Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s first live event together was sabotaged – but by whom…?

This article was updated at 10:40am on Monday 13 October. It previously posed the question whether or not the alleged sabotage ‘may have been a disgruntled member of Corbyn’s team, reportedly on their way out’. We have removed this reference as, while it only posed a question, it was without basis.

On Thursday 9 October, the Canary was leading the livestreaming of the Your Party Liverpool launch – where both Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana were due to speak. Our stream was being shared by Your Party itself and other independent media outlets. Sadly, it didn’t go to plan. Our livestream was plagued with technical difficulties: from no stream at all, to the sound cutting out, to it constantly buffering, to it not loading on our social media.

However, for us, this was not a technical malfunction or a mistake by our team. We’re calling it – and we’re calling it sabotage. But by whom?

No Corbyn, no Sultana

For those of you who were watching the Corbyn/Sultana livestream, you know you would have seen a lot of this:

We barely managed to stream anything. But we don’t believe it was our fault.

Steve Walker from Skwawkbox was running the livestream from Liverpool for us, along with the team he has worked with for years. Steve said:

We came to this stream with the same professionalism and tech that worked flawlessly last week with our successful Your Show, with four separate cameras and redundancy built in, in case of technical issues. Everything worked fine during set-up testing, then when the event started the fast link we had from the hall – both via WIFI and ethernet – ground almost to a halt. We switched to our back-up 5G mobile router that is designed to work seamlessly in case of local issues, but that couldn’t connect either; the venue management did their best to help us and were very kind and apologetic but came up a blank too – forcing us to cut the live stream and broadcast it later from the recording.

Various other people in and around the hall reported issues with mobile signal both inside and outside – having full bars of either 4G or 5G yet not having a connection. So, it does look very odd that it all started just as we were scheduled to go live.

At the other end of operations, the Canary’s Head of TV Shakir also has decades of experience with livestreaming. He said:

The team involved in producing the Your Party Merseyside launch event for streaming have deep experience in television production and had checked, developed, and put in place redundancies; everything had worked perfectly in advance, days and hours before the main event, so for this to happen organically is quite beyond credulity.

So, it seems that there was no obvious technical hitch with our stream from Your Party’s Liverpool launch. What the hell then went on?

Well, people on X had some opinions on who they thought we would blame:

Yes, Binky – iT wAs IsRaEl WoT dID iT. Because genocidal Zionists have really got time to be disrupting Jeremy and Zarah while they’re busy massacring Palestinian babies.

(No, we don’t think it was a Zionist plot – just to be clear).

Maybe we shouldn’t have #BackedZack for Green Party leader…

Green Party Comms team – preparing for Newsnight tonight to max their vote & future dominant strength in any NUPES alliance – disclaim responsibility!😀

— Charlie Mansell (@charliemansell) October 9, 2025

Meanwhile, some people were simply lovely:

Yes, odd indeed! I did wonder if the number of others carrying the stream was the culprit, but with WiFi loss in the hall too!!

Oh dear! Anyway 😇

Onwards ✊️ I look forward to the upload later, well done @TheCanaryUK 👏

— Dan Gmaj (@dansoapbox) October 9, 2025

However, the Canary cannot deny that the disruption to the Your Party livestream – given Your Party were using ours to feed onto their socials – seemed… odd.

A proud history of disrupting the left

Of course, it is not beyond the realms of possibly that our coverage was actually sabotaged (it’s not like cops and the state don’t disrupt the internet at protests and public gatherings, after all).

The establishment have a long and proud history of infiltrating anything to the left of the centre in British politics. It does this because it is a threat to both hereditary power and the colonial capitalist system.

From the Spycops scandal to the blacklisting one via the Green Party’s Jenny Jones being placed on a domestic extremist list – the rap sheet is long. My late father, a prominent member of the Communist Party in the 1950s and 1960s, always used to open his meetings in London with a ‘special welcome to his friends at the back’ (plain clothes officers from Special Branch).

Back in the day, the state intercepted letters, used agent provocateurs, and tapped landline phones. Now, they hack emails, track mobile phones, watch us on CCTV, and monitor social media. The agenda doesn’t change – only the methods to execute it do.

The point being – Corbyn and Sultana are yet another threat to the established order of things. So, why wouldn’t the state try to disrupt them – and us?

The Fraud

Oh yes. It already has.

Paul Holden’s book The Fraud is out in a matter of days. It meticulously documents how Morgan McSweeney and his vehicle Labour Together wilfully tried to destroy Corbyn and the Canary. It did this by creating a fake antisemitism crisis, smearing us as fake news, and doing everything in his power to install Starmer as Labour leader. Holden isn’t the only one to document this (see Get In) – but it is the first to properly expose it, with exclusive evidence and first-hand accounts.

The Canary will be exclusively serialising several chapters of the book before it is published – starting from Monday 13 October. Holden will also writing for us on why he has done this. He has had to be extremely careful over many months now when it comes to The Fraud. And rightly so – as it has been revealed that Labour Together under McSweeney set private investigators on both him and Andrew Feinstein.

What all this shows is that those at the centre of the British political system will do anything to keep themselves there, keep the gravy train going, and keep the white supremacist, capitalist system propped up.

Yes, we have our tinfoil hats on when it comes to Corbyn and Sultana – and us

So, we know about the Spycops scandal. We know that the now-head of Downing Street ran a coordinated smear campaign against Corbyn and the Canary. And we know that Labour Together paid private investigators to snoop on both Holden and Feinstein. Yet you’re telling us we’re being conspiratorial to think someone might of intentionally disrupted our live event?

Of course, we don’t know who this might have been. Someone from government? Labour Together? The list is long.

Sure, it’s technically feasible that there just happened to be connection problems on all our various teams technology, and their backups. – and the phones of the audience. But, so is the other alternative.

Regardless, what we do know is that the Canary’s team had everything in place. Yet suddenly, one of the biggest political moments for the left this year came crashing down – virtually. We don’t think it was an accident. And we suggest you question if it was, too.

Featured image via the Canary