A senior minister has appeared to shrug off the announcement a former Labour MP plans to set up a new party alongside Jeremy Corbyn.
Zarah Sultana, who had the Labour whip suspended last year, said on Thursday night she was quitting Sir Keir Starmer’s party and would “co-lead the founding of a new party” with the ex-Labour leader.
Mr Corbyn is yet to comment on the announcement.
On Friday morning, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said Ms Sultana had “always taken a very different view to most people in the Government” on several issues, adding: “That’s for her to do so.”
But during a series of broadcast interviews, Ms Cooper declined to be drawn on whether she was concerned the new party could pose a threat to Labour.
Asked whether she was concerned, the Home Secretary told LBC: “People have always had different views, and I just disagree with the views and the approaches they’re taking.”
In her announcement of a new political party, Ms Sultana accused the Labour Government of failing to improve people’s lives, and claimed it “wants to make disabled people suffer” in reference to ministers’ proposals to reform welfare.
Ms Cooper rejected the accusation, telling Sky News: “I just strongly disagree with her.”
The Home Secretary pointed to falling waiting times in the NHS, the announcement of additional neighbourhood police officers, extending free school meals and strengthening renters’ rights as areas where the Government was acting.
She said: “These are real changes (that) have a real impact on people’s lives.”
Ms Sultana was one of seven MPs who had the Labour whip suspended last summer when they supported an amendment to the King’s Speech which related to the two-child benefit cap.
Four of the seven had the whip restored earlier this year but Ms Sultana was not among them.
John McDonnell, another of the suspended MPs who has not had the whip restored, posted on X that he was “dreadfully sorry” to see Ms Sultana quit the party.
“The people running Labour at the moment need to ask themselves why a young, articulate, talented, extremely dedicated socialist feels she now has no home in the Labour Party and has to leave,” he said.
Mr Corbyn led Labour from 2015 to April 2020, stepping down after the party’s loss at the 2019 general election.
He was suspended from Labour in 2020 after he refused to fully accept the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s findings that the party broke equality law when he was in charge, and said antisemitism had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons”.
He was blocked from standing for Labour at last year’s general election and expelled in the spring of 2024 after announcing he would stand as an independent candidate in his Islington North constituency, which he won with a majority of more than 7,000.
Last year, Mr Corbyn formed the Independent Alliance with other independent members of the Commons.
Asked on ITV’s Peston programme on Wednesday whether that group could turn into an official party, Mr Corbyn said that they have “worked very hard and very well together” over the last year in Parliament.
He added: “There is a thirst for an alternative view to be put.”
“That grouping will come together, there will be an alternative,” he later said.
