If America is starting to feel a bit early days of Nazi Germany, then I’d say my native Britain is taking on the distinct feel of Austria before the Anschluss. Last year, the Labour party, led by Sir Keir Starmer, were elected into government with a massive parliamentary majority, which they somehow managed despite receiving fewer total votes than in the previous election in 2019, when they slumped to a massive defeat. In British politics, enjoying the sort of majority the current government can boast—however one has arrived at it—pretty much means you can do what you like. But in Starmer’s case, what he seems to want to do is bugger all. As Prime Minister, Starmer has proved a busted flush, his only meaningful interventions serving to prop up a status quo that pretty much everyone outside of Westminster can agree needs to be burned to the ground. The man seems ultimately, in political terms, to be an idiot: neither able to comprehend the situation he, or the country, is in, nor figure out how to act to do anything about it.
As such, over the past year the political agenda has been increasingly dominated by Reform UK: the group formerly known as the Brexit Party, originally established as a vehicle for the former UKIP leader Nigel Farage. Reform can only claim five MPs, making their real political power about as negligible as Labour’s is—technically—irresistible, but have recently established an imposing lead in opinion polls.
Reform have managed this, in part, by capitalizing on the uselessness of the Tory opposition, who currently feel about as relevant as the non-MAGA parts of the Republican party. But they’ve also won plenty of support as a result of their leader’s ability to pick a single, emotive issue and never shut up about it: post-Brexit, this ability is actualised in Farage’s constant insistence that the UK’s immigration system is somehow broken; that there are too many immigrants, most of whom (or so the story goes) have arrived illegally in “small boats,” and that said illegal immigrants have somehow managed to game the system, illegitimately claiming asylum in order to be maintained in great comfort at the taxpayer’s expense. Of course this isn’t actually true. The British asylum system does cost the taxpayer huge amounts of money, but it’s also really tawdry and cruel. But facts don’t really matter here, not least because Reform’s narrative has been given the official gloss of truth by the government effectively agreeing with it. Reform’s ascendancy has been matched at every step by Labour’s complete unwillingness to challenge any of their rhetoric. Instead, they have decided that their best electoral bet is to position themselves as even tougher on immigration than Farage—this despite the fact that basically no Reform supporter will ever believe them, not least because they all seem convinced that Starmer, despite the evidence of everyone’s senses, is somehow secretly a Marxist revolutionary.
The resulting atmosphere is febrile: the era of Farageist hegemony feels at once some years distant—there likely won’t be another election until 2029—and already here. Recent months have seen large gatherings by an increasingly confident far-right nationalist grassroots adjacent to if not affiliated with Reform, including demonstrations outside hotels housing asylum seekers. Take a trip through any given provincial area of the UK, and one will see roadsides newly bedecked with English flags, the result of a sustained, successful effort by the right to mark what is now its territory.
But this is a strange sort of nationalist movement, one that not only takes its cues from, but really seems to be of one nation with the American far-right. One might understand this as the consequence of the Extremely Onlineification of the political right. Last week’s demonstrations, for instance, saw British protesters memorialize Charlie Kirk, a figure largely unknown over here before his shooting, and whose attempt to start a UK branch of Turning Point was some way off being any sort of success; the crowd was also addressed via video-link by an increasingly race war-ish Elon Musk. Beyond immigration, the things they seem to care about include support for Israel and hostility to vaccines, both deeply American right-coded issues. After May’s local elections saw Reform take control of a number of local councils, its initiatives included attempting to end EDI in local government: a policy that quickly hit the wall of EDI being something that exists on a noticeable scale in the USA, but not the UK (in fact affirmative action-style policies are illegal in the UK under the terms of the Equality Act 2010). Coupled with the fact that US companies already own so much of the UK (in 2018, US companies owned approximately 20 percent of British company assets—a figure which will only have risen since), one gets the impression that under Reform, British independence will rapidly become little more than a legal fiction. In our Farageist future, full Trumpification appears to be imminent.
It is therefore clearly urgent that someone with some sort of political power attempt somewhat to resist this: to at least manage to say no, that this is not only hateful but stupid; that if these trends continue, then we are all bound to lose our personal and political sovereignty just as surely as the bulk of us seem to have lost contact with reality. I, personally, am proud of the fact that I am one of the dozens of people worldwide who don’t live in the United States of America, and I wish to preserve this status for as long as I possibly can. With Labour moribund and apparently determined to capitulate to Reform, there has long seemed a growing vacuum on the British left, which basically stretches from the dead political centre to somewhere way past Stalin.
For some years now, the leading contender to occupy this vacuum has been none other than Jeremy Corbyn, the old-school democratic socialist and anti-imperialist whose shock victory in the 2015 Labour leadership election was the catalyst for four giddy years of immense, but ultimately futile, political hope. In 2020, Corbyn was kicked out of the Labour party—ostensibly for challenging the trumped-up charges of anti-Semitism that were levelled at him over the course of his leadership—and since then there has been at least some vague sense that he might found some sort of left-wing alternative. In 2020, he launched a campaigning vehicle called the Peace and Justice Project and, since retaining his parliamentary seat by standing as an Independent in last year’s election, has sat with a group of fellow Independent MPs, all of whom were elected on a platform opposing the genocide in Gaza.
But if these decisions—starting some sort of vague campaigning platform with a wishy-washy we like good things name; sitting in parliament with an informal grouping of other Independent MPs—look like the decisions someone would take if they were kinda-sorta thinking of starting a new political party but didn’t really want to, well then I think this assessment would probably be right. This summer, it started to seem like maybe some new Corbynista party might actually happen, when Zarah Sultana—the Coventry MP who, like Corbyn, proved much too openly left-wing for Starmer’s Labour—announced that she and Corbyn were in negotiations to launch, and co-lead, a new left-wing party. Such an alliance would seem to make sense: Corbyn and Sultana broadly share the same politics, and while he has much greater name recognition, she is much younger, and is a spiky and energetic media performer. Corbyn himself seemed much more lukewarm about the initiative—and in private was reported to be annoyed by Sultana disclosing news of the negotiations—but the pair’s differences appeared to have been set quickly aside, when they jointly issued a statement confirming the launch of a new left-wing political party, which initially appeared to be called Your Party. Only then we were told this probably wouldn’t be the actual name of the party, which seemed like a strange way of launching a new party, although also kind of a relief because the name Your Party is rubbish. Members of the party were solicited to sign up and express their interest; apparently, almost 800,000 did. An inaugural conference was scheduled for November.
Last week, Your Party’s protracted journey toward becoming something that might maybe actually exist appeared briefly to be making some sort of meaningful progress, as Sultana announced the launch of a portal which would allow people to sign up as members. But then the strangest thing happened. Rather than welcoming the estimated 20,000 people who committed their money in the first morning, Corbyn—and the other Independent Alliance MPs—immediately moved to condemn Sultana, proclaiming that they had never agreed to launch the membership portal, and threatening her with legal action. Sultana immediately responded by threatening to sue for defamation (a threat she has since dropped, apparently hoping to reconcile).
In light of the dispute, activists claiming to represent grassroots members of Your Party launched a group called Our Party, with the aim of wresting control of the nascent party away from MPs. To which, of course, one feels obliged to make the obvious joke: typical left, the party doesn’t even exist yet and already it’s being torn apart by three competing factions. Of course, for all anyone might continue to try, it is hard to see any way back from here: Sunk by Corbyn’s hesitancy and ego, Your Party has proved every bit as dead on arrival as the ill-starred premiership of the hated Sir Keir (since I wrote this, reports have surfaced suggesting Corbyn and Sultana are attempting to put the membership portal back online: I await next Tuesday’s party split over what percentage discount they’re offering if you pay up front for a year).
Still, by watching these people as they have, in political terms, repeatedly fallen down the stairs while attempting to get their shoelaces done up, I do at least feel I’ve managed to learn something. What I have learned is that if there is a quality that I really cannot tolerate in someone I might otherwise have felt political kinship with, then it is dithering. For years now—in fact, if we date this from 2020, then for the best part of a decade—Corbyn has dithered. He has long had the opportunity to start a new left-wing political party, he has obviously long seen the need for him to start a new left-wing political party, but for whatever reason he has failed to actually manage to found a new political party—now to the point that he has responded with open hostility to someone else attempting to found said party on his behalf.
For all this, however, Corbyn’s dithering has at least managed to inadvertently provide the British left with some small grounds for hope. Your Party dithered so long over its own creation that its electoral niche has already begun to be colonized by the Green party, once nice-but-vague centre-left environmentalists who are now firmly in the process of pivoting to a more dynamic, neo-Corbynist platform under their new leader, Zack Polanski, elected with a Putinesque 80 percent of the vote somewhen between Your Party opening for expressions of interest and the whole thing falling apart.
The Greens still have some way to go. While they do have something Your Party conspicuously lacks, namely an established institutional structure, they have long been pretty much anonymous on a national level, despite their four MPs only being one fewer than our overlords-in-waiting Reform. Polanski’s leadership will help with this though: he is, if nothing else, an infinitely more compelling media performer than his predecessors. Clearly, the sensible thing at this point would be for any and all left-leaning voters and activists in Britain to abandon the Your Party lot to their own bickering, and work to turn the Greens into the alternative that we need instead.
Somehow, however, I doubt this is going to happen. The British left is not at a moment when it can afford to be divided; and yet it is apparently determined to divide itself. People like to say we have a choice between socialism and barbarism. But people don’t tend to consciously opt for barbarism. What they tend to embrace, instead, what they tend to love to rush headlong towards, is stupidity. Time and time again, the British left will choose our own stupidity: will make the wrong decision, the clumsy and blinkered and self-flattering decision, instead of the decision that makes the most strategic sense—one which is most likely to bring us closer to a better world. To this extent then, we are really no different from anyone else.
