Zarah Sultana, MP for Coventry South since 2019 and cofounder of Your Party, is the rare backbencher whose national profile has always exceeded her formal power, and who has now staked her career on building an organisation to match it.

Born in Birmingham in October 1993 to a Pakistani Kashmiri family and raised in working class Lozells, her politics were formed early and visibly. Her grandfather had come from Azad Kashmir to work in the city's motor industry, she is Muslim, and a trip to the West Bank and Jerusalem at 17 turned general sympathy into sustained activism. She joined Labour that same year, studied International Relations and Economics at the University of Birmingham, and worked in a call centre and in retail before Parliament. This is a more specific formation than the standard activist record: solidarity with Kashmir and Palestine is not an adopted position for her but a starting point.

She won Coventry South in 2019 by just 401 votes, succeeding Jim Cunningham. By 2024 she had turned that into 20,361 votes and a majority of 10,201, a 23.9 per cent margin. That swing is the clearest evidence that her standing is personal rather than borrowed from the Labour brand, because she built it while increasingly at odds with the leadership.

She did not simply become associated with the Socialist Campaign Group. She chaired it from May 2020 to February 2025, nearly five years, succeeding Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Richard Burgon. In July 2024 Labour withdrew the whip from her and six other MPs for backing an amendment to scrap the two child benefit cap. In February 2025 four of the seven were readmitted, Sultana, Apsana Begum and John McDonnell were not. She said she learned of it from a news report and wrote that "speaking up for Palestine is still a punishable offence". She had already voted against cutting winter fuel payments for pensioners in September 2024 and described the government as having "actively facilitated genocide" in Gaza. Whatever one makes of the language, the votes were consistent with a fixed position rather than a tactical one.

On 3 July 2025 she resigned from Labour after fourteen years and founded Your Party alongside Jeremy Corbyn, leading it with him. More than 230,000 people registered, and she sat with the Independent Alliance until the party formally launched. At 32 she is among the youngest party leaders in British politics and a member of the Council of the Progressive International.

The record also has hard limits. Posts from before her election that were reported as antisemitic, including comments read as celebrating violence, remain part of the public record. She apologised and said they did not reflect her views. She has no legislative achievement, no committee chairmanship and no ministerial experience, and Your Party has no council base, no machinery and no proven ability to win seats its founders do not already hold. The question that defines this stage is the oldest one in insurgent politics: whether she can convert a large following and a clear message into the unglamorous work of winning power, or whether Your Party becomes another left wing vehicle that commands attention without ever acquiring it.