Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana at Palestine solidarity rally. Photo courtesy Zarah Sultana/X.

If you were planning to launch a new party, this would not be the way to do it. After months of anticipation, on July 3, 2025, Zarah Sultana, a British Labour Party MP stripped off the whip by Keir Starmer’s government for opposing benefit cuts and the retention of the two-child limit for welfare support, announced her resignation to co-lead the formation of a new party alongside a group of independent MPs. The move was not coordinated with the other potential chair, Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn, who led Labour from September 2015 to April 2020, was suspended from the party in October 2020 and had the whip withdrawn amid allegations of antisemitism. He was re-elected as an independent in the July 2024 general election, and since then had become central to efforts to build a new left-wing alternative to a Labour Party seen by many as drifting rightwards. Together, Sultana, Corbyn, and four other Independent Alliance MPs launched a new formation inside the Commons—although internal tensions over leadership, membership, and process quickly began to emerge.

Sultana’s coup de main was provoked by what she perceived to be Corbyn’s characteristic procrastination. By the next morning, Corbyn and his team were forced to accept the new reality and joined Sultana in announcing the creation of a new organization. Until a formal founding conference, it was to be known as Your Party, to signal that it belonged to its members rather than to unelected organizers. It was to be a very different beast to the Labour Party, which under Starmer had completed the transition from a movement reflecting the concerns of its constituents to an authoritarian organization practicing an only slightly modified neoliberal consensus. In the July 2024 election Labour won 411 seats and a majority of 174 in Parliament by focusing resources on winnable seats. The tactic worked, but with just 34 percent of the popular vote, the electoral mandate was a hundred miles wide but an inch deep.

There was clearly an unsatisfied appetite for change in the country. On July 24, Corbyn and Sultana launched a website where people could register their support. Within the first week of the launch, some 600,000 people had signed up and by late August the number had risen to over 800,000, exceeding the membership of all the other parties combined. Corbyn noted that people signed up “because they have had enough. They’ve had enough of being made poorer while the rich get richer.” The Labour Party was haemorrhaging support, with membership at the early part of this year down to 309,000. Across the country initiative groups were established to create the promised grassroots movement. The great majority of the local activists were former Labour Party members, disappointed not only by Starmer’s bumbling leadership but also by the catastrophic absence of a vision of how the country could overcome its grave governance, economic and social ‘polycrisis.’ At the founding meeting in August of my local section in Canterbury and Whitstable, most participants had been expelled from the party not only over disagreements over social policy but above all because of the party’s militaristic stance over Ukraine and ineffective opposition to Israel’s mass murder in Gaza and the West Bank.

Opinion polls revealed a deep demand for change. A fifth of the population would consider voting for the new party, rising to a third of young people aged 18-34. Nearly a third were ready to support an alliance with........

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