Zarah Sultana on Britain’s new left party: ‘The goal is to change politics forever’

First published at NLR Sidecar.

Zarah Sultana is among Britain’s most prominent socialist leaders. Born in Birmingham in 1993, she became politically active in the student movement and later in the upsurge of Corbynism: serving on the national executive of Young Labour, working as a community organiser for the party and eventually running for parliament, where she now represents Coventry South. Her election coincided with the beginning of Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership, which she has long excoriated for its reactionary outlook and petty authoritarianism. Over the past year her profile has increased significantly thanks to her trenchant opposition to the Starmer government’s complicity in the Gaza genocide. Her dissent led to her suspension from the parliamentary party, and since then she has become a standard-bearer for the nascent left alternative: one of the youngest and most popular figures involved in its formation. Sultana has proposed co-leading the new party alongside Corbyn, and is part of a group working on the founding conference this autumn.

Oliver Eagleton spoke to Sultana about the new left party: why it is necessary, what kind of democratic structures it should have, its parliamentary and extra-parliamentary aims, its response to the far right, the case for co-leadership, and how the conference should be organised.

Let’s start with your political trajectory and relationship with the Labour Party. How has it evolved over time? What brought you to the decision to leave earlier this year? Do you think others on the so-called ‘Labour left’ will follow you?

I was formed politically by the War on Terror and the aftermath of the financial crisis. The first time I engaged with parliamentary politics was when the coalition government launched a direct attack on my generation by tripling tuition fees; I was part of the first cohort who had to pay £9,000 per year for higher education. I decided to join Labour at the age of seventeen, because at that time it seemed like there was no other party that could act as a vehicle for change. I never thought it was perfect. My local branch in the West Midlands was controlled by older men who didn’t want young people — especially not young left-wing women — to be involved. When I went to study at Birmingham in 2012, the Labour clubs and societies did nothing other than host talks by right-wing MPs, so I had to find other political outlets.

In my first week of university my dad and I joined a delegation of Labour councillors and activists who went on a trip to the occupied West Bank, and it changed the way I saw myself. I had never previously thought of myself as privileged, but I realised that because of the sheer accident of where I was born and what passport I held, I was treated differently by the Israeli authorities. I watched as they harassed and abused Palestinians and then related to me as a regular human being. I went to Hebron and saw the Jewish-only roads, the communities who were coming under daily attack from settlers and soldiers. All this was hard to fathom. But it was even more confounding that we – our country, our society – were allowing this to happen. So that ignited an internationalism in me: a deep opposition to imperial power, apartheid, settler colonialism and military occupation.

Then when I got involved in the National Union of Students I realised that I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. That’s a really magical moment, when you discover that you’re not alone in your politics. I started campaigning on issues like free education, maintenance grants, anti-racism, housing, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. It was only after I graduated, though, that I learned just how broken our social contract was. I really struggled to find work. I would go to the Jobcentre, look through my CV and wonder why, despite my degree and my experience, I didn’t have a place in this economy. And of course I was also saddled with £50,000 worth of debt.

When Jeremy won the Labour leadership election in 2015, my immediate thought was, ‘Oh my god, here is a national political operation that doesn’t hate young people!’ So I threw all my energy into the party’s youth wing. I had already seen Jeremy speaking about the issues that were most important to me — at protests, events, picket lines — which naturally made Labour seem like somewhere I belonged. He set up a Community Organising Unit, with the aim of developing a different type of politics rooted in people’s material concerns, and I went to work for it, which allowed me to organise in my home region: areas like Halesowen, Wolverhampton and Stourbridge, all of which had voted for Brexit. We campaigned on local issues, ran trainings, identified leaders and built community power. From there I had the opportunity to run in the European elections and then in the general election of 2019, which is how I became an MP.

But today we have a very different kind of Labour Party: one that is pursuing austerity, watering down bills on workers’ rights, and actively supporting genocide. I spent months pushing the Starmer government to consider popular policies like taxes on the super-rich, nationalisation of utilities and universal free school meals. I also fought against some of its worst excesses, such as keeping the two-child benefit cap, cutting winter fuel payments and disability benefits, and selling arms to the Israeli war machine. As a result, I was among the group of MPs who had the whip removed last year. When I last spoke to the party’s Chief Whip, he insinuated that I was never going to be readmitted because I had criticised their complicity in Israel’s war crimes. But, contrary to some false reports, they were never going to expel me from the parliamentary party; they were planning on keeping me in permanent limbo. I stood my ground. I told the Chief Whip that the genocide in Palestine was a litmus test — not just for me, but for millions of people across the country — and that it was far more important to me than my political career.

So leaving the party has long been a matter of when, not if. But it was important for me to leave on my own terms, otherwise you give the leadership the ability to control the narrative. I chose to do so on a salient week, when the government decided to target disability benefits and to proscribe Palestine Action. There could be no clearer reflection of where Labour has ended up. Here is a party that wants to impose cuts on some of the most marginalised people in our society in order to please investors. Here is a party that, for the first time in British history, is criminalising a non-violent activist group, using the most repressive parts of the state to protect the profit margins of arms manufacturers. If these aren’t red lines for you, then frankly you don’t have any.

The Labour Party is dead. It has destroyed its principles and its popularity. Some Labour MPs who consider themselves on the left are still clinging to its corpse. They say that by staying in they’ll be able to retain their political influence. My response is simple: you haven’t been able to stop disability cuts, you haven’t been able to stop the flow of arms to a genocidal apartheid state, so where is this influence you’re talking about? There’s no point standing around waiting for a change of leadership while people are dying — not just in Gaza, but also from the poverty in this country. Time to get out, build something new, and invite everyone to join.

For many people of our generation, Corbynism set a paradigm for radical politics. Considering the historical gulf between 2015 and 2025, though, how should we adapt it to the present?

I think we’re in a very different political moment. We have to build on the strengths of Corbynism — its energy, mass appeal and bold policy platform — and we also have to recognise its limitations. It capitulated to the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which famously equates it with anti-Zionism, and which even its lead author Kenneth Stern has now publicly criticised. It triangulated on Brexit, which alienated huge numbers of voters. It abandoned mandatory reselection of MPs for the trigger ballot compromise, keeping many of the party’s undemocratic structures in place. It didn’t make a real effort to channel its mass membership into the labour movement or tenants unions, which would have enriched the party’s social base. When it came under attack from the state and the media, it should have fought back, recognising that these are our class enemies. But instead it was frightened and far too conciliatory. This was a serious mistake. If we’re contesting state power, we’re going to face a major backlash, and we need to have the institutional resilience to withstand it. You cannot give these people an inch.

Between 2015 and 2019 I had friends and colleagues who worked at the top of the Labour Party, and they can tell you that in parts it was a highly dysfunctional working environment with toxicity and bullying — not from Jeremy, but from some people around him. Power was too centralised. This is not what we need for this emerging project. We now have a younger generation that is highly politicised due to the establishment’s disastrous policies on housing, education, employment and war. They are going to demand a seat at the table and the ability to wield actual power, and rightfully so. My vision for the new party is about that kind of active participation, because that’s how I got into politics myself: not by the traditional route of running as a councillor, but through social movements. Everyone has to feel that they’re involved and the organisation has to be representative of wider society. That also means we can’t soft-pedal our anti-racism. Some people want us to focus solely on the ‘economic issues’. But if the politics of class is detached from the politics of race then it is bound to fail — because when our neighbours are being simultaneously targeted for eviction and deportation, that struggle is one and the same.

You’re right that any left project that draws an illusory dividing line between race and class will end up dividing its base, while also degenerating politically. But I also want to ask about how the party should position itself vis-a-vis Reform. Some of its messaging so far has emphasised stopping the far right and beating Farage. I think we can all agree on the necessity of that. But is there a danger that by presenting itself as primarily an anti-fascist party it could divert attention from the government as our principal adversary, or even legitimise Labour as part of some kind of popular front?

I don’t think you have to choose whether to focus on Reform or Labour. You can oppose Farage and spell out what he would do to the country, and you can also attack the government for acting as Reform-lite. Remember that quote by Sivanandan, ‘What Enoch Powell says today, the Conservative Party says tomorrow, and the Labour Party legislates on the day after.’ Unless we challenge this Powellite politics wherever it rears its head, we’re doing a disservice to the people we want to represent. It’s true that we can’t treat the rise of racist nationalism as simply a moral issue; we have to address its structural causes: the way it feeds off the anger and despair in areas that have been devastated by the Westminster consensus. But the right does not have a monopoly on this anger. I’m angry too. We should all be angry when we think about what’s happened to these working-class communities, and we should harness those feelings to make a very clear argument — that the problem is not migrant labour but exploitative landlords, greedy energy companies, privatised services. We don’t have to patronise people and tell them their frustrations are wrong, nor do we have to pander to any kind of nativism. We can be confident in our politics and communicate it through local campaigns and persuasive conversations.

This is a long process; it takes months and even years, especially in places where these arguments aren’t familiar to most people. But there are ways to make them cut through. One is to talk about the kind of society we actually want, and to describe it in detail rather than just sloganeering. What are our long-term goals? More time with our loved ones, more green space, universal childcare, free public transport, not worrying about bills. These are things that Farage and Starmer don’t talk about, so that allows us to contrast our positive vision with their wholly negative one. And then there is always the question: how are we going to pay for this? Well, we can put an end to massive military overspending; we can tax the oil and gas companies; we can reverse the redistribution of wealth from the public to the private sector that has accelerated since Covid. We should pledge to fund free public transport instead of funding forever wars. These are policies that make sense to people. We need to argue for them as aggressively as the right argues for theirs.

That’s a good description of the long-term horizon. What are shorter-term aims of the project?

We’re still at an embryonic stage, but then again we’ve already got more than 700,000 people who have shown interest, so our job at this moment should be to focus on activating our base and articulating who we are — which, incidentally, is why I believe we should call ourselves ‘The Left’, because it’s an unapologetic expression of what we stand for. At the same time we need to be recruiting from across the country, in areas that don’t have the same levels of political activity that London does. We’ve seen a huge amount of interest in the North West and the North East, which is very exciting, and of course I’d like to see more people involved in the West Midlands. My view is that there should also be a high degree of autonomy for Scotland and Wales. A lot of unofficial local groups have also been springing up since we announced the party, but we will be formalising our structures at the upcoming conference. The overall party structure has to be unitary, otherwise it won’t be a cohesive project that unites the existing spectrum of movements and struggles. A federation will not be as able to galvanise people or go on the offensive; it could end up being little more than a loose collection of different groups rather than a powerful, united bloc.

In order to establish all this we need to have a fully democratic conference. This relies on a few different things. First, it can’t be led by just MPs. Right now there are six of us MPs in the Independent Alliance, five of whom are men. This shouldn’t be what our party looks like going forward, so the committee that’s organising the conference should be gender balanced as well as racially and regionally diverse, all with an equal stake and voting rights. Anything less would be a boys’ club. Second, those who participate in our inaugural conference have to take part meaningfully, and that can only mean One Member One Vote. There should be an accessible venue, as well as a hybrid aspect with low barriers to entry. We should be striving for mass participation, as opposed to a narrow delegate structure which could be unrepresentative of our base. And finally, we should have a genuine forum for debate and discussion, not a situation where decisions are made by an executive team and rubber stamped by everyone else.

All this is vital, because unless we have the right internal democratic processes from the outset it will be much more difficult for the party to act as a catalyst for any broader form of democratisation; whereas if we organise an open and pluralistic conference, we will have already broken the conventions of British politics, which is a first step on the road to reshaping them. We can then establish not only a platform that speaks to people’s everyday concerns, but also a major campaigning presence across the country. We don’t just want electoralism — we want a project that’s tied in to tenants unions, labour organising, the fight to defend the NHS from privatisation and the Palestine solidarity movement.

To campaign effectively on all these fronts we need to make a clear set of demands. Think of Zohran Mamdani in New York; even many of us here in Britain know what his main pledges are. He has expressed them so that everyone can understand them, and they resonate on a level far deeper than most political discourse. If we start to do this then we’ll realise we don’t have to be beholden to the archaic traditions of Westminster, which are designed to make politics exclusionary.

One of the issues we’ve discussed in this series so far is the balance between popular and parliamentary power. Some have argued that the new party should be a lever for popular mobilisation, whose main role is to strengthen or create working-class institutions as a prerequisite for future electoral campaigns. Others say that the priority is to create a prominent parliamentary bloc that can make effective interventions and win elections — which, in turn, will have a spontaneously energising effect on working-class civic life. Where do you stand in this debate?

It’s a false binary. I see my job in Westminster as a bridge between social movements, trade unions and parliament. The progressive laws that we now take for granted — workers’ protections, maternity leave, the weekend, even the right to vote — only came about because MPs were forced to respond to wider pressures. The struggles that forced these concessions often get erased from history. Today we see Labour MPs showing support for ‘women’s rights’ by wearing suffragette sashes while at the same time voting to proscribe Palestine Action. We shouldn’t follow their lead by acting as if there’s some necessary gulf between the realms of popular and parliamentary power. A party that only cares about elections will be irrelevant outside of an election cycle. And a party that ignores parliament will create a vacuum that will inevitably be taken up by the far right.

What I want — and I struggle to see how a successful left party could be set up in any other way — is a campaigning, social-movement orientation combined with a robust parliamentary presence: a situation where our MPs are on the frontlines of strike actions and anti-fascist mobilisations. If you focus entirely on parliament rather than building wider capacity, that’s a very short-termist approach, because what happens when those MPs are attacked by the establishment? What happens if they lose their seats or they retire? You need to build the social infrastructure that will support them in office and identify new leaders to replace them. It’s that kind of community power that sustains socialist politicians and holds them to account. Without that, you either get capitulation, or you get a left that’s dominated by a few figureheads at the top, which makes it formally indistinguishable from every other party.

The thing is, people recognise when politicians are inauthentic, when they have no connection to a popular base. They see through it immediately. Whereas when you’re the kind of politician like Jeremy or John McDonnell or Diane Abbott, whose authority is deeply rooted in community struggles, you have a very distinct profile, and you can make much more meaningful gains.

When it comes to certain strategic decisions, however, there might be some binary choices. For example, should the party set up its own community organising unit, like the one you used to work for, or should it leave community organising to the communities?

In theory, I love the idea of having mass community organising as part of the DNA of the party. There are people who are already doing the everyday work of making sure that no one in their community goes hungry, or that the far right cannot attack asylum hotels. The new party should be finding those people — who don’t necessarily fit the traditional notions of a political leader — and getting them involved, asking them to shape the organisation, cultivating them for positions of authority. But should this take the form of a community organising unit such as we had in the Labour Party? Here I think there are certain limitations. In my experience, the COU didn’t always get the victories that it deserved, partly because when this kind of community work is attached to a party it immediately comes with certain connotations, which might be off-putting to those who are understandably fed up with party politics. We also had situations where the COU came into conflict with other parts of the Labour Party, for example when councils weren’t paying their workers a fair wage. I’m not saying this would happen with the new project, but there’s always the danger that when a national party is doing a range of different organising activities they may not fit together perfectly and tensions may arise.

Community organising would be more effective if, rather than being run by a specific unit, it becomes an ingrained practice across the party — in how we run meetings, training sessions, canvassing and campaigns. The role of the party could be to develop this kind of mass political culture: to make it second-nature for people to engage in politics at ground level, so that they would go and set up tenants unions, book clubs, anti-raids groups, or whatever else would meet their local needs. That way, the party would play a role in stimulating popular struggles without having to manage and control them. Political education would be a vital part of that: translating people’s instinctive sense of what’s wrong with society into a radical outlook. If we got half the people who’ve signed up as supporters into political education, the effects would be transformative. It’s impossible to predict where that would lead.

That’s interesting. So the party wouldn’t necessarily be tasked with forming these institutions, but nor would it assume that they will just spring up spontaneously. It would instead use its local democratic structures and education initiatives to create the political culture that would spur people to get active. One thing that’s certain to militate against all this is needless factionalism. What of the divisions that have beset the project so far?

After I announced my resignation and intention to co-lead the founding of a new left party with Jeremy, the leaks against me were almost instantaneous. A small number of people who are involved in the party have engaged in anonymous briefings, making hostile and implicitly Islamophobic comments about me to the Sunday Times and Sky News. This behaviour is absolutely unacceptable in any context, but especially one in which we’re trying to create a new political culture. People who are supposedly on the left thinking it’s appropriate to use the Murdoch press to broadcast smears is astounding. This is the very same media class who tried to destroy Jeremy’s reputation and the politics he represents. There is no space for that in what we’re building. We all understand comradely disagreement, but it’s different when you cross class lines for the sake of factionalism and psychodrama. The members don’t want that; it’s a major turn-off for them. I personally have no time for this type of bullying and intimidation, and I’m not going to let it sabotage a project that’s much bigger than all of us. We have fascism growling at the door; egos have no place in this fight.

A devil’s advocate argument against a fully member-led party model might go something like the following. Because we don’t yet have a mass political culture, many people who want to be politically active don’t know quite what that would entail. They might therefore want to have their energies directed, rather than doing all the directing themselves. The absence of mass politics also means that the organised left consists of various relatively small groups with their own distinct priorities, which will be difficult to bring together in a unified structure without intervention from above. And there is also the related risk that some of these priorities might not be particularly representative of society at large. What would you say to this?

If we follow that argument we’ll just replicate the problems with every single other political party: top-down control, unaccountable decision-making, internal bickering, jobs handed out to mates. I find the case against member-led democracy bizarre given that our entire aim is to empower people. You simply cannot do this without getting people involved and giving them ownership over the policies, strategy and leadership. This will inevitably result in some difficult situations, with various positions and perspectives coming up against one another, but that’s to be expected. If there are certain issues where we can’t convince a majority, then we can’t just circumvent or ignore them; that would be an abdication of political responsibility. Instead we have to work harder. I have no qualms, for instance, about advocating a resolutely anti-racist and pro-trans socialist programme, even if parts of that sounds contentious to some people. It’s only by having these discussions out in the open and through the proper channels that we can create something that looks fundamentally different, feels fundamentally different, to the other Westminster parties. If that’s not the aim, what are we doing here?

While we’re on the subject of the other parties, what is your view on electoral alliances?

I’m open to electoral alliances, with the caveat that this would have to be supported by the members. In general, I think we should be willing to work with anyone who will help us beat the right and the establishment. We need to be pragmatic, especially as long as we’re working within the first-past-the-post system, although winning electoral reform should be an objective as well. But at this point it would be premature to start carving up the constituencies — deciding where we should run, where we might stand aside — when we haven’t yet understood the full extent of what we’re building. Until we’ve actually created the party, and gotten a sense of its capabilities and its limits, we can’t do that in any detail. It’s going to be four years until the next general election. We first have to develop the party’s structures, and then the negotiations about that kind of strategy will come later if the members approve them.

What are the benefits of a co-leadership model, with you and Corbyn at the helm?

If we have more voices at the top, if we avoid concentrating power in one pair of hands, then we will be more representative of our movement and more accountable to it. It’s no small thing to start a new party, there’s a lot to be done and we need to share the work. So it seems natural that two people with the same values and principles, and the same belief in the project, should do it together. We have a lot to learn from each other; I’m always learning from Jeremy and I’d like to think there are insights I can offer him as well. A co-leadership with equal powers would mean that neither of us is a tokenistic figure. It would also allow us to take what is often just a liberal soundbite about ‘more women in leadership roles’ and make it a reality, undermining the prejudices that usually hold young women back: not serious enough, too inexperienced, and so on. People are already hugely excited about this idea and they’ve been getting in touch in vast numbers. It’s not about shying away from strong leadership, but about doubling its strength.

What can supporters do ahead of the conference? How can they be most useful?

Mass recruitment is crucial. We will need to organise events in the run up to the conference to enthuse supporters and recruit more people. One of the best parts of Corbynism was the rallies and the music and the performances. We need to get that back. What we need is a politics of fun and joy. We’re not interested in meetings where everyone’s got a point of order and they talk for twenty minutes each. Do you think the sixteen year-olds who are soon to get the vote will want to sit through that? The new project should engage that generation by embedding itself in mass culture. We’ve already seen musicians, artists, actors lining up to get involved. Jade Thirlwall has been supportive, so has Amiee Lou Wood and Ambika Mod — people in that younger age bracket who are in touch with popular sentiment and who know how far removed it is from the decaying politics of the establishment. We must do politics differently and that’s not a cliche, but a prerequisite for this party.

The goal is to change politics forever. When we have a government abetting genocide and waging war on its own citizens, and a far right gearing up to enter Downing Street, we can’t deny the urgency. So I am ready to give everything to this fight. That’s what I owe to my community and to my class. Now’s the moment.