5 years after steering UK’s Labour to disaster, Jeremy Corbyn is back – with a sidekick

LONDON — In December 2019, Jeremy Corbyn led Britain’s Labour Party to its worst electoral defeat in nearly a century.

Less than a year later, Corbyn’s unrepentant response to a probe into antisemitism in the party on his watch led his successor, Keir Starmer, to oust the veteran hard-left parliamentarian from the ranks of Labour MPs after winning the premiership.

But those eager to write 76-year-old Corbyn’s political obituaries have been proved premature.

In last July’s general election, he comfortably held his north London parliamentary seat as an independent.

And now Corbyn has announced the formation of a left-wing populist party that threatens to cause further electoral headaches for Starmer, whose approval ratings have crashed, as the Labour Party plunges in the polls.

Corbyn is taking aim at the party he once led and placing his longstanding hostility to Israel at the heart of his message.

“Labour has failed to deliver the change the British people deserved,” he wrote in an article in The Guardian newspaper after announcing the new party’s formation. “Refusing to scrap the two-child benefit cap. Taking support away from disabled people. Providing political and military support to Israel as starving Palestinians are shot in the street. From the moment this government was elected, it has inflicted suffering and injustice at home and abroad.”

He is being joined as co-leader by Zarah Sultana, a young Muslim MP who shares Corbyn’s far-left, anti-Israel politics. Elected to the House of Commons in 2019, Sultana was suspended from the parliamentary Labour Party last summer for rebelling against the new government in a vote on welfare policies. She formally resigned her Labour membership last month.

Corbyn and Sultana have also won the backing of the Independent Alliance, a grouping of pro-Gaza MPs who seized four heavily Muslim seats from Labour at the general election and came close to felling a number of close Starmer allies, including Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood.

The new party does not yet have a name. Sultana says she favors The Left or the Left party, but the pair have pledged that it will be for supporters to decide.

As Corbyn and Sultana embark on a nationwide tour and plan an annual conference in the autumn, their new project is already making political waves.

MP Zarah Sultana arrives for an interview with the BBC in London on July 21, 2024. (Benjamin Cremel / AFP)

More than 600,000 people have signed up — although the supporters list is not the same as paid membership — and sources have told Sky News that it is attracting especially strong backing in London, the northwest of England, and Yorkshire and the Humber.

A poll taken prior to the launch announcement showed a left-wing Corbyn-led party winning 10 percent of the vote. Unsurprisingly, most of its support comes at the expense of Labour and the Green party. The drop in Labour’s support, the poll suggested, would allow the right-wing populist Reform party to grow its poll lead over Starmer from four to seven points.

The survey also showed that the new party would top the poll among young voters, winning the backing of 29% of 18- to 26-year-olds. Among older voters, however, Corbyn’s appeal is limited: only 4% of those over 60 said they would be willing to back a party led by him. Corbyn’s plus 18 approval rating among young Britons far outstrips that of the prime minister, who scored minus 30 among the same demographic.

Sultana suggests that the party will aim to win 20 to 25% of the vote and there seems to be a potential pool of support for it to tap: Polling by YouGov shows nearly one-quarter of British voters welcome its emergence, while another survey by the pollster found 18% of voters said they would consider voting for a Corbyn-led new left-wing party. That figure rose to 36% of 18-24 year-olds and 29% of voters in London.

With Corbyn likely to face his first major electoral test in next spring’s local government elections, there are reports that the new party has already attracted the backing of around 200 local council members. The party has also unveiled its first councilor to defect from Labour.

Amid its own leadership election, the left-wing Green party — which takes a strongly anti-Israel stance — appears split on how to respond.

At left, Shawan Jabarin, whom Israel’s Shin Bet internal security agency alleges is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terror group, and director of Al-Haq, a Palestinian NGO that Israel claims is a terror organization, greets Jeremy Corbyn, right, outside the Royal Courts of Justice in central London on May 13, 2025. (Adrian Dennis / AFP)

Zack Polanski, the youthful non-Zionist Jewish candidate running for Green party leadership, has said he’s “open to working with anyone who’s up for challenging the far-right threat of Reform and this unpopular Labour government.”

However, Adrian Ramsay, the party’s current leader, who is running for re-election, has warned against the Greens becoming “a Jeremy Corbyn support act.”

Corbyn himself has been cool on linking up with the Greens, saying they are “not a socialist organization” and accusing the party of “trying to appeal to a sort of semi-conservative voting suburban electorate.”

The marmite politician

Corbyn is undoubtedly a marmite figure: He attracts devotion among his supporters but loathing among large sections of the electorate.

But his five years as leader of the Labour party — during which time he fought for, and lost, two general elections — mean he has sky-high name recognition.

“Everyone knows who Jeremy Corbyn is, everyone knows who he stands for. And with any new party, that is not even half the battle. It’s three-quarters of the battle,” Robert Ford, a professor of political science at Manchester University, told The Guardian. “A lot of people don’t like what he stands for, but that doesn’t matter, because he’s not aiming for everyone.”

Sultana may not have Corbyn’s name recognition, but, unlike her co-leader, she is young, highly articulate and social media savvy. Indeed, Sultana has the largest TikTok following in parliament. That has also made her a top target for abuse.

The pair are offering a combination of class war at home — promising “a mass redistribution of wealth and power,” higher taxes and nationalization — and Corbyn’s trademark anti-Western leftism overseas.

Former Labour Party leader and newly elected MP Jeremy Corbyn addresses protesters during the ‘National March for Gaza’ calling to ‘end the genocide’ and ‘stop arming Israel,’ on July 6, 2024. (JUSTIN TALLIS / AFP)

James Schneider, a founder of the hard-left Momentum group who served as a top aide to Corbyn and is now helping to establish the new party, has said it will aim to draw “a big, bold line of antagonism.” He told the New Left Review: “The reason for our problems is the bankers and the billionaires. They are at war with us, so we are going to war with them.”

Undoubtedly, anger among left-wing and Muslim voters at what they claim to be Starmer’s timid stance on Gaza is fueling the party’s upward arc. Tellingly, over one-third of the party’s launch statement was devoted to the one foreign policy issue it addressed: Palestine.

Anti-Israel protesters, one wearing a shirt reading ‘death, death to the IDF,’ gather outside the High Court in London on July 4, 2025. (BENJAMIN CREMEL / AFP)

Two peas in an anti-Israel pod

Corbyn’s hostility to the Jewish state has been a constant throughout his 40 years in parliament. Thirty-one-year-old Sultana’s is no less intense. During the 2019 election campaign, she was forced to apologize after the emergence of deleted social media posts from 2015 in which she said she would “celebrate” the deaths of Tony Blair, George W. Bush and Benjamin Netanyahu and backed “violent resistance” by Palestinians.

“There will come a time in the near future where those [who] lobby for Israel feel the same shame and regret as South African apartheid supporters,” she also said. “It is not progressive to champion a state created through ethnic cleansing, sustained through occupation, apartheid and war crimes.”

Sultana, who sat on the national executive of Young Labour and the national executive council of the National Union of Students, also labeled Zionism a “racist ideology” and said students who participated in “Zionist conferences and trips” should be “ashamed of themselves.”

In parliament, Sultana has been relentlessly critical of Israel, especially during the current conflict in Gaza. She has called for the expulsion of Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotovely; repeatedly accused Starmer’s government of being “complicit in genocide” by failing to ban all arms sales to Israel; and alleged that she had not been readmitted to the parliamentary party because she was “speaking up for Palestine.” Sultana has also objected to the government’s recent decision to ban the extremist Palestine Action group, posting “we are all Palestine Action” on social media after the Home Secretary announced it was to be proscribed.

People take part in a protest in support of ‘Palestine Action’, organized by the Defend Our Juries group, in front of the Mahatma Gandhi statue in Parliament Square in London, England, July 5, 2025. (Jeff Moore/PA via AP)

Many in Labour’s ranks are pleased to see the back of Corbyn and his allies. “The British people definitively delivered their verdict on far-left politics at the 2019 general election,” said a Jewish Labour source who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Extremists like Corbyn and Sultana should never have been in a mainstream center-left party, and Labour is better off without them.”

Mixed forecast for new dynamic duo

Nonetheless, Corbyn’s new venture poses a potential threat to Labour, with nearly one in three of those who voted for Starmer last July saying they would consider backing it. Labour fears that Corbyn could peel off left-wing voters just as Reform UK has splintered formerly Conservative-backing supporters on the right.

Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, has been gleefully watching developments. “I think Corbyn’s going to attract a vote,” he told The Sunday Times. “There is growing appetite in certain quarters for old-fashioned Marxist socialism, and it will hurt Labour. If they are able to organize sufficiently and field large numbers of candidates, it will help us enormously.”

Polling expert Peter Kellner believes Corbyn’s new party may only inflict limited damage on Labour.

US President Donald Trump (R) and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer (L) talk as they arrive at Trump’s estate in Balmedie, Aberdeenshire, northeast Scotland, on July 28, 2025. (Jane Barlow/Pool/AFP)

“Labour has already lost around one-third of its support since last year’s general election, when it was not that high, despite the landslide in terms of seats,” he told The Times of Israel. “If Corbyn’s party establishes itself and survives until the next election, I would expect its national support to be well under 10%, and most of that to have come from people who have already deserted Labour, mainly to the Greens and Liberal Democrats.”

Kellner said that while Corbyn and the four pro-Gaza independents might hold their seats, the new party is likely to win “few, if any, others.”

However, he cautioned, “even if Labour loses only a few hundred other votes in its marginal seats, this would make it harder for Keir Starmer to retain his majority.”

“All in all, Corbyn’s new party helps the right — the Conservatives and Reform — rather than the Left, but probably to only a modest degree unless the next election is very close,” Kellner said.

Patrick Diamond, a professor of public policy at Queen Mary University of London who served in Downing Street under former prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, also noted that the historical precedents do not bode well for Corbyn’s party.

Jeremy Corbyn, center, holds a banner as he takes part in the ‘No More Austerity 2.0’ march in central London on June 7, 2025, hosted by The People’s Assembly Against Austerity. (HENRY NICHOLLS / AFP)

“There have been a succession of attempts in recent decades to establish breakaway parties to the Left of Labour, but these efforts usually have little long-term impact,” he said, suggesting that the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system serves as “a bulwark” against smaller parties winning parliamentary seats.

Diamond said that Left parties also bear some responsibility for their failure to gain traction.

“Breakaway parties on the Left are vulnerable to ideological splits and as a result, rarely survive,” he said. “These parties are clear what they are against — the mainstream Labour party — but much less clear about what they are for.”

“There is little reason to believe,” Diamond said, “that the new party launched by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana will perform differently this time around.”