We’re in the same venue that, just months ago, hosted government ministers and their hungover special advisers at the Labour Conference. But now, we’re here for an event to mark Your Party’s official foundation, and the vibes are unsurprisingly different. The former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, having had the whip removed by Keir Starmer five years ago, is establishing a new electoral vehicle with that other former Labour recalcitrant, Zarah Sultana. It’s worth remembering that both would still be languishing on the backbenches as Labour MPs were it not for the Prime Minister’s Stalinist approach to party management. After all, Corbyn stayed in what Peter Mandelson boasted was a “sealed tomb” of the Labour Left, all the way through the Iraq and Afghan wars, privatizations, PFI. But today, finally, the Left hopes to break from its Labourist sepulcher.

Outside the confines of a heavily scrutinized party of government — with in-built constitutional connections to politically moderate trade unions that represent millions of workers — all the neuroses of the Left come to the fore here in Liverpool. This is Glastonbury for people who unironically quote Lenin, an airport-hangar-sized space teeming with aging members of all manner of sects, and who thrive during the most arcane and interminable of debates. Motions, seconders, points of order: this is the language they speak. After Corbyn has opened with one of his woolly, meandering speeches, full of odes to “communities”, “people coming together”, “peace”, “the homeless” and “refugees”, the journalists are banished from the hall, and the revolutionary proceduralism is turned up to self-parodic levels.

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When the CIA declassified its Simple Sabotage Field Manual, it revealed how its agents would infiltrate activist organizations to hamper their activities. “Haggle over the precise wording of communications, minutes, resolutions”, it reads; “Never permit shortcuts to be taken to expedite decisions”; “Talk as frequently as possible at great length”; and “bring up irrelevant issues”. Your Party’s delegates seem to have imbibed this advice — not because they’re intelligence operatives, but because they have an incredible knack for the reverse Midas. Within minutes of the first session, the chair is being heckled and booed as she begs security to eject a shouting participant. “LET. HER. SPEAK!” goes a sporadic chant from the audience.

It’s as if the entire exercise has been conceived to confirm everyone’s worst suspicions about the hard Left. And when not concerning themselves with how many kulaks can dance on the head of a pin, the two actual issues that provoke the giddiest of cheers are the twin obsessions of Palestine and transphobia, questions that motivate vanishingly small numbers of voters. Most of them, perhaps, are in this room. The night before, one speaker at a pre-conference rally diagnosed a pre-revolutionary mood in the country, as in Petrograd in 1917. Britain, he claimed, was simmering with renewed class consciousness. The war in Gaza has “united the working class” and opened their eyes to the true nature of “capitalism” and “imperialism”. Any day now, the whole edifice could come crumbling down.

Well, maybe not just yet. Demographically speaking, scanning the room of delegates, Your Party appears to largely be retired boomer activists, who cut their teeth in the heightened political tensions of the Cold War, or else in the municipal struggles of the New Left in the Eighties. Some have been involved in the Stop the War Coalition, and many seem to be members of parties that define their politics according to their relation to the work of three or four Russian and German thinkers who died over a century ago. Alongside that cohort are some younger, millennial socialists; the downwardly mobile graduates with no future, angry at high rents, low wages and all of the contemporary identity struggles that consume the hyper-online.

A third cohort had been earmarked by Corbyn, but has been significantly alienated by the first few months of the party’s eager self-immolation: the Muslim working class, represented by the four so-called Gaza independents, two of whom have quit the founding process after falling out with Sultana over trans rights. Corbyn’s strange ability to articulate the vague, platitudinous ethical socialism redolent of a non-conformist preacher could have allowed his Your Party colleagues a semblance of unity. But they have all fallen badly at the first hurdle, humiliating themselves and their movement, turning themselves into a national joke that just keeps on giving.

The former Labour MP Sultana has courted the support of the myriad revolutionary Marxist groupuscules after a pair of botched, unilateral launches threw the nascent party into disarray. After the political operatives around Corbyn preemptively expelled some Socialist Workers’ Party members from the conference, Sultana called it an “undemocratic witch hunt” and boycotted the first day in protest, flouncing away from the venue for the gathered cameras. One old-timer Tankie confides that he was uncomfortable with the exclusions. “Even Stalin,” he tells me, “would wait for a rulebook to be formally adopted before he expelled people for breaking rules”. One prominent Corbynite in favor of the ban jokingly messages to say that the ejection of SWP members from the building is, only semi-ironically, “a delicious vision of what Grey Cuba could have been”.

As well as pushing for the inclusion of the sects in Your Party’s structures, and despite standing on an incredibly thin Labour manifesto last year, Sultana has spent her time on podiums advocating for nationalizing “the entire economy”. Because if there’s one takeaway from this tumultuous foundation process, it’s that those presiding over the Your Party perma-crisis would be capable of abolishing the entire private sector, and managing the whole means of production, distribution and exchange themselves, Soviet-style. Sultana herself is still holding on to £600,000 scraped from the membership portal she preemptively launched, apparently in a bid to bounce Corbyn into action. The Information Commissioner’s Office is investigating potential breaches of the law, and, according to one source, Corbyn is the only person among the Independent and Your Party MPs resisting reporting her to the police and Parliamentary Standards Commissioner. These, then, are the bureaucratic geniuses who could formulate Five Year Plans for an advanced economy.

Yet it’s political differences that have become the core dividing lines between Zarah and Jeremy, with the latter, perhaps for the first time in his life, somehow representing the more Right-wing strand of his party’s thinking. The former Labour leader tells me that there is no Your Party witch hunt, and that, simply put, people “can’t be members of two parties at the same time”. He is also keen to emphasize his more limited desires for public ownership: of water, energy, the old, postwar state-delivered utilities. His is a brand of old-fashioned allotment Leftism, all tatty jumpers, homemade vegan flapjacks and CND marches. Sultana, on the other hand, has adopted the combative, sometimes crazed rhetoric of the convert. One pro-Jeremy wag describes the supportive network of Trotskyists around her as “Cultana”, with a worldview shaped by the extremities of early-2020s identity politics, online cancel culture, “calling out”, and neo-Maoist public purification rituals.

But in insisting on pursuing a “member-led” process, on “empowering the grassroots” and involving a panoply of bizarre interest groups in an exercise in “ultra-democracy”, Corbyn has opened a Pandora’s box, unwittingly handing power to cults that tend towards parasitic relationships with whatever body they attach themselves to. The favored strategy of the “bottom-up social movement”, and the “prefigurative” and “democratic” structure so desired by the Left’s idealists, lends itself not to democracy, but to activist-ocracy, to domination by militant cliques of hardline oddballs who adore whiling their evenings and weekends away in damp halls full of political eccentrics, and who love nothing and nobody but the sounds of their own voices.

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And yet this is the future that Your Party’s foundational delegates have chosen: yesterday, on the final day of the conference, it was announced that members had decided to reject the “single-leader model” in favor of a “collective leadership” made up of a body of 20 non-MPs. Neither Jeremy nor Zarah will lead Your Party. In exposing the public to their spats and civil warfare, the two have lost control of the vehicle they set out to build. What’s more, Your Party members will, after all, be able to have their “dual memberships”, ensuring that it becomes, in effect, an umbrella group of the warring Trotskyist parties camped outside. The foundational conference has voted itself into permanent, certain obscurity.

There’s a genuine political space for a party that represents the socialist — not the ecological — tradition, especially in the country that birthed the labor movement centuries ago. Vast spaces have opened up on Labour’s Left flank, with broad elements of Corbyn’s 2017 and 2019 programs still attracting widespread popular support in polling. Dominic Cummings wrote of a “crude heuristic” that the median voter is, roughly, “national socialist”, meaning that they “are both more left than Blairites (e.g. tax the rich) and more right than Tories (e.g. on violent crime)”. But the hard Left are congenitally predisposed to fail to take advantage. They are stuck in the quagmire of their own dogmas, and they lack ability to compromise with electoral realities. The strong intellectual tradition associated with the last century’s Communist and Labour Party, the work of EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Stuart Hall, Anthony Crosland and many others besides, has disappeared. In its place is a void, with a political culture dedicated to self-destructive language-policing over alliance-building, determined to make enemies, burn bridges, and turn the perfect into the enemy of the good.

Slightly further to the Right, the Your Party tragicomedy solidifies the Greens’ hegemonic pull over any voter more progressive than Starmer. Zack Polanski is the principal beneficiary of this weekend’s debacles, alongside a Labour Party that no longer needs to worry about a competent, coherent force that further bifurcates its Left flank and costs them marginals (if not winning many seats themselves). The chances of that happening, of Labour being troubled by this new upstart, are almost nil. Instead, the Left have fiddled while Rome burns, with Reform on the march, and swathes of working-class Britain rushing to Farage. Your Party will not threaten this seemingly inexorable trajectory, and will be barely noticed by the average voter. Nor will it threaten a floundering Labour, nor the Greens, nor concern anyone beyond its own alphabet soup of acronyms. It is unlikely to survive the next election. Once again, the revolution has been postponed, this time indefinitely.

There are five female speakers at the Holiday Inn and just one man: an extension of her politics. Sultana, born in Birmingham to Muslim parents of Pakistani descent, is one of four sisters. She knows how to fight for herself.

She has toured Britain in the last six months preparing for Liverpool. She says she wants to unite the Left: Corbyn, ever an unwilling savior, tends to hide in his allotment. But he did emerge yesterday for his own pre-conference rally: for his Your Party. Rumors fly. Corbyn’s people brief the media that Sultana-allied Leftists banned from Your Party — the Revolutionary Communist Group, the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) and the Socialist Party (SP) — may try to disrupt Conference. It was counter-briefed that Corbyn attended a Marxist festival this year. Extra security guards have been hired.

If Sultana does kick Corbyn into the sea when collective leadership is passed this weekend — he prefers the single leadership model — she will assume de facto leadership of the hard Left, in the sense that they have leaders. She is, after all, Your Party’s only MP: Corbyn now sits as an independent. If she learned singularity from the querulous king of Islington North, she might surpass him now. She is the second most followed British politician on TikTok, after her enemy Nigel Farage.

Corbyn’s allies called her undiplomatic, which is funny, considering what he is. And at the rally, she is defensive: polished and hurt. “We’re not here for fiefdoms and coronations and jobs for mates, and we’re definitely not here for a toxic culture that witch hunts people on the eve of conference and treats people like absolute shit.” Scores of Socialist Workers were expelled from Your Party yesterday. Though 18% of people were interested in voting Your Party in summer, it then slid to 12%. She doesn’t mention the lost 6%.

The Holiday Inn and Your Party are an odd fit. The hotel is aspirational, made for Thatcherites, and styled to repress the world outside — we might plausibly be in John Lewis — but the revolution they yearn for, or think they yearn for, is not here yet. So, they plot, like people waiting to re-wallpaper a country. Speakers from Bristol Apartheid Free Zone, Stand up to Racism, the National Education Union and Borderlands, a refugee charity, discuss the rise of Reform, the fears of people of color and migrants, and small victories against the boss class. If the hard Left is usually energized by struggle, these are the most defeated I have met. They speak in whispers, and, in the break, strangers do not talk. It is as if they are exhausted, before the battle has even begun. Meanwhile, at Corbyn’s rally, there were squabbles and four people were evicted. Splitters.

The hard Left exists for its contradictions. It constantly debates and it does not debate at all; it needs systems, but it does not trust them; it calls itself progressive, but it never changes. It fights with itself, constantly. Yet it has always housed the same people, city to city. There are ancient revolutionaries, always white, seeking a shared renewal to mirror the one they want for themselves. Every few years a charismatic leader emerges, and they cling to that. Before it was Corbyn. Now it is Sultana.

So today, the revolutionaries include young women of color, energized by Sultana’s rage. Candi Williams, the Your Party organizer for Bristol, tells Sultana with tears in her eyes: “This time last year, last August, I boarded up my windows because we were scared that racists were going to break in.” Her fear is rational, of course, but I fear the hard Left response won’t be. Sultana talks about bussing people in from all over the country to combat far-Right rallies. But this will only feed the anger: all extremists meet themselves in the looking glass of battle. On making Britain safer, and more prosperous — anathema to all extremists — she has nothing beyond a call to abolish capitalism. The country — the working-class — Sultana wants to renew may as well be Plasticine.

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She recites the credo effortlessly, like a comic at the end of a tour: tax the rich; nationalize water and energy; free public transport; fight climate change; Trans rights. She will abolish the monarchy, Zionism, and leave NATO: “Every penny that we spend on tanks, missiles and bombs is money stolen from our homes, our hospitals and our schools”. No one mentions Ukraine.

The real enemy is the Labour Party. She says that Lord Mandelson, “the Dark Lord, alongside his minion, Morgan McSweeney, has created a dark government”, and she will not rest until, “Keir Starmer, David Lammy, Shabana Mahmood and the rest of them are in the docks of The Hague because [the] blood [of Palestine] is on their hands”. This all sounds absurd in the John Lewis Holiday Inn — overthrow the government from here? — and people listen with only moderate enthusiasm.

Her rally represents an incoherence, and she knows it. People ask her: “What’s the point of Your Party? You should just join the Greens.” Instead, she says, she is going to reach out to Reform voters. “One third of Reform voters actually blame the super-rich for the problems in this country,” she says. “We know that the work has to be done by listening to them, understanding their grievances and going on a journey.” Success, she claims, is about talking to those communities, speaking to the “left behind, knocking on doors and yes, some people are going to slam those doors in your face and tell you to fuck off. And that’s fine. People are really angry. But the Right does not have a monopoly on working class anger.”

These voters, she says, are “blaming the wrong people for the misery that’s been caused in their life”.  But how will she stop them? As ever with the hard Left, I think the talk of reaching out is a feint, mere vanity.  No one asks her a hard question here, as the great new Left party is being born. That would be a heresy. She does admit, though, that “often in Left-wing spaces we just say things, and not everyone is always on the same page, and we’re all in different parts of our political journey”. But she knows, she says, that the people are, “watching, they’re waiting. They’re ready to join and fight.”

The line is, then: the proletariat will save us! Perhaps Sultana has read 1984. But I can’t see how the proletariat can save us. They are barely here. This is still a bourgeois movement and, Sultana, the grammar-school educated daughter of an accountant, is no more working-class than I am. That’s the incoherence.

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The event ends when she’s asked how she navigated politics as a Muslim woman in the western world. “I really don’t want to start crying,” she says. “This is why I go to therapy”. This may be a joke, because she adds, “In all seriousness, it has been really difficult… you are just told to be grateful.” Another party member, a young woman, is grateful: “seeing you gave me so much hope that we could achieve something better”. And that’s the heartbreak: promising revolution in a constitutional monarchy will not work. Hard Leftist politics are a drug, and the comedown will be messy.

Your Party will choose its name this weekend from a shortlist: Your Party, Our Party, Popular Alliance, For the Many. Sultana’s choice — The Left — did not make the shortlist. It’s a good name, and very like her: brief, and made for TikTok.

Corbyn said yesterday, “we’re going to get through this weekend,” which is barely the rhetoric of hope. Monty Python was right.

Zarah Sultana, co-founder alongside Jeremy Corbyn of Your Party, seems to have taken this history to heart. A “fascist” threat, she says, is “growling at the door”. But the real venom is reserved for enemies and rivals on the Left, with the Green Party coming in for particular ire. The traditional standard-bearers for environmental politics are not sufficiently “anti-Zionist”, says the Coventry South MP: they support boycotts and sanctions against Israel, but not, as Sultana does, a complete cut of diplomatic ties. What’s more, she adds, they’re not a “class-based” socialist party.

It’s difficult to know whether Sultana is aware that her own “class base” is an incredibly niche subset of post-graduate activists, plus an ageing cohort of hard-Left retirees who still define their politics according to categories dreamt up in Bolshevik Russia around the death of Lenin. Indeed, to bolster her already-weak position in a party struggling even before its founding conference plumps on a name, Sultana is actively courting the extremities of British Trotskyism, adopting a series of maximalist positions couched in Marxian language. Forget Israel — we should also leave Nato. Nor is nationalising a few industries enough; true socialism would require “the fucking lot”, the whole “means of production” tout court. Sultana has also emphasised her rhetorical commitment to a “member-led democracy”, which would allow all manner of malcontents to exercise their influence over Your Party. Despite the ultra-democratic promises to leave policy to members, she has been content to pre-define Your Party’s politics on the hoof, recently chucking “climate reparations” for Jamaica into the mix. This, she contends, is just the start of a “10, 20, 30-year project” to “run government”.

As a result of these statements, a coterie of bizarre political groupings has flocked to Sultana’s embattled wing of Your Party: the Socialist Worker Party; the Socialist Party; the Revolutionary Communist Party; the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty; and Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (rs21). Each presents their own idiosyncratic and fantastical vision of leading a proletarian revolution. This is all while a real revolution of the actually-existing working class takes place in provincial, post-industrial Britain, where “C2DE” voters flock to Nigel Farage. In this context, the inter-party warfare that has broken out on the Left, and indeed the conflicts inside Your Party between Corbyn and Sultana, feel like fiddling while progressive Britain burns.

Sultana entered parliament at the 2019 election, at the age of 26, and was immediately spoken of as a future standard bearer of the Left, just as Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott approached their twilight years. She has been encouraged in this view by her husband, Craig Lloyd, a former trade-union official who, according to several sources I spoke to, has taken to telling anyone who’ll listen that he’ll eventually become general secretary of Your Party, storming the complacent establishment alongside his co-leader wife. This is in spite of Lloyd having no senior management experience in any of his previous professional positions. No matter: the pair are modelling themselves as the Left’s new power couple — British socialism’s answer to the Clintons.

After Corbynism as an organised political force was swept away by Boris Johnson’s brief experiment with Brexity, big-tent Tory populism, the recriminations began almost immediately, with the defeated Left soon resembling rats in a sack. Within the simple “Corbynite” masthead sat a messy mixture of competing ideological strands: old-school trade unionists grappled for dominance with the traditional hard-Left, while a younger crowd of Millennial socialists, steeped in the language of online progressivism, attempted to build something they called a “social movement” — pointedly not a traditional political party — from below. Sultana, a young, dynamic, non-white woman, exhibiting all the radical, aggressive certainty of any good student union-dweller, was perhaps the best-placed talisman of that latter tendency. Rather than the antiquated politics of 20th-century socialism, all brass bands and closed factories, this youthful contingent would push for Green New Deals, Universal Basic Income, four-day weeks and “fully-automated luxury communism”.

In the early 2020s, that crowd became synonymous with the increasingly dogmatic and pernickety assertions of identity politics and cancel culture, earning them a reputation for political pedantry and humourlessness on an epic scale. A case in point is Sultana’s broadsides against a cartoonist for depicting her on a box of raisins (the same newspaper spent years depicting David Cameron as a human condom and George Osborne as his pliant gimp).

This particular brand of progressivism was a departure from the Old Left’s, but, under Labour’s ossified structures, a semblance of unity between the more orthodox and more experimental groupings was possible. Now that these structures have gone, Corbyn himself has demonstrated neither the communicative abilities nor the political dexterity to join these competing factions together.

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Keir Starmer’s authoritarian approach to party management has therefore birthed a monster, his wave of suspensions and expulsions repeatedly splitting Labour’s formerly broad church. Like a North London Stalin, he has enforced an iron discipline on the emasculated Corbynite wing of the Parliamentary Labour Party, removing the whip for the most minor of infractions. When it became clear that Sultana was unlikely to be readmitted after her suspension for voting against the two-child benefit cap, rumours of the founding of an alternative picked up pace. For readers unfamiliar with Sultana’s role in Your Party’s chaotic foundation, and indeed with the surreal, schismatic culture of the British hard-Left in general, the story of internecine factionalism hits first as tragedy then as farce.

In an attempt to bounce the perennially dithering Corbyn into announcing her in a leadership role, Sultana announced the party’s launch without the agreement of her fellow organisers. She then did something similar for Your Party’s membership portal. This second action triggered civil war within Your Party, as well as legal squabbling over the future of the substantial monies collected on Sultana’s watch. A truce, of sorts, has now been tentatively agreed.

Either way, Your Party’s descent into Leftist self-parody has destroyed Sultana’s reputation, confirming her as a serious liability. The general public sees Your Party as po-faced, hectoring, lacking in self-awareness and obsessed with arcane minutiae; Sultana certainly seems determined to prove them right. And yet despite repeated setbacks, she retains the confident air of someone convinced that her substantial social-media following, shadowed by that growing Trotskyist fan club, will be enough to retain the backing of comrades eyeing Zack Polanski’s Greens with envy.

There’s an extent to which our cynical, fractious politics might suit the abrasive invective of tubthumpers like Sultana. But that righteous anger needs to be accompanied by a positive emollience, a self-deprecation, a relatability — none of which are present in the beleaguered parliamentarian. There’s an ironic air to a figure like Lee Anderson or even Farage himself. Everything is said with a nudge and a wink; they’re their own best satirists, inviting you to laugh alongside them. In contrast, the Left’s default tone is bitter rage and oblique, holier-than-thou screeds against anyone and everyone. With honourable expectations, they exude ideological zealotry.

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“The revolution”, said a condemned Georges Danton in revolutionary France, will “like Saturn, devour its children”. And so it goes again. Sultana will likely lose Your Party’s ongoing factional struggle — unlike Corbyn, she lacks a solid base in her constituency, and unlike the pro-Gaza independents, she lacks the grassroots voter networks, built through local mosques and community groups, that propelled four MPs to the Commons last year. Her TikTok game won’t be enough to defeat the phalanx of battle-hardened, former trade-union organisers stacked up behind her prime rival.

If she is ousted from the upper echelons of Your Party’s structures, Sultana might be tempted to try her luck with the Greens. But would Polanski ever give prominence to someone who has demonstrated only an aptitude for scorched-earth politics, and who has shown repeatedly that being queen of the Leftist graveyard will always take precedence over the collective reputation of the labour movement? Indeed if Sultana’s uncompromising approach to politics has to an extent proved useful in making a name for herself — notwithstanding her attacks against her own colleagues for their views on transgenderism — it’s increasingly clear that it’s little help when it comes to the painstaking but necessary work of coalition-building. Even critics who may otherwise back Sultana, but increasingly feel that broad Left unity is required to combat Reform, are condemned for “middle-class entitlement” and using “angry/irrational brown woman tropes”.

When the Comintern eventually abandoned their “class-against-class” line in 1933, they performed a speedy about-turn, calling for “Popular Fronts” with liberals and social democrats to defeat fascism. Hitler had assumed the Chancellery. Rearmament was underway. It was too late. The damage had been done by years of over-enthusiastic sectarianism. Despite Sultana’s protestations, Reform are not a “fascist” threat. But the fragmentation on a Left obliviously revelling in its own demise will presage Britain’s own shift to the Right. As ever, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

Being a millennial socialist in 2025 must feel like being a hippy in 1974: The Beatles have split up; Hendrix and Joplin are dead; Nixon is in the White House; and another, more aggressive youth subculture — punk — is emerging to replace your fading utopian idealism. The party is well and truly over. Keir Starmer has expunged any trace of radical fervor from Labour. And, as a result of his adoption of bland, buttoned-up technocracy, many young, enthusiastic Left-wingers have left the party. To make matters worse, the stuttering launch of Your Party, the new vehicle for Corbynism, turned into a carnival of infighting, undermining the reputations of all concerned. Across the Atlantic, Trump has returned to the Oval Office, and here in the UK, Gen Z voters are more likely to opt for Nigel Farage than for the Greens’ fledgling “eco-populism”. With woke-liberal messaging adopted wholesale by the upper echelons of the corporate world, the contemporary transgressive pole is now the backlash against the painfully self-righteous, the censorious, and the overtly politically correct. When academia, the arts, cultural institutions, the educational establishment and the civil service demand acquiescence with ultra-liberal social mores, it’s little wonder the counter-cultural moment lies with the populist New Right rather than the progressive Left.

In today’s climate, it’s easy to forget that there was a time when the Labour Left, resurgent with the energies of millennial socialist activists backing Corbyn, felt like it was ascendant, that anything was possible, and that the future of the Labour Party, if not the country, belonged to a class of cool kids shaping an ultra-progressive form of socialist revival. Unlike the party’s tired moderate wing, the millennial Left was brimming with ideas and high-minded, quixotic intellectual debate, and it attached itself to the Labour Party like a limpet during the Corbyn era. The Blairite modernizers, discredited by their Faustian pacts with a sub-prime City and the disasters of Iraq, would call for moderation and sober managerialism, but Labour’s millennial Left organized workshops on Italian revolutionary philosophies, followed by grime and acid house listening parties hosted by Turner Prize-winning artists, and set up “mega-games” in which participants could simulate responses to establishment attacks in the first year of a Corbyn government that never quite came. The millennials were riding a wave of optimism as the official opposition engaged in an institutional turn towards what a Marxist shadow chancellor called “socialism with an iPad”. They were enthused, not repulsed, by Jezza, who was lovingly referred to in the activists’ community centers and Glastonbury Pyramid Stage crowd not disparagingly as “Magic Grandpa”, but reverentially as “the Absolute Boy”.

Rather than spend their nights listening to drunken parliamentary staffers belt out “Things Can Only Get Better”, the Corbynista cool kids would retreat to darkened warehouses to smoke roll-ups, talk about Judith Butler and the Kurdish communes, and dance to trendy sub-genres of electronica until the early hours. Ditch the Marks & Spencer apparel and business-friendly media-speak of bland traditional Labourism, and replace it with septum piercings, oversized jeans, vintage T-shirts, mustache-mullet combinations and neo-Maoist views on landlordism, and you’re approaching the world of millennial socialism. It was dynamic and counter-cultural, with an agenda full of knowing nods and winks towards the anti-authoritarian New Left tradition and Sixties creative “happenings” — homo ludens to the old party establishment’s homo economicus.

And this wasn’t a purely British phenomenon. In the US, Bernie Sanders had led an insurgency against the Democrat’s Clintonian establishment, and on the continent a wave of upstart populist parties — Podemos in Spain, La France Insoumise and Syriza in Greece — found success in challenging the more moderate proclivities of traditional social democracy in their own countries. Like Corbyn’s Labour, they garnered the votes of mainly young, university-educated urbanites, but also built a larger electoral alliance that included older public sector workers, sections of the low-waged metropolitan precariat, and some ethnic minorities.

But the continental experiments in radical Left social movements-cum-parties have largely faded out or else collapsed completely, mirroring the diminution of the Labour Left. Millennial socialism is on the wane. And so, for the beleaguered cool kids, the outlook is rather bleak. This is the context in which the 2025 edition of their annual Corbynite festival The World Transformed (TWT) took place in Manchester last week, for the first time running separately to Labour’s own official conference. In its earlier versions, during the Corbyn years, the festival took place in either Liverpool or Brighton: suitable bastions of working-class anti-Toryism and middle-class progressivism respectively. Back then, TWT received praise from some unlikely quarters, including from Blairite apparatchiks and Corbyn-sceptic commentators, with innovative events aimed at a more youthful, vigorous and once-dominant Left wing — a Momentum-aligned fringe in vegan-friendly venues. But the millennial socialists are today looking for new solutions to their old problems.

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The spatial distance from Labour’s powerbrokers matches a yawning political divergence. The mood this year was somber. A hodgepodge of competing Leftist interest groups came to Manchester to state the case for their own version of the socialist creed and to fight over the diminishing scraps of the socialist mantle in a set of graffiti-adorned theater spaces and worthy, charity-run community venues in Hulme and Moss Side. It was not so much a united, popular front but a threadbare, garish patchwork, pulled in different directions and coming apart at the seams.

The millennial socialists were still there in force. They still have their fashions and their radical philosophy, but they’ve lost their mojo, their once-obvious vim. Marooned outside the Labour Party, they are lost, uncertain, divided, without clear strategy, and without a viable or agreed vehicle for power. Gone are the playful attitudes, the joyful optimism and post-ironic, cultural-political exuberance. Instead, there are speakers from the Revolutionary Communist Party, rs21 (Revolutionary Socialism for the 21st century), as well as issue-specific campaigning groups such as the Trans Liberation Group. Every meeting harbors nervous talk of countering an incipient “fascist threat”, by which speakers mean the Reform part. Forget the £40 billion in extra taxes levied on employers, and forget £100 billion in extra capital spending. No: Starmerism is actually “austerity 2.0”. Worse still, the government is “genocidal” and “authoritarian”. And, worryingly for these radicals, nobody quite agrees what a rebuild looks like.

At stake is the future of the British radical Left. There remain several competing tendencies among the millennial socialists, including those who want to build an anarchic, “bottom-up”, ultra-democratic “social movement” rather than a traditional party, uniting Just Stop Oil and BLM-type activist groups into a federated structure that contests elections without sacrificing an ethos of direct action. Others in Corbyn’s own camp of old-fashioned, trade unionist advisors wish for a more conventional “top-down” Left-wing operation, using Your Party’s small parliamentary platform to present an anti-war, social-democratic message to the public, getting support from trade unions, and shifting the Labour Party to the Left just as UKIP shifted the Tories to the Right.

Zack Polanski’s Leftward turn at the helm of the Greens has won more than a few converts, and a so-called “Red-Green alliance” has been mooted by Polanski. But before any formal co-operation is agreed between the Greens and a putative Corbyn-Sultana-led Your Party, recriminations abound over Your Party’s form, policymaking, personnel and purpose. In a forced display of unity, Sultana and Corbyn appeared together to speak in front of a crowd of keffiyeh-clad enthusiasts last week. A well-placed source tells me their allies are in the process of sending legal letters to each other. Nevertheless, the two sat to listen admiringly to a French parliamentarian talk of her party’s refusal to countenance a national retirement age above 60.

But there was no sign of the four other independent MPs who form the parliamentary nucleus of Your Party. Despite having joined with Corbyn and Sultana (for now), these Muslim men have shallow socialist pedigree. They sit in the Commons as the beneficiaries of a groundswell of revulsion toward the Gaza war in their heavily Islamic constituencies. And yet all four of these MPs are landlords; they voted against Labour’s new VAT taxes on private schools; and predictable spats over transgenderism broke into public view weeks ago, with Sultana calling out the gender-critical views of a Your Party comrade.

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One TWT speaker confided to me that the Left “just need to learn how to speak normally. Stuff like this [festival] is important, but we’re not going outside our comfort zone.” But others will militate against any position that doesn’t imply principled, glorious detachment from anything approaching the general public’s values or everyday concerns. Historically high levels of migration are the number one issue for voters, but at TWT any suggestion that we should reduce numbers is enough to invite immediate excommunication. The cost of living and a faltering economy come next on the list of public concerns, but these concerns are little addressed here beyond the illusory panacea of a “wealth tax”. There’s much talk of “the working class”, but few suggestions of how a group of post-graduate Leftists will persuade low-income blue-collar workers in post-industrial towns that they should ditch Farage and instead vote for people who are part of groups with names like “Queers for Palestine”, and who also, by the way, advocate for open borders.

There’s still some lip service paid to actual power among the depleted crowd of millennial socialists, who still talk of strategy, of mass movements, of what a good Leftist might call “hegemony”. But there’s little of its application in evidence. During the halcyon days of Corbynism when the cool kids were in the office of the leader of the opposition, and when TWT speakers and attendees seriously influenced policy, it felt like maybe, just maybe, the millennial socialists might one day win. True enough, the social milieu that they represented would never represent a majority of the electorate. But there was a willingness, a recognition that their project would make a hegemonic offer to the broader social body. Indeed, promises on higher public investment, nationalized utilities and the minimum wage could attract widespread support. At the apex of a genuine, mass party of government that was attempting to weave together a cross-class electoral coalition, millennial socialists were kept on the straight and narrow. But, having rejected Labourism, they have capitulated, relegating themselves to sub-cultural obscurity.

Today, like the hippies in Nixon’s America, the movement is a shadow of its former being, a set of disparate strands goading themselves into ever-more radical positions. Instead of a vehicle for political power, it’s a set of niche, minoritarian fan clubs that hold their purisms as axiomatic. The discord is the latest symptom of an increasingly fragmented body politic, with dozens of separate cultural-political tribes talking solely to each other and consuming reams of self-affirming timeline content that merely buttresses their own group prejudices. Mass politics is over, and the two-party system is imploding. But as long as the Left is kept clean, with all the correct positions, they are seemingly unconcerned that their success in detaching a chunk of Labour’s vote at the next election can only possibly result in a victory march for the very “fascism” they’re claiming to oppose most vehemently. No matter to them — as long as it’s only the cool kids at the table.

It feels good to get this off my chest. Being swept up in the Corbyn frenzy of 2015-17 was borderline compulsory for posh teenagers queasy about their own privilege. It gave me some distinction among friends whose only impression of this strange, shabby Islington MP was that he was determined to take away their holiday homes. This was an embarrassing chapter in my life, during which I never left the house without a velvet choker — the fashion at the time.

That first wave of Corbynism, like my predilection for chokers, was doomed. It insisted on ideological positions untethered from reality, its adherents allergic to the views of those outside the morally pure vanguard. The frenzy of Corbynistas was vibes-based, conviction-lite and fact-free. The faces of that movement were young, vital and countercultural; it was them versus the Tory gammons and the square New Labourites. For a teenager, the choice was obvious. Of course, none of those yelling “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” to the tune of Seven Nation Army at Glastonbury had a handle on the catastrophic economic vision of John McDonnell. Nor would one expect them to; how do you find the time to read a manifesto when you spend all day skulking around the Dalston Oxfam?

Now a chaotic new Corbyn party — a venture with the Coventry MP Zarah Sultana — claims once again to have the answers to Great British inequality and division, this time in an even more vicious political landscape as Reform paws at the door. Proving its proletarian credentials, the provisionally named “Your Party” is offering strangers on the internet the opportunity to suggest its official name. Unfortunately this does not appear to be a straightforward voting system – Party McPartyFace would inevitably result – rather, YouGov has listed some of the top suggestions being mulled over by top brass. Among them are The Collective (which sounds like a high-markup coffee shop in Hackney Wick), Arise (a yuppie pilates studio) and The People’s Party. This latter one, the favorite among those YouGov surveyed, is an interesting choice. How many People’s Parties the world over have ended up being brutal authoritarian juntas? Heed the rule of thumb: parties and states with promising names – “people’s republics” and so on – are often anything but. Just saying.

Once christened, the first hurdle, a rite of passage on the hard-Left, will be surviving infighting. Last week, a squabble straight out the gate showed “Your Party”was still in the mire over antisemitism. Sultana had told the New Left Review that during his time leading the Labour Party, Corbyn had “capitulated to the IHRA definition of antisemitism” (Corbyn adopted the definition in 2018). She went on to describe his leadership as, of all things, “conciliatory”. For those keeping score, it is worth remembering Corbyn’s interview with Piers Morgan days after October 7, 2023. “All attacks are wrong,” was his response. Pushed repeatedly to condemn Hamas, he refused. Some conciliation.

If these early tiffs don’t kill it in the cradle, “Your Party” could be a disruptor. It has already had fairly buzzy beginnings: despite the perceived chaos, at the time of writing, more than 700,000 people had signed up on the website to register their support (though it’s worth remembering that unlike other parties, it does not charge for membership). Ipsos found that 20% of voters would be “very or fairly likely” to back the party — and 33% among those aged 16-34. Corbyn told Tribune magazine that these potential voters were responding to the usual shopping list of gripes: high bills, high rents, sewage in the waterways. He added: “Plenty of good comrades have approached me over the years suggesting that there needs to be a new political voice in this country,” citing his retention of the Islington North seat as an independent. Seen from Upper Street, the future of socialism is bright.

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But the Londoners who cling to Corbyn — he himself admitted they made up an outsized proportion of those who had registered interest in the new party so far — are still the feckless, limp normies voting not for “the many” but against their parents. For them, politics is simply another opportunity for self-expression. Since Corbyn was booted off his perch, these types were left to whinge about gentrification and the scourge of landlordism while moving their Oka furniture into ex-council flats in Mile End and paying £15 for pan con tomate. Feckless, ridiculous, but harmless. It is one thing droning on about cultural imperialism at a flatroofed pub, and quite another being given a genuine political soapbox. Taking them seriously is so 2015. Next!

More so than ever being on the hard-Left is now an empty identity marker, almost guaranteed never to be tested. This is precisely what makes it so appealing to the middle classes: it is a shortcut to radicalism without any personal risk. The movement is emotionally seductive, an imitation of Seventies socialism with the reading comprehension of today’s youth. And with no answers on immigration, welfare abuse and feminism — “trans people are human beings” was Corbyn’s glib response to the Supreme Court decision on the definition of biological sex — it is structurally hollow. One gust of realism on any of these issues, and it topples.

A decade on from the initial wave of Corbynism, Your Party wants to meet Britain’s new challenges with a suspiciously 2015-esque agenda: Sultana has proposed a “resolutely anti-racist and pro-trans socialist program”. So let’s look at what’s on the to-do list as summer winds down in the UK: protesters surround hotels filled with migrants; pedestrian crossings are painted with the St George’s flag; Nigel Farage announces plans to introduce “mass deportations”. Directives to be kind can no longer mollify the working-class communities — Labour heartlands — inflamed by demographic upheaval. Corbyn’s metropolitan socialist movement is disgusted by the concerns of those communities, disappointed that they have strayed so far from his tutelage, that they are not the “good comrades” of Soviet fantasy. What’s the plan, Jezza?

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Predictably, this time round Corbyn continues to be paranoid about a conniving press (maybe he and Donald would get on?). He told Tribune: “Many in our media struggled to understand the idea of letting ordinary people shape the future of our party. For the 650,000 people who signed up, it wasn’t so hard to understand.” It is the same reasoning which scuppered the project in 2017 and 2019; again, the real villains are the newsrooms stuffed with cackling hacks throwing darts at Corbyn’s photograph, too venal or too stupid to admire his gleaming vision for a fairer world. And again, we get the same old utopian twaddle about “ordinary people” as a benevolent, uncorrupted but misled mass. These peaceable working men and women just want affordable housing, clean rivers and for everyone to get along, yeah? If they’re angry about the small boats, it’s only because of that dastardly Lord Rothermere. Ordinary people have simply been led astray, and their unsavory concerns can be wafted away with a stick of incense and a bung of Universal Basic Income. , Your Party is bringing a water pistol to a civil war, and in so doing will split the Left and hand the keys to Farage. For this, the migrants will not thank them.

Until then, the movement will serve its true purpose: to make its members feel good about themselves while letting “ordinary” communities roil with discontent. Criticism from the mainstream will only enhance the pleasure. It’s already starting: to crack open the comment section of Jezza’s Instagram page is to be hit with the stench of self-satisfaction. It’s a dumpsite of half-baked sloganeering: “United we rise. Decided we fall,” writes one typomaniac (it’s hard to text one-handed); another, responding to a mini-debate on the efficacy of wealth taxes, trumps their opponent with the scorcher: “Carry on [as] cheerleaders for the big guns… it makes you look great.” How politics looks, remember, is its most important metric. “You think a man who fought Apartheid is worse than the current PM who has allowed genocide?” bleats another, perhaps the only Briton who still believes our leaders can sway global policy. Starmer, why the hell haven’t you just told Bibi to pack it in, you massive fascist? It’s no small irony that one of the issues that killed Corbyn off is the one that’s breathing new life into his insurgent party.

Your Party begs a fundamental question for our time, one also being posed by Reform: what’s the benefit of a political movement “run by the people” when those people are so fatally misinformed? And why lean on the “ordinary” masses when they never chose you at the height of your powers? That the party is emerging from its shell as immigration once again becomes a national flashpoint is a grim omen. Once again, the hard-Left will ponder itself to death. Launder your class guilt elsewhere, Corbynites. We’ve seen this film before, and we all know how it ends.

The chaotic announcement of a new party co-led with Zarah Sultana, one of the few surviving Corbynist MPs, arrived swiftly on the heels of a major Left-led Parliamentary rebellion against the Government’s welfare reforms. The potential significance of a Left revival is reflected in Keir Starmer’s latest attempt to reassert his authority via another round of suspensions from the Parliamentary Labour Party, including Diane Abbott.

The only real surprise is how long it took for Corbynism 2.0 to get its act together: for all the shortcomings of the first version, the ideas that drove the movement have subsequently become common sense across an increasingly postliberal political spectrum. On all sides, it is now assumed that the purpose of the state is to protect a national community of producers from a parasitic globalism, and that social problems can be reduced to populist oppositions between the “many” and the “few”.

Corbyn’s much mocked post-election claim that he “won the argument” is, to an extent, true. He was, as it turns out, on the “right side of history” — albeit not, perhaps, in the way his supporters like to think.

Somewhat awkwardly, given the anti-capitalist pretensions of Corbynism, its history is that of capitalist development itself. After the 2008 crisis instigated the unravelling of neoliberalism, the consensus across global and political divides today seems to be that only a more state-driven economy — with greater barriers to the movement of goods and people — can keep the capitalist show on the road. In retrospect, it is clear that Corbynism was rubbing with the grain rather than against it.

But if Corbynism 1.0 failed to capitalize on this prescience, will it do any better second time round? As in 2015, any new party’s success depends on whether it is able to keep together the disparate, at times contradictory, elements of its support long enough to exploit the possibilities opened up by a rapidly fragmenting electoral system.

Corbynism was never politically coherent. As we charted in 2018, it emerged from a diverse mix of ideological and organisational elements, each raging in their own way against the End of History. This spanned two sets of struggles straddling the financial crisis. From the pre-2008 period, vague liberal-Left anti-Iraq war and pro-Second Intifada sentiment combined with a sectarianism that was variously Leninist and, in certain localities, Islamist. Post-2008, meanwhile, saw a newer, younger Left opposed to austerity and welfare cuts led initially by the horizontalist likes of Occupy and the student movement, before being co-opted by the trade union machine in the Miliband era.

Back then, the fractious components of the Corbyn coalition could only be glued together by the persona of “Jezza” himself. Whereas other figureheads would have been too precise about their worldview to please the motley crew the movement assembled, Corbyn’s moralistic platitudes about peace and justice seemed to create a common, if vague, cause.

A superficially Marxist friend-enemy distinction buttressed this worldview: the idea that society was divided between the 99% and the 1%. Crossed with a crude anti-imperialism fixated on the malevolent power of “the hand of Israel”, this Manicheanism created a favourable environment for the antisemitism found within parts of the movement. But it also gave Corbynism momentum, propagating a Left-wing version of Brexit based on state aid and protectionist barriers to the movement of capital, goods and people.

The difficulty this Lexit iteration of Corbynism faced was that the political divides it dealt in were exploited with much greater dynamism by an equally populist Right, which had a clearer path for how to put some of the same policy principles into practice. By the time of the 2019 election, voters could get what they really wanted elsewhere, red in tooth and claw on issues — principally borders and national security — that the Left were squeamish about confronting.

The election defeat was followed by Starmer’s ruthless program of de-Corbynisation which left its remnants cowed and adrift. Populist without being popular, Leftist intellectuals and policy thinkers rooted around for a new friend-enemy distinction around which to anchor Corbynism without Corbyn.

A listless Left turned inwards, seeking divides within and between the people that incorporated an ever-smaller part of the population on the “right side of history”. After the Brighton-based Northern Independence Party’s farcical attempt to pit ferret-wielding Northerners against the bowler-hatted South, some Corbynites landed on a cleavage between young urban graduates, radicalised by the novel experience of renting and precarious work, and their more conservative parents in the countryside, on whom the young waited for intergenerational transfers of wealth.

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But a political gambit based on the fleeting social demobility of a young middle class, only an inheritance away from growing old in suburbia, was always set to be transient. It never had a chance to prove itself anyway. Labour’s landslide in 2024 proved the political efficiency of seeking votes from across these apparent rural-urban divides.

Starmer’s victory effectively banished Corbynism back to its primordial pre-2015 state — a disconnected mess in search of a cohering force. It was possible, however, to make out its future form in a handful of highly localized harbingers: victories of various independent candidates, the not-insignificant challenges faced by Wes Streeting and Starmer himself in their own constituencies, and Corbyn holding onto his Islington seat.

The current wave of post-Corbyn Corbynism emerged from the Left’s response to Hamas’s October 7 attacks and Israel’s subsequent brutal war in Gaza, with Palestine increasingly seen as the centripetal force around which the future of the planet is organized.

Just as the mythology of Corbyn’s career — singlehandedly overturning apartheid and bringing peace to Northern Ireland — had political utility in the past, so does the Left’s enchanted image of Palestine bring shape to the same chaos of incompatible interests today — ranging from religious sectarians to social justice campaigners. Amid reports of creative differences with Corbyn over the timing and structure of any new party, Zarah Sultana’s gamble seems to be that “Gaza” might replace “Jezza” as the conceptual glue of the Left’s coming political coalition, with Sultana becoming the new bearer of the “right side of history”. Instead of vague homilies to peace and justice, Sultana offers a more precise and direct appeal: “We are all Palestine Action”. The aim is no longer to rally a mass movement, but sharpen the wedge and activate a vanguard that can meet the low bar set for electoral success now that leadership of a major social democratic party is safely out of bounds.

We’ve seen some of these electoral experiments before, from “Respect” to the “People’s Alliance of the Left”. They tend to be led by people who, despite seeing themselves as Trotsky-style strategic geniuses, draw upon little experience of political success and operate in a state of militant obscurity happily disconnected from public opinion. The legacy of Corbyn’s leadership of one of the country’s traditional parties of government, however, means the current provisional committee for a new party begins with a pool of existing MPs and muscle memory of steering a mass movement. Beyond this, precisely which social and political divides this iteration of Corbynism seeks to exploit is unclear. Without any capacity to convincingly call upon a “people” or “many” as its core constituency, the Left has little to say on the national stage other than “nobody likes us and we don’t care”.

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And yet, the contradictory character of the array of actors that Sultana-Corbynism seeks to bring together could actually act as an advantage in a multi-party electoral geography. As mass politics crumbles except possibly among the populist Right, the eking out of small victories in specific localities shaped by particular demographic dynamics could still make heavy political weather.

The new Left tendencies within UK politics would not need to take votes from Labour in every constituency to pose a problem to a disoriented governing party and sway debates in their direction. Local challengers would place further pressure on a new crop of Labour MPs often reluctant to support government positions unpopular with their constituents, for example on welfare or foreign policy.

Despite attempts by Starmer to instill collective discipline, the threat of a Left party would provide cover for breaking with Government over decisions MPs would rather not have to make. These would concern issues that Corbynism presents as being merely a matter of political will: legal and illegal migration, the deprioritization of some budgets to make way for defense and security commitments, and the development of a leaner, meaner public sector.

In these respects, then, perhaps a rebooted version of Corbynism has the opportunity to prosper in ways it could not before precisely by reducing its reliance on the figure of Corbyn himself and dispensing with a belief in mass social and political dividing lines that typically bear little electoral fruit.

The issue is that there is a very fragile potential coalition to hold together. It is set to include socially conservative Gaza independents with whom Corbyn sits in Parliament, Leninist organizers and operators with whom he has long surrounded himself, plus socially liberal young Leftists who likely feel the pull of the Green Party under a potential Zack Polanski leadership. In the intense social media heat of how views are aired and policed on the Left today — something Corbynism 1.0 did not have to reckon with in 2015 — even the magnetic pull of Palestine may not prevent this coalition from crumbling.

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And so while the new Left party is unlikely to pose any immediate threat to the Starmer government, it does raise the question of how, buffeted between threats from Right and Left, the governing party should deal with the potential split in its ranks.

Labour, too, casts about for its own friend-enemy divisions in anticipation of a Farage- or Jenrick-led surge towards 2029. Half the trouble here is that the Government finds it hard to say precisely who is going to lose from the policies they announce. Who will sit out the retooling of the state? Which sectors of economic activity will have to make way for defense reindustrialization? Understandably occupied with pacifying an election-winning coalition drawn from across the country’s fissured service-driven economy, few in Labour seem prepared to spell it out.

Pragmatically, the best bet might be to identify an enemy without, rather than an enemy within, in the shape of geopolitical rivals in Russia and elsewhere. The Government can plausibly point to the inability of the populist Left and Right alike to offer anything other than dividing lines within our own society rather than a story that can unify against a common threat. Indeed, the rise of a new Left party may enable Labour to link the dividing line without to a dividing line within, pointing to its rivals’ refusal to take seriously national security and their discomfort about any obvious commitment to the protection of liberal democracy.

Ironically, translating this rhetorical pitch into practice requires the Government to advance a radical political-economic offer itself reminiscent of the productivist and protectionist policies the party espoused, at points, under Corbyn and his Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell. The difference is that now such policies are driven not by the belief that they will overturn democratic capitalism but by the necessity of its defense.

Back in 2018, we were skeptical about claims from those such as Jonathan Rutherford and Maurice Glasman that the only alternative to Corbynism was Blue Labour. We argued that there was still a viable soft-Left path to the preservation of a global liberal order based on rule of law and international openness — a politics with which Starmer himself is sometimes now associated. Although an avenue may be opening with the first stirrings of post-Brexit European solidarity in the face of Russian aggression, such a route has been largely foreclosed by a global experience of defeat.

Today, for a lack of other options, the future of the Left once again appears to face a choice between Corbynism and Blue Labour — but on different terms. Last time around, the two tendencies represented rival attempts to reconstruct the same postwar social and economic compromise, based on the production of physical goods rooted in particular places rather than the distribution of the revenues of services generated anywhere in the world. Today, Corbynism, with or without Corbyn, is ceding this common ground precisely at the time when geopolitical circumstances make it most vital. Instead, it busies itself with building a minor political vision confined to selective social and foreign policy issues.

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Some former Corbynites, however, have adjusted themselves to the new reality by retaining a radical vision for political economy while putting it in service of a new seriousness on national security — the journalist Paul Mason, for example. Recovering Corbynite MP Dan Carden, meanwhile, has become among the most powerful proponents of Blue Labour’s postliberal politics of production in the Parliamentary Labour Party. His transition from “Red” Labour to “Blue” is less surprising than it seems to some once the performative politics are stripped away for the substantive policies.

Such voices on Left and Right alike today advance a similar vision of state-led reindustrialization focused on bringing jobs back within the UK’s borders to places battered by a relentless Treasury fixation on abstract economic growth concentrated in cities. In the long run, this increasingly hegemonic vision of a state-led national economy of producers may well be as chimerical as the fantastical images that have held Corbynism together. But, in the world as it is, rather than the world as we would like it to be, this is the contested terrain upon which Labour now has to fight.

The recent Industrial Strategy, Strategic Defence Review and National Security Strategy documents do some of this work, on the policy side at least. But without a truly political component, political economy is just plain old economics. These policies must be framed within an active argument about the future of the country and its place in the world for Labour to play the field and win from a position of incumbency. To navigate the hegemony of a postliberal moment, Labour must make the case for why what remains of liberal society must be defended against a populist challenge posed not only from the Right, but from the Left, as well.

While tacking to the progressive soft-Left may be easier to stomach, Labour forgets at its peril the need to compete with the Right on concerns around civil order and economic protection. In this sense the leftwards pressure of Sultana-Corbynism, whatever form it eventually takes and however low the bar is set for success, may not bring about the return of the Left so much as the defeat of the center by a resurgent Right. If history always progresses on its bad side — as Marx and Engels suggested — then, as in 2019, Corbynism may well find itself on the “Right” side of a wrong history once again.

Leading Corbynites write books that question whether socialism can ever even exist in a country like Britain. Or they vaguely tell the Guardian that they will change what “common sense is in the country”, before they attempt to change the Labour Party again. Momentum, joked Blairite poster boy Wes Streeting on Saturday, should change its name to Inertia. Momentum was supposed to be the spearhead of a millennial revolution, one that would permanently alter British politics. Yesterday’s winners are today’s punch lines.

But they are still here, just. They incubate in a discoloured ex-church building that looks like an ossuary, 15 minutes’ walk from the official conference. This is the World Transformed, the hard Left’s political festival and refuge, taking place for the seventh time, wobbling on its last legs. “There was a real energy before,” says a man selling Stuart Hall essay collections, “and now…”

I’m told it used to be different. I’m told there was an energy at this festival in the ancient days when Corbyn was Labour leader. Soft Left MPs like Ed Miliband used to be drawn to The World Transformed. Moths flapping to the light. “This was the cool place to be,” a council worker tells me wistfully one night. “But Miliband and the rest were pretending to be more Left-wing than they actually were.” That energy peaked in 2018, he reckoned. Then came 2019, and the Left was shredded. Their failure was historical. Overnight, Corbyn became the new Michael Foot, the new George Lansbury.

So, those who remain are not pretend Left-wingers. They are the diehards, and they come to the festival to fantasise. Penny Grennan is not pretending. She stood as a Parliamentary candidate for Hexham in 2019 and lost by 10,000 votes to the Tories.

This afternoon she is selling raffle tickets (first prize: Jeremy Corbyn allotment jam) and t-shirts that call Keir Starmer a wet wipe in a room that smells like vegetable soup. She teaches protest songs to the next generation. There are several decades of fruitless canvassing written all over her face. “We are a family here,” she says. Up the road, “the Labour party machine is voracious. It is about control and obedience.” I feel like I am talking to a particularly sweet old nun. It’s an ignoble feeling: pity. Penny has wasted years on something that doesn’t exist.

Fantasy blots out everything. I read a pamphlet that says Corbyn failed because he was not… Left-wing enough. I go down to a studio where the “youth are rising for a green new deal” — a ropey American policy idea that is older than most of the youth. Rather than rising, the youth are sitting on metal fold-out chairs in circles, drawing lines on A3 paper with felt tip pens. I am back in school.

On a panel to discuss abolishing the monarchy, Mish Rahman, a member of Momentum’s National Coordinating Group, says: “Five white people, wearing black, with a Union Jack behind them — it’s intimidating, like a far-Right rally.” This is the only room in the country where that is an applause line. We are in a parallel reality.

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They discuss the myth of nationality, and the myth of social peace in Britain. “For a thousand years the English have been ruled by families that aren’t English,” one says. One headed by “a clan of parasites”. Well, it’s not Huw Edwards in a black tie. “The Queen was in the thick of imperialist violence,” says the Momentum guy.

The only revelation is that they don’t understand the country they live in at all. Like every event at this festival, they speak, cleverly, to themselves. This is utterly irrelevant to what they are supposed to be doing, which is making people vote for them.

Other countries, ones the British Left will never have to win votes in, are preferred. For a political tribe so diminished in Britain, all that remains is a fantasy of over there. An afternoon panel about South America. The auditorium is full, because Jeremy Corbyn has shown up. He is accompanied by a Bolivian Trade Unionist, a Brazilian journalist, a Colombian senator, and a documentary filmmaker from Chile.

“What can we learn from Colombia?” Bone-rattling stories are told. Unlike in Macclesfield, there is scope in Bogotá for heroic revolutionary action. The struggle there is so beautiful. The struggle here is so banal.

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Corbyn listens. He looks happy, and cocoon-safe in his happiness. He is introduced as a “revolutionary leader who shows solidarity with Latin America every single day”.

Corbyn tells the room about Allende. The room shivers. Corbyn tells the room about the torture chambers he visited in Villa Grimaldi, Santiago. The room brrrrs. There is some glee in his description of these places. There, we can see, says Corbyn “that wonderful golden thread… the survival of the human spirit against all the odds.”

What kind of intellectual life is this? To look to Bolivia for patterns to mimic. To simplify the whole world into classes and struggles. To offer people, in a democracy, not straightforward, easily explained improvements to their lives, only the deus ex machina of a “more egalitarian socialist future”. It is the intellectual world of the fantasist.

This festival doesn’t care. It is either these fantasies, or the Westminster cynicism and business-as-usual politics being offered on the Albert Docks by Starmer. They choose the debilitating fantasy, and they choose Jeremy.

The future of Corbynism is supposed to be Zarah Sultana, MP for Coventry South. Sultana has more TikTok followers than anyone else in Westminster. On Monday night she hosts a pub quiz in the auditorium. She is late.

When Sultana arrives, she is deadpan and mock-surly with the audience, who treat her like she’s Jeremy Corbyn, or Taylor Swift. She announces that she is here to “chat shit and build socialism”. One is much easier than the other. I try to see what this audience sees in her. Sultana has a majority of just 401 in Coventry. The future of the Left is already endangered.

Suggested reading

Power is corrupting the Tories

By Will Lloyd

They still sing for the past, as he walks up the stairs. Oh, Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn touched them so closely. In his otherworldliness, any one of them, any Penny Grennan, so otherworldly themselves, might have been him.

It was not Brexit, or anti-Semitism that destroyed this movement. It was Corbyn, and the people who still flock to him this week, and their consuming fantasy of politics as a struggle, that the public rejected. In his very person — and he represented his followers so well — he exposed this movement’s flaws and showed them to be without remedy.

The image he created in the minds of the country was so different to the image in the minds of his supporters. The pictures never matched. “There is no such thing as Corbynism,” he said on the day he blew it in 2019. Corbyn was wrong then — of course there was — but he is right now.

I approach the “absolute boy”, who is sitting on a sofa. I ask him if he felt like he had been released from a burden he was never up to shouldering.

“No. No. Not at all,” says Corbyn. He seems sad. “I wanted to make changes in the Labour party, and the Labour movement. I wanted to see changes in this country. Economic policy that put food in children’s stomachs, that put them in schools, that gave them nurseries, that ended food banks…”

Corbyn talks in the past tense, and trails off. He knows he failed. All he and his movement have now is the past. The present belongs entirely to Starmer.

Marxism taught the people at this festival that this moment ought to be seized by revolutionaries. Instead, they are marooned on the far side of power, eating vegetable soup and singing songs to a faded messiah. When they call Keir Starmer a wet wipe, or say that they hate him, they are only expressing their own impotence.

Suggested reading

How Labour can beat Truss

By John McTernan

At the official conference Labour thinks it is back. There is not a soul anywhere in the ACC who thinks the party will lose the next election. Starmer finds himself with a 17-point lead over Truss, and he’s barely had to campaign. The confidence is expressed in sterile ways engineered to disgust the hard Left.

Blue chip lobbyists who avoided party gatherings when Corbyn was in charge are back. Big ticket donors are back. The canapés are better than they have been in years — and the better the canapés, the more electable the party is. Blathering on about Palestine is out, Rachel Reeves’ fiscal prudence is in. Goodbye John McDonnell, hello Peter Mandelson. The revenge of the centrist Dads is complete. Let’s party like it’s 1997.

“But,” a woman clutching a champagne flute asks me one night, “what about the Left? What are they even doing now?”

What are the Left doing? Nothing that relevant any more.