Zarah Sultana has resigned from the UK’s Labour Party after 14 years to lead a new party with former Labour leader and independent MP Jeremy Corbyn.

“Today, after 14 years, I’m resigning from the Labour Party,” she said in a statement on Thursday evening local time.

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

Sultana cited the Starmer government’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza as a reason for leaving, saying that “this government is an active participant in genocide. And the British people oppose it.”

  • frankPodmore@slrpnk.netM
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    20 hours ago

    I always call out this conspiracist stuff when the right do it, so I’ll do exactly the same when it come from the left.

    As @[email protected] put it, ‘either those reports are true or Corbyn went radio silent on the announcement of his new party and let there be room for this speculation.’ In fact, both sides are true: the party has been ‘launched’ without a coherent structure, leadership or even a name, and Corbyn has chosen to say nothing about it. These are facts. There’s no smear involved.

    • geneva_convenience@lemmy.mlOP
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      19 hours ago

      Corbyn is not silent though

      Jeremy Corbyn outlines plan for new political party and pledges: ‘I am here to serve the people’

      I’m not blaming you but the “journalists” in this one. We must not forget the tremendous “antisemite” smear campaign they launched against Corbyn because he opposed Israel.

      Right wing tabloid TheDailyMail is already going in full force to generate “speculations of leftist infighting”

      We see the BBC staff literally saying that their news favours Israel. TheGuardian is slightly better but has proven for an entire year after October 7 that they will join a media blitz for Israel. And they too smeared Corbyn. Guardian writers like Owen Jones who smeared Corbyn in the past now admit that they were wrong to do so and that Corbyn was right.

      Surely you’re not going to say that the organized media smear campaign against Corbyn was a “conspiracy”.

      • frankPodmore@slrpnk.netM
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        19 hours ago

        This is not inconsistent with anything I said yesterday or, indeed, this morning.

        There was not an organised media smear campaign against Corbyn. ‘The media’ is not in any sense a group of people who said ‘Let’s all agree to tell lies about Corbyn’, which is what an organised smear campaign would have to look like. The media has always been persistently unfair, to the level of insanity, about everyone to the left of the Conservatives, but there’s nothing organised about it, it’s just powerful people representing their own interests.

            • geneva_convenience@lemmy.mlOP
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              18 hours ago

              Corbyn opposed Israel

              Corbyn got smeared as an antisemite for opposing Israel

              BBC staff now literally says they’re forced to do pro-Israel PR

              Is there a common theme here?

              • frankPodmore@slrpnk.netM
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                15 hours ago

                No. You’ve taken one thing - the BBC pressurises their journalists to cover Israel positively, which I agree is true - and assumed it means a second thing - that (1) the BBC (2) smeared Corbyn (3) as an antisemite (numbers here because these are three separate claims that you haven’t justified, within the broader claim you also haven’t justified). You’ve then additionally taken that bundle of unproven claims as evidence of another different claim: that ‘the media’ as a whole, i.e., not just the BBC, ‘smeared Corbyn’ because he ‘opposed Israel’.

                With respect, this is exactly what I meant about conspiracist thinking: you’re taking loosely related ideas (some of them true, some of them not) and bundled them together to claim a vaguely defined malevolent entity (‘the media’) is out to get someone. This is conspiracist thinking! That’s what that is!

                • geneva_convenience@lemmy.mlOP
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                  13 hours ago

                  So you do not believe the claim that the BBC is spreading pro Israel propaganda? I’m saying the media has always been doing this. They’re simply going full mask off these days. And it’s proving their political motivation on smearing Corbyn in the past.

                  Not every conspiracy is false. And this one is fully undeniable. It’s like you’re so convinced that it can’t be true that you won’t believe it no matter how much evidence is presented. BBC is doing literal Goebbels tier propaganda for a literal genocide for Israel and I’m somehow supposed to believe that this is all a conspiracy