Jamie Driscoll joins the Green Party

By Ray Goodspeed

Socialists in the North East of England were shocked last Wednesday to see Jamie Driscoll,  the leader of the recently-formed left party, “Majority”, who had been closely involved with discussions around the formation of Your Party, announce that he was joining the Greens. This could obviously have a serious impact on the development of the left in the North East, and even nationally.

Members of Majority received an email an hour or so before the public announcement on 17^th November, informing them of his “personal decision” to join the Green Party, which appears to have been taken as an individual. It is pretty unusual, to say the very least of it, that the founder and leader of a new political party joins a different one!

In the email he makes clear that he is not resigning from Majority. To be fair, it has always allowed membership of other political parties. He describes it as “explicitly pluralist”, including members in Your Party, the Greens and “other parties and none” and “a home for progressives of all stripes.”

Majority has already endorsed and actively campaigned for a successful Green candidate in a local council by election in Newcastle. Driscoll had expressed an interest in running  to be a councillor in the Newcastle City Council elections in May, for Your Party. He mentioned standing in Monument ward – which covers the historic and commercial heart of the city, and which he has represented before. He will now probably seek to be the Green candidate for that ward, subject to being selected by Green party members, of course!

Electoral pacts between left parties are essential to avoid splitting the vote under the present “first past the post” system. But that is rather different from the leader of one party standing as a candidate of another, although it is not clear whether or not Driscoll is still the leader of Majority. He is not listed as such by the Electoral Commission.

Yet the party was completely born out of his own campaign to be North East regional mayor. Majority posters, leaflets and social media have very often prominently featured his photo, however much it claimed to be a community-based or bottom-up organisation.

Eternal hatred of the Labour right

From 2019 to 2024, Driscoll served as the Labour mayor of the “North of Tyne” area, a large chunk of what is now covered by the North East mayor. He was the candidate of the Northern England Labour Left (NELL) and defeated the favourite of the right, Nick Forbes, the Leader of Newcastle City Council, to get selected. This earned him the eternal hatred of the local Labour right wing and the party bureaucracy.

From 2019 to 2024 he was widely regarded as effective mayor, implementing a number of progressive policies with a large element of an appeal to localism, similar  in some ways to Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester. He worked with the Tory minister, Michael Gove, to bring forward plans for a mayoralty of a larger area, covering the whole North East region.

But in 2023 he was outrageously and ludicrously barred from being selected as the Labour candidate for that position, which he had helped to create, allegedly to maintain the “quality” of Labour candidates, but transparently as a part of a purge of the left. He had been regarded, 2023, as “the last Corbynista standing” and the officials and Labour right wanted revenge.

Towards the end of 2023, Driscoll declared that he would stand as an independent and was supported by the bulk of the left. Many activists in the old NELL left Labour to support his candidacy.  He ran an enthusiastic campaign that engaged many of those active in the Labour movement as well as others enthused by his independence and “sticking up for the region”.

In the event he won 28.2% of the vote to the official Labour candidate’s 41.3%. He did particularly well in Newcastle, winning 35.5%, and got more than 30% in Northumberland and the North and South Tyneside areas. These were impressive results for an independent.

Majority was formed from that campaign in 2024 and had been organising on the ground in the region ever since. It had been assumed that it would form part of any national left party, should one be formed, and Driscoll was deeply involved in the various rather shadowy meetings with Corbyn and others to that end.

The constitution of Your Party, agreed in November 2025, allowed for independent left parties that had been already formed  to have “affiliated” status for up to two years before a more unitary party was formed. This was mainly designed to attract and retain Jamie Driscoll and Majority inside the Your Party project, as well as other local groups in Liverpool, Broxtowe and others.

Your Party – factional infighting

However, in the meantime, the Your Party organisers at a national scale, by then including Zarah Sultana, were engaged in shocking levels of factional infighting, lack of communication, mutual mistrust, gossip, briefings to the mainstream media, denouncing each other on Twitter/X, and threats of legal action. The hundreds of thousands of people who declared an interest in such a party could only look on in despair while many of the most active tried to organise “proto-branches” at a local level, in advance of the new left party being officially launched in November.

Driscoll was specifically involved in the drama about the money received from the initial expression of interest and from the abortive, premature launch, by Sultana, of a membership portal. He, along with Andrew Feinstein (who had stood against Starmer in his constituency) and Beth Winter (an ex-Labour MP from South Wales) formed the board of MOU an organisation partly set up to deal with the funds received.

There was a protracted legal dispute between what was by then two wings of the “party”, Sultana’s and Corbyn’s, over when and under what circumstances the money – some £800,000 – was to be handed over to Your Party itself (ie Corbyn’s faction). All three directors resigned publicly via a social media post which made clear their irritation and exasperation with this dispute and, by implication, with the Your Party main players at national level.

And all the while this was rumbling on, the Green Party, under the radical, charismatic and media-savvy leadership of Zack Polanski shot up from 68,000 members to 180,000, many of them, without a doubt, people who would otherwise have been inclined to join the new Corbyn/Sultana party.

In this context then, Driscoll’s decision to jump over to the Greens is less surprising. He sees himself as a leading political figure in the region, and especially in Newcastle itself, and his priority is finding the best route to secure an elected position. He pointedly expressed the view that the Greens are a “serious” party – an implicit rebuke to the chaos in Your Party, which he has clearly lost all patience with.

As such, his decision can only be seen as a major blow to the chances of building an alternative socialist party, either as Majority locally or as Your Party on a national basis. It can only have a demoralising effect of local activists in those projects, and undoubtedly many activists will follow him into the Green Party. The recruitment of such a well-known regional figure by Zack Polanski will give a huge boost to the Greens in that part of the country, where they are desperate to make a breakthrough, to get away from their stereotypical (though not entirely fair) image as a southern, middle class party.

Driscoll claims that there are more socialists in the Green Party than in the remnants of Labour. Whatever may be the truth of that, he is actually unlikely to find himself on the far left of the Greens.

Pragmatic, progressive reforms

His programmes in his two mayoralty election campaigns, one for Labour and one as an independent, were not those of a wild socialist, red in tooth and claw. They were based on pragmatic, progressive, community-based, social democratic reforms, imaginatively doing the best with the resources from central government, prioritising insourcing of contracts and emphasising green projects. Had he not been victimised by the Labour right, he would probably be the Labour mayor of the North East region to this day, albeit a dissident voice.

Jamie Driscoll’s decision highlights the confusion and ferment of ideas on the left as a result of the betrayals of the Starmer government, the dramatic decline in the Labour vote and the growth of Reform. In the North East of England, following from the electoral disaster in County Durham in May 2025 in which Reform swept to power and Labour were reduced to just four councillors out of 98, the Labour Party faces a potentially catastrophic situation in the local elections in May 2026.

All the metropolitan district councils are up for election, and if the opinion polls stay the same as now, Reform could make huge gains. Where all the councillors are facing an election (rather than just one third) they could take control whole councils in Labour’s traditional heartlands. In Newcastle itself, the Labour Party is struggling even to find enough candidates to contest every seat.

The number of Green councillors will probably increase throughout Tyne and Wear, especially in the city centre areas of Newcastle, and maybe in South Shields, where they already have nine councillors. Driscoll’s move will assist that, but it is also likely to limit severely any electoral breakthrough from Majority/Your Party, in which his personal role was so prominent.

Socialists face a confusing choice, in an unprecedentedly complex and fluid situation. The left inside the Labour Party has been severely weakened but it still exists. Many are dormant and demoralised, waiting for what appears to be the imminent fall of Starmer for a chance to move the party to the left, particularly together with left trade unions such as UNITE and now UNISON. Should Your Party prove not to be a viable party, it is conceivable that some people may decide to rejoin Labour under a new, more left wing leader.  

The Greens have a high profile leader, an electoral organisation built up over time and a clear set of policies, not to mention 180,000 members! They can clearly hit the ground running and provide a serious left electoral challenge in the short to medium term. 

Your party potential

Your Party (or Majority in North East England) still have the potential to play an important role – they  have networks of experienced activists rooted in the trade union movement and working class communities, anti-racism campaigns, Palestine solidarity and other movements and also a newer layer of radical younger people. It currently has around 60,000 members.

There is a clear need for a socialist party, rooted in working-class politics in a way that the Green Party has not been, traditionally. Some leading Your Party figures, particularly around Zarah Sultana, seem to be nudging it towards a more consistent socialist position. Many of its active members in the branches are from an explicitly Marxist background.

But perhaps the majority of the new party embrace left-wing social democrat, or “left reformist” policies, similar to those put forward by Corbyn himself. This, in reality, is not that much different the position put forward by Polanski and the Greens. Corbyn does not view the Greens as a socialist party, and he often highlights supposed differences regarding international or geo-political issues. But the fact is, most workers, especially young workers and students, faced with two very similar parties, will tend to support the bigger one.

Measures to tax wealth or corporations, nationalise the utilities, increase spending on public services, and restore rights to trade unions are all policies that any socialist would enthusiastically support and campaign for. However, socialists need to consistently point out the need to go further and faster and to fundamentally challenge the iron grip of the bosses on the economy and society by expropriating the banks and the large capitalist companies.

They don’t do this so as to prove how pure and revolutionary they are, but because the history of the socialist movement demonstrates that any attempt to take on the interests of the capitalist class in a piecemeal or gradual way will be met with ferocious resistance, economic sabotage or brute force. Workers need to rely on building up the strength of their own organisations, nationally and internationally.

This is what socialists should be arguing for, wherever they are – in trade unions; campaigns on the climate or Palestine or other community struggles; or whether they are in the Labour Party, Your Party or the Greens.

[Featured image – Jamie Driscoll welcome to the Green Party – image – Green Party Facebook]