Image Credit: Kristian Buus / Contributor / Getty 
MP Zarah Sultana has quit Labour, aiming to start a new political party alongside her former leader Jeremy Corbyn.
The very online Member for Coventry South made the announcement on her X, formerly Twitter, account on Thursday, July 3rd.
The exit came close to the first anniversary of the Starmer government gaining a parliamentary majority on a low electoral turnout and, according to Sultana, after she spent 14 years in Labour—some of it sitting as an independent, due to her previously breaking ranks with the Westminster party line.
Sultana claims that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and shouted “we are all Palestine Action” amid parliamentary moves to proscribe the group.
While her actions add to the pressure on the unpopular government she just walked out of, Labour Home Secretary Yvette Cooper presented the departure as natural and predictable:
I think she’s always taken a very different view to most people in the government on a lot of different things and that’s for her to do so.
As for her new party leader (or co-leader), The Sunday Times’ Whitehall editor reports that Corbyn was “furious and bewildered at the way it has been launched without consultation.”
In the immediate term, this means that in public Sultana—like Corbyn himself—will likely be sitting and voting with the ‘Gaza independents’ bloc of MPs, partly credited with the reintroduction of religious sectarianism into Westminster politics.
