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It’s not every day that Jeremy Corbyn and some of his closest comrades are described as “the right” in a political argument. But I first heard them given that potentially lethal label – for socialists, at least – shortly after arriving at Your Party’s acrimonious founding conference in Liverpool last Sunday.
The young man who used the words did not seem to be one of the hardbitten leftwing fanatics who had taken over the party, according to most of the press. He was attending his first political conference and enjoying it immensely. Which faction did he think was ahead, I asked, in the weekend’s maze of votes and debates? “Not the Corbynists,” he said with a grin. “But us – the left!”
Ever since its chaotic launch in July, Your Party has been seen by many voters and journalists – when they have noticed it at all – as a step-by-step demonstration of the futility of leftwing politics. Through ideological disagreements, disorganisation and delays, domineering personalities and disputes over leadership structure, management of funds and membership data, Your Party has seemingly squandered the opportunity offered by Labour’s rightward shift and record unpopularity. Instead, Zack Polanski’s radicalised Green party has become the preferred vehicle for many leftwing voters, thinkers and activists. Meanwhile, Your Party has been marked, by both enemies and disillusioned potential supporters, for either a quick or lingering death. From this perspective, the Liverpool conference’s onstage rows, open factional divisions and competing purists of the left simply further confirmed the party’s fate.
Yet could it be premature and simplistic to see the Your Party saga this way? One lesson of British and wider western politics over the past decade, still insufficiently learned by mainstream parties and commentators, is that rebellions should not be written off, even when they seem to be failing or contained. In discontented times, with conventional politics widely disliked and increasingly discredited, revolts against it can subside and then flare up again, or leave remnants that fuel more insurrections. From Scottish nationalism to Euroscepticism and Corbynism, rebellions have survived setbacks to reappear in new, sometimes stronger forms. Your Party’s messy existence might be a beginning rather than an ending.
Over the past year, as I’ve spent time in the milieu that eventually produced the party, I’ve met a striking number of activists who don’t fit the media’s usual leftwing categories. Often quite young but politically experienced, strongly committed to the left but not sectarian, keen on building coalitions rather than maintaining ideological purity, and not particularly reverent towards Corbyn or Your Party’s other leading personality, the MP for Coventry South, Zarah Sultana, these activists have found the party’s splits and tantrums infuriating.
“This whole process has been led from the top by two politicians who have incredibly machiavellian, pushy advisers … engaged in bitter trench warfare,” one of these activists told me, as the conference was getting under way with a disastrous flurry of delegate barrings, ejections and boycotts – most damagingly, by Sultana herself. “Everyone I know who was keen is now totally dejected. We were very close to getting everyone on the grassroots left inside the tent.”
Yet on the final day of the conference, he was suddenly much cheerier: “The programme we wanted has won all its votes. Zarah has basically signed up to it.” The party would be led by an elected committee of ordinary members – not by a single leader, as Corbyn and “the right” had wanted – and members would be allowed to be in other political parties as well. “The members have taken control,” Sultana declared to a crowd of journalists, before finally deigning to enter the conference hall.
The speech she then made there was intoxicatingly fierce: attacking “the parasites” who own privatised utilities, and the mainstream politicians and corporate interests who would “lead us into fascism to protect their wealth and power”. Your Party, she vowed, would be “a party that belongs not to nameless, faceless, unelected bureaucrats” – a swipe at Corbyn’s advisers – “but to you”. Inadvertently, the speech made the tension between her rare gifts as a communicator – and therefore her tendency to dominate political situations – and her advocacy of Your Party as a collective endeavour very clear. Next year, the party promises to “commence a review into different options for future leadership models”.
Before and after she spoke, there were debates about the structure, workings and purpose of the party. The audiences were larger than most of those at this year’s Tory conference, and livelier than at Labour’s. A diverse succession of delegates made combative speeches, ignored the chair’s orders to keep to time limits, and were almost constantly applauded or heckled. The lack of deference towards rules and hierarchies felt startling – and refreshing: a throwback to the unruly Labour conferences of the 1970s, or a prototype for a participatory politics to come.
Shortly before the conference, a YouGov poll showed that 12% of Britons “would consider” voting for Your Party. While down by a third since the party’s launch, the figure was still surprisingly high given the turmoil, and the fact that no party scored more than 29%. Our politics remains in a fragmented and volatile state, not least because Labour, Reform and the Tories share some of Your Party’s problems: divisive leading figures, widely disbelieved approaches to reviving the country, and hostility from most voters.
The Greens and Liberal Democrats currently have fewer negative associations. But the Lib Dems’ opportunistic, ambiguous politics is unlikely to lure many of Your Party’s consistently socialist supporters. Meanwhile the Greens, despite Polanski’s canny leftwing populism and appealingly direct manner, can’t match Your Party’s connections to working class, trade union and anti-racist politics. The Greens’ leftward shift is also heavily dependent on Polanski, who has limited powers as leader, and, assuming he wants to carry on, will have to stand for re-election in 2027.
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So Your Party may survive, at least until the next general election, when winning a few seats – it currently has four – could give it leverage in a hung parliament. To maximise its chances, the party appears to be moving towards an agreement with the Greens not to stand in each other’s target seats.
Was this politics of survival, small gains, and participation as an end in itself, what people were expecting when they started talking about a new leftwing party in packed rooms a year ago? My sense is yes. With good reason, there are fewer wild optimists and more realists on the British left than there used to be.
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Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
