Jeremy Corbyn’s troubled new far left party gathers to pick name and leader

Ex-Labour head accused of antisemitism says faction seeks to establish a ‘new Democratic Socialist Party’ to ‘challenge power in our society’

Veteran British socialist Jeremy Corbyn called for his new political party to “come together” as he opened its inaugural conference Saturday, as it seeks to move on from a messy launch and become a viable left-wing challenger to Labour, which ejected him last year over a series of antisemitism scandals.

As British politics fractures into a multi-party system and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer takes Labour rightward on some issues, Corbyn’s outfit, including many who have expressed a fierce anti-Israel stance, hopes to fill a gap on the left.

“We’re here today to do something dramatic…to found a new Democratic Socialist Party in Britain that can challenge power in our society,” Corbyn told the conference in the northwestern English city of Liverpool.

He acknowledged the new party needs to get past its internal differences.

“As a party, we’ve got to come together and be united because division and disunity will not serve the interests of the people that we want to represent,” he said.

The appeal for unity comes after a rocky start for “Your Party,” which Corbyn and fellow ex-Labour lawmaker Zarah Sultana announced they were forming in July.

Four independent MPs initially signed up to join them, but two later quit amid open warfare between Corbyn, 76, and Sultana, 32, that has included a dispute over a botched membership launch and threats of legal action.

“It’s pretty obvious that it has been a disaster so far,” Colm Murphy, an expert on the British left at Queen Mary University of London, told AFP.

According to the Guardian, some of the tensions have to do with Sultana’s unilateral announcement that she and Corbyn were co-leaders, and her accusations that too much power over the faction was being placed in the hands of Corbyn’s aides.

Corbyn and Sultana also traded public barbs after Sultana launched a registration website that Corbyn said he hadn’t been consulted about.

Sultana appeared to reference those differences in a tweet Saturday that said the party “must be led by its members, not MPs,” and that “the witch hunt must end.”

Corbyn and Sultana will try to put their differences aside when several thousand supporters of the new movement gather in Liverpool, northwest England, for two days.

Members are due to choose the party’s official name and decide whether it should have a single leader or be led by its members.

The new party faces a mammoth task in its push to replace Labour, with polls showing that the fellow far-left Green Party — newly headed by a charismatic leader 30 years younger than Corbyn — is mopping up most disaffected leftists.

‘Natural home’

Corbyn lost two elections as Labour leader between 2015 and 2020 before being suspended for refusing to fully accept a rights watchdog’s findings that antisemitism was rife among activists during his leadership.

Corbyn himself was also accused of antisemitism by the Jewish Labour Movement, which cited, among other actions, Corbyn’s writing a foreword to a book that claimed Jews control banks and media, expressing support for a self-described Holocaust denier and laying a wreath at the graves of Palestinian terrorists who murdered 11 Israeli athletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Starmer replaced Corbyn atop Labour in 2020 and proceeded to bring the party back to the center and return it to power in July 2024 after 14 years in opposition.

But Labour has since plummeted in popularity among left-wing voters in particular, due to its crackdown on immigration, perceived failure to redistribute enough wealth and alleged slowness to call out Israel for its conduct of the war in Gaza.

Stuart Hill, a former Labour councilor who quit the party in 2023 after 30 years of membership, said he joined Your Party “with enthusiasm.”

“Labour is completely ineffectual,” he told AFP, accusing it of adopting similar rhetoric to Reform on migrants in order to appeal to their supporters.

Some 50,000 people have become members of Your Party, Corbyn announced earlier this month, calling the outfit a “mass democratic movement for real change.”

But a YouGov poll published this week suggested that only 12 percent of Britons would consider voting for it, compared to 28 percent for the Greens, led by Zack Polanski, 43.

Your Party is “at risk of being irrelevant very quickly,” said Murphy, noting that Polanski had “taken over” Corbyn’s role as the “populist, radical left voice” in Britain.

UK politics has long been dominated by Labour and the Conservatives, but the center-left Liberal Democrats won 72 seats in the 650-seat parliament last year, while Reform, led by Nigel Farage, won five and the Greens took four.

Labour, under pressure from its own backbenchers, adopted a number of left-wing measures in its budget this week, including raising the minimum wage, boosting child benefits and introducing a new tax on high-value homes.

“We should be doing much more to hold on to our traditional support,” Labour MP Steve Witherden told AFP beforehand, adding that his party can still “remain the natural home of the left.”