A few years ago, talking to a senior SNP politician, I was told that the best interests of Scotland could never be served by Westminster because Tory voters dominated English politics.

I’ve always viewed the “we’re left, they’re right, it can never work between us” argument with suspicion. It’s flawed. It’s based on election results, when polling and voting patterns tell a different story about English opinion. In the last three general elections the vote shares in England of Labour, the Greens and Ed Davey’s Lib Dems combined have been higher than those of the Tories and Nigel Farage’s parties put together. This was even true by a whisker in 2019 when Boris Johnson won a landslide after Jeremy Corbyn’s disastrous campaign.

On the rare occasions when Labour governments are elected, it overturns that “England is Tory” narrative. Left-leaning voters came together in sufficient numbers in 2024 to elect a Labour government with a big majority and there’s no good reason why that shouldn’t happen more often. But there is a depressing reason why it doesn’t: infighting. The left as a movement seems to have the innate properties of Cumbrian slate, fracturing under pressure.

A new party emerged on the left in 2025, Your Party, just a year after Labour’s victory. It became immediately apparent that the breakaway movement was in itself divided. Last week, in the most predictable news since it split before, Your Party split again. Two hundred and fifty people have broken away altogether from Jeremy Corbyn’s splinter party, expressing frustration at his leadership and apparently taking refuge in the ideological purity of an even tinier political movement even further removed from the inconvenience of........

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