Zarah Sultana wants to nationalise everything

Even amid the chaos that was Your Party’s inaugural conference weekend, onetime leadership contender Zarah Sultana managed to raise bourgeois eyebrows when she said the party should aim to “nationalise the entire economy” of the UK – a clarion call for full socialism that goes well beyond anything her comrade (but not friend) Jeremy Corbyn has ever advocated.

Perhaps sensing how this rallying cry might alienate some would-be supporters, Owen Jones – who, clearly still worried about blowback from the left, published an ever-so-delicate critique of Your Party’s launch in the Guardian this week – offered Sultana a chance to walk those comments back in a video interview.

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When you said “nationalise the entire economy”, Jones asked, “what does that look like?”. If Jones was indeed offering Sultana a chance to make her comments look more moderate, she roundly rejected it.

“It looks like a socialist transformation of the country,” she told him, where “we nationalise utilities, we nationalise energy” (an unkind observer would note energy is a utility), and “we nationalise transport, we nationalise communications, including the internet”.

Even Jones looked somewhat taken aback by this ambition. Jeremy Corbyn was much mocked for a policy offering to nationalise broadband as a public service. Nationalising the internet is far more radical, if much less practical: most of the internet is, of course, located outside the UK. But why let practicalities hold back the revolution?

Somewhat flustered, and once again seeming to be trying to give Sultana a chance to reassure the viewer, Jones asked Sultana whether coffee stands and kiosks would be nationalised under her plans.

The answer was yes, sort of: anything not nationalised would be run by “the workers”, through “workers’ cooperatives”. This would, she stressed, include the entire food supply chain, presumably including farms themselves. Mao Zedong would be proud.