The collapse of Your Party is bloody hilarious

Normally a left-wing party has to exist before it can start splitting. Not Your Party. The Corbyn-Sultana loonfest has leapt right over the founding-conference and manifesto-writing business and gone straight for the People’s Front of Judea routine. This fledgling gang of soy socialists that promised to save Britain from ‘barbarism’ – by which they meant Nigel Farage – has descended into an orgy of acrimony of the like we’ve not seen since Vanessa Redgrave flounced out of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. It’s delicious, hands down my favourite political event since Brexit.

Your Party – it’s not my party, mate – was announced back in July to squeals of delight in the bakeshops of Dalston. Sixth-form sulk Zarah Sultana said she was quitting Labour and would co-lead a new party with the Albert Steptoe of dusty old leftism, Jeremy Corbyn. Hilariously cosplaying as Rosa Luxemburg, Sultana said in her vainglorious letter of resignation that Britain faces a choice between ‘socialism or barbarism’. Turns out that where Luxemburg fought a revolution against the literal German Empire, Comrade Sultana can’t even set up a naff party for the Moët Marxists and dickless identitarians that make up the modern left.

From the get-go, the signs were not good. Even Sultana’s unilateral declaration of a new party pissed off old Jez, who apparently was given no advance warning of her self-exulting communiqué to the press. There followed much internecine bitching and sassy leaks to the press. Wisecracking tweeters proposed names for the odd couple’s party: the Fruit and Nut Party, or Jezbollah perhaps, given Corbyn once called the homicidal nutters of Hezbollah his ‘friends’. Now there’s an all-out digital catfight between Fruit (Sultana) and Nut (Corbyn). I’m stocking up on popcorn.

This week, Sultana sent out an email telling supporters they could become party members for £55 (you can become a member of Reform for less than half that price). Sultana says more than 20,000 people signed up, meaning Your Party could have netted a sweet mill in just one morning. But then Jeremy took to X and called Sultana’s membership drive ‘unauthorised’. We’ve referred the matter to the Information Commissioner’s Office, he said. Yikes – not even three months into its existence and already this neo-Stalinist freakshow has commissars poring over its antics.

Sultana threw a tantrum. She raged against the ‘right-wing bad-faith actors’ calling her membership drive ‘fake’. I hear you’re right-wing now, Jeremy. She accused Corbyn of overseeing a ‘sexist boys’ club’. Oh come on. How many victim cards can one woman play? First she said it was ‘Islamophobic’ for Your Party bigwigs to say she is ‘untested’. Now she’s saying it’s ‘sexist’ that they haven’t included her in every decision. Grow up, Zarah – you’re not being criticised because you’re a Muslim and a woman but because you’re shit at politics.

That’s what the fall of Your Party even before it was properly born really exposes – the rank amateurism of the modern left. The left’s bonfire of solidarity in service of the god of self-regard. The sheer impossibility of having any kind of collective movement in an era of hyper-fragility where it’s a speechcrime to say lesbians don’t have dongs or Zarah Sultana is a fucking idiot. But she’s young, people say. She’s 31! Marx was 30 when he wrote The Communist Manifesto. Whippersnapper Engels was 27. Luxemburg was 34 when she threw herself into the revolutionary tumult of 1905. I bet she didn’t cry sexism when some unbathed radical tried to chat her up in the trenches.

Sultana embodies the cult of victimology that bizarrely passes for leftism these days. The new left is packed with hammer-and-sickle furries and Vitamin D-deficient poshos who tweet about fighting barbarism and then demand a self-care day because they overheard a TERF say ‘he’ about some fat bloke in a boob tube. Capitalism can sleep easy so long as its enemies are emotionally incontinent kidults who can’t even face the morning commute without their ADHD meds.

Also, you think we’re going to take lectures about a ‘sexist boys’ club’ from an MP who openly cheered the pummelling of women by a man at the Paris Olympics? ‘If you come for the Queen, you best not miss!’, Sultana tweeted when Algerian boxer Imane Khelif – widely believed to be male – punched the hell out of women to claim gold. She also lamented the ‘transphobic hysteria’ of gender-critical feminists. Remember when it was blokeish twats who called women hysterics? Now it’s woke women drunk on the Kool-Aid of trans lunacy.

Your Party is a profoundly untenable project. Corbyn and Sultana might talk similar nonsense but their personality differences seem positively combustive. More to the point, how can you build a movement that includes both woke loons and Muslim conservatives? This is a party led by the grandaddy of the lame left, woke upstart Sultana and the so-called Gaza Independents – those small-c conservative Muslim men elected to the Commons last year largely for their opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza. A party that’s a mix of pink-haired muppets who think you can have a schlong and be a woman and straight-laced religious men who know very well what a woman is and pray separately from them every Friday? Good luck with that.

That this weirdo outfit is a hodgepodge of cobwebbed community-hall leftists, navel-gazing genderfluids and men who think Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse is bizarre but not surprising. It was the left’s grotesque back-stabbing of the working class that forced it to build these mad new alliances. Their treachery over Brexit, their branding of working men as ‘gammon’, their libelling of the little people as racist just for thinking borders matter – it was these ceaseless betrayals that made the working classes flee the left, and left the left to scrabble about in the political dirt for new pacts in a desperate bid to stay relevant. Do not mourn their demise – it is well-earned.

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 latest 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