The fight for the soul of Your Party – and how the membership won

The founding conference of Your Party was supposed to be the birth of the radical new left that we’ve all been screaming for for years. For months, this party has been billed as the movement that would tear up the old Labour rulebook, a new transformative force, member-led and ready to rip the heart out of the establishment and the elites.

Instead, those of us who travelled to Liverpool (under very short notice, may I add) witnessed an undignified and embarrassing pantomime that felt less like a conference and more like a nasty wake where all the family argues. You know the ones, where your old racist uncle tries to batter his more open-minded son whilst they lower the corpse into the ground. It was an appalling display of factionalism that will haunt Your Party forever.

The good news? The membership didn’t put up with the bullshit, and the grassroots of us fought back. They spat on the secretive plots of an unelected shadow, making decisions behind the scenes, and delivered a decisive verdict on the left in the UK. It is ours, not theirs.

The undemocratic stain that spoiled the vibe at Your Party’s conference

I need to be crystal clear about this sabotage that fucked the entire vibe of the Saturday of the conference: the expulsion of members, including those linked to the somewhat irritating Socialist Worker’s Party (SWP), took place the night before.

That was a ball-to-the-wall wild move to make. Why, when the membership had yet to vote on the motion of dual membership, were people being expelled? The vote was literally scheduled for the next fucking day. Why the hell would someone okay this entirely undemocratic move?

To us, on the outside looking in, this wasn’t enforcing a rule. It was setting a dangerous precedent. It was a message from a shadowy team behind the scenes that seemed to say: “Our unelected clique will decide who is allowed in, not you.”

Many people may welcome the ban on the SWP. Let’s face it, their style can be annoying, but denying members affiliated with them access to the conference before a democratic vote is entirely indefensible. It’s authoritarian as shit and pulled straight from the pages of the Labour right’s playbook. A book that Your Party has promised to tear up and throw away since it was first announced, so needless to say, the membership didn’t appreciate this dangerous precedent.

But whichever plank okayed the move only ensured that the first day was fucking chaos, consumed by anger and desperate calls from the floor for unity. It seemed clear: one side of the leadership chose purge over principle, and the members made their rage clear.

A pathetic show of division when we’re desperate for unity

It definitely wasn’t just the membership that was pissed off with the decision. Zarah Sultana was fucking fuming at the exclusions and the deplorable treatment she had endured in the lead-up to the conference, leading her to boycott the first day.

It’s fucking infuriating that some people behind the scenes took it upon themselves to bully and ostracise a 32-year-old female, Muslim MP who carries the majority of the youth demographic of the vote.

She is known for her warm nature and fierce retorts, spending her entire life fighting for our rights, and what did she get as a reward for this? A fucking ten-minute slot to speak all weekend.
It was enough to make me want to fucking scream when I saw it printed in black and white on the conference timetable.

This was no accident.

Deliberate

This was a deliberate attempt to suppress a powerful political voice whose focus on transformative change geared towards wealth redistribution, lifting the voices of disabled people and downtrodden ones, is precisely what younger people are crying out for.

By ostracising Sultana, Your Party has given the impression that anyone who isn’t an old, white dude will be shot down and ignored.

This childishness was only further solidified by the conference’s closing statement. After Corbyn gave his closing call for unity, Sultana was not invited back on stage for the closing photo ops or to wave away the membership. The only fucking reason she ended up there in the pictures is that the floor was so disgusted at the snug that they shouted her name until she was ushered up. She fucking belongs there.

We are supposed to be building a new, transformative political force that can take on the established order, which is systematically draining us financially. We have friends and family choosing between eating and heating, working ourselves to fucking death and yet here Your Party was, looking absolutely childish and pathetic to thousands of activists watching.

The great betrayal came from the shadows of Your Party

This mess raises one critical question: Who the fuck, exactly, is running Your Party? Because it sure as hell didn’t seem to be the members.

The rumour mill is rolling, and word on the ground is that Jeremy Corbyn himself knew nothing about the members being excluded the night before. Pardon me, but how? He’s one of the co-leaders, is he not? How the fuck did he not know?

But if this is true, then we have a massive crisis. Who is this unaccountable faction that is pulling the strings behind the scenes and making these terrible decisions? Exceptionally, when the party has neither appointed leadership nor an elected structure?

The only logical answer is that certain people behind the scenes and surrounding Corbyn are doing it in his name. Their actions make them seem desperate to control both the party and its narrative, building Your Party into a kind of Labour 2.0. They want a centralised, leader-centric, command-and-control structure rather than the people-powered party we were promised. These shadowy people seem to be replicating the tried-and-toxic architecture of the party they supposedly broke away from, and I dread to think why.

The membership was triumphant anyway

And yet, despite all these backroom dealings, the membership rebelled.

This is where the hope lies. The members stood up and fought back against these faceless forces and told them to effectively fuck off. Yes, the result was narrow, but collective leadership run by a member-led executive won the vote against a single, all-powerful leader. This was a middle finger and rejection of the old model that we know doesn’t fucking work.

Crucially, members voted overwhelmingly in favour of allowing dual membership with other political groups, despite the actions of Your Party’s shadowy ‘spokespeople’ the night before. This decision didn’t just reverse those expulsions; it absolutely decimated the entire premise of this shadowy cabal’s coup. Members sent a decisive statement with that particular vote: we value the broadest possible unity and democracy over the sectarian control being imposed.

The conference floor showed that, despite what others may think, the membership is more radical, democratically principled and aligned with the promise of transformative change than the unelected few trying to sink the fucking ship. The membership saved the movement’s soul last weekend.

The critical friend’s warning over Your Party

Now I speak personally to Jeremy Corbyn. You’re a pillar of the left whose political career has inspired millions, including myself, and we need to talk. For decades, you have stood before thousands of podiums and preached unity. Now, it’s time to practice what you preach, not just in words but in the people you surround yourself with.

It’s time to ensure that you’re not listening to them or their whispers but rather to the screaming pleas of the members Your Party has. You need to ensure you are listening to and empowering the younger, more radical activists who have joined, and you need Zarah Sultana to do so.

If you are genuinely ignorant of the toxic purges happening in your name, it’s time to step up, find out who is responsible and stamp out this factionalism before it makes things worse.

The majority of the left will follow you to the ends of the earth, but now you have a choice: will Your Party be a party of the many or of the very shadowy few?

It’s done, it’s over and our party no longer has time for this self-sabotage. The left side of politics is currently fractured and bleeding. We are facing a fascist government led by Nigel Farage that is exploiting every single sign of weakness we display.

Over to you

The Your Party membership has done its job. They have shown you their fight and their democratic desire for an entirely new type of politics. Now it’s your turn. The internal figureheads must now get their shit together, drop the Labour-lite backstabbing and turn our minds towards fighting the real enemy.

The members are ready, but are you? Will you stop the behaviour of a few, shadowy associates?

The future of the left and the lives of so many depend on that answer.

Featured image via the Canary