Your Party's moment is now or never
Your Party’s aim should be absolutely obvious: the creation of a large, broad party positioned on the far left.
That there is pent-up demand for just such a project is clear: not only from the 800,000 people who swiftly registered their interest for Your Party, but also in the preceding election of four independent pro-Palestine MPs, and in the post-launch surge of the Greens under Zack Polanski, who stands several fields to the left of any previous Green leader.
The problem, as the world now knows, is that the leaders of Your Party are fumbling the ball. Why?
One fundamental reason is that both of the principals, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and MP Zarah Sultana, have little or no experience in building anything outside the Labour Party machine. This is a real weakness, because politics in the Labour Party and politics outside it are two very different things.
Inside Labour, there is a huge bureaucracy in control of the machine. Compared to parties and movements outside Labour, it is well staffed and well funded.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
When conferences and elections come around, people and money can be mobilised, and a command structure of officials can make it all happen. Much of internal Labour politics is about the competition for control over this machine.
Outside Labour, other qualities are required. Extra-parliamentary movements are built by political persuasion, dynamic activism, the creation of alliances, and the ability to make very little money generate a lot of political impact.
Leadership vacuum
Corbyn has taken much of his team from his time as Labour leader with him, including his chief of staff, Karie Murphy, along with former Unite general secretary Len McCluskey.
Corbyn himself is widely admired for his kindness and humble approach to politics. But this has its downside in his unwillingness to take hard decisions and to be straightforward about his preferences. He is widely seen as a leadership-averse leader.
Into the vacuum this creates, Corbyn’s supposed subordinates are able to insert themselves. For them, the bureaucratic ruthlessness learnt in the labour movement machine is a way of life.
It's hard to imagine what drove the Corbyn team to launch an attack on a section of its own membership on the eve of the conference
Corbyn’s approach clashed immediately with the 30-strong advisory group - which included former Birmingham councillor Salma Yaqoob, former PCS union general secretary Mark Serwotka, and campaigner Andrew Feinstein, who stood against Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the last election - that had been meeting for months to discuss founding what has become Your Party.
Frustrated by Corbyn’s indecision, the group tried, inadvisedly, to bump him into an announcement of a new party with Sultana as co-leader. This led to the initial farce of two launches and the prolonged, public, ongoing war between Corbyn and Sultana.
As last weekend’s founding conference approached, Sultana increasingly tacked left to build support among the revolutionary groups and radical base of activists in Your Party, mobilising them against the entrenched nascent bureaucracy around Corbyn. Corbyn supporters tried to hide behind the authority of the independent pro-Palestine MPs, dragging them into conflicts for which they were politically unprepared - losing two of them in the process - and damaging relations with some in the Muslim community as a result.
In preparation for the conference, Corbyn’s team then built a series of assemblies that were “consultative” but very definitely not democratic; they were described by one participant as “woke managerialism”. No motions were allowed and no votes were permitted. There was no election of delegates; instead, they would be chosen by a lucky-dip draw known as “sortition”, a process with a deeply undemocratic pedigree.
Uniting against Corbyn
All of this exploded at last weekend’s founding conference in Liverpool. The Corbyn office management of the party reduced the 800,000 who first expressed interest to around 50,000 actual members, and then about 2,000 actual delegates at the conference - far below their own early ambitions of 13,000 delegates.
This meant that the revolutionary left, and Sultana supporters generally, were always going to be a larger percentage of attendees than would otherwise have been the case had potential attendees not dropped away.
To split Sultana’s supporters, Corbyn’s team launched a series of expulsions and exclusions from the conference, targeting members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and Counterfire. Among those expelled or barred from entry were Samira Ali, a national organiser for Stand Up To Racism, Lancashire councillor Michael Lavalette, and a member of Sultana’s staff.
Corbyn claimed the exclusion of the SWP was because they are registered with the Electoral Commission as a party that stands in elections. But this is not the case - the SWP is not registered with the Electoral Commission.
Thus, the Corbyn leadership - rather than working with long-term allies on the left - has united the far left against him. Few have managed that task before. This led to Sultana herself refusing to come to the conference on its first day, and to Corbyn’s team losing key resolutions, including on replacing the single-leader model with collective leadership.
It’s hard to imagine what drove the Corbyn team to launch an attack on a section of its own membership on the eve of the conference. Surely the Witch-Hunting 101 manual advises that this is best done after you have won a mandate - say, Monday morning, not Friday night.
Even Neil Kinnock, in his famous Labour Party conference attack on the Militant tendency and other socialists in the 1980s, knew that you needed to win the conference first. Indeed, he delivered one of his best-ever speeches in pursuit of a very bad objective. That looks like a strategic master stroke compared with the Corbyn team’s suicide-vest attack on the far left.
Yet again, the membership of Your Party must now make the best of a mess created at the top. Many members realise what is at stake - and that’s precisely why they voted for a collective leadership model.
The election for that leadership will be in February. What is necessary is that a strong, independent executive of known and respected figures now takes over the running of the party. These should include Corbyn and Sultana, but they should be embedded within a wider responsible collective.
Just as importantly, Your Party needs to end the division and bureaucratic authoritarianism, and adopt a basic five-point series of demands that address the concerns of ordinary workers and empower the members to get out and campaign.
If that happens, then by the time of the local elections next May, the decay of a hated Labour government and the desperation of working people in a broken and busted society - a condition that blights the lives of millions - may finally count more than the petty squabbles that have attended the birth of Your Party.
Polanski has shown that this can be done, even in a party whose reach into working-class areas is limited. Your Party now has that opportunity. If it fails, it will abandon whole swathes of the working class to Reform and Nigel Farage. It is not an exaggeration to say the whole world is watching.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. To learn more about republishing this content and the associated fees, please fill out this form. More about MEE can be found here.
