Yves here. Americans who have become disillusioned about the prospects for national candidates like Sanders who advocate for concrete material benefits for ordinary voters, aka socialism, might understandably be inclined to dismiss Corbyn’s efforts to seek leadership via a new party as quixotic. But things have changed since his last big. First, with Gaza genocide becoming even more visibly horrific, it’s much harder to make “pro Palestine = anti-semitic” stick. Second, as rise of Zohran Mamdani, and even more tellingly, the difficulty Team Dem and plutocrats are having in sinking his campaign, even in hard-core, heavily propagandized America, capitalism has resulted in such severe inequality and visible looting that voters are tossing the old guard over the side. The same impulse that produced Trump should if anything even more favor a bona fide socialist.
Early UK voter reactions indicate that Corbyn will be a force to be reckoned with, as in even if he does not become PM, he could come to command a big enough block of seats so as to lead a coalition essential to forming a government and hence influence policy. From Council Estate Media in New Corbyn party already bigger than Tories and Reform as 250,000 sign up in one day:
The new party founded by @jeremycorbyn and @zarahsultana might not have a name, but it already has over 250,000 sign ups. To put that in perspective, Reform has around 230,000 members and the Tories have 120,000. The evidence could not be clearer: people are desperate for change
In 24 hours, sign-ups to ‘Your Party’ have hit 250,000 and climbing. With your help, we’re on track to become the largest political party in the UK.
Keep it going 👇👇✊https://t.co/YqifXtLDVLEdit: Now at 250k! The numbers are rising faster than we can keep up with them. pic.twitter.com/CeuozLUamc
— Collective (@wearecollectiv_) July 25, 2025
At Labour’s peak under Corbyn, the party had a membership of nearly 600,000 which has plummeted to 300,000 under Starmer. Most of the people who left Labour in disgust have jumped into the arms of the new party. Expect that trend to continue until the new party is the biggest in the UK.
I’m not sure if Starmer realises that constantly kicking his party’s members in the bollocks was a suicidal move, but he soon will. Remember when Angela Rayner said she would suspend thousands and thousands of members until everyone fell in line? Well, Corbyn sends his thanks!
To unpack this development a bit, in the UK voters can become party members, which requires them to pay annual dues and also allows them to vote in leadership contests. Recall it was Tory members who chose Boris Johnson to replace Theresa May in 2019, as opposed to UK voters at large. That outcome was widely criticized as undemocratic (although Johnson cemented his status as Prime Minister after a later general election).
Readers will not doubt offer additional observations on the new-found appeal of socialism in the Anglosphere, but a fresh article in the Financial Times provides a clue. From Why are young adults in the English-speaking world so unhappy?:
One of the most striking but under-discussed insights from this year’s World Happiness Report was that the marked worsening in young adult mental health over the past decade is primarily, if not exclusively, an Anglosphere phenomenon.
The share of young adults regularly experiencing stress and anger has risen sharply over the past 15 years in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. But it has been largely stable elsewhere in the west, according to detailed data from the Gallup World Poll used in the report….
I want to throw another factor into the mix: housing.
While dozens of countries are dealing with deteriorating housing affordability, the issue is especially acute in the Anglosphere.
Keep in mind that the British are underhoused compared to Americans, in terms of living space per person. so rental housing is almost certain to be more cramped than here.
By Carla Abreu, openDemocracy’s Audience Engagement Manager, journalist. She tweets @carlasabreu_. Originally published at openDemocracy
Welcome to openDemocracy’s weekly reader comments round-up. This is an opportunity for us to showcase some of the many carefully considered messages we receive on a range of topics.
These comments are edited for clarity, accuracy and length and don’t necessarily reflect openDemocracy’s editorial position.
Money makes the world go around, so they say. So, how come those who already have a shed load of it always seem to get more, while those living pay cheque to pay cheque never do? Also, it’s past time to put a stop to political donations from bankers and businesses. They are only giving money to politicians to increase their own wealth. Or do they expect us to believe they are just being philanthropic? Give me a break! –Vee
They’ve clearly forgotten Gordon Brown’s ‘light-touch regulation’. That was a Mansion House speech, too. It ultimately led to disaster in 2008/9. Which in turn led to George Osborne’s perma-austerity, which led to Brexit and the rise of Farage. –Judith
I switched my vote from Labour to the Greens many years ago. Yes, I know it’s a lot easier to make promises in opposition than it is to deliver policies when in power. But the Green Party’s policies are much closer to ‘traditional Labour values’ than those of the current Labour Party. –Steve
Ethan Shone makes the case that Rachel Reeves and the Labour Party are now a wholly owned subsidiary of the financial services industry and are focused on a corporate-privileging agenda. While this may or may not be exaggerated (after all, we might point to some non-corporate favouring actions this year), as an overall trend, it doesexplain Reeves’s position-taking. –Christopher
I was wondering how the current situation is different from under the Tories. Not in a ‘they’re all the same’ way, but whether finance correctly spotted a chance to get more radical (and profitable) changes pushed through because Labour is so vacuous and easily manipulated, while senior Tories who know better how the city works might pushback. –Bash
Do you not think that your question is simplistic? Socialism in one country, just like that? What world do you think we live in? You do risk sounding like entitled young things who expect to get everything they want without understanding the context at all. Working for socialism is harder than that, as your own research surely tells you! –Jennifer
I do think a socialist government is possible for the UK. Just look at what happened in 1945. There was a longing for a kinder, fairer, healthier world, with its shoots appearing even during the war.
Now we are approaching a tipping point, where the general public has had enough of both Big C and Small C conservative governments. Inequality is so clear to see, yet it’s getting worse. Old Labour principles have been thrown out in favour of ‘growth’ and cosying up to Big Business. Our services and local government are underfunded, reducing our quality of life, while the distortion of the housing market is increasing homelessness, and the government won’t meaningfully commit to ditching fossil fuels. The British people feel they deserve better, and it is possible they will demand it soon. –Susan
A socialist government is electable in the UK, especially if the left pulls together. However, it would need the support of other socialist governments to counter the corporate efforts that would undermine it, specifically deals that include investor/state dispute clauses, corporate arbitration and exemptions from national laws, as well as so-called free trade zones. –Lesley G
Of course it is possible! We’ve had socialist-led governments in this country in the past, though not really since Harold Wilson’s. It was with Tony Blair’s premiership that the rot set in within Labour; he was no socialist, and it all went downhill from his first day in office. Now, we’ve got middle-class, lawyerly Keir Starmer, whose bourgeois ways and colleagues, as well as his habit of ousting anyone whose ideology isn’t in lockstep with his own, make socialism an impossibility under what passes for a Labour Party today.
But there’s hope! Jeremy Corbyn has already had a very uneasy five years as the Labour leader before all those right-wing Blair hangovers managed to oust him. Now he seems to be planning to launch a new socialist party with the fresh and enthusiastic young MP, Zarah Sultana. There’s certainly a hunger in the electorate for a socialist party to represent them, even just to listen to them with left-wing ears, so to speak, and then move on from there with fresh ideas and additional active support.
I’ll do everything I can to help, little though that is. I’m rooting for them, and I know I’m not the only one. So yes, of course we can have a socialist-led government in England – even in the UK – just as we’ve had (too rarely) in the past. Live in hope, hope for the best but plan for the worst, all that kind of thing. –Val
Yes, in my country, Scotland, if it manages to gain its independence. I believe that English votes will bring the UK a Reform-led government at the next general election, and Scotland, just as happened when it voted to remain in the EU, will find itself outvoted – and governed by that right-wing bunch of charlatans.
Reform Ltd will not need a single vote from Scotland to achieve its goal of forming the next government, although it will get some with the money it is currently pouring into winning Scottish votes. But polling suggests that most people in Scotland intend to vote for the centre-left SNP which already runs the UK’s best performing, better paid and only strike-free health service, NHS Scotland; operates the internationally acclaimed Scottish Child Payment, lifting more Scots kids out of poverty than any other part of the UK; offers free bus travel for young and old; free prescriptions and tuition; more and better paid police with lower crime rates across all metrics; more teachers and GPs per head of population; better building standards – I could go on. In other words, it is a far more socialist government and is currently politically left of Labour. –Lesley M
I hope a socialist-led government is possible; it’s the only way to save our miserable species (though it may be best for all other species if we don’t survive). But until left-wing radicals can come together in a convincing way, I can’t see it happening. –Amanda
The prospect of a new party involving Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana appears immensely popular but would face tremendous opposition from the establishment and right-wing media. So, yes, it’s possible, but only if brutal opposition can be overcome. –Barrie
The more I learn about the world, the more I doubt that socialism is possible, and this is coming from someone who likes socialism. – CAT via Mastodon
I follow Novara Live (UK) daily. Yesterday the Corbyn/Sultana offering had 300k sign ups. But, those are people who have signed up, not paying members, so there is much to be done. That Reform (Tories retread, basically?) has surged so much is solid evidence that the old guard is well past its sell by date. The new party will be further proof on the left. There will be loads of buyers remorse if Reform actually were to take power. There is time to head that off.
So what happens if – now stay with me here – what happens if the Corbyn/Sultana party wins a major chunk of the votes during the next general election sending the Reform party of into the wilderness, only to have the Tory and Labour parties go into Coalition together to keep power for themselves and keep running the country. They mostly have the same policies anyway. Tell me that this will never happen.
That seems quite likely. I know the analogy isn’t clean, but didn’t essentially the same thing happen in France?
I agree that a coalition with Corbyn at the head is unlikely. Going by previous acts, European leadership will sacrifice anything and everything before giving up neo-liberalism as the driving ideology of the state. I imagine that Corbyn’s party will certainly split the Labour vote, but its diluted messaging, “big tent” notion of socialism, and lack of long-standing community roots & education will prevent this party from being able to lead at a national level.
I’m sure we will see many areas flip to this new party in the next election cycle, but as time goes on, I’m sure increasing amounts of infighting and ideological consistency within the party will lead it to gridlock (just like what we’re seeing with the DSA). Mamdani is a great symbol, but becoming Mayor of NYC is still very different than the president and even more so the PM…
The UK has a long and hard road ahead of it before it can start building socialism, I think…
I never suggested Corbyn would head a coalition. But a junior partner with must-have votes can have a lot of influence if they choose to exercise it.
Totally true. In Canada the New Democratic Party (NDP) with 15% of the vote used its influence in a minority government to get us a good childcare plan, a start at free dental care covering millions of households with an income of less than 90k and a modest first step to Pharmacare with diabetes drugs and drugs and devices for contraception covered for free. None of these programs is complete by any means as the neo-liberals have fought back but would have been impossible to begin absent the NDP.
The NDP helped ensure that Trudeau’s approval rate was about 25% in the pre-election period, after years of serial incompetence and many scandals. Justin strung the NDP along without actually delivering what he promised them. It was only thanks to Trump, that Justin’s parachuted successor won. Meanwhile the election caused the #NDP MPs to shrink down to “UNofficial Party” status as their “reward” for perpetuating the Trudeau curse much longer than was needed.
I think that would be highly likely. I think bith would also be willing to go into a coalition with reform.
So, they re-group, organize ,and aim to increase their vote share and, hopefully, number of votes in the next election while maybe picking off a couple of seats in by-elections. One does not usually build a new party from scratch to government in 5 years. If we look at the Reform Party of Canada, it took something, IIRC, a bit over 20 years, and merges with the Progressive Conservative Party to form the Conservative Party and take power.
I believe that Farage established Reform, under some other name back in 2018.
And as Keith Newman (below) points out a minority party with the potential to precipitate an election can have real effects on policy.
For US readers: There is no fixed term for a Government (US = administration?) in the Westminster system—though in Canada an election must be called within 5 years. In Australia, I believe, it is 3 years. A Government may fall and an election be called at any time if the Government loses a vote of confidence. The Canadian Progressive Conservative Party under Joe Clark lasted 66 days.
Do you think Conservative and Labour will coordinate by fielding only one candidate together in some constituencies?
Thank you, Yves.
It would be interesting to hear what NC’s British contingent think and if any have signed up.
I know a handful of people who have. By midday London time, over 400k had signed up.
A handful of others are out off by Zionist opportunists like Owen Jones, James Schneider and Jon Lansman expressing an interest. They influenced Corbyn to accommodate the accusations of anti-semitism and throwing the likes of Marc Wadsworth, Chris Williamson and Jackie Joseph under the bus.
@ Alice X above: Novara should go back to school and learn how the economy works. They still think taxes and the bond market fund the government and the stock market funds companies.
I’m in Jewish Voice for Labour and we stay in the LP to fight the b****** but there may come a point when it is no longer useful. I’ve spent years on the stump and the problem is this: the majority of voters in Britain are right wing. It is most noticeable on Foreign Policy. What any new party needs to do is to rebuild the Labour Movement and increase a positve presence in the information space. As the empire retreats it will become more ruthless and people will change – but we are nowhere near that yet.
Thank you. I agree and wish you well.
“We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too,
We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople.”
Some assumptions are still embedded in the brain, like the memory of a lost limb, eh?! And the establishment and BBC tries to maintain this overinflated image of a strong and powerful and important UK.
I’m not certain what the difference is between the political/ideological Left and Right. The majority of voters just want relief from the policies which have laid waste to so many lives since James Callaghan became Prime Minister and started listening to his bird brained son-in-law driveling on about the importance of monetary policy, ultimately rewarding him for his economic insights with the Ambassadorship in Washington – which gave quite a a leg up to Thatcher with her strange Hayekian nightmare vision of free markets in a world of competitive corporations wielding their brands like economic swords as she clambered into Downing Street along with Geoffrey Howe, the Solicitor General who decided off his own bat to destroy the Heath government on the assumption that the sequestration of union funds would improve the the quality of Britain’s industrial relations.
Having sat contentedly as a director of EMI while it was going bust and had to be salvaged in a takeover by Thorne, he sat contentedly as Thatcher’s Chancellor by jusr as quietly f*cking up the British economy by getting rid of the dollar premium and easing up on the regulations governing foreign exchange so that the cash rich could invest in assets overseas rather than in the UK and turning thr British economy into a macro EMI without a Thorne to pick up as many pieces as possible in the hope of being able to put it back together in some sort of functional form. So as UK industry tanked through a clever combination of a little action here (eg, the destruction of the steel industry) and a little inaction there (the growth of Nimbyism and the deliberate collapse of the council housing sector, plus the failure to accept the links between poverty, ill-heath and mortality by simply ignoring the Black Report) the Tories began the creation of modern Britain: a land of hunger, an ever increasing precariat, amidst a declining public physical and social infrastructure whilst turning the real economy into a series of financialised assets which could be trusted to inflate in value and keep those lucky enough to get a foot on the housing ladder busy voting Tory to let their good times roll just as long as we didn’t build too many houses. And then it all fell apart in 1993 and we ended up in 1997 with a Labour government that offered a more stylish body of pretend technocrats who f*cked up the economy even more, used ASBOs to get the homeless off the streets and into jail, happily got caught up in overseas wars for incomprehensible ideological reasons to do with making everywhere a little USA by regime change, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia, a pattern followed by successive governments which and the results are still ongoing. Oh, and Labour forced ordinary people to pay the price of the banksters’ gambling spree.
If we consider, say, Reform to be Right and Your Party to be Left (while the incompetents in the others parties can be regarded as the failed centre) we can see a certain commonality between their supporters. Most ordinary Brits are pre-disposed to the socially conservative whilst respecting the right of others to be different as long as we are not forced to adopt those differences as an expression of “solidarity”, and we value personal liberty and tolerance rather more than the “freedoms” and obligations imposed on us by governments which do not represent us in any meaningful way; we’re also predisposed toward egalitarianism and we’re a sucker for charities and we accept that we might have to pay a little more tax to improve our country but we want taxation to fairly reflect income and wealth. We just want thing to get better for ourselves, our families and our neighbours.
I know supporters of Reform who have similar views to my own about basic principles. It’s just that they lean slightly more in one direction while I lean in another. Most people aren’t interested in foreign policy and they can be easily be mislead by a media that is increasingly distrusted, but when they see the events in Gaza on their screens, they quickly learn the difference between media massaged consent and the murder of innocents at scale because of their ethnicity and land ownership, whether it’s through bombs, bullets or starvation.
We want a change and we need a dramatic change if future generations are to have the slightest opportunities to thrive and, on the ground, the next election will be between Reform and Your Party (I hope we keep that name because Your Party so easily becomes Our Party and I want it to have the broadest church in which we deal with our difference by discussion between our supporters and our opponents and not infighting between factions consisting of the credentialed but poorly educated over privileged sods which make up the hierarchies of the Tory and Labour parties and, yes, the Liberals as well.
My own feeling is that Jeremy Corbyn, who is a great campaigner, would make a good prime minister because I’ve seen him chair difficult meetings, and the purpose of a Cabinet is to discuss, argue and attempt to persuade others of the advantages and the disadvantages of pursuing alternative approaches to solving problems. And the last thing we need is a prime minister who feels the need to continually impose his will on others. We need a leader capable of arguing persuasively to electors rather than speaking in 15 second soundbites. One point which was brought to my attention decades ago by a Tory who had served under Attlee during the wartime coalition was that Churchill made the biggest bang with the public and in the Commons, but Clement Attlee chaired the most effective and decisive Cabinet committees by saying very little until he summed up the feeling of the meeting with the knack of making everyone feel they had made a valuable contribution to shaping the final decision.
Thanks, bertl. I got a but confused with the Thorn-EMI part but otherwise gr8. And agreed.
I am wondering whether many amongst those so called zionists are at the same time real anti-semites. The first goes with geo-strategic goals and the second is a (anti?)cultural thing.
You may be correct but I still like them.
Thank you. A curate’s egg.
Took a look today. So far it appears to be a plan to have a plan. :-(
I may sign up for the right to participate in their deliberations but frankly, if they cannot find half a dozen high profile politicos with enough confidence in their judgment as to what a anti-oligarchic, anti-globalist, humanist party looks like in the first place, my hopes are not high. Why didn’t they just take the modern Chartist Manifesto or even the Common Wealth party manifesto?
https://www.chartist.org.uk/chartist-2015-manifesto/
https://www.chartist.org.uk/common-wealth-manifesto-1943/ [1]
Somebody has to scale the barricade and raise the flag and cry “follow me!”, not “point of order!”. Power is taken, not given; revolutions are led (or perhaps, ridden), not followed etc.
Part of me feels the best strategy for the left would be a Militant-style Reform entryism! Nigel has all the best tunes but lacks wonkish policy; a lot of economic “Corbynism” could be slipped into the libretto with a bit of cunning (the woke side, less so).
[1] in looking for a ready made manifesto (the Diggers and Levellers proved insufficiently modern in terms of a welfare state), I came across the Common Wealth party and it is fascinating! Plus it is the name I would choose if I were to found a political party! Good branding….
One of the movers was a scion of a local family, the Aclands, of North Devon. The initial committee and then party arose out of a loose association of political figures who declined to join the WW2 compact of national government between the major parties. They stood up radical candidates at by-elections, including Tom Driberg!
I had no idea this happened and I think this may be an important strand in the explanation of how the 1945 Labour government was so radical: because the political legitimacy of radical policies had already been quietly established. I am going to look into it more….
Thank you, R.
Corbyn is stubborn. I know his former party secretary.
Perhaps, someone can get to Zahra Sultana before Corbyn messes up.
It’s interesting to hear of James Schneider’s connections and sabotage. Corbyn refuses to.
Getting thousands to sign up is the easy part – actually putting together a party that can compete with the Labour machine in dozens of constituencies is the hard part.
My feeling is that it is doomed because of its failure to take a significant number of existing sitting MP’s with it (its not too late for this, but they need to get a move on). The Labour Party will always be able to mobilise sufficient chunks of the vaguely centre left working class low income voter to make it very hard to get a majority in traditional constituencies. And if they don’t get that, they will never get more than a handful of MP’s (or councillors for that matter).
I’m also appalled at the failure to put together a proper manifesto. Once you have a lot of members, getting agreement on something will be near impossible. The trick would have been to put something together sufficiently vague but radically populist that most people could sign up to it without having to deal with the many tricky economic and political problems which divide the left in Britain (the existence and meaning of UK/GB/England being of course one of the biggest of those).
> failure to take a significant number of existing sitting MP’s with it
I’ve often read here that Starmer effected a purge of Corbynites from the party and the means to ensure loyalty from the remainder. If so then I’d expect that lot to join the Conservative Party before going with Corbyn.
We need a new party here and Sanders’ failure to advocate for that was perhaps his biggest sidestep. I won’t say betrayal because it’s unclear whether Sanders–an old man–ever seriously expected to win anyway. He saw himself as leading a movement.
Chomsky said even dictators need consent of the governed and perhaps this common sense understanding is the difference between neoliberalism and autocratic systems like China where the elites are allowed to enjoy their privileges as long as they don’t come at the expense of the country as a whole. Russia seems to work this way too.
Of course the internationalists of today like to pretend that nationalism was the root cause of the WW2 disaster rather than out of control elites. Real history suggests the opposite.
For the US, the dilemma is the Electoral College for the Prez. And were an actual leftist elected to Congress, s/he might not be seated, the Congress can prevent that. The crafty founders wanted to improve on the parliamentary system.
For the US there is the issue of States enacting electoral legislation pertaining with Federal Elections (per Constitution it is their responsibility if I remember correctly) that favour the entrenched incumbents and practically disqualify any other party and therefore heading a long ago warning:
“On the morning of May 29, 1787, in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia, opened the meeting that would become known as the Constitutional Convention by identifying the underlying cause of various problems that the delegates of thirteen states had assembled to solve. “Our chief danger,” Randolph declared, “arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.” None of the separate states’ constitutions, he said, had established “sufficient checks against the democracy.””
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/democracy/our-chief-danger
Thank you Kouros, as John Jay (one of the three authors of the Federalist Papers) wrote: those that own the country ought govern it. Federalist #10 (Madison) gives the game away as much as any.
We have the legacy of the anti-Federalist first bill of ten amendments forward. Now they hang onto the mysterious 2nd but not the others.
I will point out that despite their aristocratic tendencies, the Founders were not in favor of an oligarchy especially of the immoral, greed is good, kind that we have now; they also expected a little revolution now and again to trim any oligarchs being too greedy, and they would be really surprised that aside from the Southern slavocracy reclaiming their power after Reconstruction, there really hasn’t been any aside from incidents like the Battle of Blair Mountain. But that is also a reason for the Second Amendment.
The one big fault of the Founders was that they expected the nation to be more civilized, more wise than it was and is. Maybe because they expected us to be more like them. The very educated, and occasionally wise, group of men who created the system that we live under.
>I will point out that despite their aristocratic tendencies, the Founders were not in favor of an oligarchy
George Washington, the president of the convention, was the richest man in the country. Hamilton wanted a King.
There could have been a broader dispute at the time with the many’s more thorough consultation.
The goal of the founders was to create a republic. The problem was a republic didn’t exist anywhere. They had to reach back to the Roman Empire in order to study a republic.
The US aristocrats were not represented by the executive but rather the Senate which was stable as Senators held their position for six years. In contrast, the people’s House was, as intended, constantly in turmoil with elections every two years.
The classic liberals who influenced the founders were interested in ‘liberty’—a different thing than democracy: liberty bell, Statue of Liberty, give me liberty of give me death, liberty ships, liberty coin, and on.
The Electoral College was a final check on an out of control executive which they thought was the biggest threat to the republic. Perhaps the EC should not have confirmed Trump.
The founder’s system of Presidential election was pretty much unworkable, hence 12th Amendment.
Musk is talking about setting up his own political party but not to win power or anything but to win enough seats so that he has the balance of power in any voting sessions. If that happens, perhaps the Republicans and the Democrats could amalgamate to keep power between them. Not sure what they will call themselves though. The RepRats? The DemCans? Probably something meaningless like the Freedom Party instead.
Musk hasn’t even looked at the rules. You have to first gather enough votes in a state to register as a party (which is made very hard) and then sit out a full election cycle before you can get on a ballot. I have not independently verified this, but this is per someone credible, perhaps Ryan Grim.
Each state has its own laws. For Hawaii:
“A political party shall be an association of voters united for the purpose of promoting a common political end or carrying out a particular line of political policy and which maintains a general organization throughout the State, including a regularly constituted central committee and county committees in each county other than Kalawao.
“Any group of persons hereafter desiring to qualify as a political party for election ballot purposes in the State shall file with the chief election officer a petition as provided in this section.
“Contain the name, … of currently registered voters comprising not less than one-tenth of one per cent of the total registered voters of the State as of the last preceding general election;
“Be accompanied by the names and addresses of the officers of the central committee and of the respective county committees of the political party and by the party rules
“Attorney General Opinions:
General election presidential ballots shall contain the candidate’s party or group affiliation along with the candidate’s name, regardless of whether the party is qualified under §11-61 and this section. Att. Gen. Op. 13-2.
” No person shall be a candidate for any general or special general election unless the person has been nominated in the immediately preceding primary or special primary.
“The primary or special primary ballot shall be clearly designated as such. The names of the candidates of each party qualifying under section 11-61 or 11-62 and of nonpartisan candidates may be printed on separate ballots, or on a single ballot.
So to sum: an “unrecognized” party can be created by petition of registered voters. The petition must be timely submitted (170 days prior to primary) so that it is approved prior to last day for nominations so that candidates can file nomination papers for that party. The party will have a section on the primary ballot for all candidates from that party. But a party petition is not required for President (however, a separate petition is required for unrecognized party candidates with the same one-tenth of one per cent of the total registered voters signature requirement).
Per Alice X, it is pretty much impossible to form a new party in the US and have it be anything more than marginal. So that criticism of Sanders is not fair. He was at 1% when he started and would have been lucky to get that much in actual votes given the many many obstacles.
True, many barriers to 3rd party (and barriers to democratic accountability) in the US (the UK also uses FPTP): the FPTP electoral system (winner takes all); MassMedia monopolies and discourse dictatorship, BigMoney dominance, formalized political bribery etc.
But for that matter, the US system is a PR democracy at best, that offers a very narrow spectrum (if any) of meaningful policy choices. The US is an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery after all. How can we expect anything different? Sanders telling us to vote for HRC, Biden, Harris etc. is telling us to vote for the corrupt status quo and genocide. So the corruption worsens and the US will continue to decline.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/sheepdog-caucus-and-so-called-democratic-socialists
I don’t think it is necessarily the FPTP per se, but the impossible high bar States’ legislations (their responsibility, constitutionally) placed on wannabe parties (but of course, not the incumbents). Canada has the NDP, the Green Parties that manged to win seats both in provincial and federal elections.
In the 2024 election cycle, Hawaii had 9 qualified parties (including “no party affiliation”) though I think “No labels” has since been disqualified.
There is a push for “jungle primary” so two Dems could move to the general election.
British perspective here. Corbyn was mauled by the UK press and seemed headed for the wilderness, however a factor I didn’t consider (pointed out on NC in this piece) is that the mechanism was smears that Corbyn was anti-semitic. That is going to backfire, since the impression now is that Corbyn was right all along.
Further factors are that Corbyn came very close to defeating Theresa May in the 2017 general election, and there is some strong suggestion he would have done so had it not been for the machinations of the pre-Corbyn Labour party establishment. Keir Starmer, now British PM, was part of the contingent undermining Corbyn and thus paving the way for a disastrous string of British PMs (Johnson, Truss, Sunak). If – and it’s a big if – the new Corbyn party can communicate this narrative, they can strengthen a case for legitimacy. Starmer was also handed the Brexit brief by Corbyn, and did little with it – some voters will remember. Lots of people voted for Corbyn in 2017, and what happened afterwards (Johnson, Truss, Sunak) is popular with precisely no-one. If Starmer seems responsible for what went wrong with Labour in 2017–19, a lot of left-leaning votes could be mobilised.
Weak points for Corbyn follow from his 2019 general election campaign, in which there was over-reach in the manifesto and in which Corbyn himself performed poorly in election debates. Some Brits have made up their minds they don’t like Corbyn on the basis of that era. Corbyn can also be irascible, and it doesn’t work well for him. In 2017 Corbyn had seemed fresh and a bit rebellious (e.g. turning up to formal occasions in working class attire), but was ultimately unable to capitalise on this image-wise. However, he does bring legitimacy to a new party due to his former leadership of Labour as the official opposition party.
I think the effectiveness of the new party will largely depend on the team Corbyn is able to assemble. If he can adopt a figurehead position (i.e. he has valuable experience from his time at the helm of Labour, and can use this to guide others), and if there are fresh, ideally younger, politicians who are able to perform well in media appearances, there can be a good chance. However, I’m not optimistic, because Corbyn wasn’t able follow this strategy when he had actual power in the Labour leadership. One difference is that he does not now have to manage the Blair-era MPs. Rather, the new Corbyn party will be uniformly supportive of socialist initiatives. Thus, the main issue will be with messaging to the public. There is a lot to draw from, including hard data showing UK public electoral preferences, in the failed 2017 and 2019 campaigns. It’s likely to be many of the campaign team members from that era who are working in the new Corbyn party campain.
The best outcome might be to gain enough votes to force a move to proportional representation for British governance. If that can happen, one of the new party members (i.e. not Corbyn) might eventually lead a British government.
Thank you.
Starmer sabotaged not just Labour over Brexit, but the May government, too. Former Tory minister and No
10 adviser Gavin Barwell has written.
As late as the Monday before the 2019 election, Corbyn met Barnier in Brussels. Corbyn had an idea from me about City access to the EU and how the EU could help supervise the City.
A soft Brexit, Norway Plus, was doable.
The people who have groomed Starmer since the early noughties, often US and Brexiteer, ensured their man sabotaged the discussions by going off script with another referendum and briefings against the leadership.
Concern about Starmer’s links to the US war machine go back two decades.
I’d say Corbyn lacks ruthlessness. The Labour party was full of MPs who were opnely acting against him and he bent over backwards trying to appease them. That just encouraged them to push harder against him. Compare that to Starmer who gets shot of anyone who even voices a different opinion from thr government.
Jeremy lacked a group of time served union MPs and staffers around him who might dislike a decision but who’ve had a lot of experience enforcing decisions they don’t like. I can think of a few guys from the Wilson years who would have handled the vicious accusations of anti-semitism with a really strong emphasis on handling the genocidal, landgrabbing bastards spewing hatred at Corbyn. Think what Bob Mellish would have made of the situation.
Second, never confuse stupid with ruthless. Starmer has to be the least persuasive lawyer in the business. He’s the sort of weakminded son of a bitch who never grew out of bullying smaller kids at school. Ideal Deep State material and that’s all. Maybe he was assigned to destroy the Labour Party, who knows?
Third, the real extremists are those in the political centre, the neo-liberals who still think that politics is an easy job with a bloody good pension if you can leave responsibility for the economy up to the market and the banksters and other tulip lovers who know what we want while us poor sods only know what we need.
Both Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn are deeply serious men who have fought hard battles when the odds were stacked against them, and both, in their different ways, have won their most important battles. JC has kept his base, and NF is slowly building his base. Together, the two of them appear to be to be in a very strong position to completely re-shape national politics and the institutions of government in the UK
Important points, all, bertl. Whenever I think about it I am still infuriated with how Corbyn failed to fight back with real and sustained force against his accusers. Regarding Starmer, would it surprise you if, for example, Lawrence Wilkerson were to drop that State did in fact take part in his grooming as Corbyn’s successor?
The Weaponisation of Labour Antisemitism | David Graeber https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6oOj7BzciA (10 min)
We should not underestimate the stupidity of the masses. In today’s elections, a TikTok streamer who dances and says, “Vote for me,” will likely get more votes than an honest socialist candidate.
[1.] No application of any dogma or ideological formula that currently exists in the West, whether Corbyn’s socialism or Starmer-Tory neoliberalism or whatever the hell Farage’s Reform turns out to be, will do anything but worsen the UK’s situation. The UK’s problem is that the Thatcher Ponzi is coming to its end. So is the general neoliberal Ponzi based on the expansion of fictitious capital, debt, and privatization to substitute for genuine economic activity that’s occurred throughout the West for the last 40 some years. But it’s particularly severe in the UK.
[2.] Here’s a UK Gov current briefing on Industry in the UK —
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8353/
— and in the second chart down, a ranking of Economic output by Industry as a percentage of national economic output.
In first place is Real Estate, at a whopping 13.1% of UK government output! How does that even work?
Well, if you look just below the chart, it explains, “Real estate was the largest individual industry accounting for 13.1% of GVA. Yet most of this is the value of “imputed rents” which is a “hypothetical estimate of what owner-occupiers would pay if they rented rather than owned their homes and not output generated by the industry.”
[3.] This preponderance of the RE ‘industry’ in the UK is a product of Thatcher’s ‘Ownership Society’ scam. Though owner-imputed rent predates her ( to c. 1965 and Harold Wilson’s Labour government), Thatcher sold off council housing cheap and moved home mortgage loan provision away from the traditional UK building associations to the commercial banks so these latter could use real estate as the basis to blow continual credit bubbles
Consequently, in the financial year ending 2023, the average UK house price was £298,000, while average annual disposable household income was £35,000, making the house price to income ratio approximately 8.6—i.e. around 8.6 years of average income to afford an average-priced UK home.
Historically, 1876 was the last time the average UK house prices as compared to average UK salaries made buying a house so unaffordable for the average person. 1876 was also the year the Royal Titles Act passed in the UK Parliament, conferring the title ‘Empress of India’ upon Queen Victoria.
Well done, Thatcher!
(continued….)
[4.] The problem of RE as the UK’s number one industry and the accompanying inflated RE values widens out in all sorts of disastrous ways. I’ll point to just two —
(a.) Because people invest in RE, they don’t invest in more productive investment. So where UK citizens’ share ownership in 1980 was about 25%, it’s now sunk to approx.10%, and foreign share ownership has risen from 5% to around 55%. Indeed, were substantial investment and credit to be diverted from RE to industry, it would deflate the RE bubble, impairing the banks’ main collateral (house prices) and potentially crashing the UK’s economy.
(b.) And of course there’s the problem pointed to by the FT article cited above, ‘Why are young adults in the English-speaking world so unhappy?’ House prices make it near impossible to buy anything without parental help and UK rental costs are ridiculously inflated, sometimes eating up 60 percent of salaries, which are low, and making life a drab treadmill to feed the landlord class. You’re arguably better off going on the dole. And that in turn means….
[5.] Between the low incentives and low salaries, 52.6% of all UK households (as of 19 Dec 2024] are taking more in benefits/services than they contribute in all taxes (in 1977 it was 37%). Moreover, 9.4 million working-age people — more than 10 percent of the UK population — aren’t in employment and are ‘economically inactive’. However, this category includes many low-earning workers, including the 16hrs a week folk, who get a whole bunch of tax credits because of that. Even if you are earning £30-40k you still get back in benefits/services more than you pay in all taxes.
Conversely, if your income rises to £100,000-£125,140, you face an effective marginal rate of 60% (and someone earning £200k pays thirty times more income tax than someone earning £25k.) And, doubtless, some on NC will opine that’s only right and proper.
But consider the real world incentives here: would you make your life a more miserable treadmill only to give more money to Two-Tier Keir, Rachel from Accounts, and the nearly 10 percent of the UK population who could work but don’t? No, you would not. Thus, what you see in the UK middle class, forex, are doctors and other professional types deliberately keeping their working hours low and salaries below £100 thousand. And in the big picture this then incentivizes lower overall UK productivity and a smaller tax base. See forex in the FT today — Capital gains tax receipts fall after big cuts in allowances:
Revenue falls 18 per cent in 2023-24 to £12.1bn as the UK’s efforts to increase revenues from the levy backfire
https://archive.ph/rVF2z
[6.] What keeps the UK afloat are, firstly, that it’s the fourth biggest exporter globally when services are included and, secondly, the City, which is a secret empire sucking in money from across the Earth. The incomes from those areas is relatively easily moved beyond the reach of the ‘tax the rich’ policies which a standard socialist ideology would presumably default to, and the effects on the UK would be adverse . That’s what happened to Callaghan in the 1960s and Healey in the 1970s, and today anyone can move money around the planet electronically in a second.
Conclusion:
No currently Western ideological dogma, whether socialist or neoliberal, will solve the UK’s problems. What might help are policymakers of extraordinary competence, managerial ability, and intellectual vision.
And one place such policymakers might possibly look for policy answers is at another nation with an even bigger problem with its real estate sector than the UK. That’s China, where RE is nominally 10-12% of GDP but which when construction, materials, services, and wealth effect are included rises to a staggering 25–31% of GDP. If Xi and the CCP can successfully deleverage China’s RE sector, it might be worthwhile to look at their solutions.
Thank you.
I second the Col. Such a good concise statement of the situation I may copy-paste this somewhere to have handy when needed.
It was Schedule A of the income tax (established by Pitt and Addington in 1799-1802, following Chapter 2 of Book V of the Wealth of Nations) which taxed the imputed rent, and which was abolished by Maudling in 1963. The primary place of residence was exempted from capital gains tax in 1965: the reasons for this were discussed by David Collison here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/studies-in-the-history-of-tax-law-volume-9-9781509952007/
Essentially, Kaldor envisaged the primary place of residence being subjected to CGT, but according to Collison officials talked the chief secretary (Diamond) out of it, presumably because they were worried about facing the liability when moving out of Greater London and the South-East on reaching retirement.
The key factor is the combination of the fiscal preference to owner occupation *and* liberalised mortgage credit. In the UK credit was liberalised in 1971-73 and from 1980. I have provided the history since 1776 in some detail on previous posts.
Thatcher actually wrote about the operation of Schedule A here when she was practising at the tax bar in the 1950s (Howe also practised at the tax bar): https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document%2F101063
Her fetishising of a ‘property owning democracy’ was not new – it had originated with Noel Skelton in the 1920s, and many senior Tories of the 1950s, notably Eden and Douglas-Home, were keen to revive it. By ‘property’ Skelton meant specifically shares rather more than housing, so what happened after 1980 was the application of revived Skeltonite rhetoric to the property Ponzi scheme. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-social-policy/article/abs/david-torrance-2010-noel-skelton-and-the-propertyowning-democracy-london-biteback-25-pp-272-hbk/F84985C51D05D834653C7E362ECBB3DD
As you rightly note, the whole phenomenon is a self-reinforcing doom loop. As credit flows into non-productive housing, industry is starved of investment, resulting in productivity and – therefore – wage stagnation. Yet this makes owner occupiers that much more dependent upon untaxed capital gains for their future security (especially given that defined contribution pensions have no indexation protection), and this makes them that much more viscerally attached to those gains, rendering reform impossible. £9.1 trillion of equity, which is nothing more than a claim on successors in title, is now being extorted from the next generation (who must also save much more as defined contribution pensioners).
I beat the bookies in 2017, knowing May was not only not gonna increase her small overall majority but that she’d lose it. I take no great credit for this: the election came out of the blue and I just happened to have a pro bono national survey in field about BREXIT. It was NOT set up to predict a general election but I did gather enough discrete choice experiment data to know the pollsters (except the YouGov “alternative model” using two sources of data) were almost certainly wrong.
No media interest so I just used a bookmaker and won. Unfortunately I lost the winnings in a side bet NOT made on data but what I wanted with my heart (Corbyn govt). What I should have spotted was that Brits want Corbynism sans Corbyn himself.
I’ll be interested to see where this goes.
Great idea, Corbynism sans Corbyn. Corbyn needs to be the enabler not the leader. He comes with baggage like Stop oil, we need a party that is not continually defending itself against tabloid stuff. It’s disappointing, but we cannot have a left wing party that also does Identity politics, de-growth and lite touch immigration, the party would spend too much time defending and not enough time communicating.
Thank you, both.
Almost anything is currently possible in the next UK election, so it would be unwise to rule much out. A few points might be worth making.
1. The UK political system is now pretty much broken. What used to be a two-party system with a little third party (the Liberals) has now largely evolved into a six-party system in England (Corbyn Party, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Conservatives, Green, Reform (Farage)) and in Scotland and Wales the nationalists make it a seven-party system.
2. The first-past-the-post system in these circumstances means the outcome becomes almost impossible to predict. A constituency could be won with 20% of the vote. A share of the national vote in the region of 25-30% could suffice to deliver a clear majority in the House of Commons. The situation has become farcical. The last opinion poll I saw gave Farage a (bare) majority on the basis of 29% vote share – and that was before the Corbyn Party emerged, fragmenting the system further.
3. Almost any of the six English parties (the Greens possibly being an exception) could get enough votes to have a substantial number of seats in the Commons.
4. Labour will most probably go the full term until 2029 before calling the next election. With the current pace of change in the world, it has become impossible to predict exactly where matters will be by then. Will we be hurtling towards a world run by AI?
5. If I was Labour I would be thinking of replacing Starmer before the next election. He will be 66. They will need a fresh face. Is there anyone in the 2024 intake who could transform their prospects?
6. One big disadvantage Corbyn has is his age. He will be 80 in 2029. People in the UK have seen what having old men in power is doing to the US.
7. The media in the UK is largely controlled by US interests (Murdoch, the new owners of the Telegraph) who tend to be very right wing. By report (I do not use them) Farage is currently having major success on social media (again backed by US right-wing interests?)
I have learned that it pays to be pessimistic where UK politics is concerned. That way you are not disappointed.
I don’t think there has ever been a less predictable potential UK election. As you say, the system is entirely broken, but nobody has any idea what will replace it.
The sticking point, as always, is the first past the post system. It massively benefits parties with geographic concentration over parties with more broader support (such as the Greens). Its entirely possible for a party to have 30% or more national support and not get a single seat – while relatively tiny parties (such as the SNP or the NI parties) can get dozens of seats with statistically insignificant (national) levels of support.
My guess is that Reform will have blown over by then, mostly due to Farages ego and apparent unwillingness to put the work into creating a proper party. Unfortunately, I think the same may apply to Corbyn – not ego, but I don’t think he is good at the legwork of building structures. The reality is that party constituencies structures matter when it comes to the hard part of getting a vote out where it matters. This is why I’d never rule out the ability of the Tories or Labour to outperform electorally no matter how awful their leaders are.
I wouldn’t underestimate the Lib Dems. They are quietly picking up the disenchanted centre and they understand how to work the votes to their advantage. By the end of the decade there may well be a huge swell of people too disgusted by Labour/Tories to vote for them, but too scared by the radical alternatives to vote for them either. I would never underestimate the power of fear of the unknown in elections.
It looks like a “sign up” on https://www.yourparty.uk/ just means entering an email and phone number (idk if the phone number is mandatory). No payment required, right? So they are comparing collecting 250,000 email addresses with having 230,000 dues paying members. I wonder what the conversion rate will be. Of course I hope Corbyn’s party knocks out Labour just like I hope some hypothetical new leftist party in the US knocks out the Democrats. I just don’t see a clear sign that the day has arrived yet.
Thank you, an important note, I brought this up in the first comment.
Phone # not mandatory; you need to enter a UK postcode to get on the new party’s mailing list.
Good. Starmer’s “Labour in name only” richly deserves smashing utterly.
Allow me to offer, in my rudimentary way, as I view it, what socialism is. A desire for a society where everyone has enough and no one takes too much. That is the principle, but until education is equalized, there will be those who, through dynastic wealth and privilege, cannot abide.
And as they cannot abide, Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Program arrived at the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. In his work, this will develop to the first stage of communism; now in my words: human beings will understand their intrinsic species co-being. They then understand that whomever needs more: a quadriplegic, a mother with three children, a clever person to achieve something of social benefit (from each according to their ability…), any worker, will find social support. Well, if I’ve turned things around, I’ll return to the bearded one’s second stage of communism when humanity can unfurl the banner: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need…
I only offer my humble moral sentiments.
from each according to their ability (join in joy), to each according to their need (join in harmony)
and in the final essence, money is not a common parlance
Saw a clip on Twitter of Corbyn saying that unlike the Labour Party his new party is committed to taking on Reform.
Imo, not the best messaging. 1) It links the new party to Labour, 2) alienates people who aren’t already ‘card carrying’ members of the left and 3) highlights what the party is against instead of mentioning policies that will make people’s lives better.
Part of “taking on Reform” will necessarily involve presenting policies that contrast strong with where Reform are on issues.
I do not believe that Reform are the unstoppable force that some people think. Their performance in local government has, so far, been lamentable.
This is an important point. I would be tempted to vote for Reform if no progressive party arises. But the temptation is fading because yet again they seem entirely unprepared to govern in either policy detail or “counting votes”. It really does seem to be a vehicle for the glory of Nigel Farage rather than for governing.
Surely all his hedge fund backers cannot be this bad at picking winners? Or is this a further symptom of the financial is action of everything, now including politics – the purpose of Reform is not reform but profit?
That’s like the US Democrats campaign of last year. They didn’t really offer anything but it was all about stopping Trump. So how did that work out?
Tactically it is the most sensible move as well as the most natural one for JC. We’ve got three parties leaning in the same direction as the others, and each focusing on small boats coming across the Channel. That’s the dead cat on the table which draws attention from the more difficult problems of day to day life in the UK.
There are more important and immediate issues like student debt, a higher education system that is failing, extortionate rents for low quality housing, failing maternity services, being lucky to get a ten minute phone call from a nurse practitioner rather than seeing a doctor in person, too few hospital beds, sky high prescription charges, privatised rail costing more than a plane ride to the same destination, potholes, credit card interest rates, filthy rivers, poorly maintained sewers and water pipes, etc, etc, all things which impact people day by day. Add to that throwing money at Ukraine, supporting the Zionist genocide until it is so late in the day children are asking their parents difficult questions about why we our government has failed to act to stop it, working with Al Quaeda’s offshoots to no good end apart from making entire territories ungovernable which is a major cause of asylum seekers, economic immigrants and illegals coming across the Channel in the first place to make a better life (sadly, in an economy which is fundamentally broken because of excessive debt financed profit extraction from “our” privatised industries – water and transport being good examples – unpayable student debt over a lifetime of precarious employment, high interest rates on government debt reducing our ability to invest in our country’s wellbeing, low wage/long hours employment, etc) and it is time to tell the electorate that we can start to hack away at the Gordian knot which has held us captive for fifty years.
People are prepared to listen to complex arguments and they will make a great deal of effort to understand the connections if they trust that the person calmly making them is fundamentally honest and worthy of their respect regardless of their own personal political beliefs and is prepared to consider any challenges. Personal trust and respect can transcend political ideology which, for most people, is a a basic attitude towards life coupled with a mishmash of responses to a world which seems to be shifting against them. And if everyone has the right to participate in the discussion, regardless of party, we might be able to develop a consensus on many of the key problems which affect most people, and if we can do that, we can begin to develop a consensus on retirement, pensions, social care, early life assistance, prison reform, and all the other issues which plague many people at some point in their lives.
The “Building the party” article from Sidecar in the links of 26/7 is very good on this context. First para:
“Building the Party
James Schneider
25 July 2025Politics
In recent months, a number of groups on Britain’s organised left have discussed the formation of a new national vehicle: either a political party or an electoral alliance. The case for such an institution could not be clearer. The incumbent Labour government is defined by deference to corporate interests, complicity in genocide and repression of dissent. While the Conservative opposition remains fixated on culture wars and tarnished by its long record of misrule, the far-right Reform UK appears to be on track to win a plurality of the popular vote, presenting its Powellite vision as the only viable alternative.”
Sadly, the rest of the interview with a sympathiser/activist for the new party is conducted in progressive pol-speak.
The new party has to speak in shirt, muscular, concrete prose if it is going to convince people it serves their interests, even if its aims remain as stated. The first three paragraphs could have been reduced to “assemble, organise, manifest”!
I would like to see the nuance of the message. Often mild mannered Corbyn can be given to understatement which is misunderstood as a lack of deeper meaning. To me, the man speaks his mind clearly.
To Rootless Cosmopolitan:
You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t criticize Corbyn for not completely exhausting the entire political topic of “reform” in “a clip on twitter.”
Corbyn is well known and admired by many even outside the UK. The new party isn’t yet off the ground and already he is accused of “alienating people” and not providing details how he “will make people’s lives better.”
It’s certainly a struggle building a new political party especially in opposition to the status quo; and so what, it’s a struggle. I’d much rather see the likes of Corbyn as UK PM and someone like him as US president instead of Trump.
Perhaps importantly, there is a new constituency (of around 1.6 mln disaffected youths) which will want to put their stakes in the ground as will be their entitlement, all going well for them –
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c93kkg37n3kt
I remember reading in September Craig Murray’s report from a meeting A New Left Wing Party in the UK?
One thing this reminds me of is the dialectic of a peoples’ party versus charismatic politics in which the party is a vehicle for the egos of its leaders. David Graeber used to argue that Corbyn was an example of a politician of the people in opposition to charismatic politics.
The question of Soctland and the SNP is also interesting.
Zarah Sultana is the relative unknown here, but probably the person who can best drive the new party forward in its early stages, with Corbyn being the recognisable face of democratic socialism, and who frightened both Labour right and Tories in his very close shave in 2017 with almost 13m votes and a 40% vote share.
This is the high water mark against which the potential for a future centre left vote might be judged.
Starmer struggled to 9.7m votes and a 34% vote share a year ago, and that might well be his own HWM.
Starmer is unpopular, except with the Blairites pulling his strings, both for his authoritarian party management, and his adherence to a centre right neoliberal consensus.
Growth can only flatline with current bankster friendly policies and Reeves’ neoliberal disposition, so the stagnant economy is not going to save him.
SKS has alienated both Left and pro European centrists, plus the majority of anti Zionists.
I doubt he can hold on to much loyalty in any future crisis. He commands both low trust and is a dull communicator.
By contrast, both Corbyn and Sultana have high integrity and respect factors within their natural core constituency.
That Reform are currently riding high is mostly down to displacement of the Tories, and nabbing their core vote plus the protest vote, through a populist leader with more charisma than any other leader, but also much uncritical right wing MSM support.
Reform leaders all have a very high BS quotient, which will likely fade in impact with voter crap detecting fully engaged in future.
Reform will certainly lose votes to the Tories as they revert to type under a new leader, as Badenoch will probably be successfully challenged this autumn, given Tory tanking, and her own unpopularity within the party.
Yet, Reform have just lost a by election to the Tories with Greens in 2nd place, in a seat they easily won just three months ago, which hints at the volatility and fragility of their support.
Unlikely that the Reform drive can be sustained til the next GE, and the Fruit and Nut party, as Private Eye describes Sultana/Corbyn, can easily take a fair proportion of the protest vote plus mining the core Labour Red Wall vote, which was boosted in those seats in County Durham and Northumberland in 2017 under JC, after a slow decline from Blair’s 2001 campaign,( but then felloff in the poor Labour 2019 campaign, incapable of competing with ‘Get Brexit Done’.)
However, how Green momentum might be sustained is open to speculation with a new left alignment. IF Clive Lewis, with his cross party Green New Deal cred joins up, then there would be a strong possibility of some future electoral pact.
Worth noting that the launch has been suppressed by much MSM – even the Guardian (though which often despised Corbyn) only offered minor column inches, and ridiculed by the same media outlets that lauded Reform’s launch and their every PR emission. That 450,000 supporters have come forward so rapidly suggests that the 15% polling reported as potential support might mean a radical alternative can gain traction.
With Tory and Reform splitting the conservative vote, there is definitely potential for a new Left party taking maybe up to half the Labour vote, and having a major input into a hung Parliament in 2029.
Add in ZS’ appeal to the new constituency of 16+ more leftish voters, and there is every chance that they can develop electoral momentum, and if they do pull in support from the Red Wall seats, could possibly hold a balance of power.
Yet, there are so many variables in UK politics right now, and as no party can call upon a totall loyal core vote, these can only be seen as “interesting times”, and left inclined observers follow a ‘wait and see’ plan for now.
Good time to flee a sinking ship. Throughout Europe the institutional center left is collapsing. I believe the forces responsible are structural, and not a matter of personalities (even if the people leading these parties, your Starmers, Hollands, Scholtzs, and I should also include Harrises are uncoincidentally fools.) Too bad the Right tends to better able to take advantage of the moment, because they’re a lot more entrepreneurial.
I would gladly support Jeremy Corbin with my vote, my time and my meagre finances if he were running for office in my country. When I look around the Collective West, he is the only one I can trust to be wise and compassionate. Name one person with his experience, record of standing up for justice and ordinary people who didn’t allow himself to be bought off by Zionists and warmongers. And who cares if he is stubborn? He is committed and not easily influenced to sell out. I can only hope that others like Corbin will emerge. God knows we won’t find them in the current batch of politicians running our western governments.