A FORMER Labour MP has announced she has quit the party and said she will set up a new one with Jeremy Corbyn.
Zarah Sultana – who had the Labour whip suspended last year after voting to remove the two-child cap – said she was resigning from Sir Keir Starmer’s party and would “co-lead the founding of a new party” with the ex-Labour leader.
Both have been vocal campaigners against the UK's involvement in Israel's bombardment of Gaza, and highly critical of Labour's direction under Sir Keir Starmer's leadership.
Corbyn is yet to confirm the move.
He is currently working with an informal group of independent MPs, named the Independent Alliance, but had hinted recently at moving towards a more traditional party format with them.
Recent polling by More In Common suggested that a new Corbyn-led party would eat into Labour support and pick up as much as 10% of votes in a General Election.
The poll most notably suggested such a party would finish first among 18 to 24-year-olds, on 32%.
In a statement posted on X, Sultana, who represents Coventry South, said that the project would also involve “other independent MPs, campaigners and activists across the country”.
She said that “Westminster is broken but the real crisis is deeper” and the “two-party system offers nothing but managed decline and broken promises”.
She added: “A year ago I was suspended by the Labour Party for voting to abolish the two-child benefit cap and lift 400,000 children out of poverty. I’d do it again. I voted against scrapping winter fuel payments for pensioners. I’d do it again. Now, the Government wants to make disabled people suffer; they just can’t decide how much.”
She urged people to “join us”.
Meanwhile, Govanhill writer and poet Jim Monaghan wrote on Twitter/X that he is part of the "interim Scottish Secretariat" of the group.
"It's on," he wrote. "Some of us have been holding on to this information as things have developed.
"I am a member of the new party and part of the interim Scottish 'Secretariat'. Let's talk, let's build. Another country is possible."
Sultana was one of seven MPs who had the Labour whip suspended last summer when they supported an amendment to the King’s Speech which related to the two-child benefit cap.
Four of the seven had the whip restored earlier this year but Sultana was not among them.
Corbyn led Labour from 2015 to April 2020, stepping down after the party’s loss at the 2019 General Election.
He was suspended from Labour in 2020 after he refused to fully accept the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s findings that the party broke equality law when he was in charge, and said antisemitism had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons”.
He was blocked from standing for Labour at last year’s General Election and expelled in the spring of 2024 after announcing he would stand as an independent candidate in his Islington North constituency, which he won with a majority of more than 7000.
