Neither Corbyn Nor Sultana: It's Their Party
Alongside the rows and recriminations at Your Party's first conference in Liverpool, there was idealism aplenty, reports Adrian Goldberg
Beyond the widely reported factionalism and leadership rows that have bedevilled the launch of Your Party lies another narrative – the idealism of many of its supporters, who desperately want to see the new left-wing party emerge as a major force in UK politics.
Jed Thomas, from Hertfordshire, was one of those drawn to the fledgling movement by the charisma of Zarah Sultana, who was his local MP during his student days, and Jeremy Corbyn, Labour leader from 2015 to 2020.
Although the pair have been portrayed as leadership rivals, 26-year old Thomas – who has never attended a political conference before Your Party’s launch in Liverpool at the weekend – said both appealed to his desire for a more just society. But even more important, he said, was the opportunity presented by the new party to ‘do’ politics in a different way.
He told the Byline Podcast: “When Corbyn got the [Labour] leadership, that was the first time that I considered getting involved in actual party politics. I never joined the Labour Party during that time. Part of the reason was it seemed like a quite alienating, already entrenched place.
“When Your Party came about, there was the chance to have a different sort of political party with different structures to Labour. They were doing innovative things with democracy, so I decided to join.”
He admits he has also flirted with the Green Party: “Earlier this year, I was going to join to vote for Zack Polanski. He’s quite an energising figure. A lot of people are very excited about his leadership. I think the Greens have great politics now. I think they have a very interesting perspective.”
So why not throw his lot in with the Greens? Thomas said that while he believes in more public ownership and higher taxes for the rich, he joined Your Party as much for the process as the policies.
Access to the Conference, for example, was decided by sortition – a kind of weighted lottery at which members are selected at random – unlike traditional parties where local branches send delegates. And members have now decided that instead of a conventional leader, the party will be steered by an executive committee, with MPs excluded from the process. That means no ‘top job’ for either Corbyn or Sultana.
“I felt that the other parties, even if I did agree with their leadership, didn’t have internal democracy that would allow ordinary members to have a large influence,” Thomas remarked.
He felt that, “conventional political parties would potentially lock out the perspectives of incomers and non-entrenched people.”
Specific policies “will emerge over the next few months,” but Thomas believes the party will be united in a tough stance against increased UK military spending – despite Russia’s attacks on Ukraine.
“It seems that [the spending] is part of a larger project, not necessarily just to help with Ukraine and support for them, but a larger project of increased militarisation in line with American objectives,” he said.
Whereas Thomas is a political ingenue, Alan Story, from Norwich, is a veteran activist. He runs the Left Lane substack and had previously complained that the party’s central organisation was refusing to share details of members those like him, who were seeking to organise at local level.
This may help account for why Your Party has only 55,000 members compared to the 800,000 people who initially signed up with expressions of interest – albeit that this is still is a significant figure for an avowedly socialist grouping in the UK.
Despite evidence of divisions at the Conference between supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana – highlighted by Josiah Mortimer of Byline Times – Story described “a really pro-people mood in the room, and a breaking from the Westminster bubble.
“What’s interesting is that by having this collective leadership model, we are spared the next three months of a leadership contest between Sultana and Corbyn. Having a conflict between the two best known personalities is not the way to start a party. So we can expect, let’s hope, that that kind of tension will be diminished over the next period of time. The media want to play this up all the time.”
Story despairs of Keir Starmer’s support for Donald Trump and “the genocide of our time” in Israel, but doesn’t believe that victory at the ballot box is the only barometer of Your Party’s success.
“You can run a good election and lose”, he declares, arguing that what’s important is the battle of ideas.
Your Party, he says, “is a political party, hopefully, of a new type. It’s not one where everything’s dependent on how you ballot.”
He wants it to forge alliances with “the people who are out there, organising housing co-ops, working with tenants, fighting for refugees.” And although Story is scathing of Zack Polanski’s ‘eco populism’ (“What the hell’s that? It doesn’t mean anything”) he envisages partnership with the Greens “to change the wacky voting system in this country.”
It’s a view with which Thomas concurs, arguing that in the age of social media, it’s possible to build a broader movement outside of Westminster, just as Reform have managed on the right, whereby the raising St George’s and union flags was nurtured by their nationalist sentiments, but not directly organised by Farage’s group.
One obvious area of division on the left is the status of Israel, highlighted by Sultana’s Conference declaration which appeared to call for the overthrow of the state of Israel – a view never publicly shared by Corbyn.
Can you believe in Israel’s right to exist and be a Your Party member?
Thomas said: “I would say to people that are interested in Your Party and maybe do believe in the existence of the state of Israel, that all sorts of nuance and beliefs were absolutely encouraged and invited at that conference.
“And even though some senior figures might have a particularly hard line response, I think all sorts of people with all sorts of beliefs can come into Your Party and have that debate. I think that’s the primary thing that Your Party is promoting – that debating conversation.”
Listen to the full episode here.
This is my latest for Byline Times; trying to dig beneath the stories about rows and recriminations to understand what has driven 55,000 people to sign up to Your Party.