04.12.2025

Socialism or barbarism

She called herself anti-Zionist, condemned the witch-hunt, demanded the abolition of the monarchy, denounced the evils of capitalism and set conference alight. This is the Zarah Sultana speech in full

Thank you for being here in sunny Liverpool today. And it gives me extra pleasure in saying that, as a Liverpool fan and as always, ‘You’ll never walk alone’.

I want to stand. I want to start off by thanking all the workers that have made this conference possible. I want to extend my solidarity to the PCS union and the Tate workers on strike.

I am so honoured to co-found this party with Jeremy, who I have an enormous amount of admiration and respect for. I know that I speak for all of us, when I say he gave us hope when he became leader of the Labour Party. But now we are building something new: Your Party, with more than 55,000 members. In just a few months, we have built something no-one in Westminster believed was possible: a mass, democratic, working class movement - the largest socialist party in the UK since the 1940s.

And this, our inaugural conference, is historic. More than 2,000 delegates in this hall, with thousands more watching online and voting. And today we will finalise the structures of a party that belongs to its members. Not to MPs, not to donors. Not to nameless, faceless, unelected bureaucrats, but to you. Some will say that the decision to adopt the collective leadership model is a win for me. It is not. It is your win: it is you, the members, who have won. But you need to deliver that win. So, if you’re watching at home, take out your phone. If you’re in this hall, vote ‘yes’.

But, before we move forward, we have to confront what took place yesterday. The expulsions, the bans, the censorship on conference floor are unacceptable. It’s undemocratic. It’s an attack on members and this movement. And those decisions were made at the top, not by you. Many of those people expelled found out only after they had arrived in Liverpool. People who had travelled across the country, took time off work, booked hotels, spent hundreds of pounds that they could not easily spare discovered at the door that they had been barred. And the shocking sight of a Muslim woman being manhandled and dragged out of conference is something that should shame any party.

These actions come straight out of the Labour right’s handbook. The same playbook we have all lived through for years. The witch-hunts, the smears, the intimidation, the bullying, the legal threats, and the leaks to the Murdoch press. Let me be absolutely clear. The members will not stand for this. The movement will not stand for this. And I did not leave the Labour Party, you did not leave the Labour Party, to create just another Labour Party.

Everywhere I’ve travelled in over 30 towns and cities across the country - from Worthing to Glasgow, from Merthyr Tydfil to Birmingham - working class people have said the same thing: this party must be run by its members, not MPs. This party must never be captured from above. This party must never become a Labour Party mark two. And that is why we are here - to build a new kind of politics: democratic, principled and rooted in the power of the working class.

Rule of rich

Everyone in this room and everyone outside of this room knows what’s wrong with Britain. Nothing works and nothing gets better. This country is rigged to serve the rich and powerful who bought and paid for it. And we plan on beating them before they lead us into fascism. Our diagnosis is simple: in the last 20 years, megadonations to political parties from the rich haven’t just doubled; they haven’t just trebled: they have gone up sevenfold.

When prices go up on your weekly shop, supermarket bosses are pocketing that and then buying politicians. When your rents soar, landlords use your cash to lobby MPs, so their interests are protected. When the seas rise and our towns flood, energy bosses buy another private jet, while we all pay the price. The billionaires buy up our newspapers, our social media platforms, our TV channels, gaslighting us into blaming our neighbours for the mess. They want you angry, but just not at themselves.

Getting worse

Our message to our friends and our neighbours is, if you want to know why your life is getting harder and why everything keeps getting worse, you should know that the people who control your food, your home, your energy and your media - they are sending billions of your hard-earned money to the Cayman Islands. And they’ve got three political parties - Labour, the Conservatives, and Reform - to support them.

So you work harder for longer, for less, while politicians take money from poor kids and pensioners. Everything gets difficult, so offshore bank accounts get fatter. The only thing that none of these old parties will ever say is that there is enough room for everyone in this country except for the renters who own Britain and charge us just for living in it. They are the real parasites and it’s about time they got what they deserve.

We have a weak and pathetic Labour government that is pushed this way and that, along with the political winds, because it does not have the political will to confront the parasites who own Britain. We are here to break up a system that humiliates our disabled friends and neighbours and deprives them of the cash that they need, while funnelling an extra £11 billion a year to arms companies. That’s right: Rachel Reeves wants an extra £11 billion spent on defence every year, and all the old parties back it. Every second, £350 is spent of our money on war. That’s money into the pockets of shareholders for the merchants of death over the last two years, where that money has funded daily spy flights over the ruins of Gaza, aiding and abetting a genocide. This is a Labour government happy to oppress people abroad and at home.

This isn’t a coincidence. The politicians who attack the disabled in Liverpool and demonise the desperate arriving on small boats - they are the same people who blow up our world with war, occupation and genocide. But we know that the real enemy of the working class travels by private jet. So it’s not about stopping the boats: ordinary humans suffer everywhere, so that the mighty and powerful can sleep in silk sheets in their blood-soaked mansions.

As socialists, we stand with the oppressed everywhere, from Sudan to Congo. And let me say this loudly and proudly: I am an anti-Zionist. We must sever all ties with the genocidal, apartheid state of Israel. We must expel the ambassador and stand with the Palestinian people, until every inch of their land is free: from the river to the sea - a single democratic state with equal rights for all. And we must ensure there is a day of reckoning for those who have enabled genocide: eg, David Lammy and Shabana Mahmood.

As a movement, we care so deeply about Palestine. In part because we know that the starvation and annihilation of a people in distant lands shows what our political class would do to us if they thought they could get away with it. The same people who run Britain want you to believe that every refugee is a rapist, while they grab £12 million of taxpayers’ money to protect a parasite - Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who has never seen the inside of a cell or a courtroom.

What matters to the rulers of Britain is not the safety of women and girls: it’s the peace and pleasure of the powerful. What a sick society we live in, where our political and media class bend over backwards for the royal family, including Prince Andrew, a close friend of the notorious paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. That’s our money that used to provide him with housing. That’s our money that defended him in court. That’s our money that put food on his table. Well, not any more. We shouldn’t just abolish Andrew’s titles. We should abolish the monarchy.

The truth is we have an epidemic of fake populists who rail against every elite, until someone mentions a wealth tax and then suddenly they go quiet. Just look up Reform’s donors. They are bought and paid for by the parasites. But the real scandal is that this Labour government is mimicking them. When Farage says, ‘Kick an immigrant’, Starmer replies, ‘How hard?’ and shamefully uses the same language as Enoch Powell, calling us an “island of strangers”. We are not an “island of strangers”: we are an island that is suffering. And we see politicians constantly shifting the blame from people who actually have all the money. And then we have our home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, being endorsed by fascist Tommy Robinson.

Fight back

Our politics desperately needs an organised working class that fights back and says, ‘If you come for any of us, if you come for the pensioners among us, the disabled among us, the immigrants among us, the queer and trans among us, if you come for any of us, you will see our collective response. A politics that does not centre on the needs of the most marginalised isn’t worthy of the name ‘socialism’. That means saying loudly and unequivocally, ‘Refugees are welcome’.

The rise in transphobia we are seeing is deliberate. It is being stoked as a wider culture war, designed to divide us. And, just as with Muslims, with migrants, with disabled people, the goal is always the same. Find a scapegoat to distract people from who really holds the power. It is an old tactic of the ruling class: divide and rule. And our movement has to say with one voice: ‘We stand with our trans siblings, with migrants, with Muslims, with disabled people. We stand with the most marginalised.’

And I stand before you as a proud child from Birmingham. My grandparents came to this country after Britain’s rulers looted their homeland. We are here because they were there! I grew up being told by politicians and police officers that people in my neighbourhood were suspicious or worthless, because we committed two offences as soon as we were born: we were Muslim and we were working class - for which I will never apologise!

And, yes, the stakes are enormous. The old politics is dying and, if the new cannot be born, this will be the time of monsters: centrist politicians presiding over decline and decay, pushing people’s rage towards the far right. But from New York, in the very heart of empire, a new politics emerges. The new mayor, Zohran Mamdani - unapologetically socialist, unapologetically Muslim, unapologetically immigrant - built a campaign that proved what is possible when the working class unites people who look different, pray differently and love differently, but all wanting a life of dignity, where people and the planet thrive.

If we don’t win this global fight, decay will give way to fascism. And people who look like me will be imprisoned in tents and deported to war zones, while everyone gets poorer - except for the hedge-fund managers, who donate to Labour, the Conservatives and Reform. But, if we win, we will aim to create a world renewed for future generations.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these stakes and it’s a huge responsibility to carry. You may have noticed that the process of starting up this party has had some hiccups. Some of that is my fault and for that I apologise. But I want you to know that my aim from the very start has been to ensure that this party is led by you, the members, and not MPs.

None of us have ever set up a new party before, never designed its structures from scratch, and that process has been messy. We have to get better at working with each other. We have to ensure that the best cure against any culture of backroom deals is people power. And that’s why I’ve been fighting for maximum member democracy. I know that I speak for many, when I say I don’t want a party of witch-hunts and stitch-ups. I want to work with every socialist in a spirit of comradeship and equality. And I want the working class to control this party, just as one day they will control the economy.

We know that control of our economy has to be taken away from the parasitical profiteers and into the hands of workers who actually generate our collective wealth. We are not here for tweaks of a broken system. We are not here just to lower some bills and sprinkle a wealth tax. We are here for a fundamental transformation of society.

Democracy

That means democracy in every workplace, every community, every corner of life. So, yes, we will reverse the failed experiments of Thatcherism by taking water, energy, our railways, transport and communications back into public ownership. But that cannot be the limits of our ambition. We must seek new horizons. The banking industry, food production, construction, and so much more, because we know this fundamental truth: the working class can run society better than the billionaires, the profiteers and the war criminals who rule over us today. People used to say that a week was a long time in politics, but these days it feels like everything can change in an hour or a day.

Whatever difficulties we’ve had in founding this party, that won’t matter if, from today, from now on, we face the working class in all of its diversity and say with a united voice something that all the capitalist politicians have given up on saying: that, in the sixth richest country in the world, life can be better. You can breathe clean air, eat good food and live in warm homes. You can spend less time working and more time with your loved ones. And you can look at your neighbours and know that they’re working hard like you (unless they happen to be billionaires, of course).

Finally, as a country, we face a stark choice. It’s socialism or barbarism. And I will leave you with one of my favourite quotes, which I’ve used at every event I’ve spoken at. It’s a quote from Arundhati Roy, who says: “Another world is not only possible: she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

Solidarity! Thank you so much.