Inside the factions of the new left

New Statesman​

2 days ago

Photo byBritain's new left-wing political party is coming into view. It has already attracted 650,000 supporters, eclipsing the membership of every other outfit in Westminster. Its initial platform, drafted by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, is both popular and transformative: wealth taxes, public ownership, climate justice, anti-racism and an end to the UK's complicity in Israeli war crimes. Polling suggests that the organisation is already level with Labour, and that it could take voters from Reform.
Aware of the project's vast potential, the often fissiparous British left has united behind it, although the details of how it will work – politically, strategically, organisationally – are to be decided. Private conversations among socialist leaders and operators have yielded various questions about the party's internal structure and external orientation. It now falls to its activist base, who will gather at its inaugural conference this autumn, to confront them.
First, there is debate about whether a party organised along traditional lines is even what's needed. Jamie Driscoll, the former North of Tyne mayor, has cautioned that building a new party straight away 'is not realistic… It will have to start as an alliance, so independents can come in.' Andrew Feinstein, the former ANC politician who ran an insurgent campaign against Keir Starmer in Holborn and St Pancras last year, has made similar remarks: 'If we just create another party,' there's a risk of alienating the increasing numbers of people 'fed up with politics as we know it'. His answer is to 'build from the local, from the grassroots up'.
In one sense, this kind of coalitional structure would fit with the fragmented state of progressive civil society. How else could a single organisation tie together a wide range of leadership figures, labour struggles and social movements? Yet a loose federation also threatens to institutionalise such fractures. A group called Collective, directed by Corbyn's former chief of staff Karie Murphy and the politician Pamela Fitzpatrick, believes that only a cohesive, unified party would be capable of channelling public opposition to the status quo. Its goal, a spokesperson said, is to establish 'a party with an inclusive and democratic leadership structure' and a firm 'class-based politics', in which 'unions would play a fundamental part'. They insist that bureaucracy should be kept to a minimum at national level, and decision-making should be decentralised, but that this basic structure needs to be in place to harness grassroots energies effectively.
Two other figures who have been participating in the discussions are James Schneider and Andrew Murray. Both previously worked for Corbyn's Labour, and both are agnostic on the alliance-vs-party question. The first, says Schneider, risks a 'loosey-goosey umbrella of independents that offers no governmental perspective for real change', the second a 'reheated Labourism with better politics but a similar party form'. What's needed instead is a highly coordinated vehicle, 'based mostly outside Westminster', whose aim is to diffuse power through society. By supporting extant popular institutions (organised labour, cooperatives, anti-war groups) and building new ones (bill-payers' unions, boycott campaigns), it could lay the foundations for an effective socialist electoral challenge.
Murray likewise warns that an 'umbrella alliance' could fail to articulate a coherent oppositional politics, while a 'centralised party' could struggle to incorporate independent forces. A party with an 'affiliation model' might be one way of squaring this circle. But whereas Schneider envisions a largely extra-parliamentary organisation, Murray hopes to establish a credible parliamentary bloc that could use its national profile to mount a genuine 'systemic challenge'. It should maintain a close relationship with social movements and popular institutions, but its main goal should not be to create such forms of associational life. 'Rather than using the party to reconstitute the working class, the party could create the space for the working class to reconstitute itself.'
Where do the party figureheads stand? While Corbyn has been accused of dithering over the launch, a more charitable reading is that he is moving cautiously in his attempt to harmonise these competing visions. Sources close to him say he is sympathetic to the idea of a more federated structure – although for both him and Sultana the main point is that the model should be participatory, whatever that looks like in practice. She argues that an immediate aim should be to convert its supporters into organisers, who can fight on a range of different fronts yet remain part of a single national project. Divisions between the two have been overstated by destructive anonymous briefings against Sultana from those who oppose the idea of her co-leadership. In reality, the pair have almost identical political priorities, and agree that the leadership system should be determined democratically at the upcoming conference.
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There are further problems to resolve: alliances with other parties, relations with the unions, developing a programme that can hold together the left's disparate coalition, potential rows over who should lead, and so on. But we can be confident that these discussions will not check the party's momentum. Under different circumstances, the plurality of views outlined above could have prevented such an organisation from forming. But in Britain today, the need for it is so apparent, and the popular pressure so overwhelming, that it's charging forwards.
[See more: It's time for angry left populism]
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