Britain’s New Left-Wing Party May Be Devastating for Labour

This week, Keir Starmer announced that Britain would recognize a Palestinian state in September, if Israel doesn’t agree to a cease-fire first. Starmer’s arrogant posture — teasing the idea that the former colonial power might acknowledge Palestinian self-determination — was matched only by its triviality. While Britain still arms Israel’s destruction of Gaza, Starmer avoided mention of how a Palestinian state will come into being or what its rightful borders would be. This PR stunt, designed only to draw a bashful distance from Israel, was breathtaking in its cynicism.

While some right-wing outlets mocked Starmer for capitulating to criticism from Labour MPs, his comments hardly suggested a change of heart. He made no apology for his government’s role in arming Israel and failed to criticize its criminal actions, instead relying on agencyless phrases like talk of a “catastrophic failure of aid.” In a year in government, Starmer’s Labour Party has surely underestimated public anger at Israeli crimes. Under pressure from the pro-Palestine movement, and a rather belated media outcry, it is now opportunistically changing its tone. Still, few will forget Starmer’s line up until now.

Gaza is sure to have blowback on British politics. The obvious comparison is the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq. Tony Blair’s staunch stand alongside George W. Bush likewise fused government dishonesty, the demonization of critics, and an ultimate but vague admission of official “mistakes.” Even this bloodbath only slowly had effects on party politics, and alternative left-wing forces achieved only sporadic local breakthroughs. But eventually, the destruction of trust did deeply undermine New Labour. The legacy of the antiwar movement played a crucial role in lifting Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership in 2015.

Today it seems that Gaza will have a far more immediate effect. Voters’ party affiliations are less certain than in 2003, and Starmer never had a genuinely strong mandate. If in the July 2024 election Labour won a large parliamentary majority over the decrepit Tories — taking 411 of 650 seats in the House of Commons — it rallied a low vote total: just 33.7 percent support on a poor sub-60 percent turnout. If Labour’s polling has kept falling over the last year, the announcement that Corbyn and Zarah Sultana are to found a new left-wing party is set to blow a further hole in its support. The Starmer government’s pigheaded authoritarianism — on immigration, disability benefits, and even its treatment of its own dissident MPs — is spurring an organized response.

Details about the new party remain scant. Announced as a website called Your Party, it is to decide its name through a still-unspecified democratic process. Six hundred thousand people signed up for its email list within just days. These are not members. But this interest made a mockery of self-styled “sensible-centrist” pundits’ attempts to ridicule the project: for it revealed the more important truth that very many people, indeed more than Labour’s own total membership, feel such a party is necessary. This is not a rerun of past “radical-left-party” projects based on small revolutionary groups: it starts from a large base of people who identify as potential activists.

All political parties are coalitions of social interests and ideas. The initial group of MPs associated with this party, if broadly left-wing, has above all been united by Gaza: it was on that basis that five independents won election last July, an unusually high count given Britain’s electoral system. Surely Palestine is no mere “single issue” outside of domestic politics proper: it crystallizes millions of people’s perceptions of Britain’s role in the world, the boundaries of political discussion, and the policing of Muslims. This new party also couldn’t have taken off without Corbyn, whose name recognition is among the highest of all British politicians. If only a minority of Brits admire him, most people know already what he stands for.

Still, this leaves fundamental questions about what this party is really meant to do. Many online debates have revolved around the idea of electoral pacts with the Greens, whose possible next leader is the progressive Zack Polanski. But does this party aspire to lead the national government after the next general election? Does it aim to replace Labour, to recreate something like a trade-union-based party with a better platform? Perhaps it’s a permanent party of opposition, base-building locally in order to empower working-class people and move politics away from Westminster? Without some agreement on this longer-term agenda — its outward-facing orientation to a mass base — it will be difficult to stop those who are today signing up from splintering over all manner of issues.

When Corbyn was Labour leader, he adopted better policies than his predecessors, but the party never distributed power beyond Westminster. Its failure to create more rooted structures, and its fear of conflictual, mass politics — including on heated issues like Brexit — ensured that it was continually blown around by media attacks and the attempt to adjust to and appease them. While in recent decades parliament has become ever more dominated by professionals, and the local structures of the labor movement have withered, the 2015–20 instance of “Corbynism” did poorly in changing this imbalance. Yes, it stood atop a mostly hostile Labour Party machine. But this had to be a call to do things differently rather than a mere alibi.

Many doubts about the new party refer to its still-opaque process: Who decides what comes next? It surely doesn’t want to create a Labour-style structure dominated by bureaucratic maneuverers and masters of rulebook jargon. Yet not everything about Labour’s history should be dispensed with. Its roots in the trade unions, however withered, grant it a residual activist base in touch with a broad array of working-class feeling, not all of it left-wing. Labour is today losing these connections to nurses and ex-mining communities and out-of-town industrial estates, and a party of progressive opinion like the Greens seems unlikely to pick them up; but it is something that a party oriented to the social majority surely needs.

Can this be created anew, or better, in a manner more suited to this century than the last? One approach is to build institutions — social clubs, advice centers — not directed toward narrowly electoral ends or even political campaigning as such. A project for collective change will surely struggle to “sell” its promise in an atomized society just by using the right messaging on TV or social media. This party might moreover think about ensuring it diversifies its public faces, also in terms of class background and education — a party led not by political science grads or NGO staff or those ever-eager to put themselves forward but also voices now more absent from political life.

Polls today suggest that Reform UK has a real chance of winning the next general election despite its own messy internal affairs: its leader, Nigel Farage, has the charismatic authority to make him the face of an array of grievances. Corbyn or Sultana or any other left-winger would never be able to play such a role, and not just because of any failings on their part. Socialist change is about changing the power relations in society: it relies on mobilizing people in moral indignation but also the stout defense of their own interests. Left-wing parties need an activist core, today likely tilted toward the higher-educated and downwardly mobile, but this cannot be enough.

Faced with a dim-witted imperial bureaucrat like Starmer, a left-wing party has every chance of rallying 10 or 15 percent of the electorate even in a short time frame. This will likely split the Labour vote, and Starmer will have scant grounds to complain. Feeble attempts to invoke the higher need for unity against Farage are as cynical as the belated “recognition” of Palestine. Only two years ago, Starmer had told his critics: “If you don’t like the changes that we’ve made, you can leave.” Now, many will. The Labour Party will not last forever, and Starmer is bringing it closer to a French– or Italian-style demise. What remains unclear is whether a new party can build something stronger on the ruins.