslim Vote. Their target areas are not areas where the Greens are likely to have a breakthrough, and I suspect Polanski will be canny enough not to try and bring those candidates into the GP.

Sultana will not be re-elected. She's deeply unpopular in Coventry and I don't see her getting in anywhere else. Honestly, if YP want to contend in Coventry, they'd be better off with Dave Nellist - he's getting on a bit but he's a lovely man and people actually like him.

On balance I don't think YP will exist at the next election. It hasn't even been founded yet and the very same faultlines from Respect are already there - albeit in a modulated form, so 20 years ago the SWP condemned the Muslim element for its "small business mentality" rather than landlordism. But the attitude to the Gaza MPs is very reminiscent of how they treated the Tower Hamlets and Newham councillors as NPCs who would just do what John Rees told them.

I am not fond of Rees, but he's a bit more impressive than Violet Bott and her entourage.

As for the left having a habit of using codewords as an acceptable way of being pejorative about minorities - I would think it's quite obvious what I meant.

Is there a reason that you omit potential SNP seats?

Basically I don't expect them to change very much - same for sinn fein and plaid cymru and it further complicates the picture of how the left right split will play out with the collapse of both Labour and the Tories. But no offense was intended 😅.

Both SNP & Plaid Cymru would be expected to support a Left coalition led by Labour so the number of seats doesn't depend on the loons in the Greens or YP.

I agree. My only point with my napkin calculation was to point out that even if you assume non-linear numbers of MPs to percentage of the popular vote (and really especially if you consider it) you can easily get to a situation where Labour has to pick up nearly all the center-left to far left non-Tory, non-Reform MPs to form a government which gives MPs in splinter parties disproportionate influence even when the splinter parties are very small and not ideologically coherent.

Looking at Electoral Calculus, and be aware this is a lagging indicator because it's their end of October prediction, and a new one will be along in a few days, they're projecting 13 independent wins in mainland GB (Alex Easton in Northern Ireland is a very different sort of independent):

Blackburn (Adnan Hussain incumbent)
Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed incumbent)
Bradford West
Bradford East
Birmingham Perry Barr (Ayoub Khan incumbent)
Birmingham Ladywood
Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley
Leicester South (Shockat Adam incumbent)
Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn incumbent)
East Ham
Bethnal Green and Stepney
Ilford North
Ilford South
Slough

That's probably close to the high tide - there aren't very many other seats that look like obvious targets. (There are a few that leap to mind, like the remaining Tower Hamlets and Newham seats, maybe a couple more in Birmingham, but not very many.)

With the exception of Islington North, where Corbyn has huge personal support, these are all very heavily Muslim constituencies. That means the candidate will be Gaza Independent, i.e. precisely the people the far left want to push out of YP.

Outside of heavily Muslim areas, I don't see very many YP candidates saving their deposits. We have a long history in the UK of far left candidates standing for election with minimal success. The handful of recent successes (think of someone like Counterfire's Michael Lavalette in Preston) have been surfing the wave of Gaza votes. But there have been other cases up north of Green or even Lib Dem candidates benefiting from Gaza votes - whoever was best placed to punish Labour locally.

The far left groups seem to be high on their own farts if they imagine they can trash Corbyn, trash the Gaza MPs and ride to success on the back of Sultana's alleged popularity.

Let's also mention that, for the far left groups, ideology is a problem - extremism doesn't survive contact with normie voters - but potentially a much bigger problem is safeguarding. The SWP's rape coverups are fairly well known (though "Comrade Delta" is the tip of the iceberg), but there have been similar issues in the SPEW, the AWL and the micro-sects. Sultana may have turned her back on the socially conservative element only to ally with the rapey element.

I don't know where you're getting the stuff about them standing for blasphemy laws and cousin marriage. It's news to me and even if it's true, that's not been an issue anyone has raised upon their departure.
Both of the MPs who have now left YP oppose a ban on cousin marriage and are in favour of putting a definition of Islamophobia into law. Both of those things are regressive 'socially conservative' and harm Muslim women more than any other groups. The fact that it didn't matter and wasn't discussed meant that they didn't care about 'social conservatism' when YP was being set up, and they didnt care that anyone was a 'landlord'. Otherwise they should have raised concerns at the time. You can be Muslim and a socialist like Zahra Sultana and Ask Sarkar. But if the fact that MP's were 'socially conservative' is now a problem it should have been a problem at the time. Now they have divided into obvious factions- what did they even have in common in the first place.

On current polling, there could be a dozen or so independent MPs aligned to Operation Muslim Vote. Their target areas are not areas where the Greens are likely to have a breakthrough, and I suspect Polanski will be canny enough not to try and bring those candidates into the GP.

I think the Greens will run candidates against Indy MPs which may potentially affect the outcome depending on who they use. For instance Mothin Ali type Greens may be a significant draw and could even defeat an Indy candidate or even let Labour sneak through. Where YP candidates might have an advantage is as a party they might be able to cut a deal with the Greens to let them have a free run in exchange for standing down in other areas as the Greens have negotiated with Lib Dems before sometimes.

Though ZP is so ambitious and trending he might see no need for a deal. It will depend if YP actually starts something solid and fights successfully in elections in the next few years. YP need to decide what they are doing in May. In Scotland they are running and Glasgow YP may have significant impact there on the list votes.

OK I didn't know that about their positions, thanks. However I'm not sure "a definition of Islamophobia" is the same thing as blasphemy law. Islamophobia is normally considered to mean discrimination against muslims, not offence against the words of Islamic scripture.

One problem is it's not clear, or maybe consistent, who you mean by "they". This conversation started with me saying YP members had reacted to Hussein and Mohamed's departures by writing them off as transphobic and non-socialist. Those members weren't given a say in their role setting up the party in the first place - indeed the process started with the six MPs before there was even a membership at all, so I'm not sure how their background and voting record would have been scrutinised by the non-existent members to a sufficient degree to allay your implications of hypocrisy.

Once the party was announced, Jeremy and Zarah were obviously the headline figures and at any rate, it was made clear that all the preparations going on were only that, and that the choice of established leadership going forward would be subject like everything to decisions by the membership starting at the national conference. If after that they'd chosen to elect Hussein and Mohamed as leaders, then you may have a point.

FWIW there were plenty of members voicing rumblings about Hussein before he resigned, for example when he had the initial spat with Sultana over the trans issue. And I personally knew of a few people who had not signed up yet because they had reservations about those factors, but have signed up now he's resigned. So no I don't think the sudden u-turn on social conservatism that you make it out to be is accurate.

Ok maybe I'm being unfair as I thought the 5 independent MPs had become part of the project almost immediately (or as soon as it was belatedly announced after Sultana had bounced JC into action) so people joined knowing what the setup of the party was, which means they more or less ignored the voting records and opinions of these MPs either because they didnt think it mattered until they started voicing opinions they didnt like and them suddenly decided they didnt want ' socially conservative' people in the party. If people joined after the 2 MPs resigned because they were concerned about their views then they are obviously not being hypocritical. Im my experience the Left has a history of treating women and ethnic minorities as bit players in the great movement of White Middle Class Worthy Men fighting oppression from other White Middle Class Men who arent as worthy as them.

The independent MPs were already on board when the party was announced so yes, people signed up knowing they were part of it. Most people probably didn't scrutinize all their voting records (I certainly didn't). It was very much presented with Jeremy and Zarah at the forefront so I think we all just assumed their politics was the basis for it, and the others must have been reasonably close to it to get involved. Maybe that was a mistake, but God knows there was more than enough information to try and digest with the chaotic launch already.

And if we'd said "Ooh we like Jeremy and Zarah but don't want to join due to those muslim MPs", then I'm sure you'd be telling us how Islamophobic we are.

In my experience the Left has a history of treating women and ethnic minorities as bit players in the great movement of White Middle Class Worthy Men fighting oppression from other White Middle Class Men who arent as worthy as them.

And yet the most prominent player in this, who has strong support throughout the membership - including taking her side on allegations of being shut out by the "boys' club" - and who has been the subject of much of this thread, is both a woman and from an ethnic minority.

But don't let the facts get in the way of a good story!

Well, I'm probably regretting my 50/50 odds prediction and election arithmetic. But, I would still underline the new electoral territory in which we find ourselves. In the last 125 years there has never been a general election in which at least one of the major parties (lib dems, when it was major, Labour or Conservative) didn't have more than 30% of the vote, and only one election in that same time period in which Labour alone - after it had ascended to major party status - didn't have at least 30% of the vote .

If people cast protest votes against both Labour and the Tories, historical precedents - like: far left parties don't do well in UK politics - become less relevant. UK voters did protest-voted against Tories in the 2024 showing they now are included to do so. And I think it's quite likely they will do so against Labour in the next general election, very possibly while still protesting Tories. If that were to happen we would have a UK election that that's unprecedented in the modern era. More than than I probably shouldn't venture to speculate.

I realise that but I'm talking historically in the Labour movement.

Zarah Sultana is closely and openly allied with the SWP.

Does she get off the hook for that because of her sex and ethnicity?

Not from me she doesn't.

I think that is the issue though. I take your point that the members would assume that the people who were the founding members of a group would have at least broadly similar views, and the blame for that probably lies with JC, who quickly aligned himself with them but it is hardly news that religious groups are... religious? If you don't want a socially conservative party don't align with religious groups who are socially conservative ( Almost all of them are to some extent which is why Socialism is largely atheistic) It just seems a bit silly to start a movement that includes two groups who have literally nothing in common but their opposition to a foreign war. There should have been more to them than that and Jeremy Corbyn should have done more due dilligence and put together some kind of point to the party before starting to take money from people. I agree most of this has been caused by Sultana jumping the gun but JC is also to blame. How did this whole thing even start? Who told Sultana about it and why did she leave the Labour party to announce a party that didn't exist, had no aims? Had she had conversations with Corbyn about it? They took money from people on the basis they were going to put together a 'new kind of party' but didn't know what that was because they didn't do the basics of deciding what their aims and objectives were outside of opposition to Israel.