On July 3, MP Zarah Sultana announced she was resigning from the Labour Party: “Jeremy Corbyn and I will co-lead the founding of a new party,” she wrote. Corbyn himself was reportedly taken by surprise, only responding the next day that “discussions are ongoing” while welcoming the forcing of his hand.

Less than three weeks later Your Party was officially announced, and in just three days more than 500,000 people had signed up to support it. A new left party has the potential to “reshape British politics.” Early polls showed that 18 percent of eligible voters would consider voting for a Corbyn-Sultana formation. Among people under 25, it’s more than a third — kids still love this 76-year-old!

This new formation is part of an international trend: an upsurge in neo-reformist parties and figures. Ten years ago, when parties like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain represented the hopes of a generation battered by the global economic crisis, Corbyn channeled that same youthful energy into the Labour Party (just like Bernie Sanders channeled it into the Democratic Party). After Corbyn won the leadership contest in 2015, hundreds of thousands of people joined the Labour Party, briefly making it the largest in Europe.

Despite his unmatched popularity, Corbyn was defenestrated by the Labour bureaucracy in 2020, after an intense smear campaign by the conservative and liberal press. Labour’s new leader Keir Starmer helped the party win an election in 2024 — but with three million fewer votes than Corbyn.

After 14 years of absolutely brutal conservative rule, people had expected that a Labour government would be a “lesser evil.” Yet Starmer has continued the Tories’ policies. Like many representatives of what Tariq Ali calls the “extreme center,” he has taken up anti-immigrant talking points from the Far Right, calculating that he can hold back Nigel Farange’s Reform UK party by implementing its main policies. The results have been the opposite: Reform’s racism appears more reasonable, and the right-wing party’s support is growing.

Starmer has also carried out unprecedented attacks on democratic rights, declaring the peaceful protest group Palestine Action to be a terrorist group. For more than a year, hundreds of thousands of people have regularly demonstrated through the streets of London to protest against the genocide in Gaza. Yet Starmer has given steadfast support to Israel: militarily, politically, and diplomatically. It reflects Britain’s colonial past that Palestine would be at the very center of national politics — the solidarity movement in London is larger than in any other imperialist capital.

Labourites

Despite Labour’s ongoing turn to the right, Corbyn had been in no hurry to launch a new party. It’s been almost five years since he was suspended from Labour, and more than a year since he was expelled from the party. He subsequently won his seat in Islington North, where he had been the Labour MP for over 40 years, as an independent.

As millions of people across Britain waited for Corbyn’s signal, he continued with backroom discussions. This is not due to some inherent fecklessness. It was only the massive Palestine solidarity movement that forced his hand (with an additional push from Sultana), even as he has dithered and hesitated at every step. This same movement led to the election of four other independent MPs (as well as four Greens) last year. This movement and its growing dissatisfaction with Labour is an expression of a new generation – not only in Britain but internationally – that is coming to the realization that the traditional parties hold no future for them. Their push for a new party has the potential to break with the historic subordination of the mass movement under Labour – if these hundreds of thousands of people draw the right conclusions.

A member of the Labour Party for 60 years, Corbyn was expelled despite years of bending over backward to accommodate the party’s right wing, both as leader and as an oppositionist. You can take Corbyn out of Labour, but it seems you can’t take Labour out of Corbyn. He remains fully committed to a Labourite strategy of reforming the system by winning elections, passing laws, and forming a government, all within the framework of Britain’s bourgeois constitutional monarchy.

Corbyn is clearly not like most bourgeois politicians. Starmer comes across like a robot without political beliefs of any kind. Corbyn, in contrast, strikes people as shockingly sincere, riding the tube and marching for Palestine (and Ireland and other colonized countries) as he’s done his whole life.

Yet when he was party leader he displayed the same willingness to compromise demanded of any bourgeois politician, agreeing to support the UK’s Trident nuclear weapons program and keep the country in NATO, in a reversal of his long-held views. The old republican must have felt ashamed for ritualistically praising the queen. Corbyn’s organization, Momentum, lacked any meaningful internal democracy.

As Labour leader, he was nonetheless ruthlessly smeared with false allegations of antisemitism. And yet he refused to fight back, instead sacrificing some of his own comrades to the witch-hunt. Again, this was not due to cowardice — Corbyn’s strategy for socialism requires a Labour majority in parliament, which in turn requires unity with Labour’s right wing.

Corbyn is no stranger at street protests. Yet he sees protests as a tool for putting pressure on parliament — he has never had a vision for a radically different kind of state, run by and for working people. In other words, he is a reformist, for whom protests can be a useful tactic, but only in the framework of a strategy of parliamentary action.

A former leader of Momentum elaborated on this strategy in an interview with the New Left Review, sketching the left populist strategy advocated by Podemos. This strategy led Podemos into the cabinet of Spain’s imperialist state in 2019, with Pablo Iglesias serving as a minister in a government applying austerity measures, deporting immigrants, and denying the right to self determination. James Schneider of Momentum makes no reference to this experience. For him, it is self-evident that socialists should serve to administer the capitalist state: “I’m not arguing against winning elections or going into government. I think that is essential.” Instead of a socialist project, he proposes “democratising the state” in order to “establish a society that recognises the essential dignity of every person.” In the last decade, we have seen how these sincere attempts to reform a fundamentally inhumane system have only led to more inhumane policies. 

Socialists

Despite all of this, Left reformists are still hoping that Corbyn’s new party can play a role similar to that of the Labour Party a generation ago. In the Verso Blog, Andrew Burgin and Kate Hudson write that “there has been no adequate political representation for the working class for decades,” which is certainly true. However, they argue that Labour’s main problem was the “ruthless” imposition of discipline from above, instead arguing for a party that consists of multiple “platforms.” Yet from its inception, Labour was a tool of the trade union bureaucracy to integrate the working class into the capitalist state. It never aimed to rip out capitalist exploitation at the root.

Despite a certain recovery of the workers’ movement in Britain, the wealthy bureaucrats in control of the unions are largely sticking with Starmer’s Labour government, even as it attacks their members. Burgin and Hudson write that a new left party “will be all the stronger if it has the trades unions at its heart,” yet they make no distinction between millionaire union bosses and rank-and-file workers. Bureaucrats serve as “labor lieutenants of capital” and their role inside the workers’ movement is as a political police force. A genuinely left party would indeed need to break down the division between “politics” and “union work” — but by fighting against bureaucrats, for direct democracy, instead of taking them as genuine representatives of the working class. 

There are numerous groups in Britain from a revolutionary socialist and Trotskyist tradition, and they need to find ways to debate and collaborate with the hundreds of thousands of young people who are placing their hopes in Corbyn. The Socialist Workers Party, for example, put Corbyn on the main panel at its Marxism festival, as they have often done in the past. 

Yet too often, groups that call for a socialist revolution have held back with their criticisms of Corbyn’s fundamentally reformist project, claiming falsely that he was leading a “revolution” and simply needs to “be bold.” RS21 offered zero criticisms of Corbyn’s record. Meanwhile, the SWP’s statement argued:

We don’t need a repeat of the shattered promises and betrayals of Syriza in Greece, Podemos in the Spanish state—or the Labour Party in Britain.

Such formations prioritised winning elections over struggle, and when they reached government, they conceded to the bosses and bankers, moved rightward, and failed.

But the failure of these (neo)reformist projects was not rooted in concessions they made to the ruling class while in office — their entire program and strategy were a concession to the bourgeoisie from the start. Long before they were anywhere near ministerial posts, Syriza and Podemos had promised to respect the bourgeois state with its guarantees of private property. The betrayals they committed while in office were a direct and inevitable result of their strategy, and something that revolutionaries needed to point out well in advance. 

Whether or not revolutionary organizations in Britain decide to join the new party or participate in the foundation process to accompany the hundreds of thousands of people excited for it, they shouldn’t adapt to Corbyn’s politics and dilute their own in his endeavor. Anything less than that can only sow illusions in the dead end of reformism. Every party is an expression of a strategy, and revolutionaries must support a strategy  for the political independence of the working class.

It’s not enough to say that a new left party should focus on social movements — reformism, after all, does not exclude demonstrations. The difference between reform and revolution is not one of degree, with revolutionaries being particularly dogged in the struggles for concrete reforms. As Rosa Luxemburg put it, reform and revolution are not two roads “to the same goal, but a different goal.” In other words: The problem is whether these social movements – with the working class at the helm – are being integrated into the capitalist regime, or fighting for political independence.

The British bourgeoisie will continue its support for the genocide in Gaza unless it is forced to stop. This will require not just mass protests, but the use of working-class methods like strikes, blockades, and boycotts of cargo destined for Israel — it will require serious disruption of the bourgeois capitalist state, which is something that even a left-wing loyal opposition cannot lead.

Workers and young people in the UK need an anticapitalist program with the aim of replacing the constitutional monarchy with a workers’ government. That is the only way to make sure that the millions of people hoping for a left alternative are not led by Corbyn into yet another dead end.

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