The second weekend of October saw a major political festival, The World Transformed, in Manchester, England. It was a place where one could see great enthusiasm for radical left-wing politics, but also a disregard for the problems of the eastern EU countries.
The World Transformed political festival has been held regularly since 2016 and opens up a space for discussion about left-wing politics in Britain. It was originally created out of the excitement surrounding Jeremy Corbyn becoming the new leader of the Labour Party. The World Transformed festival was held in parallel with the party’s regular party conference. After Keir Starmer became the new leader of the party [in 2020], the festival struggled with its identity, as most of the organizers fundamentally disagreed with the direction represented by Keir Starmer. In connection with this crisis, public interest in the festival slowly waned and attendance also decreased.
This year, however, it has risen from the ashes again. Above all, it has become completely independent from the Labour Party and is no longer the naughty twin of the party conference. This year’s edition was held in the Hulme district in the wider centre of England’s second largest city, Manchester. In addition, it received a new political impetus when Jeremy Corbyn and the very popular politician Zarah Sultana announced the creation of a new party in the summer. They are calling their party Your Party for now and are to present the new name, structure and operating model together at the party’s inaugural conference this November.
Each of the speakers did not hesitate to criticize American and European imperialism, as well as NATO as its military tool. However, the topic of Russian imperialism, or Chinese imperialism, was almost never mentioned.
But that’s not the only interesting news from the British left. At the beginning of September, the new leader of the Greens was “eco-populist” Zack Polanski, who has a strong mandate from party members to promote a radically left-wing version of green politics and is attracting enormous media interest, which could currently only be compared with the interest in the likely new mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani. The interest in the new leader is so huge that in the latest polls the Greens have the same support as the ruling Labour Party – that is, 15 percent of the vote.
Since Polanski became the new leader, the Greens have also seen massive growth in membership. During the political festival The World Transformed, the party’s membership surpassed the 100,000 mark, making it one of the largest parties in Britain. There is speculation that the Greens now have the same number of members in Britain as the traditional Conservative Party.
The problems with Corbyn’s project
The emerging Your Party has been plagued by disagreements within the leadership of this as-yet-non-existent party for some time. Disputes between Jeremy Corbyn’s associates and Zahra Sultana’s team were evident even during the announcement of the new political project. In July, former Labour Party MP from Coventry Zarah Sultana wrote on her social media that she and Jeremy Corbyn were founding a new political party without consulting anyone beforehand, which caused considerable embarrassment. Something similar happened in September, when Sultana sent a notice to registered Your Party supporters that they could become members of the party for £55 and that the party was starting to function formally. On the same day, just a short while later, Jeremy Corbyn wrote that this was both an unauthorised email and an unauthorised form of membership model and called on supporters to cancel all financial transactions they had sent to the party.
Although Your Party has not yet been formed, there are already a number of controversies surrounding it that need to be properly explained to supporters. However, nothing of the sort has happened so far, and Corbyn and Sultana have only issued a joint statement that the project is continuing and that they are working together to change the political system in Britain. However, the success of the charismatic Green leader is currently perhaps the biggest threat to the new political project under Corbyn and Sultana, and the question is whether British voters have enough patience to wait for the two leaders and their teams to resolve their mutual animosities. Many of these people have instead applied for membership of the Green Party, which has not yet addressed any similar issues and is rising in the election polls.
Cooperation between the greens and the reds?
This dynamic also permeated the political festival The World Transformed. Perhaps the biggest event of the entire festival was the debate between Corbyn and Sultana in the presence of other politicians from European radical left political parties. In addition to these two, the debate was attended by Peter Mertens, Secretary General of the Belgian Workers’ Party, Janis Ehling from Die Linke and Nathalie Oziol from La France Insoumise. The interest in this debate was truly enormous and more than a third of those interested did not even get into the Niamos Center theater hall. The crowds certainly wanted to catch a glimpse of popular British politicians Corbyn and Sultana, but many of them also wanted to hear answers to their questions about the functioning of the emerging party and probably also wanted to know how the politicians intend to resolve their differences.
To the discontent of such visitors, however, the debate did not address this topic at all. Its focus was primarily on how to build a strong political movement in times of increasing influence of the far right across Europe. Although the debate in the completely packed hall was very interesting in many ways, after it ended, a strong aftertaste and skepticism remained as to whether the new party could ever have real political success.
In the evening, a popular pub quiz was held at the same venue, where people competed on their knowledge of British politics, left-wing thinking and pop culture. This pub quiz was surprisingly moderated by the new Green Party leader Zack Polanski, and he once again showed everyone present what his great political talent is. He conducted the game confidently, humorously and promptly for over two hours and showed what exactly studying acting in the United States had brought him. It is worth remembering that in previous years Zarah Sultana moderated the quiz.
This event was followed up the next morning by a discussion between Zack Polanski and Zahra Sultana regarding the possibility of cooperation between the “red” and “green” political currents in British politics. The discussion showed that both parties are open to such cooperation, especially in a majoritarian electoral system, in which there is a great potential for fragmentation of forces. Polanski and Sultana agreed that they would have to proceed in a coordinated manner and in some constituencies they would only field one common candidate, so that the duel between the green and red candidate would not contribute to the victory of the far-right candidates from Reform UK. This debate was, however, very hypothetical, because Sultana and Corbyn’s party does not yet exist and does not even have a name.
There were some heated exchanges between Polanski and Sultana during the debate. For example, Zack Polanski called on Sultana to become a member of the Green Party. Sultana, in turn, accused Polanski of being too benevolent towards both the NATO military alliance and the state of Israel. Polanski rejected both of these attacks as unfounded. The issue of the genocide in Gaza is currently the strongest mobilizing issue in British left-wing politics, and this is also why criticism of the nominally left-wing Prime Minister Keir Starmer is growing. Not only has Starmer not yet taken any fundamental action against the massacre of civilians in Gaza, but his government has even labeled the activist group Palestine Action a terrorist organization and is very uncompromisingly criminalizing its members.
As the festival made clear, left-wing voters in Britain are completely unconcerned with Starmer and the Labour Party. Starmer tried to appeal to right-wing and far-right voters with his tougher rhetoric on migration until he lost a crucial part of his electoral coalition – urban, cosmopolitan left-wing voters. Among them, Labour is no longer reckoned with and they are impatiently waiting for another left-wing alternative.
Ignoring Eastern Europe
However, the threat of a possible electoral victory of the far-right Reform UK led by Nigel Farage in the next parliamentary elections loomed over The World Transformed festival. Politicians, activists and left-wing voters are counting on this eventuality as a very likely scenario. This topic was discussed in almost all panels and discussions as the biggest threat. What is interesting about British left-wing politics, however, is that the answer to the growing power of fascism is not tougher anti-immigration rhetoric as in the case of Keir Starmer or conservative left-wing groups such as the German Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht or the the Czech Republic’s Stačilo!, but, on the contrary, unequivocal support for immigrant communities and the fight against the far right by all possible means.
Most of the debaters expressed the need to build a strong anti-fascist policy for our time, while offering disappointed Labour and Reform UK voters a very clear vision of a policy that will completely transform the way British society has functioned so far. For them, solving the housing crisis, the rising cost of living are essential, but there was also talk of public ownership of key industries and security infrastructure. In short, the prevailing feeling on the British left is that the current system needs to be completely radically transformed and that this is the only possible answer to the rise of the far right to power.
During the debate with Zahra Sultana, Zack Polanski at one point quoted from the poem “British” by Benjamin Zephaniah, which thematizes a multicultural vision of the history and present of Great Britain and speaks of the diverse, colourful and unique identity of British society. It was a very powerful moment, but for Eastern European ears it touched on a problem that kept coming back throughout the weekend.
Zack Polanski talked about how Britain is made up of communities of people from India, Pakistan, the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean and that it is they who create the unique mix that makes Britain Britain. This is certainly a powerful message, but the question remains why people from Eastern Europe were missing from his list and why Eastern Europeans were absent from almost all the debates and panels that I attended at the festival. It is particularly strange with Zack Polanski, as his family fled to Great Britain from Eastern Europe to escape the horrors of the Holocaust.
The question is whether an emerging political movement can afford such a fundamental strategic error. Eastern European immigrants now make up 2.2 million of Britain’s population, and many Britons, including Polanski, have Eastern European roots. It is indeed strange that no one is paying attention to this demographic group, especially when the far right built its Brexit campaign on hatred of people coming to Britain from the eastern countries of the European Union. People from Eastern Europe should have a clear place in the vision of a multicultural Britain.
What will happen to Ukraine?
The debate on the situation in Ukraine was similarly short-sighted. Each of the speakers did not hesitate to criticize American and European imperialism, as well as NATO as its military tool. The topic of Russian imperialism, or Chinese imperialism, was almost completely absent.
It is great that the main theme of the political programme of the emerging Your Party and the Greens is a completely uncompromising rejection of Israel’s genocidal policy and unconditional support for Palestine. But Ukraine, which has been heroically resisting Russian imperialist aggression for over three years, also deserves the same approach. However, events on the eastern border of the European Union are clearly not a British domestic political issue, and in this respect the British radical left is still captive to the logic of the Cold War and the legacy of the horrors of Britain’s imperial past.
Especially in the current situation, when Donald Trump is the unofficial leader of NATO, it is certainly appropriate to reconsider the relationship with the transatlantic military alliance. At the same time, there is a need to talk openly about how left-wing political forces will approach foreign policy. Pacifism and demilitarization are of course a fundamental part of British left-wing politics, but in the current geopolitical situation full of armed conflicts, it is necessary to find a convincing answer to how a potential radical left-wing government will respond.
None of the speakers questioned the right of Palestinians to armed resistance against Israel. The question is why this is a much bigger problem in the case of Ukraine. If the main theme of current left-wing politics is the fight against fascism and the far right, why not lend a helping hand to an Eastern European country that is currently resisting the invasion of the clearly fascist regime of the Russian Federation? Moreover, the vast majority of British society still supports Ukraine in its defensive war, as YouGov data from August this year shows.
These questions somewhat cloud an otherwise very powerful experience from The World Transformed festival, for which we can only envy the British. I have never seen so much enthusiasm for radical left-wing ideas and politics in our country. The World Transformed offered four days full of amazing discussions and panels, including the daily Great Assembly, where fundamental political and strategic issues were discussed en masse and non-hierarchically, and this was also led by the funny and charming journalist Ash Sarkar from Novara Media. The British now face the possibility of two radical left-wing groups entering Parliament – the Greens and Your Party – general frustration and dissatisfaction with the current political situation was felt everywhere. For an Eastern European, however, it was also a clash with what the Western left represents today. Its dismissive attitude towards the peripheries and semi-peripheries of the European continent is unfortunately painful and quite evident.
Originally published in Cech in Alarm. Read the original here. This is a machine translation edited for Left Renewal by Ben Gidley, published with the author’s permission.
Jan Bělíček is a literary critic and journalist. Since the end of 2019, he has been the editor-in-chief of Alarm, which he co-founded in 2013. He writes about literature, culture, but also politics and society. He hosts the podcast Kolaps with Pavel Šplíchal and, together with Eva Klíčová, the literary podcast TL;DR. | [email protected]
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