Corbyn's New Party for Britain's Disillusioned Left

Jeremy Corbyn's launch of a new party to represent disillusioned left-wing voters, titled 'Your Party,' arrives at a time when immigration and economic issues are at the forefront of British society. The context of his message is stark when compared to Keir Starmer's Labour, which scrapped the Conservatives' plan to send migrants to Rwanda but embraced a 'tough' outlook on immigration. Indeed, they pledged to end hotels for asylum seekers and increase enforcement for migrants seeking jobs. Police action against far-right protests against migrant accommodations is spreading, and police-escorted standoffs have become normalized among the administration. Internationally, human rights groups are warning of attacks on free speech after the government proscribed Palestine Action as a 'terrorist group,' making support of them the same as supporting groups like ISIS, because they committed non-violent acts of vandalism. In this climate of left-wing policy not being fully implemented by the Labour government, Corbyn represents a growing interest among voters, particularly in defending human rights against punitive migration policies and in ending the social hardship that many voters face.

In previous years, immigration policy from the Labour Party has oscillated, but party elites have long been fearful of anti-immigration right-wing backlash. As a result, Starmer did try to appease left-wing voters by promising a 'rules-based asylum system,' but to appease right-wing businesses elites, the government has promised to end hotels housing refugees with no place to stay. In practice, the policy on immigration has not shifted significantly since Sunak's Conservative administration.

In Jacobin, Corbyn illustrates his popular message that caused more than 700,000 British citizens to register for the party in under a week, making it the biggest political party by number of members. For context, the Labour Party(as the second biggest) has 309,000. In the piece, Corbyn explains what many left-wing Brits are feeling, saying that Labour is 'paving the way for fascism' with their anti-migrant policy: publicly posting detention footage, causing a cultural stigma against those seeking asylum, and creating a culture centered around fear. Refugees who are exercising their legal right to flee conflict and contribute to the economy are being attacked. Specifically, he frames his new party as the vehicle to resist the 'slippery slope' where parties once considered centrists incrementally start to normalize authoritarian policy. In essence, when more 'moderate' parties start to embrace more extreme policy, the ideas of 'right and left' get skewed.

In the British 'majoritarian system' of voting, a dominant party can quickly entrench its frames of politics, especially on security issues, across executive, legislative, and policing related practices. This comes in the context of the UK's post-Brexit media, with its fixation on punitive gestures in the press. A government can talk like a labor importer but legislate like a border hawk: the inconsistency is the problem for voters. Under Labour, voters feel that the system has led to no strategy for integration, stalled systems, and a weaker economy. Politically, Labour's shift to the right on border control has fractured its voting control, opening space not only for Reform on the right, but also for hundreds of thousands of voters to switch to the new Corbyn party on the left, especially in urban and university settings where civil liberties concerns are more likely to be important to voters. Economically, as well, migrants are significant contributors to the British economy, and many voters feel disenfranchised with the policy of less migration post-Brexit, feeling that it has not allowed for substantial potential GDP growth.

While Britain may be a 'democracy,' elements of criminalizing protest and increasing police presence in immigrant communities have started to migrate in a political system that, on paper, should allow for free expression. Corbyn's warning in the Jacobin article is less about imminent change in the UK, but about the incremental borrowing of illiberal tools worldwide that is seeping into British politics. Corbyn's policy is both a critique and a prediction: that a humane, pro-work asylum policy can be electorally viable if someone speaks to the economic situation without scaremongering. Labour still has the chance to pivot: caring more about processing, integration, and growth rather than policing and attacks on human rights. But if it continues in its borrowed far-right strategies, it risks validating a world that makes everyone feel less free.