THE enormous interest in a new socialist political party earlier this year is one of the reasons why independent MP Zarah Sultana decided not to join the Greens, she told The World Transformed (TWT) Festival 2025 on Saturday.

Hundreds squeezed into Hulme’s Ascension Church to hear Ms Sultana, Green Party leader Zack Polanski, Abubakr Nanabawa from The Muslim Vote campaign and Manchester city councillor Amna Abdullatif discuss a possible red-green alliance at the next general election.  

In her speech, Ms Sultana said there will have to be co-operation between Your Party, as her embryonic party is currently known, and the Greens, but this will have to be decided democratically by the membership.

“We don’t have identical voter bases,” she said. “That is an important thing to know. And that’s a strength. There is enough room for both of us on the left, and we have to work together.”

“There will be places where the Greens are strong and it will make sense for us not to stand. We have to be strategic,” she said.

“There will be places like Holborn and St Pancras, where Andrew Feinstein is polling well, and seats in the north-east where Jamie Driscoll has a majority, where it makes no sense for the Greens to stand to divide the vote.

“And we saw that plainly with Leanne Mohamad, a British-Palestinian woman who could have unseated the ‘heir to Blair’ in Wes Streeting if it wasn’t for the Green Party. I know that Zack has said that policy will change — and it has to if we are to keep Nigel Farage out of Number 10.

“How that co-operation works obviously will be decided collectively and democratically by our respected members. But that’s the kind of politics we’re talking about. That’s grassroots led, not top down.”

Mr Polanski took a more cautious approach to a possible alliance, saying the next election was “too far away to say” definitively and that we didn’t yet know “what Your Party is going to stand for.”

But, he added: “I can’t imagine a scenario, personally, where we wouldn’t at least be talking” about an alliance. “We will definitely be talking and making those kinds of informal arrangements.”

Mr Polanski joked that since becoming Green Party leader, he’d been hanging out with Ms Sultana more than his own boyfriend — and added that he would welcome her and Jeremy Corbyn into his party.

Later Ms Sultana said: “There will be some people who say: ‘Oh, why don’t you just join the Greens? You and Jeremy shouldn’t bother with this socialist left-wing endeavour and just stop what you’re doing.”

“But 800,000 people expressed an interest when we first launched Your Party — which I also think should change its name and be called the Left Party, but at the end of the day, the members all decide what it’s called.

“And that tells you that there is an appetite for an explicitly socialist mass-movement party, and that’s really important.”