19.09.2024
Corbyn’s maybe party
An eclectic mixture of soft lefts, reformist has-beens, committed localists, inveterate unity-mongers and the plain deluded have been secretly meeting. But, asks Carla Roberts, can we expect anything more than yet another Labour Party mark two?
You really cannot charge Jeremy Corbyn with being hasty or precipitous. For nearly four years, ever since he was suspended by Sir Keir, he has been asked, urged and begged by his small army of loyal supporters to found a new party - any party. The more naive commentators might have assumed that most of the 325,000 who joined Labour after his election as leader in 2016 would have followed him to form a new organisation - and might even still do it now. That, though, is not going to happen.
In any case, the pre-party formation, Collective, has apparently just decided - at a “private meeting” held in London on September 15 - to “begin drawing up democratic structures for a new party to launch”. Not only was the meeting “private” - we also have to read The Guardian to find out about it. Not a peep from Collective itself - not even a quick email to its fee-paying ‘supporters’. There is nothing on the website, nothing on social media.
Attendees
Corbyn was among the attendees, we read, as were ex-Unite leader Len McCluskey, film director Ken Loach, former North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll, anti-apartheid activist Andrew Feinstein and Lutfur Rahman, mayor of Tower Hamlets. According to the Canary website, the participants were “unaware” that The Guardian would be reporting on the meeting - and “were unsure how the media outlet found out”. Secrets have the habit of being outed.
A spokesperson for Corbyn later said that his attendance was “not an official endorsement” and that he had just come along in order to “listen to and share a variety of views about the way forward for the left”. Oh, and he was given the opening speech, naturally. Corbyn might try to pretend Collective has nothing to do with him, but that is clearly nonsense: the formation has adopted the ‘programme’ of Corbyn’s tame Peace and Justice Project (all five minimal points of it) and was registered at Company’s House on February 28 this year as ‘Justice Collective Ltd’, with journalist Justin Schlosberg and Pamela Fitzpatrick as directors. The latter is also co-director of the ‘Peace and Justice Project’ (the other one is Jeremy Corbyn). Fitzpatrick apparently said at the meeting that “now is the time” to become an established party.
We hear that it is, however, not a done deal. Andrew Feinstein and Jamie Driscoll apparently disagreed with forming a party just yet and Corbyn himself wrote only two months ago that he opposes “a new centralised party, based around the personality of one person”. Naturally, we too oppose leader cults, though communists argue that a democratic left party would have to be “centralised” to be effective. Corbyn, on the other hand, argues for “local people’s assemblies everywhere” instead of a party. Only once his idea of a “grassroots model” and “real community power” (which allegedly led to his election victory in Islington North - nothing to do with name recognition or data resources accumulated as a long-time sitting MP) has been “replicated elsewhere, could it become the genesis of a new movement” that “will eventually run in elections”.1
Writing in the Morning Star a couple of weeks ago, Jamie Driscoll too seemed to be arguing against setting up a political party, waffling about “people power” instead. On the one hand, he writes:
Is the logical next step to set up a new party? Many have tried. Under ‘first past the post’, none have prospered. Sometimes among the left, there’s a nervousness about innovative organisation, and a retreat to minutes and matters arising. A political party that wants to change the way politics is done is a paradox.
Instead he wants “us” to “develop manifestos” (plural!) “to bring communities into politics”, as well as “putting people power in town halls up and down in Britain”.
But he also admits that, “We want innovation and freedom, yet need consistency and discipline.” How on earth does he imagine “consistency and discipline” without forming a party? He does not elaborate, showing his deep political confusion - no doubt, like so many, he has been burned by his experiences with Labour and is contemptuous of the confessional sects that grandly declare themselves to be the ‘party’.
Interestingly, we also read that Fiona Lali - member of the newly renamed Revolutionary Communist Party (aka Socialist Appeal) - was present at the meeting. This might have been by personal invitation of Pamela Fitzpatrick, as both were standing as ‘independents’ in north London constituencies in the July 4 general election and had organised a few joint events. It seems very unlikely that the RCP would, so shortly after its relaunch, consider joining another party - and one in which it would probably be exposed as the small fish it actually is. After all, just in May it declared itself “a clean break from the so-called left”. It claimed to be focused on “preparing for power”, as “our party will, within the next five or ten years, be hurled into the turmoil of the British revolution”. They would be struggling to uphold that mad outlook within an organisation led by soft left Labourites. Could be fun to watch, mind.
There is also a question mark over Corbyn’s relationship with the four new independent MPs with whom he has only just set up the Independent Alliance in parliament. According to The Guardian, they are unlikely to join the new Collective party. Clearly, Corbyn and the four have very little in common politically, apart from their opposition to the war in Gaza.
Owen Jones
That obvious fact seems less clear to Owen Jones, who as a general rule is always on the wrong side of an argument. He is centrally involved in the ‘We Deserve Better’ campaign, which was also ‘represented’ at the private Collective gathering. Just last week, he argued in one of his god-awful Guardian commentaries that the five independent MPs should get together with the four new Green MPs and, hey presto, we’ve got ourselves “the biggest parliamentary grouping elected on a left-of-Labour platform in British history”. That could “lay the foundations for a historic political breakthrough”. All it takes now is “discipline and focus” to make it happen and turn the alleged crisis of expectations into something wonderful.2
This is, as an aside, the same Owen Jones who repeatedly stabbed Corbyn in the back when he was Labour leader. He also bought fully into the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign, publicly legitimising the witch-hunt of Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone and Chris Williamson and later naively declaring that “Starmer can succeed and he deserves our support”.3 He made his grand final stand in March 2024, publicly resigning from the Labour Party, listing as one of the main reasons for his departure the leadership’s support for Israel’s genocidal war. He clearly still does not understand what the campaign to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism - a big lie which he still appears to believe in - was all about. Well, Owen, the whole campaign was designed to get rid of that troublesome Corbyn and close down any criticism of the state of Israel.
As an aside, it is also extremely questionable whether the Green Party would be the slightest bit interested in joining the new Corbyn party - after all, it is fully on board with the anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism lie, has dropped its opposition to Nato and hankers after being a safe coalition partner with this or that mainstream bourgeois party in the future. Naturally then, they also support plucky little Ukraine. In fact, they are going exactly the way of the German Greens - marching in lockstep with imperialism.
Last week, a new grouping called ‘Greens Organise’ was set up by 200 Green Party members and supporters to challenge the leadership’s trajectory and fight for “an internationalist, anti-capitalist and ecologically transformative agenda”.4 No chance, in our humble opinion. But it is quite feasible that this new grouping - or a section of it - might jump into the new Corbyn party, especially considering who has signed up: among them, for example, are Matt Zarb-Cousin (“former spokesperson for Jeremy Corbyn”5), a handful of former Labour Party councillors and former Labour members, like the restless Philip Proudfoot, who in 2020 helped found and lead the ridiculous Northern Independence Party, before he left in 2022 to join the Greens.
Not invited
The pressure to form a new ‘left’ party is certainly there, as is the political space. One unnamed Collective organiser told The Guardian that “there will be a new left party that will contest the next election and hopefully be a meaningful counterweight to Reform and the rightwing drift of the Labour Party”. Clearly, this will not be a Marxist party and we suspect the word ‘socialist’ might also be absent, at least in any meaningful sense.
Various left groups that have sprung up after Corbyn’s defeat (and have shrivelled back to near nothing) are already listed as “in solidarity” with Collective on its website, including Transform, Reliance, Assemble and the Liverpool Community Independents.6 After its disastrous electoral performance, both the Socialist Party in England and Wales and its Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition are now on board too, as is The Muslim Vote. They might also be joined by the five suspended Labour MPs who rebelled for a second time last week, voting to retain the winter fuel allowance. John McDonnell, Apsana Begum, Richard Burgon, Ian Byrne and Zarah Sultana now face possible expulsion by the Labour Party.7
Missing is the Workers Party of Britain - George Galloway was not invited, we understand. But he too has repeatedly called on Corbyn to lead some sort of “popular front movement or party” (perhaps because, while some candidates of the Workers Party did quite well on July 4 - when they stood in areas with a large Muslim population - most of them did as badly as the rest of the left). Would he liquidate the WPB into the Corbyn Project? There is not much difference between them politically for sure (though Galloway has complained that Corbyn blanked him the entire time he was leader of the Labour Party).
The differences between them are matters of style, really. Both are decades-long Bennite Labourites, through and through - focused on the futile idea that they could run national capitalism on behalf of the working class. In order to be allowed into government, of course you have to make compromises. Corbyn, for example, readily dropped his decades-long fight against Trident and his anti-monarchist views - and that is before he got anywhere near No10!
Galloway is more openly populist, showing off how ‘hard’ he would be in dealing with migrants and protecting Britain’s borders. But then Corbyn’s former advisor, Andrew Fisher, has just given the thumbs up to Italy’s rightwing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, and her asylum scheme, which offloads refugees for processing to Albania - all those unsuccessful get sent straight back: “That scheme makes logical sense”, applauds Fisher. Keir Starmer should copy it and the only problem Fisher has is the question, “Who could be our Albania?”8
Rather than fighting for what the working class needs, these Labourites always focus on what they believe is possible (not much at the moment, clearly). Collective might or might not come into existence as a fully registered party, but one thing is for sure: it won’t fight for the self-liberation of the working class.