On 26 February, the Green Party trounced Labour and Reform to win the Gorton and Denton by-election. The same day, Jeremy Corbyn cemented his reactionary leadership of Your Party (YP) when his The Many slate routed Zarah Sultana’s Grassroots Left slate winning 14 seats to seven in the party’s Central Executive Committee (CEC) elections. Sultana’s claim that Your Party will be anti-Zionist is now out of the question. It is a major defeat for not just Sultana but those middle class left organisations who had set up the Grassroots Left slate to challenge Corbyn’s autocratic control over YP’s apparatus.
The size of the Green’s victory – 40.6% as against 28.7% for Reform and 25.4% for Labour – was unexpected as opinion polls had put the three parties on more or less level pegging the day before the election. There is no doubt that Labour’s support for the genocide in Palestine cost it the support of the 28% of the constituency who are Muslim; its explicit racism would have repelled the 44% who identify as coming from a minority ethnic background. However, the successful candidate, Hannah Spencer, also had working class credibility – she is a plumber by trade – and successfully pitched a radical social democratic message, declaring in her acceptance speech that ‘life has changed. Instead of working for a nice life, we’re working to line the pockets of billionaires. We are being bled dry.’ With 170,000 members and predictions that it will soon exceed 200,000, the Green Party is riding high. It is clear that in many city constituencies and those with large ethnic minority populations its new-found radicalism will have a great appeal for those repulsed by Labour and Reform.
Your Party: a rotten corpse
Meanwhile, Your Party remains mired in internal conflicts which the results of the CEC elections will not resolve. Sultana failed to explicitly challenge Corbyn’s leadership just as she had in the lead-up to the founding conference last November; indeed, the Grassroots Left publicly called on its supporters to vote for him. There was a lot of moaning about the lack of democracy, in particular about the unelected and mainly anonymous clique headed by Corbyn that was really running the party and CEC from behind the scenes and which had control of its finances. Yet Sultana and her serried ranks of supporters from left organisations such as the SWP, Socialist Party, Socialist Alternative and so on were determined to ensure Corbyn remained in the party leadership since they regarded it as crucial for Your Party’s electoral credibility.
Now they are hoist on their own petard. Having wittered on about the need for unity, Grassroots Left supporters will not explicitly challenge the majority leadership. Corbyn received 14,784 votes from the 25,347 members who voted; despite huge efforts from her slate supporters, Sultana got just 8,242. Corbyn now has a powerful ally in ensuring that Your Party accepts the pro-imperialist stance of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign on Palestine: its chair, Louise Regan was elected as an East Midlands CEC representative.
The CEC results prove once again that Your Party is dominated by the rotten, bankrupt politics of the Labour left, a force which has ensured the death of every progressive development within the working class. Even before its founding conference we asked of Sultana
‘Will she take on and expose those who have attempted to silence or sideline her views? Will she reject any compromise over the issues of socialism, of Palestine, of trans rights, of the need for the working class to take power? Or will she make concessions, in the misguided belief that she and her supporters will be able to sustain any meaningful fight for their positions in Your Party, with its undemocratic constitution? The reality is they will be reduced to providing radical sounding cover for a party that offers little more than slightly more to the left of Labour Party – a new Fabianism.’
The litmus test was always whether she would confront Corbyn’s reactionary standpoint, and throughout the CEC election campaign she ducked out – as did the rest of the left. His position is now unassailable, the party not just dead on arrival but putrefying. There is no way that it will catch up with the Greens, whose own meretricious form of social democracy is subject to the whims of current leader Zack Polanski.
