Your Party’s Chaotic Conference Exposed a Movement at War With Itself

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“My glass of wine later is turning into a bottle,” said the chair of Your Party’s conference in Liverpool at one point during a particularly rowdy part of Saturday’s session. It was hard not to feel sorry for her.

“We’re going to have to cut the mic [of the speaker]. We have to keep order. We have to keep order!” she exclaimed at one point.

The member concerned wouldn’t stop speaking – as he railed against what he described as a ‘witchhunt’ of members of other socialist parties.

It must have been a particularly painful thing to hear for Jeremy Corbyn, whose supporters so often condemned what they viewed as a witchhunt against his supporters in the early days of Keir Starmer’s leadership. Now it was allegedly happening within Your Party, Jeremy Corbyn’s upstart socialist party that has been riven with personal divisions and factional fighting even before it formally launched.

Its conference in Liverpoor exposed some real problems for the party. Originally planned to host 13,000 people, in the end, only around 2,500 people turned up, selected by ‘sortition’ – a bit like a jury. It’s a hung one.

In the huge cavernous space of the ACC – also home to Labour’s conference earlier this year – at times the delegates resembled ballbearings rattling around in a tin can. 

Of course Your Party doesn’t pretend to be a party on the scale of the Labour Party. But it does share some things in common: in particular the factionalism that so often tears left-wing movements asunder.

Internal Tumult

At one of many points of disruption in the hall, the Chair told members: “Please, please remember that we have a very important battle outside of this room, and it is called the very right wing media.”

Your Party’s scepticism of Britain’s press is understandable and justified. But the project has often done itself few favours: from Zarah Sultana’s unauthorised membership launch in September, to the departure of all the directors of MoU, which held the party’s funds – including the income from that botched scheme. 

And, in the past few weeks alone, they have seen the edeparture of two MPs from Corbyn’s Independent Alliance in Parliament, which had been steering the foundation of the new party.

As a result, Your Party organisers were expecting some disruption at conference, and they got it.

Reporters were told – without much prompting – that if safety was put at risk or there was any violence, the conference would likely be shut down.

There was, thankfully, no suc violence. But heckling and defiance of the chair over members of the Socialist Worker’s Party, Socialist Party and others being rejected from the conference (and in some cases actively removed) made the atmosphere tense. 

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Britain’s 57 varieties of far-left parties have certainly jumped on board Your Party – or attempted to. I counted literature for eight different socialist/communist factions and parties at Your Party conference, plus Zarah Sultana rally leaflets. This was at one event, largely under one chair.

At the rally for Sultana supporters on the eve of Your Party conference, former Labour NEC member Mish Rahman hit out at briefings against her by other YP figures “in the billionaire press”. “You don’t do the movement any favours by talking to them…You haven’t even got the guts to put your name to it.”

At that very moment, at least one close ally of Sultana was briefing a journalist from a right-wing newspaper, I later learnt.

The battle for control of the 55,000-or-so strong party – without doubt Britain’s largest formally socialist party since the second world war – has been fierce.

Sultana and her allies were intensely opposed to the decision of Your Party (so far) to ban dual membership – being a member of other national parties at the same time. The national secretary of the SWP spoke alongside her at her rally on Friday, having been told he could no longer attend. He had already travelled to Liverpool and booked accommodation, only adding to the frustration.

Another supporter, Lewis Nielsen, had chatted to Jeremy Corbyn on the train down, bought a cup of tea for his wife and then found himself barred from the conference by Corbyn’s allies at the helm. 

As oneYour Party member told the rally on Friday: “I used to help run Labour Against the Witch Hunt, which was directed against Jeremy Corbyn. Now Corbyn is running a witch hunt… is this ridiculous or what? We have to stand up and say, we’re not going to take this”. When several of Sultana’s prominent backers were barred from the conference on Saturday, she boycotted the first day entirely. 

For Your Party officials, there was no debate needed: “Members of another national political party signed up to Your Party in contravention of clearly-stated membership rules – and these rules were enforced. We’re focused on hosting a democratic conference.” 

Unfortunately, and inevitably, everyone else was focused on the spats.

In the end, members voted to allow so-called ‘dual membership’, following agreement by the elected central committee early next year, and with a list ratified by the next conference.

It is hard to see this as anything other than kicking the can down the road.

Groups like the SWP and Socialist Party are incredibly adept at organising within other groups – from unions to other parties. They will make good use of the new rules when they come in. 

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Underground Warfare

Sultana has, it appears, tied her hopes to these groups. But she will be a means to an end: Your Party becoming a formally revolutionary party, significantly to the left of where it is now. 

Of course teething troubles were guaranteed. As Corbyn said in his opening speech on Saturday: “Over the last few months, I looked very hard in all the libraries I can find for a handbook on the establishment of a political party. There isn’t one.”

“Maybe we could write one, learning from over-reaching.”

However, after a weekend at Your Party’s first national conference, I don’t think all the necessary lessons have yet been learned. 

Far from focusing on principled debates about political direction, the event was dominated by personal disputes between Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s camps. 

Corbyn said of Sultana’s rally – held roughly at the same time as an event of his on Friday: “Zarah spoke [at her] rally, and I very happily, proudly sent a message to that rally, and Zarah sent one to ours. I was grateful [for] that support & solidarity…We’ve got to come together and be united.”

But there was nothing in that message to praise Sultana or suggest they will work together with real unity in the coming months.

And the vote by members to reject a single-leadership model – which would have triggered a direct Corbyn v Sultana leadership contest – will only move the warfare underground. Elections for the central committee – from where the ‘collective leadership’ will be drawn – will be fierce.

A Your Party spokesperson put a positive spin on it, saying: “This vote shows that we really are doing politics differently: from the bottom-up, not the top-down… With a truly member-led party, we will offer something different: democratic, grassroots, accountable.” 

But there is a reason parties have single leaders (as the Green Party and Zack Polanski have shown). In Britain’s personality-focused politics: you need a single big bold figure to cut through the noise.

Corbyn will be 80 at the next General Election. Previously, it felt likely he would run the party for a term then hand over the reins to Sultana, or someone else. It is hard to see his allies allowing anything like that to happen now.

In her own conference speech on Sunday, after ending her boycott, Sultana drew parallels to “the Labour right’s playbook” in Your Party, including alleged “witch-hunts, smears, intimidation, the bullying, the legal threats and leaks to the Murdoch press” from Corbyn’s allies. She said she “did not leave the Labour Party to create another Labour Party.”

But the egos, in-fighting, and off-the-record briefings from competing camps suggest that the former Labour figures involved are carrying much of that baggage with them.

Beyond the senior-level rows however, the stakes were high. Everyone knows the threat from Reform is real and that Nigel Farage could now become Prime Minister.

Lost Momentum

Your Party had, and perhaps still has, potential. The £800,000 war chest – no doubt now significantly lower from exorbitant conference fees – plus 800,000 initial supporters could still prove powerful.

However, a rather shambolic conference and a botched membership launch has burnt through much of the movement’s goodwill.

Momentum has already been lost and plenty of potential backers have already jumped ship to the Greens under Polanski’s left-populist leadership.

Your Party appears set to back candidates – independent socialists, including some YP members – in May’s local elections. 

If they run against Greens, it is hard to see that furthering the party’s aims to take on corporate power, and the mainstream parties.

Can they make a dent elsewhere? The evidence from this weekend’s chaotic scenes does not look promising.