The far-left Your Party, founded by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, continues to be beset by infighting and factionalism, with hundreds of members announcing their defection and the formation of another new leftist party.
Turnabout is fair play for the British far-left, apparently, with Jeremy Corbyn’s breakaway party suffering the same fate it attempted to impose on his former Labour Party, as 250 prominent members announced their defection and plans to form another left-wing party, provisionally known as the “Socialist Federation”.
A significant number of the splitters are said to have come from the “Grassroots Left” wing of the party, aligned with Coventry MP Zarah Sultana, who, despite co-founding the party with Corbyn, has spent much of the past year in public conflict with the septuagenarian socialist.
However, according to the London-based New Statesman magazine, Sultana did not have any involvement in establishing the new breakaway party.
In a post on social media, the Socialist Federation expressed frustration with Corbyn’s leadership and claimed that the party had “squandered the enormous promise of 800,000 signups last summer and showed only contempt for the huge wave of grassroots socialist self-organisation that followed.”
The party said that it intends to become “something neither Labour nor the Greens can claim to be: a party with unwavering socialist principles, that actively builds working class power in communities and workplaces.”
It is not the first major defection to hit Your Party since its fraught inception, with two of its founding MPs, Adnan Hussain and Iqbal Mohamed, quitting the party last year over accusations of “toxic culture” towards Muslim men within the top brass.
They added that there was a “pattern of clique-like behaviour and gatekeeping” within the party leadership and that it was “dominated by persistent infighting”.
Indeed, it took months for the party to even coalesce around a single name, with Sultana previously arguing that it should have been called “The Left” party, similar to Germany’s Die Linke, the descendant of the former communist ruling party in East Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Sultana, who has also alleged prejudice, claiming that Corbyn and other party leaders had acted like a “sexist boy’s club”. This came after she sparked a lengthy legal battle within the party after having established an unauthorised membership portal, through which she raised some £800,000 in donations, some of which have yet to be returned to the party.
The constant infighting within the Corbynista movement has allowed for the Greens, under the refreshed leadership of former hypnotist Zach Polanski, to scoop up dissatisfied former Labour voters as it shifted its focus away from the climate to a combination of hard-left economic policies and pro-Gaza rhetoric, both of which were the intended main selling points of Corbyn’s Your Party.
A Your Party spokesman said of the latest defections: “Our focus remains on building a broad, democratic, socialist party capable of delivering meaningful change.”
“Our priority is supporting members to organise in their communities and building a movement capable of challenging both this Labour government and the growing threat of the far right.”