Your Party: ‘proudly anti-Zionist’, Sultana comes out fighting

Following their very public spat about the launch of Your Party, Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn have officially mended relations, both vowing that it would never happen again. However, Sultana has opened a new front by declaring a set of clear principles for the party which puts her entirely at loggerheads with Corbyn’s vapid and reactionary politics.

The ideological differences between Sultana and Corbyn are fundamental. They start with Palestine. Speaking in Liverpool on 11 October, Sultana was clear: ‘our movement will be proudly anti-Zionist. We will stand for a free Palestine, a secular state with equal rights for all’ adding ‘Israel must be treated the same way apartheid South Africa was treated as a pariah state’. This defence of Palestinian self-determination is in diametric contrast to Corbyn’s reactionary standpoint – his support for a two-state solution, his rejection of anti-Zionism, his dismissal of the equation of Zionism with racism, his acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the existence of the racist colonial-settler state.

The clarity with which she addresses the reactionary concerns of the Independent MPs – declaring openly that ‘trans rights are human rights’ and stating that ‘landlords and mortgage companies [are] squeezing us dry’ is a slap in the face for Corbyn’s MP alliance. She presents Your Party clearly as a working class party, a party fighting for socialism: ‘we’re not here for tweaks, for lowering a few bills here and there, sprinkling of a wealth tax. We’re here for a fundamental transformation of society, the means of production controlled by the working class.’

Leaving her Liverpool audience in no doubt she added, ‘capitalism isn’t just a few bad bosses or greedy companies, it is a system and built for private profit not social need. As long as this system remains we will continue to reproduce inequality and exploitation. It is only socialism that can lay the foundation for genuine equality, solidarity and freedom. That is what I want us to be fighting for.’ Her view is that Your Party must be an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist party, a party which ‘will stand unconditionally with the oppressed because that is what socialism is.’

Meanwhile the organisations of the left – Socialist Worker, The Socialist, Socialist Alternative, The Communist, rs21, Counterfire, Morning Star – shamefully continue to insist on a unified party with Corbyn at its head. They have never wanted to break from Labour, and they want to prevent a total rupture now. Sultana is a million miles to their left, and of her erstwhile allies such as Salma ‘maybe we do need small shopkeepers, small landlords’ Yaqoob, or Andrew ‘we need to learn to live with our differences’ Feinstein. The unity that these reactionaries want would require subjugation to an unreconstructed Labour left and a dismal continuation of the backward politics that has driven the movement into the sands. We do not possess a sincerometer to measure politicians’ sincerity, so we cannot yet know how far Sultana is prepared to follow through on the logic of her political positions. What we can say is that they could not be accommodated within the same organisation as Corbyn’s. If she remains determined to fight for them – against Zionism, against imperialism, against transphobia, against state racism and for a democratic, working class, socialist organisation – then a split will be necessary. That would be an enormous step forward for the working class in Britain.