Former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn announced Thursday he was forming a new political party that will push for a “mass redistribution of wealth and power” and a “free and independent Palestine,” opposing all British arms sales to Israel.
The North Islington MP announced the party alongside fellow independent MP Zarah Sultana, who was suspended by Labour last year after she and several other members of parliament voted to scrap a controversial cap on child benefits.
The two lawmakers said their new left-wing outfit will be called Your Party.
“We will only fix the crises in our society with a mass redistribution of wealth and power,” they said, in a brief statement that called for raising taxes on the wealthy, nationalizing utilities, challenging fossil fuel companies and boosting public housing.
“Meanwhile, millions of people are horrified by the government’s complicity in crimes against humanity. Now, more than ever, we must defend the right to protest against genocide,” it continued, in an apparent oblique reference to the UK’s recent proscription of an anti-Israel activist group as a terror organization, following its attacks on British military sites.
“We believe in the radical idea that all human life has equal value. That is why we will keep demanding an end to all arms sales to Israel, and the only path to peace: a free and independent Palestine,” they said.
The announcement came as UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who has sought to pull Labour to the center since succeeding Corbyn as leader, faces growing calls within his party to recognize a Palestinian state.
Both Corbyn and Sultana have been accused of antisemitism in their comments about the war in Gaza, ever since the Hamas terror group’s October 7, 2023, attack in Israel ignited the conflict.
The former Labour leader was slow to explicitly condemn the atrocities by Hamas, and initially refused to call the group — whose members once thanked him for his “support and solidarity with the Palestinian people” — a “terror group,” or to advocate its deposition as the de facto government of Gaza.
Since then, Corbyn has called for a total arms embargo on Israel as it battles Hamas and seeks to return its citizens taken captive during the 2023 invasion.
Prior to the current war, during his tenure as Labour leader, Jewish groups accused Corbyn of allowing a massive surge in antisemitism within the party’s ranks.
He drew criticism for his own past actions, including: initially endorsing a mural that appeared to show an antisemitic caricature; authoring a glowing foreword to a book that claims Jews control global financial systems; calling terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah “friends” when inviting members for a parliamentary meeting in 2009; and attending a ceremony that honored the terrorists behind the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre.
In 2020, a UK government investigation found in Labour under Corbyn “a culture within the party which, at best, did not do enough to prevent antisemitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it.”
The party ousted Corbyn after he responded to the report by saying that the problem of antisemitism had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons.”
Sultana, for her part, said in since-deleted social media posts from 2015 that she would celebrate the deaths of former UK prime minister Tony Blair, former US president George W. Bush and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. She also wrote that she supported “violent resistance” by Palestinians and that Zionism is a racist ideology.