On 3 July 2025, Zarah Sultana, Member of Parliament for the Coventry South constituency, announced via a letter published on social media that she had decided to resign from the Labour party to join Jeremy Corbyn in co-leading a new leftist political project.
Sultana: socialist or servant of imperialism?
Ms Sultana’s letter announcing her departure from her chosen party of imperialism, of which she had been a member the last 14 years, stated that factors including the Labour government scrapping winter fuel payments, her party colleagues voting against the abolition of the two-child benefit cap and Labour’s active participation in the Gaza genocide were reasons for her decision.
Sultana also stated in her letter: “We need our money spent on public services, not forever wars.” Whilst this may be true, what Sultana cannot and will not reconcile is that for 14 years she has been an active member of a party that has been a party of ‘forever wars’ for decades – as the utter carnage unleashed on nations like Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine can attest.
She has also been a member of a party that has been a loyal supporter of the settler-colonial state of Israel since its inception, and which began to enforce austerity under the leadership of Gordon Brown even before the Con-Lib coalition government came to power in 2010.
Yet despite all this, her loyalty to the party took 14 years to finally break. Her letter closed with the bold statement that “In 2029, the choice will be stark: socialism or barbarism.”
In fact, that choice – between socialism and barbarism – has been one facing the working class in this country for a century and more, regardless of those times when the bourgeoisie chooses to allow us the opportunity to elect our oppressors!
It should also be noted that, despite Sultana’s much-cultivated public image as a socialist warrior, she has not been backward in ingratiating herself with the rest of the political class by upholding the interests of British imperialism in a multitude of ways.
This began in the earliest period of her parliamentary career. In September 2020, less than a year after taking office as Coventry South MP, she penned a letter to Dominic Raab, the then secretary of state for foreign, commonwealth and development affairs, to raise her concerns about what she described as “the situation facing the Uyghur muslim ethnic minority population in the Xinjiang region”.
Sultana then went on to make a series of allegations, sourced from western imperialist propaganda entities including Associated Press, the Guardian and the Independent, that Uyghurs had been held in detention camps for extended periods, had been forcibly sterilised, had had their freedom of religious expression repressed and had been forced into labour camps.
The reality is glaringly at odds with Sultana’s account. In July 2019, ambassadors from 37 countries, over half of which were muslim-majority states, signed a letter commending the Peoples’ Republic of China’s efforts in “protecting life and promoting human rights through development”, praising the measures taken to defeat the ongoing threat of western-backed terrorism in the Xinjiang region, and attesting that the people there were “happy, fulfilled and secure”.
The western-created myth of the ‘oppression and genocide of the Uyghurs’, which was swiftly reframed as a ‘cultural genocide’ when it became obvious that the ethnic group’s population had actually risen rather than falling in the period from 1953-2020, shows clearly that imperialism never misses an opportunity to take the fullest advantage of a crisis in any state that it deems to be its adversary, which in this case was the constantly-present threat of radicalisation and terrorism in the Xinjiang region of China.
In fact, the imperialists themselves had created this problem, before going on to condemn Chinese measures to protect the population from bloody terrorist atrocities the west’s puppets carried out, and its efforts to remove the grounds for radicalisation through economic development and educational opportunities.
In penning her letter to the government, Sultana laid bare not only her deep ignorance of the realities of the situation in China, but also her willingness, whether consciously or otherwise, to step forward to act as a ‘useful muslim’ in the interests of British imperialism.
From this it should be clear that any new political project with Sultana as its figurehead, joint or otherwise, will be nothing more than a Labour party 2.0 – dressing all the brutality of imperialism in Britain and abroad with the tinsel of ‘left’ social democracy.
If more proof were needed, one has only to recall the supposedly ‘anti-imperialist’ Sultana’s reaction when the imperialists finally got their way in overthrowing the government of President Bashar al-Assad and destroying the secular and anti-zionist Syrian Arab Republic – a sovereign country and key member of the Axis of Resistance that had been a thorn in the side of imperialist machinations in the middle east for over seven decades and which is now suffering the most horrific genocidal violence and openly hosting sexual slave markets.
On 8 December, as the west’s proxy army of HTS headchoppers arrived in Damascus, Sultana’s true role as muslim apologist for British imperial criminality was on display on X:
“As Syrians reunite with loved ones after years of torture and imprisonment, the Assad regime will be remembered as one of history’s most brutal – responsible for gassing, torture and mass displacement. The Syrian people deserve freedom, justice, and the right to decide their future.”
‘Revolutionary’ Trotskyite Lali calls for ‘audacity’
Meanwhile, on 4 July 2025, national campaigns coordinator for the ‘Revolutionary Communist Party’ (RCP) and occasional GB News guest Fiona Lali published an article in the form of an open letter in response to Sultana’s announcement.
Lali opened her article by regaling readers with the story of how she became involved in Project Corbyn, waxing lyrical about how she and 300,000 others had signed up to a Labour party which, under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, would be able to bring about “genuine socialist change”.
Of course, as those hundreds of thousands who joined Labour during the peak of Corbynmania found to their cost, Labour is not and has never has been a vehicle for ‘genuine socialist change’ – it is a party of imperialism; a party of the ruling class, designed from its inception to divert working-class anger into the dead ends of parliamentarism and social democracy (that is: expressions of socialism in words but support for imperialism in deeds).
As well as joining Labour in 2015, Lali also joined an organisation that was unnamed in the article, but which has subsequently rebranded itself as the RCP. That organisation was Socialist Appeal (SA) – a sect founded by Trotskyite luminaries Ted Grant and Alan Woods after their expulsion from the Militant Tendency in 1992 following yet another ‘Judean People’s Front/People’s Front of Judea’ split.
After working alongside and within Labour for almost 30 years, most notably during the years that Jeremy Corbyn was leader, SA was proscribed by the party in 2021, meaning that any Labour member found to be in association with it, whether in the present or past, would be expelled from the party. Shortly thereafter, Socialist Appeal and its entire international network (the International Marxist Tendency/IMT group) underwent a complete transformation from a Labour-aligned ‘Marxist’ pressure group into a full-blown revolutionary ‘Marxist’ party, namely the Revolutionary Communist party (not to be confused with the Hoxhaist RCPB-ML).
September this year will mark the tenth anniversary of Corbyn’s almost inexplicable rise to the Labour leadership, an ascent which, despite its total failure just four years later, was remarkable given Corbyn’s status as a permanent Labour backbencher, the huge grassroots campaign that catapulted him into the leadership and, most markedly, the manner in which he trounced his leadership opponents. Yet Lali believes that the last ten years has been marked by a ‘transformation’ into “imperialist wars, Tory and Labour austerity and the oppression of minorities”, along with organised working-class resistance to them.
A brief scan through history, however, shows that this ‘transformation’ has not, in fact, taken place over the last ten years. Indeed, it could be reasonably argued that there hasn’t really been a transformation at all. Instead, there has been a long line of imperialist wars, repeated instances of domestic austerity and regular scapegoating of minorities going back well over a century – alongside repeated waves of workers organising themselves to fight back against all of the above.
One can perhaps excuse Ms Lali for having no personal recollection of events that preceded her lifetime, but what cannot be excused is that she has apparently not deigned to make the effort to find out the truth before speaking out.
Even a brief look back over history should make it clear how unchanging have been the priorities of British imperialism over the last 120 years: oppression and exploitation of the working class at home alongside the looting and pillaging of nations abroad – creating destitution and despair in country after country, forcing people to leave the lands of their birth and move to wherever they can find employment as unwitting members of a strata of hyper-exploitable workers, disciplined and brought to heel by the precariousness of their circumstances and the ever-present threat of deportation.
All this while the ruling elites, via their mouthpieces in the media and political class, use the very immigration that they both need and cause as a means of splitting the working class into squabbling factions along ethnic lines.
Lali demands that Corbyn and Sultana’s new project should be “audacious” – ‘bold’ in both form and content – although she does not specify what form this ‘audacity’ should take. It stretches the limits of credibility to suggest that any project led by Corbyn and Sultana, which at the time of writing still had not been formally announced, will ever be the foundation of what Lali claims to want: ie, a political force “organised around a clear anti-capitalist programme … [to] change the world”.
The demand for ‘audacity’ and ‘boldness’ were reiterated in the leaflet that RCP members were giving out at the Durham Miners’ Gala on 12 July – a leaflet full of stirring rhetoric about the crimes of capitalism and the need for ‘revolutionary change’ but totally lacking in any reference to British imperialism or suggestions for a practical programme for the working class. Apparently, in the view of these ‘revolutionary communists’, the road to socialism consists of pinning our hopes on one or two hand-picked saviours.
No wonder ruling class politicians and media promote these charlatans at every opportunity!
Failures and hard lessons of the Corbyn project
Ms Lali and her ‘revolutionary’ friends wilfully pass over the harsh realities and political lessons that the collapse of the Corbyn project taught so many thinking workers.
Corbyn was the leader of the Labour party for over four years and was elected on incredibly strong mandates, the second being stronger than the first, which swept him to office in September 2015. Yet what was he able or willing to achieve during this period, with such unassailable mandates and so many willing foot-soldiers?
Under pressure from the establishment, he U-turned on every supposedly ‘lifelong principle’. The supposed ‘antiwar leader’ dropped his opposition to Nato, qualified his personal opposition to Trident by saying that he would “adhere to Labour party policy” (which was an imperialist policy to maintain Britain’s nuclear ‘deterrent’) and allowed his MPs a free vote on whether Britain should overtly ramp up its role in Syria (rather than whipping them to vote against a further ratcheting up of the war).
He rejected the possibility of introducing mandatory reselections, which meant that career politicians airdropped by the party machinery to become MPs in safe Labour seats could never be held accountable by local party members, continuing to work to the detriment of the working class with impunity. Corbyn’s apparently inexplicable cowardice in this regard allowed a free hand to his opponents to undermine the very project he was supposed to be spearheading.
And all this is apart from Corbyn’s crowning betrayal to his supposedly ‘antiwar’ and ‘anti-imperialist’ principles – his craven response to the confected campaign waged by zionists within the party and across the mass media that Labour was infested with antisemitism. Corbyn ally after Corbyn ally was thrown under the bus, with party general secretary Jennie Formby acting as Witchfinder General and Corbyn as a mute bystander.
By the end of his time in leadership, the Labour party hardly retained a member who was willing or able to voice genuine support for the Palestinian people’s just struggle against apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing. Opposition to zionism had been effectively banned within the party, and the notoriously zionist IHRA definition of antisemitism had been adopted by political parties and state institutions alike, despite being proven to be indefensible in law.
This conflation of racism with anti-zionism has been a major plank of the state’s attempt to criminalise the militant core of the current Palestine movement against genocide and zionist criminality. Corbyn’s retreat in the face of the witch-hunt played the major role in facilitating the normalisation of this line of attack against working-class resistance to British imperialist crimes.
Then, crucially, he set aside a political lifetime in which he had repeatedly voiced scepticism toward the imperialist, anti-socialist and anti-worker European Union trading bloc, not only to campaign (unconvincingly) for Britain to remain a member of the EU, but also to allow himself to be kiboshed into making a volte-face on the party’s position after the Brexit vote had taken place.
Having initially announced Labour’s intention of respecting the referendum result and negotiating the best deal for workers, he steadily retreated until landing on an appallingly fudged and cack-handed position whereby a deal to exit the EU would first be negotiated and then brought back to the electorate for a second referendum – with a recommendation to reject!
This volte-face caused a wave of working-class anger and revulsion, which played a major part in delivering Corbyn’s electoral defeat in 2019, when large numbers of lifelong Labour voters turned to Boris Johnson’s Tories in the hope that they really would ‘Get Brexit done’.
Corbyn’s leadership – a failure of social democracy itself
At the peak of his popularity as leader, Corbyn commanded a Labour membership of around 600,000. At no point during his leadership was any serious attempt made actually to mobilise any of these people in a serious way against his internal opponents within the party.
At no point did Corbyn or his allies attempt to organise their mass base in defence of such policies as their (alleged) support for the Palestinian cause or their supposedly ‘lifelong opposition’ to both Nato and the European Union. Nor was there any serious attempt to campaign against and overturn the myriad anti-strike and anti-union laws, which date back to the Thatcher period and which both Corbyn and fellow ‘left-winger’ John McDonnell claim to ‘oppose’.
This was not just a matter of cowardice on their part; it is symptomatic of the politics of reformists like Corbyn and Sultana. They are as terrified by real class struggle as are their nominal ‘opponents’ on the ‘right wing’ of the Labour party, and thus will never stray beyond the narrow channels of bourgeois parliamentarism.
This guaranteed his failure to deliver anything to the working class as Labour party leader, and it will also guarantee the failure of their new endeavour.
Waiting for the new (old) messiah
Interestingly, Corbyn was reported to be ‘livid’ with the timing of the announcement of his new party, having neither endorsed the announcement nor agreed on when it should be made.
The co-director of his Peace and Justice Project, an initiative which is notable for having achieved precisely nothing since its launch in 2021, messaged colleagues to say that both Corbyn and his wife Laura Alvarez had been treated with a “lack of respect”. It would seem that Saint Jeremy is not quite ready for his role as Messiah 2.0 for the proposed ‘new project of the left’.
Yet despite the lessons of the not-too-distant past, and despite there being no sign at the time of writing that this supposed project will ever be more than a pipe dream, a sizeable number of political activists have been enthused by Ms Sultana’s announcement and are brimming with enthusiasm at the possibility that Corbyn might be about to rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes.
In exchanges between Corbyn loyalists and those of a more sceptical persuasion, the word most often used by the Corbynistas in explaining their desire to heed Sultana’s rallying call is “hope” (and where have we heard that before, dear reader?)
But it’s the hope that kills you.
The reality is that we, the working class, are the ruling class in waiting – not the likes of Corbyn or Sultana, who only serve to distract us from the necessary task of building genuine working-class organisation and working towards establishing genuine working-class power.
In order to actually seize power, to become the ruling class and to rebuild the world for the benefit of those who toil, the working class must reject false prophets like Corbyn and Sultana, reject the curtailed, wretched and false institution of bourgeois democracy, and instead develop the self-reliance and fortitude necessary to carry out the long and arduous work of building a genuinely working-class revolutionary movement.
