Is Zarah Sultana the most ridiculous politician in Britain?

Tremble, ye capitalists! For a new spectre is haunting Britain. The spectre of Magic Grandpa and his TikTokking simp. The spectre of a 76-year-old MP who was once besties with Hamas and his 31-year-old protégée who thinks you can have a cock and be a woman. The spectre, at last, of a dazzling alliance between the politician who backed an Early Day Motion lamenting ‘prejudice against pigeons’ and his fresh-faced apostle who once said people without Covid masks make her feel ‘incredibly unsafe’. Bet you’re quaking now, you plutocratic pigs!

This is the news, the delicious news, that Zarah Sultana MP is resigning from Labour to create a radical new party that will be the gravedigger of ‘barbarism’. She’ll ‘co-lead’ the party, she says, with that dusty old idol of community-hall leftism, Jeremy Corbyn. Or perhaps not. Corbyn hasn’t commented. There are reports that he’s ‘furious and bewildered’ that Ms Sultana unveiled their revolutionary plotting without consulting him first. I love it – the party doesn’t even exist yet and it’s already being consumed by ‘People’s Front of Judea’ shit.

We’re all due some mirth in these bleak times, one year into the rule of shite Sir Keir and his emotionally incontinent deputies. And it surprises me as much as it does you that that mirth has come from Coventry’s own void of joy, Zarah Sultana. Her resignation letter is the funniest thing I’ve read in ages. We face a ‘stark’ choice between ‘socialism or barbarism’, she says, cosplaying as Rosa Luxemburg for the titillation of her audience of Media Studies muppets who can’t get through a day’s grind of graphic designing without their ADHD meds, far less fight a revolution against the German Empire.

She makes Rick from The Young Ones sound like Friedrich Engels. We live under a ‘tiny elite bathing in cash’, she wails. All we get is ‘broken promises’, she blubs. The unfairness of it all is ‘obscene’, people are ‘suffering’, and all the while ‘the billionaires’ get even more filthy rich, yada yada. These are Adrian Mole levels of infantile leftism. Though at least he was poetic: ‘Do you weep, Mrs Thatcher, do you weep? / Do you wake, Mrs Thatcher, in your sleep? / Do you weep like a sad willow / On your Marks and Spencers pillow?’

The idea that Sultana is about to do a Brit version of storming the Bastille is comical beyond words. If the sight of Tories sans Covid masks made her feel ‘incredibly unsafe in the chamber’, how’s she going to face down the forces of barbarism? She sums up the Fisher-Price radicalism of the TikTok generation, where one minute they’re saying ‘FUCK CAPITALISM’ and the next they’re taking a self-care day because they saw JK Rowling say ‘he’ about some fat fella in a bikini. ‘Misgendering’ is ‘utterly disgraceful’, Sultana says. This will be the most easily defeated uprising in history – all the riot cops will have to say is ‘dude’ to a lad in a dress and they’ll all be running home to sob into their dog-eared copies of The State and Revolution.

Sultana embodies all the moral contortionism of what madly passes for ‘left’ these days. She laments ‘men’s violence against women and girls’ and yet she cheered when a biological male beat the shit out of a woman for sport. When Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who’s widely believed to have male DNA, won gold in the women’s boxing at the Paris Olympics, Sultana tweeted: ‘If you come for the queen, you best not miss.’ What kind of feminist celebrates a male pummelling a woman so hard that she feared for her life?

She bemoans the ‘transphobic hysteria’ of gender-critical feminists who’d rather not see an estrogen-shrivelled knob in their changing rooms. I’m old enough to remember when it was boorish blokes who called women ‘hysterical’, not leftish women MPs. She rages against online abuse and yet when lovely Tom Felton paid JK Rowling a compliment she tweeted: ‘It makes complete sense that he was Slytherin.’ Jesus.

To Rowling herself, who’s bombarded with digital misogyny on the daily, Sultana once said it’s not surprising ‘most of the Harry Potter cast doesn’t speak to you anymore lol’. Leaving aside how unbecoming it is of a Member of Parliament in her 30s to go all Mean Girls on an author whose only sin is to know that men aren’t women, this lame jibe also exposes the undiluted cant of the ‘Be Kind’ brigade. Be kind to me is what they mean. Those bitches who think men should not punch women or get their cocks out in women’s changing rooms? Screw them. Say what you like to them. Subject them to teenage taunts about how they have no friends ‘lol’.

Sultana rages against building a third runway at Heathrow yet agitates for a new airport in Mirpur in Pakistan. She claims to care about ethnic minorities yet she spent the past week yelping ‘We are all Palestine Action’ despite Palestine Action’s sickening destruction of a Jewish-owned business in Stamford Hill. Are you that, Ms Sultana? Do tell. She claims to support the working class yet agitates against fracking for gas and digging for oil in the North Sea, making it pretty clear she gives not one damn for the well-paid jobs such industries would provide or the spiralling energy bills workers will suffer as long as our energy is sourced elsewhere. Hypocrisy, thy name is Zarah!

Her new movement won’t be a party for working people – it will be a safe space for the insufferable sons and daughters of the leisured elites who think wearing £25 earrings that say ‘Literally A Communist’ makes them Che fucking Guevara. It will be a cauldron of all the bourgeois drivel that falsely calls itself radicalism. I bet a month’s wage every member will have a PhD, a keffiyeh, a therapist, a subscription to Novara Media and a propensity to yelp ‘Gammon!’ when they spy someone from the working class. ‘Socialism or barbarism’, they’ll cry, when we all know the only moral dilemma these dweebs have ever faced is where to have brunch.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy