Vast numbers want a party that counters the country’s rightward lurch. Despite the chaos, they are willing Your Party to get off the ground

Does Britain need another leftwing party? If you’re not on the left – or if you are, but consider yourself a realist – then the answer may seem obvious. This is a conservative country, you probably believe, in its underlying political assumptions, electoral system and media biases. Any party that doesn’t fit these is put under intolerable pressure. It always splinters, shrinks and collapses, sooner or later.

If even the Labour party, in which radical leftwingers are only ever a minority, is still fundamentally unacceptable to many voters and powerful interests – as the right’s constant outrage at Keir Starmer’s occasionally egalitarian government demonstrates – then what chance does a less established, more disruptive party than Labour have? Over the past half century in particular, ever since Margaret Thatcher successfully undermined socialism’s legitimacy as a mainstream belief system, the space for leftwing politics has sharply contracted in this country. Britain has become one of the world’s least left-tolerant democracies.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist