The new Corbyn-Sultana party will need more than democracy to win
Tuesday, August 5, 2025Recently former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and former MP Zarah Sultana, both now expelled from the Labour party, formed a new as-yet-unnamed party. Within a few days, they had over 600,000 people register their interest (I initially wrote "members" based on me what I thought they'd said in interviews, thanks to Simone for the correction). They're promising action on the kind of things you'd expect: wealth inequality, public ownership, climate, Gaza. They also promise to be radically democratic, allowing members to choose the party's name, constitution, and policies. But we already have a party that promises action on all these things, and has a similar commitment to internal party democracy: the Green Party. And admirable though these commitments have been, they have not been particularly successful electorally.
Political parties absolutely should have some degree of internal party democracy — but being maximally democratic is not a requirement. Democracy gives legitimacy to the structures that govern our lives — if it affects us, we should have a say in it, ideally. But party membership is voluntary, and does not need legitimising with maximal democracy.
Political parties exist to effect change and win elections. To do this, they need vision, discipline, and strategy. The Conservatives, possibly the most successful party in the history of liberal democracy, have all of these (at least until perhaps the last 10 years when rifts over Brexit, the pandemic, and corruption caused the party to repeatedly implode). Too much democracy can be at odds with these qualities. The Green Party is a case in point.
The Green Party allows its members to decide all of its policy, at least in theory (which we'll get to). All this policy ends up in a large document, which now requires a Green Party membership to view. However, you can read a fairly recent version on the Internet Archive. To its credit, this document is comprehensive. They have policy on lots of issues that the major parties ignore. However, as the document proudly states, this is an accumulation of 50 years' worth of policies.
Each of these policies was decided at a party conference. Only a minority of members attend conferences, and thus policy can be shaped by small groups of members with commitments to a particular view. Also, people come and go from parties. So what the Green Party have ended up with is a an accumulation of 50 years worth of policies, shaped by small groups of members, many of whom may not even still be in the party. Thus when the Green Party went more mainstream in the 2010s, members often struggled to defend some of the more unusual and divisive policies in that document — policies that, if the party had some more vision, discipline, and strategy, may not have ended up in the book. When it comes to election periods, the party's leadership produces a manifesto for that election, which is much more focused and palatable, and generally plays down the main policy book.
All this is to say that the Corbyn-Sultana (Cortana?) party will need more than democracy to win. Strong leadership counts. Marxist scholar David Harvey has criticised anarchism's "fetishization of organisational forms", where maximally democratic decision-making processes become an end in themselves, at the expense of leadership and action. Moreover, with the level of opposition the party will face from the establishment, the party will need to be agile and opportunistic. It cannot afford to hold votes on its position and strategy with respect to every developing situation.
So far all we have really heard about the new party is that it will be radically democratic, and that (at least these initial 600,000 founding) members will have an equal voice in the party's constitution. It may be that I'm arguing against a non-problem here, and the party that forms will have suitable structures in place for strong leadership, strategy, and agility. But we have the example of the Green Party to show that radical democracy can make this a challenge, at least given the current democratic culture that we have in this country.