As his opponents predicted with glee, Jeremy Corbyn’s new vehicle is already beset by disputes over what exactly a party of the Left should do. While over 600,000 people have signed up to “Your Party” (which effectively constitutes a free mailing list for now, rather than a party membership), there has already been disagreement about everything from the name of the project to the parts of Britain it should target to spread its message. The new party’s founding statement calls for “a mass redistribution of wealth and power”, “an NHS free of privatisation”, and a “massive council-house building programme”, as well as criticising “the government’s shameful complicity in genocide” in Gaza. Yet other policy questions remain unanswered.

One key area of contention came into focus on Monday night, when independent MP Adnan Hussain, a co-founder of the Independent Alliance alongside Corbyn, asked online: “Is there space on the left to create a broad enough church to allow Muslims an authentic space, just as it does all other minority groups?” The Blackburn MP, who is Muslim, highlighted the socially conservative views of those who follow the religion, adding that “the left needs to address this huge elephant in the room.” This is especially pertinent given the chance of pact between the new party and the socially liberal Greens, which has been welcomed by Green leadership candidate Zack Polanski.

At last year’s general election, Labour lost over 300,000 votes in areas with significant Muslim populations, while four new independent MPs, including Hussain, were elected on platforms explicitly attacking Keir Starmer’s position on the war in Gaza. These four sit alongside Corbyn and former Labour MP Zarah Sultana in the Independent Alliance, and hold views that are at odds with the project’s more socially liberal bent. For instance, Hussain has defended gender-critical feminists, while fellow independent MP Ayoub Khan has suggested that his Muslim faith prevents him from supporting same-sex marriage.

As well as some agreement on welfare reform, Gaza has thus become the single unifying issue for Corbyn’s party. Yesterday, shortly before the Prime Minister pledged to recognise Palestinian statehood in September, Sultana claimed that “Labour is the genocide party”; the same day, Corbyn referred to the Government’s Middle East policy as “shameful”. Yet even those committed to the pro-Palestinian cause and loyal to Corbyn himself have been treated with suspicion.

James Schneider, who co-founded the grassroots organisation Momentum and then served as Labour’s director of strategic communications under Corbyn, coordinated the former leader of the Opposition’s re-election campaign in Islington North last year. He has been closely involved in the establishment of the new party, and last week gave an interview to New Left Review in which he laid out his ambitions for a socialist mass movement. Yet some Corbyn supporters, such as activist and writer Philip Proudfoot and journalist Ally Fogg, have highlighted the fact that Schneider is married to Sophie Nazemi, who serves as Starmer’s Press Secretary. Proudfoot referred to a “conflict of interest” if “you’re founding a new political party and your wife is the comms officer for that party’s main competitor”. A source close to the Corbyn-Sultana project told me on Wednesday: “James is committed, and always has been. Who he’s married to doesn’t change that, and we need to avoid internet gossip that gets in the way of building a strong-based Left-wing alternative.”

When I spoke to him in early June, several weeks before the launch of the new party and before his involvement was publicly known, Schneider told me that a new progressive force would have to counter “Reform [UK] and Labour with clear Left-populist politics” and avoid “getting sucked into obsessing about Westminster or following the rules of the political-media class”. In his New Left Review interview, he said that “our party needs to be a vehicle for establishing unity, a catalyst for popular organising and a lever for popular mobilisation towards a social alternative,” and expressed openness to a formal alliance with the Greens.

Opportunities for collaboration in Corbynworld, however, are always liable to be scuppered by supporters’ preoccupation with total ideological conformity. Creating a big tent on the anti-Labour Left will inevitably factor in a range of social views and while the project’s founding statement does not make reference to issues such as trans rights or abortion, questions remain over how social conservatives such as Hussain will work within a framework partly dictated by Sultana’s more typically millennial progressivism. The new Left-wing party is poised to shave several percentage points off Labour’s vote, and its total would be bolstered further by a prospective pact with the Greens under Polanski. But the bigger obstacle may come from deciding just how broad the tent should be.

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is UnHerd’s Deputy Editor, Newsroom.

RobLownie

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