‘Toxic culture’: Chaos in Corbyn’s new far-left UK party as spat overshadows gathering

Co-founder Zarah Sultana skips conference’s first day, accuses ex-Labour chief accused of antisemitism of leading a ‘witch hunt’ against her backers; party to pick name, leadership

LIVERPOOL, United Kingdom — Veteran British socialist Jeremy Corbyn’s new far-left political party faced a fresh crisis on Saturday after its co-founder, Zarah Sultana, skipped the first day of its two-day inaugural conference.

Corbyn had called for members to “come together” at the opening of the conference, with the party seeking to move on from a messy launch and become a viable left-wing challenger to the ruling Labour party, which ejected him last year over a series of antisemitism scandals.

“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,” Corbyn told the conference in the northwestern English city of Liverpool.

A few hours later, a spokeswoman for Sultana said that she would not enter the conference hall on Saturday in protest at one of her supporters being denied entry to the event and several others being expelled from the party over alleged membership of the fellow far-left Socialist Workers Party.

Sultana — who backs an immediate severance of all ties with the “genocidal apartheid state of Israel” — said she was “disappointed” at the expulsions, but would not be “pushed out” of the new party. She held several competing events on Saturday with party members outside the conference hall, with British media saying she was intending to deliver a speech inside the hall on Sunday.

“We absolutely have to work together,” she said. “But what we have to get rid of is this toxic culture of leaks to the right-wing press, of legal threats, of bullying, intimidation and acts of sabotage.”

A spokesman for the new party, currently called Your Party, defended the expulsions.

“Members of another national political party signed up to Your Party in contravention of clearly stated membership rules — and these rules were enforced,” the spokesman said.

This is the latest blow for Corbyn’s outfit, including many who have expressed a fierce anti-Israel stance, which hopes to fill a gap on the left as British politics fractures into a multi-party system and Labour moves rightwards on some issues.

Corbyn, 76, and Sultana, 32, both former Labour MPs, have been in frequent dispute since they announced the party in July.

Two of the four independent MPs who initially signed up later quit over the divisions, which have included a row 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.

Corbyn declined to call Sultana a friend when asked about the subject during a Sky News interview on Saturday, replying instead that she was a “colleague in Parliament” with whom he “communicates.”

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.

“I don’t think movements should be led by sole personalities. I think you have to represent the broad mass movement,” she was quoted as saying. “That allows responsibility to be shared and more people’s ideas to be listened to.”

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.”

The Guardian reported that Sultana intends to run against Corbyn for the party leadership if members vote to have a single leader.

The new party faces a mammoth task, with polls showing that the Green Party — now headed by charismatic leader Zack Polanski, 30 years younger than Corbyn — is mopping up most of the disaffected on the left.

Over the course of the conference, members are set to choose the party’s official name and decide whether it should have a single leader or be led by its members.

‘Natural home’

Corbyn lost two general 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.

“I voted Labour for most of my life, but became disillusioned with some of their stances on not being visible about anti-transphobia, anti-racism and not supporting Palestine visibly,” said Tris Rodriguez, 49, who traveled from Bristol to attend the conference.

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.

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.