Left MP Zarah Sultana yesterday quit the Labour Party and committed herself to the launch of a new party of the left.

Her move came shortly after a meeting of the organising committee for the new party voted to ask Ms Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn to act as their co-leaders.

Today Jeremy Corbyn congratulated Ms Sultana on the decision.

Four separate sources told the Morning Star that the vote for co-leadership was “overwhelming.”  Both Ms Sultana and Mr Corbyn were among the 25 attendees.

Those supporting Ms Sultana and Mr Corbyn as co-leaders included the four pro-Gaza independent MPs as well as several of the key independent candidates who made a powerful impact at last year’s general election.

In her statement, the Coventry South MP said: “Today, after 14 years, I’m resigning from the Labour Party.

“Jeremy Corbyn and I will co-lead the founding of a new party, with other independent MPs, campaigners and activists across the country.

“Westminster is broken but the real crisis is deeper. Just 50 families now own more wealth than half the UK population. Poverty is growing, inequality is obscene and the two-party system offers nothing but managed decline and broken promises.”

Mr Corbyn wrote on X: "Real change is coming.

"Our country needs to change direction, now.  Congratulations to Zarah Sultana on her principled decision to leave the Labour Party. I am delighted she will help us build a real alternative.

"The democratic foundations of a new kind of political party will soon take shape.

"Together we can create something that is desperately missing from our broken political system: hope."

Ms Sultana was suspended from the Labour parliamentary whip with six other MPs for voting against keeping the cruel two-child benefit cap a year ago. Four had the whip restored earlier this year but she remains suspended, alongside Apsana Begum and John McDonnell.

There have been no indications that the Labour whips would ever readmit Ms Sultana, who says in her statement that she would “do it again,” noting that she also voted against the cut in the winter fuel allowance and opposed the recent failed bid to slash benefits for disabled people.

Slamming Nigel Farage, Ms Sultana added that “a billionaire-backed grifter is leading the polls, because Labour has completely failed to improve people’s lives. And across the political establishment, from Farage to Starmer, they smear people of conscience trying to stop a genocide in Gaza as terrorists.

“But the truth is clear: this government is an active participant in genocide. And the British people oppose it.”

She said money is needed for “public services, not forever wars. In 2029 the choice will be stark: socialism or barbarism,” channelling Rosa Luxemburg.

Appealing for support for the new party, Sultana says “billionaires already have three parties fighting for them. It’s time the rest of us had one.”

The vote at the new party’s organising committee is the latest step in the tortured road to creating a socialist alternative to the left of Labour.

The committee also had before it a paper calling for Mr Corbyn to be the sole leader of such a party, on an interim basis, supported by un-named deputies, among other proposals.

The meeting preferred a combination of Mr Corbyn’s experience and peerless campaigning record and Ms Sultana’s youth and combativity.

Mr Corbyn himself has called for the formation of a new party publicly, and with increasing urgency, in several public speeches and media interviews lately.

He told ITV’s Robert Peston on Thursday: “There is a thirst for an alternative view to be put. That grouping will come together. 

“And there will be an alternative put there which is about a society that deals with poverty, inequality, and a foreign policy that’s based on peace rather than war.”

Asked if he would serve as leader of the new alternative, he said: “I’m here to serve the people in the way I’ve always tried to do.”

Any leadership decision is understood to be on an interim basis, pending a new party establishing democratic structures.

Prominent campaigner Andrew Feinstein, who contested Sir Keir Starmer’s Camden constituency last year and helped cut the prime minister’s majority in half, announced the news to wild cheers at a left rally. 

The initiative undoubtedly taps into considerable pent-up support for a new party, which polls suggest would start with the support of 10 per cent of the electorate.

Its formation still remains in the future, however, with much work to be done to get it ready for launch.

It will already be a spectre haunting Sir Keir’s Downing Street, since its existence complicates, to say the least, the prevailing strategy of pitching to woo Reform-inclined voters, and opens up the danger of a war on many fronts for the beleaguered government.

John McDonnell said he regretted Ms Sultana’s departure from Labour. 

“The people running Labour at the moment need to ask themselves why a young, articulate, talented, extremely dedicated socialist feels she now has no home in the Labour Party and has to leave,” he said.