Not so keen after all… ?

Now that Zarah Sultana and her supporters have bounced Jeremy Corbyn into agreeing to a jointly-led new party, the Morning Star and the Communist Party of Britain might be expected to be very happy.

Corbyn, after all, is a long standing friend of theirs, and Sultana has been repeatedly held up as the charismatic representative of a new generation of left wingers.

But in its editorial of 5-6 July, immediately following the declaration of the new party, the paper welcomed not a new jointly-led party, but “a left alliance around Corbyn” before warning: “We should not get ahead of ourselves. Organisational disputes over the shape of any new alliance, even whether it will be a political party in the traditional sense, remain unresolved. There is no programme or even outline statement of principles” (a very minimal “statement” has since appeared).

Leading CPBer Andrew Murray, writing on 16 July, gave a detailed and rather downbeat account of the formation of the Corbyn-Sultana party. Here are the main points:

•” [M]oves to actually establish the party remain fraught. Discussions are continuing as to how or whether to carry forward the principle of ‘co-leadership’”

• “The decision of the organising committee… to seek co-leadership, taken by 17 votes to five abstentions, appears to have caught some of Mr Corbyn’s strongest personal supporters by surprise… a number have now withdrawn from the committee”

• “Mr Corbyn … did not take any part in the final vote” and “was surprised by Ms Sultana’s announcement, which he had not signed off on and believed should not have been issued, insofar as it mentioned him too”

• “Mr Corbyn favours an alliance of already existing local independent initiatives and is more reluctant than Ms Sultana to directly attack Labour”

• “A meeting of Collective, the body whose members have mostly withdrawn from the committee, heard calls for reconciliation and a consensus view for patience and waiting to see how the situation develops”.

Given that Murray, then Len McCluskey’s chief of staff at Unite, was drafted into Corbyn’s leadership team (part-time) in early 2018 and helped run the 2019 election campaign, I think we can take his account of the “fraught” early days of the party as well-informed. In particular, he has a close political relationship with Karie Murphy, a political associate (and partner) of Len McCluskey. Murphy is the leader of the Collective grouping, outmanoeuvred by Sultana’s supporters, that advocated delaying the announcement of a new formation and who wanted Corbyn as sole leader.

Worse

It has been suggested that Murphy and her associates saw the project as a means of exerting “leverage” for the left and the unions over the Labour government, rather than as a new party. Sultana and her people, by attacking Starmer in shrill terms (as a de facto war criminal who “belongs in the Hague”, and “worse than the Tories”), and by directing their main fire at Labour, have effectively scuppered that strategy.

Thus the Morning Star’s reservations, as expressed by Murray.

Murray’s piece was headlined “A Corbyn-Sultana Party ‘Would Poll Equal To Labour’” and opened by reporting, with apparent enthusiasm, an early-July opinion poll that put the new party neck and neck with Labour on 15 per cent (the most recent has it at 6%). But Murray closed with this:

“The same poll underlined the stakes, since it put Reform on 34 per cent of the vote and the Tories on 17, making a hard-right government after the next election much the most likely outcome as things stand.” (More recent polls are similar).

Two further points of relevance to this: they have been silent on the recent report into corruption within Unite involving Len McCluskey. A solitary article has noted the reactionary statements (e.g. on private and faith schools) of some members of Corbyn’s “Independent” group of MPs. There has been no mention of the fact that one member, Ayoub Khan, asked for the army to be called in to break the Birmingham bin strike (although since then Khan has come to the 25 July mass picket to back the strikers).