Frustration with the United Kingdom’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, had been building since Labour won last July’s general election in a “loveless landslide.” Cuts to disability payments, winter fuel subsidies, and other benefits, coupled with crippling austerity policies, support for Israel’s ongoing siege of Gaza, and a relentless rightward shift within the party had dismayed many left-wing voters hoping for real change after 14 years of Tory governments. Then, last week, the dam finally burst.

On September 6, nearly 900 activists were arrested in the country’s capital during a demonstration in support of Palestine Action—a pro-Palestine activist group Starmer’s government recently designated a terrorist organization—fueling an outcry over Labour’s escalating clampdown on free speech. Days later, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner quit over a tax scandal, prompting Starmer to reshuffle his already right-leaning cabinet and shove it further right than ever before. More bad news flooded in from across the Atlantic as new evidence of close ties between Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Mandelson, the UK’s ambassador to the United States, was splashed across international headlines, with Starmer initially ill-advisedly standing by his pick. Even though Mandelson was eventually sacked, questions about whether Starmer will continue to lead the country into the 2029 general election began to swirl, with would-be challengers like popular and more populist Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham—dubbed the “King of the North”—reportedly waiting in the wings.

Existential fault lines in Starmer’s government had begun to appear even before the dramatic events of last week, however. Earlier this summer, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn—who recently led a two-day inquiry into the United Kingdom’s role in what experts have declared a genocide—seized on Gaza as a key issue in British politics to offer increasingly disenchanted Labour voters a new home in the form of a left-wing political party. For now it’s called “Your Party” until a vote can be held on a name, and will be cofounded with former Labour member of Parliament Zarah Sultana and four other pro-Palestinian independent MPs.

The leftist breakaway from Labour had also been a long time coming. Ever since Starmer took Labour’s reins in 2020, it’s become increasingly clear that left-leaning MPs are no longer welcome in the 125-year-old party. Especially unwelcome is Corbyn, whom Starmer almost immediately expelled. Weeks into the new Labour government, several MPs, including Sultana, were suspended from the ruling party for voting to eliminate the Tory’s “two-child-benefit cap,” a policy that restricts the amount of support welfare beneficiaries can receive. Although some MPs were ultimately invited back into the fold, Sultana, a 31-year-old Muslim who has represented Coventry South since 2019, was told she could no longer stand with Labour after her social media posts criticizing the government’s support of Israel.

At the same time as Starmer has been seen to purge Labour’s left, he’s been accused of capitulating to the rapidly rising far right. As Reform UK cynically scapegoats immigrants for crumbling public services and a struggling economy, the former human rights lawyer has responded by dancing to Nigel Farage’s xenophobic tune and announcing severe new immigration proposals—policies that are only set to shift even further right under the new home secretary, Shabana Mahmood. Starmer himself came under significant fire for echoing Enoch Powell’s 1968 “rivers of blood” speech with his own statement declaring that the UK “risks becoming an island of strangers” (a turn of phrase the prime minister later “deeply regretted”).

“Keir Starmer is not Enoch Powell,” Jonathan Portes, professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London, told The Nation. “In some ways, that makes his current [immigration] stance both worse in a sort of objective sense, because he knows a lot of what he’s saying is stupid or wrong, and it also makes it dark from a political point of view, because, frankly, he’s not fooling anyone.”

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Progressive International’s communications director, James Schneider, put it even more bluntly: “The current Labour government has laid the path down to Downing Street for Nigel Farage and Reform.”

Remarkably, Starmer’s Labour has so thoroughly abandoned traditional Labour ideals as its policy takes a lead from Reform that it’s created room for Farage to cynically co-opt what should be progressive concerns, such as scrapping the two-child benefit cap and nationalizing water utilities.

“Locally, we’re seeing cuts to funding, public services, libraries, voluntary service, cultural institutions,” says Grace Lewis, a 21-year-old who became the first councilor to jump Labour’s sinking ship in favor of Corbyn and Sultana’s party.

If recent plummeting approval ratings are any indication, the Labour government’s austerity policies that are set to further cripple public services have undoubtedly alienated more than just the party’s left-leaning supporters. The state of the country’s beleaguered National Health Service is another top concern among Britons on all sides of the political spectrum. Starmer’s health minister, Wes Streeting, has yet to meaningfully make a dent in waiting lists, while avoidable deaths linked to long emergency room waits have risen significantly. More worrying to NHS advocates is Streeting’s focus on the private health sector’s spending over directly funding the public service.

“That switch towards the private sector is a real death blow to the NHS if it carries on,” cochair of Keep Our NHS Public Dr. Tony O’Sullivan told The Nation.

On housing, another hot-button issue, housing barrister and author of Against Landlords (Verso Books, 2024) Nick Bano indicates that Labour has begun to make some progress, with long-overdue protections for renters set to come into effect early next year, including an end to “no-fault evictions.” However, along with new worker protections, the “renter’s rights bill” seems to be under threat since Rayner’s departure. Even if the bill survives, Bano, like Corbyn and others on the left, argue that Labour has not gone far enough, stopping short of implementing rent controls that were once commonplace.

O’Sullivan and Bano highlight how slashing disability benefits and other austerity measures—the very policies Sultana and others got booted from Labour for voting against—could only aggravate the dire situation in both healthcare and housing provision. In the absence of a Your Party policy platform, Corbyn and Sultana’s recent statements in tandem with their track records as MPs paint the opposite picture to Labour’s current direction and, for an electorate desperately grasping for an alternative, it’s proving popular. Policies on Your Party’s “assumed platform,” such as keeping the NHS fully public, increasing taxes on the wealthy, and implementing rent controls, all enjoy broad public support, according to an August Ipsos poll.

Unfortunately for Britons eagerly awaiting a well-organized response to Labour’s failings, Your Party got off to a rocky start. After Sultana first broke the news this summer that a new party was in the works, it took the two socialist coleaders a chaotic three weeks to put out a joint statement at the end of July declaring, “It’s time for a new kind of political party—one that belongs to you.” To the surprise of many, within 24 hours of the haphazard initial launch, Your Party’s website was flooded with a quarter of a million sign-ups—a number that today stands around 800,000. Polls quickly followed showing that a significant chunk of the British electorate was enthused by the formation of a new party, with the same August Ipsos Poll revealing that one in five Britons would consider voting for Your Party. When broken down by demographics, the numbers are even more encouraging for the newcomers: A third of young people and Labour voters as well as 43 percent of Green Party voters would consider giving the new party their vote.

Just as Your Party experienced a large wave of support early on, critics piled on nearly immediately. Ex-Labour leader Neil Kinnock and Labour MP Patrick Hurley claimed that the splintering was a boon for Reform UK and the Conservative Party, as it could peel significant votes away from Labour. The two right-wing parties celebrated Your Party’s formation, seeing it as a clear sign of trouble brewing within the ruling party. While leftists have responded by placing the blame for this fracture squarely at Starmer’s feet, some criticisms have come from the left, too, such as from former chief of staff of the union Unite Andrew Murray.

“[Your Party] will not have the strength that comes from being a part of the political fabric for 120 years,” warned Murray in an interview with the New Left Review, “nor the historic roots and power bases which, although they have massively atrophied for the Labour Party, have not disappeared entirely.”

Some have voiced apprehensions about whether the British left should continue to depend on Corbyn, wondering whether it was time to turn the page. There are also concerns that a new Corbyn-led party—and one in which former insiders are very much still calling the shots—may not have internalized key lessons from his tenure as Labour leader. Sultana herself turned heads in recent weeks, declaring the need “to recognise [Corbynism’s] limitations,” before sketching out a laundry list of failures from Corbyn’s five-year Labour leadership. But an August YouGov poll highlighted the limitations of both coleaders on the national stage, with Corbyn’s and Sultana’s combined favourability numbers still above Starmer’s—but low overall.

There’s been a recent flurry of Your Party activity, including a number of events across the country such as a recent rally in Lewis’s constituency, and it’s full steam ahead for a November conference that will prove pivotal. It’s not just the party’s name that’s up for grabs at the conference either. Plans are underway to “found the party”—in other words formally establish the new political organization—through a series of meetings at the fall conference “stewarded” by Corbyn, Sultana, and the four other independents. Schneider, who also served as Corbyn’s director of strategic communications while he was opposition leader, told The Nation that party structures pertaining to leadership and political strategy will be then decided “by the people who are building the party themselves through the founding conference process.” The members even get to decide whether the current cofounders should lead the party jointly—or not. So far, while there was reportedly some hesitation within the party, there’s now support for the duo, with one senior Your Party politician declaring, “Jeremy is the older statesman, and Zarah is the future of the party. We are thrilled to get Zarah and her social media followers.” Indeed, Sultana’s social media presence—coming only second among British politicians to Farage on platforms like TikTok—is one of the young socialist’s strong suits. Although differences have appeared early on between Sultana and Corbyn about the most effective democratic organizational structures, Corbyn has recently promised that this process will not only be different but actually “fun.”

Aside from these key decisions, which insiders like Extinction Rebellion cofounder Roger Hallam are urging need to be taken sooner rather than later, what the party’s focus should be in the coming weeks and months varies depending on whom you ask. Despite a promising poll showing Your Party could already scoop up 18 percent of the vote in a general election, the electoral constraints in the British “first past the post” system will prove undeniably challenging. Still, there’s hope that the new party can pull Labour back toward the left on certain issues, and some point to Starmer’s carefully worded announcement in July that the UK would recognize Palestinian statehood as evidence that the pressure is already working.

Dave Nellist, a former Labour MP and chair of the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition that immediately backed Your Party, points to the spring 2026 local elections, when thousands of local council seats and 10 mayorships will be up for grabs. Your Party insiders have reportedly already recruited about 200 people to form a subcommittee of councilors, and in early August, news broke of Lewis’s defection from the party she joined at the age of 16.

“I’ve been disillusioned for quite a while with the Labour Party,” Lewis told The Nation days after resigning. “Your Party offers a sense of hope.”

Reform UK and Your Party aren’t the only ones to seize on Labour’s mounting failures. With a staunchly pro-Palestinian position and an “eco-populist” vision that includes a wealth tax and renationalization of water companies, the Green Party’s newly elected leader, Zack Polanski, can often sound as if he belongs in Your Party himself. The charismatic former actor’s landslide election is indicative of a broader trend happening within the Green Party itself. Feeling at sea as Starmer began shifting the party further and further right, some on the left, like Matthew Williams, a mental health worker and former Green Party candidate in Newcastle, found a home with the Greens doing the sort of organizing he’d learned while working for Corbyn’s Labour.

Green Party activists told The Nation that while their party has gained momentum in economically deprived areas in northern England and other parts, including among voters who are less than partial to Corbyn himself, they have yet to garner the kind of support Your Party received in a matter of hours. Polanski recognizes this. Even as he tries to increase his own party’s low membership numbers—currently standing at under 70,000—he’s publicly welcomed the new party as a possible boost for the kind of left political discourse that had been rapidly disappearing since Starmer’s leadership began and pledged to work with Corbyn and Sultana. He’s not alone in hoping this leftist alliance can be built.

“My family’s from Brazil, where the Socialist Party and Worker’s Party have a friendly relationship, and politicians will endorse each other, and you see what’s happened in France as well [with the Nouveau Front Populaire alliance],” says Yara Rodrigues-Fowler, novelist and organizer with Fossil Free Books, a group that organizes workers “for a genocide free, fossil free books industry.” She adds, “I think that’s what we need here.”

It’s not yet clear whether Your Party will find ways to forge much-needed alliances with the Greens and others as it tries to build a fresh power base in Westminster and across Britain, or whether it will learn from Corbynism’s historical shortcomings. Nor do we even know what this new alternative will stand for, how it will be organized, who will helm it, or what name it will carry. What is apparent is that, at a time in which Labour has abandoned the left in countless ways, the far right inches closer to Downing Street than ever before, and the existing parties have so far failed to offer an effective opposition, hundreds of thousands of Britons are already placing their hopes in this still-forming alternative. Your Party would be wise not to squander that hope. Britons can finally be given something to vote for rather than against—while maybe, as Corbyn has repeatedly suggested, even making it fun.