
Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana announce new political party
The former Labour leader - who earlier this month appeared to have been blindsided by the announcement of a new party by Ms Sultana - said it was "time for a new political party".
In a post on X, he co-signed a statement with Ms Sultana, the independent MP for Coventry South, urging people to sign up at www.yourparty.uk.
The statement read: "Our movement is made up of people of all faiths and none. The great dividers want you to think that the problems in our society are caused by migrants or refugees. They're not.
"They are caused by an economic system that protects the interests of corporations and billionaires. It is ordinary people who create the wealth - and it is ordinary people who have the power to put it back where it belongs.
"It's time for a new kind of political party. One that is rooted in our communities, trade unions and social movements. One that builds power in all regions and nations. One that belongs to you."
The pair said there would be an inaugural conference where members would decide the party's "direction, the model of leadership and the policies that are needed to transform society".
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


The Independent
18 minutes ago
- The Independent
Crystal Palace have court date set to hear on European future
Crystal Palace is challenging UEFA's decision to demote them from the Europa League to the third-tier Conference League. The demotion is due to UEFA's multi-club ownership rules, specifically concerning John Textor's controlling stake in Palace and his previous ownership of Olympique Lyonnais. A closed-door hearing at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) is scheduled for 8 August, with a ruling anticipated by 11 August. If Crystal Palace's appeal is unsuccessful, Nottingham Forest, who finished seventh in the Premier League, will take their place in the Europa League. Crystal Palace supporters have protested UEFA's decision, including a demonstration at the organisation's headquarters in Switzerland.


The Guardian
19 minutes ago
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on England's riverbanks: landscapes that everyone should be able to enjoy
In a country often said to be racked by division, criticising the condition of rivers is one of England's few unifying pastimes. Sewage dumping, which occurred for nearly 4m hours in English rivers and coastal waters last year, has become a potent source of anger, inspiring campaigners to push for cleaner water. Despite the concern that people show for England's rivers, however, it is remarkably difficult to stroll along their banks, let alone take a dip. The Guardian's recent reporting on the River Dart in Devon has shown that large stretches of its bank are privately owned, and many of these are difficult to access. The researcher Lewis Winks, who used Land Registry data to map the Dart's ownership, found the 47-mile long river has no fewer than 108 separate owners. The Duchy of Cornwall owns 28 miles of riverbank; two aristocratic estates own a further 13; 11.6 miles are owned via offshore companies. Wilks's map gives a snapshot of a national problem. Only 4% of English rivers are open to the public. As the demand for swimming spots has surged, many paddlers and kayakers have been reprimanded for trespassing. Paths alongside rivers often meander far from their banks to avoid privately owned land; one can 'walk' along the River Test in Hampshire, for example, yet much of its bank is inaccessible. In 2020, visitors to one of its few access points found it blocked by a barbed wire gate. The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs told the Guardian that England is a 'nation of nature lovers'. But the nation's feudal patterns of land ownership put much of nature off limits. Forming a deeper connection with the environment can inspire people to care for it. Campaigns for bathing water status, which compel the Environment Agency to improve water quality in rivers designated for swimming, are testimony to this. They are driven by people who directly experience these landscapes, and so want to protect them. Labour pledged to improve access to nature and protect wildlife in its 2024 manifesto, but its ministers have since diluted both promises. The government's new planning bill will weaken environmental protections by allowing developers to offset their destruction of natural habitats, rather than avoiding such destruction to begin with. In opposition, Labour vowed to introduce a right to roam. In government, it U-turned on this promise, bending to pressure from landowner groups. Its plan to create nine new 'river walks' is a paltry compensation. The government has given no detail on where these walks will be located or how it will create them, and its plan will probably be thwarted by the same 'permissive' model of access that campaigners object to, where rights of way depend on the goodwill of individual landowners. To create a walk along the length of the Dart, each of its 108 landowners would have to voluntarily allow the public to use their land. The Dart is small: longer rivers will pose even greater challenges. Landowners have long attempted to shield their estates from public view. 'Concealing wealth,' writes the land campaigner Guy Shrubsole, 'is part and parcel of preserving it.' A plan by the housing minister Matthew Pennycook to open up the Land Registry will make it easier to see who owns England's riverbanks. But this doesn't go far enough, since there is no guarantee that landowners will allow the public to enjoy these landscapes. This, surely, has to change.


The Guardian
19 minutes ago
- The Guardian
My message to doctors, after five days of strikes? Work with us: if you go to war with us, you'll lose
As five days of strike action by resident doctors come to an end, the BMA has written asking me to return to the negotiating table. I've responded, with the irony of their letter being that I never left the table. We are back to where we were two weeks ago, when I sat down in good faith and offered to work intensively with them over a few weeks to negotiate a package of measures that would make a real difference in meeting the costs of doctors' training, the costs associated with being a doctor and the lack of promotion opportunities. The only difference between now and a fortnight ago is the damage that the BMA has done to the NHS through its reckless strike action. Thanks to the hard work of NHS leaders and the heroic efforts of frontline staff who stepped up, including many resident doctors who showed up for work, the disruption was not as bad as it might have been. We managed to protect more operations and procedures than in previous years, and our accident and emergency response times improved during the period of strike action. But I do not want for a moment to play down the real impact of strike action on patients. The BMA has made no bones about the fact that it wanted to do damage to the progress we are making on cutting waiting lists and waiting times, and use the suffering of patients as leverage against the government. It cannot duck the consequences of its actions now. On Saturday, I spoke to a patient whose kidney cancer surgery has been postponed by a month until the end of August. I rang him personally to apologise because, having been through kidney cancer myself, I know exactly how it feels to wait, and the impact the fear and anxiety has on our families and close friends. It was just one of countless examples of cancer care that was affected, not to mention many other operations, appointments and procedures. We are still counting the costs of strike action on patients and stretched NHS budgets – budgets that doctors are relying on to deliver real improvements to their working conditions, as well as to patient care. Doctors are not the only staff I am responsible for in the NHS. The Royal College of Nursing will shortly publish a survey of its members and, without having seen the results, I have spent enough time with our nurses to know that they have not felt valued by the previous government and they are looking to Labour to deliver meaningful change to their profession. The GMB union has made similar representations on behalf of paramedics. Unite returned a negative ballot this week. Unison, the largest trade union in the country, knows better than anyone that staff right across the NHS are looking for material improvements to their pay and conditions. Many of them will never earn as much as the lowest-paid doctor. I have committed to work with them through the NHS staff council to make sure that we drive real change for their members, too. None of them have had a pay rise of 28.9%. Only resident doctors can claim to have received the highest pay rise in the public sector two years in a row. No wonder other NHS staff have looked on aghast at the action of the BMA. The BMA's demands, and the speed with which it launched a strike – and a five-day strike at that – have left many other NHS staff, most of them paid far less than doctors, dismayed and appalled. The BMA is now adding jobs to its pay dispute, presumably because its members agree that picking a fight on pay after a 28.9% pay increase is unprecedented and unreasonable, and they are more worried about whether they have jobs to go into. They are right to be concerned, but working with the BMA to address doctor unemployment and career bottlenecks are among a number of things we are able and willing to do to improve the lives of doctors. All I ask of the BMA is two things. The first is to drop this unnecessary and unreasonable rush to strike action. It harms doctors, it harms patients and it is fundamentally self-defeating, because it leaves the NHS with less money to address the issues that doctors care about. The second is to recognise that this government has a responsibility to all NHS staff and, above all, to patients. We can't fix everything for everyone everywhere all at once. Labour didn't break the NHS, nor did the doctors. Patients are looking to us to work together, as a team, to get their NHS back on its feet and build an NHS fit for the future. The past 12 months has shown what this government and the NHS can achieve when we pull together. Waiting lists are at their lowest levels in two years and it feels like the NHS is finally moving in the right direction. It should be clear to the BMA by now that it will lose a war with this government. It's not too late for us both to win the peace. Wes Streeting is secretary of state for health and social care Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.