Zarah Sultana has accused the Labour Party of being “directly complicit in genocide” and declared that Jeremy Corbyn was “definitely the best Prime Minister we never had” during an appearance at Glastonbury Festival.
Speaking to an audience of over 100 on Thursday as part of an interview with actor Ambika Mod, the MP for Coventry South said she remained indefinitely suspended from the party after criticising its stance on Gaza.
“My political situation is unknown. I am in this political limbo where the party have kind of indefinitely suspended me. It was meant to be six months; it has gone on for much longer,” Sultana told the crowd.
“It is because of me calling Keir Starmer out for his LBC interview? For highlighting how he refuses to call it [the war in Gaza] a genocide? How he has allowed war criminals to come to London and have the red carpet rolled out? how he has continued to let arms sales continue?”
She claimed that her suspension had been extended because of her criticism of the party leadership. “For all of those reasons – and for David Lammy not liking my tweet where I tell him to stop selling arms to Israel – my suspension has continued,” she said.
Wearing a T-shirt in the colours of the Palestinian flag, the 31-year-old MP urged an audience member to “explore every other possible option” before voting Labour at the next general election in 2029 after he explained that the choice in his constituency could be between Labour’s Maria Eagle and a Reform UK candidate.
Sultana said: “That’s a difficult one. The choice right now before you is incredibly s***, to put it mildly, and I think unless the Labour Party ends its complicity in genocide, undoes austerity – which it is not doing at the moment – I think you have to explore every other possible option and who knows what else will be in place in 2029.”
She went on to accuse the party of imitating Reform UK: “The Labour Party [is] basically copying Reform and driving further and further to the right because it thinks that is how it is going to get re-elected. It will not. People will vote for the original, not the copy. That is s***… that is a terrible political strategy.”
“Unless the Labour Party changes completely” including its policies around trans rights and ethnic minorities, Sultana said that she “cannot see a way for electoral success”.
And, in 2029, she suggested there would be a choice between “fascism or a radical alternative”.
“It is my job and your job and everyone else’s job to win that fight when it comes, but the work starts now, not in 2029,” she added.
Sultana also accused the party of “attacking our civil liberties,” but praised Hackney MP Diane Abbott for “speaking truth to power”.
During the conversation, Mod – best known for her role in the Netflix mini-series One Day – asked whether Sultana would consider becoming Prime Minister “if the situation arose”. “Never say never,” she replied.
But she went on to describe Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader since suspended from the party after he suggested its antisemitism crisis was “dramatically overstated for political reasons”, as “definitely the best Prime Minister we never had”.
“The way Jeremy [Corbyn] was treated – in particular as a brown person – I feel that [the treatment of me] would be worse,” she added.
Sultana said she saw a “spike in abuse” including death threats when she spoke about migrant rights and Palestine and had been accused of being a “terrorist sympathiser”.
This week, the MP came out in support of direct-action group Palestine Action, which is set to be banned as a terrorist organisation. Sultana wrote on X: “We are all Palestine Action”.
On Friday, counter terror police arrested four people in connection with the damage to RAF planes at Brize Norton, which Palestine Action shared footage of.
At Glastonbury, Sultana said: “It is incredibly f***** up to be called a terrorist sympathiser when you say Palestinians shouldn’t be killed or there should be a ceasefire, or we shouldn’t sell arms.”
She added she was inspired by people marching around the world “demanding an end to the genocide”.
She went on: “In late October - early November, I was one of very few people who were talking about arms sales, in particular how our government licensing F35 components of lethal fighter jets. Very few people were talking about that; very few people were actually calling for a ceasefire back then.
“It does take some people a year and a half to realise that killing people is wrong, killing Palestinians is wrong, but we are where we are. You have to move people in a direction.”
She concluded that she did not mind that other MPs do not like her – “I know that I am speaking to people outside of Parliament because inside most of them do not like me and I don’t actually want them to like me either”.
She vowed to be “Like a bulldozer” and “keep going until we win”.
