Zarah Sultana celebrates, as Your Party backs ‘collective leadership’
Your Party members have backed a proposal for collective leadership at the founding conference. The options presented to members were the collective leadership model or single leadership. Notably, Zarah Sultana supported the option which won, whereas Jeremy Corbyn was a proponent for the alternative:
We did it! 🥳
Join the movement: https://t.co/g0Ua1vP0ug pic.twitter.com/jyt7CCxOJv
— Zarah Sultana MP (@zarahsultana) November 30, 2025
Your Party: collective Leadership
Following the vote, Your Party will have a collective leadership for its first two years. This will mean the party makes decisions via a collective group, which is headed by a non-MP. As the decision will mean there will be no leadership contest between Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn, outlets like the Independent have framed the story as follows:
Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana dropped as Your Party leaders
Sultana, meanwhile, supported the result:
I have fought for maximum member democracy since day one. Seeing members choose collective leadership is truly exciting.
Together, we’re building a new socialist party – radically democratic and powered by a mass movement. This party will be led by its members not MPs. This is only the beginning.
The result is seen as a loss for Your Party current co-leader Corbyn:
Big loss for the Corbyn faction here – Corbyn is acting as interim leader and made clear he intended to run for sole leader. Membership has rejected that entirely. https://t.co/EY0UES07u2
— Stats for Lefties 🍉🏳️⚧️ (@LeftieStats) November 30, 2025
Corbyn has previously made his feelings clear on why he supports the single leadership model:
“It’s quite hard for the public to grasp the idea that there’s ten people that run things.”
Jeremy Corbyn suggests he prefers a single leadership model for Your Party rather than a collective leadership. pic.twitter.com/yq6XCT6v1o
— PoliticsJOE (@PoliticsJOE_UK) November 29, 2025
Others such as Novara’s Michael Walker are heavily critical of the collective leadership model:
Your Party has voted for dual membership (I.e to be amalgam of small Trot parties) and for collective leadership (I.e rule by committee with no leader, Corbyn or otherwise).
My take: If it already seemed like a directionless mess, it’s about to get even worse.
— Michael Walker (@michaeljswalker) November 30, 2025
Walker’s colleague Steven Methven took issue with Walker’s point about dual membership, showing that there’s a breadth of opinion even within individual left-wing media organisations:
Sorry Michael, but I think this is completely wrong about dual membership. And it’s a dismissal of the probably 50k members who aren’t in small groups. What you actually have now is the largest explicitly socialist party in decades – trying to organise on socialist principles
— Steven Methven (@StevenJMethven) November 30, 2025
Methven also noted that the Your Party leadership model vote was tight:
The party has also voted for collective leadership, though with a much tighter margin. Again, it shows a rejection of Westminster style structures, as well as a lack of trust in a single leader to keep the party genuinely representative. pic.twitter.com/xskGWTf0uE
— Steven Methven (@StevenJMethven) November 30, 2025
Regarding the potential Your Party leadership options, Ed Sykes wrote for the Canary on 28 November that members will vote either to make this CEC the collective leadership, or simply to make it part of a leadership team alongside a single elected leader. The former would represent a significant break from how parties usually work in the UK.
He added that leaders have taken on a more prominent role in Britain in recent decades. And this has arguably contributed to the anti-democratic policies that have come to dominate over that period. In this context, a more collective, grassroots, member-led model of leadership could help to challenge the destructive idea that the ‘leader-centred’ system we have today is the only way to do things. Alternative models like this already exist in some trade unions, left-wing parties in Europe, Latin American grassroots movements, and further afield.
Featured image via Zarah Sultana
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Good article, thanks.
Hmm, it sounds like Michael Walker has been on GB News one too many times.
Government by committee: it never works. No two people will agree on everything and the more people you add in, the more variance you get.
The original five in Your Party didn’t agree on anything so how is a larger number?
We do need a properly socialist party but, sadly, after the good intentions, Your Party has shot itself in the foot and cannot really expect any support.
So what David Lewis is saying is that because there was a difficult birth, the baby should be killed immediately and not allowed to grow and mature.
This is the one chance in a lifetime, the membership are not inclined to let it slip away. This vote for collective leadership for an interim period – not for ever – (disclosure: I voted for it) neatly heads off the ambitions of those like Corbyn’s dubious ex-Labour advisers, and makes it difficult for them to form a power base and take over, which I (and many others) suspect was their intention.
If you really believe in a socialist alternative, then you’d better get behind YP and make it work – because there may not be another chance, especially in my own limited lifetime.
Although from David Lewis’ other posts on the subject, he appears to really be wanting YP to fail, so I suspect a degree of crocodile tears are involved.