The New Left’s Pillars of Salt and Sand

For context, ‘new left’ encompasses both the recently formed Your Party and the revitalised Green Party under Zack Polanski. 

At the moment, these two separate parties have even been campaigning side-by-side, in a somewhat wholesome, but more so politically disconcerting joint campaigning effort that won’t last ten minutes. They appear tethered in a codependent manner, comparable to the graphic horror of Michael Shank’s Together, though they are distinct political entities with competing electoral ambitions. The grassroots movements of both are trying to induce a tolerance for assimilation that is jarringly sparse among their own leadership, who seem preoccupied with personal power. 

The opening remark made at a recent Your Party meeting in Coventry, by their only councillor, was that the Greens weren’t really socialists. Such a casual dismissal raises the question: how long will it take this new left infighting to seep into the grassroots effort? 

Everything left of the Labour Party in Britain (albeit sometimes themselves included) is primarily known for one thing: infighting. Beyond Labour and the Liberal Democrats, you quickly cascade into self-imploding chicanery, where everyone who doesn’t outright denounce capitalism is an agent of the wealthy bourgeoisie. This quest for ideological purity has often been one of many reasons why the majority of voters have treated such parties as unelectable student political bodies, as exemplified by the laughable infighting on which Your Party was founded, and one of its co-leaders labelling their own organisation a “sexist boy’s club”. Upon the rock of internal squabbling, they shall build their socialist church. 

The two parties overlap in regard to being distinctly unserious, particularly given the Greens’ new policy stances, which include abolishing landlords and legalising all drugs – yes, you read that right, all. A Britain in which heroin and fentanyl are legal goods… 

You have to ask if they’ve really thought about what they’re proposing. Such policy positions are so inconceivably detrimental that they don’t even constitute criticism, and it’s on these sorts of non-issues that the divisions between the new left appear to rear their head. 

Sultana, co-leader of Your Party, was keen to outline the differences between the parties at the recent ‘The World Transformed’ festival in Manchester. She referred to the Greens as undemocratic, implying they failed in being anti-imperialist over their position on NATO. Even after all this quarrelling, however, Polanski still publicly invited Sultana to join the Green Party. This might be (partly) out of a genuine desire to unite the far-left, but it’s easy to make such gestures when you’re the one in charge – and that’s the heart of the issue. 

We saw it when Sultana announced she was co-leading Your Party with Corbyn, the former Labour Party leader, when he hadn’t agreed to co-run anything; it’s all about power. It’s even clearer now how much Sultana used the founding of the party as a personal power grab, given Your Party’s newly published constitution only refers to a singular leader – as if the powerbrokers never really wanted this power-sharing structure in the first place. Being a ‘true leftie’ clearly only matters so far as it affords the three players of Sultana, Polanski, and Corbyn influence. They squabble over individual policies when such differences are largely manufactured simply to justify them being separate parties, with none of them willing to unite their movements out of fear of losing their individual power. The grassroots movements are clamouring to unite, and their ideologies are close enough to merit it, so why don’t they? There’s only one self-serving answer. 

The salt and sand foundations of the new left are bitterly weak. The movement is built on a vague notion of empathetic politics, which is really a front for personal ambitions. There honestly aren’t any other reasonable explanations as to why they aren’t one singular entity, aside from the feeble policy differences that matter little to their members. By sticking to this current system of divisions, the parties' shared electorate will be divided, weakening their collective political weight (which may well be a blessing), indicative of the new left’s self-destructive nature.

It’s hard to visualise Your Party breaking off from Labour, forming what can be classified as the new left with the Greens, only for this to itself grow increasingly divided (even if this is only symbolic), with the mainstream left already divided between Labour and the Lib Dems. It’s pluralism gone mad, and not even for a constructive purpose. Divided parties don’t win elections, and parties that ought to be united but remain separate to feed the egocentric whims of their leaders certainly won’t. If the heavily overlapping beliefs matter so much to these leading radicals, who espouse them as an imperative moral political purpose, then they should put their own interests aside for their ill-guided vision of a ‘greater good’. Somehow, it’s unlikely events will unfold as such. 

Image: Flickr/Alan Denney

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