Zarah Sultana, one of the UK’s most Left-wing MPs, has resigned from the Labour Party. In a statement yesterday evening, she announced that “Jeremy Corbyn and I will co-lead the founding of a new party, with other independent MPs, campaigners and activists across the country.” Could this be a credible Left-wing rival to Labour, and a potential doomsday scenario for Keir Starmer?

The problem with Sultana’s statement, however, is that it remains unclear to what extent this party exists. Last night, Gabriel Pogrund, Whitehall editor of the Sunday Times, tweeted that Corbyn has “not agreed to join the new left party with Zarah Sultana yet” and that “he is furious and bewildered at the way it has been launched without consultation.” However, the writer Aaron Bastani, who is close to the Corbynites, disputes this interpretation.

It’s possible that Sultana only meant to suggest that she will be taking a leading role, alongside several others, in discussions about forming a new party. That at least would be consistent with Corbyn’s own more cautious choice of words on the Peston show this week, in which he stated that an “alternative” would be coming together. When asked whether he’d be leading this alternative, all he said was that “I’m here to serve the people in the way I’ve always tried to do.”

So not unlike Withnail and I going on holiday by mistake, Sultana may have launched a new party by accident. Or to employ another Eighties reference, yesterday’s announcement wasn’t a Corbynite Limehouse Declaration but instead a case study in unclear communications.

Polling from More in Common indicates that a fully-fledged Left-wing party with Corbyn as leader would debut on around 10% of the vote. More of this vote appears to have been snatched from the Greens than from the Labour Party, but even a modest loss in support would be catastrophic for Starmer. The maths of multi-party politics in a first-past-the-post electoral system means that a few percentage points can make all the difference in scores of Labour-held constituencies.

The argument that this would only benefit Reform UK misses the point. The tactical objective for a Corbyn-led party would be to persuade anti-Starmer Labour MPs that they’re doomed where they are — and that their best chance is to follow Sultana’s example and bring about a realignment of the entire political system.

So with Labour already in disarray, what is stopping Corbyn from confirming this new movement? The answer is the ideological incoherence of his proposed alternative, which would have to unite secular progressive Leftists and Muslim independents in Parliament. While these factions agree on foreign policy and largely on economics, they’re worlds apart on social issues such as abortion and transgenderism.

To hold that alliance together, while also doing the necessary electoral deals with other Left-wing parties as diverse as the Greens and George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain, will require epic quantities of fudge. If Corbyn is holding back, it’s because he isn’t ready yet. The greatest threat to his objectives isn’t the establishment, but the disunity and indiscipline of his friends.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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