Is Zarah Sultana right for the left?

0:02Sky News, the full story first.

0:09Coming up, she's the left-wing firebrand who left Labour to set up a new party. Your party. So who is Zarah Sultana?

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1:02I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow. No one ever said setting up a new political party would be easy. But did Zahra Sultana ever imagine it would be this hard?

1:28Rob Powell:Is this a purge of your supporters? It is something that is deeply concerning, especially when we are calling for a democratic party. We are not here to expel people. We are not here to build a culture of witch hunts. So how did we get here? Well, Zahra Sultana was once a Labour MP. She left the party in protest, flanked by others, including the former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Together, they've created a new political party called Your Party. They say it's time for a change, a left-wing movement rooted in communities, trade unions and social movements. But their party conference held in Liverpool not long ago suggests you might want to add division and infighting to that list.

2:10Breaking through in politics from outside the mainstream isn't easy, though it can be done. Just look at Zach Polanski's Greens, or for that matter, reforming Nigel Farage. Zahra Soltana has her work cut out. So who is she? Let's get started with our political correspondent, Rob Powell, who you heard speaking to Zahra Soltana a little earlier. OK, then, Rob, tell me about Zahra Soltana. How exactly did she get into politics in the first place? When you listen back to interviews from her and how she became political,

2:41Rob Powell:it does feel like there are a certain number of moments that I think anyone in their 30s can probably relate to. She talks about being amongst the first wave of students to pay£9 ,000 a year tuition fees. She talks about being quite young, a teenager during the Iraq years and the Iraq invasion as well. It's that sort of post-Iraq climate that she talks a lot about as being a Muslim woman growing up in Birmingham. The feeling like the Muslim population and community were under siege post 9-11. and then having to go to university and pay all this money for tuition fees and sort of becoming active in politics during that period where you saw student activism essentially accelerate against tuition fees.

3:26That combined, I think, with the recession, the financial crash,

3:31Rob Powell:and then the austerity years. I think that is what has moulded Zahra Sultana into this quite firebrand, left-wing politician that she is now. When she came out of university, she was a community organiser for a while for the third sector, for charities, then moved into supporting the Corbyn Project before then becoming Coventry South MP in 2019 when she was in her mid to late 20s. So was young into Parliament, but I think has felt that as Labour under Keir Starmer has changed, she has felt that it's sort of moved away from her. But I think arguably she has become more firm and I guess hardline in her views and left wing views at the same time as well.

4:12OK, but really, was the Labour Party ever a natural fit for Zahra Sultana?

4:17Rob Powell:I think maybe it's the irony, right? She joined as a Labour MP at the time when Corbyn was on the way out. As a parliamentarian, I guess maybe the Labour Party was never quite in the place that she thought. But her time as an activist, I think, was spent with Corbyn as leader. That was when I think she really cut her teeth as a Labour activist and a Labour organiser. You saw a time then when I think the Labour Party probably did fit with her broader, more radical beliefs. I think she has probably got more radical as the years have gone by, at a time when clearly Labour has tacked more to the centre, especially as it's moved into government.

4:57So what specifically was the nature of the falling out with the party apparatus?

5:02Rob Powell:She was one of the MPs that rebelled basically against the two-child cap. And it was when there was a big vote on that, a load of Labour MPs voted against the government whip on it and we saw suspensions from mainly people in the socialist campaign group. But some of her most staunch criticism was over the Labour government's position on Gaza, as well as sort of domestic factors that made her become political. She talks a lot about a visit that she made to the West Bank and the broader area when she was a young student. She went there with family and talked about the impact of seeing what was going on in terms of what Palestinians, the conditions that they had to live in.

5:38Rob Powell:So that is a huge motivating factor for her as well. And you could argue that on that, the government's position has changed and hardened since Zahra Sultana left. You're in a position now where Keir Starmer has recognised Palestine as a state, something that she had been pushing for. On welfare, you've had that U-turn, and then you have had the U-turn on the two-child cap as well. So a lot of the things that she fell out with Labour about have actually come to pass. Her explanation now, though, is basically that she feels the Labour Party is beyond repair. She talks about, you know, this government as being a genocide-enabling government and feels that something completely different has to happen now.

6:17Give us a flavour of the policies that we might see in Zahra Sultana's Britain.

6:22Rob Powell:Yeah, well, some of the stuff that Zahra Sultana has been talking about does go way beyond what Jeremy Corbyn put in place when he was Labour leader. And I think that's part of the reason why you're starting to see these splits within your party. I mean, last weekend in Liverpool, she was talking about nationalising the economy. So you're not even talking about nationalising public services, utilities. So not communism. I mean, that is basically communism. That is quite full on for even a left wing policy in this country, I think. She wants to expel the Israeli ambassador. She wants to leave NATO.

6:54Rob Powell:There was an interview she did about a month or two ago, where it wasn't entirely clear how she reconciled her opposition to what's going on in Ukraine in terms of Western armaments of Ukraine against Russia. And she was asked about Coventry being somewhere that was, you know, devastated in World War Two. And basically what the difference is, if you were a politician back then, would you have been saying we shouldn't arm up and defend ourselves against Hitler. And she said, well, we were fighting fascism back then. And it was sort of put to her, well, Ukraine is fighting a sinister, brutal force in Russia.

7:24Rob Powell:Should we not be doing the same thing there? And she couldn't quite square the circle on that. So I think the pulling out of NATO criticism of Ukraine as well, it's an interesting topic where on service level, I think she'll find a lot of favour with it. But you dig a bit deeper and it doesn't really have that much substance to it. And the final thing that is one of her policies is abolish the monarchy as well. So this is all stuff that goes down well with sort of a young radical audience. Look, the pragmatic practicalities of it for someone that sort of talks about wanting to have power and to actually affect change.

7:53Rob Powell:I guess that's another question. A lot of the criticisms that Zahra Sultana has made of the Labour Party have also been made by, you know, Jeremy Corbyn. But interestingly, those two haven't exactly been in lockstep, well, ever since the day one of your party. Yeah, it has been pretty bumpy. I mean, we obviously saw Jeremy Corbyn and sort of spearhead, I guess this independent alliance group of MPs. And then there had been talk about something more formal, a formal new party. And then Zahra Sultana went and announced it and was quickly essentially pushed back on by Jeremy Corbyn. Clearly, who wasn't ready for that announcement, didn't want to make it at that point.

8:33Rob Powell:Zahra Sultana said that her and Jeremy Corbyn were going to co-found and co-lead initially this new party. And that was pushed back on from Corbyn right at the beginning. She then went on to launch a membership drive, essentially took money, donations from people. A lot of money. A lot of money,£800 ,000 in total, and had the extraordinary situation where you had Jeremy Corbyn and people around him urging people to cancel their direct debits to a party that he was supposed to have been co-founding. Now, that money is gradually making its way from an account controlled by Sultana over to the main Your Party apparatus.

9:06Rob Powell:at us when we were there at the All Party conference in Liverpool last weekend, about 600 ,000 of the 800 ,000 had been transferred across. But look, I hadn't appreciated until I interviewed both Jeremy Corbyn and Zahra Sultana last weekend, quite how deep this rift actually is. What's the basis of it? Is it just, you know, too many cooks? I think on part, there is probably a degree of Zahra Sultana jumping and making these announcements before Jeremy Corbyn felt that he was ready and the people around him were ready to make it. But there is something, I think, a little more fundamental in that Zahra Sultana, a lot of her supporters do come from more hardline left-wing organisations.

9:50Rob Powell:There was a big disagreement at conference last weekend about expulsions that were taking place from your party. A lot of that was because of the issue of being a member of another political party. Which is the same as with the Labour Party. You can't be the member of the Labour Party. Exactly. But a lot of these people were members of the Socialist Workers Party. And Zahra Sultana came out to bat for them and said, no, this shouldn't be happening. This should be a sort of broad church where we're welcoming of people that have come from other sort of left wing traditions. So I think you're in a place where she is courting a lot of support from people that are further to the left than where a lot of the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn might have been.

10:28Rob Powell:there is also a really intriguing split around Middle East policy. Now, there are stories in the last couple of weeks that started to emerge of people turning up to your party regional assemblies and meetings and shouting at Jeremy Corbyn and calling him a Zionist. Now, I think this came as a little bit of a shock to Jeremy Corbyn. And the rest of it. Given that he's spent decades and decades and decades campaigning on the issue of Palestine. And quite frankly, if people think that he's moved too far on issues around the Middle East, the criticism has been that he's gone too far in favour of Palestine and Palestinian rights rather than the other direction.

11:03But when you look into this, you can boil this down to a split in the

11:07Rob Powell:left as well, because Zahra Sultana's position on the Middle East and Israel is different from where Jeremy Corbyn's is. She doesn't believe in a two-state solution. She believes in one state where everyone lives with equal rights. And she is quite firm on that and quite unapologetic around it. Now, Jeremy Corbyn in the past has talked about a two-state solution being the only realistic route to peace. So there is a split on the left when it comes to the Middle East on this. I think there is a split as well around the types of groups and who they are siding behind. And I think that split goes through how much members should be in charge of the party as well.

11:44Rob, you and I have attended more party political conferences than we can care to mention. What was this one like?

11:50Rob Powell:It's quite nostalgic, really. It sort of reminded me of the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour conference era in terms of sort of running a gauntlet of leafleteers before you've even got into the Liverpool arena. I ended up with armfuls of literature from a variety of organisations. Go on. So we had the deep breath revolutionary communist group, the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Unity Platform, the Socialist Equality Party, the Democratic Socialists, the Democratic Bloc, the Spartacist League, Workers Hammer, the Weekly Worker and of course the Morningstar as well. You missed out the Judean People's Front.

12:24Rob Powell:Well, quite. And this is the sort of grand irony that I think lies at the centre of this new party in that there is very clearly a space for a new left party. Many people feel Labour has abandoned what it promised to do, not only in Keir Starmer's leadership pitch, but also the general election. And as tacked right, as moved towards the centre on economic issues, but I think probably most pronounced on issues around migration as well. So that gap is there. So their reason for being your party is a good one. But for a party that is basically pitching itself as the new face of the modern left, there is an awful lot of old, quite tried and tested left wing traps that they seem to have stumbled into.

13:08Rob Powell:You know, battles between different factions, different factions clashing between each other, arguments about whether members are being frozen out of the party. I mean, it was quite remarkable after having covered most of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour leadership, a frequent refrain that you got from the Jeremy Corbyn led Labour leadership was that there was a witch hunt against people connected to the Labour leader being waged by figures on the right of the Labour Party. at this conference that language was being used again a witch hunt by faceless bureaucrats was what Zahra Sultana literally said to me you know when I asked Zahra Sultana who are these who are we talking about unelected bureaucrats who are we come on who are we talking about she said it's people around Jeremy Corbyn that have learned the wrong lesson she said from their time in the Labour Party that this sort of stuff was dished out to them and now they're dishing it out to us it's Absolutely intriguing how the whole thing has tipped on its head.

14:02Rob Powell:And now Jeremy Corbyn is being accused of being the person trying to sort of drum out independent thought and member interests from this party. Does she then have the skill set to square the circle? We know that she's a good communicator. We know that she's a great campaigner. We know that she has a massive presence on social media. I'm not sure whether she does, quite frankly. and talking to people connected intimately with the structure of your party. I mean, one of them was pretty clear to me as I was leaving the Your Party conference last week. They said that she's going to end up torching this whole project and torching her own career in the process.

14:39Rob Powell:Where we were left after last weekend's conference is basically they didn't pick a single leader model. So there's going to be no kind of bruising leadership battle between Zahra Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn, which I guess for the party may seem like a good thing. But what we're going to get instead is a committee that is going to run the party, a leadership committee made up of ordinary members, not MPs. Four of them, that committee can be MPs. But the chair, the vice chair, the senior leadership positions, the faces of this party are going to be ordinary members. And what this person was very clearly saying to me is that there will likely then be a proxy battle between allies of Zahra Sultana and allies of Jeremy Corbyn for control of that committee.

15:19Rob Powell:it's already been suggested to me that actually Zahra Sultana may not run for one of those public posts but her team may put forward a slate of candidates that it's approving for the posts of chair vice chair treasurer and then given she does carry quite a lot of influence among members a lot of the votes that were took place over the weekend went the way that she wanted them to go it could well be that she gets her way and she gets people that she wants on that committee now it was suggested to me if that happens, the first thing that will probably take place is the two remaining MPs of the Independent Alliance, or two of the three anyway, who aren't Jeremy Corbyn, will walk.

15:56Rob Powell:And that's Shokhat Adam and Ayyub Khan. Others have already walked over infighting. They will go. That potentially means that Corbyn goes as well. And your party basically turns into something that is very much more in the image of Zahra Sultana than it is in the image of Jeremy Corbyn. Do you see your party lasting to the general election? I mean, hasn't what Zahra Sultana has done in setting up your party, you know, essentially proved the soft left's biggest criticism of the hard left, that they're more concerned about ideological purity and infighting than they are about electoral success? I think that's right.

16:32Rob Powell:And the point being made by some Your Party insiders is that exactly could be proved right if we get a situation where Zahra Sultana's allies control this party, because they ask who is voting for them in that circumstance. If you have a position where Jeremy Corbyn has left and is not involved in this anymore, I mean, it was put to me that she would struggle at the moment to hold her Coventry South seat. What they said was she will probably try and stand in a seat in Birmingham. But the problem is she is not on the same necessarily the same page, even as the Independent Alliance MPs, the sort of pro-Gaza, very pro-Palestine group of MPs, because she's made comments about what their views are on things like trans rights.

17:11Rob Powell:So that group of MPs, while yes, they are vocal around issues in the Middle East and Gaza, actually on some social issues, they are quite conservative minded. And that is not where Zahra Sultana is. So it was put to me that if she tried to stand in a Birmingham seat, which is where she grew up, she would have reason to do that. You may be in a situation where actually a sort of independent alliance pro-Gaza, pro-Palestine candidate stands against her and is much more capable of winning votes from the Muslim community around there than she is because she has set herself up against some of those candidates because of some of her social views around trans.

17:50Rob Powell:And then if you also have Jeremy Corbyn standing on a separate platform, they make the point of who's voting for her. If the sort of softer left have maybe gone to the Greens or with a Jeremy Corbyn type candidate, if the Muslim voters gone with an independent alliance pro-Gaza candidate, all you're really left with is quite hard left socialist worker party types voting for her. So that is why these people say that's why she's torching herself in the process as well. It struck me when your party started that actually a party led by both Jeremy Corbyn and Zahra Sultana could be a real threat because you have someone that, you know, is a very well-known leader that a lot of people came back to Labour when Jeremy Corbyn was leader and would go across there.

18:33Rob Powell:I think if he's not involved and you also don't have the involvement of some of the Independent Alliance MPs that are basically able to mobilise votes from Muslim communities as well, then I'm not sure who she's appealing to, especially when you have Zak Polanski operating on the left and hoovering up a lot of votes there as well. You know, she could be left that she has just alienated too many parts of the left wing base that she finds out she hasn't actually got many people left voting for her. That's politics for you. Rob, many thanks. My thanks to Rob and of course to you for listening It's been a pretty busy week on the podcast We've been looking at the future of juries The grooming gang still operating in the UK And how county lines have destroyed young lives So if you like what you've heard, do give us a follow That's your lot for this week Have a lovely weekend We're back again Monday

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20:17This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.