The Corbyn-Sultana Power Struggle: How 'Your Party' Got Here And How It Ends
Your Party: Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn (Collage by Antonello Sticca)
10 min read
Ahead of its founding conference, Sienna Rodgers reports on the hostilities within the new left-wing project, Your Party, as Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana battle each other for control
“The whole thing is like an elaborate leftist self-parody performance,” one left-wing source remarks drily. “We’ve got more factions than MPs,” sighs a senior figure.
Those involved in the new party being founded by Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana and the other pro-Gaza Independent MPs elected last year often indulge in gallows humour. The start of ‘Your Party’, as it is temporarily named, has been chaotic and no less unpleasant for its members than factional battles were in Labour.
Naturally, most of those involved believe the nascent party still has the potential to help fill the gap Labour has opened to its left. But few, if any, would deny it has been defined by infighting so far – some of it brutal and public.
As the founding conference of Your Party on 29 to 30 November in Liverpool approaches, there is no sign of tensions dissipating. In fact, hostilities could even ramp up further, as it is expected that the leadership election taking place in the new year will see Corbyn and Sultana face off against each other to win the top job.
Meanwhile, the Green Party is surging in the polls thanks to new leader Zack Polanski’s punchy communication style. While most in Your Party accept that an electoral pact with the Greens will be needed, and some celebrate Polanski’s success, there is significant anxiety that the window of opportunity for their own party is closing.
A source close to Sultana wonders, dismayed, whether those engaging in negative briefing against her want to crown the winner of the leadership race “King of the Ashes”. A Your Party critic of Sultana, on the other hand, says if she did win against Corbyn, she would simply be “leader of a rump”, such is the poor state of her relations with colleagues.
How this will play out at the upcoming conference is unpredictable, as Your Party has borrowed from Athenian democracy: the thousands of members invited to attend and vote at the end of the month are a “lucky” bunch selected by sortition. Those who decided on this random lottery reckon it will stop the gathering being dominated by well-organised Trot groups, as will the rule against ‘dual carding’, which bans Your Party members from also being members of other national political parties.
Sultana’s camp is sceptical of both measures, worrying that individual members chosen in this way for the conference will not be able to stand up to powerful organisers, and that people could be excluded for having joined another project at a time when there was a “vacuum on the left”.
So, how did ‘YP’ – as insiders call it, avoiding the “Your party? Whose party?” confusion – reach this level of internal acrimony? With Corbyn wanting a grassroots movement rather than a top-down project, it was slow to get going for some years, but then everything happened quickly.
It took off with a bang when a July meeting of an organising committee (“the OC”) voted in favour of Corbyn and Sultana serving as co-leaders. Although Corbyn himself had refused to vote for the proposal, Sultana fast announced she was quitting Labour and founding a new party with him. Corbyn’s camp was furious, and the ex-Labour leader himself has kept his distance from Sultana and her allies ever since.
The following months saw Sultana work on the basis that this co-leadership arrangement was real, while Corbyn’s team insisted the whole Independent Alliance group of MPs was in charge. This divergence culminated in the young Coventry MP, frustrated that she was being excluded from decision-making, unilaterally launching a membership system in mid-September.
It brought in over 20,000 supporters and almost £500,000 in just a couple of hours. But Corbyn soon posted that the email sent to supporters inviting them to join up had been “unauthorised” and “should be ignored”. “If direct debits have been set up, they should immediately be cancelled,” he added. Sultana allies have insisted she was following the roadmap that had been set out by the party days earlier.
Publicly calling him a sexist is unlikely to make for a happy political marriage
After Sultana set up a website (yourparty-membership.uk rather than the original yourparty.uk) and directed supporters – via a mailing list owned not by her but Corbyn’s pre-existing Peace and Justice Project (PJP) – to a new membership portal, YP referred the matter to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). YP sources claim that, based on legal advice they have received, Sultana’s actions could be open to legal scrutiny. She denies any wrongdoing.
An ICO spokesperson told The House: “People have the right to expect that organisations will handle their personal information securely and responsibly. If an individual has concerns about how their data has been handled, they should raise it with the organisation first, then report them to us if they are not satisfied with the response.
“Peace and Justice Project have made us aware of an incident and we are assessing the information provided.”
Following the backlash to her launch, Sultana said she had been “subjected to what can only be described as a sexist boys’ club”. While the statement was later deleted from her X account, she has never publicly withdrawn the comment, which frustrates Independent Alliance MPs still. A member of the cohort, Adnan Hussain, has now quit the founding of Your Party, citing this incident as one of the reasons.
YP continues to grapple with the consequences of the unilateral launch. Much of the mess stems from the initial decision to split the money and data along factional lines, which seemed fair at the time but now looks deeply unwise.
Back in July, when supporters were first invited to sign up to a mailing list and donate – in a drive that raised an estimated £800,000-850,000 – Corbyn’s PJP was given responsibility for the mailing list data, while MoU Operations owned the data connected to donations and the bank account they went into. The latter was a new company, set up by former North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll, activist Andrew Feinstein and ex-Labour MP Beth Winter, who were perceived as being Sultana-aligned.
After the Sultana launch, September and October were spent in negotiations. YP wanted their treasurer added to the MoU bank account, but that request was refused, with MoU wryly telling YP that if it were assessed by Ofsted, it would be “placed in special measures”. The MoU directors decided that they wanted to wash their hands of it all and transfer the whole company to the MPs – but the latter refused to accept it, demanding MoU hand over only the money instead.
Eventually, Sultana acquired MoU alone. YP sources then accused her of delaying the transfer of funds in order to use them as political leverage. Sultana’s side denied this and said there was no deliberate delay. She is now in the process of paying £600,000 of it to YP in regular £200,000 tranches, to help with the upcoming conference. YP sources allege that money from her portal is associated with “serious legal risks”, so will only accept the more than £800,000 in initial donations to Your Party – not the £500,000 from the Sultana launch. They say they refused ownership of the MoU for the same reason.
After the first £200,000 was transferred on 13 November, the Independent Alliance MPs released a statement calling it “insufficient” and demanding the whole sum of those initial donations at once. In doing so, they appeared to confirm that Sultana was no longer a member of their parliamentary grouping. Although the MPs say she stopped attending meetings and being part of the communication channel months ago, a source close to her says she was surprised to find out she was not a member.
The statement, shared via the YP account, caused a huge backlash among supporters online. Behind the scenes, a number of YP insiders believed that releasing it was a “crazy” idea; according to them, it was not Corbyn's doing.
“I’m not a member of Your Party, and won’t be joining. I do feel sorry for their members” – Jamie Driscoll
Without access to all the money raised from initial donations, YP sources say organising the conference in the Liverpool ACC on a “shoestring” budget has been difficult, and it is understood that a number of people are currently working for the party without pay.
The goal was once 13,000 conference delegates, as per a Morning Star report in October, but this ambition has since been reduced: two sources said 3,000 to 4,000 are now expected to join.
As for the party’s name, The House is told the plan is to put it to a vote by all members around the 29 to 30 November gathering, alongside votes on the already published draft founding documents.
According to the same papers, a single leader and central executive committee should be elected by the end of March, with this first elected leader serving no more than 21 months.
Despite everything, extraordinarily, Sultana’s preference remains co-leadership. Sultana’s critics in YP find the idea laughable (“publicly calling him a sexist is unlikely to make for a happy political marriage”), while a source close to her emphasises there are barely any political differences between her and Corbyn, and theoretically co-leadership is still an option if the constitution is amended.
Failing that, Sultana will stand alone. And if she loses, as her critics predict? A source close to the MP says she is committed to the project and would not jump to the Greens.
Meanwhile, Corbyn has not confirmed his intention to run as The House is told this would pre-empt the founding conference and members deciding on the leadership model. Although he is widely expected to stand, one ally says it is “not impossible he could buckle under the pressure” and either opt out or pull out during the contest.
Asked to comment on the themes covered here, Corbyn told The House: “To build a party that stands for that overwhelming majority, we need as many people as possible to be part of it, with a real say in what it does.
“That means fostering a culture of unity and collaboration which comes from facing outward, not inwards, built out of the communities we all come from. If we can do that, we will be building something unique and historic.”
There is also talk that the leadership race could feature at least one other candidate; a non-MP perhaps with a ‘plague on all your houses’ campaign aimed at highlighting the chaos that has emerged under those running the show so far.
Joshua Virasami, the Black Lives Matter leader and tenant union organiser who was brought into the YP fold by Corbyn’s former comms chief James Schneider, has been cited as a possibility, although he has not put his own name forward. A recent X post by Virasami raised eyebrows as it said the successes of Polanski and New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani would show YP that “relatively unknown figures can rocket to becoming key political players in a matter of months”.
But YP is so messy that fresh faces are asking whether a bid would enhance their reputation or jeopardise it – and whether the risk of being caught in the Corbyn v Sultana crossfire is worth it either way.
Driscoll, the former mayor and MoU director who was once touted as a potential candidate for the leadership, has decided to remove himself from the project altogether.
He told The House: “I’m not a member of Your Party, and won’t be joining. I do feel sorry for their members, though, who joined on a prospectus of a new kind of politics, only to find people at the centre repeatedly issuing anonymous briefings that damage Your Party. You’ve really got to ask why their political leadership is allowing this to happen.”
The preference of some Corbyn allies would be for the founding conference to pass a motion endorsing him as the time-limited leader, then everyone could move on. A simple solution, perhaps, but – while other players have counted themselves out – Sultana continues to fight back. The battle for control continues.
