❈ ❈ ❈

Your Party: ‘A New Democratic Socialist Party in Britain’

Isaac Nellist

After months of buildup, the founding conference of the Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana-led Your Party took place in Liverpool over November 29–30.

The conference ratified the name “Your Party”, initially a temporary stand-in name, and decided on a leadership structure, key constitutional provisions and set a vision for the kind of party it hopes to be.

Your Party was announced in July when Sultana posted on X that she was leaving the Labour Party to form a new party with Corbyn, other independent MPs and activists across the country.

The party was broadly conceived to be a left alternative to Labour, and a force to challenge the rise of Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK party, which has risen in the polls and which some analysts said in October could hold the largest bloc of MPs in the house if an election was held.

The Keir Starmer Labour government has overseen falling living standards, delayed promises to overturn anti-union laws and has backed Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It has also refused to tackle Reform’s racism head on and has hardened its policies around asylum seekers.

Initial excitement

The strong appetite for a party that can take on these challenges was made clear when 80,000 people signed up to the Your Party mailing list within five hours of its opening. By August, 800,000 people had signed up.

Since then, the initial excitement waned as internal divisions, in particular between Corbyn and Sultana, played out in public.

Tensions erupted when Sultana launched a membership portal, reportedly without permission from Corbyn and the other independent MPs. Corbyn’s team reported the matter to the Information Commissioner’s Office and urged supporters to cancel any payments made.

Sultana responded by describing the Your Party leadership as a “sexist boys’ club” from which she had been excluded from discussions.

These divisions led some to jump ship to the Green Party, which claimed to have reached 170,000 members last month, more than doubling the 70,000 members it achieved when Zack Polanski took over the leadership in September.

By the time the Your Party conference came around, many were concerned the project would fall apart before it began.

Two of the independent group of MPs involved in forming Your Party — Iqbal Mohamed and Adnan Hussain — left in the weeks before the conference.

Hussain said he quit because of “persistent infighting and a struggle for power” in the organisation, while Mohamed cited “false allegations and smears against him”, after he was accused of transphobia.

Another flare-up occurred when members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) were expelled from Your Party on the eve of the conference, with Sultana boycotting the first day of the conference in solidarity with them.

“It’s been a bumpy road,” Corbyn told left-wing commentator Owen Jones on the opening day of the conference. “It hasn’t been an easy time … but we are where we are, and we are going forward together.”

A ‘new democratic socialist party’

The conference was attended by about 2500 delegates who were selected through an online sortition process, which involved randomly selecting people from the membership to act as delegates.

The first day began with an introduction by Liverpool City councillor Lucy Williams and an opening speech from Corbyn.

“We are here today to found a new democratic socialist party in Britain that can challenge power in our society,” Corbyn said.

“We have an amazing opportunity before us … It’s up to us to develop a mass party and a force that brings people in and gives people that sense of hope.

“We live in a world with the most grotesque level of inequality imaginable … Our movement is one of justice, equality and environmental sustainability.”

Corbyn spoke about Britain’s complicity in arming Israel’s genocide and led a chant of “Free, free Palestine”. “We will not rest until there is justice!”

He also spoke about the need to oppose Reform UK, challenge Labour’s attacks on refugees and address the housing and cost-of-living crisis.

Corbyn said the goal of Your Party is “to transfer the wealth and power now concentrated in the hands of the few, to the overwhelming majority in a democratic, socialist society”.

“Your Party stands for freedom, from exploitation, poverty and war … this is our opportunity, we are going to seize it with both hands and build that party, build that society and campaign for real socialism and real social justice.”

‘Party must be run by the members’

Sultana spoke on the second day of the conference. “I am so honoured to co-found this party with Jeremy, who I have an enormous amount of admiration and respect for.

“In just a few months, we have built something no one in Westminster thought was possible, a mass democratic working-class movement, the largest socialist party in the UK since the 1940s.”

Addressing the expulsion of SWP members, Sultana said “the expulsions, the bans, the censorship on the conference floor are unacceptable. It is undemocratic and an attack on members and this movement.

“This party must be run by members, not MPs, it must not be run from above,” she said.

“Everyone knows what’s wrong with Britain, nothing works and nothing gets better. This country is rigged to serve the rich and powerful … we plan on beating them before they lead us into fascism to protect their own wealth and power.”

The conference decided on some key points, including retaining the name Your Party, and voted up a constitution, a founding political statement, standing orders and organising strategy. It also voted to allow dual membership with aligned political parties, likely reversing the SWP’s and other expulsions, and for a collective leadership model over a single elected leader.

The collective leadership model includes a 20-person executive committee made up of 16 elected members and four people who hold public office. From amongst them, there will be six positions elected, including treasurer, secretary, spokesperson, political officer, chair and deputy chair, who will oversee the day-to-day running of the party.

Time will tell whether Your Party is able to regain some of the momentum lost in the lead-up to the conference.

It now has more than 55,000 paid up members, which Corbyn described as a “sustainable basis for our work and activity”.

Leadership elections will take place over January and February and branches will be established across the country in the coming months.

Founding conferences will be held in Scotland and Wales next year.

[Courtesy: Green Left, an Australian socialist newspaper, written by progressive activists to “present the views excluded by the big business media”.]

❈ ❈ ❈

Strengths and Weaknesses on Display at Your Party’s Founding Conference

Editorial, Morning Star Online

Your Party’s founding conference brought thousands of people to Liverpool at the weekend.

Many more of the party’s 50,000 members participated online. They voted for collective leadership; for dual membership with other parties to be permitted; for the party to be explicitly socialist and for the social alliance it seeks to build to be centred on the working class.

Like every chapter of the Your Party story so far, the conference was beset by controversies, but any assessment of the new party must bear those facts in mind.

It is, by the standards of the British left, a big party. Despite legitimate concerns about conference arrangements, its membership have taken important decisions about what it will look like, some of those against the preferences of the interim leadership.

There is a world of difference between declaring you are rooted in the working class and actually being so, but the intention is important, particularly given a likely overlap in appeal with a left-leaning Green Party.

Your Party is a product of the labour movement tradition, one that seeks to end capitalist exploitation through organised working-class power. That matters.

And it is a party with considerable appeal. A recent YouGov survey suggested 12 per cent of the population could vote for it–a figure widely reported as a setback, as it is lower than in some previous polls.

But any existing left-of-Labour party would be exuberant at such polling–and it comes after months of widely publicised infighting.

Most people do not follow these political fallouts as closely as the activist left, and if Your Party can stop cutting off its nose to spite its face and move on from its conference in unity, early squabbles could quickly be forgotten.

Unfortunately that remains a big if. The conference itself did not proceed in unity: a last-minute attack on the Socialist Workers Party caused significant ill feeling; needless controversies were occasioned by the withdrawal of conference passes from particular attendees, based on unrealistic fears of disruption; co-founder Zarah Sultana boycotted the whole first day, continuing the trend of mutual escalation of disagreements that has so scarred the party’s formative process.

There is no guarantee the collective leadership will put an end to these rows, but if it does not it is hard to see the new party intervening effectively in British politics.

The antecedents of the new party in the original Corbyn project give it strengths in terms of profile and familiarity, but potential weaknesses too.

Some are of significance to the whole left. For example, the common but mistaken belief that “zionism” or the Israel lobby played the decisive role in defeating Corbyn’s Labour through smears that it was anti-semitic.

Electoral evidence shows this was a minor issue compared to its disastrous handling of the Brexit question. That’s important–because it was not merely a failing of Corbyn himself or even his supporters, but of the labour movement generally, exposing a gulf between the institutions of organised labour and the majority of the working class.

Closing that gulf is essential to any revival of working-class power and to defeating Reform, whatever one’s view of Your Party. A project for all socialists and trade unionists.

Rebuilding class-conscious trade unionism is increasingly recognised as a priority in our movement. But doing so requires developing a popular understanding of the economic basis of society, and exploitation in particular. The General Federation of Trade Unions’ first political economy conference at the weekend shows that sections of the movement understand this.

Over the coming year, events marking the centenary of Britain’s only ever general strike–including the Morning Star’s conference on April 11–will debate how to build a mass movement of and for the working class. It is a question far wider than the fate of Your Party, but those fighting for the latter to be a class conscious, community-organising and anti-imperialist socialist party are helping to answer it.

[Courtesy: Morning Star Online, a socialist British daily newspaper with a focus on social, political and trade union issues. It has been functioning as an independent readers’ cooperative since 1945.]