Rumors of a new left-wing party in the United Kingdom had been swirling for weeks, so it was no surprise when two parliamentarians — Zarah Sultana and the former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn — held a press conference last week to announce that the prospect was becoming reality. What has come as a surprise to many is the dizzying rate at which they have attracted followers. Within 24 hours, 200,000 people had signed up to this unformed, untested and even unnamed left-wing party. This number topped half a million on Monday, and is still growing. It now undoubtedly ranks as the largest political membership in the U.K., by some distance.
It is clear that the initiative has tapped into a well of energy too quickly consigned to the past by commentators and politicians alike. A few years before musicians led chants against the Israeli military at Glastonbury, the crowds were singing, “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn,” a sign of the enthusiastic support he attracted even as he lost two general elections. He eventually ceded power to Keir Starmer, who led Labour to power a year ago.
It seems unlikely that Corbyn and Sultana’s new party will form the next government. If polls are to be believed, it will likely garner in the region of 10% of the vote and will be in heavy competition with the Green Party. Perhaps above all, it will face the challenge that most people have already made up their minds about Corbyn, a veteran fixture of the British left, who has represented his London constituency in Parliament since 1983. But this does not mean that it is unimportant: On the contrary, the party’s startling number of adherents hints at its viability and a future in which it may have influence that belies its parliamentary strength.
The party, whatever it turns out to be called, is also one more sign that political fragmentation in the U.K. is not going to be put quietly back in the bag — a fact that could have profound implications for the country’s future. With a party landscape that looks increasingly like that of its European neighbors but an electoral system unsuited to European-style coalition-building, the U.K. is sailing into unknown waters.
The new left-wing party itself does not yet really exist — what does is a website where supporters of “Your Party” (Sultana and others had to quickly take to social media to clarify that this was not, in fact, the name of the party) can sign up to have a say in what it will look like, including at an inaugural conference to be held soon. Yet if the tone is bottom-up and open-ended, a statement from Sultana and Corbyn gave the broad agenda — a “mass redistribution of wealth and power,” a reversal of the government’s “shameful complicity in genocide” in Gaza and a new kind of politics rooted in communities, taking its lead from party members.
The timing and content of the announcement are astute. A third of Labour lawmakers have been calling for the government to recognize Palestinian statehood (Starmer announced yesterday that this would happen unless Israel agreed to a ceasefire and recommitted to a two-state solution) — a measure of the disquiet that exists throughout the party and among its potential voters about how little has been done to challenge Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. The public finances, too, have been a source of internal ructions, particularly cuts to winter fuel payments to pensioners and the retention of the two-child benefit cap — a measure that has been directly implicated in the country’s stalled progress in addressing child poverty. And at the same time, Starmer’s political machine has been gaining a reputation for an uncompromising and opaque style of party management that has worsened recent rebellions.
Each of the planks of the new party, then, directly addresses issues plaguing Starmer’s government. And each issue seems baked in under his leadership. At the very least, Corbyn has the platform from which to act as a gadfly. His name is recognized by practically every person in the country — more so than Starmer’s. He is popular with young people, helping to extend his social media reach, and the voting age for the next general election has just been lowered from 18 to 16. The party may well gain further parliamentarians from among the independents elected because of opposition to the war in Gaza and those currently suspended from Labour. One of the Green Party’s current leadership candidates is explicitly open toward an alliance with the new formation, and whether that comes to pass before the next election or not, there are reasons to think that a section of left-wing opinion may once again be coalescing into a political force, whose influence has every chance of growing thanks to the U.K.’s unusually stark generational voting divides.
One reason to think that the growing power of smaller parties is here to stay is that the overarching trend is a long one. In the immediate wake of World War II, politics in the U.K. were a two-party affair. Across the country, the branches of the Conservative Party under the leadership of Winston Churchill boasted in the region of 3 million members, their meetings part of the rhythm of middle-class and rural life, entwined with the Anglican Church and the business community. The Labour Party had some 1 million card-carrying members, with many millions more forming part of a wider labor movement through trade union membership. In the 1955 election, these two behemoths garnered close to 100% of the vote, a figure that then steadily trended downward over the next several decades. The Liberals regained their footing in the 1970s and joined with Social Democratic Party defectors from Labour in the 1980s. Scottish and Welsh nationalists began to stir, as some of the forces that had kept the union together — the monarchy, empire, religious identities and state-led industry — began to fade. Other small parties like the Greens and Nigel Farage’s anti-EU UK Independence Party started to chip away at voters on a micro scale, especially from the 2000s, as they found issues — climate change and immigration, respectively — on which New Labour failed to track public concern.
The trend was reversed in the elections of 2017 and 2019, as a polarized country once again lined up behind the red and blue teams, boosting their combined share of the vote back to over 80%. Yet beyond these campaigns, a very different story was playing out. One of the main issues facing the country — Brexit — was one on which the two main parties had been bitterly divided and had faced serious opposition from smaller challengers. The divisions of economic policy that had once broadly pitched middle-class Conservatives against working-class Labour voters were being bisected more than ever before by questions about Britain’s place in the world — by immigration and by Europe. The Conservatives, in particular, were forced to ride the tiger of anti-immigration populism to keep the challenge from the right at bay. In the middle of 2019, at the height of the Brexit political crisis, as Theresa May’s premiership came to an end, the country had briefly appeared to be split into four even segments, as the pro-Europe Liberal Democrats and Farage’s new party, Reform UK, made hay from the main parties’ woes. The era led to easily forgotten startups like the centrist, pro-European Change UK, an alliance of disaffected Conservative and Labour representatives who were quickly swallowed by that era’s fast-changing political currents.
While Brexit has been resolved and discussing it has become almost politically taboo, the salience of these issues around identity and borders has not lessened, nor is it now easy to see this happening as right-wing discourse increasingly revolves around this single question of what it means to be British and who the U.K. is for. This is one reason why, in retrospect, it feels like, during the late 2010s, two-party dominance was simply hanging in the air for a moment, waiting to realize it had run off the edge of a ravine. Ironically, Corbyn may have been the one doing the most to keep the show going — his unabashedly left-wing economic proposals reminding people of the parties’ traditional oppositions and motivating them to vote out of a mixture of enthusiasm and competitive bile.
The Conservatives have now leaned into immigration for so many years that it has reshaped perceptions of their brand, and the Labour Party has tacked sharply to the right on the economy. It is not a coincidence that Farage is riding high, and the Liberal Democrats and Greens have been creeping up in voters’ estimation from already historic peaks in terms of seat numbers. The two largest parties appear to have lost the stomach for the kind of left-right fight about taxation and services that can still fire up many voters. Labour has explicitly stated that it regards Reform UK as the primary challenger at the next election. As voters navigate these realities, imbibing media coverage that hinges increasingly on debates over immigration and culture war issues, a new pattern of thinking about politics is being reinforced.
Some of those boosting the polls for Reform are no doubt also motivated by a certain kind of desperation — a feeling that neither of the main parties can fix the deep-rooted problems with the country’s public services and housing that Farage and his outriders blame on immigrants. Steady delivery of improvements in this regard could undoubtedly shore up Labour’s position — though that horse has bolted for the Conservatives.
The traditional main parties, then, are partly the architects of their duopoly’s continued decline. And the way they have reacted to the rise of competing forces has become part of a pattern perpetuating the shift. They have spied opportunity in the collapse of old allegiances — they can still win big by becoming masters of messaging, as they detach themselves from the messy business of hammering out consensus and policy details with their rank and file. In turn, public disagreements are tolerated less — when messaging is the primary strategy, raising dissenting voices is the cardinal sin. Yet as this unfolds, they risk erasing key parts of their historic identities, alienating wings of their organizations or local activists, and discovering that they have less that is solid to return to when they seek to rebuild after setbacks. By treating voters increasingly like consumers who are looking for the best offer in a crowded marketplace, they make the diagnosis into a reality — these big tents are being erected in the ruins of the broad churches the two main parties used to inhabit.
This dynamic unites two figures who are rarely seen as having anything in common — Starmer and the former Conservative leader Boris Johnson. In 2019, Johnson won a huge victory that cut deep into Labour’s historic territory, largely by appealing to Brexit-leaning traditional Labour voters (though running against Corbyn, whose party was at that point mired in scandal over the handling of antisemitism complaints and whose standing with the media was abysmal, also helped). Yet to maneuver into position, Johnson had to discipline his more liberal Brexit rebels, suspending 21 parliamentarians — more than half of whom never returned. While this might have appeared more like a masterstroke than a misstep at the time, the public and symbolic break in pursuit of a wider but shallower base of support was revealing — a key moment in the journey that led the party to lose much of its wealthy southeastern heartlands last year to the Liberal Democrats.
Starmer has taken up this baton of suspension and expulsion in the interest of sending strong signals. Corbyn himself was expelled from the party for his defiant, knee-jerk response to investigations into antisemitism in Labour under his watch. In the summer of 2024, seven rebels were suspended after a rebellion on the two-child benefit cap — one was Zarah Sultana. Corbyn’s long-standing ally Diane Abbott, the first Black woman elected to Parliament, was recently suspended for suggesting there are differences between racism based on visible appearance and racism of other kinds. Four further lawmakers were then suspended for helping to organize different rebellions, or what a government insider was widely quoted as calling “persistent knobheadery.” One wonders if the Labour leadership’s willingness to make a show of stamping on dissenters who are simply reflecting the views of their constituents might not lead to unforeseen problems when the weather changes, as it did for the Conservatives — Labour losing its dominance in London, for instance.
Corbyn and Sultana’s party has its own diagnosis of what has been going wrong with the main parties in the U.K. and how to work with its electoral system. In place of seeing voters through the lens of the focus group, as bundles of preferences to be won over on election day, it is betting that they are yearning for active civic engagement, desperate to join a movement and take part in reshaping the country for the better. But more than that, it is suggesting that a political party could become reintegrated with civil society in the way that the Conservative and Labour parties were in the middle of the 20th century. Corbyn’s former adviser James Schneider, something of a spokesperson for the new initiative, has spelled some of this out. “Civic life in Britain, as in much of the Global North, has been rubbed to a residue,” he said in an interview for the New Left Review. “Working-class associational life has been smashed; not just the unions and cooperatives, but the libraries, the pubs, the clubs, the bands, the sports teams. Fewer and fewer people even remember this earlier political culture,” Schneider said. Yet glimpses of this life had been seen in the campaigns by pro-Palestinian independents in 2024, he suggested, which had worked “on account of the real social power in their communities, which is largely based in the mosques — although, of course, many non-Muslims and non-practising Muslims campaigned and voted for them as well.” Each mosque is “a place of sociality, a place of welfare, a place of moral direction,” Schneider added. In Corbyn’s own seat of Islington North, too, people saw his campaign as expressing “their own civic life. Every gardening group, every church, every mosque, every trade union branch in the area: they all recognised that Corbyn was their political embodiment, which is why they turned out for him, almost regardless of what they thought about specific policies.”
So the intention behind the new party is not simply to engage the most politically opinionated on the left and gather them to disagree loudly over policy. In Schneider’s framing, it is to build support in areas where majorities can be built from “asset-poor workers, downwardly mobile graduates and racialised people,” by working through communities. The gamble is that a party might become something that people do not just feel part of, but that they feel grows out of their everyday life. Of course, a deep grassroots movement can find its appeal doesn’t stretch very widely into the electorate. Moreover, the alternative view that most people want a competent government they don’t have to worry about, led by a likable character, has a grain of truth to it. Nevertheless, this left-wing vision has won a hearing with over half a million sympathetic people practically overnight.
In many ways, the U.K. is becoming more like its European neighbors in its range of parties — the French and Germans might see little here to get excited about. Yet the U.K.’s “first past the post” electoral system, which sees one representative elected in each geographical constituency with no reference to the national share of the vote, is creating an outsize level of uncertainty. It rewards unity and sorting out one’s coalitions before the ballot is held: For example, three or four divided left and liberal parties might fail dramatically in the face of a unified right-wing force or two parties with a pact about where to stand, and be left with little parliamentary leverage. This is the kind of scenario that could emerge if a left-wing challenger keeps up pressure on Labour while Farage and the Conservatives make some sort of deal. The proliferation of parties polling within a broadly similar range also increases uncertainty within this system to a level where wildly different outcomes become possible on the basis of a series of small shifts in turnout or support. The behavior of more groups matters, and the idea that any groups of voters can be safely ignored gets shakier. Tipping points emerge. It’s hard to imagine Labour’s position collapsing in three or four years’ time, yet the remarkable thing is that the most credible models suggest this would likely happen if the election were held tomorrow.
The change that is happening in the U.K. can’t really be summed up by discussing the parties alone, however. A large part of what feels different about the rise of Reform, and to a lesser extent the appearance of “Your Party,” is the sense that political experience, media voices, institutions and money are in play. In the case of Reform, the poll lead is undoubtedly opening doors: There is every chance of further defections from big-name Conservatives, and it seems eminently possible that major media outlets like The Telegraph or the Daily Mail could end up supporting the party at the next election, or demanding that the right find some way to unite. On the left, Corbynism is not a new force, and many of the people associated with the new party will be activists and organizers with experience from his time as Labour leader, while certain prominent left-wing commentators who were associated with the movement’s previous incarnation as a part of Labour may be drawn back into its orbit. The high number of members also provides a significant potential financial base. There are even larger prizes at the outer limits of the possible. The Unite union, one of the two largest in the U.K., has recently said it will reexamine its relationship with Labour due to the government’s management of a protracted strike of refuse workers in Birmingham that has left rats scurrying between piles of rubbish in broad daylight on suburban streets. Unite, which was closely associated with Corbynism, can now convincingly threaten to take its political backing elsewhere.
Corbyn’s new venture is not just about his politics, which he will not enforce. It’s about a wholesale new approach to society, a vision that is evidently resonating. The changes to British politics are complex — shifts in institutions, issues and events have all contributed to a world of wider offerings, more political entrepreneurship and greater voter volatility. Some of this may be undone or contained. Leaders may self-destruct, and fortunes may be reversed. Yet it would be foolish to imagine that the end result can be the system spinning back round to land right in the place it came from.
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