What the hell is going on with this new left party?
Many of us have been looking forward to a new party of the left for some years now. In the last few weeks, Zarah Sultana issued an announcement that lifted everyone’s hopes. Within twenty four hours, the lack of follow-up, and a series of damaging leaks seem to have thrown the entire project into question.
If you want an overview of what’s happened in the last week, you should check out Andrew Murray’s reporting in the Morning Star. If you want a blow-by-blow account of all the sordid details, you should check out Gabriel Pogrund’s reporting in The Times. For the whole history of these negotiations for a new party, you should check out Carla Roberts’ columns in the Weekly Worker. If you’re interested in the ravings of an anti-communist crank, Paul Mason’s latest screed is surprisingly entertaining.
What I want to explore here are some of the underlying dynamics that seem to be driving this whole dysfunctional process. As far as I can work out, the basic dynamics are as follows:
- Everyone recognises that Corbyn is the key figurehead with a uniquely large personal following capable of bringing in enough members to make the project viable.
- Corbyn, therefore, has effective veto power over everything, because if he walks out, the project collapses.
- Corbyn himself has no particular vision for what the party should be or do (or even if there should be a party).
- Corbyn is completely indecisive & relatively impressionable.
- The whole process largely becomes a battle for influence over Corbyn personally.
- One faction with particular personal influence over Corbyn seems to be completely toxic & totally unwilling to accept not being in control (this may be unsurprising for people familiar with the way that Corbyn’s office was run from 2017-19).
- Hardly any of the key players involved in the process have a particularly clear, confident, or fully fleshed-out vision for the project in terms of structure, strategy, process, or political programme.
- This reinforces the secrecy & the dysfunction, because nobody has anything substantive that they can lay out publicly, but also nothing can get any real scrutiny, and nobody from the outside can contribute to the project’s intellectual development.
This is the context that has led some of those involved to propose a co-leadership arrangement as a way of circumventing these problems by reducing Corbyn’s singular importance. Zarah Sultana’s public announcement of this co-leadership, apparently without clearing it with Corbyn, appears to have been an attempt to break free from this dysfunctional cycle by presenting the arrangement publicly as a fait accompli before anyone can have time to reverse it behind the scenes. And yet we are still left with virtually no information about what is supposed to happen next, or what Sultana, or anyone else, wants this new party to look like.
Where are they leading us?
One of the most striking things in this whole farcical process is the relative absence of any clear proposals or substantive discussions about the process by which the party should be formed; about how the party should be structured; about how its democratic processes should work; about what its strategy should be; about its long term political objectives; or about its policy platform. In short, it feels as if there is a vacuum of leadership.
It wouldn’t be fair to suggest that none of the people involved have offered any kind of leadership. Zarah Sultana has offered courageous and important leadership on specific issues, such as opposing the proscription of Palestine Action, and, most recently, by making an open announcement about this new party. Karie Murphy was offering leadership by forming Collective and publicly agitating for a new party in the first place. Andrew Feinstein has offered leadership by being one of the only people involved to begin to publicly articulate the process by which the party might actually be formed.
And yet, as best I can tell, virtually nobody involved in these negotiations has published openly in writing any detailed or substantive attempts to address the key questions about the formation of a new party. There are a few vague comments from Andrew Feinstein and Jamie Driscoll in Red Pepper or in speeches, and a handful of podcast appearances by the likes of James Schneider or Pamela Fitzpatrick. Perhaps there is more detail in private, but if so, even its existence is being kept very tightly secret, even from close allies. The only relatively substantial written treatment of any of these questions by someone involved in these negotiations seems to be James Schneider’s book, but that was all the way back in 2021. If that’s the best we can do, then we ought to be worried.
What is a leader anyway?
These people are ostensibly the left’s leadership, but what does it mean to be a leader? Well, you are supposed to lead! Whether you are leading the foundation of a political party or leading holiday-makers on a walking tour, the essential concept is the same. You ought to have a clear idea of where you want us to get to, and of the steps we need to take in order to get there, and you should be communicating that clearly to your followers, and explaining to them clearly and persuasively why they should want to get there, and why they should follow your route.
It should seem rather strange that this hasn’t really been happening at all in the two years (or more?) that our ostensible leaders have been cooking up this new party – that the people leading this process give every indication of being just as confused and uncertain as anyone else about where it’s going or by what process it should proceed. Unfortunately, this is hardly unusual for the left in Britain.
Corbyn is the most extreme and the most visible example of this, but it is very common in the British left for our ostensible leaders, our figureheads, the people in positions of prominence and power and influence, to lack any clear sense of strategic vision, or to be unable or unwilling to articulate it publicly.
Why can’t our leaders lead?
It would take a longer and better researched article to do this question justice, but I’ll offer some schematic ideas. There are undoubtedly other important factors that have an influence here (including the paucity of Britain’s local democracy), but what I want to focus on here is Britain’s non-proportional first-past-the-post electoral system, and the structures and culture of the Labour Party.
It’s the electoral system, stupid
The first-past-the-post electoral system severely punishes smaller parties. If you want to win, you need the broadest possible appeal. Even if a political project or argument has a significant base of support, if it remains a minority, it will struggle to find any representation unless it sands off its rough edges, avoids anything contentious, and seeks coalitions with other forces.
And more importantly, you can’t start with the candidate, or even with the political project. You have to start with the factions you need to unite, or the voting base you need to appeal to, or even with the specific target seat that might be conceivably winnable, and then you go looking for a candidate and a platform that can bring those together. In a proportional electoral system, you can start with a party united in your political objectives, and make gradual progress, winning people over by arguing publicly for your ideas – that’s not a winning strategy in Britain.
You don’t want a candidate with strong opinions that might be too controversial or too niche. You want someone with broad appeal – a lowest common denominator who all the different factions can unite behind. This might select for someone with the right personal connections to appease the different factions, and who’s never taken enough of a stand on anything to alienate any of them. It might select for someone young, charismatic, handsome, likeable, fitting the right demographic profile. Or it might select for someone with a storied CV that makes them seem impressive, authoritative, and well qualified (perhaps a human rights lawyer who went on to lead an important government department…).
What you don’t want or need in a candidate is a visionary or an ideologue or an organiser or a strategist. Those people can content themselves as staffers or advisers.
It’s worth noting that the USA has some of the same problems with its electoral system, but the anti-democratic effects were recognised long ago, and systems like the open primary were imposed as a partial remedy – meaning that political “parties” in the USA function very differently from the rest of the world. The particular problem in Britain is the combination of a closed electoral system and closed parties. Which brings us on to our next problem.
The Labour Party kills brain-cells
The Labour Party is a church so broad that it can barely stand – governed by confusing federal structures, and filled with factions which despise one another and which share hardly any common ground politically. At the national level, the big questions around policy and rule-changes tend to be fixed in private negotiations between trade union leaders, cabinet members, and other key figures. At the local level, candidates are selected through usually vicious factional jockeying and backstabbing, but the worst of it is kept behind closed doors. In front of the cameras, everyone smiles and pretends that we’re all comrades working for the common good of party and country.
This breeds a political culture where hardly anybody important is interested in having serious political arguments or disagreements or discussions about strategy out in the open. The public, the voters, the party members, the activists, are excluded from these conversations, and the political figureheads are often uninterested in them or unequipped to deal with them. It ends up being a small caste of unelected staffers, advisers, and networked insiders who are responsible for driving the strategic, political, and intellectual dimensions of the project – at least, in as far as the project has those dimensions at all.
What are the leaders we end up being left with? Celebrity figureheads like Jeremy Corbyn who, as much as we all adore him, seems to be dangerously indecisive, and seems to lack any kind of organising skill or strategic vision; professional bureaucrats like Karie Murphy, who can seem to try so hard to be ruthlessly effective that they end up being ruthlessly ineffective; or networked insiders like James Schneider, who may have many intelligent things to say, but don’t seem to place a very high priority on communicating them with the rest of us.
The democratic alternative
We need a new generation of leaders. Not the celebrity figureheads, the professional bureaucrats, or the networked insiders, but activists and organisers who have graduated from the grassroots through to national politics. We need people who have been elevated not through their factional connections or through secretive bureaucratic manoeuvring, but by arguing openly in the democratic arena for their politics and for their strategic vision, and by showing a proven capacity to organise and lead a mass of people.
But we need the structures which can train that new generation of leaders. We need membership organisations where ordinary activists can get involved, unite around their common long term objectives, and talk to one another about how to develop the strategies capable of achieving them. And they need democratic structures which can connect those conversations at the grassroots to those of the leaders on the national stage.
And we will need left media that platforms open debate between different tendencies, but we need those tendencies to clearly articulate their positions in programmatic terms, and we need left media that will critically interrogate them if they don’t. At Prometheus, we’ve tried to offer our own limited contribution to that.
Chickens and eggs
Unfortunately, building those national structures requires national leadership. So we find ourselves stuck in a situation where the wider activist left is unable to act because we’re waiting for the “leaders”, the people with positions of power and influence, the people with large public profiles, the people with control of the email lists and national organisations, to lead us, to give us something to do, to build the structures that we can enter into and take forwards.
Meanwhile the “leaders” are stuck too. Stuck looking for answers that they don’t have to questions which they don’t always understand. Stuck in these dysfunctional secret negotiations that seem to go round in circles, and which seem to have little effect beyond driving deeper and deeper personal animosities between the people involved, and driving the rest of us crazy in anticipation.
And the rest of us can’t help them. Nobody else can contribute their own ideas, because everyone else is completely excluded from the conversation. We can’t even offer scrutiny or constructive criticism, because we don’t know what’s being proposed or discussed. We don’t even know who to hold to account for the problems, because we still don’t know for certain who is involved. It can seem like all we can do is wait, and either criticise the problems we can only glimpse through the inevitable leaks, or offer uncritical support for a project we know nothing about.
I want to break free
There is a limit to what anyone excluded from those privileged positions can do. We can at least start by trying to break free from this culture of deference and silence, where it’s taken for granted that the meaty strategic arguments are the preserve of your betters, and that you shouldn’t criticise those people because they know better than you, even if they won’t tell you anything.
Zarah Sultana has played an important role here, by finally bringing these conversations out into the open and finally ending this ludicrous open secret. Whoever responded by irresponsibly making damaging leaks to right-wing journalists has ended up playing their part too. At least it’s proven to the rest of us that the emperor has no clothes, and that we can’t take for granted that there is a room full of important people who know what they’re doing and will sort it out for us if we only trust them.
But we need to push these people to go further and to tell us what’s going on! They need to lay out their positions, their arguments, their practical proposals, and they should put them in writing, and they should enter into a dialogue with the wider left. Believe it or not, there are a lot of intelligent people out there on the wider left, and that collective intelligence is being wasted. Worse than that, by excluding people from these discussions, we are all made stupider.
And in the meantime, we can do what we can to build our own organisations and our own power. Whether that’s a socialist organisation, like rs21, which I joined almost two years ago, or a national campaigning group like Palestine Solidarity Campaign, or Stop the War Coalition, or whether it’s a purely local project. For all their limits, there are democratic projects out there, which anyone can get involved in, and which can help to build alternatives to the paralysing leadership of celebrity figureheads, professional bureaucrats, and networked insiders.
Pessimism of the intellect
Whilst the events of the last week have moved things forward in important ways, I remain deeply pessimistic about the prospects for the new party.
Its leaders have still offered little or nothing in terms of vision or strategy. We still don’t know who is involved in these negotiations. We still don’t know what they want the party’s platform to be. We still don’t know what they want the party’s structures to be. We still don’t know what the process will be by which the party will be built. We still don’t know who will lead the party, or who will “co-lead the founding” of the party, to use Zarah Sultana’s rather particular wording. We don’t even really know what it means to “co-lead the founding of a party”. We don’t know if Sultana and Corbyn are on the same page, or even if they are still on speaking terms.
In the last few days, Max Shanly has published a very articulate and relatively practical proposal for how the left should move forward in response to the apparent breakdown of the national negotiations. Hopefully, it will be the first of many. It is incumbent on our leaders to step up to this level, to take seriously and to engage with proposals like this, and to publish their own. If they are unable to do this, the rest of us will need to start taking leadership into our own hands.
