Earlier this week I was at a meeting at which someone commented about a prominent local political figure “he’s really old, he’s about sixty”. The implication was that he might be quite good at cave painting, making arrow heads from flint and hunting mammoths, but not immediately relevant to a younger generation. However, 75 year old Jeremy Corbyn makes him look like a pimply adolescent by comparison.

My first thought on learning that Zarah Sultana has quit Labour and announced that she and Corbyn have appointed themselves leaders of a process to create a new political party was “Oh Jesus, no. Why?” It was also my second and third thought. Anyone interested in joining Team Zarah can do so here.

There isn’t a word you can disagree with in Sultana’s statement when she says Labour is “wanting to make disabled people suffer” and is an “active participant in genocide” in Gaza.”

Corbyn at the moment is much more equivocal about this initiative, but he has been involved in the sort of back room negotiations which bewilder anyone who’s not involved in them. When you read comments from Len McCluskey like “We know who should lead it and “- pointing to Corybn – “he’s here,” and “Jeremy Corbyn is the only person who can unite the left,” from Pamela Fitzpatrick, I am reminded of Tony Benn’s last decade. In what I always thought resembled a kind of elder abuse he was wheeled out time after time to give exactly the same speech (“tie the bloody ropes together”) even though it was clear his moment had passed.

As one who has some experience of a “party” stitched together with a celebrity figurehead and a bunch of scheming bureaucrats, it really isn’t something I would recommend. Sultana and Corbyn are infinitely more principled and are keen to speak for the working class than the self-aggrandising, morally repulsive Galloway ever was, but the creation of a party based on factional manoeuvres and self-declared leaders is a bad method.

If anyone can find a cigarette paper of difference between what the Green Party have been saying and doing recently on austerity, Palestine, civil liberties and the sorts of politics Corbyn and Sultana stand for, they have a better microscope than me. Zack Polanski, who is likely to be the next party leader, was happy to be photographed at Glastonbury wearing a “we are all Palestine Action” T shirt, a clear “f**k you” to the genocide supporters in Labour and the press.

As James Meadway recently pointed out “The Greens are second-placed in around 30 Labour-held seats, with slender majorities.” In Tower Hamlets they got 14% of the votes in the general election without a nanosecond of campaigning. They are certain to come second in next year’s mayoral election, pushing Labour into third place.

We are in a period of fragmentation, realignment and maybe even the much desired splits and fusions. The Greens have a rapidly growing profile as a radical, internationalist, pro working class party; they have a national presence; they have local and national structures and policy making bodies. Setting up something new makes no sense at this point and Corbyn and Sultana would be doing a tremendous service to the British working class if they, their group of MPs and supporters just knocked on the door of the Green Party.