Zarah Sultana’s speech in Leeds shows the energy and hope around Your Party is back

The creation of a new left party was never going to be easy. But after some rocky moments, it looks like the energy and hope around Your Party is back. And Zarah Sultana’s speech to around 600 people in Leeds On Wednesday 8 October was a perfect example of that:

Zarah Sultana delivers a passionate call for unity and resistance

Zarah Sultana started off with honesty and openness, acknowledging the frustration many people feel about disagreements at the top of Your Party and apologising for her part in them. She stressed that she and others will need to work hard to rebuild the trust of the 800,000 people who expressed interest in a new party, who she said “are still watching us cautiously”. But she was also clear that “the stakes are simply too high” to let the project fail. And she outlined her vision for the party, and why it’s essential to build it.

She rallied against the war criminals in government, the divisive fascist rhetoric targeting marginalised groups, the political ideology of Zionism that has brought us a live-streamed genocide in the last two years, and the role NATO plays in actually making Britain and the world less safe. At the same time, she called for a party that: is proudly socialist and trade unionist; backs the creation of one state in Palestine where all groups live with equal rights and Israel’s settler-colonial occupation ends; and isn’t afraid to talk about the class war that the super-rich have been waging against the rest of us.

For Sultana, power in numbers matters. Unions need to step up their struggle. People need to join Your Party and get more active in their communities. Because fascism is on the rise. And we don’t defeat it by debating how to be perfect down the line. We defeat it by recognising what we have in common, standing firm together, and showing fascists that we won’t allow their hateful, divisive politics to fill parliament and fill our streets.

Class war, and knowing our enemy

Working-class people, Zarah Sultana stressed, aren’t “turned off by class politics”. Far from it:

They live it every single day. They live class war when their bills go up while energy companies post record profits. They see class war when landlords hike the rent and evict families without a second thought. They see class war when bankers get bailed out while austerity [lands] on their shoulders. They see class war when 50 families hoard more wealth than half the country, when food banks outnumber the number of McDonald’s restaurants in our country.

So we need to embrace class war. And it’s time we won.

The new left party, she said, must be:

Rooted in working-class communities, proudly socialist, fiercely democratic. And I will always fight for maximum member democracy. You have my word.

The “politics of anti-imperialism” also matters, she insisted. So the party must be “proudly anti-Zionist”, in favour of “a secular state with equal rights for all” in Palestine. It must treat Israel “like a pariah state” just as the world treated apartheid South Africa as such. And it must fight to leave NATO – “an imperialist war machine that profits from death and destruction” and makes the world “less safe, not more” with its “endless wars”. As she asserted:

every penny that is spent on tanks and bombs is stolen from healthcare, housing and the future.

She argued that people:

have to believe that the working class can run society better than the billionaires, better than the profiteers, and definitely better than the war criminals who are running the country today.

And with that final point, she pointed out that prime minister Keir Starmer “belongs in The Hague” over his support for Israel’s genocide.

We need a movement of “collective struggle” to defeat fascism and its billionaire backers

Zarah Sultana also insisted that:

Every single right that we have, for women to have the right to vote, for the weekend, for the NHS, that has been won through collective struggle. It was never handed down to us by the political elite. Even though we have Europe’s most repressive anti-union laws, trade unions secure real wins for their members every single day. These victories matter because they prove to us that change is always possible

And collective struggle isn’t just about making our lives better. It’s about standing up to those who want to make them worse. As she said:

We are living through the largest fascist mobilisation in recent British history. This has not come out of nowhere. It has been emboldened by politicians and the media who scapegoat migrants, Muslims and minorities every single day. And Reform is their political vehicle.

She added:

We must challenge them in the streets as well as the ballot box. To be clear, you can’t beat far-right politicians and fascism by ignoring them or, as the Labour Party are doing, copying them. You do it by fighting them, you do it by organising, you do it by uniting the working class around a positive vision. And by building a movement that is broad and rooted in solidarity.

Emphasising that “the far right thrive on a politics that is reduced to scapegoating, division and fear”, she asserted:

our movement has to say with one loud voice, we will not play that game. We will fight for every single person and we will defend the most marginalised.

In particular, she noted:

This rise in transphobia that we are seeing is deliberate. It is being stoked as a wider culture war to divide us. And just like with migrants, just like with Muslims, just like with disabled people, the goal is always the same: ‘find a scapegoat so people don’t look upwards at who is really holding the power’.

And she stressed that:

the only way to beat that is to cut through the noise, to cut through the bullshit and to speak to people about their daily realities. We have to address the housing crisis, insecure work, wages that don’t cover the bills, the NHS on its knees.

People don’t want or need culture wars, they need hope, they need material improvements in their lives and that’s what we’ll do.

The applause of hundreds of people listening to Sultana in Leeds interrupted her regularly during her speech. And when she finished, she received a standing ovation. If audience members had doubts about Your Party before attending, many of them seemed to have faded by the end.

The energy and hope in the room was palpable. And tonight, Sultana will be with Jeremy Corbyn in front of an even bigger crowd in Liverpool.

To the dismay of the billionaire class and its lackeys, Your Party is clearly just getting started.

Featured image via the Canary