Corbyn’s new party will put Farage in No10

She called for Corbyn to nationalise “major corporations”, without compensation; asked where she would get the money, she replied “through expropriation”, following a “revolution”.

Before considering the long-term function of the new party in British politics, we should notice the short term function that figures like Lali play for Nigel Farage: the party’s most radical voices will be employed (and I mean for money) as perfect, lunatic-sounding foils to bring onto GB News, night after night, to dramatize the culture war and boost the far right’s own narrative.

In the same week, the party’s cofounder Zarah Sultana, tweeted: “Keir Starmer and David Lammy both belong in The Hague”. Taken literally, that means the leader of the Labour Party, whose manifesto Sultana was happy to stand on long after his initial response to the Gaza conflict, and whose money she was happy to take in last year’s election, is a war criminal who should stand trial for genocide.

To expand the point, the Green Party supporting columnist Owen Jones has also suggested that Lammy should go to jail.

To be clear about what is going on: the far left is intent on ensuring that Corbynism 2.0 plays a much darker part than its first iteration, when it emerged as a legitimate – if ultimately ineffective – response within left-wing social democracy to electoral failure.

This time around it is reading from a script familiar to anyone who has studied the role of German communism in Hitler’s victory. In the late 1930s, on Stalin’s orders, the German Communist Party designated the million-strong socialist party as “social fascist”.

It used the same language of disgust, declaring in February 1930 that “anyone who still belongs to the SPD is rotten and must be hounded out of the workplaces and the unions.” It peddled the same fantasy of retribution: “This struggle [against the socialists] will end with hearings of the revolutionary tribunals of the Soviet Republic”.

It pitched its appeal to young, unemployed nationalist German workers, echoing Nazi language of “volksrevolution” and “führer”, its leaders famously predicting that, “after Hitler, it’s our turn next”. And when it came to a Nazi backed referendum to topple a socialist regional government – yes, you guessed it, the German communists joined in.

There will, of course, be many disgruntled members of the trade unions, and student activists who want Labour to take a tougher line on Gaza, who might look sympathetically on the idea of launching a left-social democratic alternative to Labour. The old leadership group around Len McCluskey, Karie Murphy and Andrew Murray see the new party as “leverage” for the trade union leaders over the Labour government. When push comes to shove they might be prepared to split the progressive vote in a few safe Labour seats.

The intervention of figures like Lali, Jones and Sultana herself is designed to make sure that cannot happen. Once you identify Labour as the main enemy, and led by genocidal criminals, it becomes impossible to vote critically, or even demand some kind of formal alliance to keep either the Tories or Reform out. 

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What the far left wants Corbyn’s new venture to become is, in short, a wrecking ball against the Labour Party, which results in a Reform government and – necessarily – the collapse of UK fiscal stability and the erosion of democracy. If you are committed to expropriating property by force, in defiance of the basic rules of the WTO and (by the way) the European Convention on Human Rights, the collapse of democracy is your only route to power.

That’s why, instead of joining the laughter as Corbyn and Sultana screwed up the party’s launch by failing to agree its name, I am deeply worried – not for Labour, which will lose very few MPs and councillors – but for the young people who are going to be dragged into the net of the utterly cynical Leninist re-enactors who will form the party’s apparatus.

They are fine with Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Republic flags on their demos. But they are strangely un-fine working with Labour members and supporters, who they portray as “genocidaires”. They have developed a practice of hounding Labour MPs in their constituencies, and are encouraging people to risk 14 years imprisonment by declaring their support for the banned terrorist group Palestine Action.

The real threat, meanwhile, is the far right. Reform is polling around 27% and brazenly stoking fantasies of civil war among the hard core of young, racist and misogynist men who’ve been mobilised to cause trouble outside asylum hotels.

If Labour cannot turn the economy around, and start delivering not only on the “soft” issues like the NHS and schools, but the hard issues like policing, rule of law and migration, there is every chance that Reform could win the 2029 election. In that case we are going to need aggressive electoral alliance tactics to keep Farage out.

But politicians like Sultana no longer care. They are swept up in a rhetoric so similar to the Comintern’s social fascism line in the 1930s that one can only conclude they have never read a history of their own movement. 

Lali, Sultana and their like genuinely believe that Starmer himself is responsible for the growth of Reform; that the ingrained racism and fantasies of violence now present in some small-town communities can be assuaged by a waffling speech from Jeremy and the promise to build more council homes.

That is why, no matter how many anti-racist demos they organise, the one thing they will never do is go into the beleaguered working class communities where Reform is strong and show, by building cohesion and resilience, there is a way back from far right radicalisation. That is the work Labour MPs and councillors do day in day out.

What cured communism of its madness in the 1930s was catastrophic defeat. The “tribunals” that jailed the socialist leaders turned out to be Nazi ones, not Red. Within a year, world communism abandoned its rhetoric of hatred against liberals and socialists and embraced them, in alliances that in 1936 defeated the far right electorally, first in Spain and then in France.

But there is no Comintern to save people like Sultana and Lali – only Russian and Chinese bot farms to drive their social media traffic, just as they drive Reform’s. 

Only Labour can govern Britain as an alternative to a Tory-Farage tie up. Those of us who are critical of the party’s performance in power have to start every conversation from that premise. And only Labour can do what Lali dreams of doing – building a coalition of progressive and socially conservative working class voters in the left-behind towns.

Starting a new party, without programme, name or constitution, and with the founding premise that Starmer is a war criminal, can have one intent only: to take votes from Labour and put Farage into Downing Street.