Zarah Sultana: if I can survive working Christmas in Primark, I can survive Westminster

On 18 October, Zarah Sultana led the Northern March for Your Party. She also talked to children who did a sponsored walk for Palestine, gave a speech at a rally, took part in a question-and-answer session, and spoke to the Canary. She made so many important points about the struggle for change in Britain. Plus, she revealed telling aspects of her early life – like working in Primark. So below, we’ve listed some of the comments from Sultana that didn’t appear in previous articles.

These include comments on: uniting the left against capitalism and fascism; building community power while empowering workers and students; ensuring Your Party is as democratic as possible; taking on the genocide-supporting establishment, from Labour to Reform; and more.

Radically changing the system

“The challenges facing the working class can’t be met by a Labour 2.0 that mimics the party’s structures or limits itself to pursuing reforms under capitalism. At best, you might get some temporary gains. You might be able to nationalise a few industries, but you cannot fix the crises of capitalism, of inequality, of exploitation and ecological destruction that define the capitalist system. So we need full democratic control of the economy by workers because the problem we know isn’t just a few bad bosses or a few greedy companies. It is a system that is built for private profit, not social need. And as long as this system remains in place, it will reproduce all of these inequalities and exploitation.”
On socialism, “we mean factories, banks, the energy system, industries being democratically owned and run rather than controlled by private profit and right now those decisions are obviously being made in boardrooms by people who are only accountable to shareholders – socialism means that those decisions are made by society as a whole in the interests of many. So when I say democratising the economy it’s not just voting every five years while the billionaires run the show in between, it means workers having a say in their workplaces, in their communities controlling local services, it means public ownership not just as an arm of state bureaucracy but real democratic participation… So put simply, it’s democracy in every aspect of our life, not just parliament but the economy too.”

Unity to deal with the biggest threats we face

“The biggest threats we all face today aren’t military invasions. It’s the rise of the far right, it is global pandemics, it is climate catastrophe and economic crises. And NATO cannot solve any of these. Instead, it swallows billions of pounds that should be going into our homes, our healthcare, and addressing the climate catastrophe.”
“I don’t think it’s right that you can’t be a member of another party while joining the party, because our job is to unite the left… The planet is on fire, inequality is deepening, fascism is growling at the door. We unite now, or else we’re going to lose. And that is a terrifying concept.”
“The mailing list of Your Party should have been used to mobilise people to turn up to that [13 September] demo to counter the fascists… We need an anti-fascist league of the 21st century and Your Party has to be building that with trade unions root and branch to fight back.”
“In liberation politics, we talk about the chains that we have being different, but we have to unshackle them all, and that’s a key part of my politics, understanding that our oppressions might look different, but we’ve got to dismantle the whole system, because none of us are free until all of us are free.”
“We know that the media is our class enemy and they will throw everything at us, including calling for me to be deported. And I think we have to understand that we are building something that the establishment will throw everything and the kitchen sink at, and we have to build the resilience to defend ourselves and the party that we are building.”

Education, work, and community power

“I believe an MP’s position is supporting workers on the picket line.”
“Education is a public good. It is not a commodity that you can buy and sell. And so we must have a fully funded education model which involves maintenance grants, it involves abolishing fees for good, it means having a democratically run system where student and staff welfare and well-being is respected and prioritised.”
“This party that we’re building isn’t just an electoral project. It is one to build power in our communities. Because that’s where change truly comes from.”
“There are so many people in our communities that are leaders and they are organising food banks, they are supporting schools and teachers and parents, they are making sure no kid goes hungry at night, they are providing uniforms. Those are the people that we want to engage with what we’re building, they know the issues of their community and they can represent them really well and there’s so many people in this room who can do a much better job than many people who are MPs.”
“Any successful left-wing party must be a campaigning, social-movement-orientated force, combined with a robust parliamentary presence and winning councils up and down the country, where our MPs are on picket lines, outside embassies, at Palestine demonstrations, at anti-fascist mobilisations, and defending the rights of all marginalised people, trans people, migrants, the most vulnerable in our communities. Because if you only focus on parliament, and if you neglect the movement, you might end up with a disestablishment, as we’ve seen before. And when they lose their seats, or when they retire, the whole project collapses.”

Your Party democracy and structures

“Your Party councillors elected through open selection must be people who do not vote through cuts but fight cuts and recognise that that is their job to do, not to administer austerity.”
“Future conferences must have all-member meetings in local branches that elect delegates, because that is democratic. We must have an executive committee that is elected through OMOV [one-member-one-vote], that holds the party’s leadership to account. That executive committee must be the one that has a hiring panel taken out of it, because we do not give jobs to mates.”
“We must put our efforts and our energies to building a democratic member-led party that is not controlled by a handful of people, especially MPs at the very top.”
“Conference has to be sovereign, democratic, and its motions have to be binding. If, for example, councillors and MPs are not upholding what is passed at conference, we have to look at the right to recall and obviously mandatory re-selection has to be there. Because you are not an MP for yourself. You are a voice of the movement. And that’s incredibly important.”
“Going forward, I hope comms will be better.”

The ‘authoritarian, anti-socialist’ Labour Party

“What we are seeing is authoritarianism trying to smear our cause, the Palestinian cause, and to trample on all of our civil liberties.”
The invasion of Iraq saw “a million people contacting their MPs, taking part in our democracy, trying to stop this country, this Labour government at the time, from following the US as the US’s poodle into an illegal war. Those people were ignored… And what that showed many of us across the country is that if you see something that’s wrong, and you oppose it, and you organise and a million people march, your government can still turn around and ignore you. So do we really live in a democracy?“
“Under Keir Starmer, this is a party of corporate lobbyists and billionaire donors, a party that is so anti-socialist it is stepping into McCarthyite territory.”

Israel’s genocide in Gaza

“What I’ve seen through all the London marches, all the events I’ve done all over the country, is that the people in this country, the British public, completely disagree with this government and the previous Tory government – that we do not allow genocide to happen in our name.”
“We know that a ceasefire has not led to any material change. Bombs are still falling on Gaza. There is not enough aid in Gaza and we know that a ceasefire does not mean peace. It does not mean an end to military occupation. It does not mean an end to apartheid. It does not mean an end to an illegal siege. So we must continue marching. We must continue boycotting. We must continue divesting.”
“We must expel the Israeli ambassador. We must shut down the Israeli embassy. Because you cannot have normal relations with a genocidal state.”
“I’ve called for a single state, because the two state solution is dead, it is a fallacy. It’s a singular, secular state with equal rights for all and that involves the right of return and all obligations under international law.”

Reform UK has fed off the weakening of the left

“We’ve seen Reform surging in the polls and that isn’t because they offer real answers. It’s because the establishment has smeared and silenced the left while leaving millions to rot in a broken system. The truth is millions of people or most people are not turning to Reform because they are hardened racists or fascists – these people, many of them, are disillusioned. They see a country that is failing them and they feel like they have nowhere else to turn. And for too long the left has simply not been on the pitch.”

The Green Party

“There is a democratic deficit in the Greens where conference is not binding. And I ask ‘what’s the point if we all go to Bournemouth or Liverpool or Birmingham, clap our hands at some speeches, pass motions but your MPs can do absolutely whatever they like?’ That is not democratic.”

(For more on her thoughts about the Greens, see here.)

The experiences that led Sultana into politics

“Before I entered parliament, I actually worked in retail. I worked in Primark, and I worked in H&M. And I say that’s where I got my thick skin from. Because if you can survive Christmas sales working in Primark, Westminster is nothing compared to that.”
“My best job, I would say, was working as a community organiser, because that took me from an activist to an organiser before I became a politician, because I understand that true power lies in our communities.”

You can see the Canary‘s coverage of the 18 October march here. You can also listen to her speech from the march here. And you can watch our interview with her from later in the day here and here.

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

This post was originally published on Canary.