Well, thank God Your Party is not our party.
I should eat some humble pie. “It is easy to write off Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s political party,” I wrote in August. I should have stopped there. For all my musings about how Corbyn “upended British politics once and … has the power to do it again”, it has become very, very easy to write off the party now officially called Your Party.
Comically so.
Far leftists are famous for in-fighting. It sometimes seems as if a socialist wedding would involve three schisms and the appointment of the mother-in-law as an interim groom. Still, it was especially impressive that Corbyn and Sultana fell out before their organisation even had a name. Corbyn and his “Independent Alliance” colleagues accused Sultana of unilaterally launching a paid membership portal. Sultana complained that a “sexist boys’ club” was freezing her out.
Further disagreements were ideological. Sultana insisted that there was “no place for transphobes” in the party, but members sympathetic to her perspective were shocked and appalled to hear that some of the Muslim independent MPs who supported it held socially conservative opinions on gender issues. Devout Muslims with socially conservative opinions? Of all things!
Actually, I think right-leaning smugness on this question is a bit premature. People like Ms Sultana, as well as American figures like Ilhan Omar or Zohran Mamdani, have shown that Muslim politicians can be socially liberal. Yes, some reactionaries would howl that such Muslims were practicing “Taqiyya” even if they got gay married, but Occam’s Razor suggests that they just have an innovative interpretation of their faith. Still, left-wing bewilderment at the idea that a Muslim MP might have concerns about transgenderism has been quite funny. You can support “intersectionality” all you like, but some of the people you believe you intersect with might not want to intersect with you.
Your Party has also faced the problem that Zack Polanski and the Greens have stolen a lot of its thunder. For all my criticisms of Mr Polanski, it is true that a simple message of “tax the rich, am I right?!” has a lot more mass appeal than tedious discourse about party structures and national conferences. The Greens were off and running, in other words, before Corbyn, Sultana and their comrades had agreed on their correct position at the starting line. It also helps Polanski that he seems fairly jovial whereas Corbyn, Sultana and Co. seem like they believe that “having a laugh” should be prohibited until you have the agreement of a workers’ council.
This has all culminated in the first Your Party conference. Any joke that you could make about the far left turned out to be too real to really amount to a joke. A trans speaker denounced associations with supposed transphobes. The speaker turned out to have been suspended from the Greens over alleged — though as yet unproven — sexual misconduct. A speaker denounced Your Party officials for trying to exclude members of Trotskyite groups. She turned out to have been an important member of the Socialist Workers Party who had reportedly played a role in the mishandling of rape allegations against a party figure. As Your Party officials cut the live video of the conference while a speaker was ranting about being “silenced”, one could almost sense the genial Corbyn wondering if Stalin had had a point about purges.
Meanwhile, Zarah Sultana had decided to boycott the first day of the conference of the party she had helped to found. There was good news for Sultana as Your Party members voted for collective leadership, which she had supported and Corbyn had opposed. In general, I think a party needs a leading personality to attract support. Given the personalities in Your Party, though, Sultana might have had a point.
These people are the most compelling argument for libertarianism
“We need to nationalise the entire economy,” Sultana was saying in interviews. Well, of course! Who wouldn’t want to give the people who have built an organisation as functional as Your Party massive amounts of power? It makes all the sound good sense of investing in Enron in November 2001.
These people are the most compelling argument for libertarianism. I would not go that far myself, perhaps, but the hubris of people who think that they could organise an economy when they could not even organise a football match on a field next to a ball factory makes it tempting.
Of course, the same can be said of fringe right-wing parties, with nationalists often making an accidental implicit argument for exclusionary politics inasmuch as no one would want to include them. I would hate to be seen as making an argument for “centrist” politics here inasmuch as “centrism” is so often phoney and hypocritical. Still, people who make the most radical arguments for consolidating power provide a strong case for not doing so.
