Groucho Marxism

The launch of Your Party, the UK’s new left-wing party, is not going very well. On Thursday this week an email went out to potential members inviting them to join the party with a sign-up link, only for another email to be sent out out a few hours later telling everyone to ignore the first email. Many assumed that the initial email was a scam, but it appears that it was sent out by Zarah Sultana and her team, with the second email being sent out by Jeremy Corbyn and his team. Various statements were subsequently made by both Sultana and Corbyn, most of which were not very helpful in clearing up what had actually happened. The whole thing seems a complete mess. If Sultana and Corbyn are sending contradictory emails before the party has even been launched, what hope do they have co-leading the new party?

At times like these we must remind ourselves that the new party is not about Sultana and Corbyn or the reformist advisers they have surrounded themselves with. The new party is (or should be) fundamentally about working class political representation. Still, I think it is important that we try to figure out what is actually going on here. The most sympathetic reading is that there is a difference of opinion between Sultana and Corbyn in how to proceed, with Sultana keen to press ahead and Corbyn keen to bide his time. Thursday’s email fiasco would then reflect a cock-up caused by a lack of communication between the two parties. This explanation has the advantage of adhering to Hanlon’s razor: ‘never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence’.

But if Thursday’s events were the result of a cock-up, it would be a cock-up of epic proportions. Surely Sultana and Corbyn aren’t that incompetent?! I know starting a new political party isn’t easy, but it shouldn’t be this difficult: Nigel Farage managed it, and so did George Galloway (twice). Even Robert Kilroy-Silk, hardly the sharpest tool in the box, managed to get a new party up and running, albeit only briefly. This suggests to me that there is something more sinister going on behind the scenes. I am beginning to wonder whether Corbyn and the people around him may actually be trying to sabotage the new party. The claim seems ridiculous on the face of it: why would Corbyn and his team go through all the effort of getting the ball rolling on this new party only to then try and sabotage it?

One possibility is that Corbyn’s heart just isn’t in this new project. He is probably still feeling bruised from his time as leader of the Labour party, and he must know that whoever leads the new party will be subjected to relentless attacks from the establishment. Perhaps he doesn’t have the stomach to go through all that again – and quite frankly, who could blame him. There is also the fact that Corbyn is a Labour man through-and-through, and has represented the party for all of his political career until only very recently. Corbyn seems to have a loyalty to the Labour Party that is bordering on pathological. I am pretty sure he’d still be in the party now if he hadn’t been thrown out of it, despite the appalling way he was treated by the party establishment and the party’s obvious neoliberal turn.

Personally, though, I think there is more to this than Corbyn not being fully invested. In a statement released yesterday, Sultana said she took the step of unilaterally launching a membership portal after being sidelined by Corbyn and his allies and being frozen out of official accounts. She went on to claim that she had been the victim of a ‘sexist boys club’, and that she had been ‘treated appallingly’ and ‘excluded completely’. According to Sultana, this sexist boys club has refused to allow any other women with voting rights on the Working Group. Sultana went on to point out that Karie Murphy and her associates have ‘sole financial control over members’ money’ and ‘sole constitutional control over our conference’. (If you aren’t aware, Karie Murphy is a trade unionist who served as the Executive Director of the Leader of the Opposition’s Office under Corbyn from 2016 to 2020.)

What are we to make of this? I think it is a clear sign that a small faction has formed around Corbyn that is attempting to take control of, and possibly even sabotage, the new party. This may seem an outlandish and conspiratorial claim, so let me try to back it up a bit. Consider James Schneider, a co-founder of Momentum who was Corbyn’s Director of Strategic Communications during Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour party, and is still one of his closes advisers. Schneider comes across a perfectly likeable, articulate person with genuine left-wing views – until you find out that his wife, Sophie Nazemi, is Keir Starmer’s press secretary! For this reason alone Schneider should be nowhere near the Your Party leadership, as this clearly creates a massive conflict of interest.

It gets worse though: in a 2020 article for the Spectator, Schneider was apparently exposed as a spook by his friend (and fellow spook) David Patrikarakos. Both Patrikarakos and the other subject his article, Schneider’s former flatmate Ben Judah, had been named in leaked documents from the Integrity Initiative, an organ of the UK deep state. To be clear, there is no evidence that Schneider himself is a spy. Nevertheless, Schneider’s friends Patrikarakos and Judah certainly do appear to be close to the intelligence community. Judah is now a senior fellow at the CIA-linked Atlantic Council (effectively NATO’s think tank). Do we really want people like this connected to and influencing the leadership of our new party?

I am aware that what have said above might make me seem a tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist. But if the years 2016-2019 taught us anything at all, it’s to be alive to the danger of progressive movements being sabotaged from within. To look at it another way: if you wanted to prevent a progressive movement from succeeding, what better way to do it than to start one yourself, get thousands enthused about and invested in it, then take control of it at the highest level and deliberately sabotage it? In my view, we must act now and take democratic control of our new party, before it’s too late.