Zarah Sultana quoted Gramsci twice last weekend: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
The first time she cited the Italian theorist was in a clammy conference room on the second floor of a Holiday Inn in Liverpool city centre, where she’d gathered her supporters on the eve of Your Party’s founding conference. The mood was tense and sparky, partly because, hours earlier, one of her co-speakers was among those expelled from the party and barred from the conference.
The second time was on the conference mainstage on Sunday afternoon: her supporters reinstated, her major party proposals accepted, and her will asserted over Britain’s biggest new socialist party in generations.
If 32-year-old former Labour MP Sultana saw her place in history as willing this new world into existence, and her monsters were easy to spot – the hard-right is ascendant as it has been in modern British history – it was hard not to see the ‘old world’ in her 76-year-old Your Party co-founder, the most successful and recognisable British socialist of the modern era, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Over the course of a messy, fractious and difficult conference, Sultana sought to draw the curtain on Corbynism as the headline turn of the British left, and set the stage for its next act.
But last weekend was not a complete victory for Sultana the individual or Sultanaism, not least as Sultanism does not yet exist as a fully formed, coherent political platform. Some of her own supporters still have questions about the future of Your Party, and Corbyn remains an influential force; even among Sultana’s most ardent backers, there are few who would relish his complete exit from the project.
It was instead a victory for the members of this fledgling formation who, having watched in horror for months as it teetered on the brink of self-destruction, now voted for a new type of party, fronted by two charismatic and talented politicians but in theory free of the pitfalls of personality politics (members voted against having one leader, instead opting for a collective leadership model led by a Central Executive Committee).
There was still plenty of acrimony in the air over the blustery weekend in Liverpool, as Corbyn and Sultana’s various aides and supporters fought pitched battles via conference motions, WhatsApp groups and press briefings. But there was also genuine excitement and the oft-expressed hope that a better, different kind of political party could deliver a better, different kind of future.
Though in the face of this at-times chaotic conference, it would be easy to write off the whole experiment as typical leftie grandstanding, it should be noted that it is not every day that a political project arrives quite so fully formed. Your Party has a growing number of councillors, only one fewer MP than Nigel Farage’s Reform UK (and there are rumours of it gaining more with impending defections), and similar membership figures to the long-established Green Party before its recent surge.
A different kind of conference
Contrasted with a conventional political conference, the main hall at the Your Party conference looked ramshackle: a handful of makeshift stands and hospitality carts around its perimeter, a smattering of chest-height silver tables in one area and two banks of 60 or so seats arranged in front of a projector screen in another.
The last major conference I attended was Reform’s, back in August, where the first conversation I’d had was with a man employed by Direct Bullion, who directly tried to sell me gold bullion. He was manning a huge conference stand for which his employer, who also has Farage on its payroll, had paid tens of thousands of pounds.
The only private company with a visible presence at the Your Party conference was the radical publisher Pluto Press. It had a small table laid out with books about the history of the left in the Labour Party.
Beyond the main hall was the auditorium, where a few thousand socialists faced a large stage adorned with Your Party banners and a giant screen.
Liverpool nurse and councillor Lucy Williams opened the proceedings with a rousing speech in which she described the party as being “Scouse enough to terrify the establishment”.
Then came the party’s spiritual leader: “Good morning. I’m Jeremy Corbyn, and I’m a political activist.”
In this, the first of two speeches he’d give from the main stage over the weekend – one more than Sultana, as her supporters were keen to point out – Corbyn acknowledged, in a roundabout way, the difficulties the project had faced in getting to this point.
“There’s no handbook on how to set up a political party, but after this experience I might write one,” he joked, prompting someone within my earshot to whisper: “What Is To Be Done *literally* exists”.
“I’m sure there are easier ways we could have done it,” he continued, which is true, but downplayed the many significant ways in which Your Party has tried to be as democratic and inclusive as possible, even in spite of some teething problems.
In recent months, the party has held a series of in-person rallies, where members could discuss its founding documents and propose amendments to them. These documents were then published online, with members able to propose further amendments through a crowd-editing portal. This process was followed by a series of debates at the conference, with both members attending in person and online able to vote on more than two dozen proposed amendments, before finally ratifying the documents in their entirety.
“This way,” Corbyn explained from the stage, “we’re drawing directly on the expertise of the more than 50,000 people who have joined Your Party. Putting power in members’ hands is essential if we are to build a society in which power and wealth are redistributed to all.”
Delegates were selected to attend the conference by sortition, essentially a lottery-style system carried out by an independent third party, which is designed to result in a selection representative of the membership as a whole.
As one source put it: “It was a monumental, gargantuan, herculean effort, only made possible by a huge number of volunteers working without pay in extremely trying circumstances.”
Ghosts of Labour past
The open-source style politics on display at the conference were in stark contrast to the months of opaque backroom dealings that preceded it.
Plans for a new party had been underway for the best part of two years, initiated by people close to Corbyn, including his long-time ally Karie Murphy, a trade unionist and political strategist who was Corbyn’s chief-of-staff while he was Labour leader, and the well-heeled leftwing operative James Schneider, Corbyn’s former comms director, who assembled activists and politicians from across the left in the months before the 2024 general elections.
The project got underway in earnest soon after the election, with the first signs that Keir Starmer’s mega majority did not reflect a widespread enthusiasm for his Labour Party.
The process for forming a new party was started by Collective, an organisation co-founded by Murphy. People who attended its meetings say they left feeling optimistic, but worried that the operation had the same dysfunctional working style as the Labour leadership under Corbyn, and had issues with Murphy’s abrasiveness.
Some of these people decided to launch a new organisation: the MoU, named for a document drafted by Jamie Driscoll, the ‘technocratic socialist’ former mayor of North of Tyne, who played a central role in this period but has since distanced himself. Crucially, the MoU had Corbyn’s blessing and involvement – which some wrongly interpreted as him agreeing that Murphy would have no role in a future party.
The MoU made considerable headway, commissioning polling on different names (including, to the continued amusement of some involved, Robin Hood) and attempting to set out a clear political and organisational basis for the party. But some members bristled at what they felt risked becoming a tribute to Corbyn’s legacy, rather than something new.
Eventually, Corbyn insisted that the two operations running in tandem must be merged together, resulting in a group called the Organising Committee, which brought in more figures from across the political left, including climate activists and renters rights campaigners, and the four independently elected MPs who, along with Corbyn, had banded together in Parliament to form ‘The Independent Alliance’.
Throughout this period, Sultana was, in the words of one source, “the shoe waiting to drop.” If Corbyn is the past and present of British socialism, Sultana is almost universally recognised as its future.
To one source involved at the time, “that the two should both be central was almost self-apparent as soon as it became an option.” But it was easier said than done.
Tentative talks between Sultana’s camp and members of the Organising Committee began around May this year. The series of events that followed are now broadly well-understood by anyone with a passing interest in left-wing politics, in part because they have played out all too publicly: Sultana unilaterally announced the launch of a new party in July, and two months later she unilaterally emailed supporters inviting them to become paid-up members, which – due to a separation of data and finance assets between the different camps, complicated by Sultana’s decision to launch membership with a new system – resulted in a legal and financial quagmire that remains unresolved.
These were just some of the feuds already simmering when Lewis Nielsen, a prominent member of the Socialist Workers Party who was slated to appear alongside Sultana at her Holiday Inn rally, received an email informing him that he’d been barred from the conference and expelled from the party due to ‘dual carding’ (holding membership of more than one political party). At the time the email was sent, Nielsen was already on his way to Liverpool, on board the same train as Corbyn and his entourage.
Hours later, one of Sultana’s chosen conference aides, independent councillor James Giles, found out that he, too, had been barred from the event – although, this time over an unspecified “personal matter” relating to an apparent investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office. Giles said he has never heard from the regulator and attributed the decision to factionalism on the part of Team Corbyn, namely, Murphy.
And so the conference began on Saturday with Sultana in boycott.
“I’m disappointed to see on the morning of our founding conference, people who have travelled from all over the country, spent a lot of money on their train fare …[and] on being able to participate in this conference, being told that they have been expelled,” she told the assembled press.
“That is a culture reminiscent of the Labour Party,” she added, keenly aware of how this would play with so many of this new party’s supporters, who, throughout its formation, had expressed strong feelings that Your Party should not be ‘Labour 2.0’.
The other left-wing hopeful
Jannah, a volunteer on Sultana’s social media team, is exactly the kind of thoughtful, passionate young person that any political party would like to attract to its cause.
At 18, she had already experienced grubby machine politics up close; she was canvassing for Faiza Shaheen in Chingford and Woodford Green ahead of last year’s general election, when the Labour Party unceremoniously deselected the left-winger against the wishes of local members, in what was seen universally as a factional stitch-up by the party leadership.
“I’d been knocking on doors and canvassing in the hail,” Jannah explains, “but I got really frustrated with the way Labour deselected her. They just sent her a crappy email. It was completely unprofessional. So when she resigned from the Labour Party, so did I: now there's no real alternative.”
Incidentally, Shaheen was briefly involved with the Your Party project at one stage, but stepped away, with sources familiar with the process saying she was one of several people who had concerns about Murphy’s involvement.
It is worth remembering that Your Party isn’t the only political party looking to tap into the energies surging to the left of Starmer’s loveless Labour project.
Having won the Green Party’s leadership contest this summer, Zack Polanski, a gifted media performer and political communicator, has so far had great success in capturing the major gap to the left of Labour in UK politics. With his platform of “eco-populism”, he has supercharged the Green Party’s poll numbers and its membership.
At the Your Party conference, there was an awareness that the Polanski surge had eaten into the party’s potential base but also a conviction that the Greens are not the answer to the UK’s left-wing hole. “I wouldn't vote for the Greens, as much as I love Zack [Polanski],” Jannah said. “He’s not going to cut through with the working-class vote.”
Ellie Gomersall is well-placed to make the judgment, having been selected as a Green Party candidate for next year’s Holyrood elections in Scotland, which is technically a separate party from the Green Party of England and Wales. Turning this down, she travelled to Liverpool from Glasgow, where Your Party has three councillors and is expected to pick up more in the coming months, to be involved in what she described as a “historic opportunity”.
“I decided that this party, Your Party, is a movement that I really want to be a part of. It's not often you get the opportunity to set up a new political party, one that genuinely speaks for the working class and one that can genuinely improve people's lives. One that isn't just wanting to tweak around the edges of capitalism, but is wanting to throw away the whole damn capitalist system. I think that's really, really exciting,” Gomersall said.
Max Shanly, a tall, floppy-haired socialist organiser who has clearly thought deeply about all this, set out his views when we stepped out of the conference hall to find a quiet place to chat. “The Greens have good ideas, right? Don't get me wrong, they have lots and lots of good ideas, but it seems to me that, for one thing, they don't have a class analysis: their fundamental outlook on politics is what could probably be best described in Marxist terms as petit bourgeois.
“And they've no analysis of the state whatsoever. I think they're setting themselves up to fail because of that. I think it'd be wonderful if the Greens' agenda got through, genuinely, it'd be great – but I don't think they're capable of actually carrying it through.”
Another view emerged when speaking to the people who make up Your Party. It goes something like this: the next general election is a long way off, but there’s no way a brand new party is going to be able to win it alone. While we are developing this one, it can only be a positive that there is an existing, fighting-fit party advocating for left-wing policies and able to compete electorally.
When the election comes around, many said, we will make a pact with the Greens and other independent socialists to build a wide progressive coalition.
A (messy) new dawn
If you’re not allowed to enjoy singing Bella Ciao with your friends in a room full of people committed to a broadly similar vision of a better, fairer society, what is even the point?
Such were my attempts to quiet the cynic in my head as I looked around the main hall in the final few moments of the Your Party conference.
Despite how it may have looked from the outside, for the 2,000 people in the hall, and the thousands, perhaps millions, in the country beyond who share a vision of a fairer, progressive, socialist society, the conference had been a success, even if it was a messy one.
Having spent weeks piecing together the founding of the party, which members last weekend voted to permanently call Your Party, I am surprised it ever got off the ground. It almost, very nearly didn’t. Several times. Even a few weeks before the conference, people close to the operation were not sure it would go ahead at all.
It was perhaps inevitable that Your Party’s founding conference would be, with some justification, written up in much of the press as one of division, faction-fighting and weaponised bureaucracy. The news bulletins focused on the barrings and expulsions, the tensions between the project’s leading figures, Corbyn and Sultana, the accusations of “witchhunts” by “nameless, faceless bureaucrats”.
But this was not the full story of a weekend that, in years to come, may be looked upon as the dawn of a new era in British socialism and politics.
When the conference came to a close on Sunday afternoon, a few thousand people stepped out of the ACC Liverpool and into the frigid November air, for the most part believing they had taken part in something worthwhile and historic. In that drafty, hangar-like conference centre on the south bank of the River Mersey, a new socialist party had been born, with a commitment unique to British politics, that it would be led from below, by and for ordinary people.
Fractious though it may have been, this was a political conference truer to the pure ideals of democracy than most. There were no corporate exhibitors, and no private events where party elites shared their unvarnished plans with lobbyists. Ordinary people from all walks of life and from all corners of the country took to the stage in that huge exhibition hall and made thoughtful, impassioned contributions. Members of this new political movement were empowered to vote, either in person or through a unique online system, on how the party should function, how it should be organised and how it should be built from here.
Your Party’s conference didn’t look like a conventional political conference; it was in parts shambolic, rough around the edges, idealistic, and it involved far too many people getting inexplicably animated about things like the percentage of members required to form a quorum for a local branch.
As one organiser with the Democratic Socialists group, which had pushed hard to successfully secure measures including collective leadership and dual membership, put it: “Fundamentally, normal people don’t care about Your Party right now, and that’s absolutely fine, because it affords a movement like ours the opportunity to figure things out.
Or as a young tenants’ rights organiser from Yorkshire, who stopped momentarily to chat on the way out of the conference hall on Sunday, said: “This isn’t normal, but people are sick of normal politics.”
