How Sultana made Stalin look like a Tory – and sent Your Party to the Gulag

From this, most Jews and supporters of Israel will derive a sense of relief. To recap Your Party’s origin story, it was formed from the independent alliance in Parliament that consists of Corbyn, his fellow ex-Labour colleague Sultana, and four MPs who ousted Labour incumbents last year after campaigning on the issue of the Gaza war. Aiding their efforts to substantial effect was The Muslim Vote, a highly-organised coalition of 24 Muslim activist groups, including some that have openly backed armed struggle against Israel and the “resistance” provided by Hamas.

Two of those MPs, Adnan Hussein and Iqbal Mohammed, have already severed links with Your Party. But the views of those who remain are truly radical. Shockat Adam has been accused of drawing on Nazi imagery by referring in Parliament to Israel’s “blood-soaked tentacles”. As for Sultana, she told the conference that Britain should cut “all ties” with Israel, expel its ambassador, close its embassy and “stand with the Palestinian people until every inch of their land is free, from the river to the sea” – an echo, lest we forget, of Hamas’s demand to drive Israel’s Jews into the Mediterranean.

In attacking Corbyn for his supposed “capitulation” to the Zionists, as shown by his failure when he was party leader to stop it adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of antisemitism, Sultana seems to have made more Your Party enemies than friends. She did the same by her launch of an online membership portal without her colleagues’ knowledge, followed by a refusal to take swift steps to transfer the £800,000 this raised to Your Party’s coffers, prompting threats of lawsuits. Some would say that describing her comrades as a “sexist boys’ club” was not tactful, either.

The consequence of this “s***show”, my Corbynista friend told me, was that although the total of 55,000 people said to have joined Your Party looks impressive, it is only a small fraction of the 800,000 who expressed enough interest to submit their details to an online register back in June. It is also clear that many of those still in already belong to other ultra-left parties. Thanks to their dominance of procedural votes at the conference, they won’t, unlike the Trotskyites who plagued Labour during the 1980s, even need to hide it.

From the perspective of Israel’s supporters, Your Party’s travails may turn out to have beneficial consequences. An effective alliance of leftwing socialists and inner-city candidates backed by The Muslim Vote could have become a formidable force, seen as likely to win tens of seats at the next general election, and so able to exert a strong influence on the policies of the current government, not only with regard to the Middle East but on issues such as imposing a legal definition of Islamophobia.

The vagaries of Britain’s electoral geography suggest that the obvious beneficiary of Your Party’s teething problems will struggle do as well. According to my source, vast numbers of the vanished 745,000 have switched allegiance to, and in many cases joined, the Green Party. However, “even if they poll close to 20 per cent, they won’t win in anything like as many constituencies than a working class-Muslim partnership might.”

The new Green leader Zack Polanski is evidently charismatic, and extremely anti-Zionist. But the Greens’ position on issues such as trans equality and women’s rights can only reduce their appeal in constituencies with large Muslim electorates.

That said, it would not be wise for Zionist Jews to offer more than two cheers for Your Party’s self-inflicted failures. The underlying issues – the surge in antisemitism since October 2023, and the widespread demands to curb all manner of relationships with Israel – have not gone away. Alas, the farcical state of the Corbyn/Sultana front will do nothing to alleviate them.