ZARAH SULTANA’S announcement on co-leading the founding of a new party with Jeremy Corbyn will be welcomed across much of the left.

It does not come out of the blue. Work to bring together a socialist election-fighting machine around the former Labour leader has proceeded for months.

It’s a response both to the Labour government’s appalling anti-working class and pro-war policies and to the police regime within the party that leaves little room for dissent inside it.

The ban on peaceful protest group Palestine Action as “terrorists” and the prosecutions of peace movement leaders show that police regime is being extended across society.

Sultana’s announcement follows her speech denouncing the Palestine Action ban, and that context is important.

We need voices in Parliament who will speak up against Britain’s forced march towards authoritarianism and war. We need Labour MPs who support cuts at home and genocide abroad to face electoral pressure from the left. We need somewhere for furious and disenfranchised working-class voters to go that is not Reform UK.

All that means we should welcome the emergence of a left alliance around Corbyn, by far the highest profile socialist in the country and one who has an ability to inspire people which is vanishingly rare among today’s politicians.

That does not mean dismissing the significance of the revolt by Labour MPs that gutted Starmer’s disability cuts this week. Polls showing Labour support has collapsed faster in its first year than that for any government since John Major’s show Starmer is on the ropes.

Labour MPs’ growing willingness to challenge the government must be sustained and encouraged. It should not be counterposed to the formation of a new left alliance, in an endless retread of debates about whether socialists should or should not be in the Labour Party.

The hand of the left within Labour would be strengthened if the right-wing leadership had to worry about electoral challenges from the left.

Nor should those ready to criticise Sultana’s decision ignore the reality that she was suspended from Labour for taking a correct and principled decision to vote against retaining the Tory two-child benefit cap, and that unlike a majority of colleagues suspended at the same time, she has not had the whip restored nor did it seem plausible that she ever would.

Like Corbyn before her, she has been driven out of the party: the question facing those in that position, especially if they have the profile and platform of a seat in Parliament, is whether to try to organise outside it collectively or operate indefinitely as independents. For socialists the former is surely preferable.

We should not get ahead of ourselves. Organisational disputes over the shape of any new alliance, even whether it will be a political party in the traditional sense, remain unresolved. There is no programme or even outline statement of principles.

Nor can such a project be seen, as some predecessors hoped to be, as a refounded or replacement Labour. Trade union interest in electoral challenges to Labour is even weaker than under Tony Blair: this will not be a mass party of the organised working class in that image. Rather it should be seen in the context of a fragmenting two-party system and the more complex electoral landscape that creates.

And any hope of success in influencing Britain’s political direction rests on not just replicating the politics of the Corbyn years but learning the lessons, too.

The gulf between the political left and huge swathes of the working class that became so visible over Brexit has not gone away, and the need for a sharper, class-conscious socialist and anti-imperialist politics stripped of liberal illusions is urgent.

That is not a politics which will be built by one new party but a project for socialists and communists across the movement.