As one of the half million plus who have signed up to receive emails from the new Sultana / Corbyn party, I have to confess it wasn’t much of a sacrifice and still less of a commitment. It is what used to be called fear of missing out and curiosity about a project I hope flourishes.

Anyone who has ever organised an event using online tools will tell you, the number who will eventually commit to do anything is always a fraction of the total sign up. Nevertheless, even 20% of 500 000 is a serious number and it potentially puts the new party in a good position for the next general election. Starmer showed these people the door and they obliged. Moreover, his eighteen months of actively supporting a genocide means they are never returning to him. Any bad things that happen to Labour are on him.

It is self-evident that the major danger to the internal functioning of the new party is not fairly marginal groups of Leninist cos players. Its big self-imposed problem is likely to be longstanding habits of bureaucratic sectarianism which are a feature of both the far left and the Labour and union apparatuses, something which is omitted from this survey of Respect and European parties by someone who was a skilled practitioner of it.

The founding statement of the new party is completely unobjectionable and is little more than the commonsense of the radical left in Britain. A casual reader would assume that no one else is making these arguments to a mass audience at the moment.

We know that simply isn’t true. With the authority of someone who spent quite a lot of time today trying to write a short snappy statement for an upcoming election, I can confirm it is a tricky job. I can also confirm that it can be done and include a reference to other political parties. While the Greens are not everyone’s cup of ginseng and honey tea, they have emerged as a real force on the left and are very definitely a part of the fragmentation and realignment of British politics. The statement from Sultana and Corbyn deals with them by pretending they don’t exist.

Zack Polanski’s response to the launch of the new project was the correct one. He said “I’m open to working with anyone who’s up for challenging the far-right threat of Reform and this unpopular Labour government.” Somewhat less happily, Ellie Chowns and Adam Ramsey whom he’s opposing said they don’t want to be part of a “Corbyn tribute act”, a phrase you could easily imagine being sneered by a Labour right winger. It is also the reason they are almost certainly going to lose to Polanski. That said, this seems to be as extreme as political denunciations get in the Green Party. Unlike Labour, no one flings round slanderous allegations of antisemitism or tries to get political opponents sent to jail.

What Chowns and Ramsey have in common with some of the people who appear to be the central organisers of the Sultana / Corbyn party is that they have risen through the party machinery. A major difference is that stitch ups, back room deals and packing meetings are essential skills in the Labour Party and unions and not ones that are easily unlearned. A good account of that with the taste of bitter experience can be found here from Phil Pope.

A tightly controlled phony democracy was the ruination of Respect. Any new party has to trust its members. For a section of the Greens to set themselves up in opposition to the new party is a serious sectarian mistake. For the new outfit to pretend Green members and voters are not a part of the realignment on the British left is a worrying early indication that old habits of bureaucratic sectarianism die hard.