A year ago, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won an overwhelming victory in the UK’s general election, but on barely a third of the total vote. Most analysts thought Starmer would have a lengthy honeymoon period given his huge majority, and the new government started with a leadership determined to maintain discipline, along with a deep suspicion of the Labour left.
A year later, much has changed. Labour has plummeted in the polls, and there is a common view that the parliamentary party has veered to the right and won’t adequately address the sense of inequality, frustration and marginalisation evident across the country.
Within that parliamentary party there is much unease, not least over Gaza, with more than a few MPs showing signs of independent thinking. For the leadership, that is unacceptable and requires discipline – a taste of which has been delivered this week.
Four more backbenchers have had the whip removed for rebelling over the government’s planned disability cuts – including York Central MP Rachael Maskell, who spearheaded the rebellion – and there are rumours that more will follow. A fifth MP, veteran Diane Abbott, has been suspended from Labour for a second time, although the party has not said why.
At ‘Peak Corbyn’, six years or so ago, party membership was close to 600,000 people. Current membership figures are distinctly difficult to come by, but may be less than half of that, while Labour has also continued to slip in the polls, even falling behind Nigel Farage’s Reform Party.
Amid this uncertainty, talk of a new left-wing party has persisted. There is now a move in that direction, with news that a so-far unnamed grouping, involving Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, is on the horizon.
Although that is very much in its early stages, the response has been enthusiastic and is already showing in the polls. One puts the new group on 15%, with Labour’s support falling to the same figure. Taking the Corbyn/Sultana grouping in any kind of arrangement with the Greens would produce 20% support, while another poll suggests that 18% would consider voting for a new party led by Corbyn.
The former Labour leader’s personal popularity is still very high, as shown repeatedly in the size of the audiences across the country when he does events. Last week, he spoke on the final afternoon of the Bradford Literature Festival, itself a remarkable venture that has grown from nothing to Britain’s third largest literature festival in a decade and the most vibrant and multicultural of any. In a crowded programme, Corbyn got a standing ovation from an audience of over a thousand.
The new group has two possible next steps. One is to establish a new party with a formal structure now, so that it can start campaigning for next year’s English local elections, as well as those in the Welsh and Scottish parliaments. The other would be to spend the next year or so consolidating and developing a network of local groups, building a strong support base from the ground up.
The early indication is that the latter avenue might be more realistic, as it seems that a move to form a fully structured party with adequate funding is not going to be rushed and may take many months to emerge.
Of course, this option would not preclude people from standing as independents in forthcoming elections, perhaps with loose coordination, meaning a sharing and promoting of many policies. While this runs counter to the view that having an established party with a clear manifesto on major issues is essential for fighting elections, evidence of it working can already be seen in the Independent Alliance of five MPs elected last year.
But can a wait to form a new party avoid losing momentum? That might depend on how policy is handled.
In the case of the Independent Alliance, its policy positions have mainly centred around specific issues where it disagrees with the government. These include the alliance’s support for scrapping the two-child benefit cap, keeping the winter fuel allowance for pensioners, maintaining Personal Independence Payments and banning arms sales to Israel, as well as its broad opposition to austerity.
These are all likely to be positions supported by any new Corbyn/Sultana grouping, whose wider policy platform can be reasonably assumed to also include renationalising water companies. There is potential for much more, though. Take three examples: wealth, aid and climate.
On the first point, a new grouping could easily garner support by suggesting how it might transform the UK’s loophole-riddled tax system to ensure the wealthiest pay their fair share and reduce the current marginalisation of millions of people. Research published by Tax Justice UK and Patriotic Millionaires UK this year, which outlines ten tax reforms that could raise £60bn, offers a good starting point.
On the second, the grouping should put forward an immediate proposal to restore the £4bn development budget cut, but follow this with increasing the budget to 0.7% and then 1% of GDP. There should be an emphasis on three issues across the Global South: confronting deep poverty, challenging gender disparities and supporting the transitions to renewable energy resources.
The current Labour leadership seems to have little idea of the damage done by its diverting a sizeable chunk of the development budget to the military. “Ploughshares into swords” was anathema not just to activists but to many of the millions of people in the UK who support charities working in the Global South, such as Christian Aid, Save the Children, Oxfam and the rest.
The third issue, climate, must be a persistent focus. This may be one of the few areas where Labour has a reasonable record, but that is largely due to one person, Ed Miliband – and there is still far more that could and should be done. A new left-wing grouping could seize upon this, not least because policies of climate inaction may yet become an Achilles' Heel for Reform and the Conservatives as the evidence of breakdown gathers pace.
Given the support already evident for Corbyn, much of the UK’s right-leaning media and especially its billionaire press will move into overdrive to oppose him and what he stands for.
Bearing in mind the experience of last time, charges of antisemitism will loom large. Those who know Corbyn ridicule such claims, but in any case, it will be harder this time around for the media to misrepresent his opposition to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians as antisemitism, thanks to the policies of the Netanyahu government and the horrors unfolding every day in Gaza.
