Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory Award: Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana
For some light relief in an otherwise challenging political landscape, we now turn to Your Party.
UK fringe parties have generally had a very good year. In addition, during the last six years since the Labour hard left’s loss of the party leadership to Starmer, there has been a steady outward drift of members on the left to other parties. The Green party has been a particularly grateful recipient of Labour’s surplus, and Corbynite vehicles such as Novara Media have increasingly looked towards the Greens as a replacement Labour Party through which to achieve their ends, resulting in an increasingly nutty Green politics, which, let’s face it, was fairly nutty to begin with.
Nevertheless, in light of all this, it should have been a slam-dunk for a hard left group, to capitalise on the disillusion of Labour’s Corbynites on being faced with the unappetising compromises of actual governing; particularly in view of the conscription into the new movement of one former party leader and an MP who was starting to be seen as his anointed successor. Correctly executed, this new party should have been a real threat to Labour.
This, however, was to prove far too simple for the Corbynites: stick them in a room together and there will inevitably be arguments, over what Sigmund Freud referred to as “the narcissism of small differences”.
Having formed in July a new political party with a now-significant membership (estimated at around 50,000), they then proceeded to spend the second half of the year in constant wrangles between the twin factions of Jeremy Corbyn and of Zarah Sultana. It couldn’t decide on its name. It couldn’t decide on who held the purse-strings. And it certainly couldn’t decide on who would lead it. There were expulsions; frenzied briefings and counter-briefings to the press; and Sultana ended up boycotting the first day of her own conference.
