Michael Lavalette welcomes the announcement of a new left party, and outlines what we need it to be 

At last, the deed is done! 

Thursday morning’s announcement, in a joint statement from both Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, that a new party was being set up was met with huge enthusiasm across the county. Within 24 hours over 200,000 people had signed up to get involved. 

The Corbyn/Sultana declaration started by asserting boldly that ‘the system is rigged’. It made the case for a party that fights poverty and is for the redistribution of wealth; is against privatisation and profiteering and for nationalisation of key services and public utilities, and is for peace and against war and the genocide in Gaza. 

As they made clear: ‘The system is rigged when the government says there is no money for the poor, but billions for war.’ 

There is no doubt that the new party is desperately needed. After a year in government, Starmer’s Labour are not significantly different to the Tories who proceeded them. They have cut benefits, attacked pensioners, are picking fights with the unions in places like Birmingham and in the NHS, and, of course, have continued to support the genocidal regime in Israel. 

To paraphrase what Zarah Sultana said previously: the rich and the bosses have three parties in Reform, the Tories and Labour – it’s time that we, the many, had one. 

The promise is of a new party doing things differently. Even the name hasn’t yet been settled because this is something that the ‘members should decide’. A conference in the Autumn is being planned formally to set up the new party, get a name and structure and turn towards challenging the establishment parties at the polls, but also in our communities and on our streets. 

The announcement is a very welcome development. For many of us this should have been done far sooner, but if the best time to announce a new party was before the last general election, the second best time is definitely today! 

But an announcement is just an announcement! It’s important that the new organisation doesn’t simply become the Labour Party Mark 2. Neither should we be lulled into any kind of notion that Zarah and Jeremy have come over the hill as ‘saviours’, lifting us out of the horrors of life after years of austerity, cuts, privatisation and rampant inequality. 

The new party has to embrace the energy and dynamism of the 200,000+ people who have signed up. They have to be involved in shaping and creating the new party and a better world. 

We must reject top-down diktat, but instead establish a party that is responsive and accountable to members. It needs to establish networks and branches on every estate, in every town and city and in every constituency in the country. It needs active members in every community organisation, every tenants’ association, every union and every university campus. 

Key to this will be how it relates to struggles: to the mass movements and to the trade unions, to tenant struggles and community campaigns, in other words how it relates to the class struggle in modern Britain. 

It needs to be a party that is rooted in the experiences of working-class communities and the struggles we face. It needs to have a vision of linking our representatives in council chambers and Westminster to our movements on the streets and in our unions. It means being principled, brave and clear sighted in recognising that the ‘rigged system’ needs to be confronted everywhere, in the interests of the vast majority because ‘we are many, they are few’. If we get this right, then we can start to reshape British society fundamentally in the interests of the vast majority.