22.05.2025
Everyone wants to join
While Corbyn and his trusted aides prepare to launch yet another soft left party, the SWP acts as foot soldiers … including for born-again Green leftie, Zack Polanski. Carla Roberts reports from Sheffield
The generational shift in the Socialist Workers Party’s leadership has seen members running around like headless chickens, without any clear political direction. In itself, that is nothing new, of course - but it is now taking on rather bizarre dimensions.
This was all too clear at a packed We Demand Change ‘summit’ in Sheffield on May 18. Over 400 people crammed into the Sadacca Centre to hear Jeremy Corbyn MP, Lindsey German (ex-SWP, now Counterfire), Green Party deputy leader Zack Polanski, Respect founder Salma Yaqoob and a bunch of SWP members wearing a range of non-SWP hats. This included, rather absurdly, the new national secretary, Lewis Nielsen, who was introduced as “from Stand Up to Racism and WDC nationally”. The main sessions were all chaired by SWPers using any title but their SWP membership (eg, “I’m a mother and trade union activist”). This might have fooled some newcomers, though the dozen or so SWP paper sellers outside, drawn from much further afield than just Sheffield and even South Yorkshire, made it rather obvious who was running the show.
WDC works closely with Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project: Corbyn has agreed to speak on its platforms, allows donations to be collected via his PJP and has also seconded his organiser, Artin Giles, to act as WDC chair at various events.
However, reading between the lines of the report published by Socialist Worker (and, indeed, listening to leading SWP members), it seems that they are not welcome in the about-to-be-launched Corbyn party. Not that there are any honest reports about the negotiations currently taking place - it is all very hush-hush, but we hear that a “soft launch” will be taking place “within the next two months”.
How WDC fits into the new Corbyn party remains something of a mystery - including, it seems, to SWP members. The official line given out by the SWP is that the various WDC summits are supposed to “bring together the different movements” - nothing more, nothing less. Bring them together to do what? Nobody knows - it is all very opaque. And unsurprisingly, everybody else in Sheffield was talking about the real question (just as they did at the March 29 WDC launch event): should we form a new left/socialist party - and, if so, what kind of party?
Charlatan
The only speaker at the plenary session who had no problem answering the question was Zack Polanski. Without any contributions or questions from the floor, there was no way to challenge his call for people to join the Green Party to build the “green industrial revolution” (oh, and to vote for him in the current leadership elections) or indeed question his new-found love for Gaza and the plight of the Palestinians.
Yes, people change and hope dies last, etc. But it is important to remember that Polanski - now much-feted by sections of the liberal left like Novara Media and turncoat Owen Jones - was until 2017 an active member and candidate for the Liberal Democrats. He heckled Jeremy Corbyn at an election rally1 and entirely supported the big lie that the Labour Party was overrun by anti-Semites. He publicly criticised Corbyn “and his absolute complicity in saying or doing, or sometimes not saying and doing, [which] is an existential threat. The Jewish community needs better than someone who is primarily concerned with power.”2 Corbyn concerned with power? If only - he might have put up more of a fight instead of rolling over when confronted by the pro-Zionist right.
Polanski praised David Baddiel’s anti-Corbyn, pro-Zionist book Jews don’t count and proudly and vocally campaigned for the Green Party to adopt the IHRA fake ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism, which has played a crucial role in the campaign to conflate criticism of Israel and anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and has been a powerful weapon in trying to silence anybody speaking out on behalf of the Palestinians:
I’ve been keen for a long time for the Green Party to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. I’m thankful that I recognise my experiences with my fellow Greens is that I feel we don’t have the same scale of issues with anti-Semitism in the Green Party as with [sic!] other parties do. It is nevertheless still important for us to send a clear message to Jewish communities both in the party and in the wider world that we stand in solidarity with them.3
Polanski is clearly a careerist charlatan who will hang his flag whichever way the wind is currently blowing. His born-again support for Palestine should not have gone unchallenged. Alas, the SWP allowed him to present himself and the pro-capitalist Green Party as a viable alternative and quite a few members of the Sheffield audience might well have been taken in. The SWP probably thinks it is playing a clever political game by having him at their WDC platforms, just like they think it is clever politics to allow centrist Labour MPs, trade union bureaucrats and even active Zionists to participate in their front, Stand Up to Racism. Needless to say, this perverted version of the ‘united front’ in fact does very little to ‘build the movement’: rather it gives useful political cover to the right - and brings into ever sharper focus the SWP’s own political confusion.
Lewis Nielson
When it comes to the question of ‘What kind of left party’, for example, the SWP has no coherent answer - not even ‘join the SWP’. Various speakers tried to explain their tactic in Sheffield, and the most confused was probably Lewis Nielsen:
We have to build the politics of hope. How? We need more days like today and like yesterday and like the national demo against austerity … We’re organising a protest on the day of the benefit cuts vote in parliament and we are going to shut down the country! We need more bin workers on strike. We don’t say, ‘Vote for us’, but we say ‘Organise!’ The answer is the movements. All of that requires leadership. And this leadership is in this room. And those leaders should stand at the ballot box. We could stand hundreds of candidates.
Err … we’ll shut down the country? We’ll stand in elections, but don’t bother voting for us?
I assume he was trying to say that the SWP wants to stand candidates, but not under the mantle of We Demand Change - presumably because people like Corbyn said ‘no’ in exchange for their support. It was all very unclear, but then he was very excited. He argued that candidates should “stand on a short platform of five demands” (it’s six, actually), which were outlined in Socialist Worker a couple of weeks ago: no austerity, refugees welcome and fight racism, LGBT+ liberation, welfare not warfare, free Palestine and real action on climate change.4 Excited yet?
He was certain about what he does not want: “a party made up of the existing left - an alphabet soup party. The existing left is not the answer: the movements are.” In a later workshop his comrade, Maxine Bowler (presented as “a community activist who has stood in elections many times”), was even more blunt about it: “We simply do not have the time to build a party - the threat from Reform is too big. But we need to put forward an alternative. I am prepared to organise this necessary electoral challenge and sign up, here and now, anybody who wants to stand in the 2026 local elections. Come and see me and I’ll put your name on the list.” I did not see people rushing towards her, I have to say.
This was all the more confusing, considering that we know Jeremy Corbyn is involved in launching a new party (of some sort) that will very soon contest elections. As usual, he kept his powder pretty dry in Sheffield and would only say that “we have to do it: we have to launch an alternative, we have to come together. We have to find a level of agreement, which is not really that difficult.” We would certainly disagree with that point - when done right, it is extremely difficult.
Non-socialists
Salma Yaqoob, who we know is centrally involved in launching the new organisation, was a bit more outspoken: “We need an answer at the ballot box. We need a new left party. Our movements are coming together and we will make a call very soon. Let’s get this party started!” In a later workshop, she added: “Forming a new left party is going to be difficult, but it has to be done.” She asked for a show of hands: “Who would join a new left party if Jeremy Corbyn was involved?” Everybody in the hall put their hand up, naturally. “Well, get ready, because it is on its way!” She repeated the old formula that “we need a minimum programme and to unite on the 80% or 85% we all agree on.”
When pressed from the floor what the new party will do about the “important 15% to 20% we might disagree about”, she said the new organisation will “absolutely allow for free speech and differences of opinion. We cannot have leaders put out the line and expect that people follow blindly. How we are doing things will be as important as what we are doing”.
That sounds good. However, we hear that there is no plan for branches or, indeed, political platforms, tendencies or factions that could openly organise to take on the leadership. So how exactly any dissent could be expressed in the new Corbyn Party is one of the many things that remain unclear. We were also a little worried when Yaqoob explained that “we might not use the same kind of language that we’ve used before - we can perhaps be a bit more creative”, because “not everybody involved will be a socialist”.
We wonder if the SWP has been told that it is not welcome in the new formation, so as to not ‘put off’ those non-socialists, whoever they may be - perhaps the Muslim MPs who sometimes work and vote with Corbyn? Perhaps some other local ‘independent’ or ‘community’ groups? We also got the impression from the speaker representing the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition in one of the workshops that the Socialist Party in England and Wales has not been invited along for the ride. Mick Suter argued: “Any new left party of the left has to be built by the trade unions, who have to split from the Labour Party.” Another SPEW member made a similar contribution from the floor. Absolute pie in the sky, as can be seen by the unimpressive list of signatories to Tusc’s new appeal to that effect.5
It would be easy for us to sneer, particularly at the SWP’s rejection - they often enough act in a similar sectarian way, doing their best to ignore and/or keep out the rest of the left. However, that would be short-sighted - clearly, it is not just the SWP and SPEW that will be kept out when it comes to launching Corbyn’s new shiny party. Counterfire might be allowed in (though you could not tell from Lindsey German’s speech in Sheffield, which was as focused on ‘the movements’ as the speeches by her former SWP comrades), as might the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain (some of Corbyn’s former advisors, like Andrew Murray, are CPB members) and the various assorted ‘broad left fronts’ they run.
One thing is clear from all these secret backroom deals: the new Corbyn formation is not going to be the kind of democratic, transparent and politically principled working class party we so desperately need.