Will Corbyn and Sultana be spoilers for the SNP, or will they pave the way to the Promised Land?

My attitude to the prospect of a new Corbyn-led or Corbyn-founded or Corbyn-backed party of the left has been "I'll believe it when I see it", and in a strange way that hasn't changed as a result of the announcements of the last couple of days, which seem to have been more about individuals jostling for position before the launch of a party rather than getting on with the actual business of setting a party up.  However, presumably the talk has gone sufficiently far by this stage that some sort of new party, and one that will have a parliamentary presence, is highly likely to emerge in some form.  The only thing that might stop it would be if Keir Starmer is forced out of office in the near future and replaced by someone from the soft left, who then seeks reconciliation with the Corbynites.

We sometimes fall into the trap of thinking of events like this potential breakaway as taking place in another country and as being only of indirect interest to Scotland.  But in fact there was an opinion poll a couple of weeks ago that suggested the SNP was one of three parties that would suffer if a Corbyn-led party is set up, with the others being Labour and the Greens.

Hypothetical voting intentions if a Corbyn-led "populist" left party is formed (More In Common):

Reform UK 27% (-)

Labour 20% (-3)

Conservatives 20% (-)

Liberal Democrats 14% (-)

Corbyn Party 10% (n/a)

Greens 5% (-4)

SNP 2% (-1)

In this case the percentage changes are calculated from the standard voting intentions numbers in the same poll.  Now, to put it in perspective, the SNP vote in the Scottish subsample only drops from 28% to 24%, and that's based on a sample of only a couple of hundred respondents.  So the apparent appeal of Corbyn to SNP voters may just be statistical noise.  On the other hand, the Corbyn party is on 18% in the Scottish subsample, and it's hard to believe that a party of the left could perform anything like that well in Scotland without harming the SNP to at least some extent.

I'm reminded of walking around Glasgow in the days leading up to the 2017 general election and overhearing people spontaneously talking about how excited they were about Corbyn and how he was persuading them to turn back to Labour.  Those were almost certainly people who had voted SNP in 2015 and Yes in 2014.  So we'd be naive not to think that the new party could have broad appeal in Scotland, although the flipside of the coin is that Labour performed extremely poorly in Scotland under Corbyn in the 2016 Holyrood election and the 2019 general election.  Perhaps it was only when he had momentum in England that Scots thought he was worth taking a look at.

There was a write-up of the poll in the New Statesman with a very odd headline dismissing Corbyn as a "phantom" menace.  That didn't tally up with the contents of the article, and it certainly didn't tally up with the actual results of the poll, which suggest Corbyn would take one-third of the combined Labour/new party vote.  That makes him a figure of considerable significance, not the fringe irrelevance that London establishment folk like to portray him as.  And taking three percentage points off Labour could easily be enough to change the outcome of the next general election.

But to actually win or prosper in that general election, rather than to be just a disruptor, Corbyn will need more than 10% of the vote.  And there's one obvious way he might get it, which is by going into an electoral pact with the Greens.  Such an alliance could be greater than the sum of its parts, and might just be strong enough to overtake Labour in some polls during this parliament.  That would be a huge psychological moment, and would be difficult for centrists within the Labour party to wrap their heads around.  There's some speculation that Zack Polanski might be open to a pact if he becomes Green leader, although whether he'd be able to sell it to his party is another matter.  If he can't, the Greens and the new party might cancel each other out and leave the left in an even worse position than they currently find themselves, although it's interesting that the poll implies Corbyn could take votes away from Labour that the Greens currently can't seem to reach.

As Donald Rumsfeld might put it, here are some of the other 'known unknowns' about the new party, ie. 'things that we know that we do not know' - 

* Will other Labour MPs, with or without the whip, cross the floor and throw in their lot with Corbyn and Sultana?  It's hard to imagine Corbyn and his former Shadow Chancellor being in different parties from each other, but it might well work out that way due to John McDonnell's cultural loyalty to Labour.  But I speculated a few weeks ago that if there was even the slimmest of slim chances of an early general election before 2028, it would probably depend upon the partial disintegration of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and even a modest number of MP defections to the Corbyn party could conceivably end up looking like the first step in that process of disintegration (although it would almost certainly have to eventually involve right-wing Labour MPs searching for a very different sort of alternative political home, maybe even in Reform UK).

* Will George Galloway and the Workers Party want to join the new Corbyn project?  And perhaps more to the point, will the people around Corbyn want Galloway now that he seems to have lost the plot completely and started chasing the openly racist vote?  He always claimed he was talking about the Iraqi people, and not Saddam Hussein, when he "saluted your indefatigability", but he didn't mention at the time that he wanted the UK borders closed to all indefatigable people without pale skin.

* If Zarah Sultana foresees the new party having a conventional leadership structure with herself (or herself and Corbyn) at the top of that structure, will all the Independence Alliance MPs still be happy to join up?  They've got very used to having full parity of esteem with Corbyn in their current set-up.

* Is it possible that the new party could take a slightly more enlightened stance on Scottish independence than most London parties do?  Outright support for independence is far too much to hope for, clearly, but is there a chance of a neutral position, and perhaps no closing of the door on a referendum?  Corbyn would be personally sympathetic to at least being neutral, I suspect.  As Labour leader he indulged in plenty of Nat-bashing, and even trotted out the hoary old "you can't eat flags" line, but I suspect that was one of the compromises he felt he had to make (along with campaigning for Remain) to shore up his position.  My guess is that a London party will always revert to type and go Brit Nat.  But who knows - a Corbyn/Polanski alliance open to an indyref and polling at 15-20% might just be the sort of black swan event that unexpectedly opens the door for independence.

Incidentally, I was on Facebook last night and I saw that a friend of the family had changed his profile picture to a photo of Zarah Sultana, overlaid with a quote from her Twitter announcement yesterday.  She really has become a folk hero for a lot of people in a very short period of time, and the new party will be blessed to have her as an alternative figurehead if Corbyn, who has always seemed to be in two minds about whether he wants to be a party leader again, opts for a lesser role.  I've got to be honest, I'm a big fan of hers too, and if I was a voter in England I'm pretty sure I'd be thinking this is the most exciting thing to happen in politics for years.  Give me a Sultana over a Swinson any day of the week.

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