By David Osland

I’m not quite sure when the first bold predictions that ‘Corbyn is set to launch new party’ made it into print. But this story, generally penned by journalists whose contacts on the left cannot be much more substantial than my grasp of colloquial Serbo-Croatian, has been running for at least three years now.

At last there are real developments. Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana’s announcement on Thursday night that she is leaving Labour to co-lead the founding of the new outfit seems to have been precipitate, and probably came as something of a surprise to Corbyn himself.

But the following day, the former Labour leader confirmed that the plan is going ahead, just not overnight. That is nothing more than he has said on multiple public platforms in recent months.

As anyone even vaguely plugged into leftwing gossip knows, a number of groups – including Karie Murphy and Len McCluskey’s Collective and Owen Jones-backed We Demand Change – have been pushing in this direction for quite a while.

But discussions are said to have stalled over the shape the initiative should take. Some participants have been arguing for a traditional national party model with branches and individual memberships; others contend that a looser lash-up of local independent candidates is the way forward.

Given a political landscape littered with the ruins of the Socialist Labour Party, Scottish Socialist Party, Socialist Alliance, Respect, Respect Renewal, Left List, Left Alternative, TUSC and Left Unity, the caution is obviously merited. Say something once, why say it again?

Yet the prospects for what we must call – for want of any other even putative title as yet – the Corbyn party look more propitious than those of its less-than-illustrious predecessors.

Not even Keir Starmer’s strongest backers dare dispute that there is very real and widespread disenchantment with the first year of the current Labour government. To date, this has largely been tapped by the right. But there is no obvious reason why an organised left could not benefit from the backlash too.

Opinion polls suggest that a Corbyn party might pick up voting intention support of around 10% on day one. Opinion pollsters, on the other hand, are slightly sceptical, pointing out that asking questions about hypotheticals tends to produce unreliable answers, even by the glorious standards of opinion polling.

As one article in the New Statesman noted, the comedy-gold centrists of Chuka Umunna’s Independent Group initially picked up similar numbers in early 2019, only to bomb at the general election just months later.

Yet somehow the comparison doesn’t stand up. The TIGs were the brainchild of half a dozen great minds living in the splendid isolation of the Westminster bubble and represented nothing in the country.

Corbynism, on the other hand, was a mass movement that enthused hundreds of thousands. There is still a market for this brand of left reformism, which has been given additional electoral muscle by the Gaza conflict.

In other words, if the same people who told you that Corbyn didn’t stand a chance in Islington North tell you Corbyn doesn’t stand a chance anywhere else next time round, don’t necessarily believe them.

Meanwhile, there are obvious questions for any Labour Hub readers thinking of cancelling their direct debits and signing up.

How will the party be organised? What rights will members enjoy?

Will the internal workings function democratically, or be controlled from the top, not least out of a perceived need to stop leftist headbangers running riot?

What will its policies be? Simply answering ‘socialist’ doesn’t help much here. For most people on the left, ‘tax the rich/welfare not warfare’ is motherhood and apple pie stuff. Of course.

But real and deep-seated divisions remain on many issues, from whether the Ukrainian war is the fault of American or Russian imperialism to the scientific basis of the acronym TWAW (Trans Women Are Women). These are not going to evaporate in a spirit of ‘can’t we just all feel the love’.

Then there is the question of relations with other political forces. Will the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers’ Party be allowed to affiliate? Or to put that another way, should the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers’ Party be allowed to affiliate? What ideological influence will they exert if they do get in?

Most importantly of all, it looks increasingly likely that Zack Polanski will win the leadership of the Green Party on a platform  he describes as ‘eco-populist’, whatever that means.

Given that the Greens and the Corbyn party will turn towards the same demographic, they will have to come to some sort of understanding when divvying up the seats. That may mean concessions on both sides.

We’ll see how things roll out in the coming months, which will also bring with them a greater than nugatory prospect of the implosion of Starmerism. Corbynism redux can’t be blamed for trying to take full advantage.

David Osland is a member of Hackney North & Stoke Newington CLP and a long-time left wing journalist and author. Follow him on Twitter at @David__Osland

Image: Zarah Sultana. Source: Furious nurses march on Downing St as the battle to save the NHS intensifies. Author: ReelNews, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.