The announcement that a new party of the left will be formed by former Labour MPs Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn could be a chance to re-orientate and re-group a Scottish left that has been left scrambled by more than a decade of political turmoil. In 2015, when Jeremy Corbyn shocked the country by becoming leader of the Labour party, the Scottish left – fresh out of the 2014 independence referendum – became clearly delineated between its pro-independence and ‘Corbynista’ wings, with little prospect or wish for unity.
A decade on, with the independence movement demoralised and Corbynism defeated and pushed out of Labour, there is little reason for the old dividing lines to continue to act as a block to building a new left party.
The Scottish political scene is in dire need of fresh impetus. The addition of the Greens to the Scottish Government from 2021-2024 did nothing to turn around the SNP’s almost two decades of ‘progressive neoliberal’ administration from Holyrood. As is typical for administrations that have survived in power for too long, the SNP has become an entrenched establishment tied deeply into Edinburgh-based networks of corporate lobbying and patronage, increasingly distant from it’s base and completely exhausted of new ideas.
Holyrood has not put a dent into Scotland’s chronic economic problems over the past two decades: under-investment in infrastructure and productive activity from both the public and private sector; domination of key resources by foreign capital; an over-reliance on low-paid, precarious service-sector jobs; rampant rentierism in housing and utilities; and a deep divide in wealth and health inequalities.
It was this disappointing record combined with the failure of successive SNP administrations to make any progress on independence which led the party to its historic defeat at the 2024 General Election, where it’s number of MPs was reduced from 48 to just nine.
The party’s fortunes have been resuscitated over the past year not by anything of its own doing under the limp leadership of John Swinney, but by the abject performance of Keir Starmer’s Labour in office. Labour have been so dismal across the board, from welfare to warfare, that it couldn’t have failed to show the SNP in a better light. Nonetheless, the discontent bubbling under the surface in Scotland has not gone away. The rise of Reform in Scotland, which is currently polling in third place at around 15% of the vote for the Holyrood elections, is unprecedented and is clearly drawing from a deep well of disgruntlement.
If voters are left with nowhere else to go to voice their displeasure with both Scottish and British governments in 2026, we shouldn’t be surprised if they turn to the far-right. But a new left party established in plenty of time for the 2026 Scottish elections could offer a viable alternative for those unhappy with the status quo in Edinburgh and London.
To do this, a number of hostages to fortune need to be avoided in the construction of a new party in Scotland. Firstly, although independence is no longer the beating heart of Scottish politics like it was in the Sturgeon years, a new left party will nonetheless have to be sensitive to the dynamics around the constitutional question, an ever-present in Scottish political life. The party across the UK must unambiguously support the right of Scotland to national self determination. In practise, that means that the Scottish Parliament has the right to decide on an independence referendum, without conditions from Westminster.
Taking a clear and principled stance on the question of the right to decide would allow the new party to carve out it’s own political space over the constitution, since neither the SNP (which likes to pretend that independence is just a vote for the SNP away, despite years of evidence otherwise) nor Labour (explicitly opposed to Scottish self-determination) will stand on that ground.
The right to decide on Scottish independence should also be linked to other civil rights which need to be urgently defended in the UK today, most obviously the right to protest. The new party should stand squarely in opposition to the British state’s authoritarian turn, wherever it rears its ugly head. On whether to support independence itself, it will be necessary for the party to allow for a plurality of views in Scotland. This may be difficult for those on both sides of the constitutional divide in 2014 to stomach but it would be necessary to avoid blocking entry to the party from the beginning for either side.
Once again, there is a distinctive advantage to taking a constitutional position which focuses on rights, rather than outcomes. A lot of Scots are tired of the SNP’s empty promises about independence in the future without offering any viable path to get there. A full-throated defence of Scottish democracy would be a more honest and grounded approach. Secondly, the new left party must avoid repeating the failures of left Labourism in Scotland. Without wishing to rake over old ground, if the new party is simply a re-heated version of Scottish Labour in the Richard Leonard years, it will entirely fail to gain ground in the political space which is wide open for it.
The key lesson is that a bunch of left-leaning policies doesn’t amount to a compelling story and doesn’t necessarily bring you any closer to the heads and hearts of voters than bland centrism. Policies have to animate a narrative about what’s wrong with Scotland and how to make it better. Zohran Mamdhani’s successful Democratic primary campaign in New York is a good example of how to integrate policies into a compelling story about affordability. There is an enormous amount that socialists can say about affordability in the Scottish context, for instance: Scotland is a country overflowing with energy resources but with some of the most expensive energy bills in the western world because a small cartel of energy monopolists work in cohort with the state to set exorbitant prices and extract super-profits.
Scotland is a nation replete with stories about the lost potential of its land and people because of a class of politicians and corporate elites in Edinburgh and London who. want to keep it that way. Telling a story about reining-in the rentiers, the monopolists and the land barons so that our wages are no longer pilfered by the super-rich is one that could speak to a broad swathe of workers struggling to get by. What needs to be avoided is a left managerialism that thinks talking up public services and ending austerity is enough in and of itself to appeal to people who are often scunnered by their day-to-day experience of the public sector, an unfortunate by-product of the neoliberal era.
Third, in an age of great power politics, the left party must be uncompromising in its opposition to British militarism and imperialism, including Trident nuclear missiles. With Sultana and Corbyn at its head this shouldn’t be in doubt, but it would mean breaking with narrow sectional interests in certain unions which created a problem for the Corbyn-project in Labour at its peak.
Fourth, there is a risk that a Corbyn-Sultana led party will be limited to a very similar demographic appeal as the Greens: young people in university towns and cities. While this would undoubtedly make up some of the electoral base for a new left party in Scotland, it is too narrow a constituency in and of itself to be successful and, more importantly, winning votes only here would not necessarily grow the left’s political influence in society.
To expand its voting base would require breaking out of the left’s comfort zones, which would mean consciously working to adapt a new left party’s organisation and communication to appeal to sections of the working class who do not currently identify with the left at all but are politically homeless. This would require strict message discipline to cut-through. Corbyn and Sultana are not necessarily the profile of people who are going to be able to do that. Developing leaders in Scotland with the verve to front the project and the discipline to stay on message would be essential.
Making a success of a new left party in Scotland is a huge challenge. Even to get started as a serious project, it would require a genuine willingness to put aside past divisions on the Scottish left, co-operate and compromise, which is never easy. But there doesn’t seem to be a better path available in Scotland to move forward. More drift while world events accelerate dramatically is asking for permanent irrelevance. The launch of a new left party potentially presents an opportunity in Scotland to move past the wreckage of defeat and start building again, and for that reason it is a project that is worth exploring.
