No single organisation can deliver the change that socialists want. As Nigel Farage has shown, politics has to be ruthlessly tactical
For the long-marginalised British left, parliamentary byelections aren’t usually cause for much excitement. But Gorton and Denton is different. Polls, bookmakers and tactical-voting websites name the Greens as the close-run favourites, and thousands of activists have been knocking on doors for “Hannah the plumber”, a popular local councillor and proud owner of four beautiful greyhounds. What is particularly interesting about this week’s byelection is that it represents a politics of competing populisms that bypasses the classic Labour-Tory duopoly, with the Greens and Reform UK thrashing it out to be the rising force to take on the political establishment.
It is also the first time the Greens have looked like a majoritarian political project. Hannah Spencer didn’t go to university and isn’t part of the professional classes. She defies the typical image of a Green candidate and has the potential to reach beyond their usual voters. As left parties across Europe struggle to attract non-graduates, and politics becomes more polarised, running candidates such as Spencer – who in many ways conforms to Reform’s idealised image of Britain – is a powerful move. If the Green party leader Zack Polanski is serious about taking on Reform and replacing Labour as the left-of-centre party, he will need to contend with an electoral system that privileges small-town and rural seats. Running more Spencers must be part of the plan.
Your Party is in quite a different place. With elections for its all-important central executive committee having ended yesterday (and results to be announced on Thursday), the party is riven by factionalism, navel-gazing and the tyranny of small differences. Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn stood on opposing slates, and activists from both sides have been tearing chunks out of each other on social media.
At least there are genuine strategic differences between the two. Corbyn’s slate wants a deeper alliance between the Muslim community and progressive graduates, emphasising shared economic concerns and anti-imperialism over social issues such as trans rights – similar to Salma Yaqoob and George Galloway’s plan for Respect, a party launched after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Sultana’s slate has a more straightforwardly radical-left approach, focusing on member democracy, building power beyond elections and what you might call ideological maximalism (recall her words about wanting to “nationalise the entire economy”).
Both strategies have merit. Despite the disastrous public fallouts, an MRP poll from January suggested that Your Party could still win four seats at the next election and come second in a handful more, all of them in the heavily Muslim areas of Birmingham, Leicester and Bradford. This is Corbyn’s gambit.
Sultana would point to the success of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in the US, a hyper-democratic, broad-left socialist organisation of 100,000 members that has won elections – the New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is one of its members – and also built power in workplaces and communities, most notably through its Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee which has worked with more than 10,000 workers who want to unionise their workplaces. This is her example to follow.
The lingering concern, however, is whether Corbyn, Sultana and their associates have the discipline or ability to pull off any of this. A year of spectacular infighting may well have soured the internal culture beyond a point of no return.
And then, of course, there’s Labour. Ever since Keir Starmer betrayed the 10 pledges of his leadership campaign and went on a Morgan McSweeney-directed purge of anyone to the left of Ed Miliband, thousands of socialists have exited the party and cast scorn on those who have chosen to stay. And while you couldn’t pay me to knock on doors for Labour right now, the gamble of the remaining Momentum activists – now allied with the newly launched soft-left pressure group Mainstream and buoyed by the election of leftwinger Andrea Egan as general secretary of Unison – looks set to pay off.
Starmer will almost certainly go after the May elections, and polls indicate that the soft-left MPs Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband are odds-on favourites to replace him (with the Mandelson-Epstein scandal teaching Wes Streeting a thing or two about timing in politics). Both would follow a similar playbook: move left on the economy, invite socialist MPs back inside the tent and present a united front against Reform. After being hopelessly marginalised under Starmer, the Labour left would be back in play.
So which party should British leftists throw their weight behind? My answer is: all of them.
Personally, after a tumultuous marriage to Labour under Corbyn and a brief flirtation with Your Party, I joined the Greens. But I don’t think everybody should do the same. There are many good reasons socialists may stay where they are: trust and relationships they have built up over decades; their ability to effect change as local councillors; the influence they have within the party structure; the comparative strength of local branches meaning that another party is a worse option.
The grand-strategic case for hedging one’s bets is that no single organisation is capable of transforming Britain into a socialist society and, rather than arguing over who is a member of what, the left should build a mutually reinforcing ecology of organisations that can cooperate, coordinate and work in productive tension.
Nigel Farage knows this better than we do. His multi-decade project to reconfigure British politics around a Eurosceptic, right-populist agenda has seen him run Ukip, the Brexit party and then Reform with a large degree of strategic ambiguity. He has built outside and inside the Conservative party, always tactical as to whether he is trying to change it, take it over or replace it. From his haranguing of Theresa May for her supposedly soft Brexit while supporting the European Research Group of Conservative MPs, to his temporary ceasefire with Boris Johnson to help destroy Corbyn in 2019, Farage’s focus has always been in flux, dependent on the balance of forces and the opportunities at hand.
There is much to learn. It’s clear that a surging Green party strengthens the Labour left, who are leveraging the Greens’ success to force a progressive shift, creating a dramatic tension that captures media attention and creates more space to talk about leftwing ideas. This is a productive dynamic and long may it continue. We should also have the humility to admit that many possibilities are open and we should prepare for all of them.
The Greens could replace Labour as the party of the left, but they may also crash and burn with one bad interview or a scandal yet unknown. Your Party will most likely fizzle out, but if it does there will still be a DSA-shaped hole in the British left that some of its more competent activists could fill. And Labour, for all the turmoil and crisis of Starmerism, has lasted for more than a century and may well overcome its midterm polling deficit with a new soft-left leadership.
Farage understood 30 years ago that there’s little certainty in modern politics. Rather than choose one party over another, en masse, the left should embrace the ecology and hedge its bets.
