2 hours ago
10
None of us are in our first flush of youth – well, obviously some are, but not Yanis Varoufakis, Ken Loach or, for that matter, me. The Greek firebrand economist and the campaigning British film-maker have written an open letter imploring Your Party to stop being idiots, or – in their only marginally less inflammatory language – “to work together in good faith”. The only reason I would bring anyone’s age into this is just a simple: how many times?
How many times must everyone over the age of 18 have looked at the Labour party, its left flank, its right cadre, its sodden middle, and thought, “I’m out, I’m completely out, I am no longer emotionally engaging with this”, only to be dragged back in by sheer desperation, to find once again that we were right the first time?
To recap on Your Party: it launched with an announcement by one of its leaders, Zarah Sultana, that the other leader apparently didn’t know about. Jeremy Corbyn managed to contain his annoyance to the extent that he didn’t immediately disavow the project, but nevertheless got it across that he was only lukewarm about the co-leadership idea, putting out a statement that merely said Sultana would “help [him] build a real alternative” to Labour, one that understood that “poverty, inequality and war are not inevitable”.
At this point, the party had no name. Some wag on X suggested Jezzbollah, but it was the start of July and Palestine Action had just been proscribed as a terrorist organisation, so no sane person would have laughed. Nope, not one. Meanwhile, in the Spectator, a rightwing contrarian was suggesting that Glastonbury should be bombed, but to fantasise about the death of your opponents is just ordinary, decent free speech, while to laugh at wordplay is hate speech – don’t look at me, I didn’t make these rules. I would like to point out, however, that the right is greatly excelling the left in confidence at the moment.
The new party looked like a shambles, in other words: a “messy surprise”, ran one headline. The lack of name seemed to be one of the main counts against it – until, that is, its holding name arrived, Your Party. You can see what they were trying to do: bring everyone into the tent, give everyone a sense of ownership. In that, it was not ineffective: it said that 600,000 people signed up for updates and information on how to get involved in under a week. There is no shortage of appetite for these ideals, none. Yet it remains the worst name under the sun, for its simple ambiguity – what are we actually talking about? The political party co-led by Corbyn and Sultana; the movement-building project of Corbyn’s, with Sultana helping; or a social event that one person in this conversation thinks the other one is having? Again, observe the enemy: everyone knows what “reform” means, and everyone – even my kids, who would cross the street to avoid picking up even the scantest current affairs knowledge – knows who the leader is.
Things move quite fast in these febrile times, so you may have forgotten the bit where nobody informed the Workers party. Its leader, George Galloway, more in anger than in sorrow, tweeted that he couldn’t possibly work with Your Party anyway, “due to significant difference on the issues of trans … Russia-Ukraine… net zero and other things”. No time now to linger on the bits of the left that are actually indistinguishable from the right. The Corbyn allies in Your Party were named, and it was exactly the same team, centred around political strategist Karie Murphy, who did such sterling, pluralistic work while he was leading the Labour party.
One reason Reform are doing so well is that they don’t let anyone tell them their silly agenda won’t wash with the voters. They won’t be told by pollsters, they won’t be told by sensible centrists; they will just keep on thumping away until their issues are all any of us are talking about. The left, by contrast, operates on a spectrum, from “poverty, inequality and war can wait until we’ve dealt with the deficit” to “I will wage implacable war upon injustice, just as soon as I’ve destroyed this comrade”. They cannot, any of them, stay on topic – they could learn from Nigel Farage, they could learn from Zack Polanski, but they have to start learning from someone.
