Your Party must focus on solidarity, says Jewish anti-Zionist candidate for CEC

Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi is a long-time trade unionist and anti-racist campaigner. And she’s chosen to run in Your Party’s Central Executive Committee (CEC) elections. The Canary spoke to her to find out more.

As an “ardent anti-Zionist”, Wimborne-Idrissi stood firmly against the right’s witch hunt against pro-Palestine voices in the Labour Party. And she faced numerous attacks because of her commitment, as co-founder of Jewish Voice for Labour, to speaking out. That’s a key reason why she now insists it’s:

absolutely vital that we show solidarity with one another, outwardly and internally

That absolutely means:

solidarity with all our members if they are ever under attack

And it means taking a firm stance against:

the throwing of people under the bus for expediency, the attempts to compromise with forces that are out to get you.

But it also means avoiding purity tests and connecting with people on a human level instead.

Building a mass party requires “solidarity with ordinary people”

If Your Party is going to be a successful, mass party, it needs to be able to handle disagreements. As Wimborne-Idrissi asked:

Do we just say ‘we will only have in this party people who agree 100% with a very sort of pure, socialist, internationalist, socially progressive agenda’? Or are we willing to acknowledge that people learn, people change, people develop as they are involved in various campaigns and struggles?

Most ordinary people care about the state of housing, social care, the NHS, schools, safety on the streets, and so on. But not everyone has a deep understanding of why things are the way they are. As she stressed:

You can’t expect a mass party to have people in it who are all 100% knowledgeable

And the way to bring people around to a better understanding is by connecting with them, recognising who broadly agrees with key principles, and welcoming them in. It’s not by lecturing them. As she insisted:

You have to be there in your community, supporting them in whatever issues they face in their daily lives…

It’s solidarity that is really the key to this. Solidarity with ordinary people fighting ordinary battles in their daily lives…

We’ve got to be embedded in those communities.

Your Party must be a listening party

In terms of Your Party itself, she said:

The important thing to do is to go out and listen to the grassroots members. What do people really need in order to build locally, in their branches, in their communities and, where they have the capability, electorally?

She emphasised:

Trust your membership. And do not start from the beginning with divisive rules.

Members will know what campaigns matter most to people in their areas. So they need to decide what to do with the resources they have. And as she asserted:

The decisions that are made by the membership need to be adhered to by the leadership.

Establishment political parties have treated ordinary people with contempt, she said. And Your Party needs to be different. It needs to listen, and show solidarity.

With her long experience in struggles for peace and justice, Wimborne-Idrissi has learned about “standing up for yourself” and the power of “working as well as possible with people who share our views”. And she hopes to bring her collaborative, democratic spirit to the first collective leadership of Your Party.

Featured image via the Canary