Is London excited for Mamdani?

Inside Your Party's NYC Mayoral Election watch party in Tottenham

On 4 November, Your Party held a ‘Zohran Mamdani’ election watch party at The Post Bar in Tottenham. The post gathered an impressive 822 likes, 343 retweets, and 313,000 impressions. Presumably there would be a strong showing of enthusiastic leftist activists and fellow-travellers.

Your Party (apparently a placeholder name), which is currently competing with the Green Party to become the main party of the anti-Labour left, originates from not one, not two, but three separate left-wing splinters. The first was the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour Party after he asserted that anti-Semitism in the Labour Party during his time as leader had been exaggerated for political reasons. He was barred from standing again in Islington North; after defying this and standing as an independent MP, he was expelled. Large parts of the constituency party campaigned for Corbyn, the MP in Islington North since 1983, instead of the official Labour candidate, and Corbyn was ultimately reelected with a solid majority of 7,242. The second was the election of the four so-called ‘Gaza Independents’ in heavily Muslim constituencies at the 2024 General Election, in protest against Labour’s equivocation on the issue of Israel-Palestine. The third was the withdrawal of the whip from Zarah Sultana (who has a very large following on social media) and six other Labour MPs in July 2024, the height of Starmer’s power over the Labour Party, after voting to scrap the two-child benefit cap. Unfortunately, all of Sultana’s erstwhile far-left Labour allies eventually returned to the Labour fold, with four having the whip restored in February 2025 and the other two having the whip restored in September 2025.

Needless to say, this does not necessarily make for a coherent grouping, and the process of turning Corbyn, the ‘Gaza Independents’, and Sultana into Your Party has not been at all smooth-sailing. Corbyn and the four ‘Gaza Independents’ would together form the ‘Independent Alliance’ in September 2024, but the difficulties started almost immediately after Sultana became involved. Although Sultana is from a Pakistani background and is similarly exercised by the issue of Israel-Palestine, she is not fundamentally aligned with them politically (it is perhaps telling that Sultana is married to a white man and has never worn a hijab). Whereas the ‘Gaza Independents’ are effectively a parochial Muslim grouping, with a resulting alignment with small business interests and social conservatism, Sultana is a strongly ideological socialist. Corbyn could potentially have been the bridge between Sultana and the rest, but Corbyn, never in possession of the best political antenna and now a septuagenarian, seemed reluctant to press matters forwards at every stage (perhaps because he is so old that he has vague memories of Ramsay MacDonald as a ‘splitter’) and, for unclear reasons, seemed far more comfortable associating with borderline anti-socialist Muslim men than with Sultana.

Sultana appears to have somehow succeeded in bouncing Corbyn into launching the new party against his wishes after simply announcing it in July 2025 without first obtaining Corbyn’s consent. Then, in September, Sultana began a membership drive, again without obtaining Corbyn’s consent. This precipitated a bitter conflict which has not still been fully resolved: Sultana accused the other MPs of being a ‘sexist boys’ club’, legal action has been threatened, and the funds from Sultana’s vehicle have not yet been transferred to the now-unified party. It is partly this conflict that has allowed the Green Party, led since September by the explicitly far-left Zack Polanski, to gain the momentum on the anti-Labour left. Your Party’s future is therefore very much in doubt, and many left-wing activists have already called for Your Party to give up and fold itself into the Greens.

The watch party was pointed our way on the day by a friend of Pimlico Journal and, keen to get a sense of what the feelings were among the Your Party rank-and-file about the recent Sultana-Corbyn debacle, the ideological tensions within the party itself, and their understanding of the relationship between Your Party and Polanski’s Greens, I decided to head over at the behest of the editor-in-chief (he had determined that, of those affiliated with Pimlico Journal, I would ‘fit in’ best at a left-wing event). It wasn’t how I saw my Tuesday night going but, persuaded by the editor-in-chief’s offer to pay for my transport and drinks, I hurriedly changed into the most Woke set of Carhartt clothes I own and took the tube to Seven Sisters. And it wasn’t just an undercover Pimlico Journal reporter there: America’s CBS must have gotten the same idea and even sent out an interviewer and a camera crew in anticipation for what they must have thought would be a groundswell of popular support for left-wing American politics from Londoners.

I arrived to a confused scene of a small live music show with a few people standing around, clearly unsure of where to be. The vibe of the pub was supposed to be softly alternative; more of a music venue than a bar, reflected in its primary clientele of vaguely ‘alt’, ‘Playboy Carti’ black men and women. A Tottenham-supporting friend — who must have walked past this pub hundreds of times on the way to the stadium — had never noticed it, so inconspicuous it is to a football-supporting lout. The girl behind the bar didn’t realise that there was a Your Party event on at all. Eventually, it became clear that the watch party was taking place at the very back of the pub on the small outdoor terrace. To the pub’s credit, it was at least cheap (by London standards), with a pint costing just £5.50.

Barely anyone had turned up. CBS were desperate for interviews, asking people about what excited them, as a young Londoners, about Mamdani and his campaign (I doubt that any of these will ever see the light of day). It took perhaps an hour, if not more, for the event to pick up at all, with a total of perhaps thirty people in attendance at the peak of the night. This came as a surprise: looking at their posts on Instagram and X, and even accounting for misleading camera angles, their other events in London seemed well-attended — though full of old people. All of this should, of course, be caveated with the fact that this was a Tuesday night, but there is no doubt that the organisers would have been disappointed by the attendance.

This crowd was quite different from what I had seen online. There was a substantial cohort of postgraduate students and unemployed recent graduates, supplemented by a few middle-aged or retired socialists who seemed confused by the general demographic at the event. It quickly became apparent that barely anyone at the event was from Britain. For the avoidance of doubt, I do not even say this in an ethnic sense: virtually everyone there was a foreign national who had come to this country as an adult, with little understanding of this country’s culture or politics as a result. This was also rather unexpected, and is not a good sign for Your Party’s ability to compete with the Greens for younger, anti-Labour voters in this country.

What has become apparent about the base of Your Party, especially in the Midlands and the North, is that South Asian Muslims motivated by Gaza, sometimes from a lower-middle class background (and even the working class supporters are not generally motivated by traditional socialist concerns), have been able to exert their weight to push the party away from the current mainstays of the hard-left — e.g., rejecting anti-landlordism, taking a pro-small businessman line, supporting private and/or religious education, and expressing vague disapproval of transgenderism and homosexuality, at least in the classroom. Needless to say, this attitude poses a challenge for an ideological socialist.

With this event being in London, beyond merely the Polanski-curious, what I expected to see was a cohort of attendees who were, much as appeared in the pictures, older socialists who cared chiefly about anti-imperialism and foreign affairs, which is surely one of the main reasons for a left-winger rejecting the Greens at this juncture and remaining with Your Party despite these ideological difficulties in the provinces. This archetypal figure (much like Corbyn himself) had probably been involved with CND and other ‘anti-war’ movements, and may (much like both Corbyn and Sultana) have unpopular opinions on Ukraine, NATO, and an obsession with Israel-Palestine. At most political events, the older attendees, having grown up in a more sociable era, tend to be the booziest and most amenable characters to strangers. This was certainly not the case here: the older attendees were mostly hanging around in the background, not speaking to anyone at all, so I got little sense of what they were thinking and why they remained loyal to Corbyn and Sultana.

I therefore focused my efforts on the younger attendees. The dominant political concerns of these attendees were largely about cost-of-living and the typical economic complaints, both distributional and of the state of the job market for recent graduates. A fashionably-dressed black man wore a keffiyeh, presumably seeking to signal his support for the Palestinian cause, but I heard surprisingly little on Gaza at all. Fatigue may have set in even for Your Party, not boding well for them capitalising on the issue at an election that will take place in around four years, given that Sultana has claimed that one of the main reasons that Your Party is different from the Green Party is that Your Party does not believe that any kind of diplomatic relations with Israel, an ‘apartheid state’, is possible.

There was very little energy in the room. People were barely watching the election coverage, choosing instead to natter in small groups. Of the younger portion of the crowd, there were Australians, Canadians, some Chinese, and international students from all over. A man who was, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the very few natives present, in his late twenties or early thirties and a Your Party activist, did seem pretty well informed about local politics and had a good grasp of what was going on internally and in the Greens. This, however, was unique among the attendees I spoke to. The overall picture I was left with from this event was that the vast majority of those still interested in Your Party in London are fairly low-information. Almost everyone seemed baffled by the divisions that prevent an alliance between the Greens and the Corbyn-Sultana faction. For instance, there was no real understanding of Corbyn-Sultana’s rigidly ‘anti-imperialist’ (and hence Ukraine-critical and anti-NATO) stance, and there was only very limited understanding of Sultana’s desire to turn Your Party into an explicitly ‘class-based’ party — let alone any of the more esoteric (often organisational) disputes that had caused division on the far-left.

This began to make more sense when I learned that very few of the attendees were members of Your Party at all. The younger crowd felt that Polanski was doing a far better job than Your Party, and some seemed incensed by Sultana’s hostility to the Greens. Despite Sultana’s huge TikTok following, there seemed to be no loyalty to her personally; indeed, many outright disliked her. Understandably, they merely saw the division between the Greens and Your Party as unnecessary factionalism and saw no reason for there not to be a broad coalition on the Left. Even the attendees of a Your Party event, then, had not been won over by Your Party.

The overall feeling was one of despondence: Starmer was actively paving the way for the coming Reform government, and we are experiencing a ‘far-right moment’ in both Britain and America. There was some consternation that Trump would try to ‘take out’ Mamdani and ‘go full fascist’, but the attendees believed that Zohran would not cave. Beyond resignation to the difficult electoral landscape for the Left in the next years, there was the general view that Reform and Trump would both burn themselves out and make space for a ‘real alternative’ — as long as disinformation in the media didn’t end up distracting us from the real issues again. They tended to conceptualise the motivations for both Reform and Trump in rather post-liberal terms — that the ‘communities’ which had been failed by the state were lashing out against the ‘establishment’ — and they genuinely seemed to believe that Mamdani had successfully shown a left-wing solution to this issue by ‘reaching out to Trump voters’. There was also concern raised about the need to show CBS that Mamdani supporters were, and I quote, ‘shaggers’.

In the end, most ended up leaving by about midnight. They couldn’t wait two more hours for the exit poll. True, Mamdani was certain to win by this stage, but there was just no electricity in the air. It was time for bed — for me, and for everyone else too.

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This article was written by ‘The Hitch’, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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