Oliver Eagleton’s Sidecar interview with Zarah Sultana (the third instalment in the blog’s ongoing series, published under the title The Alternative) is not a party manifesto but a conversation. Its framing matters. Eagleton introduces Sultana as co-architect of the nascent left party forming in the wreckage of Labour, and his questions set the co-ordinates: how to structure a new party, how to balance parliamentary and extra-parliamentary work, how to respond to the far right, and how to avoid repeating Corbynism’s mistakes. Sultana’s answers are often sharp, particularly on Labour’s complicity in genocide and austerity, but the interview as a whole reveals more about the limits of this new project than about its potential.
What emerges is less a revolutionary rupture than a reformist repetition. The horizon remains parliament, electoral intervention, and a shopping-list of redistributive policies. There is no reckoning with the class character of the state, no transitional method linking immediate demands to the conquest of power, and no recognition that the dominant class will not be tamed by better MPs or improved party democracy. Eagleton’s questions draw out these contradictions, but also naturalise them, as if the real debate is about form rather than content, the structure of the party rather than the substance of power.
The ghost of Corbynism
Sultana is admirably clear on Corbynism’s failures: capitulation to the IHRA, triangulation on Brexit, compromise on reselection, refusal to fight back against the state and the media. She speaks of dysfunction, bullying, and excessive centralisation. It’s a candid assessment, but what she draws from it is not the necessity of a revolutionary break, but the need for a more democratic, pluralistic, joyful reformism. The ghost of Corbynism remains: electoralism dressed up as movementism.
The problem is not simply one of better organisation. Corbynism collapsed because it sought to govern through the bourgeois state rather than against it, and imagined it could compromise its way past the dominant class. Sultana sees the wreckage but proposes to rebuild on the same foundations.
This is not a peculiarly British story. From the Popular Front governments of France and Spain in the 1930s, to Allende’s Chile in the 1970s, to Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, the same pattern recurs: left governments or parties that believed the state could be bent to their will, only to be broken by the state itself. Corbynism was simply the latest iteration of this cycle.
Popular front logic
Eagleton presses her on Reform UK and the far right. Sultana insists the new party must fight Farage, must oppose racist nationalism, and she is right. But her frame is one of stopping the right through electoral counterweight, rather than smashing the conditions that produce it. The implication (unchallenged in this interview) is a politics that risks collapsing into the popular front: uniting against the far right with anyone who will stand alongside you, including elements of the establishment itself.
This is the trap that has recurred across the twentieth century: strategies of “unity” that bind the working class to its enemies in the name of anti-fascism, disarming revolution in the very moment of its necessity. Sultana calls Starmer’s Labour “Reform-lite.” In truth, Labour is not a weaker copy of Farageism but the main political instrument of British capitalism, complicit in genocide abroad and austerity at home. The danger of the interview’s framing is to obscure this fact, presenting Labour as a passive echo rather than as the active arm of the dominant class.
The point is sharper still if we recall that the British state’s function is imperial. Its role in Gaza today, its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan yesterday, its long record of colonial violence: these are not policy aberrations but the essence of the project. Any new party that imagines it can ‘pressure’ Labour from the left while leaving this imperial role intact is fated to reproduce the same paralysis.
The Mirage of Co-Leadership
In Eagleton’s interview, the idea of co-leadership (with Sultana and Corbyn at the helm) is presented as both symbolic and strategic: it undermines patriarchal norms, shares power, and is meant to be more representative of the movements it springs from. Yet I remain unconvinced that co-leadership actually delivers on those promises.
History shows that dual leadership often dissolves into imbalance or paralysis. One figure inevitably dominates, or tensions arise when the two diverge. It doesn’t necessarily deepen democracy; it can merely double the personality-driven politics at the top, while distancing leadership from accountability.
A useful contemporary example comes from the Green Party of England and Wales. For decades, its leadership model resisted hierarchy, favouring a shared leadership ethos aligned with grassroots democracy. Yet, in the current 2025 leadership election, Zack Polanski has instead stood as a single candidate, breaking sharply with tradition. His candidacy underscores a recognition that a solo leader might better project clarity and coherence. Especially in fast-moving political terrain.
This matters because if a new left party leans into co-leadership merely as a gesture of inclusivity, it risks becoming symbolic rather than functional. The real question is not how many leaders you have, but whether they are accountable. Without the right to recall, without limits on pay, without a structure rooted in the membership, the number at the top makes little difference.
Parliament and the Trap of Figurehead Politics
Sultana is at her sharpest when she reflects on the dangers of small parties with limited parliamentary presence. A few MPs, however militant their intentions, quickly get lost in the machinery of Westminster: the committees, the timetables, the etiquette of respectability. Detached from movements, they become professional lobbyists in red rosettes. She insists instead on MPs as tribunes of struggle. The need to be visible on picket lines, at anti-fascist mobilisations, rooted in community campaigns. Without that grounding, she says, the left risks either capitulation or hollow figurehead politics.
This is true, and it matters. Britain’s electoral system is ruthless: a left party with half a dozen MPs is structurally irrelevant in the Commons. Its real strength could only ever lie outside parliament, in its ability to mobilise, organise, and sharpen the struggles of the working class. The danger, which the interview never quite acknowledges, is that once you centre parliament at all you invite the gravitational pull of its bureaucracy. The record is there for anyone who wants to see it. Joe Higgins in Ireland, George Galloway in Britain: authentic tribunes, capable of extraordinary interventions in parliament, but their parties never grew beyond them. Once those figures were defeated or drifted, the projects withered. Without movements beneath them, MPs cannot anchor a party; they are swallowed by the very bureaucracy they seek to challenge.
Sultana contrasts the “authentic” MPs (Corbyn, McDonnell, Abbott) with the inauthentic careerists. But authenticity is not a guarantee against absorption. Corbyn himself was once the archetype of the authentic MP, rooted in community struggles. When leadership came, authenticity proved no defence against the pressures of the state and the Labour machine. Unless the movements themselves are organised to hold their representatives accountable, and unless those representatives understand themselves as replaceable instruments rather than indispensable leaders, the cycle will repeat.
The missing element here is the base itself. Without rooted strength in workplaces, unions, tenants’ organisations, and anti-racist and anti-war movements, MPs remain free-floating. A revolutionary party would build those institutions as its foundation, not as an afterthought.
Contention and Concessions
One of the more revealing moments in Eagleton’s interview comes when Sultana says:
“I have no qualms, for instance, about advocating a resolutely anti-racist and pro-trans socialist programme, even if parts of that sounds contentious to some people.”
It’s a strange formulation. Why should anti-racism and trans liberation be treated as contentious? These are not cultural add-ons but preconditions for working-class unity. A politics that brackets them as optional, or accepts them as divisive, already abandons the possibility of a unified movement.
What Sultana is doing here is clear enough. She is pushing back against the economism that reduces socialism to wages and prices while quietly accommodating the culture war. She is also resisting the Starmerite drift towards triangulating with racism and transphobia. But the way she phrases it shows the limits of her project. To speak of these commitments as “contentious” is to admit that in a broad party they will always be treated as negotiable, subject to compromise. That is not a strength, it is a concession to backward prejudices in the name of holding a coalition together.
The result is that what ought to be foundational is presented instead as brave but divisive. And once you frame things that way, you invite exactly the retreat you claim to resist: “unity” purchased at the expense of those most oppressed. That isn’t solidarity; it’s surrender dressed up as inclusivity. A socialist programme that does not treat anti-racism and trans liberation as non-negotiable is no socialist programme at all.
The missing programme
The interview highlights policies: free public transport, childcare, taxing oil companies, ending military overspend. These resonate, but they amount to a social-democratic wish list, not a programme of struggle. Nothing links these demands to the question of power, or to the expropriation of the dominant class. There is no recognition that the capitalist state, with its police, courts, and army, cannot be captured and repurposed but must be confronted and dismantled.
The Sidecar format itself flattens this distinction: the questions orbit around “party structures,” “co-leadership,” and “parliamentary vs extra-parliamentary” balance, rather than the fundamental question of how to break the power of capital. The result is an interview that feels radical in tone but reformist in content.
Sectarian capture
What neither Eagleton nor Sultana directly address is the danger of sectarian capture. But anyone with experience of Britain’s left knows the risk. The Socialist Party, the SWP, TUSC, fragments of Stalinism, and remnants of the Labour left all circle such initiatives like vultures. Their record is not one of building class power but of bureaucratic manoeuvre, control of committees, and parasitism on broader movements.
Sultana speaks of bullying and anonymous smears already dogging the project. This is not incidental: broad parties without a clear programme become battlegrounds for sects, who exploit the vacuum of clarity to entrench themselves. The fate of Respect, of the Socialist Alliance, of countless “unity” initiatives should serve as warning. Without clarity, members drift away disillusioned, while the apparatuses of the sects remain.
The revolutionary alternative
A serious left project must take the energy Sultana represents and turn it towards something more than Corbynism without Labour. That means insisting (against the drift of the interview) that:
- Capitalism and imperialism are the enemy, not just Farage or Starmer.
- The state is not a neutral terrain but the organised power of the dominant class, to be dismantled, not democratised.
- Elections are a tribune, not a strategy; a revolutionary party contests them to expose the system, not to manage it.
- Transitional demands — sliding scale of hours and wages, expropriation of landlords and arms firms, workers’ control of production — must connect immediate struggles to the need for power.
- Workers’ democracy — elected and recallable representatives, officials on a worker’s wage, full rights of factions and tendencies — is indispensable, not an optional add-on.
Without such clarity, the path sketched in The Alternative leads not to rupture but to repetition: Syriza without Greece, Podemos without Spain, Corbynism without Labour.
Conclusion
Eagleton’s interview, for all its promise, reveals the danger of mistaking disillusion with Labour for a revolutionary moment. Sultana has taken a brave step in breaking from the party of genocide and austerity. But unless The Alternative becomes more than a lively broad-left party with good intentions, it will be captured, compromised, or broken.
The crisis of leadership is not solved by new faces or new structures. It will only be solved when the working class has an organisation rooted in its own struggles (industrial, social, and internationalist) that can confront and defeat the capitalist state. A party of good intentions will not survive contact with the state. Without revolutionary clarity, The Alternative is not the answer but the latest variation on the problem.
