Zarah Sultana speech brought packed room in Newcastle to its feet

Your Party’s Zarah Sultana brought a packed room to its feet at a Newcastle event alongside Majority’s Jamie Driscoll on 6 September. There was clearly a lot of enthusiasm about the coming creation of a new mass party on the left, and Sultana energised people even more with bold statements and promises.

Zarah Sultana: “bold action and collective power”

Sultana made it clear that strong policies and stances are necessary, and that the active participation of ordinary people matters, saying:

The crises we face, which everyone in this room knows about – climate, cost of living, housing, inequality – they are too big for tinkering around the edges. They demand bold action and collective power. And that power starts here: it starts with you, it starts with our members, our communities, and our activists. And Your Party has to be that platform for that power, a politics driven by the people: a politics that values diversity, but not as this window dressing exercise. It gives a voice to those who have deliberately made voiceless, and makes democracy feel real, feel tangible.

She added that groups like Majority have already shown:

You don’t need big money, you don’t need big names. You need commitment, you need organisation, and you need this very simple belief: the extraordinary power of ordinary people.

And in a rallying call, she insisted:

Our politics is broken. But it’s not beyond repair. It can be rebuilt bottom-up, not top-down, by ordinary people… It’s important that we imagine a Britain where politics isn’t done to people, but by people.

She asserted that she’s “not interested in building a Labour Party 2.0”, and that “we need structures that empower every single member, every single voice, every single action”. Members of the new party, she stressed, “aren’t going to be spectators, they ARE the decision makers”. With this in mind, she called for “a conference arrangements committee that represents the breadth of the movement”, being “gender-balanced” and “regionally and racially diverse”. And fundamentally, she emphasised, it must be a party where:

members will shape policy, structure and direction through ‘one member one vote’

Firm principles

Zarah Sultana also addressed her suspension from Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, highlighting that it was:

because I called out this Labour government’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal war crimes. And it’s important to be clear that this isn’t just a political disagreement. It isn’t just factions or whatever. It’s about genocide. And I am not going to be complicit in genocide to save my political career… I am a proud anti-Zionist, and the smears definitely are not going to work this time.

She also stressed that:

We’ll stay rooted in our principles, in our people, in our movements, because that’s how the left wins… We will win by organising with renters facing eviction.We will oppose fascists when they incite hatred in our streets. We will stand on picket lines with striking workers, and we will demand an end to this genocide and hold complicit politicians to account. And let me be clear about something else too: trans rights are human rights… and Your Party will defend them. No ifs, not buts. And I won’t let anyone, whoever it is, get in the way of this fight. It is too important. It is non-negotiable.