Why the Corbyn left is sliding into political irrelevance... and what can be done about it.

An all-out establishment war on Corbynism didn’t quite manage it. Starmer’s purge of Corbynites from the Labour Party didn’t either. But in the end, the Corbyn left might succeed in destroying itself.

It’s a tale of epic and tragic proportions. But one of the lesser-told stories from the general election that delivered a Labour landslide was the sheer number of people who didn’t vote for Keir Starmer – or who supported candidates firmly to the left of his party.

Labour’s 174-seat majority was secured off the back of the lowest turnout in history, and with fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn managed in Labour’s disastrous 2019 election. And Starmer’s share of the vote in July was considerably smaller than Corbyn’s in 2017.

Prior to the election, it was against a backdrop of concern about the ‘shallowness’ of popular support for Starmer’s Labour that a new organisation was formed in April this year, aiming to unite various groups and factions of the left and establish the first mass party of the working class in Britain outside of the Labour Party.

Called Collective, it emerged organically from a series of meetings involving a broad cross-section of activists, as well as smaller regional and local parties from around the country.

A number of initiatives and new parties on the left had sprout up in the years following Corbyn’s leadership. But none of them had succeeded in attracting a critical mass of support without Corbyn’s endorsement. Despite a broad political consensus and some attempts at fostering unity, the landscape became dogged by turf wars and egos vying for influence – including several of Corbyn’s former advisors themselves.  

The plan for Collective was to transcend that competition, reaching out to any and all groups and candidates with a shared commitment to anti-austerity and anti-war politics, real climate action and justice for Palestinians.

And the hope was to establish a credible and historic new electoral force – one that captured the energy and ideas of the Corbyn years, but which also embraced a new future for the left beyond Corbynism.

When the election was called earlier than had been expected, a decision was taken not to try and establish a new party until afterwards. Instead, Collective backed a range of independent parliamentary candidates – including Jeremy – who were standing somewhere in the space between the Greens and George Galloway’s Workers Party.

Unexpectedly, the election was a remarkable and barely told success story for the independent left. Starmer’s support for Israel’s ongoing attacks on the Palestinian people had given pause to many natural Labour supporters, especially but not only Muslim voters, and even those who desperately wanted to see the back of the Tories. 

Standing as an independent, Jeremy Corbyn defeated the Labour candidate in his long-held seat of Islington North, prompting even a Times Radio interviewer to acknowledge him as “the one they couldn’t put down”. Four other candidates won their seats for the first time on an anti-genocide and anti-Starmer ticket, creating a political block in the Commons that matches the number of Reform MPs and eclipses the Greens. Andrew Feinstein, the veteran anti-war campaigner, stood against Keir Starmer and cut the prime minister’s majority by more than half. 

On average, independents supported by Collective won a 13 per cent vote share without any of the infrastructure or resources of an established political party. 

I was one of the co-founders of Collective. Like many others, I believed that in the shadow of this surreal Labour supermajority, there was a historic opportunity to provide voters with a real alternative to endless austerity, war and climate destruction.

And for a moment, it all seemed so possible. The factionalism and political timidity that had long plagued the left was finally giving way to a united front in the face of an on-going genocide and a two-party system drifting ever further to the nationalist right. 

Jeremy Corbyn himself had certainly signalled as much privately. And after George Galloway’s political showboating ran out of steam at the election, there was now a widely shared recognition that a new serious and sustainable party of the left needed to be organised collectively. And it needed to be done now.

But amidst this excitement, one thing bothered me. Even after the election, and at the constant behest of his advisors, Jeremy’s association or involvement with Collective or anything to do with a possible new party still, it seemed, had to be kept both secret and arms-length.

There was some understandable logic to this during the election when Jeremy was anxious to keep the focus on his constituents, and not dilute or confuse the messaging of his campaign as an independent with reference to a national movement or party that didn’t yet exist. 

But post-election, it felt like the politics of independence was morphing into the politics of individualism – especially after Jeremy, Andrew Feinstein and other independents started to push their own agendas for movement or party building at local and regional levels. 

It’s not just that these initiatives are being organised behind closed doors and in exactly the kind of top-down fashion that flies in the face of the grassroots values they extol. They are symptomatic of a bigger and deeper problem: a failure of the left to connect with minority and working-class voters.

Corbyn’s own answer to this problem is to achieve “real change from the grassroots up” – by holding monthly “people’s forums” in his local constituency. This seems to be yet another version of the kind of local assemblies and other such initiatives that various left organisations have been convening for years. Anyone (like me) who has attended such events, knows they are at best half-empty rooms largely populated by white, middle-class, well-meaning and card-carrying socialists. 

And yet the rise of far-right political parties and movements across the democratic world is the direct result of the left’s disconnect from working class and minority voters – the very constituencies that should form the bedrock of any genuine mass movement for change. 

Corbyn, of course, is not to blame for this disconnect. It is rooted in the systematic ways in which the mainstream media either ignore or demonise left politics, something that Jeremy more than anyone bore the brunt of both during and after his five-year leadership of the Labour Party.

But as much as people’s forums aren’t the answer to this disconnect, nor are cynical appeals to nationalist or populist sympathies. In their own way, both Starmer’s Labour and Galloway’s Workers Party have attempted this and failed miserably to attract voters away from Reform.   

Only a bold new left-wing party can achieve that. And calls for such a party from the very “grassroots” that Jeremy appeals to seem to get louder by the day. Responding to these calls with vague appeals to people power is the equivalent of kicking them into the long grass; and at best a missed opportunity to recapture the extraordinary political spirit and energy that became known as Corbynism.

Part of the problem is that Jeremy and other leading figures on the left don’t want to alienate sections of their support base by appearing to side with one faction over another. And instead of being the unifying force it was supposed to be, Collective became yet another competing force amidst the clamour for a new party.

So when Corbyn gave the opening speech at a Collective meeting last month, it was quickly made clear that his attendance did not mean official endorsement of a new party, but merely a chance for him to “listen to and share a variety of views about the way forward for the left”.

As well as growing tired of such equivocation, many activists across the country are growing tired of what looks and feels like a London-centric and elite stranglehold over left-wing politics. The hard truth is that Jeremy’s profile and reach means that he not only holds the keys to unifying the left, but he is also a block towards unity through inaction.

The same can be said to a lesser extent of some of the other big-name independents in London – including Feinstein and Leanne Mohammed, who almost unseated health secretary Wes Streeting in Ilford North.

For better or for worse, this bubble won’t last. And it will not so much burst as gradually deflate, once the 2024 election recedes into political memory, the media’s fixation with Corbyn inevitably begins to fade, and the left can be safely ignored once again. 

By 2029, an election fought under some vague or loosely affiliated alliance of greens and independents may save or even win a few more seats for the left, but it will be too easily ignored by a political and media system overwhelmingly rigged against new entrants, and especially from the left. A profound and historic opportunity to redraw the map of British politics will be lost for a generation or more.

I’ve stepped away from Collective not because I no longer support what it is trying to do, or because I no longer believe a new party is possible. I stepped away because I don’t believe that endless talking shops behind-closed-doors is the way to build unity and establish a new party, especially in the face of a neo-austerity regime in the UK, an on-going genocide in Palestine and Lebanon, and a US and UK establishment growing every more war hungry by the day.

The time, in Jeremy’s words, for ‘listening to and sharing a variety of views about the future of the left’ is surely over. Now is the time to act.

And starting a new credible and serious party of the left doesn’t have to be rocket science if it is backed by unity and strength in numbers.

Call a national conference and launch a membership drive. Hold online elections for an interim leadership team charged with developing proposals for party structures, rules and policies. Put organised labour at its heart and ensure women and people from minority communities are fully represented in positions of influence and power.

It doesn’t need more people like me. It doesn’t even need Collective necessarily. But it does need all groups to work collectively; and it needs those individuals with political capital – including Jeremy - to put aside their personal pet projects and do what socialists are supposed to do: pool their resources for the common good.