Is Zarah Sultana a useful idiot? To be that, she’d need to be useful

The left coalition currently known as Your Party has had a shambolic start – and its co-founder isn’t making it any smoother, writes David Aaronovitch

The new Corbynite party of the left is having difficulty being born. It is months past its due date, we’re not sure who the daddy is, and its head does not yet seem to be engaged.

It was all supposed to happen by the time of last May’s council elections. A coalition loosely constructed around the former Labour leader and a group of Independent Muslim MPs, together with the whipless and dynamic young MP Zarah Sultana, would emerge as a bright, new socialist alternative to the stuttering Labour Party.

But Jeremy Corbyn dithered, and others grew impatient. Sultana unilaterally managed not one but two false starts (usually enough for disqualification), money was raised that according to the Corbynites shouldn’t have been, legal threats were issued, the question of the party name was delayed until a lengthy consultation process was completed, and in the meantime, many potential members were romanced into the Green Party by its new leader, former hypnotherapist Zack Polanski.

Now an inducement date has been set. On the weekend of 29-30 November, several thousand “members” selected by ballot will pitch up to a venue, probably in Liverpool, and over two days will finally found the new party, name and all. It is promised that it will be the exact opposite of Reform UK, where the name and everything else have been decided by one man. Connoisseurs of far-left founding conferences anticipate a shambles. For example, the Muslim independents tend towards social conservatism, seeing no disgrace in private Muslim schools and in being landlords. To many on the left, they would also qualify as being transphobic.

All that is to come. In the meantime, as a curtain-raiser, Zarah Sultana (and not Jeremy Corbyn) has been doing the media rounds to raise public interest in the weeks before the Your Party chrysalis breaks open to reveal the butterfly within. And almost immediately, she ran into trouble.

Zarah Sultana (and not Jeremy Corbyn) has been doing the media rounds to raise public interest in the weeks before the Your Party chrysalis breaks open to reveal the butterfly within (PA Wire)

It was always open to the new party to slough off some of the historic dead skin of Corbynism and make a new kind of appeal to voters looking for something novel and hopeful. In the US, the man who is most likely to become the new “socialist” mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, has rather ruthlessly centred his appeal on domestic issues of affordability and fairness. The 2025 campaign ads haven’t mentioned Gaza at all, and I can find no record of Mamdani ever talking about Ukraine, Russia or Nato.

Sultana has taken no lessons from Mamdani. So in an interview last week with Politico, following on from an X post in which she called for Britain’s withdrawal from Nato, she offered a very Corbynesque take on the war in Ukraine. “Putin is a dictator, a gangster, and there are war crimes that have been committed,” she conceded, “but Zelensky isn’t a friend of the working class either and … the only people that benefit from conflict in Ukraine, in Gaza or anywhere else, are arms manufacturers and people who profit from the arms industry.”

In effect, what Sultana was demanding was that Britain stop supplying arms to Ukraine and reduce its capacity for contributing to any resistance to Russian expansionism, while simultaneously admitting that Putin is an aggressor. The net result of everyone in the West following Sultana’s prescription would be a total Russian victory over Ukraine: a victory whose benefits for Sultana’s imagined “Ukrainian working class” would be hard to discern. It’s all a bit reminiscent of when, in 1939, the Communist Party of Great Britain denounced the war against Hitler as an imperialist adventure, only to do a handbrake turn when he invaded its beloved Soviet Union.

This much any sentient voter is likely to know or have pointed out to them. The fact that this analysis leaves her in the same camp as far-right America First Republicans must be regarded as awkward. But it also shows how hard it is for the British far left to move on from a mash-up of anti-imperialism, pacifism and a prioritising of foreign affairs over making a disciplined appeal to the direct interests of British voters. But then, the hallmark of the British far left over the years has, above all, been self-indulgence.