The dog that failed to bark

This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.

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When starting a new political party, it is generally helpful if its founders have a shared idea of who they are trying to appeal to and for what purpose. Unfortunately for Jeremy Corbyn’s “Your Party”, that was never the case: they couldn’t agree on who the “Your” were. Taking heart from the victories of four independent MPs plus Corbyn himself in the 2024 general election, Your Party activists mobilised for this year’s 7 May local elections with high expectations. 

The party had employed a “targeted” strategy of supporting 300 local election candidates across England, mainly in Labour’s urban heartlands, which it hoped would pay off by delivering embarrassing defeats to high-profile figures such as Wes Streeting. Some of the candidates endorsed were standing for YP but most of the party’s efforts were directed at supporting allied independents. Corbyn did a nationwide tour to endorse their candidacies. 

Given the potency of Palestine, housing and austerity as issues in the target areas, they anticipated winning in Tower Hamlets, Newham, Redbridge, Bradford and Birmingham. With Labour’s core vote evidently collapsing, they even thought they had a fair chance in other parts of Yorkshire and the West Midlands too. But once the ballots were counted, the “major gains” did not materialise. Your Party was nowhere to be seen in the headlines. Where did it all go wrong?

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The Newham mayoralty was missed thanks to a split in the anti-Labour left vote between the YP-backed Newham Independents Party and the Greens. In coming second and third respectively, they allowed Labour to slip through in first place. YP’s other big disappointment was Streeting’s East London backyard, Redbridge, where independents went from one councillor to nine — falling far short of their aim to take away Labour’s majority. Streeting’s team found this hilarious and reiterated that he only did so badly in 2024 (narrowly keeping his seat with a majority of 528) because Labour had stopped him from campaigning in his own constituency.

Elsewhere, YP-supported campaigns enjoyed slim pickings. Your Bradford Independent Group was barely a footnote in the reporting on how Reform UK took away Labour’s majority there. Just two seats were won in Birmingham, where the Lamborghini-driving “TikTok lawyer”, Akhmed Yakoob, has built a far more formidable independent machine. Just a handful of seats were won in Sefton and Blackburn. In Kirklees, Labour was indeed crushed as YP had intended, losing every one of its 34 seats — but mainly because Reform UK arrived with a sledgehammer.

In Tower Hamlets, Corbyn celebrated the victory of Aspire — led by mayor Lutfur Rahman, whose past conviction for electoral fraud and temporary disqualification from office proved no hindrance. But it is questionable how much of Aspire’s success can be attributed to the endorsement it received from YP. Rahman’s party returned 33 councillors, compared to 5 Greens and 5 for Labour. 

Indeed, given the extent of Aspire’s grip on Tower Hamlets, why would it sublimate itself into a branch of Your Party when the latter contributed so little mobilising power? This is the council where several ex-Labour Corbyn staffers now work — some after being closely involved in YP; others not, having never thought it would be a goer. The ambitious have figured out where their best chances of actually wielding power lie.

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So, why has Corbyn’s project failed so miserably (and it has been miserable for everyone involved)? The explanations are laced with gallows humour: having more factions than MPs; an elaborate leftist self-parody performance; being too dysfunctional a group for the Deep State to infiltrate even if they wanted to.

The ready answer is the sudden soaraway success of the Green Party. Although the intention to form YP was announced in July 2025, its thunder was stolen two months later by Zack Polanski’s election as the new Green leader whilst YP was still trying to organise a founding conference. Polanski’s personality and comms style has allowed him to become a more persuasive heir to Corbynism than the now 77-year-old Corbyn himself. 

Still, this cannot be the full explanation, given that the number of members who voted in last year’s Green leadership election — 24,000 — was well short of the 55,000 members YP had enrolled three months later in December, even after a launch conference that was not unfairly portrayed as chaotic. 

The fundamental reasons existed at the moment of YP’s conception. Keir Starmer succeeded Corbyn as Labour’s leader in April 2020. Seven months later, Corbyn was suspended from the party. He was expelled in May 2024 after announcing he would stand for his Islington North seat as an independent at the next general election. 

His allies urged him to create something new, an alternative vehicle for their politics that could eat into any parliamentary success Starmer would find. Yet Corbyn was wary of the traditional model of party-building, arguing that a new organisation could not be created by a handful of insiders deciding its name, rules and hierarchy behind closed doors. If a genuine successor movement were to emerge, he believed, it had to be rooted in local campaigns and community structures, from which a democratic national organisation could grow organically.

James Schneider, the Momentum co-founder and former Corbyn spokesperson, wrote an action plan, Our Bloc: How We Win, for a new electoral force that would build on the approach of Black Lives Matter, rent strikes and the post-Covid warmth towards public sector workers. Schneider reckoned it could, perhaps in partnership with the Greens, “surpass Labour as the main anti-Tory vehicle in one or two electoral cycles”. This was, of course, before Reform UK redrew the political map.

Meanwhile, Karie Murphy, Corbyn’s former chief of staff, joined a couple of other left-wing activists to create “Collective”. This network of existing independent candidates and organisations, “driven by the spirit of ‘Corbynism’”, would form the basis of a mass-membership party of the left. Despite some teething troubles, including one co-founder quitting over excessive factionalism and secrecy as he saw it, Collective helped to coordinate campaigning for activists such as Leanne Mohamad in Ilford North, who came close to unseating Streeting.

Volunteers were encouraged to believe that they would form the backbone of a new national movement, so many later felt sidelined when the decision-making that created the party didn’t involve them. Thus the project descended into procedural trench warfare. Meetings were held, motions and constitutions drafted, all infused with paranoia over what had been agreed by whom and without whom.

Corbyn held talks with Lutfur Rahman as well as Jamie Driscoll, the former Labour mayor who has now defected to the Greens and was always regarded with suspicion by some Corbyn allies due to his perceived centrism (perhaps because he was always emphasising “professionalism” and wanted to attract voters on the right as well as the left). Those in Collective who had spent months pursuing Corbyn’s vision of grass roots democracy were alarmed when Driscoll drafted governance papers.

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But it was the public row with Zarah Sultana that overshadowed everything. Then a young party organiser, she had been selected as Labour’s 2019 candidate in Coventry South under Corbyn’s leadership — a move enabled by some of his closest allies who now bitterly regret it. In July 2024, Sultana, by then an MP, announced she was quitting Labour to found a new party alongside Corbyn. The only problem was, according to Corbyn’s supporters, she had neglected to agree such a plan with him first.

Corbyn took a chicken-and-egg approach to leadership: he would not be leader without being democratically elected to the post; but it first required the authority of leadership to bring such a body of electors into being. So, some of those dissatisfied with his indecision spotted an opportunity in Sultana’s ambition and drive. They drifted towards her. Buoyed by these currents, she left Labour and announced she would “co-lead the founding of a new party” with Corbyn — even though the man himself had refused to support the idea.

Sultana’s clique presented the co-leadership idea as a neat symbolic package: old and young; white man and woman of colour; veteran socialist and Gen-Z radical. Corbyn loyalists saw something more calculating: an attempt to harness his personal following whilst managing him into irrelevance. Their view was that without Corbyn, there was no mass movement, and it was pure arrogance for the then 31-year-old Sultana — social media whizz though she may be — to assume she would play a role on his level. 

Despite the fury of his closest friends, Corbyn tried to ignore the tensions in public; the pair soon launched a mailing list for the temporarily named “Your Party” (his preference, not hers) and 800,000 people signed up. Meanwhile, Sultana made barbed criticisms of Corbyn, including an accusation that under his leadership, Labour had “capitulated” on anti-Semitism. She also declared herself an “anti-Zionist”, a term Corbyn has consistently refused for himself. 

It seemed Sultana was outflanking him on the left with her argument that Corbyn was not radical enough for Corbynites. 

Purity tests became ever more demanding. On Israel-Gaza, do you favour a two-state solution or a single Palestinian state? On Ukraine, are you supportive of Ukraine’s resistance to Putin or does your anti-imperialism lead you to prioritise opposition to Nato expansion? And, more challenging for socially conservative Muslims, will you sign up to the slogan “trans women are women”? Whilst Corbyn was happy to accommodate ambiguities on such questions, Sultana supporters were not.

This was deeply uncomfortable for pro-Gaza MPs such as Blackburn’s Adnan Hussain, who openly said that “most sane people want to be segregated in a toilet”. The independent MPs also opposed the Labour government’s tax on private school fees. Eventually, Hussain and Iqbal Mohamed quit YP.

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Relations hit a particular low point in September when Sultana called Corbyn and his pro-Gaza MP friends a “sexist boys’ club” after she was accused of unilaterally launching the party for a second time, by using the YP mailing list to send supporters details of a new membership portal. Thousands signed up — until Corbyn and his sympathisers spread the word that the system was unauthorised. 

The problem arose from the initial divisions between founders, which had led them to split the mailing list (managed by Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project) from the donations and associated data (controlled by a company, MoU, set up by Driscoll and others). 

Your Party sources said the funds brought into MoU from Sultana’s original launch of YP amounted to over £800,000, whilst her membership system launch raised £500,000. A long-running row over funds ensued, which led to Sultana taking ownership of MoU herself. It is unclear whether the financial and data problems have ever been fully resolved.

The founding conference in November descended into chaos. Sultana’s allies accused Corbyn of leading a “witch-hunt” after Socialist Workers Party members were expelled on the eve of the event, some whilst travelling there. In protest, Sultana boycotted the first day of the conference. She also called for the nationalisation of “the entire economy”, including “banks, food production and construction”, which even stunned the left-wing journalist and activist, Owen Jones. Corbyn, meanwhile, seemed simply to want to read poetry aloud with the former Unite leader, Len McCluskey.

Rather than formally splitting, the party is now in the awkward position of having chosen Corbyn as its parliamentary leader whilst Sultana remains on its executive committee, challenging his decisions in private meetings. The acrimony is now largely expressed behind closed doors, but it is far from over.

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The consequences of this dysfunction have left YP more closely resembling Corbyn’s original vision: a loose federation of community independents. And though he has been hurt by the breakdown in relations with supposed comrades, he happily presses ahead with plans for policy commissions involving party members — which, outside the left, would be called self-indulgent preaching to the choir.

Realists on his side argue that YP’s future viability lies with existing independents in significantly Muslim areas of the country — Tower Hamlets, Newham, Redbridge and Bradford. Other very left-wing constituencies such as Hackney saw independents seriously underperform their expectations: the Green wave was just too strong for YP to gain ground. Corbyn’s decentralised, almost anti-leadership approach contrasts with what has propelled the Greens — the election of a clear and charismatic figurehead in Polanski.

Now the prospect of Andy Burnham leading the Labour Party and becoming prime minister if he wins the Makerfield by-election could be another spanner in the works for Corbyn as well as for the Greens. Amongst those on the left of Labour, the strategic debate is whether to attack Burnham now for not being radical enough or stay quiet, hope he takes the reins and try to influence him in government.

The British left has always excelled at producing manifestos, acronyms and disputes. Building durable institutions has proved more difficult. A Burnham government could force it back into its comfort zone: arguing about the Labour Party.