Communists and many others on the left are looking with interest at the new initiative emerging from meetings between Jeremy Corbyn, Zara Sultana, other prominent labour movement figures, local councillors and community campaigns.
Ex-Labour MPs Corbyn and Sultana announced the formation what will be a new left-wing party in a joint statement on July 24, although as yet it has no official name, structures or policies. Nonetheless, more than half a million people have since registered their willingness to support and take part in the new project by going online to yourparty.uk.
The website’s founding statement is short and very general, but Jeremy Corbyn has elaborated some main lines of policy in an article in The Guardian on July 29. These should come as no surprise to CP members:
- Lift the two-child benefit cap and restore disability cuts
- Invest in welfare not warfare
- Return water, energy, rail and mail to public ownership
- Tax the wealthy more
- Stop the scapegoating of migrants and minorities
- End political and military support for Israeli genocide
- Justice for the Palestinian people
Clearly, Corbyn is constrained in what he can set out at this early stage: he wants the party’s founding members to play a full, democratic part in determining its policies and structures.
The Communist Party has made no formal comment on these developments yet, although there has been some discussion at our Executive and Political Committees. The question features in the EC’s draft Main Resolution to be issued to all members, branches, districts and nations on August 14 and so will be considered on November 7-9 at our 58th Congress.
What can be said at this point?
Firstly, this initiative is likely to mark a significant new point of departure for the Labour Party and the left in Britain, and possibly for the electoral struggle for working-class representation at Westminster in particular.
Why? Because there are already eight ex-Labour and independent pro-Palestine MPs signed up to it. One or two more are likely to join them very soon, while other left Labour MPs are staying put at present.
With successful electoral machinery already in place in a number of localities and thousands of volunteers ready to join it, this new formation is qualitatively different from recent attempts – the Socialist Alliance, TUSC, Respect, George Galloway’s Workers Party – to set up a substantial electoral alternative to the Labour Party.
Clearly, the rightwards march of Keir Starmer’s bureaucratic-centralist party and government is driving the advance of the Corbyn-Sultana proto-party in public opinion polls.
In our EC and PC discussions, comrades have taken a broadly supportive view of these developments. Labour has been fertilising the ground for the growth of Nigel Farage’s ReformUK, demonising asylum seekers, banging the British nationalist war drum and alienating millions of working-class voters with policies to protect the City speculators, the super-rich and the crooks who run the privatisation racket in the energy and transport sectors.
Hence the second point: the emergence of a popular force to the left of today’s Labour Party will offer a substantial alternative to ReformUK and could – however remote the prospects look today – conceivably assist a left-led fightback inside the Labour Party despite the severe erosion there of inner-party democracy.
At the same time, Communists should be cautious and realistic as well as broadly positive in our attitude to the Corbyn-Sultana movement. The pitfalls are there as the hostile mass media – except, of course, for the Morning Star – and the Labour machine prepare to use all kinds of lies, distortions and dirty tricks to discredit the new party and its leaders.
Importantly, there have been no major responses from the trade union movement, notably from unions affiliated to the Labour Party. Any mass electoral alternative to Labour needs the solid base and the reach into working-class communities that unions can provide.
The experience of previous electoral initiatives on the left pose two other problems that will have to be confronted: firstly, the readiness of ultra-leftist sects to infiltrate broad-based mass movements in order to divide them, pose as a ‘left opposition’ to the leadership and recruit from those they can influence and mislead; and secondly, the danger that founding and building a new party could divert many of its new members from their invaluable work in mass campaigning movements for peace, for Palestine, against austerity cuts and racism, etc.
It was primarily the growth and activity of Stop the War, CND and the People’s Assembly that created a popular base for Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour Party leader in 2015. As inner-party organisation and struggle – together with electoral work – subsequently claimed more of their time, too many Corbyn supporters sharply curtailed the extra-parliamentary activism that might otherwise have sustained Corbyn’s leadership against its powerful enemies.
Corbyn’s Labour also failed to analyse the EU in class terms, its idealist notions leading to disastrously wrong positions in the EU Referendum campaign and on a Second Referendum. What position will the new party adopt on this and issues such as identity politics, federalism, NATO membership and relations with China?
The left in Britain should heed the lessons from Greece, where Syriza soared and then soured as it replaced the PASOK social-democrats, capitulated to EU-IMF austerity and privatisation demands as the KKE retained its working-class base and its Communist principles; in Spain, PODEMOS (also like Syriza without a stable class-based theoretical foundation) surged and then retreated, unable to supplant the PSOE social-democrats who refused to collapse.
The Communist Party will, as before, consider how best it can work with its socialist and progressive allies, whether in the new party or in Labour and others. How can we help ensure that mass campaigning surges forward, combating the Labour government’s anti-working class and warmongering policies, exposing the class character of ReformUK and isolating the racists?
Of one thing we can be sure: the peoples and the working class of Britain and its three nations need a much stronger and more influential Communist Party; one which is organised for broad-based mass struggle and engages in independent electoral work, putting forward the consistent socialist and anti-imperialist politics derived from our Marxist-Leninist analysis.
Mass campaigning – the key to advance!
Build left unity and the United Front!
The Communist Party – for working-class power!
Robert Griffiths
General Secretary
Communist Party
1 August 2025
END.
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